overthinking

Preening peacocks

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Sometimes overthinking becomes so confining that one must step back and think only of the shallowest things and all the plumage that adorns and connects those things. And how those things are completely transitory.

S cares a great deal about looking good, and often refers to himself jokingly as a peacock. This is mostly evidenced by his colorful and well-tailored sartorial choices. We thus talk a lot about peacocks – of both the figurative and literal sorts.

I think of this sometimes – peacocks. When I first moved to Gothenburg I misread a sign on a restaurant called Peacock, but I swear that even now my eyes are fooled every time I see it, thinking it says “Supercock”. From far away, the Chinese characters that precede “peacock” really look like an “S” and a “U”. Maybe I see what I want to see.

The peacock theme comes up now and then. Not long ago I read Flannery O’Connor (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose) and a story about a loud peacock and chickens (“From that day with the Pathé man I began to collect chickens. What had been only a mild interest became a passion, a quest. I had to have more and more chickens.”), which reminded me of a former colleague who loved her chickens and was always trying to convince me to get chickens of my own – to persuade me by doing everything from bringing me fresh eggs to letting me borrow comprehensive books about how to raise chickens.

Then this week, a friend from school days posted in social media about her new peacock, which she has perfectly named “The Fonz”. She gave him a mirror, and he stands admiring himself in it. Of course he does.

In the meandering way in which I think makes this peacock Fonz remind me of my conversations with a younger colleague, to whom I often explain old (mostly American) cultural references. I don’t know how or why I was explaining Happy Days one day, but ended up explaining “The Fonz” and asking her if she’d heard the term “jump the shark”. She hadn’t. But even if she had, maybe it would not make sense or it would not even have registered with her. In fact when I mentioned this conversation to someone else (my own age), his first response was, “But how can she understand ‘jump the shark’ without understanding The Fonz and Happy Days?”

It’s interesting how the smallest references, so indelibly branded on our brains, disappear – or never existed to those who came later and never experienced them. A group of colleagues and I were discussing someone’s gaudy fake fingernails, and I referenced the famous FloJo fingernails. But Florence Griffith Joyner is a now-deceased former Olympic champion and 1980s relic star of track and field. But there are a lot of people my own age (and those older and slightly younger) who immediately understand what I am talking about when I say “FloJo” or, more specifically, “FloJo nails”.

And these things… these pieces of shorthand… come and go the same way beauty fades. It’s there one day and gone the next. Even a peacock doesn’t live forever.

From the Height of Emotion to the Dread of the Telephone

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On repeat: DO THIS FOR YOURSELF

The day finally came, and when it did it was actually the middle of the night. Staring at the glut of white dresses that some e-commerce site ‘suggested’, evidence that they were listening in, spitting back all the recommendations the earlier eavesdropped conversations indicated. But who needs a long, lace dress to drag through sand… or dress shoes for that matter… when the whole point of the South Pacific destination is to be warm… to return to the shoelessness of Hawaiian toddlerhood?

After all, there is no more value to be found at this point in life for caution, trepidation and overthinking. Just enough thinking. As one of Louise Erdrich’s characters in The Plague of Doves states simply, “But it happened in the heat of things”, to which another replies, “What doesn’t happen in the heat of things?”

Photo (c) 2013 Daniel Chodusov used under Creative Commons license.

My political platform: Bringing back capes, gloves, postage stamps, anti-hypocrisy and flexible work options!

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It’s another one of those random days where random thoughts are weaseling their way into my brain too fast to keep track of them.

“I’m not sorry we loved, but I hope I didn’t keep you too long.”

First of all, I overthink. All the time. All weekend in between working and then taking breaks from that work to do other work, I was beating myself up over the realization that it is always just when you ease into a comfort level, feeling like you can let your guard down, that you are at your most vulnerable, a victim to be gutted. You know, gutted and chopped into pieces, not unlike a poor, hapless young giraffe minding his own business in a Copenhagen zoo (and see below). Trust me.

In other news (or non-news), what the hell is wrong with Fox News and other conservative talking heads? I cannot come up with words – nothing that has not already been said. They have started blabbing about how free healthcare disincentivizes working. Who says it best? Why, Jon Stewart, of course!

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-february-6-2014/terror-on-bulls–t-mountain

Writing (oh so seamless the segue) about disincentives to work and purported laziness, I was heartened to see a series of articles from Virgin on the future of flexwork (Richard Branson is a big supporter of flexible work solutions). Three cheers! It’s one thing for me to bang my own pots and pans on the subject of flexible, remote and virtual work (only I hear the ceaseless clanging – and maybe a handful of other folks who happen upon this blog). It is another thing entirely when someone as respected and well-known as Richard Branson puts his weight behind this flexibility.

The website covers different aspects of flexible work – which can include remote work, shared locations, next-gen workspaces and enabling “intrapreneurship”. Be still my heart.

Of course, another aspect of flexible work, as I have learned since the dawn of my professional life, is doing the most flexible kind of work there is (and that means you will get a lot of flexibility but you are going to have to be equally flexible in kind – and sometimes to your own detriment): freelancing. I find these days that when I apply for jobs that are not ideal for me but my skill set matches some other need a company has, I get calls on occasion offering me freelance projects, and I cannot complain.

On a slightly tangential note, I will never get used to how potential employers in Scandinavia, in formal interview settings, often use the word “shit” in interview conversation. This must be a failure to understand that “shit” is not quite the casual profanity that they imagine it to be. (It makes me laugh.)

As for the music and magic of hypocrisy, who embodies it better than my favorite punching bag, Marissa Mayer of Yahoo! disaster fame? The Virgin remote work segment highlights the hypocrisy and head-scratching quality of Mayer’s decision to end distance-work options for her employees (“How odd that the head of a tech company that provides online communication tools doesn’t see the irony in that statement?”). Mayer has become the lightning rod for this issue, really. One article I read questioned the fairness of piling all the blame on Mayer when other large corporations scaled back or eliminated their distance work options at the same time (e.g. Best Buy). The hypocrisy of it – the real rub – is precisely what the Virgin article on supporting remote work points out – a tech company supposedly at the forefront (or wanting to believe it is still at the forefront) of innovation and online communication is taking the workplace back to horse-and-buggy days when most of the tech world is, I don’t know, driving a Tesla or taking a high-speed train.

Another nod to hypocrisy, even if not an entirely matching overlap, is the recent decision of a zoo in Copenhagen, Denmark to kill a perfectly healthy young giraffe in its care and feed it to the zoo’s lions. I posted something about this on my Facebook wall, which sparked an immediate argument between two people who are strangers across the world from each other. One argued that those of us who were lamenting the giraffe’s senseless death were hypocrites who cannot handle how nature works when it’s shown to us with transparency. While I can appreciate the argument on its surface, the bottom line is – this happened in a ZOO, not the wild. This took place, apparently, in front of zoo visitors (the killing and the feeding pieces to lions). Yeah, if a family went on safari somewhere or were out in the wild, maybe “nature” and its transparency would be expected. In the zoo? Not so much. The zoo has defended its decision and now is paying an unfortunate price (I saw on the news that the zoo’s employees are receiving death threats now).

Back to the flexwork thing – all the articles come down to one thing: trust. Flexwork is possible when you have trust and no need to micromanage. You would also think we could trust a zoo not to kill a juvenile giraffe, and maybe once upon a time, people would have thought Marissa Mayer would not take a giant tech company back to Little House on the Prairie.