Of Cover Letters and Other Truth Telling

I'm applying for a new job because my current job is like a vampire for my professional self-confidence.  Every shred of skill, ability and attitude I have honed over the past 15 years of my professional career has almost been drained away by the past 160 hours of my work life.  I took this job because it was a timely opportunity and it was something I thought I could learn how to do, but things are not progressing as I had hoped they might.  Thankfully another opportunity came up that's a better fit for me.  And I have to get out before I lose myself in the trees instead of continuing to develop forests.  I'm good at developing forests - and apparently not so good at learning how to groom the trees.  

For me, the hardest part of applying for jobs is the cover letter.  I grew up in a culture of women where you were to be demure, you were to deflect complements, and you were not to speak highly of yourself in any way.  You were not to express your true opinion because "if you don't have something good to say, don't say anything at all."  So unless you were talking about how good the Jell-O salad was, you kept your mouth shut - or you just kept shoveling food in your mouth until it was the appropriate time to get up and help with kitchen cleanup. (I've wondered on more than one occasion if this is not the root cause of many a church-lady's plumpness.) Voluntary kitchen duty for me has more than once involved "mistakenly" disposing of someone else's hot mess of a potluck dish then disavowing all knowledge about where the rest of it might have gone. 

So writing about myself in a way that places my abilities, talents and experience in a positive light has been a difficult task I have had to learn during my last semester of graduate school. I've had to shed my genteel upbringing and learn how to write about myself in ways I'm not used to.  It has helped me to put myself in the shoes of my mentors, to think about the things they would say about me and my work.  It has also helped me to let go of the control I feel like I need to have over every word I write.  The letters that have won me the interest of prospective employers have been the ones I've fired off quickly, where I've written eloquently about my passions, and the ones where I've treated my abilities and talents with (Yikes!) the most honesty.  


I still shed complements.  I still deflect glory - but only because I work with other women who can only take credit indirectly.  They're also the ones who make the best potluck dishes.  And every Southern woman worth her salt knows that silence is actually the best complement you can give a cook during any meal.  The other one is not refusing to take home leftovers. 

Beef - It's What's Making Me Sick

Beef - It's What's for Dinner.  This is a familiar ad I grew up with - this triggers all kinds of happy memories from grilling out to the theme song from Rogers and Hammerstein's Rodeo.  I was raised on the gold standard of beef - grass fed.  Twice a year, my Dad would scope out a prime specimen among the hundreds of unknowing bovine candidates in our pastures to become our dinner for the next six months.  He'd carefully select the best one out there, load it up in the trailer and roll off to the butcher 80 miles away.  A few days later, we'd pack empty coolers in the back of the Suburban and bring Bessie back to the deep freeze as steaks, roasts, ribs and ground beef.  

Because I was raised on such lusciously wonderful beef, I haven't been particularly impressed by the grocery store's efforts at what they call beef.  This has apparently been a lucky stroke for me.  Several years ago, I had a student who was diagnosed with a beef sensitivity, along with sensitivity to tons of other crazy things like olives.  She was a high achieving student, but reached new heights after she quit eating beef.  A couple of years later, my Mom's skin rash that had been diagnosed as Lupus and subsequently as a Latex/Lanolin allergy was so bad she changed doctors.  She was diagnosed with all kinds of crazy food allergies, including beef, watermelon and Brazil nuts.  She never eats Brazil nuts, so cutting those out was obviously not a problem - the other two were.  But after she quit eating foods she was sensitive to, her skin rash totally disappeared after plaguing her for constantly for more than 10 years. It was when my sister-in-law was diagnosed with similar crazy allergies, including a sensitivity to grapes, that I started to pay attention to my own reactions to foods I eat.  

My culprits:  almonds, soy, fruit whose juice is red, melon/squash, and...you probably saw this coming...beef. I went to the hippie grocery store last weekend (as opposed to the regular folks grocery store with lower prices and *gasp* corn fed beef) specifically to buy the good stuff.  I made this super-licious spaghetti with meat sauce to store away for lunch this week.  I've been eating it like gangbusters because of just how yummy it is.  I've been increasingly indescribably uncomfortable, and I've lost sleep because I've had acid in my mouth all night.  Then last night, I had a pretty wonderful grass-fed burger at a party along with several tums.  I think it was about halfway through the fireworks that a light bulb came on over my head that the Beef was making me sick.  I hadn't eaten any of those other foods in weeks because I'm very careful about not eating them.  It had to be the beef.  

So - this discovery doesn't really help me today.  In a few minutes, I'm off to get antacids to get me through until the Prilosec kicks in.  I've already had as much allergy medicine as I can have and stay awake for work today.  So, goodbye grass fed drips of grease down my happy hamburger eating chin, goodbye chunk of savory Sunday pot roast, goodbye to the sizzle of Ruth's Chris steakhouse, and goodbye spaghetti with super-licious meat sauce - we had a good run.  Now to find an allergist to get official confirmation of my own crazy food allergies. And more Tums.

Shalom – Stillness of Spirit

“Cease striving (in some translations – be still) 

and know that I am God.” Psalm 46:10 

Wholeness.  When you’re whole, there is a sense of “cease striving” that allows you to truly experience acceptance and affirmation that only God can provide.  Without wholeness, you strive for it constantly – some unseen reality, a standard too high, an undefined nirvana.  Even if you’re the achiever-type and who can visualize exactly what success will look like, what your 3, 6 and 12-month plans are to get closer to that, achievement is not always what it’s cracked up to be. 

Especially for achiever-types, and I know this because I am one, achievements only open the door to other things you need to do to get to the next level of achievement.  I started graduate school in 2000, and just graduated in May with my Ph.D.  As if writing a dissertation and getting it approved wasn’t enough, my advisor is adamant about having publications come from it, which truly is a wise thing.  Then the other mentors on my committee are also after me to present my findings at conferences. Another wise thing. But these things only lead to more work, which leads inevitably to more work.  It’s like I’m always a step away – as if I’m walking up the wrong-way escalator.  Each time I get up a step to the top, another appears.  My lack of excitement at my graduation has mystified some of the people I work with.  I should be excited about this achievement.  But one achievement’s children become the next stairs on the escalator that leads only to new stairs. It’s quite a tail-chasing way to live. 

 In the middle of all of this, I’ve been dealing with some very important identity issues related to how I will choose to live the rest of my life.  I have friends for whom the search for a husband is the most important part of their lives right now.  I have other friends for whom getting rid of their husbands (or wives) is the most important thing they have ever done for themselves.  Some of my friends spend all of their mental and emotional energy investing in their children or taking care of their aging parents.  I don’t have any of those things in my life right now, so sometimes their stories are just entertaining rather than instructive for me, and sometimes they just make me feel bad for the storyteller.  It makes me perversely glad that I’m not in those shoes.

I feel most whole when dealing in the land of ideas, concepts and translation of those ideas into the lives of others.  Maybe I don’t need a romantic relationship to feel whole, don’t need a family of my own, don’t need to invest my life in those kinds of things.  Maybe ideas are all I need.  I have questioned for years whether the romance/marriage thing was something I really wanted or whether it was a social norm that I didn't want to conform to.  I even considered very seriously becoming Catholic so I could become a nun.  That's a pretty serious statement coming from a Baptist girl.

Maybe I’ve been looking at the wholeness thing all wrong.  What if instead of achieving in order to be whole, Shalom comes for me through simplicity, through stripping down what’s not necessary, through becoming poor in spirit.  And poor might not mean having nothing, but having only what's most important.  It may come particularly for me through peeling away layers of ideas and experience to get down to what I really need – to feel accepted even with my own flaws, with my own createdness in all its uniqueness including being at home in the land of ideas and big high sounding words.  And only God truly provides that kind of stillness, that all-inclusive wholeness, that depth of affirmation.  I feel myself wanting to jump off that escalator all of a sudden. Maybe someday I will.

Q-Tips: Enemy of Warrior 3

Yoga went much better today than normal.  In the past six months that I’ve been going to the Chiropractor regularly, I’ve recognized that I have one side of my spine and body that is much more flexible and strong than the other side.  That’s mainly because I have a tiny tad of scoliosis just above my sacrum.  I never guessed that clumsily leaping off a high jump mat and cracking my tailbone in the 5^th grade would echo into my 30’s. A valiant attempt to impress those 8th grade boys had become a miserable preadolescent fail.  

My main Yoga problem, however, is not my unbalanced strength and flexibility – it’s balance.  Warrior 3 is a joke for me – you want me to stand on how many feet?  Not all of them?  I’m quite sure that my instructor can feel my incredulous eyes boring a hole in the back of her head.  This whole issue, or so I thought, caused my right side balance to be much more stable than my left side balance on most days.  That is, until today. 

The past few weeks, I’ve been feeling sore in my left ear.  Saturday morning after my run, it started to get worse.  Monday I was fevered and the pain was beginning to diminish my appetite.  I noticed I could not walk a straight line down the hall.  Yesterday, I admitted to myself that I was fully into the 3^rd day of an ear splitting headache and was going downhill fast.  I left work early to go to the clinic.  After washing my ear, which felt like they were shooting a stream of water up into my eyeball with a stun gun, they made me lay on my side while they pulled out a piece of earwax larger than what should logically fit inside my tiny ear canal.  It was big.  And unnaturally gross.  It was a color that things that come out of your head should never be.  It was like a train wreck – I was utterly repulsed but I could not look away.  The culprit?  Q-tips.  The Dr. said that using Q-tips is like loading a musket with a tamping rod – it just shoves whatever is in the ear canal up against the ear drum.  Since I am a fan of really clean ears, it made sense, but I’m going to have to rethink my affection for the little white cotton covered tamping rods if this is the ultimate and super nasty conclusion of all things Q-tip.

 

After she removed the giantific ball of wax, I felt nauseous and the nurse had to hold me up because the room started spinning.  I recovered quickly, spent more than enough at the pharmacy for meds and went to bed early. This morning, after a massive dose of pain medication and my first round of eardrops since I was a baby, my Yoga practice was unfettered by any concern about my balance.  In fact, I’m wondering why I hadn’t decided to blame my ear wax for a less than stellar practice up to this point.  Warrior 3 was a one-footed miracle today – one that I don’t want Q-tips to ever steal from me again!

First International Church of Starbuck’s

I am friends with a group of people that includes several members of the staff of a large local church.  One recently was fired for being too outspoken about church policies he disagreed with.  One was even more recently promoted because her boss recommended her for the position after the woman retired.  The senior pastor of that church resigned a few weeks ago, the hiring committee asked the music minister to resign.  Drama, of course, ensued. 

The response from the church members I know has been strong to say the least.  One side trusts the hiring committee explicitly because “they know things about the situation better than the rest of us do.”  The other side wants to raise hell because they were not involved in the decision making process, ostensibly implying that they would have kept the people happy and found a way to work through things.  I regret to say that this is pretty typical of churches I have known.  The story line is always the same:  do one thing, someone else doesn’t like it, drama ensues. 

I know a lot of folks in conservative churches listen to talk radio – you know the kind I mean - where the radio host is intolerant of any liberal views, cuts people off mid-sentence, and is generally disrespectful of anyone who is even a shade of gray away from his own views.  I can’t stand that stuff, even though I agree with 99.9% of what is said.  I can’t stand it because of how the hosts treat the callers.  My Mamma taught me that that behavior was rude and any lady worth her salt doesn’t treat people that way. 

The sad part is that this is how disagreements are treated in the Christian circles I have been a part of.  Dissent is never treated as an opportunity for exploring a topic.  It’s treated like leprosy.  Only the leper colony is now bigger than the “pure” folks inside the walls of the city.  This is doubly bad for those who ask hard questions because the defensiveness that comes from being a minority compounds the need to draw hard and fast lines about which all members must make a public decision.  It’s Travis’s line in the sand – and I fear that those who stay inside will die a painful death like the rest of the Texan patriots at the Alamo. 

For this church to survive, and many like it, there has to be an intentional process of drawing out the conflict very carefully, skillfully moving toward reconciliation – or at least enough forgiveness that those who choose to stay can move forward together as a church body.  This might be a wonderful opportunity to learn the skill of debate – recognizing the merits and weaknesses of someone else’s argument and presenting your own before both sides come to a new understanding of the issue.  All of this is very Hegelian, and sadly most Christian folks know very little about this nor do they care to learn anything about how to practice it.  But it is likely the most important skill that the pure church insiders need to gain if they are to reach the lepers they have ostracized by their staunch foothold on their version of the truth.

 

I’m not advocating for a looser definition of truth here.  I am advocating for listening, for respect, for openness to others’ ideas & perspectives, for laying down your own pride and considering others as more important than yourself.  All of this is Biblical, yet these phrases do not characterize the way that this church has been treating its staff.  And the lepers become less and less interested in getting back into communities that treat people like they’re enemy guests on an afternoon radio show.  That’s why I think I’ll stay a leper and hang out with the other lepers for a while longer at Starbuck’s on Sunday mornings. The coffee's better there, anyway.  

Proud Mom of 3 Graduate Degrees

An article by Slate.com recently explored the experiences, motivations and rationale for women who remain childless.  Since I am a childless woman who is nearly 40, I was fascinated.  I’ve always said that my excuse was that I had my nose in the books and didn’t have time for boys.  Come on, I have three graduate degrees that I have collected in the past 12 years – that’s a lot of attention on the text on the page instead of the dudes across the room.

The first real truth is that I would love to find a man.  I just would like him to already have kids.  The men I know who have become dads since I’ve known them have expressed the most wonderful qualities since their kids have come along.  I remember my younger brother having a complete freak fest when he held my niece for the first time.  Now, he’s the primary care provider for his two kids, ages 2 and 6 months.  He’s more patient, more gentle, more relaxed, and has become the king of follow-through, bath time and diaper changing.  With my niece, he was in denial that there was even a living creature in the baby burrito much less was he willing to deal with the contents of her diapers.  The problem with the single men I know is that they need to be trained – in soooo many ways. 

The second real truth is that all of the moms I know who have young children is that they have lost themselves in their kids.  You see this on TLC’s What Not To Wear all the time – women who have become frumpy and without any thought of a gym membership.  No wonder it seems like celebrity moms buy their children on Rodeo Drive.  I touched base with an old friend over the weekend because I saw something that reminded me of her, and she told me she had no memory of it – which was odd because it was so much a part of who she was for all the years that I knew her.  I wondered at her response for a moment, and decided that my sister-in-law (mother of 2 under 10) swears that motherhood kills your brain cells.  My friend agreed but had to quit the conversation to go chase her boy down because he was being too quiet. 

So, between wanting a man who already has gone through the delightful dad metamorphosis and not wanting the medusa mom transformation to happen to me, I am childless and proud to be an aunt of 4 fabulous young people whom I love to spoil on a regular basis.  The possibility of children is not off the table – for me, it might be about finding the right person who could become the delightful dad and temper my medusa mom.  But for the time being, I’ll stick with the story that my graduate degrees are my children – at least if they are too quiet in the next room, I know that all’s well in there.  

Kick Something's Butt Every Day

Today was a bit of a workplace nightmare.  Your boss being on vacation only guarantees that a week of workplace bliss will be followed by several days of workplace chaos.  This was Day 1.  After a morning of nothing to do (remember this is only my 3rd Monday of a highly technical job for which I am still training), the afternoon hit.  I had told a colleague that I was afraid I would soon have more than enough to handle on my to-do list.  


Just after lunch, a flurry of email snowed me under for the rest of the afternoon - it will spill over into tomorrow.  I have a stack of papers to process through waiting for my prompt 8 a.m. arrival.  One of those emails led me like Alice through Wonderland, digging through stacks and stacks of forms, tracing through data files and subfolders I didn't organize (IF I had organized them, I would have gone right to what I needed).  


I started feeling overwhelmed, and by 4:30, I was almost in tears because of my lack of success.  I decided that I needed to kick something's butt today and finish the report.  After visiting my very well rested and happy looking boss, I systematically replicated his procedures, and on the third time running the data,  things came out just fine.  


After all, kicking something's butt must be on everyone's to-do list every day.  I wonder what it will be tomorrow...