A girl and her cat say good-bye

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Clarence

Clarence

He loved dried apri­cots, rotis­serie chicken, and sleep­ing in the sink. He detested other mem­bers of his species. He cost $70, shots included, and I acquired him back in 1996 while still work­ing in Man­hat­tan as a lawyer.

It wasn’t my idea to get a cat. The direc­tive came from two sep­a­rate friends, both exas­per­ated by my fail­ure to get over a not-so-recent breakup. They thought that a cat would be good for me. I sus­pect they hoped it would shut me up—or at least shift the conversation.

He came home with me in a taxi cra­dled in my blue Coach purse, hav­ing won release from a card­board box through piteous kit­ten mews. An antic feather-light ball of fluff, he devel­oped a dis­con­cert­ing habit of rac­ing through my Upper West Side apart­ment and hurtling off the bed, legs splayed in all direc­tions, noth­ing to break his fall. I named him Clarence—not for Clarence Dar­row, the most fre­quent of all first guesses, but for Clarence, the disheveled Angel Sec­ond Class who strug­gles to res­cue George Bai­ley from despair in the movie “It’s a Won­der­ful Life.” In time he grew regal and immense (“large-boned,” my father called him). “Such a small tongue—and so much kitty,” a boyfriend once observed, watch­ing the cat’s pro­longed and painstak­ing groom­ing process. “Clarence is a cer­e­mo­nial cat–not for every­day use.”

Sev­en­teen – almost 18 – years is a very long time, and we went through a lot together Mr. C and I. We moved from New York to west­ern Mass­a­chu­setts to Cam­bridge then back to west­ern Mass and finally to Brook­line. I quit law, pub­lished two nov­els, cycled through jobs and unem­ploy­ment. Through every chal­lenge, every dis­ap­point­ment, the cat was there beside me—splendidly furry and imper­vi­ous, purring and reassuring.

He’d been los­ing weight for more than a year, and it was clear some­thing was wrong.  Kid­ney fail­ure was one pos­si­bil­ity. Can­cer was another. Diag­nos­tic tests were incon­clu­sive. I began giv­ing him sub­cu­ta­neous flu­ids to help with hydra­tion, pills to stim­u­late his appetite. (“You … you are like a nurse for your cat!” sput­tered a courtly Latin gen­tle­man on hear­ing of my min­is­tra­tions.) Then, six weeks ago, with his appetite flag­ging, came another round of tests. The ver­dict: Late-stage can­cer, in both his abdomen and lungs. When I brought him home, groggy and weak, from the hated ani­mal hos­pi­tal, I whis­pered to him a promise that he’d never have to go back.

I knew that I wanted him to die at home, but that’s all I knew. I didn’t know what that would entail, or what I should do or when. Not sur­pris­ingly, it was one of those times when the Inter­net proves a god­send. With a bit of search­ing, I dis­cov­ered Har­bor Vet­eri­nary House Calls, which not only does home vis­its but also offers pet hos­pice care. As the lovely and kind Dr. Maija Mikkola Cur­tis explained on her first home visit, hos­pice care for animals—as for humans—is about qual­ity of life. She told me to think of her as a part­ner, to email her if I had any ques­tions at all about ongo­ing treat­ment or next steps.

The next weeks were pretty good ones for Clarence—lots and lots of rotis­serie chicken, tuna, and attention—but by the end of last week, he began a pre­cip­i­tous decline. He stopped eat­ing and took to retreat­ing to the dark­est reaches of a closet. Already frail, hav­ing dropped more than half of his weight in the course of the past 18 months, he grew even weaker and frailer. With a heavy heart, I con­tacted Maija, and she came out the next evening.

We watched Clarence for a while, Maija and I, as I reached a final deci­sion. “The spark has gone,” she said qui­etly. I had to agree. The process of euthana­sia was sim­ple and very peace­ful. I’d already been say­ing good-bye for a very long time, and I pet­ted and whis­pered my love to him as his life ebbed away.

Early last month—shortly after learn­ing how very sick Clarence was—I  hap­pened on an advice col­umn about a guy who was spend­ing thou­sands of dol­lars to keep his cat alive despite liv­ing on a dis­abil­ity pen­sion and, from the per­spec­tive of his best friend (the let­ter writer), hav­ing “no extra cash for lux­u­ries.” I loved the columnist’s response:

It may be that your friend’s rela­tion­ship with his cat is some­thing he truly can­not live with­out; it may be that he feels some­thing toward this cat that is beyond the under­stand­ing of out­siders and with­out the pro­tec­tion of social sanc­tion or nam­ing.… [P]erhaps even­tu­ally we will come to see that a man’s rela­tion­ship with a cat is not sim­ply that of a per­son to a lux­ury item, but some­thing else, some­thing sacred.  

I’m down with that.

The house is very quiet when I get home these days. “Where’s the boy?” I call. Not because I’ve for­got­ten but because it’s what I do. I’ve also taken to scrolling through Petfinder, gaz­ing at the pic­tures of the count­less cats wait­ing to find homes. There’s Glad who reminds me oh-so-much of Clarence. (Would that be strange or good?) There’s sweet-faced Her­man with his gor­geous coat and play­ful goof­ball Mr. Then I look at a photo of Clarence that Mon­ica took in April.  So present, so very there. He was—is—a beloved being. You are a beloved being.

When $1 billion isn’t enough, and one dollar is too much.

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Eduardo Saverin

Eduardo Saverin

When Face­book co-founder Eduardo Saverin renounced his U.S. cit­i­zen­ship last year, with the appar­ent goal of sav­ing hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars in taxes after the company’s IPO, the Brazil­ian native had no short­age of out­raged critics.

“He has made him­self the poster child for the cal­lous class of 1 per­centers who are all too happy to use national resources to enrich them­selves, and then skate, or cry foul, when asked to pay their fair share,” Ilyse Hogue wrote in the Nation, to cite one exam­ple. “The story evokes the image of the maraud­ing aliens from the movie Inde­pen­dence Day, who come to Earth to take what they can get before mov­ing on to another planet.”

But for all the furi­ous accu­sa­tions, Saverin seems to have been on the cut­ting edge of a grow­ing trend. “U.S. cit­i­zens ditch pass­ports in record num­bers” was the head­line on a May 8, 2013 Fortune/CNN piece report­ing that more than 670 U.S. pass­port hold­ers gave up their cit­i­zen­ship (and U.S. tax bills) in the first three months of this year—more than any quar­ter since the IRS began pub­lish­ing fig­ures in 1998 and nearly three-quarters of the total num­ber for all of 2012. The newly ex-patriated include Isabel Getty, daugh­ter of jet-setting socialite Pia Getty and Getty oil heir Christo­pher Getty, and—last year—wealthy songwriter-socialite Denise Rich.

This got me to think­ing. While I totally get the anger at Saverin and his ilk, I’m also intrigued by a larger ques­tion, implicit yet unad­dressed. How much money is suf­fi­cient for any sin­gle per­son? Does some­one like Saverin ever say “Now I have enough!” Or do you keep on push­ing until you have all the money in the world?

As I turn over these ques­tions, I also find myself think­ing about another man—one who could not be more dif­fer­ent from Eduardo Saverin. His name is Daniel Suelo, and in 2000, at the age of 39, he left his life sav­ings ($30) in a phone booth and walked away. For more than a decade since, he has not earned, received, or spent a sin­gle dollar.

Daniel Suelo

Daniel Suelo

“Unlike the aver­age American—wallowing in credit-card debt, cling­ing to a mort­gage, ter­ri­fied of the next down­siz­ing at the office—he isn’t wor­ried about the eco­nomic cri­sis. That’s because he fig­ured out that the best way to stay sol­vent is to never be sol­vent in the first place,” is how a piece in Details mag­a­zine summed up Suelo’s finan­cial non-plan.

Born into an evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian fam­ily whose beliefs he’s long since dis­carded, Suelo’s per­sonal phi­los­o­phy eludes easy def­i­n­i­tions. He lives in the caves and wilder­ness of Utah.  He for­ages, dump­ster dives, and eats with friends (as well as strangers). He doesn’t pan­han­dle, col­lect food stamps, or accept other gov­ern­ment support—not that he sees any­thing wrong with those who do, he’s quick to say—and he often works, just not for pay. He does make use of pub­lic libraries—borrowing books, check­ing email, and keep­ing his web­site and blog. “He wants to have the small­est eco­log­i­cal foot­print and the largest pos­si­ble impact at improv­ing the world. His life goal since I met him is to take as lit­tle and give as much as pos­si­ble,” his best friend told writer Mark Sun­deen, whose com­pelling book about Suelo is called The Man Who Quit Money (River­head, 2012).

As I think about Saverin and Suelo, a study in oppo­sites, I mar­vel over the vast elas­tic­ity of our con­cept of need. Saverin thinks he needs bil­lions of dol­lars. Suelo needs to have none. Needs are not objec­tive facts. They reflect val­ues and choices.

I hope it goes with­out say­ing that I’m not sug­gest­ing we stop doing all we can to make the world a more just and more equi­table place. What I am sug­gest­ing is that, in the mean­time, we give our­selves a chance to thrive, that we have the courage of our con­vic­tions (which starts with know­ing what they are).

Ken Ilgunas

Ken Ilgu­nas

For me, this per­spec­tive is lib­er­at­ing. Early retire­ment, single-family homes, col­lege edu­ca­tions – these accou­trements of the Amer­i­can Dream are increas­ingly hard to come by. Do we sim­ply redou­ble our efforts to achieve such estab­lished socially sanc­tioned goals? Or do we explore new paths, expand our reper­toire of options? (Another ter­rific exam­ple of some­one doing just that is Ken Ilgu­nas, a Duke grad­u­ate stu­dent who lived in a van to avoid going back into debt and turned his expe­ri­ence into the won­der­ful mem­oir Walden on Wheels (New Har­vest, 2013)

Few of us are likely to fol­low Suelo’s example—I, for one, am not inclined to fill my den­tal cav­i­ties with pine pitch. What I take from his story isn’t the specifics of his jour­ney. Rather it’s his capac­ity to find ful­fill­ment while lack­ing things that most of us reflex­ively assume to be essen­tial. If Suelo doesn’t need any money, I some­times muse, per­haps I don’t really need [fill in the blank].

There are those who attack Suelo for fail­ing to con­tribute to some larger social good. (One exas­per­ated fan finally got his detrac­tors to shut up when she told them that she pays taxes, doesn’t use the library, and is donat­ing her share to Suelo.)  But to my mind, his provoca­tive life is con­tri­bu­tion enough. His choices push us to think harder about the nature of our own. His life expands our sense of pos­si­bil­ity. And that, to me, is priceless.

Where is Aretha when you need her?

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Aretha-Franklin-9301157-5-402So you go to a spin class in your pro­gres­sive neigh­bor­hood, in your pro­gres­sive city, at your pro­gres­sive women’s gym—one that has as its stated mis­sion to “empower women to be strong, both phys­i­cally and mentally.”

You have never been all that keen on spin class—indeed, truth be told, you’d admit to hav­ing Face­book opined that “there are two kinds of peo­ple: Those who like spin class and those who do not like spin class.” Still, you are there. You get your bike set up, and soon class begins.

You are not crazy about the music (you are some­one who joined this gym in part because it plays clas­si­cal music in the locker room and also for the rea­sons described by Salon’s Mary Eliz­a­beth Williams in a piece that, curi­ously enough, appeared just last month). But hey, it is spin class. You aren’t here for enter­tain­ment. You’re here because you’re feel­ing stressed and aer­o­bic exer­cise improves your mood. That is until you hear the lyrics, when your mood takes a decided nosedive.

Shake that ass for me, shake that ass for me …

Seri­ously? This is the music of choice for empow­ered women? You try to ignore the words. You man­age … for a while.

If good girls get down on the floor

Tell me, how low will a bad girl go?

She’ll prob­a­bly pick it up, drop it down real slow

Either that or she’s upside down on the pole .…

And that’s when you get off your bike, col­lect your things, and leave.

* * * *

My friend Lynne Marie Wana­maker—a fit­ness trainer and anti-violence educator—wasn’t a bit sur­prised by my expe­ri­ence. Here’s what she had to say when I asked her to weigh in:

“We live in a rape cul­ture and even the most pro­gres­sive peo­ple don’t see it. I am told all the time that cer­tain things are not a prob­lem or are not a prob­lem here. (i.e, teen dat­ing vio­lence, domes­tic vio­lence, sex­ual abuse, racism, homophobia–I could go on and on.) It’s a QED of denial: We are a pro­gres­sive com­mu­nity of good peo­ple on the side of good, there­fore that isn’t hap­pen­ing. Even if it is. I have decided to call this ‘Pro­gres­sive Self Con­grat­u­la­tory Disorder.’”

It feels impor­tant to say that my own reac­tion was in no way self-consciously political—it was imme­di­ate and vis­ceral.  Any­one who knows me knows that I am far from being a polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness queen. My con­cerns lie in the realm of human expe­ri­ence, not in abstract theory.

I’m also a woman who, in ret­ro­spect, spent way too much of my youth think­ing about what men think of me—a will­ing if clue­less col­lab­o­ra­tor on the larger social project of turn­ing women into objects. Mes­sages like the ones I heard in spin class? For decades, I absorbed them with­out think­ing. The results were not good. (A fas­ci­nat­ing side note: Research has shown that women who see them­selves as objects are less able to count their own heartbeats—a find­ing that fur­ther under­scores how music that objec­ti­fies women is fun­da­men­tally at odds with the goal of empow­er­ing women to inhabit their own bod­ies, “to be strong, both phys­i­cally and men­tally,” in the words of my gym’s pur­ported mission.)

Finally: You know what? I sim­ply couldn’t care less how low a bad girl can go—I’m way more inter­ested in hear­ing about how far a smart one can. In my era, there was music that was ener­giz­ing and enliven­ing with­out turn­ing women into dis­pos­able body parts—think Bruce Spring­steen, the Talk­ing Heads, R-E-S-P-E-C-T Aretha. I assume—at least I pro­foundly hope—it still exists today. Next time I’m in spin class, I’d really like to hear it.

* * * *

Note:  In a sub­se­quent email exchange, a Health­works spokes­woman wrote that instruc­tors, who choose their own music, are expected to play “clean ver­sions” of the songs they select and to “use good judg­ment in choos­ing music that would not be con­sid­ered dis­taste­ful or offen­sive” and that they would fol­low up with the instruc­tor who taught the class I attended. I wrote back: “With all due respect, it doesn’t seem to me that you are pro­vid­ing ade­quate guide­lines here.” I did not receive a response.

Making it home

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My neighborhood, on lockdown

My Coolidge Cor­ner neigh­bor­hood, on lockdown

On Mon­day, the bombs exploded. On Fri­day, the city was put on lock­down, and on Sun­day I boarded a plane to fly across the coun­try to a place I’d never been.

It was a trip I’d planned for a long time to a place – Port­land, Ore­gon – that I’d long wanted to visit. At the same time, as I fin­ished up my pack­ing and man­aged a last few errands, I found myself wish­ing that I wasn’t going any­where at all. What I wanted was nor­mal­ity – a return to the usual rou­tines of writ­ing, work, and friends.  It was then that I real­ized, with some sur­prise, that this place I’ve been liv­ing since Sep­tem­ber has come to feel like home.

For my friend Jan, the Boston/Cambridge area has felt, from the very begin­ning, like where she was meant to be. “Cam­bridge is the first and only place I’ve felt like I belong and where I’m entirely com­fort­able in my own skin,” she wrote last week, in the dizzy­ing days after law enforce­ment staked out the Cam­bridge res­i­dence of the alleged marathon bombers.

My own rela­tion­ship with the area has been both slightly longer and far more fraught. It began back in 1978, when I arrived on the Har­vard cam­pus at the age of 18, a seri­ous, shy Mid­west­erner abruptly cat­a­pulted into a for­eign land. In the 20th–cen­tury intel­lec­tual his­tory class I took fresh­man year, our pro­fes­sor lec­tured on the 1897 novel Les Dérac­inés, about seven young provin­cials who lose their way after arriv­ing in Paris, the price of hav­ing been torn away from their native tra­di­tions. That word stayed with me— dérac­iné, unrooted. I cer­tainly wasn’t liv­ing in France at the turn of the cen­tury.  Still, I knew what it felt like to be alone and unmoored.

I did not cope espe­cially well. I went to a lot of par­ties, and I began a drink­ing career that would last through my mid-30s. I recall a cou­ple of half-hearted vis­its to Har­vard Uni­ver­sity health ser­vices with no notable results. Some two decades later, Melanie Thernstrom’s Halfway Heaven would chron­i­cle a murder-suicide in one of Harvard’s under­grad­u­ate houses. An Ethiopian stu­dent, lonely and unsta­ble, stabbed her Vietnamese-born room­mate to death then hung her­self. Read­ing Thernstrom’s account of the sys­temic fail­ings of Harvard’s psy­cho­log­i­cal ser­vices, I would nod my head think­ing, yes, this is what it was like.

Being young, con­fused, and far from home, bereft of sup­port structures—it’s never been a recipe for hap­pi­ness. Yet why do some tri­umph against all odds, while oth­ers self-destruct, while still oth­ers lash out vio­lently with trag­i­cally hor­rific results?

By all accounts, the eth­nic Chechen Tsar­naev broth­ers were con­sid­ered friendly and well-liked. What series of events led to them to mutate from seem­ingly assim­i­lated immi­grants to mur­der­ous bombers? While the answers may never be fully known, a his­tory of uncer­tainty and dis­lo­ca­tion is unlikely to have helped.

Wher­ever you go there you are. The more I reflect on that neat apho­rism, the less true it seems. For many of us, and for many dif­fer­ent rea­sons, home is not a place to which we return, it is some­thing we cre­ate, and that act of cre­ation takes energy, resources, and sup­port, along with that unde­fin­able and elu­sive thing called luck. When I moved back to Boston this last time, I had all of these. I know what it’s like not to: It’s really, really hard.

Per­haps the most iconic photo to emerge from the marathon bomb­ings is the image of a man in a cow­boy hat leap­ing to the aid of a crit­i­cally injured vic­tim, hav­ing beaten down flames and tied a tourni­quet to one of his par­tially sev­ered legs. We now know that the res­cuer is Car­los Arredondo, a 52-year-old peace activist who’d already faced more than his share of per­sonal tragedy. Nine years ago, on learn­ing that his 20-year-old son had been killed by Iraqi snipers, he doused him­self with gaso­line and set him­self on fire. Two years, ago a sec­ond son com­mit­ted sui­cide, hav­ing never recov­ered from his brother’s death and father’s result­ing meltdown.

How do we account for this sort of gor­geous alchemy? If Arredondo had become a ter­ror­ist, we would have no short­age of ready expla­na­tions. But instead his anguish fueled a pas­sion to save and res­cue. “Cities are not resilient, peo­ple are. And, some­times, they are not,” wrote Boston jour­nal­ist Elaine McNa­mara. The jour­ney from despair and loss is both pro­foundly per­sonal and unpre­dictable. Wrong turns hap­pen. Not every­one makes it back.

Sheryl Sandberg’s Trojan Horse

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Sheryl SandbergHav­ing already read the book and heard the inter­views, only two things caught me by sur­prise last Thurs­day when Sheryl Sanderg brought her Lean In road­show to a the­ater in my neighborhood.

First was The Dress, a form-fitting lit­tle black num­ber, at first glance unre­mark­able in this era of Cor­po­rate Alpha Female 2.0, where sex­u­al­ity is proudly fea­tured rather than downplayed—unremarkable, that is, until she turned her back and dis­closed a gold-toned zip­per run­ning from top to bot­tom. (And before you get all “You-Wouldn’t-Be-Talking-About-What-She-Was-Wearing-If-She-Were-A-Man” on me, let me be clear: If Barack Obama showed up in a tra­di­tional suit with a con­trast­ing zip­per run­ning down its back, I would remark upon it.) For me, this took the out­fit from Seen This Before, to WTF. It seemed to be demand­ing some sort of response, though I’ve yet to fig­ure out just what.

Sec­ond, and far more sig­nif­i­cant, was Sandberg’s pointed ref­er­ence to how com­pa­nies are quickly mov­ing to adopt the Lean In model—which, depend­ing on your per­spec­tive, could be either a great thing or a very omi­nous sign.

I’m of the sec­ond view. Let me explain why.

Women’s work­place ini­tia­tives of the sort that began to take root dur­ing the boom­ing 90s—the period dur­ing which I prac­ticed law in a large New York firm—focused on help­ing women bal­ance moth­er­hood and career. Being sin­gle with no kids, I always had my issues with this exclu­sive focus (I want to write a novel! What about flex-time for that?), but all in all, it was a big step in the right direc­tion. There is more to life than work. We need to rec­og­nize that.

Enter Sheryl Sand­berg and the Lean In phenomenon.

While pur­port­edly respect­ing – even cel­e­brat­ing – the diverse choices women make as they bal­ance fam­ily and career, Lean In’s core mes­sage is some­thing very dif­fer­ent. “Life is a race, Sand­berg is telling us, and the way to win is through the per­pet­ual accel­er­a­tion of one’s own labor: mov­ing for­ward, faster,” writes for­mer Face­book employee Kate Losse in her ter­rif­i­cally tren­chant and insight­ful piece in Dis­sent “The real antag­o­nist iden­ti­fied by Lean In then is not insti­tu­tion­al­ized dis­crim­i­na­tion against women, but women’s reluc­tance to accept accel­er­at­ing career demands.”

You may think this is a great way to live or a ter­ri­ble way to live (and research sug­gests that most women with young kids will go with the lat­ter), but that’s not what pri­mar­ily con­cerns me here.  Rather, my con­cern is that Sandberg’s pre­scrip­tion pur­ports to be some­thing that it is not – and in this guise is draw­ing sup­port from women whose lives it’s just going to make harder.

The fol­low­ing exchange is instruc­tive on this point.

Respond­ing to an audi­ence ques­tion about nav­i­gat­ing both moth­er­hood and over­whelm­ing work demands, Sand­berg essen­tially said that women need to do a bet­ter job set­ting expec­ta­tions and bound­aries, not­ing that she her­self man­ages to make it home for din­ner with her kids.

What she didn’t men­tion was this (from page 133):

“Face­book is avail­able around the world 24/7, and for the most part, so am I. The days when I even think of unplug­ging for a week­end or vaca­tion are long gone. And unlike my job at Google, which was based almost exclu­sively in Cal­i­for­nia, my Face­book role requires a lot of travel.”

The Lean In web­site cur­rently lists dozens of busi­ness part­ners includ­ing finan­cial insti­tu­tions (Amer­i­can Express, Bank of Amer­ica), big law firms (Skad­den, Sid­ley Austin), con­sul­tants (McK­in­sey & Com­pany), and other large busi­nesses (Pfizer, AT&T). These insti­tu­tions doubt­less already have women’s and other diver­sity ini­tia­tives. What will the Lean In move­ment con­tribute – and what will it take away?

Women with full-time jobs and out­side lives have very lim­ited band­width. Here’s my, admit­tedly pes­simistic, prog­nos­ti­ca­tion: The con­ver­sa­tion about lean­ing in will slowly but surely sup­plant talk about on-site child care, work/life bal­ance, and other “fam­ily friendly” poli­cies. (As for the would-be nov­el­ists among us: As you were.)

I can’t help but think that Lean In offers a fem­i­nism tailor-made for our New Economy—one where the pri­mary ben­e­fi­cia­ries are com­pa­nies, not women. Through the magic of Lean In, women’s ini­tia­tive costs – poof! – trans­form into cor­po­rate prof­its. The Greeks left their model horse out­side the gates of Troy and pre­tended to sail away. As for us, we have more clues than the Tro­jans did. We know who’s still hang­ing around.

Replica of the Trojan Horse at Troy, Turkey

 

When walking is working (plus an invitation)

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Image by © Royalty-Free/Corbis

Image by © Royalty-Free/Corbis

My friend Marci Albo­her – vice pres­i­dent of Encore.org and author of the ter­rific new Encore Career Hand­book – recalls the moment she real­ized she’d landed in the right work­place: It was when she dis­cov­ered that busi­ness meet­ings rou­tinely took place over long walks.

“Walk­ing is a great way to be cre­ative,” she observed. “That’s how I knew I was in the right office culture.”

These reflec­tions came as we final­ized plans for this Tuesday’s Encore Town Hall in New­ton, Mass­a­chu­setts, the lat­est leg of Marci’s national book tour. The topic: The grow­ing wave of peo­ple mov­ing into pub­lic ser­vice in the sec­ond half of their careers—and how you can join them. (More about the book here.) I’m excited to be inter­view­ing Marci and also mod­er­at­ing a fas­ci­nat­ing panel of peo­ple who have made—or are making—the shift into encore careers of their own. If you’re in the area, do try to join us! While the focus will be encore careers, the advice will be valu­able to any­one in a career tran­si­tion or con­tem­plat­ing one.

Find­ing sat­is­fac­tion at work can be a com­pli­cated under­tak­ing. It’s not just what we do but also where we do it and why. This is some­thing I’ve been think­ing about a lot lately in the con­text of my still-pretty-new job at Har­vard School of Pub­lic Health. Why am I so much hap­pier here than I’ve been in other jobs where the sub­stance of my work wasn’t all that dif­fer­ent? As I wrote here, I think the answer lies in work­place culture.

But what is work­place culture?

For starters, it’s far more than office perks—and if we start con­fus­ing the two, we’re likely to get into trouble.

“Free sodas are not work­place cul­ture,” Vicki Brown quipped on LinkedIn, in response to my pre­vi­ous post.

“A ping pong table, laun­dry ser­vice, or free cof­fee is not com­pany cul­ture; not linked to core val­ues and guid­ing prin­ci­ples,” tweeted Vala Afshar, author of The Pur­suit of Social Busi­ness Excel­lence.

Core val­ues and guid­ing prin­ci­ples, yes: I think he’s on to some­thing. Some­times perks and poli­cies reflect these. Other times, they are sim­ply an over­lay, a cal­cu­lated distraction.

Shortly after I got off the phone with Marci, my boss appeared in my office door­way for our weekly check-in. He was hop­ing to do it quickly since he wanted to head out to the Clover food truck to pick up lunch.

“What if I walk over with you, and we can meet that way?” I asked.

This sounded like a great idea to him, so that is what we did. For me, it was another sign that I too have landed in the right place.

Join us in New­ton: The Encore Town Hall is just days away—on Tues­day, April 9, 2013, from 7-9pm at Lasell College’s deWitt Hall. Space is lim­ited. For more infor­ma­tion or to reg­is­ter, please click here.  We hope to see you there!

What is Sheryl Sandberg trying to say?

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Sheryl SandbergSome of the ear­li­est cri­tiques of the cri­tiques of Lean In, Face­book COO Sheryl Sandberg’s con­tro­ver­sial fem­i­nist manifesto-cum-rallying cry, com­plained that few of its hos­tile crit­ics had actu­ally read the book.

Well, reader, I have now read it.  And here’s my bot­tom line:  It’s a book that is fun­da­men­tally con­fused about what it wants to say.

Let’s start with the title. When we say “lean in,” what do we mean? As best I can deci­pher it, the answer is: It depends.

On the one hand, Lean In is a clar­ion call to a very spe­cific set of bar­ri­cades, urg­ing women to aspire to the high­est pin­na­cles of cor­po­rate and polit­i­cal life. “A truly equal world would be one where women ran half our coun­tries and com­pa­nies and men ran half our homes,” Sand­berg writes in the introduction.

On the other, the book pur­ports to be address­ing Every­woman. “I am writ­ing it for any woman who wants to increase her chances of mak­ing it to the top of her field or pur­sue any goal vig­or­ously,” Sand­berg writes in that same intro­duc­tion. “This includes women at all stages of their lives and careers, from those who are just start­ing out to those who are tak­ing a break and may want to jump back in .… This book makes the case for lean­ing in, for being ambi­tious, in any pursuit.”

I’m not buy­ing it.

One big hint as to the highly tar­geted agenda that lurks beneath this talk of inclu­sion is Sandberg’s sta­tis­ti­cal back­drop. Her claim that women “have ceased mak­ing real progress at the top of any industry”—an asser­tion that essen­tially frames every­thing that follows—draws its sup­port­ing data from only two realms: For­tune 500 com­pa­nies and national pol­i­tics. Among the roles ignored in this data cap­ture: Uni­ver­sity pres­i­dents, law firm part­ners, invest­ment bankers, fed­eral judges, jour­nal­ists and authors, film pro­duc­ers, med­ical doc­tors, tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tors, entre­pre­neurs, and non-profit leaders.

Per­haps the odd­est thing about the sta­tis­ti­cal frame is the fact that most of the female lead­ers about whom Sand­berg writes so admir­ingly them­selves fail to reg­is­ter on this screen. Fem­i­nist icon Glo­ria Steinem is invis­i­ble. So are White House Project founder Marie Wil­son, Barnard Pres­i­dent Deb­ora Spar, Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan Pres­i­dent Mary Sue Cole­man, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, and Rock­e­feller Foun­da­tion Pres­i­dent Judith Rodin. (And beyond the book, to name just a few, we have the three female U.S. Supreme Court Justices—Elena Kagan, Ruth Bader Gins­burg, and Sonia Sotomayor; Har­vard Uni­ver­sity Pres­i­dent Drew Gilpin Faust (in fact, half of the eight Ivy League schools now have women pres­i­dents); WHO Direc­tor Gen­eral Mar­garet Chan; and Hillary Clinton—who would have made the cut dur­ing her time in the U.S. Sen­ate but been dropped from Sandberg’s lead­er­ship stats dur­ing her years as Sec­re­tary of State.)

By none of this do I mean to sug­gest that women don’t face enor­mous obsta­cles on myr­iad pro­fes­sional fronts—or that the world would not be well served by hav­ing far more women in influ­en­tial, high-profile posi­tions. Rather, I’m balk­ing at what strikes me as a con­stricted and restric­tive notion of lead­er­ship. I’m uncom­fort­able with the word “lead­er­ship” being invoked as proxy for “lead­er­ship of a For­tune 500 com­pany” or “lead­ing a nation,” with the implicit assump­tion that this is “real” lead­er­ship, lead­er­ship in its purest, most sig­nif­i­cant incar­na­tion. And, as I’ve writ­ten before, I’m uncom­fort­able with the notion that the most lucra­tive and pow­er­ful posi­tions are nec­es­sar­ily the most valu­able uses for 21st-century tal­ent and passion.

That said, for all my issues with the book, there was much about it I liked. I often found myself writ­ing “Yes!” in the mar­gins or under­lin­ing a point to refer back to later.  Sand­berg is engag­ing and like­able, and in the course of read­ing, I came up with a the­ory: In the begin­ning, she envi­sioned writ­ing a book for younger ver­sions of her­self, “high poten­tial” aspi­rants on the busi­ness fast track. But from her publisher’s per­spec­tive, the book needed to be far larger—bestsellers aren’t writ­ten to niche mar­kets, and this needed to be a best­seller. This would go far towards explain­ing the book’s schiz­o­phrenic nature—its bounc­ing back and forth between the notion that lead­er­ship means look­ing like Sheryl Sand­berg, and the idea that it could equally well mean look­ing like Sheryl Sandberg’s mother—a school­teacher who turned down the oppor­tu­nity to become a school admin­is­tra­tor because she wanted to stay in the class­room. (“My mother has leaned in her entire life …  . She has always con­tributed to her com­mu­nity and the world. She is my inspi­ra­tion,” Sand­berg writes in what was for me a whiplash-inducing conclusion.)

In a grad­u­a­tion speech at Barnard that con­tained the seeds of Lean In, Sand­berg exhorted young women to “Find the right career for you and go all the way to the top”—“to lean into your career and run the world.” Recall­ing this speech, she rhetor­i­cally asks: “If we can’t tell women to aim high at a col­lege grad­u­a­tion, when can we?”

When can we? Well, if you’re ask­ing me, I’d say the answer is Never.

The goal shouldn’t be to impose our own choices or strategies—to decide what suc­cess and hap­pi­ness look like—but rather to fos­ter the capac­ity to look within, to iden­tify a uniquely per­sonal vision of what it means to lead. For some, it will look like being COO of Face­book. For many—probably most—I sus­pect it will look quite dif­fer­ent indeed.

How about zero dollars per word—is zero good for you?

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ZERO take 2There’s a clas­sic New Yorker car­toon where a guy is stand­ing in his high-rise office talk­ing on the phone: “No, Thursday’s out. How about never—is never good for you?”

I was reminded of this last week when vet­eran jour­nal­ist Nate Thayer used his blog to pub­lish an email exchange with an Atlantic edi­tor inter­ested in “repur­pos­ing” a piece Thayer had pre­vi­ously writ­ten if he would first revise it. For this, she offered the princely sum of … noth­ing.  (By these stan­dards, humorist Calvin Trillin’s editor–the “wily and par­si­mo­nious Vic­tor S. Navasky,” with his offers “in the high two figures”–was pos­i­tively prof­li­gate.) Thayer lost no time in reg­is­ter­ing his outrage.

“I am a pro­fes­sional jour­nal­ist who has made my liv­ing by writ­ing for 25 years and am not in the habit of giv­ing my ser­vices for free to for profit media out­lets so they can make money by using my work and efforts by remov­ing my abil­ity to pay my bills and feed my chil­dren,” wrote Thayer, later not­ing the irony of hav­ing once been offered an Atlantic retainer of $125,000 a year for six articles.

The post quickly went viral, with both sup­port­ers and detrac­tors flock­ing to weigh in. To his fans, Thayer was a hero, finally say­ing “enough is enough” to ever-more exploitive jour­nal­is­tic over­lords. To his crit­ics, Thayer seemed both enti­tled and unre­al­is­tic, fool­ish in his alien­ation of the very peo­ple who might hire him.

A follow-up piece on Gawker.com—itself an acknowl­edged user of writ­ers who work for free—used the flap as an object les­son in the ongo­ing devo­lu­tion of jour­nal­ism into a pro­fes­sion largely pop­u­lated by those with ample resources. “Becom­ing a suc­cess­ful writer—or jour­nal­ist or actor or wigmaker—is an ambi­tion that, like pretty much every­thing else in soci­ety, is rigged in numer­ous ways to favor peo­ple who start off with money,” Cord Jef­fer­son tren­chantly observed.

Not much dis­agree­ment on that score. How­ever, there was plenty about what the ulti­mate take­away should be.

“When Thayer was being offered $125k/year I was being offered $140k,” noted my friend Anne, an expat Amer­i­can lawyer, now liv­ing in Eng­land. “I’d love to be on 2002 rates again—who wouldn’t? But the real­ity is much different.”

A Gawker.com com­menter had this to say:

“Maybe they expect peo­ple to write for free, because plenty of peo­ple are ready and will­ing to write for free. If you want to make a lot of money, go be an invest­ment banker or start a busi­ness or what­ever. If you want to write, then do that, but don’t whine about how you’re get­ting paid squat for doing it. You made your choice.

My friend spends hours upon hours work­ing on his model trains which he dis­plays and are enjoyed by many peo­ple who see them. He never once asked to be paid for his efforts. Don’t act like your call­ing is so much more noble and wor­thy than his.”

Law—one of my sev­eral pre­vi­ous pro­fes­sions (and another that, inci­den­tally, is fast head­ing towards meltdown)—works by anal­ogy:  Is X more like Y or like Z? In that spirit, I found myself mus­ing over whether a free­lance writer is, in fact, sim­i­lar to a guy who plays with trains. As usual with analo­gies, I could see the facts both ways. In the pro col­umn: Thayer enjoys writ­ing. He, like the fanatic hob­by­ist, is doing it because he chooses.  In the con:  Writ­ing is also Thayer’s pro­fes­sion, one he set­tled on with an eye to mak­ing a liv­ing at a time when such a plan didn’t seem wildly risky. No, he would likely never be rich. But he’d be paid more than … zero.

My favorite legal doctrine–and yes, as a mat­ter of fact, I do know how geeky that sounds–goes by the name of reliance. (I also wrote about it here.) Sim­ply put, if you induce me to “change my posi­tion” based on your claim or promise, you can’t later change your mind and just tell me to go away. For exam­ple, if you sell me a prod­uct to wash my car, I’m enti­tled to rely on the fact that it will do just that—and with­out strip­ping the paint.

Law school exams are called issue spot­ters. They con­sist of “fact patterns”—stories of sorts—packed with legal issues that the test taker must first iden­tify then ana­lyze. The world after the Great Reces­sion is filled with tales like Thayer’s, with peo­ple whose lives have been upended by new tech­nolo­gies and seis­mic global changes. They (we) relied on what we knew, on what we were told.  If life were an issue spot­ter exam, it might pose the fol­low­ing ques­tions: Was this reliance jus­ti­fied? Is there a remedy?

Note: Thanks to my writer friend Amy Rogers who helped me pull that New Yorker car­toon from the recesses of memory.

Why Sheryl Sandberg is beside the point

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Sheryl SandbergThe offi­cial pub­li­ca­tion date for Lean In is still a day off, but as the Sheryl Sand­berg tsunami approaches land­fall, its his­toric scope and impact are read­ily apparent.

Like any self-respecting trea­tise in the Inter­net age, Sandberg’s opus—currently  #1 on Amazon.com—has spawned wave upon wave of impas­sioned com­men­tary, crash­ing ashore in pre­dictable stages. First comes the announce­ment, then the cri­tique, then the back­lash against the cri­tique, then the meta con­ver­sa­tion about the con­ver­sa­tion. (For the record—and likely due to time con­straints and a prob­lem­atic Face­book habit–my own con­tri­bu­tions tend to come towards the end of this cycle.)

My ini­tial plan to track Super­storm Sheryl quickly fell by the wayside—there was sim­ply too much com­ing in too fast for me to absorb (at least absent a deci­sion to lean out of my full-time job). That said, I’ve been pay­ing atten­tion and read­ing quite a bit. And more and more, I find myself stuck on a sin­gle ques­tion: Why aren’t we just tak­ing what we can use and for­get­ting about the rest?

A some­what baf­fled Paul Krug­man seemed to say as much this morn­ing on ABC’s This Week: Of course, Sandberg’s pre­scrip­tion is not for every­one. It seems to be quite help­ful for some. What is the big deal?

So what is the big deal? (Because, clearly, there is one.)

The more I think about it, the more I sus­pect that some of the debate’s feroc­ity stems from an atavis­tic faith in the myth of the Right Answer. Many of us, me included, grew up in an era where female ambi­tion often found its out­let in efforts to be the Good Girl, to ful­fill goals set by oth­ers, not to define our own. The suc­cess­ful Good Girl’s stock in trade was her ready store of right answers. Not right for her, but right period. She cul­ti­vated excel­lent lis­ten­ing skills and became a world-class mimic.  In return, she got gold stars and As. She did not get raped or killed.

Put dif­fer­ently, per­haps one of the rea­sons we care so des­per­ately about what Sand­berg thinks is because we are aren’t entirely clear what we think our­selves. We latch on to her ideas—or, alter­nately, lash out against them—because we don’t see (or aren’t com­fort­able with) other more nuanced options. This shouldn’t be sur­pris­ing. We live in an age when the com­pet­ing voices are loud and many—and often far out­strip our capac­ity to choose among them or shape our own course. (Intrigu­ingly, even Sand­berg her­self sounds famil­iar with the dilemma: “Every woman I know feels guilty about the choices they’ve made,” she told 60 Min­utes this evening.) We are, in the words of Harvard’s Robert Kegan–who put forth this the­ory in a book of the same name–“in over our heads.” (N.B. This is a prob­lem not just for women but for pretty much every­one.  Another place it’s espe­cially visible–and anxiety-provoking–is, as I wrote here, around career choices in the after­math of the Great Recession.)

But there’s another rea­son that it’s a big deal, and it’s an impor­tant one: The dan­ger that a vision intended to inspire could become an oppres­sive cud­gel. The dan­ger that women already struggling–and they are infi­nitely more numer­ous than Sand­berg and her black swan peers–will be told that, if they’d just lean in more, Presto!, prob­lems solved. Not that anyone’s likely to say this in so many words, or that it’s what Sand­berg intended. But these things have a way of seep­ing in. The process is grad­ual. That Sand­berg and other uber achiev­ers have become the most vis­i­ble faces of women’s work­place issues is, as Car­olyn Edgar com­pellingly writes, both absurd and disturbing.

Late last month, the ever-thoughtful Kate Gace Wal­ton, who runs the blog Work Stew, mused that Sandberg’s choices would never be her own. “For me per­son­ally, a book that would res­onate more might be called ‘Lean In, Gasp with Hor­ror, and Run the Other Way,’” she quipped. At the same time, she took the oppor­tu­nity to take the con­ver­sa­tion deeper—to ask friends and read­ers how they’d responded, what was true for them: “What path makes sense for you, and what changes (in your­self, and in soci­ety) need to hap­pen to make that pos­si­ble?” she wrote on Facebook.

This is another kind of lean­ing in that I think we could use more of—a lean­ing into our own lives, to our own val­ues and needs. How do we decide whose advice to fol­low? Where do we look for guid­ance? Here, Sheryl Sand­berg is beside the point. We can only look to ourselves.

Porridge and Clouds #2

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Bowl of clouds

Por­ridge & Clouds is an occa­sional series on things I’m think­ing about + things that make me think.

Those Crim­son Women Circa 1978  and the Fla­vors O’ Success

My mus­ings on the obsta­cles that may have kept women on the Har­vard Crim­son in my era from evolv­ing into uber suc­cess­ful jour­nal­is­tic super­stars has sparked some lively conversation—especially timely as the Sheryl Sand­berg tsunami approaches land­fall on this Inter­na­tional Women’s Day.

Among the com­ments: My writer friend Cathi Hanauer (Gone, The Bitch in the House) made a com­pelling case for the myr­iad ways moth­er­hood may fig­ure into this equa­tion, while col­lege class­mate Arthur Kyr­i­azis pointed out that a num­ber of women of my Crim­son era had, in fact, been phe­nom­e­nally suc­cess­ful. Both of these are excel­lent points, and I revised the post slightly this morn­ing to clar­ify what I meant.

To quickly recap: I didn’t mean to say that Crim­son women of my era didn’t go on to amaz­ing careers, just that—with one salient excep­tion, not in my col­lege class—none became the super­star jour­nal­is­tic brands that an astound­ing four of the men from my fresh­man comp did. Sim­i­larly, while I don’t have kids myself, it’s obvi­ous to me that moms face unique challenges—but at the same time, I don’t really see that account­ing for what I described. It wasn’t that the women of my era didn’t tri­umph in careers known for their over-the-top non-family-friendly demands—investment bank­ing and cor­po­rate law being two examples—it’s that the paths they fol­lowed didn’t involve the pub­lic act of claim­ing their voices.

Also, a coda: A col­lege friend who read the piece emailed me, won­der­ing if I remem­bered a few Crim­son women she’d known: Susan Chira, Suzy Spring, and “Nancy” some­one. For Susan Chira my answer was a resound­ing Yes: She was pres­i­dent of the Crim­son a cou­ple years ahead of me and went on to a career at the New York Times. (If she’d been in my Crim­son comp, she’d have seri­ously under­cut my lede.) “Nancy” didn’t ring a bell. Suzy Spring sounded famil­iar. “Did she go on to the Her­ald?” I emailed back. The answer: “SHE MARRIED JACK WELCH.”

Fol­low Your Heart 2.0: Notes from the Field

A few weeks back, I wrote about how eco­nomic pres­sures are paving the way for a new under­stand­ing of what it means to “fol­low your heart”—one informed by an aware­ness that bliss is gen­er­ally eas­ier to come by when you can pay your bills.

In this con­text, I was intrigued by pop­u­lar travel blog­ger Mariellen Ward’s post about her deci­sion to trade the peri­patetic life that informs the Breathe­DreamGo blog inspired by her pas­sion for India for life in her native Canada. What I love about this piece is its insight into the real­i­ties of find­ing sta­ble foot­ing on the road less traveled–and how this is always a work in progress. In par­tic­u­lar, this:

“On my first night in Goa, when I couldn’t sleep because of fear and hunger, I sud­denly real­ized: I’m done. I’m home­sick, I’m tired of try­ing to make a liv­ing as a travel writer and blog­ger, I’m tired of trav­el­ing with lim­ited funds, I’m tired of the strug­gle, of TRYING so hard for so lit­tle in return, and I want to go back to Canada. Just like that. I don’t know if it was the house I was stay­ing in, or the plan­e­tary align­ment, or maybe just the tim­ing. But that night in Goa every­thing changed.”

Another won­der­ful post about the highly per­sonal process of forg­ing a mean­ing­ful life comes from my friend Lisa Maguire, now con­tem­plat­ing a career change from invest­ment bank­ing to horse care as the still-contracting finance indus­try con­tin­ues to bleed jobs.

“It occurred to me that this was the first mean­ing­ful work I had done in years,” she writes with char­ac­ter­is­tic wry humor, describ­ing the expe­ri­ence of vol­un­teer­ing to muck out stalls. “Work that had tan­gi­ble results (I could see the clean stall) and a pur­pose (the res­cue relies solely on vol­un­teer labor). It was also work that I was able to do with­out any pol­i­tics or con­tro­versy. Unlike work­ing in an invest­ment bank, no one dis­puted who was going to fill up which water bucket; no one stood next to your just-filled bucket and claimed your work as their own; no one emp­tied your just-filled bucket and then refilled the bucket, say­ing you had not done it right; no one debated the process con­trols and reg­u­la­tions around fill­ing up the buck­ets, tak­ing out mea­sur­ing sticks to see how far from the lip of the bucket you’d filled.”

Job­less Rate Falls to 7.7%!  Big News—Or Not?

Plenty of excite­ment about this today—here’s the New York Times piece—but how excited should we really be? I, for one, am putting off judg­ment until I know more about the qual­ity of the jobs created—specifically, how salaries and ben­e­fits stack up against the pre-Recession jobs they replace.

Also: In case you haven’t noticed, jobs are still dis­ap­pear­ing. Don’t believe me? Check out the new (and appar­ently ongo­ing) series about being laid off after the age of 50 from busi­ness jour­nal­ist Jon Fried­man, who is shar­ing his evolv­ing story in a series of lively posts. Here’s the first.

Man­ag­ing Stress in Stress­ful Times

It’s one thing to apply stress-management tech­niques to the ordi­nary annoy­ances of daily life—traffic, noisy neigh­bors, being put on hold by Comcast—but what if you’re fac­ing far more seri­ous issues shaped by larger eco­nomic trends? Think job loss, fore­clo­sure, major invest­ment losses. Last week, Plan B Nation had a chance to put this ques­tion to a panel of experts at Har­vard School of Pub­lic Health, part of a fas­ci­nat­ing panel dis­cus­sion livestreamed from HSPH’s Lead­er­ship Stu­dio. Well worth watch­ing (which you can do here).

Recipe: Quinoa Black Bean Burgers     

A recipe! There’s always a recipe here on Por­ridge and Clouds. Last time it was for red vel­vet cake. This time, it’s quinoa black bean burg­ers. They come highly rec­om­mended by me (assum­ing you like such things).