I’d been invited to a kid birthday party, and in my circle of friends, that means there can be way more adults than kidlets. I had gone around the kitchen island to get some snacks, and was heading past the dining room table with all its seated parents to get to the living room.

One dad had his chair pushed into the aisle, and his elbow thrown over the back of the chair.

“Excuse me,” I said.

He politely moved right away to let me past.

I gave him a shrewd look and said “You’re really manspreading there.”

He’s a cosmopolitan guy, and stretched further into the space to show how very manspreading entitled he could be, leaning into my accusation in hyperbolic humor.

He knew what manspreading means. Do you?

I’ve since realized that it’s not universally known. Women started to complain about the space men habitually took up while riding on public transportation.

This sort of thing is very familiar:

It is not limited to transit. I’ve been noticing men with their legs and elbows out in any chair they land in. At work, at church, at little kids’ birthday parties.

I know as a woman, I am hyper-conscious of the space my body takes up in public space. Like it’s an expensive  piece of real estate and I’m not sure I can afford it.

I am not bringing this up to accuse men of entitlement. That’s covered well elsewhere.

I’m reading a new book Presence. The author, Dr. Amy Cuddy, gave this TED talk. Go ahead and click  after you’re done reading my weekly wonder, it’s good.

The book was written after the TED talk, and goes into so much more detail about how being positive and optimistic makes us better people. Happier people, more effective at our jobs, at anything we set our minds to.

So those entitled men spreading their body parts all over the landscape? Maybe they have something to teach me. I have been endeavoring to stick my elbows out and stretch my legs like I’ve got a right to.

Why not?

Do you have any idea how FOREIGN it feels to let my knees fall apart and stretch my legs out under a table?

This is something girls are absolutely trained not to do.

Even standing at our full height without cocking a hip to seem shorter (assuming the woman in question is tall) is rare.

And high heels for short women. If some of you reading are unaware of manspreading, perhaps you are also unaware of another female phenomenon.

Some women I have met are so accustomed to wearing high heels that their calf tendon has shortened, and it is painful to be in flat shoes.

True story.

People, I am unwilling to shrink myself anymore. I am sure I will fall into it sometimes, but I am moving into a bigger space, and I invite you to join me.

Hands on hip, wide stance, taking on the world.

It can’t hurt and there is evidence that it helps.

Maybe you can learn how to fly.

“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.” Warren Buffett

The internet brought me that quote last week, and then I couldn’t’ remember who had said it. So I searched for it and found that Warren Buffett is the source of the quote.

The internet said that it means “Rome was not built in a day,” and that it means it takes time to do big things.

Sometimes the internet is stupid.

I can’t help but think about a specific tree I love when I read that quote.

My house was built in 1950. When we first saw it, before we bought it, there was an enormous tree as old as the house itself. 50 year old tree, more than 100 feet tall.
It spread shade over our house, over the lawn and over our neighbors.

It was a glorious tree. I loved that tree.

It died. It caught a virus and had to be cut down. It was hollow in the middle. Look:

And now our backyard has no shade. Someone, once, a long time ago, planted a tree.

And it was glorious.

And then it died.

We had a mature tree in our front yard too. That tree died first. We got another tree, and it is growing. There is a draught in California, where we live, so last summer I scooped the water from my daughter’s bath and dumped it on the tree.

I hoped it was growing. I couldn’t tell because the leaves were all brown.

But look at it now:

It’s green! All green baby leaves in the place it’s supposed to have leaves.

Except…

t’s not the sort of tree that you can sit in the shade of.

Which is why that statement by Warren Buffett is more complicated that just, Rome wasn’t built in a day. There are steps and stages, and delayed gratification when it comes to planting trees.

And then there is the part where the tree is almost completely self-sustaining.

I am certain that the person who planted the original tree in my backyard is dead. He did not get to sit in the shade of that tree like I did.

I wonder if I will be around to sit in the shade of the tree that I did plant in the front yard.

I’m still glad I planted it. I can imagine the people who will sit in its shade. One day.

Veronica has been saying she wants to see New York City and Paris.

Me too. I’ve seen NYC, but not Paris.

In addition to getting her a passport, I need to help her get the hang of what it means to travel the world.

Ask yourself:

What does it REALLY mean to travel the world?

There are the amazing new sights and sounds; flavors, smells and shapes. The new ways of doing and seeing that lodge in your heart and add a new dimension and understanding to everything.

Yes. YES.

and also, there is the part where you travel on public transportation and walk.

And walk.

Don’t forget the museums. The feet aching museums.

I thought I would try to expose my daughter to some of these things.

We each have tomorrow off.

I thought I might take her to the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. They have exotic and splashy art. For a first real art museum, this could be a good one.

She’s been asking to take a train ride. I thought we could walk to the train (WALK! Like World Travelers!) to the train station and go to downtown Union station.

Union station in LA is beautiful. I’ve always wanted to spend time exploring it. maybe Veronica would do that with me.

Then we could walk across the street to Olvera. It’s a bit like going to Mexico, visiting Olvera street.

You can see this is starting to be my favorite choice. Norton Simon can wait. We’ll be having tacos on Olvera.

Chris is worried that it will rain.

That happens when you travel the world too. We’ll bring an unbrella.

I heard someone say last week, that she no longer makes room for overwhelm.

Really? I didn’t think overwhelm worked like that. Whelm implies a flood…and a flood is irrisitable. A different thing, a foreign substance fills your surroundings and threatens your very life.

Water, or quicksand, can overwhelm you in a physical way.

Emotional overwhelm is actualy internally created. I think all of us have felt overwhelmed from time to time. I certainly know what it means when someone else tells me that they feel overwhelmed.

It’s a sense of helplessness.  A sense of being trapped and incapable.

I guess if it comes from my mind, maybe I can turn it off. If I am overwhelmed by feelings and expectations, maybe I can change them.

How crazy is that?

I remember when my daughter was first born. I was overhwhelmed, totally. All the things it took to take care of a newborn! I felt that it would take everything I had and more and I would still fail.

I realized after several months that I was crying. I was crying every day. Not all day, but at least once a day.

I watched myself cry every day. I thought about it, and one day, when I was starting to cry because I was so overwhelmed, I was disgusted with myself. Not only was I so overwhelmed that I was crying, I was mad at myself for crying. It made me want to cry more.

So, that day, I saw myself, and I said to myself, “Crying is the problem, not the solution.”

After that I stopped crying. I did continue feelign overwhelmed, but at least I wasn’t mad at myself for crying.

I cry all the time.

But that was the day I decided to stop crying every day because i was scared and tired and ignorant.

I decided. and I stopped.

I wonder if I can just stop being overwhelmed.

I am going to try it.

Let’s see…Being overwhelmed is the problem, not the solution.

Yeah. That’s true.

Let me see if I can stop the problem

The thing is, she learned about curling irons yesterday. Someone at the mall demonstrTed an expensive one. 

We did not buy that one, but I showed her the miracle of Amazon and we chose another curling iron

She was almost hyperventilating, she was so excited 

And at 2:30 AM She went to the bathroom. It woke us up.

I went to check on her. 

SHE WAS SO EXCITED!!!

She had lost a tooth, which she hadn’t even realized was loose and tomorrow was day camp with zohreh and everything was SO EXCITING

I didn’t even bring up the curling iron

I tried to think about how to help her get to sleep. I tried to tell her a story, but she kept interrupting with relevant facts.

I made her get up and eat milk and a graham cracker. Then we watched doc mcdtuffins

While the show was on I tried to figure out how to do the tooth fairy. We are low on quarters.

When she went back to bed she checked on the tooth. I told her the tooth fairy might not have put her on the route since she lost it in the middle of the night

She thought the tooth fairy has spies that keep track of all the teeth

Just when I think her breathing is even, she rolls over

I wonder if I could rob her piggy bank to fund the tooth fairy?

I wasn’t there, but my husband was watering the plants in the backyard. He heard a funny noise and thought something was wrong with the hose. He looked around and saw a swarm of bees.
Hundreds of bees had come to our backyard.

Apparently, this is something that happens. Bees will get a new queen, and each hive can only have one queen. A contingent of bees will break of and look for a new home.

It is officially called a swarm. The bees were swarming.

We didn’t want to get stung. And we didn’t want the dog to get stung. The dog wanted to investigate and see what all this activity was about. We knew what the activity was about, so we restrained the dog and didn’t let her bother the bees.

When bees go looking for a new home, they send out scouts to find a spot. The scouts come back and perform a dance describing their choice of a new home. The more excited the dance the more excited the scout is about the new spot.

These bees are so organized, and they all know what they are doing. Some kind of instinct, a program kicks in and they begin to perform new tasks.

These bees have to only know the hive they are from. They were larvae there, and they did their bee work their whole lives.

Then, one day, something happens. A trigger is pulled and everything changes.

Even though they haven’t done it before, even if inside the bee is freaking out, they still know exactly what to do.

I watched these bees gather in a two foot long pile on a branch of my Nandina bush. I’d never seen bees do that before. Some single bees broke off to fly on an errand, so the pile was wriggling a little bit. The bees clung together in this new environment.

It was strange and eerie. They did not sting me, but I still had small phantom itches and pricks on my skin as I watched them.

All of the bees had a role to play. How did they know?

It made me think of intuition, and striking out into the unknown. Those bees didn’t know what they were doing, they didn’t know what was going to happen for sure.

Maybe some of them believed the enthusiastic scout bee, maybe they were convinced by her dance showing how great the new spot would be.

Maybe some of them didn’t buy it at all.

Still, when the time came they flew away. And when they flew, they protected the queen.
At night, when it was cold, that long swarm shortened up. They huddled much more tightly, because they were out in the open air at night. It was cold, and they wanted to protect the queen and be warm.

I went and looked at them in the early morning. They were very very still, none of the single bees flying away.

The bees were sleeping.

It’s not easy to move to a new place. How different are bees and people? Someone may come up with a story about how great a new place is, and then some people will break off and go to live there.

Nobody knows really what it will be like once you get there.

The bees stayed on our bush for a little less than a day. I wanted them to live, but not in our bush. Maybe they figured it out. In any case, they flew away in a swarm while I was napping. My husband and daughter saw it.

They left behind some hexagons. That’s what bees do. They make combs. I can imagine that some of the bees were deciding if this particular branch was going to be the final home, and others of the bees didn’t care, they were bees. Bees make combs.

So leaves and berries were holding wax, because these bees were not uncertain.

Wherever they were, no matter what they were bees and bees do what bees do.

I like to think that is a reason to trust the unknown. I may not know what is happening out there, when I’m moving into an area I don’t know.

That’s no reason to do nothing. I still gotta do what I know I gotta do. I’m inspired by my bee visitors. The bee scout danced her dance to find a new home. The worker bees worked and made wax combs, even if both of those were ignored in the end.

Wasting effort wasn’t a problem. The bigger problem would be giving up and doing nothing.

My dad tells me that when he was in community college his professor the students was a rare and special because they were attending college: less than 5% of people had the advantage of a college education.

Except it wasn’t true anymore, and hadn’t been true since the 1940s. After World War II, the U.S. created the GI bill to pay for returning soldiers to go to college. My dad’s out-of-step professor had already been teaching these veterans for decades and hadn’t quite noticed that the world around him had changed.

When I graduated from high school, I assumed I’d be going to college. I’d held several entry-level jobs, and I knew I needed a leg up to do something better. I fixed my class schedule so I could work as many shifts at my job as I could. It took a long time, but I never had to take a loan for my education.

Which makes me part of a bygone era. Millennials didn’t have the option of debt-free education. Education costs skyrocketed, and jobs for inexperienced young people had almost disappeared. Then again, loans were easier and easier get. The result is the best educated generation in America.

This Whitehouse report shows 47% of Millennials have a college degree. Jobs were scarce and loans were easy, so people borrowed more money and had fewer jobs. My Gen X friends stacked roommates up in tiny cheap apartments, or couch surfed around in their 20s. The next set of 20 year olds lived at home with their parents in greater numbers and for longer. The parents of Millennials generally supported the focus on education to the exclusion of job experience.

That doesn’t last forever, though. The time would come, and is now at hand, when students would become professionals.

And the classroom is different from a job.

Our educational system is based on science method. Even the non-scientific fields use this basic foundation.

Thomas Kuhn, in one of my favorite life altering books, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, says this:

“science…is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like”

Put another way science is based on accepted forms of knowledge and the mutual agreement that some answers are right and some are wrong. Everyone agrees those are the rules.

It’s their paradigm. And universities are incentivized to help their students succeed. Professors have office hours and they craft their curriculum with assignments that are achievable. Successful students mean a successful university.

Jobs have a different paradigm.

Some bosses make time for you. Many do not. And even the good ones have other people above them in the organization chart that they have to appease.

My experience as a professional has shown me again and again that businesses consider human resources chess pieces to play how they will. Growing, reducing, staffing up or reorganizing down, that’s just business.

Don’t take it personally. It’s not about you.

So how is that going to fit into the worldview of Millennials? As adult children raised in an age of helicopter parenting and over-education, how are they going to fit in with the heartless corporate environment of the job market?

Highly educated and ambitious Millennials have a new sort of world to conquer when it comes to business.

It’s a new century–not even that new anymore. The twenty-somethings are all plugged into a new paradigm. The rest of us know it’s new, but maybe the Millennials don’t because it’s the air they breathe.

The talk at the water cooler is that Millennials in the workplace seem needy and require more feedback. Managers have little patience for it.

Then again. Would it be so bad to change the corporate culture of America to be more focused on the individual worker?

No doubt there will be some uncomfortable adjustments. Tapping the shoulder of an intimidating boss was more than I was willing to do when I started my career. I hadn’t had a history of positive responses to my suggestions.

Millenials have, so perhaps they can be emboldened to raise the issues to negotiate a better work environment. That same White House report show that Millennials are more interested in creative work environments than previous generations. Creativity, flexibility and room for friends and family.

This is an age of entreprenuerial efforts as well. If this generation is burdened with debt, they are also compensated with the widened horizons of the digital age. From the get-go, they know they are not stuck.

New entrants into the job market, with aspirations to start careers, are carrying a lot of freight. Debt and the oppressive climate of the Great Recession are non-trivial.

There are still way more reasons to be hopeful than grim.

We haven’t begun to tap the potential of collaborative problem-solving the digital age presents us with. And businesses need the Millennials more than the Millennials need those jobs. The future always seems to sneak up on us when we are doing something else, and the highly-educated, tech-savvy Millennials are the present and the future.

I better go get my shades.

I was raise to respect authority. There was a strong message that authority is God’s way of talking to us, and that if I were to listen to what the people in charge of me I would be following God’s will.

I believed it, like you do when you’re a kid. I maybe believed it more than other kids might have. I had friends who would sneak and do what suited them, but I was convinced that I would be better off somehow—happier or more blessed—by staying obedient.

Then of course there was the hellfire.

But I believed in the carrot, not the stick. It was about loving God to stay inside the confines of what I was told to do.

I did break free, I did learn to disbelieve in the direct line of continuity of God through human authority figures.

In principle.

In reality, I still give in to this temptation in a thousand ways.

“I’m just obeying orders.”

“Well, he probably knows something I don’t”

“He’s the boss.”

It’s easy to cower and stay put. Mice are very good at that, and look how well they’re doing.

I guess.

One place I am not at all willing to cower and delay about is for my daughter. If I see she needs something and someone else disagrees, then we disagree.

When she was three, I made a mistake of taking someone else’s advice. She was getting ready to do her preschool Christmas carol show, and I was fawning and fussing over her outfit. She was crying because she was nervous.

She was so little! Her teacher shooed me out, telling me she would stop crying as soon as I left.

My baby girl got up on stage and Full on Sobbed her way through the performance. The Show Must Go On, even though she was overcome.

I was past overcome. I should never have listened to that teacher! I knew what my daughter needed, and it really WAS me.

If I can know it for my daughter, I can know it for me too. There’s always somebody ready to tell me that they have a better way.

One Weird Tip

5 Things to Never Do Again

The voices of “I know better than you” are proliferating.

I wasn’t put on this earth to be like anybody else. I’d kind of like to believe that all my dreams would come true if I just followed one weird tip. Or that I could lay down the burden of uncertainty and responsibility by handing over my life to someone else.

It feels easy to give up like that.

But it’s not what I want. And even if I make a mess of it and make other people uncomfortable, I am the one who does me the best.

I can do me.

Like a boss.

When the british isles were becoming industrialized, the factories had to take people who had been serfs and fit them into the time schedule of a factory.

You might thing that people would come late all the time. But these people had been plugged into the rythm of the season. They went to work when the sun woke up.

So, yes, in the winter they were late. BUt in the summer they were early.

Yes, this is a post about daylight savings.

It’s pretty common to human history to alter our natural impulses for some perceived benefit.

People have fasted to get wisdom, which is a very big alteration of the natural order.

Tattoos are experiencing a resurgence. That’s a body modification.

We all get persuaded that it’s a great idea.

It’s natural in another way. It seems to be a human trait, to strive for something greater, something over the horizon, that is better.

So we endure discomfort, pain and misery to see if it will lead to something better.

Some people say it will. Maybe thinking makes it so.

I had listened to one webinar too many, it seems.This one was giving advice on how to shorten the content to grab your audience’s attention.

Attention span and competition are inversely proportionate it seems.

I am thinking about Anna Akhmatova.

She was a Russian poet, oppressed by the Soviets. Her works were hand-copied, and passed between eager readers. Eventually to save the life of her son, she was forced to write a poem in praise of the Soviets.

I want to weep when I compare this to the shrinking world of words.

How did the dias of literary royalty get filled with Oprah’s book club authors?

Elizabeth Gilbert, that champion of the international yoga pants brigade, is passed around now?

what is left?

headlines?

there are webinars on those too.

I think i hate everything right now.