June 7, 2008

Circumference

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the circumference of our lives. As individuals, how far does our influence extend in regards to other people, or within our little socioeconomic sub-groups, or farther on into –yes, American society — but really into the world as a whole? When my pebble drops into the pool of this big bad world, how far do the ripples extend?

I have had the benefit of knowing some very tightly centered people. Their focus and influence is concentrated into a small area– family groups, small communities, the people that surround them on a daily basis. I myself have always felt a little more thinly spread… that my circumference has always been larger, but perhaps not nearly as potent or (let’s be honest) meaningful for all of its diversity.

Recently I was picking through the never-ending mystery of my blog stats, turning over a rock here and there, looking for some meaningful insight as to why people are so interested in whether or not I’ve lost a finger to one of my power tools yet. What struck me was that in the last week, someone in Argentina spend 28 minutes on my website (virtually a lifetime in the world of blog stats), reading about my projects, my life, and yes, my love affair with power tools. I’ve had shorter, but perhaps no less significant visits from people in Slovakia, Iran, Estonia (which I’m ashamed to say I probably wasn’t even aware was a country… but I know now), India, New Zeland. From thirty-eight countries in the last month, to be exact. I wonder, who are you people? Are you men? Women? Power-tool junkies? Are you happy? Do you believe in yourselves? Have you ever built a pergola? Does what I have to say about my life mean anything to you in yours?

It’s interesting to think that I may have more of an impact on people I’ve never seen, than on my 10 year old brother, who very much unlike his big sister believes that bunnies exist for shooting, not petting.

And of course I wonder, what separates those of us with large, light circumferences from those with smaller more concentrated ones? Is it a love for technology or traveling that broadens our circle? Is it the difference between working for large global companies or small local ones that determines our personal reach? Is it a love of people or one-on-one interactions that determines how far our influence in the world extends? Does it make a difference in what we do, or choose to do, on a daily basis, and does it make us better at those things?

I’d like to be able to see in on a map. All those rings overlapping, reaching out across the arbitrary borders we set for ourselves, moving each other this way and that. Perhaps we never have as much influence as we believe, but the idea of it makes me, for one, feel that much more connected to my Argentinian and Estonian neighbors.

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May 2, 2008

Losing Faith in the Harmlessness of a White Lie

At the risk of increasing what appears to be my very poor perception of the American people, I just have to say. We are a country of complete liars.

Seriously.

When is the last time you remember going a whole day without at least withholding some pertinent information or skewing the facts of some-such-thing in your own favor?

My mother recently read a book about the fact that we don’t often draw our own boundaries firmly enough, and then we are all shocked when people invade our space in some way. (I think it’s this book.) So she has been making a conscious effort lately to clearly state her boundaries (and I’m talking in no uncertain terms).  

As I’m explaining to her that I am going to bed early tonight because my beloved boyfriend received a phone call at 3:30 this morning from some drunken female who shouted “Heeeeey Baby!” almost directly in my eardrum, and as a result I slept no more than four hours last night… she totally interrupts me and lets me know that my boundaries have been violated and I should not stand for it.

Now, I don’t feel particularly violated or angry at my boyfriend who can’t directly control who calls his cell phone and when, but my mother says I’m not establishing my boundaries because I’m afraid it will make me look like the jealous girlfriend.

I start to form a token protest, and then stop and actually think about this one for a minute. I think she is right in the fact that there is a pervasive sense of “politeness” in our society, even among two people who see each other naked on a regular basis. I’m not jealous, and because I don’t want to be seen that way I don’t say things like, “If people are going to be making middle of the night calls you need to shut your phone off or sleep somewhere else.” That’s not jealous. That’s a reasonable request. Especially for people rapidly approaching 30 on a work night.

I had to admit to my Mom that she was right. If anyone asked if I had lied to my significant other lately I would say absolutely not, and in fact may even have praised myself for being such a kind and understanding girlfriend for not making a big scene about drunken females calling at the wee hours of the morning.  But in a sense, this was lying.  pretending that something was okay with me when it wasn’t.

It reminded me of the Esquire article “I Think You’re Fat” by A.J. Andrews, regarding the Radical Honesty movement in America.

Andrews perspective is that there are both good things about living a life of complete honesty…

I start in again at dinner with my friend Brian. We are talking about his new living situation, and I decide to tell him the truth.

“You know, I forget your fiancée’s name.”

This is highly unacceptable — they’ve been together for years; I’ve met her several times.

“It’s Jenny.”

In his book, Blanton talks about the thrill of total candor, the Space Mountain-worthy adrenaline rush you get from breaking taboos. As he writes, “You learn to like the excitement of mild, ongoing risk taking.” This I felt.

Luckily, Brian doesn’t seem too pissed. So I decide to push my luck. “Yes, that’s right. Jenny. Well, I resent you for not inviting me to you and Jenny’s wedding. I don’t want to go, since it’s in Vermont, but I wanted to be invited.”

“Well, I resent you for not being invited to your wedding.”

“You weren’t invited? Really? I thought I had.”

“Nope.”

“Sorry, man. That was a mistake.”

A breakthrough! We are communicating! Blanton is right. Brian and I crushed some eggshells. We are not stoic, emotionless men. I’m enjoying this. A little bracing honesty can be a mood booster.

And then maybe some not so good things…

My wife tells me a story about switching operating systems on her computer. In the middle, I have to go help our son with something, then forget to come back.

“Do you want to hear the end of the story or not?” she asks.

“Well…is there a payoff?”

“Fuck you.”

It would have been a lot easier to have kept my mouth closed and listened to her. It reminds me of an issue I raised with Blanton: Why make waves? “Ninety percent of the time I love my wife,” I told him. “And 10 percent of the time I hate her. Why should I hurt her feelings that 10 percent of the time? Why not just wait until that phase passes and I return to the true feeling, which is that I love her?”

Blanton’s response: “Because you’re a manipulative, lying son of a bitch.”

Okay, he’s right. It’s manipulative and patronizing to shut up and listen. But it’s exhausting not to.

My point is simply there is truth in this… I think we are overly polite as a society. Overly PC.  Overly concerned about not hurting another persons feelings, so we allow our boundaries to be invaded. And we’re lying. I wonder how many things we do on a daily basis that no one wants to participate in, but everyone does because they feel they should?

I realized that this is the exact reason I hate salesmen. Because the niceness and the joking and the feigned interest in my life is a lie. It’s not real, it’s a sales tactic. And like Andrews says, it’s manipulative and patronizing. And even though I feel manipulated and patronized I don’t say what I’m thinking, which is “Cut the shit, man. You being nice to me isn’t going to contribute to my purchasing something in any way other than I might not do it, just to get the hell away from you.” Why? Because it wouldn’t be polite. And while I’m not the epitome of Miss Manners as it is, I don’t make a point to be deliberately hurtful either.

The thing is… I think we would be more efficient and less hurtful if we stopped, not only with the major earth-shattering lies, but with the little insignificant untruths we saddle each other with every day.

We’re not perfect, and as humans I don’t think we expect perfection from each other. I don’t think it would be unheard of to expect a little more reality from each other though.

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April 8, 2008

Recession-ish.

As a person trying desperately to change careers, recession-talk defintely hits home. It’s clear that America is recession-ish, although people who have bigger brains than I do seem to be debating about whether or not we are in one, on the verge of one, or simply in the midst of a media-induced panic attack.

Apparently there isn’t a standard book of definitions that tell people when they can start shouting the word “recession” from the treetops. People in the know say that there needs to be a period of more than a few months of declining gross domestic product before we can officially start mumbling recession under our breath while shaking our heads. And I guess we aren’t quite there yet. But we’re definitely somewhere that isn’t great.

My question is this… mostly it seems like we’re blaming our quasi-recession-ish state on alternatively the not-so-mysteriously bursting housing bubble or the fact that all of us are getting raped at the gasoline pump on a daily basis. However, every time I go into the bank I am nearly suffocated with promotional material advertising “homeowner line of credit” and “life improvement loans”… in fact, yesterday when I was cashing a check the teller actually asked me if I’d had my mortgage evaluated lately. I blinked at her seven times before she asked me slowly “Do. You. Know. What. A. Home. Equity. Line. Of. Credit. Is?”

What I thought was, “listen lady… do you live in the world right now? Do you know what is happening with our economy and the housing market? Do you really think you should be pushing people to borrow more money? Do I look like an idiot to you?” But I kept my mouth shut and smiled blandly at her while glitter and rainbows shot out of her mouth as she explained that I could get money any time I wanted for big spring projects around the house. Gutters? Deck? New flower beds?

Finally I shut her up by saying, “That’s okay, I’m trying to get out of debt.”

The thing is, what ever happened to social responsibility? The smartest thing the government could do right now is to start educating people about the kind of debt they are getting in to and why it appears that as a country we are getting screwed sideways because of it. And failing that, shouldn’t we be able to but some kind of pressure on banks… like, hey, I’m all for business and doing what you’ve got to do to make money, but when you are also handing people the shovel with which to dig our economy’s grave,  but I just  think at some point someone should step in and say, “hey, enough.”

Hey, enough.

 

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April 2, 2008

Earth: Better of without us?

 I read an article today that suggested that dolphins show near (and in some cases above) human intelligence, but that their intelligence must be limited because they lack the limbs (and perhaps desire) to manipulate their environment. Unlike humans, of course, who will not be satisfied until we can control every force and element on earth with the push of a button.

Really?

I wonder how many dolphins are on Paxil because they are depressed about the fact that they spend 40 hours a week in an unfulfilling job sitting in front of a computer, stretching themselves to make the payments on a too big mortgage for a too big house, or to pay for $200 shoes for their kids, or for botox treatments, or designer clothes, all of which they need because everybody else has it?

Oh wait… that isn’t dolphins. They spend their days frolicking about the water, playing tricks on unsuspecting pelicans, savings humans from sharks, living a full and active social life, having sex just for the heck of it, and petting the occasional cat. Wait, what?  No kidding.

Anyway, I guess not trying to manipulate every variable of you environment saves you from the oppressive weight of a mortgage payment, the threat of economic collapse, or the fear of ever being shot by a gun. And they are considered less intelligent because of this?

Which, I am not a big dolphin fanatic or anything, I just thought it was an interesting distinction to make. And it got me thinking about why we don’t seem to be able to live at peace with our environment. The truth is that almost everything on the planet works in delicate balance with everything else, and as humans we seem hell-bent on doing whatever we can to disrupt that balance. The truth is, the outlook for our planet seems much better if we aren’t involved in it.

An article in New Science magazine quotes biologist John Orrock as saying:

The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better.

Pollution of natural resources would cease overnight if the human population to mysteriously vanish one day. Even areas that would immediately be affected by nuclear fallout would begin to see a takeover of the natural habitat surrounding them within a few decades. (As evidenced by the regrowth of the area surrounding Chernobyl.) In fact areas of the rainforests that have been decimated by loggers and developers would take longer-possibly centuries-to recover.

Fish populations would recover, viral-like algal blooms will recede, fresh water will abound as nitrates and phosphates begin to be cleared away.

It’s humbling to realize that the world itself would be a better place without an inherently violent and industrial species attempting to overtake it. Perhaps this is something we should all consider on our never-ending quest for bigger and better.

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March 27, 2008

China, we know you’re lying.

China is like that girl in high school who told off-the-wall stories over and over again believing that the more times she said it the more likely the rest of us were to believe it was true.

China darling, just because you say it, that doesn’t make it fact.

I’m talking mostly about this mess, regarding Tibet and the recent riots. Although they apply the same theory to Taiwan… as if as long as they don’t admit that Taiwan is its own nation with its own government, the rest of the world will still believe it is a part of China.

The government has said the March 14 riots were masterminded by “the Dalai clique,” Beijing’s term for the Dalai Lama and his supporters.

Are we talking about the same Dalai Lama? The one who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 for his consistent opposition of the use of violence? Yes, it does sound like he’s the sort that would encourage a riot that would lead to the deaths of 22 people (according to china) or 104 people (according to Tibetans).

I visited China in December, and a couple of the people in my travel group actually went to Tibet before hand. Their impression was that it was a fairly downtrodden place. (Try spending a week in a hotel with no heat in Tibet in December… thanks, but no thanks.)

The thing with China is that you expect it is ruled with an iron fist, and that the people of China are either clueless or are just as bad as their government is. I spent ten days in and around Beijing and Shanghai and the truth is that you would never know it is a communist country. You see free people, free trade, and booming industrial growth… granted you see all of this through a particularly nasty haze of pollution, but that is another topic for another day.

We asked the Chinese-born general manager of a foreign auto-parts company whether or not he felt their governing system was helping or hindering their economic growth. What he said was very profound to me. He said that the Chinese people love Americans. They don’t hate the West, they embrace it. And they’re government is moving slowly but surely in the right direction. And then he looked at us and said that the government wasn’t going to do a one-eighty… they weren’t going to start going back to the way they were before the doors of the country were open to foreigners and foreign trade… unless their government was attacked or put under some immense pressure from another country, like oh, say, ours.

They know they don’t have the power or the rights to stand up, overthrow the central government, and start making decisions on their own… even if they did, the entire country would collapse without the structure their government provides. But little by little they are making changes, and this man plead with us “tell your government not to do anything.”

They are so worried we are going to make a move that is going to force their government to turn back in on itself and lock down.

So I wonder, is that why we make-believe that what they say is truth? Not for the small percentage of the Chinese population that makes up the government, but for the rest of them? (I suppose that it may also have to do with the fact that some ridiculously large percentage of our goods have parts that are manufactured cheaply in China… they have a lot of our major companies by the short hairs.)

Frankly, I don’t know if the world could sustain the kind of economic shockwave that the collapse of China would bring. But I also don’t think that we should have to tiptoe through the tulips with their government when they say things like the Dalai Lama masterminded the Tibetian riots.

This is why I could never be a politician. I have a deep-seeded need to call everyone (even whole other countries) on their bullshit.

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March 19, 2008

Americans: Unable to keep our word?

I’m not sure that out of the entire collection of people I know that I could pick out three (or possibly even one) that I  believe would keep their word if they gave it to me.

Not because I don’t know good people… I know great people. I just believe that there was some breakdown in our culture in which the meaning of “giving our word” lost value. People say things all of the time. We make promises that we don’t intend to keep– or worse, do intend to keep until “something comes up.” We outright lie… but occasionally try to make ourselves feel better about it by calling it a “little white lie.” We set goals for ourselves but never achieve them. We pad our resumes, and back out of commitments, and in general show a severe lack of concern over the fact that we gave our word but can’t follow through.

On a national level we’re dealing with a gamut of deception. A hypocritical governor who both cracked prostatution rings and patronized them. “Authors” such as Margaret Seltzer and James Frey who created fictional lives and passed them off as authentic. And, perhaps the most indicative statistic of our national inability to keep our word is the fact that as a country, we have a 48% divorce rate.

I guess this line of thought was brought about by this article about divorce parties.  There is something rankling about the fact that people are making really bad (or ill informed) decisions about the rest of their lives and then, not only being unable to keep their word (or their vows) but celebrating that fact.

Now if it was one of my friends and she (or he) was doing this divorce celebration to make themselves feel better about whatever is going on in their life, would I support them? Of course. But I think on a bigger level it just indicates how little we value keeping our word for no other reason than because we gave it.

Is that a lack of honor in our society? Or is it just laziness? I feel like a lot of times people don’t want to go to the trouble of making an informed decision and then they end up not being able to do the things they say they are going to do because they didn’t fully think a situation through first.

On the other hand, I know some other cultures take it to an extreme the other way. Honor and respect are a way of life for old-time Japanese. I had a professor that is on the board of a Japanese electronics firm, and we often discussed how a lot of times younger executives will defer to the judgement of older executives, simply because they are bred to honor and respect their elders. And in some cases those business decisions aren’t the best choices for the firm, and while others might know it, no one speaks up. It’s not quite the same thing as giving ones word, but I guess I’m expressing the idea that you can go too far one way or the other with things like honor and integrity and respect.  

Regardless, I think impressing upon people the importance of honoring their word couldn’t hurt this country at all… now there is an important skill that could be taught in schools.

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March 18, 2008

Globalization: The Pope gets it, but why?

The world is getting smaller, and that is a fact. If you ask Thomas Friedman, apparently it is getting flatter, but as a visual person that metaphor never made much sense to me. I mean, if you flatten out a sphere, more than half of the points on it actually end up farther apart than when it was round.

Not being a Catholic I had absolutely no idea that the Vatican actually decided what was a sin and what wasn’t, but I’m impressed that they actually understand and acknowledge the impact that globalization is having on the great debate about ethics. I always thought of whatever mysterious things Vatican officials do with their time as being somewhat archaic.

I also always thought that sins were determined by God, and were written in stone or in the first bible somewhere, but according to an article on cnn.com, apparently not. Now drugs, pollution, genetic manipulations, abortions, and pedophilia are being added to the list. The Vatican officials say that:

…whilst sin used to concern the individual mostly, today it had a mainly a social resonance, due to the phenomenon of globalization.

On one hand, like I said, I’m impressed that they’re focusing on sin and responsibility in the grand social scheme of things, as opposed to on an individual level.

Although it does make me wonder, when the Vatican starts listing things such as “pollution” as sins, doesn’t that impersonalize the act of sinning for all of us on an individual level? I mean, is anyone really going to believe they are going to hell for using aerosol hairspray, or that they should carpool because the pope says so?

I know that isn’t the point. The point is that this is one of the ways that the Vatican wields its political influence. However it’s hard for me to reconcile politics and religion as two things that should influence each other. That, I suppose is the American in me… the unwavering belief in the separation of church and state.

I’ve always though of religion as something that should be intensely personal. The foundation of it, after all, is the relationship between a person and whatever god they worship. Politics, on the other hand, is not about an individual’s relationship with their country… it is generally about the greater good for all the citizens of a nation, and seems to be more impersonal to each of us on an individual level because of that.

I wonder if by taking “sin” and globalizing it the Vatican is really doing themselves a favor in the long run. As omniscient as their decisions might be, it seems to me like this kind of move will actually make the Catholic church less accessible to the common man in the long run.  

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March 13, 2008

What is a “good” American?

First of all, this site is first torturous throes of construction. Having blogged at three other sites over the course of the last four years, I can truthfully attest that these first growing pains are the most awkward and painful times to write. Where is the experience? The background of months of interesting (if not always informed) posts, if not to draw information from, at least to refer back to when you’re drawing a blank?

I’m here because I’m a lazy American. In almost all of these first twenty (or a hundred) posts you’ll hear me acknowledge that. I’m here, because I’m trying to do something about it, and other than wielding powertools with a badass fury, asking questions, finding answers, and distilling those answers into something meaningful for myself, is one of the things I do best. This is how I become a better American.

But in writing post number two (the second in what I am afraid is going to be a long and arduous journey) I’m finding that I don’t even know what the hell I’m trying to be. What is a good American? I find it hard to believe that it can be summed up in something as simple as “someone who pays their taxes and votes.”

Hell, I can’t even come up with a valid description of just plain ol’ “American.” I mean, if I say, ”old white American” and “young black American” those phrases conjure up a set of cultures all their own that are as far apart in the spectrum of the universe as  sunlight and bleu cheese. As in, they don’t have anything apparent in common other than the fact that they both exist.What is the common denominator there? What factors could I say would make “good Americans” to people even farther apart than that on our socio-economic scale?

  • Voting? 
  • Making an effort to be informed about local and federal issues?
  • Giving back to our communities?
  • Knowing all the words in the Constitution?
  • Taking a stand for things you believe in? (Or just believing in something, for that matter?)
  • Displaying the American flag?

According to the Urban Dictionary:

A good American is “an American who knows what is good for him”. Or in other words, a USA citizen who knows that he is stupid, his government is smart, and his government knows what is good for him.
A good American pays all the taxes.
A good American doesn’t care that secret military experiments are being held a mile from his house.
A good American supports the war (no matter where it is being held).
A good American buys American cars.

Ohhh, “buys only American cars,” I didn’t think of that one. Am I still a good American if I support NAFTA, child labor in third world countries, and the outsourcing of American jobs to more competitive firms overseas? Or are those three black marks against me (four, if you count the Nissan currently taking up space in my driveway)?

And, if I’m and actively bad American… is that better than just being a fucking lazy one?

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March 7, 2008

Lazy Americans: The Air Force Tanker Controversy

This post originally appeared on my DIY blog www.diydiva.net on March 7, 2008. At the end I wrote “Frankly, I think we’ve gotten lazy as a country…” and I meant it. And because I do my damndest not to be a hypocrite, I include myself in that as well. I started this blog on a whim, because I’m sick of being a lazy american. Despite the MBA, things that involve business and economics and politics aren’t intuitive for me. But right now I’m taking responsibility for my ignorace. The Lazy American is my way of doing something about it.

Okay, I know, DIY blog here, but it also happens to be my personal blog, and I personally have a need to share my feelings on the big Air Force Tanker controversy, and here’s why…

Two years ago I would have heard all of the propaganda about giving $35 Billion in tax dollars to European countries that aren’t supporting our war effort, and how that money should be used to infuse our failing economy, etc. etc. And that’s all I would have heard. And I would have said yeah, that’s bullshit, rah rah rah, and a very ignorant part of me would have gotten swept up in all of the spin.

But then I spent 14 months studying the impact of globalization and international trade on pretty much everything that we do today. It doesn’t make me an expert, but it did enlighten me on one key aspect of the business world (highly relevant in this case) that I otherwise would not have thought of.

The necessity of competition.

Here’s what happened. Airbus(Northop Grummon) offered a bigger, better product. In all of the articles I’ve read and debates I’ve seen on TV the issues that are being debated never center around the actual product. Instead, people that like to start fires say things like ”this is going to hurt our economy” and “we’re giving money to people that won’t send troops to support our war effort.”

But you know what happens when we decide ‘hey, we should just keep the contract in the US to support ourselves’? No competition. So maybe that works out okay for us this time, but next time Boeing knows it’s going to get the contract since it’s an American company, so they don’t need to worry about making a bigger/cheaper/more efficient product. Then our military isn’t working with the best equipment it could be and there’s absolutely no incentive for a big company like Boeing (who doesn’t have any real national competition) to offer a better product.

What I don’t understand is why everyone is up-in-arms against the Air Force. If, as Americans, we want to be pissed that the Air Force contract went overseas, then it’s Boeing we need to pissed at. Offer a better product, Boeing. Step up to the frigging plate next time so that the jobs stay in America.  

Outsourcing is not the devil.

We believe in a free-market economy in this country, and for good reason. It breeds competition, innovation, and it responds to the needs of the consumers. Any time a country tries to close its doors, and any time a government tries to take over and control a country’s economy, the same things happen: lack of efficiency, inflation, and economic failure. Why wouldn’t the same principles apply on a smaller scale (think Unions and how the lack of motivation/incentive for workers has essentially killed the American auto industry) or on a larger scale, as in how we as a country function in the global market.

Frankly, I think we’ve gotten lazy as a country. We’ve been sitting at the top for so long that we don’t feel like we should work for it anymore… like its unnecessary to be the the most educated, the most innovative, the most hard-working. We want handouts, and we’re blaming all the wrong people when the jobs go somewhere else.

You would think at some point the government, the companies, and people of America would start taking responsibility for themselves instead of engaging in all of the finger pointing, fire starting, and laying of blame.

But that might be asking too much.

End rant.

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