Cheer Like You Mean It

I just finished Kate Torgovnick's Cheer: Three Teams on a Quest for College Cheerleading's Ultimate Prize and the first thing I had to do was head over to YouTube to find a video of the teams I'd just read about. Lucky for me, in addition to being able to look for the teams (Memphis All-Girl Tigers, Southern University Jaguars, and Stephen F. Austin Lumberjacks) I found a video put together to promote the book.

It was a little difficult to imagine the sequences Torgovnick was describing in words, simply because cheerleading is such a demanding sport and not one that gets anywhere near as much play as, say, baseball. Unlike a game with set basic skills, like running, hitting the ball, throwing and catching, cheerleading involves gymnastics and tons of moves quite unfamiliar to the layperson. The book was a great thrilling read, particularly in the descriptions of the championships; I was on edge waiting to get to each team's results.

What I was hoping for was more exploration of the cheerleaders as people; Torgovnick does talk to some cheerleaders who are injured in practice, and meets one who struggles with bulimia. But these interludes are secondary to following the teams' performances. We don't know what will happen to these cheerleaders when they finish college, we don't learn what they study in school, or much about them outside of their athletic field. While the author starts with an introduction explaining that she isn't going to explore the mythic American Cheerleader, she doesn't do much to flesh out her subjects as three-dimensional people off the mat, which might have helped the reader to identify more with them.

Recruiting Ruthlessly

I visited yet another recruiter today, making the third one that I'm currently in touch with. My favorite recruiter is S, followed by J. The woman I met today, M, is very different from both S and J.

S and J are both very friendly and personable. S is always updating me on her schedule so we can coordinate phone calls and meetings, and she asks me about my week, how things are going, and so forth. She treats me like a real person, and not a robot. I've only spoken with J over the phone, but he's easy to talk to, asks clear questions and is a great communicator. Both S and J are very diplomatic in their dealings, and if they need to change something on my resume, or ask questions about my work history, they put me at ease.

I met M at 10 this morning, and when I left I felt like I had spent the past hour in an interrogation room. As usual, I was asked to explain the particulars about why I left my past jobs, and so forth. She flat out said that I made a stupid move leaving the job with my mentor, and that I made a big mistake discussing the job move with my mentor beforehand. I tried to point out that my mentor is supportive of me, and wanted me to move on to bigger and better things, but I think M doesn't believe in helpful bosses. She was ridiculously obsessed with why I left my last job, and I kept feeling as if she didn't believe my reasons (a first). Further, my taking notes during our conversation was labeled "rude" (another first).

I'm not sure I can work with someone who doesn't trust me, or doesn't inspire trust. And any time I've taken notes in an interview, I always ask, "Do you mind if I take notes?" I've never been given so much as a sideways glance over that. The whole experience grated on me; it's not as if I can't take a little criticism--but most of what M said went against everything my mentors and past experience has taught me.

I've worked with a fair number of recruiters now, and M is an entirely different person than the others I've known. Even the woman who told me I didn't have the right kind of experience for her clients (and therefore couldn't be placed from her firm) was more professional and polite to me than M was. Of course, M was trying to correct me so that I would play well with her clients, but I still felt slighted by the whole experience. Not to mention that her interview kept me for two hours today, much longer than any other visit I've ever had to a staffing firm.

The positive note in all of this is that I don't have to work with M. I will definitely look at her advice and assess what I can and can't use from it; there's no sense in having wasted an interview. But working with a recruiter is a matter of choice, and I may ultimately decide to drop myself from M's roster of candidates. If I can't be comfortable with the recruiter, how could I trust her to represent me to a hiring manager?

Taking Rejection In Stride

I got a phone call today from Corp Theatre. Sadly, it was not a call with a job offer.

But while I didn't get a job offer from my dream job, it was still one of the nicest phone calls I've had with a hiring manager in ages. The Director praised my skills, and let me know that she appreciated all the hard work I put into applying and interviewing. She told me that it was a difficult choice to make at the end, but they chose someone else who had more experience with direct ticketing (which is part of the job).

On the bright side, the Director was completely sincere with me, and I really appreciated that. She told me that she wanted to keep my resume, should they have any openings in the future. This was not the standard, "we'll keep your resume on file," line. This was an actual person telling me that she was impressed with me and she was hoping there would be an opportunity for me again in the future.

City Mouse Goes To The Country

I visited my mother yesterday to continue stripping the wallpaper in her front room. I had really been looking forward to spending some time in quiet suburbia, working on a relaxing project and listening to my iPod. But the day was far more hectic.

First, I had to continue to worry about the phone service in my apartment. Even though I had taken everything apart and fixed it, and eventually went to the trouble to install a new jack, the phone still wasn't working properly. I could call out, but no one could call in. So I had my home number forwarded to my cellphone as a temporary measure until I could get a Verizon repair person to my apartment. (I'm waiting on him/her now as I write.) I figured that I would at least be able to keep up with job searching from my cell phone at my folks' house. But no. My parents live in a cell phone dead zone.

This was discouraging, but I thought that I'd at least be able to check email; I'd brought my laptop. And I'd found a wireless connection there before. But no. The magic wireless network had disappeared.

It makes me realize how great it is to live in the city. Wireless networks about, and the only time I lose cellphone service is in the tunnel under the harbor on the Blue Line between Aquarium and Maverick. And everything is within walking distance. My mother has to drive everywhere, while I am conveniently surrounded by a grocery store, a Radio Shack, coffee shops, restaurants, a hardware store, and more. A quick bike ride takes me to Target. I can walk or ride to any number of parks.

I have fond memories of my childhood home, and I remember being a kid and thinking I would eventually buy a house there and have a family of my own. I would send them to school and that child would have most of the same teachers that I did, just as most of my teachers had taught my father. But I can't even begin to ponder the idea of going back to the suburbs. It's too quiet, too stretched out, too much effort. I like my own neighborhood, where people sit out on stoops and talk to each other, instead of hiding in their big houses behind lines of trees. I like the fluoridated tap water, the nearness to the harbor, and the enormous public library. In fact, I think the only thing I really miss is being able to walk around in bare feet.

Speeding Up and Slowing Down

One of my favorite television shows is M*A*S*H, partly because I'm a big Alan Alda fan, and partly because I think it's great writing that still outshines a lot of new television shows today. I was reading an article about amphetamine use this morning, and it reminds me a lot of later season M*A*S*H episode. In the show, the hospital is under tremendous pressure as increased fighting keeps inundating the staff with casualties and wounded. Charles, the eminent doctor from Boston, in order to combat his fatigue, pops into the supply cabinet one night, and takes an amphetamine pill. A few days later, he can't stop taking them, because he's so impressed with his performance on the drug and he can't bear to slow down. Only the intervention of the other characters can help him to realize that he is only human and he needs to stop taking the pills.

Though the Korean War is long over, and most of us are not overseas fighting in combat (as always, my greatest respect to those who are), the idea of needing to speed up to fight mounting pressure in daily life still persists. I'm not a morning person, but life demands that I get out of bed and get to work, whether it's studying for the GMAT, applying for a job, going for an interview, or running errands and doing the laundry. I have a very difficult time doing this without two cups of coffee. In my formerly employed life, my secret weapon was an extra-shot grande toffeenut latte from Starbucks, venti if I was having a really bad morning. My super-secret last resort weapon is caffeine tablets.

From Nicholas Rasmussen's piece:

So the amphetamine-assisted, physician-abetted social adjustment of yore is back as a mass phenomenon. But it does not, at first glance, represent as severe a problem proportionally. There are fewer than 10 million medical and nonmedical amphetamine users today, whereas the population has increased from 200 million to 300 million since 1969. Amphetamine use is therefore less than two-thirds as prevalent as it was in 1969. But we might expand our purview beyond simple statistics to ask a broader sociological question: Has the medical demand that amphetamines once filled abated? Apparently not. Counting all the medicines used now for conditions that amphetamine once treated — depression, obesity, and "fatigue," or inadequate working attention — we can estimate that, proportional to population, each year roughly twice as many Americans now take a drug that would, in 1969, have very likely been an amphetamine.

That calculus suggests that if the amphetamine epidemic of the 1960s was symptomatic of a deep-rooted social disease — drug use to meet unwholesome expectations of incessant cheeriness, unnatural productivity, and extreme slimness, and to boost the postwar consumerist ethos that the sociologist David Riesman once called the "fun morality" — then America is now twice as sick. When Allen Ginsberg helped open the counterculture's own anti-amphetamine campaign in 1965 under the slogan "speed kills," he wasn't referring just to the drug that so many Americans relied on to keep up. He was also thinking of the demand that amphetamine satisfies. It might be time to think again about heeding his call.

So are we just rats in the maze, searching for a faster way to the center? Sometimes I sincerely feel we are. Yesterday, I had the luxury of spending the afternoon with Nate, riding our bicycles to Deer Island. We walked out on a jetty and explored the tidal pool, where we walked among hundreds of thousands of periwinkles. I am fascinated by the way in which a periwinkle will emerge from its shell and glide in my palm if I hum to it. We also discovered that by lifting some of the smaller rocks, we found dozens of small blue-green crabs scuttling around the pebbles and barnacles. When we finished at Deer Island, we rode to Revere Beach for ice cream cones. The whole afternoon was quiet and relaxed, and it was easier to breathe without the threat of the job search or graduate school looming over us.

Not every day is so idyllic. More often, there are days that I can almost feel time slipping through my fingers as I rush from interview to interview, and I feel lost at sea. There are days that I think, wouldn't it be great if I had a pill that could keep me going? The idea of an internal combustion engine like an amphetamine is truly tempting. But it's not a solution.

The solution is to give up some of our obsession with the insane pace of life in America. I'm sure someone out there is probably reading this and thinking I wasted yesterday because I spent it relaxing in the harbor instead of writing. I don't think that time was wasted in the least. Americans are too proud of their ridiculous devotion to work, to Blackberries, and so forth. We should take a break once in a while. Go on a vacation. Spend an afternoon at the beach. The hustle and bustle will still be there tomorrow, and you can afford to miss it for one day.

Fixing A Hole

At a job interview recently, I was asked, "How are you with tech skills?" I'm not a computer programmer, and I've never programmed a server, so I asked for a little clarification before I answered.

"Well, can you set up a printer?" the woman asked. I inwardly sighed. "Yes, I can definitely set up a printer, I'm very good at that."

I have always been interested in how things work and solving puzzles, and one thing I secretly really like to do is assemble desktop hardware: computers, printers, scanners, etc. There's a deep sense of satisfaction in knowing which jack is a phone line and which one is for an ethernet cable. I have found, strangely enough, that this isn't a common skill in the offices I've worked in. It isn't something difficult to master, particularly now that a lot of plugs and holes are color coded or have guiding icons nearby.

This morning, the phone had stopped working. And so, I had to shuffle over to the shelf that contains my printer, scanner, modem and wireless router and figure it out. In our whole apartment, there is only one phone jack, and accordingly, we have a triple jack splitter to allow for two landline phones and the internet connection. Well, the condensation from the non-stop humidity and thunderstorms over the past week had corroded the splitter (the sole phone jack is conveniently located below a window). Taking everything apart was a mess, particularly since I had just woken up and wasn't at my sharpest. But eventually I pulled it all apart and located the splitter.

My first attempt to fix it involved paper towels and a hairdryer. But the corrosion was beyond the scraping of a paper towel. I moved on to a toothbrush, and when that failed, I looked for sandpaper. When I couldn't find any sandpaper, I gave up and walked down the street to the corner hardware store and just bought a new splitter.

The point of pride is that this was a problem I could fix, for $2.99 no less. For Verizon to have come out to the house to look at this would have cost at least $100 for the service call, plus a markup for any splitter they would have sold me. It's nice to know I can rely on my own skills to put together and take apart a phone line.

Self Promotion

This morning I had the opportunity to attend a networking event hosted by Diane Darling of Effective Networking. It was a different networking event than I had attended before, but I think I made the most of it.

Most networking events that I attend are held by a professional association, like Women in Development or American Fundraising Professionals. Or I've been to some Downtown Women's Club events. But the commonality of the attendees at this event wasn't a fundraising career or women's business. Everyone at this event was connected through Diane Darling.

I met Diane when I wrote about a piece of hers not so long ago, and she contacted me to ask if I wanted to be added to her contact list. Since then, I've been reading Diane's columns in the Boston Business Journal. She's a real networking guru, and I really enjoyed her breakfast event this morning. It opened with a few remarks from Diane, and then she introduced a few volunteers who she spoke with about their networking dilemmas, with input from the assembled.

Aside from meeting Diane in person, my two best connections made this morning were with a new recruiter, for a staffing firm that specializes in placing women, and a staffer from the Boston Business Journal. I have a few new cards that I traded for, and a lot of ideas.

Blog Options and Strategic Planning

Today I looked at WordPress. I've been very happy for the most part with Blogger, but I would like a new layout that isn't so generic. There are some nice ones that can be customized in WordPress, but the huge drawback for me is the fact that it won't allow me to used my Amazon widgets. While some might say, how much money are you actually making from your Amazon referrals, I would point out that it's my second-most profitable online venture after Half.com. I'm not willing to let that go.

I'm personally proud of the growth that I've been able to sustain for this blog. Last year at this time, I had roughly 20 readers per day; currently I average at 75. I used to write solely for myself; now I write for three blog networks: Brazen Careerist, the Women's DISH, and Damsels in Success. And I even have my own trolls on a secret forum who exist simply to trash my writing and make fun of me.

For the next year, I'd like to double readership, and start having some guest posters to expand my network. In the next month, I want to develop a proper business plan in order to expand the site's profitability and publicity. I'm having a lot of success with recruiters who are attracted to my online writing; in a lot of ways, blogging is like having an online portfolio.

Internationally Speaking

Last night was Nate's last graduate school class, so I kept him company on his way there, and waited for him so we could head home together, triumphant. I had planned on reading or writing on my laptop at the nearby Starbucks while he was in class, but amazingly, I encountered two very nice students that I talked to for three hours instead.

Both men were Fullbright scholars; Felipe was from Colombia, here to study Ecology. Ahmed came from Afghanistan to study International Law. They would be starting their programs in the fall; for the summer they were in a conversational English course, to learn more about American ways of speaking. (For example, they were picking up idiomatic phrases such as "I don't buy it.") Felipe did a lot more listening than talking, I think he was less certain of his English. But I was still impressed by the range of topics he and Ahmed could talk about. We covered a lot of terrain: world demographics, geography, politics in America and abroad, technology, women's rights, the upcoming presidential elections, the war in Iraq, the military efforts in Afghanistan, cultural history, and more. In his home country, Ahmed was a defense lawyer, specializing in women's rights. He told me that I should read A Thousand Splendid Suns, because it has a lot in there about the women's situation in Afghanistan. We also talked about the rights of transgender people, and I recommended that he read Cris Beam's Transparent.

One of the images that sticks with me from the conversation is Ahmed's description of technology adoption
in Afghanistan. Six years ago, he told me, he went to Pakistan to buy a computer to work on. When it was all set up in his house, his entire family came to see this amazing computer. And now, he says, everyone has a computer or a laptop. And a cellphone. He wasn't impressed by cellphones; he felt they were too expensive and not very necessary. A cellphone call costs about 5 afs; 10 afs will buy a loaf of bread. He said he was saddened that there were some people who would pay 5 afs to call a friend outside of their home, while not far away there are people so poor that they survive by eating grass. It's a hard image to swallow. It seems like a scaled down version of the people on Beacon Hill here in Boston who live in the lap of luxury, while just across Beacon Street, homeless people bed down for the night on the Common.

I learned a lot from Filipe and Ahmed. I learned that in Colombia, according to Felipe, there are many women who dominate in the Life Sciences. I learned that in Afghanistan, when they instituted voting identification, many people asked for as many as ten ID cards, just to have the copies of their photo. I gave them my card, and I hope I will hear from them, as it was one of the best conversations that I've ever had. It's amazing what can happen when you're willing to talk with an open mind.

Challenging Gender Order

KRUJE, Albania — Pashe Keqi recalled the day nearly 60 years ago when she decided to become a man. She chopped off her long black curls, traded in her dress for her father’s baggy trousers, armed herself with a hunting rifle and vowed to forsake marriage, children and sex.

For centuries, in the closed-off and conservative society of rural northern Albania, swapping genders was considered a practical solution for a family with a shortage of men. Her father was killed in a blood feud, and there was no male heir. By custom, Ms. Keqi, now 78, took a vow of lifetime virginity. She lived as a man, the new patriarch, with all the swagger and trappings of male authority — including the obligation to avenge her father’s death.

So begins an article in today's New York Times, which discusses how, in the current age of advancing women's right, the "sworn virgins" of Albania are disappearing. According to Dan Bilefsky, because regular women are allotted more privileges and independence now than they were even twenty years ago, they no longer see becoming a man as a necessary option for autonomy.

What is really interesting about this cultural gender switching is that it is based on economics and hierarchy, rather than personal gender choice. In Transparent, Cris Beam explores the ways in which transsexuals are physically one sex, but internally identify with the opposite gender. Beam also mentions some cultures, including Thai and Native American cultures, that allow for a "third gender" of transsexuals. But what separates these instances from the Albanian "sworn virgins" is that in Albania, a woman who has become a man is completely severed from sexual activity. These women have chosen to become men, not because of internal feelings or sexual attraction to women, but because it gave them standing within their villages.

As I read about the Albanian "uncles," I thought about gender politics here in the West--particularly in the workplace. Women in the office are seen as weak and incompetent, but if they change their tactics to act like men, they are deemed too tough and unfeminine. As Lisa Belkin notes, "women can't win." While in the Albanian village, it is accepted for a woman to assume the role of a man, in the Western office, women are not allowed to do the same. Think of how many people tarred Hillary Clinton with the word "mannish."

Imagine for a moment that a woman in America could be allowed to dress and present herself as a man, and gain respect from both men and women around her. (It's not a solution to the issue certainly; the real solution is for women to be valued for what they offer instead of being labeled by their gender.) But this situation wouldn't happen. If a woman dressed as a man in the American office, she would be labeled a freak. Even women who work hard to act like men (i.e. aggressively) are not safe once they reach the executive level; think of the spectacular fall of Zoe Cruz at Morgan Stanley. Were Zoe Cruz a man, she would have been considered a great success, or perhaps the template of an Alpha Male. But because she was a woman, she was called names like Czarina, Wicked Witch, and Cruz Missile behind her back. Furthermore, even though she had a proven track record in financial leadership, she was constantly being undermined by the men in her company:

Jay Dweck, a former Goldman Sachs executive who had switched over to Morgan Stanley was surprised to see the level to which Morgan Stanley employees went to undermine their female boss. When Ms. Cruz voiced her opinion that the company should pull out of its investments shorting subprime mortgages and going long on higher quality triple-A mortgages that were previously considered to be stable, the company did not immediately back her decision, but instead devoted precious time to questioning her judgment. Mr. Dweck was overheard by several people saying, “At Goldman, this isn’t happening. When they say get out, they get out. At Morgan Stanley, when Zoe says get out, people start negotiating.”

One of the criticisms leveled against Cruz is that she was "hard as nails" and "unsympathetic" to subordinates. What makes her any different from any number of high level Wall Street male executives? Would Cruz have risen to the role of Morgan Stanley's second-in-command if she had been more feminine? Organized office parties? Worn more pink? Of course not.

Back to the Albanian sworn virgins. Obviously choosing the male path is not a decision to be taken lightly. For one thing, these women no longer belong to the female social sphere, and for another, they are forswearing any sexual identity or expression. They cannot marry, have sex, bear children, and so forth. It is a huge choice to make. But what they gain is respect and power. Is it worth it? In the face of women's advancement, there are no new sworn virgins. If Albania is making this leap forward in valuing its women , perhaps American corporate culture could as well?