Authentic or Not?

au·then·tic
–adjective

1. not false or copied; genuine; real: an authentic antique.

2. having the origin supported by unquestionable evidence; authenticated; verified: an authentic document of the Middle Ages; an authentic work of the old master.

3. entitled to acceptance or belief because of agreement with known facts or experience; reliable; trustworthy: an authentic report on poverty in Africa.

 

I recently attended a Women's Leadership Conference where much of the content focused on being an authentic leader.  Women, I learned, by their very nature, view the world differently than men and therefore bring a unique perspective to business.  For instance, men tend to be focused on one thing (hunters) and women consider many things at once (gatherers).  We were told not to emulate men but to be authentic, be who we are.  Have high expectations, advocate for other women and be comfortable in our own skin.

 

Sounds good doesn't it?  The only problem is that if I am going to be truly authentic, then the work world needs to change their idea of acceptable business behavior.  Crying when frustrated needs to be allowed, hugging people just because I am happy must be protected by human resources and dressing in sweatpants on 'fat' days must become the norm.  I mean seriously, can a woman really be authentic in the workplace? 

 

I love the idea of authenticism.  By virtue of its definition, it has to be real.  I have been in many meetings where men get angry, pound their fists and use expletives.  This is their manner of telling everyone that they are not happy with some outcome or that whatever is going on must change.  Put a woman in that same position acting the same way and she is instantly labeled as a b*tch.  The problem, as I learned this week, is she needs to stop emulating men and be authentic. OK, Do-Over:  same meeting, same people.  She listens to what is going on and after finally getting everyone's attention (which takes awhile because she doesn't yell, pound or curse and is being authentic) she tells everyone how very disappointed she is and sends everyone to time out! Ha! :)  Just kidding, but essentially she must suppress her emotional outburst while it is fine for the men in the room to express theirs.

 

At this point I feel it is important to specify that I am not a radical feminist or a man hater, nor do I frequent bra burning events.  I love being a woman and I love being treated like one.  I am not opposed to feminism although I believe that just like many other causes the movement gets labeled by the radical activists within it, none of which I can relate to or agree with.  I am angered that women only make .70 to every dollar earned by a man and that only 2% of all fortune 500 companies are run by women, but I still like to have the door opened for me and to be told I smell nice. Am I confused or do I suffer from multiple personalities? I don't think so.  I think I am just being authentic.    

 

 

Truths from a Frequent Flyer

I remember when flying on a plane was an exciting and enjoyable event. Everyone got really dressed up and it was special. The women wore hats and the men wore suits.  There were no security checks where you had to remove your shoes, coats and wristwatch, there were meals served to everyone and the flight attendants were all female, pretty and called stewardesses. They passed out decks of cards, airplane pins and models, and the children could go visit the pilot in the cockpit before takeoff. It was a luxury. 

I hate to fly. It has become a miserable experience. The airlines can no longer discriminate so the 'stewardess' on the flight I am sitting on as I type this is bald and grossly overweight. He is twice as wide as the cart he is pushing and he apparently thinks that if he keeps trying to be funny that I will forget that he smashed my right arm with his stomach when walking by. Yuck!

Looking around I see a variety of attire. Since the plane left at 6:10 am some people are still wearing their pajamas - oops sorry those are now known as lounging pants. Double yuck!  

I love to people watch and wonder why each person is traveling. I found out that the woman sitting to my left is on her way to a convention in Boston. During the traditional niceties while taking our seats I asked her what type of convention, and she answered, 'contraceptive'. I feigned sleep. 

Business travelers, military and students are fairly easy to recognize. Sometimes I imagine Grandparents traveling to see their new family member, or Snowbirds flying home for the summer. Regardless of the 'why' people just don't pay ridiculous money for this miserable experience without a good reason. 

I travel by plane a lot. My family lives on the opposite coast of the country and I typically travel for business at least once a quarter. I also love to travel for pleasure which often involves a flight. Being a frequent flyer, I  have learned the following truths which inevitably contribute to the misery of the flight experience:

1)  If the flight attendant is walking down the aisle with a seatbelt extender, it is for the person who is going to occupy the seat next to me.
2)  'Food for Purchase' means a selection of extremely small overpriced snacks with high sodium content. 
3)  Changing your seat to accommodate others who want to sit together generally results in a less than optimal seating arrangement.  
4)  Suitcases weigh a lot.
5)  Handles break, wheels fall off, and shampoo explodes.
6)  When they say, 'Use caution when opening up the overhead bins', they mean it.
7)  No one else on the plane knows how to wipe off the toilet seat.
8)  The person sitting directly in front of me has eaten beans in the last 24 hours.
9)  The plane is most often either too cold or too hot and rarely comfortable.
10) I am not getting fatter, it is the seats and the legroom that are shrinking.

Here are my travel tips and I hope they help to ease the misery of flying:

Dump your cheap luggage, it's cheap!
Pack your own food - it tastes better, is cheaper and better for you
Go to the bathroom on land and don't drink beer
Wear layers and bring a light blanket
Put everything you can in plastic
Don't book seats without checking seat guru online, some seats just suck....
Indeed DO open the overhead bin with caution

These tips and others that I would love to hear from you should help to make your flight as painless as possible.

One last tip: Don't forget to change out of your Pajamas!

Did I say that?

Money Madness

Much has been said and written about money. In fact, money consumes a great deal of our time. Our libraries, bookstores, newspapers and newscasts are saturated with information about money. How to save more, make more, invest wisely, retire early, pay for college and get a better paying job. We have Paypal, we wait for payday, and we use pay as you go phones. We can't escape this human obsession with money.

We all like to have it, it makes many things easier, and let's face it, it's fun to play with. We play the stock market, we play the slots, we play the lottery. Play, play, play!  And then we buy stuff...we buy things and gadgets and stuff we don't need and then we sell the needless stuff to other people that don't need it on Craig's list or at a garage sale so we can get more money to buy more stuff! We envy others that have more money stuff than we do and I was recently informed by a 12 year old girl that the most popular girls always wear the most expensive stuff. We play with money, buy with money, pay with money, fight over money and complain about money.  Liza Minnelli sang that Money makes the world go around, the Beatles taught us that Money can't buy us love, Madonna confessed to being a Material Girl, and who can forget Pink Floyd with the cash register "cha ching" written into the music?  Brilliant! 

One has to think with all the time we spend thinking, spending, paying, making, playing and singing about money that God would be a bit more understanding.  Nope - it is pretty clear that the Bible says that the love of money is the root of all evil.  Ouch!  The root of a plant anchors the plant to the earth. It also collects the water and nutrients necessary for the plant growth.  This is getting heavy.

Sounds to me that the issue is not with having and playing and singing about money, and maybe not even wanting to have more money.  The issue is whether we can be completely embedded in a money culture and still love God more than anything that money can bring us.  That's tough, maybe tough by design.  After all, it wasn't easy for God to love us.  He made the greatest sacrifice of all time to prove his love for us.  Why shouldn't it be a little work for us to prove our love for Him? 

We live in a world where God is no longer very popular.  If you follow the wisdom of 12 year old girls, you may believe it is because those who follow him don't always wear the most expensive stuff.  It could be because we just don't like anyone telling us what to do, and we certainly don't like being seen as offensive or radical doing that which we believe God would want us to do.  How absurd!

God is constant - money is not.  If you believe in your money and what it can provide for you, wait awhile.  I guarantee at some point it will let you down. In fact, the more money we have, the more we worry about losing it.  Strange isn't it?  How different God is!  The closer we get to God, the stronger our relationship becomes and the less we worry about everything - money included. 

I had a lesson in this last week when we had a major sewer explosion at our rental property.  All of a sudden the money that was being saved for our fun vacation went bye bye...right down that sewer pipe!  When I felt myself starting to stress out about money and trust me, I DID, I realized that my hope is not in the value of the dollar.  After all, to root myself in something that is that unpredictable is completely foolish.  God didn't tell us not to love money to be a kill-joy, He did it because He knows how unstable and unfaithful the dollar is and that our roots need to be grounded solidly in the rock, not the dollar. 

But what about popularity?  Knowing that we will never achieve popularity while following a risen Savior I have developed a solution for you.  Do you want to be so popular that your phone is ringing off the hook?  Stop paying your car payment for a few months - you won't believe how popular you will be!

Did I say That?

Origiddle

Solve this Riddle:  If I am turning 35 next year, 45 the next and 55 the year after that, what am I today? 

Did you figure it out?

This is my very first original riddle.  I am calling it my Origiddle.  Down spell check! Down!  You can only have one Origiddle in your life and this is mine.  Do you have one?

Riddles, or brain teasers are often a play on words and some people are really good at solving them.  A good riddle will cause us to think about our world differently than we have been programmed to think. For instance, most people I challenge with my origiddle will answer ‘25’.  Why?  Because we are programmed from a very early age to think about mathematics when presented with numbers and this sequence of numbers appears to be in increments of 10.  The correct answer however has nothing to do with numbers.  The correct answer is:  ‘Dyslexic’.  Get it?  Yes, I will be 53 next year -*sigh*.

I like to solve riddles and crossword puzzles, play games and the like.  They keep me from feeling like my brain is atrophying.  After working in the same profession for many years, work starts to become second nature and nothing ever really seems ‘hard’.  Don’t get me wrong, the deadlines can be aggressive, the goals challenging, the projects interesting, but nothing really gets those neurons fired up like a good brain teaser! 

They say that to keep your mind healthy you need to exercise it just like the rest of your body.  In my personal battle against stupidity, I decided that I needed something other than games to keep my mind from becoming silly putty and so I decided to try line dancing.  Besides loving music and loving to dance, this would also help to keep my mind and body healthy – perfect!

I never really tried line dancing before unless I get credit for an intoxicated electric slide.  I have always preferred being scooped into the arms of a man and twirled around the floor over dancing in a line with a bunch of other people.  However, knowing that this could be my perfect ‘kill two birds with one stone’ solution I drove to the local place where “it’s cool to be country” to give line dancing a shot. 

The experience was…..well….humbling.  I attended the “beginner” class only to find that most of the beginners had been beginning for several years. And then there was me.  To my advantage I was familiar with most of the terminology from other types of dancing, but found that the time it took to move the term from my brain to my feet was highly deficient.  Directions have always been a challenge for me as well.  Trying to follow directions while turning around in circles to face different walls, remembering left from right without the luxury of placing your hand over your heart and doing all this while kicking, tapping, clapping or stomping all in rhythm to a song you have never heard before - I feared that the putty had already begun to form and that it was merely a matter of time before I was in a hospital drooling.

No way!  I am going to learn this line dancing. I am going to save my brain and my body and I am going to do it with rhythm!  I am stubborn and I have always thought that I could do anything I set out to do, and I will do this.  The day will come when I no longer look like I am having a seizure will line dancing and I will be proud!  It has to happen.  Being a 25 year old dyslexic with a seizure disorder and a problem with saliva is just not an option.
Did I say That?
 
 
 
 
 

Tethered

I don’t recall my Father ever coming home late from work.  He did go on the occasional business trip for “Ma Bell”, but every night at 5:35 Daddy walked down the street from the bus stop towards our house and I would run to meet him.  He would have a treat or two in his coat pocket that my hand would feel for immediately.   Sometimes his pocket was empty and as I looked up at him with my bottom lip sticking out in disappointment, he would pull a piece of gum or a sweet out from behind my ear…..just like that!
 
Last night I worked until 11pm.  My wonderful husband knows the signs that this is going to happen and graciously brings me food to keep me alive.  He used to ask me when I would finish, but quickly gave up after continually hearing finish times that never materialized.  Now he understands the routine.
 
I am an architect.  Not the type that design houses, I am an information technology architect.  I design systems made up of technologies, people and the processes that keep them working efficiently.  Sounds like a party huh?  By the very nature of my work, I spend a lot of time studying, researching and ‘pondering’.  For each new initiative there is an indiscriminate amount of pondering time before the creative juices begin to glue all my research notes and information together into something that makes sense.  Apparently when this creative juice glue begins to flow there is something in my eyes or posture or attitude that alerts my family to leave me alone and let me type.  So goes the routine….
 
I am not sure if this is similar to an experience a writer has when developing a story.  How wonderful it would be to design that which others could enjoy, rather than that which others must follow as a requirement for their employment.  I guess that is why I blog!
 
Corporate America has come to expect that we will be online after hours answering emails, or at the very least, checking our Blackberry Devices at all times.  Technology advancement has created this 24x7x365 electronic tethering that is very difficult to untie and remain employed. 
 
Daddy had a tether - it was family. He was led to come home each night at the same time to a meal with his family, perhaps a few games or an episode of Gunsmoke.  He didn’t go into work on weekends or carry devices that kept him in contact with his office.  We never saw an expression on his face that led us to stay away so he could work; unless of course it was on the car or his telescope (and even then we were offered the opportunity to participate if we wanted to). 
 
What happened?  It makes you wonder if this “transfer of the tether” or new focus of attention has something to do with the prevalence of family destroyers like divorce, suicide and addiction.  Maybe you think that is farfetched, but think about it; when society is tethered to organizations 24x7x365 that must remain value neutral and cannot express beliefs about God or religion, what happens to the hearts and souls of the people?  How much time is left to nurture ourselves or our families?  What a tremendous loss we have experienced!  
 
Maybe the rise in unemployment isn’t as bad as we think it is. Perhaps society is experiencing an untying of the corporate tether and we are being given back an opportunity for a few episodes of Gunsmoke. 

Tactfully Honest

Honesty is the best policy - or is it? The movie "Liar Liar" portrays this conundrum well. The character Jim Carrey loses his ability to tell a lie and the results are of course hilariious.

Being a motor mouth myself, and one whose blog is titled "Did I Say That?", you can probably imagine that I can relate to sticking ones foot in ones mouth! Oh yea, mix that with a glass of wine or a bad hair day and I can easily choke on a knee!

I Like to pride myself on being an honest person, but I don't think that being honest should ever interfere with being human. I mean seriously, we aren't robots that rely entirely on logic - we are complex human beings with deep feelings and a lifetime of experiences that all contribute to who we are and how we "hear" each other. This balancing of truth and relationship is what I call being tactfully honest.

In Graduate school I took a class on Leadership and Communication (didn't we all?). The main focus of the class was learning to understand how you are perceived by others. In other words it matters less what you say than how you say it and to whom you say it. I for one have been known at times to get this very wrong.

Ok, hold onto your hats for this epiphany...We could learn a lot from politicians who practice being tactfully honest. Have you noticed this? They know their audience and when they answer a question they do it in such a way that will not upset or insult the "hearers". They don't necessarily lie, but use a lot of tact in their responses. Ok some lie, I know, but I think they try to avoid lying so as not to fuel the opposition flame.

Jim Carrie wasn't being honest, he was being transparent - moreso than any of us should be. We all have those wicked little thoughts that run through our minds that we only hope don't come out. For instance, I was asked to dance the other night and replied, "No thanks, not right now", when what was really inside my head was, "are you kidding me, don't you even know what deodorant is? You stink!" Does this make me a liar? I don't think so.

Hey, does my butt look big?

A Great Sunday

Today was a fabulous day! We went to Rhode Island this morning for dance team practice and the routine is finally coming together. On the way to practice we had some great conversation and enjoyed the sunshine beaming into the windows. After 3 hours of practice we came home to take my son Danny to the pet clinic to get his cat vaccinated and checked. We went to a new grill next to the clinic and they were having .25 wings in 8 different flavors. We had our fill of wings and beer and the bill was barely $20! Went to Trader Joes, came home, Steele went to DJ and Danny and I hung out, drank tea and visited. A perfect Sunday!

Some of you may be saying, "but what about church?" I haven't regularly attended church for years now. I used to go faithfully, not only on Sunday, but during the week too. But then something happened...I got a divorce. Suddenly there was gossip flowing from Christian to so-called Christian. I was apparently having multiple affairs and more than one "friend" told me that I was backslidden. Apparently, divorce is so bad that all the service, sacrifice, prayer and fellowship is instantly forgotten. My ex-husband even had the nerve to tell my then 7 year old son that "Mommy doesn't love Jesus anymore."

I love my Lord and I always will, i just don't like church people. Sure, there are the exceptions, but I find the majority of church people don't practice Christianity outside of church walls - they fail to understand that WE ARE the church. Maybe that is the issue, we are, but they aren't! Whatever it is, I refuse to allow myself to go through that sort of rejection and pain again, so I don't go. I tried attending weekly without getting to know anyone at the church or spending time with them but it just didn't work out, it wasn't the same.

Apparently divorce is a worse sin than all the others that caused Christ to go to the cross, although I can find no evidence of this anywhere in the Bible. I know this because my ex-husband was nominated as a deacon, and it was denied because he was divorced. He had married a young girl who got pregnant while still in high school. He was pressured by family to have her get an abortion, but he refused. He felt that marrying her was the right thing to do. Ironically if he had aborted his offspring, he would qualify as a deacon, so apparently divorce is much worse than abortion. One man in our church used to be a drug addict AND dealer. You guessed it...he was a deacon!

No, I am content to enjoy the people I love on Sunday. To dance, to eat, to visit, it's all good. Thank you Lord for a wonderful day!