Safety School

When I was job hunting this fall, I applied for a couple of positions, and I got an offer at the first one I interviewed at before I even interviewed with the one I really wanted. It’s like being picked by your safety school and having to give them a decision before you hear from your first choice.

So:  as I was in the midst of the serious due diligence required to be employed at Safety School (fingerprinting, criminal check, etc), I got a call for an interview from First Choice, but they couldn’t schedule anything for nearly three weeks. You know where this is going, right? I scheduled an interview, and in the meantime as much as I delayed with Safety School, they made me an offer. At this point I still hadn’t had an interview with First Choice, so I decided a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, or whatever that crappy expression is. I took it.

I took four weeks off in between jobs and I have now been at Safety School for six weeks. To be blunt: it is not all that it’s cracked up to be. Today I found myself driving past convenience stores when they weren’t even on my way home*—oops, I mean I found myself back on the website for First Choice. It appears that the position is still open.

Er-hrrrrm.  This is a bit of a pickle. More to come.

* Sorry, couldn’t resist. I just have that image in my head of Nicholas Cage driving slowly past the convenience store in Raising Arizona, feeling hemmed in by domestic life and trying to resist going back to his checkered and more exciting past.

Happy Leap Day!

Gjon Mili—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

I love this picture. It makes me want to jump for joy!

What leaps are you taking today?

Change

There's a light on a hill

That's far out in the distance
And it calls out my name
It calls out for a change
- Fishbone, "Change"

Well, my friends. There have been a lot of changes going on and it has been pretty overwhelming.

For one, I changed jobs. Of course, every job is different; every job has its good and bad things about it. I had been at my last job for over five years and I guess I got pretty comfortable there. So now, being in a new place, I am struck by the contrast. There are good things: the people I work with are really on the ball, super organized and detail-oriented. The work flow proceeds at a much quicker pace, so there is definitely a sense of accomplishment. Some things are neither good or bad--just different. Among those: the corporate culture here is very reserved. People don't do a lot of socializing. There seem to be an inordinate number of rules and safety regulations. To be in compliance with licensing, we do multiple types of drills--earthquake, fire, civil unrest. The bad: many of the employees are unhappy. There's a lot of talk about how the organization has gone downhill in recent years. Interestingly, this has not a whole lot to do with the economy, which you might expect, but rather with what many see as a shift in corporate culture. What also strikes me is that at the last place I worked, people uniformly seemed excited about the mission and purpose of the organization--even people who didn't work directly with the clients were proud of the agency's work. There was a sense of ownership. Not so, here. There is a definite divide between the people who work with clients and who genuinely seem enthusiastic about their work, and those who don't (no buy-in whatsoever, it could be just any job). These are just my impressions, but it is a big difference to me.

Other changes:  a lot of family drama. A LOT. Not in my immediate little Blah Blah circle, but in my family of origin--i.e. my mom, my sister, my brother-in-law and ther family. I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but that whole crew lives together. Until my grandma passed last year, there were four generations in one house. In the last year or so, relationships there have deteriorated. My mom and brother-in-law stopped speaking, there were periodic outbursts followed by more not speaking, my mom packed her things and went to live in a hotel for a few days, etc. It has gotten really out of hand. The ownership of the house is complicated; the value of the house is 2/3 of what it was when they bought it five years ago so they can't sell it and get away from each other even if they could overcome the ownership issue. It is a basic nightmare. Oh, and my mother was evidently diagnosed with a mental illness several years ago and no one told me.

All these years I have been trying to come to terms with wildly erratic and sometimes downright hurtful behavior from my mom, completely bewildered by it. Trying to respond from a loving place, with understanding, and yes, sometimes anger because it was so frustrating and it seemed like she was at times being malicious. And maybe she was. But I feel like I would have been more understanding had I known what was really going on.

Oh, so much more to say. I have just uncapped a flood.

Other changes:  My sister just got let go yesterday. She had been at her job for 14 years. The economy.

I love my sister so much. She has a heart as big as the world and is so very sweet. She makes mistakes in judgment at times, but mainly from wanting to make everybody happy. She was already so stressed by the situation with my mom and the house and her husband that her eyebrows started falling out. (I am not making this up.) I am disheartened by this latest development, but buoyed by the hope that her recent job interviews will pan out. Yes, she had already begun looking for a job. She worked for a family-owned small business that had really been struggling in the recession, and she could tell by the balance sheet that something was going to have to give. So I am trying to remain hopeful.

It helps that my little bunch is a messy, loud, hugging, smothering ball of goodness. At the end of the day, when I get home from work, I am coated in love. Sweet Dub is a child-wrangling, dinner-cooking, laundry-doing, always-kissing rock star. Viva is a doe-eyed eager-to-please sweetpea. And that Ceeya--well, I am here to tell you that Age Three can be Challenging. I much prefer the Terrible Twos in some ways. But Ceeya is always quick to run to me and wants to be by my side constantly. For better or worse. (Like especially when one of us is in the bathroom. she wants me to sit down next to her while she's on the toilet. Sigh. She won't always be this small, I know. I should enjoy even this.)

Next time: a little more fun. Maybe some discussion of Viva's upcoming birthday and what our plans might be. If you're still reading, that is.

Wee Hours

Can't sleep.

Starting a new job is exciting, nerve-wracking, and exhausting. Last night I had the classic teeth-falling-out dream. Tonight, I fell asleep around 10pm, woke up sometime after 12, and haven't been back to sleep since. I have to get up at 6. Fun times.

Yesterday as part of familiarizing myself with my new job, I took a tour of one of our early care facilities which serves kids from 18 months to 3 years with developmental disabilities. It was amazing. It's a really comprehensive program with family support, clinical assessment, occupational therapy and individualized attention for the kids who are medically strong enough to be in a classroom setting. I sat in on a parent support group and then watched some of the kids during Circle Time in the classroom. The kids were singing along with the teacher and they all looked happy and engaged--well, there was one little boy who decided he was not interested in singing just at that moment, so he was sitting apart from the group on a kid-sized couch, looking out the window onto the play yard and up at the sky. We all have our moments when we need to collect ourselves and calm our nerves.

It's important for me to remember this during my first weeks at the new job. As at every non-profit I've worked at, space is at a premium and I am in a shared office with no window. My tendency is to work through lunch while eating at my desk. In my last job, I would often walk out to my car at the end of the day and realize I had not been outside all day since arriving in the morning.

My goal now is to take a cue from that little boy on the couch and be mindful to take a break, rest my nerves, and leave the office so I can look at the sky.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Happy New Year!

No, I haven't been eaten by a pack of wolverines, I've just been trying to keep my head above water--but my blog has suffered for many months and I apologize for that. Since the layoff in April 2010, Sweet Dub has been doing freelance videography and photography, and one of his regular clients is a bar/club, which translates into him being gone a lot in the evenings. This translates into me doing the evening routine with the kids by myself, which translates into me being too tired (after a full day of work) to do much else besides fall asleep on the couch watching TV. Sweet Dub comes home and wakes me up in the wee hours, and I often don't get back to sleep for a while. It's not a good pattern.

In the New Year, I resolve to figure out a better balance with this situation, and be more conscientious about making time to write here.

Many blessings, love and light to you and yours in 2012!

Moving On

So:  I gave notice at my job this week. No worries, I have another job to go to. More to come.

Frowny Face

This morning I was sitting in a ballroom listening to a talk on the neurophysiology of empathy. The presenter stated that one of the major factors involved was facial feedback.  Basically, however your face is arranged impacts how you feel—your mood, and even your respiration and your posture. The example she gave was when you are talking with someone and their face is scrunched up in an expression of distress, you subconsciously do the same, and that this impacts you physiologically. She told a very interesting story: research shows that injection of Botox into the area between the eyebrows, where people typically get a frown line, has been shown to reduce depression. Because you can’t physically frown, it impacts your mood!

This is fascinating to me. Not that I’m going to run out and get Botox, but simply because I never really thought about this at this level and yet it makes sense. How many times have you heard from self-help gurus something along the lines of “fake it ‘til you make it” or “act as if?” The idea is that no matter how you feel, if you put a smile on your face and act as if everything’s great, you create that reality. It becomes a self-fulfilling action. Naturally, if you have a serious mental health disorder, this is not going to cut it. But for most people, often times it’s just a matter of a shift in attitude. Take a minute and regulate your breathing, relax your face (unfurrow your brow!), and you are going to feel better. 

Now, I must have missed the flap about this research when it first came out—and having delved into it now, it turns out that the doctor who conducted this research only used ten patients as subjects, nine of whom were allegedly depression-free two months after treatment, so it’s hardly an authoritative study.

  

But anecdotally around the web, a number of people have come forward to state that while they got Botox for cosmetic reasons, they noticed two unexpected side effects: the first, a lifting of what had previously been a lengthy depression; and the second, a reduction in headaches, including migraines.

Okay, that all sounds pretty great, but then there are the cons, among them: facial paralysis. Thanks, but no. Others have said Botox seems to suppress certain emotional responses. How can that be healthy? It seems like if you were sad and wanted to cry, but couldn’t, it would be toxic to your insides. 

Well, I think I’ll be keeping my frown line and just try to be more mindful not to scowl while squinting at my screen. How about you?