The slight heartbreak of little things piling up has hit me tonight. Already feeling a twinge of melancholy, the evening turned into a platform of little blooms of grief.
My friend’s poor cat passed away this evening. It was not unexpected, but the loss of a beloved pet – lovely, non-judgmental pets – always breaks my heart a bit.
Of course, understated but never underrated actor Philip Seymour Hoffman also passed away, and it just seemed so deflating. Such a waste. I often wonder about people blessed and cursed with so much talent. I discussed drug abuse with someone earlier, and he said something about famous people and their drug habits, but it struck me (without having any knowledge on the subject) that many of the most talented people probably already struggled with addiction issues before they ever dreamt of becoming “famous”. There is, I like to imagine, something so intense about embodying that kind of talent and losing oneself in one’s performances, that the temptation to lose oneself in drugs or some “altered state” is too great.
Eventually I succumbed to a discussion on the fucked-up things that happen to us as children and our helplessness about it and how those things influence (but hopefully don’t control) us.
Meanwhile I reflect on my own little, private issues and how I cannot bring myself to be open about them, even when there is something optimistic about them.
Now I am just hoping the Seattle Seahawks will not destroy the only good thing that can come of this day.
I hate driving, and I never really wanted to do it. But after being kind of pushed into getting a driver’s license as soon as I was old enough, I have always driven. And have always, despite my dislike, seemed to live somewhere faraway from where I worked or went to school.
Lately this thing I take for granted as something I have almost always been able to do feels more ”precious” because I have encountered so many people in my age bracket who do not know how to drive and/or do not have licenses. Maybe in the big scheme of things they are better off. The world does not need more cars or drivers, but I have done this to myself.
The snow won’t stop – it has been going on for days. Even in this ultra-prepared place in which snow is no real impediment to most people, it has piled up in a way that makes driving a bit perilous. Under such conditions, driving builds up an ungodly tension. My normal drive takes about two-and-a-half hours on a winding country road, which is not really feasible or safe to drive under current conditions. In inclement weather, I take a longer, primarily motorway-based route, which takes perhaps four hours. But last night I drove into my driveway just as the clock hit the five-hour mark. And it was exhausting.
Exhausting, yes, but I found that so much snow had fallen that the first thing I had to do was grab a shovel. As I am fond of saying, I strike a great pose as a lunatic shoveling snow in a dress in the middle of the night. (It has since snowed even more, so I almost no amount of shoveling will keep a path clear.)
I never considered myself fickle or particularly doomed to having a short attention span with regard to people. I pride myself on listening even to the most boring, long-winded people. I often imagine that I want to be a therapist for heaven’s sake – what else is that but a whole lifetime listening to intensely self-focused people, many of whom will not be in the least bit interesting? (They don’t need to be subjectively interesting to need help.)
I thought, even though I don’t love “people” in a general way, I had the dedication to individuals, especially after I know and care about them, to dispense with any kind of fickle, “carousel” approach to having them in my life.
But the truth is, I have without acknowledging it fully been like this. I had a few conversations this week about my propensity for indifference and, as one guy put it about 20 years ago, I am a “pro at being aloof”. Indifference comes on suddenly. As soon as one person becomes dull or somewhat unresponsive in the way I want them to be, it’s “Au suivant…” (My use of this particular song has nothing to do with the thematic content of the song itself; that is, my situation is nothing like what the lyrics describe! – just the rapid-fire call of “Au suivant” seems most appropriate.)
It’s hard not to be a bit indifferent – a concoction of my stubborn clinging to freedom and independence has made people think I would be single and available to them forever. When the situation changes somehow, either through my indifference or a substantive change in circumstance, these people seem surprised that the “ship has sailed”, particularly when they realize they did not sail it as they should have when they could have, so to speak.
Eventually the ship does sail for faraway places – it’s a cliché, but I certainly have never known when it would happen that I would no longer feel like exclaiming impatiently, “Next!”
I have belabored the whole Yahoo! putting a stop to telecommuting story and the backlash surrounding it. What’s done is done.
What is more important, which is something I have been meaning to write about, is the companies that have embraced virtual work –either in part or in some cases, the company is 100 percent remote (such as Automattic, the maker of the well-loved, much-used WordPress platform). This has been on my to-do list, but I happened upon an article from Forbes that highlights the top-100 companies for offering work-from-home options, according to the FlexJobs website. As the article points out, if not going for jobs that are obviously remote (such as work with the aforementioned Automattic or Mozilla, which are reputable companies with very visible virtual-work profiles), it can be challenging to identify companies and jobs that support remote-work possibilities – and jobs that are not just some kind of work-at-home scam to lure unsuspecting, naive dupes down a blind alley.
Of course there are a lot of companies that offer flexible work schedules and remote options without publicizing it – it is more a matter of building a relationship with people inside the company and demonstrating that location has very little to do with the work. Likewise, there is a growing number of sites and services that cater to a freelance workforce, allowing flexibility to both freelancers and companies and individuals who are seeking more project-based help. The best-known among these, oDesk and Elance, recently merged.
But where are the companies that are, if not “loud and proud” about being virtual-work friendly, supportive of the future of and possibilities enabled by a virtual, distributed workforce?
One that I stumbled on in my search is actually quite vocal about its support for taking advantage of the benefits of a distributed workforce. It’s called Lullabot. The Lullabot team is one-hundred-percent remote, and as its own content (an article from the company CEO) states, “My feeling is that most conventional co-located companies simply don’t know how to manage, and more importantly, how to include their remote workforce.” These are exactly the kinds of objections I hear again and again – and tend to think it is more a stubbornness and resistance to change the way work is done than any real hindrance to working remotely. It’s like everything else – people don’t like change, and anything new is disruptive. With a company that has been distributed from day one, this change never has to happen.
I should also clarify, as Lullabot has done, that there should be a distinction between “remote” work and “distributed” work – a fully distributed company has no central location (necessarily) from which to be remote. The whole company is distributed.
Further to this distinction, I came across another company, Fuentek, which is, as an NPR article described, not a virtual workforce but an entirely virtual company – which changes the whole mindset.A company founded on the flexibility enabled by a distributed workforce is entirely different from a traditional company trying to implement flexible policies.
That said, some quite traditional employers are moving in the right direction.
A really surprising leader in virtual work growth is the US federal government. (This will not come as any surprise to most, especially if you’ve ever worked for the government.) While it is not true across the board, some government agencies have been more eager to take on telecommuting in a serious way. The groundwork has already been put down to introduce telework across government agencies, but so far the one federal trailblazer has been the US Patent and Trademark Office, which has a dedicated telework coordinator and almost 70 percent of its workforce working remotely at least part time.
Ultimately these moves should not come as any surprise. The evidence shows that virtual work is a win-win. Employers can, like Aetna, attract and retain premium talent while reducing their costs. Employees are more likely to stay, feel trusted and feel a sense of loyalty to the company. Most companies have the technology for enabling virtual offices but the attitudes and institutional support lags behind.
While perhaps I could be a willing proponent of literal back biting (haha), the whole concept of “backbiting”, as in badmouthing someone who is not present (or, as I define it here, complaining about something rather vague only to have someone with whom I was speaking create a drama about it and turn it into backbiting – even if there was no text or subtext to indicate that), is not my thing. I have suffered the consequences of, but not permanently learned a lesson from, confiding in all the wrong people – or just by being opinionated and unabashed about opening my mouth. The most understanding ear is often attached to the most treacherous snake. The problem comes when you realize it too late. I am not really in a situation like that although I suspect that some of my complaints are making the rounds (but not in a malicious, backbiting, drama-creating way), but I have not yet pinpointed who the “culprit” is, so still freely sharing my opinions and frustrations. (In such scenarios, images of the film Raise the Red Lantern spring immediately to mind.)
I don’t know why this train of thought makes me think of a teacher I had in junior high and high school. Maybe because we ended up making fun of her behind her back all the time? Maybe because, in the course of a fairly short span of time, people can change, and you (and they) want to preserve you exactly as you were when you met them. In this case, the teacher in question taught my pre-algebra class when I was about 12. She was an incredible teacher who made all manner of mathematical complexities seem simple, assigning everything very methodical approaches that were so grounding and solid that they carried me through algebra and various other mathematical pursuits long after that class had ended, and I was exposed to much less gifted math teachers. You know what they say about getting the basics right. She left the junior high to teach at the high school, and I relied completely on the fundamentals she had taught, but little by little, each step I made in math was a downhill step. By the time I hit geometry in 9th grade, I was lost and had no idea what was going on (not to mention that I have no ability to conceptual shapes and angles and could not begin to write a proof about how an angle as big as my fingernail was the same as some angle that was as big as a house).
This teacher had her quirks, of course (ultimately why we made fun of her), from the laminated posters of Neil Diamond plastered all over her classroom to the what I can only refer to as “whorehouse chandelier” earrings, to her love for expressions like, “Yowza!”. She was her own character. Her self-satisfied attitude and even the “I am cool” voice she adopted in her teaching was enough to sicken me. But you can’t really argue with a virtuoso, particularly when she clearly not only knew her stuff but knew how to convey that information in a neat and palatable way. (I still can’t quite erase the memory of her smug expression and tone when she would show you some easy way to solve an equation and say, “All you have to do is plug… (pause for effect) and chug.” My response: Ugh.
But people change. I am sure she was still a math-teaching whiz by the time I got to the high school and landed in algebra II/trigonometry. She just did not apply herself. It was in fact only because of her mastery and teaching skill that I could manage the more algebraic elements of trigonometry. But for me there was WAY too much geometry mixed into trig (just seeing a webpage about trig has me petrified), and I was completely derailed. And by this time, the once careful, methodical, albeit arrogant, teacher, had taken on all kinds of extracurricular duties, like coaching the track team and god knows what else. She created all kinds of barriers between herself and the students, such as insisting that during class, she would only accept two questions on the homework. As a result of all these limitations, I got more and more lost, and by the time I began failing exams, it was too late. She, reflecting on her memory of my identity as a “good math student” from our previous time in the same classroom, called me in for a one-on-one chat and basically asked, “What happened to you?” (She was also not impressed by my brief pseudo-goth appearance, which seemed to make her think I was on drugs.)
Frankly, I wanted to ask the same thing, so far was she from her teaching roots. “What happened to you?”
Ultimately we were, in those three short years, in completely different places in our lives. When she finally saw how much I was flailing about and bothered to ask me if something was wrong and whether she could dedicate any time to help me further – because suddenly she was more than willing to answer as many questions as I had – it was too late. I was so far gone that I did not even know how to ask questions about what I did not understand.
I hate crowds of strangers enough that I decided – on the worst day possible – to give up public transportation in favor of my own two feet. Gothenburg is a completely walkable city, so even though I generally stay somewhere in the city center and work outside of it, it’s not a big deal to walk – even though the mounds of uncleared snow seemed insurmountable this morning. It felt slightly reminiscent of the training montage (minus the grunting!) in Rocky IV when Rocky has to work out in the snow, sawing and carrying logs, running through icy rivers and helping a man with a horse and carriage stuck in snow (?) and stuff. It being the Soviet era, a bunch of the scenes of Dolph Lundgren as machine-like nemesis Ivan Drago are all red, as if he works out in a bright Soviet-red room. Then again, it was the 80s – that’s how it always looked. And it was the 80s, so everyone looks a bit coked out. (Thanks again, Grace Jones, for delivering Dolph Lundgren to the world. Just realizing that I have written about Dolph and Rocky IV too many times already.)
I am not sure why it took me until now to decide this (walking, not comparing my life to scenes from Rocky IV) was a good course of action – a few too many times getting slapped in the arm by overzealous tram riders gesticulating wildly while talking on the phone, a few too many broken-down trams, a few too many long waits (I am a wee bit impatient), a few too many scenes I just don’t want to be party to or relive. And I love walking. And I love the cold. Why not choose the one day of the year that snow falls and really stays to start? Walk!
Walking everywhere – and then realizing that I never take elevators anymore if I can avoid them – makes me think of how influential people in our lives can be in the most imperceptible ways. Little things that change how we do things. One ex-boyfriend always walked and never took the elevator, and eventually that shifted my take on how I get around and … how I ascend (haha) in buildings. (It didn’t help my confidence in elevators that the one in our building was always breaking down.) Another ex-boyfriend insisted that I add color to my wardrobe – I resisted, but long after we split up – right up until today (and that split was, what… 15 years ago?) – I still wear colors and never returned to the all-black wardrobe I donned back then.
It’s funny recounting relationships how we are more prone to cite the landmark things – like how someone’s influence changed your whole feeling about love, made you want to be a better version of yourself, turned you against marriage, made you want to have children or even something like suddenly made you realize the merits of living in a big city versus the suburbs. But in reality the impact in day to day life is evident but almost unacknowledged – whether subtly adopting a word or phrase that that person used frequently, or always taking the stairs.
“Naked Girl Falling Down the Stairs” – The Cramps: An apt tune. Always take the stairs, even if you’re a clumsy one like me, likely to fall down. Naked or not. (Check the awesome picture from when I fell flat on my face on one of Stockholm‘s main streets!)
“When first my brave Johnie lad came to this town,
He had a blue bonnet that wanted the crown; But now he has gotten a hat and a feather,
Hey, brave Johnie lad, cock up your beaver!
Cock up your beaver, and cock it fu’ sprush,
We’ll over the border, and gie them a brush;
There’s somebody there we’ll teach better behaviour,
Hey, brave Johnie lad, cock up your beaver!”
Yesterday was Robert Burns‘s birthday, which is celebrated in Scotland as Burns Night (or other names).
I think a lot about Scotland, not least because of my work with the city of Glasgow. Other recent developments make me consider a life in a reverse 1950s kind of scene with someone who reaches me on a level that few have. It might not ever really happen, but I am living “in the pretend” as though it will. It makes the day to day easier.
The beauty of these things is not being able to control them.
For people who are not content or digital marketers – what do these terms mean and why do you need to care? I am finding that as straightforward as the term “content” is – or should be – it’s actually sort of misunderstood. A lot like the oft-thrown-about term “digital”. What does “digital marketing” really consist of?
Content is drop-dead important. But without context, relevance and a plan, content can be fairly meaningless. Just a fountain of uselessness that does not achieve anything. You are not going to get anywhere without good content that supports whatever your mission is. Content drives everything and even though it’s front and center, it is also kind of a behind-the-scenes engine – you get followers, shares, attention, discussion – by creating content that is worth talking about. Relevant. Not spun BS. Not repetitive garbage. Hopefully not jargon-filled nonsense. Everywhere you look, you are advised to “create content worth spreading” – and for all purposes, this is true. Get content right and your job is easier.
In much of my freelance work, I have wanted to yell at my clients: “Stop chasing trends and buzzwords and focus on the real meat on the bone – and the bone itself.” Good content is almost all that is going to get you the right (target) audience or traffic – and of course you need to drive traffic from somewhere. But content plays the most important role in that as well. You can’t really have an effective SEO strategy without focusing on content. (Search algorithms are actively taking quality and freshness into account.) You can’t effectively distribute content if you have not really got something worthwhile to put out there.
As far as content goes, I am well aware that this blog post is generic and serves mostly to air my own frustration about how much mileage this topic gets without people gaining any deeper understanding of how they need to focus on content development and content marketing. I almost feel like there are a lot of people in business who read a lot of articles about this elusive “content” and spout a lot of stuff about how content needs to be – but they are not really content creators themselves and therefore have no hands-on understanding of how it fits into and supports their goals.
To calm the nerves, then, a song from ages ago. “Sheffield Park” – The Mekons
I recently watched the TV show Broadchurch. (Great show by the way.) It struck me that when the main cop lady asked spitefully, early on in the show, “How could you not have known or seen?” when meeting the ex-wife of a criminal, it stuck with me. Clearly this judgmental moment would come back to haunt and foreshadowed some plot twist.
It also foreshadowed recent steps in my own life, though not in a negative way. It is truer to say that I came very close to self-sabotaging something because of my own fear. It was only after taking this little tumble that I saw everything clearly – it was like a trigger. In the past I have wanted to know where things stand, so I have intentionally forced the issue or forced someone’s hand. But in this case it was backwards. I could not see what was right in front of my face – at least not clearly – until I put myself, unintentionally, into an awkward position that required me to communicate about things that make me uncomfortable. I can look at myself and ask, “How could you not have known or seen?” – about myself.
I made a deal with myself that I need to be in the habit of writing, so I write in this blog come hell or high water, as the saying goes. I force myself to write every day – usually I have something to say, even if it is largely useless, and can cobble together something that stays thematically cohesive (for example, it might not be important to tell the world, i.e. whatever unlucky soul stumbles into this blog, that I changed my mind about Julie Delpy or that I desperately want to make chicken pho, but these posts at least have a theme and a target – a point.
Today, though, my head is a jumble of random thoughts that I want to spew out in a most random fashion, if for no other reason than to follow through on writing at least one post per day. Rest assured, all the deal-making with myself will hopefully not be for naught. I have specific writing projects I want to tackle at some point but have fallen so far out of the habit of regular, disciplined writing that I am at least trying to create a pattern or a rhythm to start with. The organization comes later. It’s kind of funny because you’d think that writing about things you really want to write about – whatever it is – would come easily. For me, as soon as I sit down, determined to write something with a purpose (other than something academic or a blog post, anyway, which is informal in any case), everything goes out the window. That is, every day in my job and in my freelance work, I research, organize and write all kinds of outlandish things that I never imagined knowing the first thing about. But it’s something that can be ordered – someone says, “I need a white paper about connected TV” or “We need a clinical summary of this paper on manual dexterity when employing double-gloving practice” – I am perfectly able to wrangle all the disparate details, read the studies, gather intel and info and get to work and produce perfectly workable results. Someone else has requested these things, so it’s work.
But when it’s me and my stuff – with a fairly solid outline and a crop of good ideas – I can find every reason to put it off. I don’t know when this happened. As a kid and teenager, I suppose I was less concerned with what other people thought about the outcome and wrote stories every single day. All I did was write and, like a maniac, get months ahead on school homework so I would have more free time to write. I earned this reputation among teachers and adults around me as “a writer” to the point that the reputation preceded me and stifled me and caused me to start feeling insecure and trapped. I stopped writing and buried myself in foreign language textbooks. I distinctly remember making a couple of choices at the pivotal age of 13 or 14. Take creative writing as my English course or enroll in regular English (where my friends were). I opted for the latter. The following year, our courseload was reduced from seven classes per day to six (so we could have even longer classes – ugh!), meaning we had fewer choices/options. I was faced with the choice between taking journalism or French. The journalism teacher (who had taught creative writing the previous year and was disappointed that I did not join) practically begged me to join – I took French. The journalism teacher still let me write articles for the school paper. I did it, but my heart wasn’t in it. By then, I was completely in love with all my irregular verbs and the passé composé. I spent the rest of my school years studying all the languages the school had to offer – except German, which seems to have hurt the German teacher’s feelings. Writing for pleasure – complete fiction and imagination – stopped.
I still wrote a lot, of course, because I was a very engaged student. I wrote papers and never, ever managed to stick with word limits. I still struggle with this but am getting a little bit better. I became skilled at research and writing what was asked of me – and this continues today in my career and my lifelong engagement as a student (always enrolling in study programs just for the sake of learning).
I am, however, further away from personal writing, really good writing and being able to self-edit my own personal writing. I let all the creative energy slip away. Perhaps it is still there somewhere, but I have no one but myself to blame. As I wrote, all the adults in my life encouraged me to write to an almost daunting degree, but that was also the problem. It was daunting, and I did not think I could live up to their expectations or hopes. I was not sure I wanted to. Deciding to pursue something in life like writing or the arts or photography is undoubtedly a hard road – completely subjective, all about timing, a person needs to develop thick skin and embody perseverance. I was never sure I could endure the subjectivity and fickle nature of perceiving “talent”.
My feelings about it are still mixed. Creativity and imagination when we’re young are vibrant and unbridled forces – unfettered by the real life we later experience, which dampens the spark we may have to explore ideas that are fictional and illogical. Yet writing, fictional or otherwise, informed by life experience can have so much depth and meaning, touched as it is by reality, which requires time, insight and experience. My feelings on the subject are similar to how I feel about therapists. In addition to wanting to write, I always thought – and still think – I would like to be a therapist. I love listening to other people’s problems and thoughts more than almost anything, but it occurred to me early on that it seems, no matter how mature and insightful you are when you’re young, that you don’t really have enough insight, gravitas or authority to be a good therapist until you’re about 40. Rough rule of thumb, really. I am sure there are gifted therapists of all ages, but for me, and in my view, I never seriously considered going back to school to become a therapist until the last few years. I only feel fully prepared to do that right now.
Then again, if I am being honest (and random), there are a lot of things that I only feel prepared to do (or think about doing) right now. I only think of things like having serious relationships or rearing children now. It seemed totally improbable and unappealing in my 20s. More power to the people who did pursue those things when they were young and potentially had more – or at least less complicated – choices. I still think there are plenty of choices but I tend to think fairly broadly. The whole world is my workshop (my personal motto and seemingly also the motto of American foreign and military policy! Reminds me, totally off topic, that my brother described the end of the last US government shutdown thusly: “the dick show is over”). I don’t feel limited by location, language or any other constraints.
Things can expand into all kinds of crazy territory if you let them. For example, you can start out with a marketing idea of just giving your customers some cake and somehow end up with seven local, interactive microsites to capitalize on their brand loyalty. You can start off buying green beans from Kenya and end up with a wife from there! Sounds like a good case study, doesn’t it? “Kenya: From green beans to a new wife” – it certainly piques some curiosity and raised eyebrows. “What could this possibly be about?”
But then you can end badly. Toto will do it for you with “Africa”. Don’t get me started on the whole “generalizing Africa” topic.
