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Cinema Verite (Part II): If Movie-Going Were Like Shopping

The concept of individually pricing movies occurred to me during a conversation between me and my boyfriend; we were discussing what movie we would go to on Friday night (here's just a snippet of the conversation, as it dragged on almost as long as a movie itself).

HIM: “Want to see Alexander? I saw the commercial. It looks really good.” Translation: there are a lot of battle scenes with heavy weaponry. There should be some great fight scenes.”

ME: “Yeah, well the Times seemed less than enchanted with it. They think it’s Oliver Stone’s worst in 20 years.” Translation: Maybe by throwing in some allusion to the Times I can appeal to his ego and he won’t argue with me about it being bad.

“We could go see Bridget Jones.”

HIM: “That supposed to be any good?” Translation: You better give me documentation before I ante up $10 to see a chick flick. Is there any screwing or farting or gross things for men to laugh at?

ME: “Don’t know. I haven’t read anything.” Translation: Everyone I’ve talked to says it isn’t as good as the first Bridget, but I’m a woman, I should get SOMETHING out of it.

HIM: “Well I’ll need more than that if I’m going to shell out $10 for it.” Translation: I want to see National Treasure.

Cinema Verite: Addressing the Movie-Going Mindset

When getting ready to go out, some people deliberate on outfits or restaurants. In our house hours are spent trying to decide what movie to go see.

10 Ways to Achieve the Perfect Orgasm

Like the blog title? It works for Cosmopolitan. I’ve taken up reading women’s magazines again.

This is a big deal for me. I decided to stop reading women's magazines, quitting cold turkey, dropping the sauce, so to speak. (All these pre-Thanksgiving-dinner allusions. I must be hungry.) I decided that I had to read things that were substantial. Business Week, The Times, the long political features in The New Yorker.

You could say I was denying my heritage, abandoning the first type of literature (OK, the second, if you count the V.C. Andrews series) that got me reading outside of the classroom—the first un-forced instance of spontaneous browsing. I'd forgotten where I'd learned the basics of being a woman. I'd taken their advice on shaping my brows and deep conditioning once a month and then took off for college without even saying goodbye.

During this haughty, carpet-bagging, Glamour-less period, I fell out of the mainstream of collective female knowledge, wearing square-toed boots amidst the pointy-toed women walking to work Downtown, my fingernails rough and uneven, while I stewed on other magazines that typically appealed to the more analytical half of the brain.

I suppose I miss appealing to my more spontaneous side. I was at a girlfriend's house. She loves shopping and owns as many pairs of shoes as my boyfriend owns tool gadgets. While we chatted over merlot I picked up her latest copy of Women's Magazine X, thick as a catalogue and teeming with stilettos; shiny, powdery cheeks; and practical beauty tidbits that you hardly take in consciously. They slip so naturally and easily into a women's memory bank.

"Hey," she yelled over to me. "Have you even heard a thing I've said?" She'd caught me, the real me, the women's magazine reader.

That weekend I parked myself at Barnes & Noble with the intention of browing all of the magazines that I browsed when I had afternoons to fill as a teenager. I had some catching up to do.

From Here to Autonomy (Part V): Your Money or Your Life?

If someone put a gun to your head and asked you to give them your wallet, what would you do?

The answer seems obvious, but the truth is that this has happened to many of us—we’ve been forced to choose between our money and our lives—and we’ve chosen to keep the money.

I loved Shoshanna Zuboff’s column this month in Fast Company; she did an informal survey of the other soccer parents living, like her, in rural Maine. Some of the parents were locals and worked in local industry, others were transplants—professionals who had decided to slow down and chose lifestyle over career status. This led Zuboff to explore why people who had “succeeded” in their careers chose not to live in a more urban, status-oriented world that rewarded their success.

By the same token one could ask why a handful of executives, once they hit a zenith in their careers, decide to resign; or why a novelist, with a mass market bestseller under his belt, decides to pen a “quiet” book under a pen name; or why Michael Jordan decided to play Minor League baseball. 

Do people wither in the limelight?

From Here to Autonomy (Part IV): Reading the Tea (or Tree) Leaves

Like I said in the first part of this series, I’ve been working on this Godforsaken book at work. At some point it became my job to do the patchwork required to put the book together: Coordinating the copyediting and proofreading, working with the designer on the cover, and with the printer on the file format and typesetting, and with direct marketing list brokers for marketing it, and with our PR guy for touting the hell out of it.

Let me amend my first sentence, the book is not Godforsaken, it’s actually quite good, or will be quite good when it is done, I’m told. The content is first rate. I wouldn’t know that, however. I’ve hardly read it myself, save for the thousands of redlined words.

This situation has become a wonderful metaphor for the concept of losing one’s perspective at work, entering into a profession with the expectation of immersing oneself into something fascinating, seeing that there are “dues to pay” in the form of lackluster busywork, and then getting so immersed in this busywork that you forgot why you are at your company or what you wanted to get out of it in the first place.

From Here to Autonomy (Part III): Work is cheap, thinking is priceless

I read an interesting blog entry on Worthwhile today that chips away at a dynamic I’m only just beginning to make out. They pulled a quote from -- Michael Ray’s and Rochelle Myers’s book, Creativity in Business:

After finding that about one child in 30 is brilliant and happy, (Harvard psychologist Burton) White did a great deal of research to determine what demographic or psychological characteristics distinguished those children. … he determined that the bright and happy children had only one thing in common: All of them spent noticeable amounts of time staring peacefully and wordlessly into space.

See, all that time my mother let me vedge out and watch episodes of Gumby was not a waste; something was happening there. I used to daydream a lot in class about sports, boys (those pre-sexual bubble-bath fantasies), and being the youngest actress to ever win an Oscar for Best Actress (screw you, Tatum, you only got best supporting actress). None of these habits have been cited as contributing to success later in life, but perhaps this now makes the case for adults who give Palm Pilots to their kids so they can manage their busy extracurricular schedules. Thanks Mom and Dad, you have taught your kid to be a no-questions-asked suck-up. You have taught your kid to be a Do-er.

The Burton study provides a beautiful argument for letting adults free their minds and see what answers come to them....at work. Certainly, making required contemplation a company policy might be interpreted as early Happy Hour for some, but for others who are craving the time to simply sit and think it could make all the difference.

From Here to Autonomy (Part II): The Do-ers, The Be-ers, and The Visionaries

Somewhere down the line I suspected I was a Turncoat, a mutineer from the Do-er ship. Several jobs ago, at a Dot Com, when I was a generously compensated Do-er, which makes Doing much more bearable, our company endured several rounds of startling layoffs. I never saw them coming, of course; I was too busy Doing to notice—so you can imagine my surprise.

It was even more surprising when our management brought in a Guru to help build morale. Morale-building, in my book, was very anti-Do. It took away from the time I needed to file, call, follow-up, draft, input, etc.

The Guru asked us to assign ourselves into one of three groups: “Do-ers,” “Be-ers,” or “Visionaries.” My guess was that by doing this we would better understand how our colleagues defined themselves, and we’d get a better sense of how to work with them. And seeing as we now had half the colleagues we used to have, we would have to understand underlying motivation quite clearly, lest we force a Be-er to be a Do-er and incite violence in our now vacuous hallways.

I gravitated over to the “Visionary” side of the room, prompting an immediate response in one of my colleagues,

“What the hell are you doing over here? You’re a Do-er! Go be with them.”

From Here to Autonomy: An Employee's Journey (Part I)

I got a call from my boss this morning, not so unusual except that today is Saturday. He was reviewing a book that I’ve been working on with him for several months. We are in the homestretch; just reviewing the proofs to make sure everything is copasetic before we go to press.

Unfortunately things were not copasetic.

“The wrong chapter is in this thing!” he said, referring to a chapter that had been submitted late, then shuffled through an edit and copyedit several times, then returned to be rewritten and copyedited again. Somewhere in the hullabaloo of managing 21 other chapters, most of which had also been submitted late, or with changes, or with special instructions, I must have submitted the wrong version to the publisher.

Clearly my boss felt that this a was big enough deal to call me on a Saturday morning,

“I know you are on a deadline, and I didn’t want you to have to find out about this Monday morning,” he said. Thrill: I now have the pleasure of stressing about it for the rest of the weekend.

I supposed he wanted to tell me in case I might find it imperative to go to the office and fix the problem so we’d be back on schedule Monday morning. I browsed my schedule on my Palm Pilot to see what else I had going on this weekend. This is what I had listed for today:

            --Read

            --Sked hair appointment

            --Write/think

            --Groceries???

            --Plans/JM

Boy, tough day, huh? Still, I shut off my Palm Pilot and went back to my reading. It was very important article in O Magazine.

I’ve found a radical shift in my behavior over the past few months; I surprise even myself sometimes. Here my BOSS is working on weekends and calling me about something important, and I—the underling—cannot find the time to address it.

I’m not trying to be contrary or rebellious. I take great pride in my work. It bothers me that the book schedule is now thrown off because of my mistake. But a new question arises when these things happen? I no longer ask, “What can I do to fix it?” I ask myself, “What am I committed to being, a “Do-er” or a “Visionary”? At least, this is the question that I ask on weekends; when I ask it every day I will be in a new place, at a new level. Employed or not, I will be autonomous.

Marriage: A Realistic Look

I’ve been to a lot of weddings lately.

During times like these us singles just can’t help but think about our own impending day. Not like I have any expectations; any I can ADMIT to anyway. As I was getting ready for one of the weddings we went to, two weeks ago, my boyfriend made a grand announcement:

“Just so you know,” he said, “I HATE diamonds. I think they are ugly and part of a conspiracy by the diamond industry to force people to believe they can only show their love by buying overvalued rocks.”

He left me, clipping my ears with fake pearls, perplexed.

“Cripes, tell him to get over it,” said one of my girlfriends. “Diamonds are one of the most durable precious stones in the world. It can withstand almost anything, like a marriage should—get it?”

There are more precious materials, my b-friend Jesse says, like amber, the fossilized resin that in some cases is millions of years old. I suppose, should that special day come, when he asks me to be his and hands me a hemp-lined box with a hunk of amber, I should be pleased: He’s asking me to enter a life of hardened-yet-malleable bliss. Something a bit more realistic than diamonds, which despite their origins actually sound a bit artificial to me, like some washed-up, Botoxed starlet—they can take repeated beatings and still retain a time-defying luster.

Bushwhacked! Part II

Surely there are other places to go for political commentary. All I can say is I've felt an unquestionable sorrow this week, even in light of the birthday celebration of my Dear Friend (and Old Boss) Donald Van de Mark.

Donald was a CNN and CNBC news reporter for many years before settling in the Bay Area to pursue the next, more reflective and partisan phase of his life.

A Libertarian who voted for George W. Bush in 2000 (and who never mentioned it then!), he has a new perspective on Dubya and his conservative regime that he expressed recently. I thought it was well-put and stood out from the usual Bay Area Republican-hating rants: