Tripping on the high wire
By Olive L. Sullivan
I had a fabulous weekend, the kind that finds you at work on Monday morning still smiling. But I’m exhausted.
It started Friday with dinner at my parents’ house. On Saturday, my fiber artist friend Colleen and I did an arts workshop, and then dashed home to change and drove to Kansas City for a concert by my favorite blues artist Kelley Hunt. We arrived back in Pittsburg at 3:30 in the morning, and I was up Sunday in time to go to my poetry critique group. From there, I dashed off to pick up my sweetie and we headed to Joplin for lunch and a concert at St. Philip’s. We then allowed ourselves to be swept off to dinner at JB Elephant’s with the musicians and some friends. By seven o’clock, I was ready to either burst into tears or become exceedingly silly. By eight thirty, I was home in bed.
At first glance, it looks very well balanced. I covered all the important bases in my life: time with family, time to honor my creativity in various ways, time spent with my boyfriend, and restorative time listening to a variety of good music with friends. I even did a little networking here and there.
These are the things that got left out: sleep, laundry, dog walks in the woods, and reading. Not to mention the freelance projects I’m still working on.
In my quest for balance, I’ve hit a wobbly patch. With less structured writing jobs, I’ve been able to combine fun and work in a way that no longer seems to be working. As a newspaper reporter, for example, I was “on” all the time. I carried a notebook with me everywhere I went, and I could be at a concert, a play, out to dinner with friends, or even shopping when a story idea would hit, I would buttonhole someone for an impromptu interview, and an article would appear in print the next day. I was either at work, thinking about work, preparing for work, catching up on work, or recovering from work. And my family and friends joked that a lot of what I called “work” looked like what they called leisure. For example, my family and I toured an apple orchard in Missouri. They had a great time, bought apples and cider, and called it a fun outing. I had a great time, wrote about it, and called it work. I’ve been on trips, including two weeks in Costa Rica, that looked like vacation to some, and were work to me. The up side is pretty obvious – I was always enjoying myself. The down side was that I never really focused on the creative writing that is important to me, because I was always scrambling for an idea that would pay.
Some people work all the time because their job is their life, but my struggle will be familiar to anyone who goes to work primarily to pay the bills, shunting their real passion into weekends and all-too-rare vacations. And don’t even get me started on vacations. When I started here at the real job, I joked that the main drawback is that it cuts into my travel schedule. As I hit the reality of limited vacation time and endless possibilities, that’s no longer quite as funny. Since I’ve never had to compartmentalize my life before, I’m finding it a real challenge. I have cut 50 hours out of my week and put it in a box labeled “real job.” But I still have 70-plus hours of life to cram into what’s left over. It ain’t working.
When I started my current job -- which, you’ll recall, I really enjoy -- I thought I would also have more time and energy to devote to my creative writing. I am working on a poetry collection and finishing up a novel, two projects which have consistently been shoved to the back shelf while I have been trying to make a living. I’m also working on a screenplay, which needs to be top priority right now. But if it’s at the top of the to-do list, how can I get it done when my time is otherwise allocated to the real job that pays the bills and feeds an important part of my identity? And what about family, friends, sweetheart, dogs? Books? Cooking? Sleep?
My mother, who has never held down a full time job – although no one would make the mistake of saying she has never worked! – pushes the notion that my current job allows me the freedom to put it down at the end of the day. I work 8 to 5, and I’m done. I come home and have the leisure to do whatever I want. This is true, in its own way. What it doesn’t take into account is that I don’t have the energy to do whatever I want, after working 8 to 5 and commuting nearly two hours. My dogs are especially distraught. The first couple of weeks, Romeo, my big German Shepherd mix, would be so excited to see me that he had a hard time remembering humans don’t show love by biting each other’s noses. He has calmed down, but it’s the calm resignation of someone who knows he’ll never get another evening walk – at least not until the days get longer and I can get home before dark.
When I was in college, I worked for campus publications. I regularly worked until 2 or 3 a.m., and was in class the next morning getting As. I rode my bike everywhere, went to concerts, took lots of trips, and generally had a great time. Who needed sleep? Unfortunately, it turns out, here in my middle years, that I do. I need sleep to restore my physical energy, but also for the mental and creative energy that I rely on. I mentioned that screenplay. I’m in the envious position of having a producer waiting for it (impatiently). In my previous freelancing life, I’d be done with it by now, because it would have been the focus of my efforts. No matter what else I was doing, I would be thinking of the script, and bits and pieces of my day would find their way into the pages. That’s still happening, of course – that’s part of the writing process – but it’s happening at a far slower rate. My focus is scattered like sunlight on the ocean, and I’m looking for the rainbow.
Reading my last column, my editor posed the question, “Will your newfound 8-to-5 be the center of your universe or just the part that you squeeze in before the important stuff?”
The problem is figuring out what the important stuff really is. You’ve heard the rule, “Don’t sweat the small stuff,” and its corollary, “Remember, it’s all small stuff.” Well, in my life, it’s all important stuff. I’m not willing to cut Friday dinners with my folks, time with my sweetie, music, time with friends, including dogs. I can’t really cut out the creative stuff because it’s such an integral part of who I am. And of course I can’t shirk my job, for so many reasons, not the least of which is the overriding ethic that makes me expect excellent performance from myself – a thing worth doing is worth doing well.
On the other hand, I have long said that if I’m not having fun doing something, I’m not going to do it. To me, the beauty of that statement is that it can be taken a couple of different ways. The first, obvious reading is that I won’t do it if it’s not fun. The other side of that is that if I have to do it, I’ll make it fun. Everything I did this weekend was fun by its very nature. I guess my struggle will be to make the things that got left out seem like as much fun as the things that I did squeeze in.
I know that not every weekend will be as jam-packed as this one was, but I expect that the holiday season will include many more like it. My goal is to enter January feeling restored and blessed, not frazzled and exhausted, having given my best energy to those I love and care about – including dogs, and including myself – and honoring who I truly am.
Whoever that is.
If you have thoughts on this topic, I would love to hear them – especially if you have figured out the answers! E-mail me at olive@olivesullivan.com, and I’ll try to address some of your ideas in a future column.
My column "Back to the Rat Race" appears every two weeks in Joplin Tri-State Business. This edition was published on October 28, 2008. JTSB is now available online at www.joplintristate.biz.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Cosmic Connections
By Olive L. Sullivan
When I was working from home, my life seemed pretty seamless. Tasks flowed one into the other, and there wasn’t a marked dichotomy between “work” and “life” the way there seems to be now that I have a “real job.” Since I leave my house early each morning and seem to come home merely to change clothes or sleep, life is something that happens on weekends, and has little connection to work.
Since most of the people in my workplace have a skill set far outside my comfort zone, the dichotomy is even more pronounced. Honestly, what do I have in common with all these engineers and physicists and tech geeks? I’m what my friend Sue calls a word nerd, and even though these guys are self-professed nerds, we all learned in high school that math nerds and word nerds don’t mix. I think of myself as a poet, an artist, and—I’ll admit it—a bit of a flake. I think of these people as serious-minded scientists and technicians. We are not The Same. We have little in common but a willingness to accept the other’s completely weird world view.
But sometimes worlds collide.
One Friday at lunch, several of the guys were talking about scientific theories of dark matter. Briefly, dark matter is stuff that emits no light or energy of any kind, but scientists hypothesize that it exists because of its effects on other objects that we can detect with our scientific instruments. The debate rages in the scientific community, but goes largely unremarked by those of us who learned about the planet Pluto and the dinosaur Brontosaurus in grade school, only to have both those “facts” change by the time our kids entered school. (For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, the creature we knew as a Brontosaurus is now a Brachiosaurus, and Pluto is no longer a planet.) I know just enough about dark matter, from my lifelong exposure to science geeks, to hold my own in such a conversation, and even make intelligent contributions from time to time. And then we all went back to work.
Sunday, I attended my regular poetry critique group, something I do to keep myself connected to my real life, reminding me that I’m a poet, not a tech writer.
The group is made up of poetry professors and grad students, all serious about the art and craft of poetry and language. It’s challenging, stimulating, creative work of the kind that most people don’t see when they read the finished piece in a book or journal. It’s the nuts and bolts of my real world, the same way capacitors and circuit breakers are the tools of the trade at my workplace.
But then Chris Anderson, who teaches literature at Pittsburg State University, passed out his poem to be critiqued. The working title, “Field Cosmology” caught my attention right away. From Chris I expect an interesting blend of nature and science that is reflected in the poem’s title, with its play on scientific field work. But as he read, the disparate parts of my life crashed into one another like atoms in a particle accelerator, and that interesting blend became a remarkable fusion. The hard science conversation at work was the same conversation we had over Chris’s poem. Just the imagery was different. When some of the group members questioned Chris’s images, I was able to connect the hard science facts with the metaphors of the poem to make it make sense.
As I passionately explained that the blackbird in the last stanza, folding and unfolding its wings, is the universe expanding and contracting and expanding again as various scientific theories take the lead, and that the kestrel in stanza two is the radio telescope in stanza one, all kinds of things made sense. To me, this is what poetry has always done. It takes ideas and thoughts that are not quite accessible, that can’t be expressed in words, and presents them as images that expand the reader’s mind until the inexpressible becomes the inevitable. Poems are the dark matter of the literary mind. You know a poem works by the effect it has on objects around it. I knew all that, recognized the interconnectedness of science geek and word nerd because I have always straddled the demarcation between the two realms of thought, especially when it comes to nature studies. After all, poets know the names of birds and trees and animals; it gives us power over them. But lately, with my focus on fighting for balance in my stressful “real job,” I had forgotten that the balance is already there. It seems only fitting that a poem would remind me of it.
Chris has given me permission to publish his poem even though it’s still a work in progress. Even its title is still in flux, as are all those theories about dark matter and the real composition of the universe.
So, under the title “Field,” here it is.
Radio telescopes turn their ears
to the sky and hear the mad howls
of solar winds, the big bang’s
birth pangs, a cacophony of gamma rays
and x-rays, the death-rattle of stars.
From a hundred yards away, a kestrel
hears a vole’s footfall, cocks her head,
opens her talons and strikes. A harrier
flies ten feet above the hay field: dark matter
hovering alongside the visible world.
The cosmos is a starling: specks of light
on a dark body, a squawker and a thief.
Universe, magnificent blackbird, chirr
like a locust, moan in your sleep, fold
your wings, spread them, fold them again.
My column "Back to the Rat Race" appears every two weeks in Joplin Tri-State Business. This edition was published on March 31, 2009. JTSB is now available online at www.joplintristate.biz.
By Olive L. Sullivan
When I was working from home, my life seemed pretty seamless. Tasks flowed one into the other, and there wasn’t a marked dichotomy between “work” and “life” the way there seems to be now that I have a “real job.” Since I leave my house early each morning and seem to come home merely to change clothes or sleep, life is something that happens on weekends, and has little connection to work.
Since most of the people in my workplace have a skill set far outside my comfort zone, the dichotomy is even more pronounced. Honestly, what do I have in common with all these engineers and physicists and tech geeks? I’m what my friend Sue calls a word nerd, and even though these guys are self-professed nerds, we all learned in high school that math nerds and word nerds don’t mix. I think of myself as a poet, an artist, and—I’ll admit it—a bit of a flake. I think of these people as serious-minded scientists and technicians. We are not The Same. We have little in common but a willingness to accept the other’s completely weird world view.
But sometimes worlds collide.
One Friday at lunch, several of the guys were talking about scientific theories of dark matter. Briefly, dark matter is stuff that emits no light or energy of any kind, but scientists hypothesize that it exists because of its effects on other objects that we can detect with our scientific instruments. The debate rages in the scientific community, but goes largely unremarked by those of us who learned about the planet Pluto and the dinosaur Brontosaurus in grade school, only to have both those “facts” change by the time our kids entered school. (For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, the creature we knew as a Brontosaurus is now a Brachiosaurus, and Pluto is no longer a planet.) I know just enough about dark matter, from my lifelong exposure to science geeks, to hold my own in such a conversation, and even make intelligent contributions from time to time. And then we all went back to work.
Sunday, I attended my regular poetry critique group, something I do to keep myself connected to my real life, reminding me that I’m a poet, not a tech writer.
The group is made up of poetry professors and grad students, all serious about the art and craft of poetry and language. It’s challenging, stimulating, creative work of the kind that most people don’t see when they read the finished piece in a book or journal. It’s the nuts and bolts of my real world, the same way capacitors and circuit breakers are the tools of the trade at my workplace.
But then Chris Anderson, who teaches literature at Pittsburg State University, passed out his poem to be critiqued. The working title, “Field Cosmology” caught my attention right away. From Chris I expect an interesting blend of nature and science that is reflected in the poem’s title, with its play on scientific field work. But as he read, the disparate parts of my life crashed into one another like atoms in a particle accelerator, and that interesting blend became a remarkable fusion. The hard science conversation at work was the same conversation we had over Chris’s poem. Just the imagery was different. When some of the group members questioned Chris’s images, I was able to connect the hard science facts with the metaphors of the poem to make it make sense.
As I passionately explained that the blackbird in the last stanza, folding and unfolding its wings, is the universe expanding and contracting and expanding again as various scientific theories take the lead, and that the kestrel in stanza two is the radio telescope in stanza one, all kinds of things made sense. To me, this is what poetry has always done. It takes ideas and thoughts that are not quite accessible, that can’t be expressed in words, and presents them as images that expand the reader’s mind until the inexpressible becomes the inevitable. Poems are the dark matter of the literary mind. You know a poem works by the effect it has on objects around it. I knew all that, recognized the interconnectedness of science geek and word nerd because I have always straddled the demarcation between the two realms of thought, especially when it comes to nature studies. After all, poets know the names of birds and trees and animals; it gives us power over them. But lately, with my focus on fighting for balance in my stressful “real job,” I had forgotten that the balance is already there. It seems only fitting that a poem would remind me of it.
Chris has given me permission to publish his poem even though it’s still a work in progress. Even its title is still in flux, as are all those theories about dark matter and the real composition of the universe.
So, under the title “Field,” here it is.
Radio telescopes turn their ears
to the sky and hear the mad howls
of solar winds, the big bang’s
birth pangs, a cacophony of gamma rays
and x-rays, the death-rattle of stars.
From a hundred yards away, a kestrel
hears a vole’s footfall, cocks her head,
opens her talons and strikes. A harrier
flies ten feet above the hay field: dark matter
hovering alongside the visible world.
The cosmos is a starling: specks of light
on a dark body, a squawker and a thief.
Universe, magnificent blackbird, chirr
like a locust, moan in your sleep, fold
your wings, spread them, fold them again.
My column "Back to the Rat Race" appears every two weeks in Joplin Tri-State Business. This edition was published on March 31, 2009. JTSB is now available online at www.joplintristate.biz.
The Rewards of Losing
By Olive L. Sullivan
The competition is all but over, and Rocky is solidly in the lead. I’m not surprised.
What did surprise me was that up until a few days ago, I was the front runner in the race to lose weight fastest. Our company president called the competition in January, challenging us to see who could lose 10 percent of our body weight the fastest.
Apparently some of us took it more seriously than others. While Eddie and I munched carrots and griped, Rocky started riding his bike more regularly. Kevin attended the Monday weigh-in with a can of Dr. Pepper in one hand and a candy bar in the other. “This is how much I’m gonna weigh as soon as I eat ‘em,” he said.
Meanwhile, I have been experiencing a perfect storm of weight loss, when everything just came together. In addition to Spike’s support – and that man does say all the right things! – and my own motivation to win that 50 bucks, I signed up for a class called “Unzip Your Fat Suit.”
Led by Andy Mason, the class used a technique known as Emotional Freedom Therapy, or EFT, to help participants explore the emotional causes of their overeating. You know, like when you are under stress and you grab a bag of Oreos rather than choosing something healthy? Or mindlessly work your way through a bag of chips because you’re bored? That kind of thing. Andy has lost over 100 pounds himself, and he offers sessions through his business As If By Magic, which has offices in Pittsburg and Joplin.
The class felt like magic, too. Each of the participants experienced marked change over the six weeks. In my case, I rapidly lost weight, but the changes in my body seemed more than could be accounted for by the numbers on the scale and the tape measure. I started thinking of myself as a thin person rather than a fat one. I bought new jeans, two sizes smaller. Within a couple of weeks, Spike said, “Are those your new skinny jeans? They look a little loose.”
Told you he says the right things!
At the same time, we hired a new receptionist at work. Though she declined the contest, she did agree to join me on my lunchtime walks. We use the walking track just south of 26th St. on St. John, and we can easily knock out two miles. One day we had both had a bad and stressful day at work, and we were so fired up we zipped through three fast miles. Instead of stress eating, we relied on stress walking. If everything’s going well at work, we talk about politics and that gets us revved up, too. Next week we plan to start doing intervals of jogging in preparation for a 5K race in June. She is the extra motivation I needed to get moving and keep moving, so I’m grateful she’s here.
As my weight loss continued, I maintained the lead in our corporate competition. Eddie took to calling me Skinny. When I reported that to the Unzip group, they started referring to me as Skinny as well. As a lifelong fat girl, I can’t tell you what a charge I get out of being referred to as Skinny Sullivan, even if it is more of an inside joke than an obvious moniker.
Last week, though, Rocky came in with only two pounds to lose. I still had six to go. Spike had joined me on the diet, and I used him as my conscience. He was a strict taskmaster, but he also cooked dinner several times, so I could hardly whine. Okay, I whined, but then so did he, so it worked out all right. We avoided restaurants and parties to the limits of our will power, and then guilted each other into choosing the grilled chicken and skipping the salad dressing if we did go out. Between us we lost more than 40 pounds.
Yes, I’m still a couple of pounds short of my work goal, and a good ten over my personal goal. But I’m more than 20 pounds under where I started in January, and I have lost over 50 pounds since I started getting serious about fitness and health in 2006. I know the date – I was at an anniversary party and later saw photos of myself. Man, if that doesn’t get you on a diet quick, you don’t need one!
Rocky has to maintain his loss for a week. If he can’t do it, the weigh-in next Monday will determine who the next possible winner is, and then that person has to maintain HER weight loss for a week. But even if he takes home the money, I know I’m coming out ahead. This is one game where the loser really is a winner.
My column "Back to the Rat Race" appears every two weeks in Joplin Tri-State Business. This edition was published on October 28, 2009. JTSB is now available online at www.joplintristate.biz.
By Olive L. Sullivan
The competition is all but over, and Rocky is solidly in the lead. I’m not surprised.
What did surprise me was that up until a few days ago, I was the front runner in the race to lose weight fastest. Our company president called the competition in January, challenging us to see who could lose 10 percent of our body weight the fastest.
Apparently some of us took it more seriously than others. While Eddie and I munched carrots and griped, Rocky started riding his bike more regularly. Kevin attended the Monday weigh-in with a can of Dr. Pepper in one hand and a candy bar in the other. “This is how much I’m gonna weigh as soon as I eat ‘em,” he said.
Meanwhile, I have been experiencing a perfect storm of weight loss, when everything just came together. In addition to Spike’s support – and that man does say all the right things! – and my own motivation to win that 50 bucks, I signed up for a class called “Unzip Your Fat Suit.”
Led by Andy Mason, the class used a technique known as Emotional Freedom Therapy, or EFT, to help participants explore the emotional causes of their overeating. You know, like when you are under stress and you grab a bag of Oreos rather than choosing something healthy? Or mindlessly work your way through a bag of chips because you’re bored? That kind of thing. Andy has lost over 100 pounds himself, and he offers sessions through his business As If By Magic, which has offices in Pittsburg and Joplin.
The class felt like magic, too. Each of the participants experienced marked change over the six weeks. In my case, I rapidly lost weight, but the changes in my body seemed more than could be accounted for by the numbers on the scale and the tape measure. I started thinking of myself as a thin person rather than a fat one. I bought new jeans, two sizes smaller. Within a couple of weeks, Spike said, “Are those your new skinny jeans? They look a little loose.”
Told you he says the right things!
At the same time, we hired a new receptionist at work. Though she declined the contest, she did agree to join me on my lunchtime walks. We use the walking track just south of 26th St. on St. John, and we can easily knock out two miles. One day we had both had a bad and stressful day at work, and we were so fired up we zipped through three fast miles. Instead of stress eating, we relied on stress walking. If everything’s going well at work, we talk about politics and that gets us revved up, too. Next week we plan to start doing intervals of jogging in preparation for a 5K race in June. She is the extra motivation I needed to get moving and keep moving, so I’m grateful she’s here.
As my weight loss continued, I maintained the lead in our corporate competition. Eddie took to calling me Skinny. When I reported that to the Unzip group, they started referring to me as Skinny as well. As a lifelong fat girl, I can’t tell you what a charge I get out of being referred to as Skinny Sullivan, even if it is more of an inside joke than an obvious moniker.
Last week, though, Rocky came in with only two pounds to lose. I still had six to go. Spike had joined me on the diet, and I used him as my conscience. He was a strict taskmaster, but he also cooked dinner several times, so I could hardly whine. Okay, I whined, but then so did he, so it worked out all right. We avoided restaurants and parties to the limits of our will power, and then guilted each other into choosing the grilled chicken and skipping the salad dressing if we did go out. Between us we lost more than 40 pounds.
Yes, I’m still a couple of pounds short of my work goal, and a good ten over my personal goal. But I’m more than 20 pounds under where I started in January, and I have lost over 50 pounds since I started getting serious about fitness and health in 2006. I know the date – I was at an anniversary party and later saw photos of myself. Man, if that doesn’t get you on a diet quick, you don’t need one!
Rocky has to maintain his loss for a week. If he can’t do it, the weigh-in next Monday will determine who the next possible winner is, and then that person has to maintain HER weight loss for a week. But even if he takes home the money, I know I’m coming out ahead. This is one game where the loser really is a winner.
My column "Back to the Rat Race" appears every two weeks in Joplin Tri-State Business. This edition was published on October 28, 2009. JTSB is now available online at www.joplintristate.biz.
Back in the Flow
by Olive L. Sullivan
Spike is passionate about fishing. If there is water, he’s wondering what he can catch.
When he found out I’d never caught a fish, he expected that teaching me would be a chore. He thought he’d spend all his time untangling my line and getting my hook out of trees and bushes. He was pleasantly surprised to learn that I knew how to cast, bait my hook, and untangle line. He was even happier to find that I know quite a bit of fishing etiquette. I can even be happily quiet for a good long time, and I believe that a day spent by water is never wasted. You see, it’s not that I had never been fishing, it’s just that I had never landed a fish. For Spike, the final clincher that made me his favorite fishing buddy was the fact that I have a canoe, and I know how to use it.
So we’ve been spending a fair amount of time out at Witmore Pits, west of Pittsburg, floating serenely, me composing poetry in my head, and him seriously pursuing the sport.
The first time we went out, I really didn’t expect much success. I figured I would enjoy the canoeing part, and Spike would enjoy the fishing part. He would catch a couple of fish, and I’d help him eat them. We were fishing with minnows. In the past, I had fished mostly with lures, and it was a challenge to get used to the visceral part of baiting a hook with live bait.
It was a bit disconcerting watching Spike do it. He seemed to have no qualms about it at all, and he certainly had no qualms about ripping the poor thing’s little face off when it was time for a fresh minnow. At first, I took the girlfriend prerogative of letting him impale the minnows for me, but I finally decided if I was gonna fish, I was gonna cut bait, too.
As I scooped a minnow out of the bucket and gingerly approached its quivering jaw with the hook, I said, “Sorry, baby.”
Spike looked at me disapprovingly over the tops of his glasses. “Real fishermen don’t apologize to the bait,” he said sternly.
“And real Buddhists don’t fish,” I retorted. “I’m screwed either way.” Then I jabbed the hook through the minnow and tossed him into the water.
I went through a few minnows unsuccessfully. One came back looking somewhat the worse for wear, after I’d had a pretty ferocious nibble. “Maybe a turtle,” my guide opined. “Did you see a turtle sticking its head out of the water?” When I shook my head he said, “Would you recognize a turtle head if you saw it?”
It was my turn for a scathing look. “You forget, I grew up roaming these woods and pits,” I said. “I ain’t no city girl.”
“Good thing,” he said. An aside: My friend Jenny disagrees. She believes anyone who considers whether her earrings and bandana match her fishing outfit is exemplifying distressingly citified behavior.
After a while, Spike broke out his fly rod and poppers. All was tranquil. It was his turn to cast, so I sat with my minnow dangling in the water. Suddenly the rod was practically wrenched out of my hand. “Oh!” I said, or something equally witty.
“You got something? Set the hook!” he said (we had earlier established that yelling, “Set the hook! Set the hook!” does not work, but he was excited). Before you could spit, I had landed a nice 12-inch bass, and Spike was prying the hook out of its gullet. I watched him work on the bleeding fish, and felt slightly queasy. I struggled between the atavistic thrill of contributing to the cooking pot, and the fact that we were killing another living creature (somehow I expect if I had to hunt down and kill a cow to eat it, I’d give up steak). It was interesting, to say the least.
I downplayed the event. “I didn’t actually do anything,” I pointed out. “I didn’t even set the hook. He just committed suicide.”
“That counts,” said Spike.
So that was one. The second was equally anticlimactic, but easier. Spike assures me that eventually I’ll quit counting. Then, I really will be a fisherman.
Meanwhile, learning to fish has had an unexpected bonus, one that Spike surely didn’t see coming.
It’s helping me get my next job.
The day I was laid off from my “real job,” I called Larry Dablemount, who writes an outdoor column that is published in the Globe and Pittsburg’s Morning Sun. He’d been looking for “a part-time lady” to help him with his publishing projects. I figured I could be a lady part-time, and we had been in touch about how we could work together. One of the first questions he asked was if I liked hunting and fishing. I said I was mostly into hiking and canoeing, but had recently taken up fishing. So we had agreed to meet when we could find a time. And here I was, in Joplin on a Wednesday with the whole day ahead of me. We agreed to meet in Springfield at Bass Pro Shops, and by the end of the day, we had a plan.
See, Larry wants to write a book about World War II combat veterans. The book would include 25 interviews with vets, each interview becoming a chapter in the final book, to be published by his Lightnin’ Ridge imprint. And since my first ghost-writing effort was a book about a World War II prisoner of war, I was all for it. That book, A Glimpse of Hell: The World War II Years, was based on transcripts of tapes by Jim Brooks, in Pittsburg, and included stories of how he grew up hunting and fishing near Arcadia, and how some of these skills helped him survive when his plane was shot down over Germany. He was the radio operator on a bomber, and managed to live on his own for several days before being captured by the Nazis. The story is riveting, and all the more so for being true.
So I’m now looking for vets to interview. If you know one, or are one, please contact me at olive@olivesullivan.com, and we’ll talk.
I’m noticing how everything seems to be coming together. I spent nine months at the real job where I was – dare I say it? – like a fish out of water. When I got the axe, I sunk back into my real life without a ripple, just like a trout released back into the stream. One of my friends commented about the way the Law of Attraction seems to be working in my life, and I joked that if I had known all I had to do was ask, I would have asked for something more. Then I realized that, in fact, saying it is the first step to achieving it. Back in college, I was a double major in English and biology, before being defeated by the math required in science. People used to ask me what I was going to do with that combination, and I said I was going to write about animals. It’s only taken me 30 years, but it looks like I’m about to keep my word.
My column "Back to the Rat Race" appears every two weeks in Joplin Tri-State Business. This edition was published on July 20, 2009. JTSB is now available online at www.joplintristate.biz.
by Olive L. Sullivan
Spike is passionate about fishing. If there is water, he’s wondering what he can catch.
When he found out I’d never caught a fish, he expected that teaching me would be a chore. He thought he’d spend all his time untangling my line and getting my hook out of trees and bushes. He was pleasantly surprised to learn that I knew how to cast, bait my hook, and untangle line. He was even happier to find that I know quite a bit of fishing etiquette. I can even be happily quiet for a good long time, and I believe that a day spent by water is never wasted. You see, it’s not that I had never been fishing, it’s just that I had never landed a fish. For Spike, the final clincher that made me his favorite fishing buddy was the fact that I have a canoe, and I know how to use it.
So we’ve been spending a fair amount of time out at Witmore Pits, west of Pittsburg, floating serenely, me composing poetry in my head, and him seriously pursuing the sport.
The first time we went out, I really didn’t expect much success. I figured I would enjoy the canoeing part, and Spike would enjoy the fishing part. He would catch a couple of fish, and I’d help him eat them. We were fishing with minnows. In the past, I had fished mostly with lures, and it was a challenge to get used to the visceral part of baiting a hook with live bait.
It was a bit disconcerting watching Spike do it. He seemed to have no qualms about it at all, and he certainly had no qualms about ripping the poor thing’s little face off when it was time for a fresh minnow. At first, I took the girlfriend prerogative of letting him impale the minnows for me, but I finally decided if I was gonna fish, I was gonna cut bait, too.
As I scooped a minnow out of the bucket and gingerly approached its quivering jaw with the hook, I said, “Sorry, baby.”
Spike looked at me disapprovingly over the tops of his glasses. “Real fishermen don’t apologize to the bait,” he said sternly.
“And real Buddhists don’t fish,” I retorted. “I’m screwed either way.” Then I jabbed the hook through the minnow and tossed him into the water.
I went through a few minnows unsuccessfully. One came back looking somewhat the worse for wear, after I’d had a pretty ferocious nibble. “Maybe a turtle,” my guide opined. “Did you see a turtle sticking its head out of the water?” When I shook my head he said, “Would you recognize a turtle head if you saw it?”
It was my turn for a scathing look. “You forget, I grew up roaming these woods and pits,” I said. “I ain’t no city girl.”
“Good thing,” he said. An aside: My friend Jenny disagrees. She believes anyone who considers whether her earrings and bandana match her fishing outfit is exemplifying distressingly citified behavior.
After a while, Spike broke out his fly rod and poppers. All was tranquil. It was his turn to cast, so I sat with my minnow dangling in the water. Suddenly the rod was practically wrenched out of my hand. “Oh!” I said, or something equally witty.
“You got something? Set the hook!” he said (we had earlier established that yelling, “Set the hook! Set the hook!” does not work, but he was excited). Before you could spit, I had landed a nice 12-inch bass, and Spike was prying the hook out of its gullet. I watched him work on the bleeding fish, and felt slightly queasy. I struggled between the atavistic thrill of contributing to the cooking pot, and the fact that we were killing another living creature (somehow I expect if I had to hunt down and kill a cow to eat it, I’d give up steak). It was interesting, to say the least.
I downplayed the event. “I didn’t actually do anything,” I pointed out. “I didn’t even set the hook. He just committed suicide.”
“That counts,” said Spike.
So that was one. The second was equally anticlimactic, but easier. Spike assures me that eventually I’ll quit counting. Then, I really will be a fisherman.
Meanwhile, learning to fish has had an unexpected bonus, one that Spike surely didn’t see coming.
It’s helping me get my next job.
The day I was laid off from my “real job,” I called Larry Dablemount, who writes an outdoor column that is published in the Globe and Pittsburg’s Morning Sun. He’d been looking for “a part-time lady” to help him with his publishing projects. I figured I could be a lady part-time, and we had been in touch about how we could work together. One of the first questions he asked was if I liked hunting and fishing. I said I was mostly into hiking and canoeing, but had recently taken up fishing. So we had agreed to meet when we could find a time. And here I was, in Joplin on a Wednesday with the whole day ahead of me. We agreed to meet in Springfield at Bass Pro Shops, and by the end of the day, we had a plan.
See, Larry wants to write a book about World War II combat veterans. The book would include 25 interviews with vets, each interview becoming a chapter in the final book, to be published by his Lightnin’ Ridge imprint. And since my first ghost-writing effort was a book about a World War II prisoner of war, I was all for it. That book, A Glimpse of Hell: The World War II Years, was based on transcripts of tapes by Jim Brooks, in Pittsburg, and included stories of how he grew up hunting and fishing near Arcadia, and how some of these skills helped him survive when his plane was shot down over Germany. He was the radio operator on a bomber, and managed to live on his own for several days before being captured by the Nazis. The story is riveting, and all the more so for being true.
So I’m now looking for vets to interview. If you know one, or are one, please contact me at olive@olivesullivan.com, and we’ll talk.
I’m noticing how everything seems to be coming together. I spent nine months at the real job where I was – dare I say it? – like a fish out of water. When I got the axe, I sunk back into my real life without a ripple, just like a trout released back into the stream. One of my friends commented about the way the Law of Attraction seems to be working in my life, and I joked that if I had known all I had to do was ask, I would have asked for something more. Then I realized that, in fact, saying it is the first step to achieving it. Back in college, I was a double major in English and biology, before being defeated by the math required in science. People used to ask me what I was going to do with that combination, and I said I was going to write about animals. It’s only taken me 30 years, but it looks like I’m about to keep my word.
My column "Back to the Rat Race" appears every two weeks in Joplin Tri-State Business. This edition was published on July 20, 2009. JTSB is now available online at www.joplintristate.biz.
Not to brag...
by Olive L. Sullivan
Several years ago I was working on a tab for the local Farm Bureau awards banquet. I interviewed several Crawford County farmers who were being honored for their contributions to the local farm scene. One of the questions I asked, quite logically, I thought, was how many acres they farmed, or how many head of cattle they ran on the land.
To a man, these farmers looked shyly at their wives and said they’d rather not tell me. I explained that they were being honored because of their farms, and so it seemed natural to say how big the farms were. They then explained to me that they didn’t want to have the figures printed in the paper because it would seem like bragging.
On the other hand, I have several friends and clients in the art world, where self-promotion—bragging—is the name of the game. One person I know actually wrote a scholarly introduction to his own book, using a variant of his name. Another woman refers to herself in her marketing text as “the best [genre] writer in the region.” Heck, I refer to myself as an award-winning author. In my case it is true that I have won awards for my writing, but it’s not like I won the Pulitzer or the National Book Award. But as independent business people, we have to seize the opportunity when and where we can.
That brings me to Facebook. I am one of those Facebook-resistant types who finally succumbed only because my friends insisted (that’s lower-case friends, as in people I actually see frequently in person and interact with outside of cyberspace). One of my Friends is a small business owner who seems to use Facebook exclusively as a marketing tool. He posts about his various community oriented meetings and events, but very little about his personal life. An author friend says she is on Facebook and Twitter only because her publisher requires it as a marketing tool. She doesn’t want to blog about her life, so she posts intriguing tidbits about the time period in which her series of mystery novel is set. A Kansas politician I know does the same sort of thing, although we learn a bit more about his family life, especially his kids’ sports activities. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I have a Friend, the sister of a friend, who posts all sorts of very personal stuff I’m not sure I want to know, and certainly wouldn’t want everyone I know to read about me. Another Friend frequently posts comments about how tired or ill she is. This, of course, worries me, but also makes me wonder how she gets through her day. And of course there are hordes of people collecting equipment for their Farmville farms and taking quizzes to find out what sort of dog they’d be if they were lucky enough to be a dog. I was insulted to be a Yorkshire terrier. I am quite clearly a golden retriever. I was even more insulted when one of my friends said, “No, no, I can see you as a Yorkie.”
So now you know that my posts are somewhat more personal than the politician’s, but I try not to be too personal. Sure, I posted pictures of my new granddaughter and of my son’s wedding, and of the big bass that Spike caught. But I also post news of various business activities, such as a note about the book I’m currently editing, or the writing workshop I gave last week at the National Tar Creek Conference in Miami, where three people cried at my closing meditation. I invite people to readings that I’m giving, and generally try to mention every now and then that I am looking for clients. I also posted links to Joplin Tri-State Business (so people can read my column) and to my blog. I try to stay conscious of the fact that these are Friends, including some well-respected and nationally known writers, who might someday become clients or otherwise support me in my professional life. I don’t want to post anything that would make them think twice about associating with me outside the Web. I find that the people who comment about my more personal life have generally been reading this column, not the Facebook posts. So that’s good. I think.
I was talking to a former Pittsburg school board member the other day and he was saying, “Oh, yeah, Facebook. I just got on it to check in with my son. We play Farmville together. It’s kinda fun.” He didn’t know what else he could do, and didn’t seem particularly interested in learning. He laughed it off.
I took his comments as a variant on the farmers’ modesty. In the Midwest, we have a strong cultural bias against bragging. It’s just not polite to toot your own horn too loudly. That bias comes smack up against the need to market one’s services. How can I market my skills and services if I can’t tell you why I’m good at what I do? I have to list my credentials, and they have to be impressive enough to make you choose me over your other alternatives. If my Web site doesn’t have a certain amount of bragging in its testimonials section, why would you bother to hire me? I guess the advantage of testimonials is that you are getting someone else to do the bragging for you, but still, it’s posted on my Web site, so the viewer knows I at least endorse the comments.
I thought I was immune to the cultural bias. I’m pretty good at schmoozing and promoting myself and my skills when the opportunity arises. But I was at a party the other day, and one of my dearest friends actually embarrassed me by listing my accomplishments to another person I know only slightly. I found myself trying to downplay these accomplishments, muttering modestly, “Oh, you couldn’t really call me a musician, I just write a few little lyrics.” Things like that. I joked that my friend was trying for the position of PR director at Sullivan Ink. Later, I wondered why I couldn’t just let her talk me up. Why did I feel compelled to downplay? Was it because it was a purely social occasion? If we had been at a Chamber of Commerce dinner, would I have felt the same discomfort about being bragged on?
I do think that’s the key, and the tricky part about social networking Web sites like Facebook and Twitter is to remember your own goals. Are you there to chat with your Friends and take fun and silly quizzes? Are you there to connect or reconnect with friends and family who live far away, or whom you haven’t seen in awhile? Or are you there to market a business or service? All those goals can give you an idea of the sorts of comments you should be posting. No matter what your goal, you also need to consider that you may think you’re chatting with friends, but you never know who might be lurking just beyond the home page. That lurker might be your next boss, your next client, or even your next spouse. Do you really want him to know you’re a Yorkshire terrier?
My column "Back to the Rat Race" appears every two weeks in Joplin Tri-State Business. This edition was published on October 6, 2009. JTSB is now available online at www.joplintristate.biz.
by Olive L. Sullivan
Several years ago I was working on a tab for the local Farm Bureau awards banquet. I interviewed several Crawford County farmers who were being honored for their contributions to the local farm scene. One of the questions I asked, quite logically, I thought, was how many acres they farmed, or how many head of cattle they ran on the land.
To a man, these farmers looked shyly at their wives and said they’d rather not tell me. I explained that they were being honored because of their farms, and so it seemed natural to say how big the farms were. They then explained to me that they didn’t want to have the figures printed in the paper because it would seem like bragging.
On the other hand, I have several friends and clients in the art world, where self-promotion—bragging—is the name of the game. One person I know actually wrote a scholarly introduction to his own book, using a variant of his name. Another woman refers to herself in her marketing text as “the best [genre] writer in the region.” Heck, I refer to myself as an award-winning author. In my case it is true that I have won awards for my writing, but it’s not like I won the Pulitzer or the National Book Award. But as independent business people, we have to seize the opportunity when and where we can.
That brings me to Facebook. I am one of those Facebook-resistant types who finally succumbed only because my friends insisted (that’s lower-case friends, as in people I actually see frequently in person and interact with outside of cyberspace). One of my Friends is a small business owner who seems to use Facebook exclusively as a marketing tool. He posts about his various community oriented meetings and events, but very little about his personal life. An author friend says she is on Facebook and Twitter only because her publisher requires it as a marketing tool. She doesn’t want to blog about her life, so she posts intriguing tidbits about the time period in which her series of mystery novel is set. A Kansas politician I know does the same sort of thing, although we learn a bit more about his family life, especially his kids’ sports activities. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I have a Friend, the sister of a friend, who posts all sorts of very personal stuff I’m not sure I want to know, and certainly wouldn’t want everyone I know to read about me. Another Friend frequently posts comments about how tired or ill she is. This, of course, worries me, but also makes me wonder how she gets through her day. And of course there are hordes of people collecting equipment for their Farmville farms and taking quizzes to find out what sort of dog they’d be if they were lucky enough to be a dog. I was insulted to be a Yorkshire terrier. I am quite clearly a golden retriever. I was even more insulted when one of my friends said, “No, no, I can see you as a Yorkie.”
So now you know that my posts are somewhat more personal than the politician’s, but I try not to be too personal. Sure, I posted pictures of my new granddaughter and of my son’s wedding, and of the big bass that Spike caught. But I also post news of various business activities, such as a note about the book I’m currently editing, or the writing workshop I gave last week at the National Tar Creek Conference in Miami, where three people cried at my closing meditation. I invite people to readings that I’m giving, and generally try to mention every now and then that I am looking for clients. I also posted links to Joplin Tri-State Business (so people can read my column) and to my blog. I try to stay conscious of the fact that these are Friends, including some well-respected and nationally known writers, who might someday become clients or otherwise support me in my professional life. I don’t want to post anything that would make them think twice about associating with me outside the Web. I find that the people who comment about my more personal life have generally been reading this column, not the Facebook posts. So that’s good. I think.
I was talking to a former Pittsburg school board member the other day and he was saying, “Oh, yeah, Facebook. I just got on it to check in with my son. We play Farmville together. It’s kinda fun.” He didn’t know what else he could do, and didn’t seem particularly interested in learning. He laughed it off.
I took his comments as a variant on the farmers’ modesty. In the Midwest, we have a strong cultural bias against bragging. It’s just not polite to toot your own horn too loudly. That bias comes smack up against the need to market one’s services. How can I market my skills and services if I can’t tell you why I’m good at what I do? I have to list my credentials, and they have to be impressive enough to make you choose me over your other alternatives. If my Web site doesn’t have a certain amount of bragging in its testimonials section, why would you bother to hire me? I guess the advantage of testimonials is that you are getting someone else to do the bragging for you, but still, it’s posted on my Web site, so the viewer knows I at least endorse the comments.
I thought I was immune to the cultural bias. I’m pretty good at schmoozing and promoting myself and my skills when the opportunity arises. But I was at a party the other day, and one of my dearest friends actually embarrassed me by listing my accomplishments to another person I know only slightly. I found myself trying to downplay these accomplishments, muttering modestly, “Oh, you couldn’t really call me a musician, I just write a few little lyrics.” Things like that. I joked that my friend was trying for the position of PR director at Sullivan Ink. Later, I wondered why I couldn’t just let her talk me up. Why did I feel compelled to downplay? Was it because it was a purely social occasion? If we had been at a Chamber of Commerce dinner, would I have felt the same discomfort about being bragged on?
I do think that’s the key, and the tricky part about social networking Web sites like Facebook and Twitter is to remember your own goals. Are you there to chat with your Friends and take fun and silly quizzes? Are you there to connect or reconnect with friends and family who live far away, or whom you haven’t seen in awhile? Or are you there to market a business or service? All those goals can give you an idea of the sorts of comments you should be posting. No matter what your goal, you also need to consider that you may think you’re chatting with friends, but you never know who might be lurking just beyond the home page. That lurker might be your next boss, your next client, or even your next spouse. Do you really want him to know you’re a Yorkshire terrier?
My column "Back to the Rat Race" appears every two weeks in Joplin Tri-State Business. This edition was published on October 6, 2009. JTSB is now available online at www.joplintristate.biz.
Grave Decisions
By Olive L. Sullivan
My decision to hire Mike as a personal assistant is working out well (aside from that whole England incident). We have been busy updating archives and my blog, and next will get to work on the neglected Web site. It has freed me up to concentrate on my clients, which means more income. Right after I hired him, one of my friends sent me a link to Jeanne Robertson’s U-Tube video of how she hired her personal assistant. Robertson is a Southern comic and motivational speaker who is just plain hilarious. Her bit about sending her husband to the grocery store brought tears to my eyes. But the one about the personal assistant hit a little too close to home. I worried, Am I making my business decisions based on comedy sketches? Surely not. Am I making my business decisions so I can write comedy sketches? Yikes!
I mean, Mike and I together are a little bit like Frank and Ernst, or Laurel and Hardy. But overall, it’s going well.
I told Spike I’d made another decision this week that I thought was going to make things go much more smoothly. He was intrigued, but the look on his face became more and more skeptical as I explained it. “So, your big business decision is to take time off?” he said.
Well, it doesn’t sound so smart when you put it that way, does it? But, yeah, that’s it.
Like many freelancers, I have a couple of issues. One is that, if I don’t do it, the work doesn’t get done. I can’t just hire someone to write my column, blog, or edit for me. These are the skills I bring to the table, and I have to implement them to bring in the money. That means if I don’t feel like working, no money comes in. I think we can all agree that’s a bad business decision. I have to work. Unfortunately, the other common freelance bugaboo is procrastination. I was talking to Spike about this, too, and he got it. He gets deadlines. He recalled how, in graduate school, the closer the deadline got for a term paper or dissertation chapter, the more urgent his need to clean the kitchen or mow the lawn. In my case, I sometimes think the housework would never get done if not for deadlines I’m avoiding!
But because I know I have to work to pay the bills, the deadlines do get met. I was complaining to my writing coach, Ann, one day about this very problem. I had hired Ann to help me work through a major book project that I was simply stuck on. She listened to me whine about procrastination and how I simply couldn’t break through it. Then she told me that I could procrastinate all I wanted, as long as I realized I would have to make up the work later. I got through that project, but her words didn’t really sink in until I had already made the decision to take more time off. The part Spike didn’t get is that it’s not so much taking time off, as scheduling time off.
My former procedure was to declare that I had to work from the time I got out of bed until the time I went back to bed that night. Those are my working hours, seven days a week. With that schedule, I have pulled more all-nighters than you can imagine, because if there’s a deadline looming in the morning, I don’t get to go to bed until it’s done. When I was a 20-year-old journalism student, I could pull all-nighters several times a week and just move on. Now that I’m closer to 50 than 40, I can still do whatever I want or need to do, it just takes me longer to recover. So each all-nighter pushes the next project back that much more. But I know many entrepreneurs that have the same attitude. The success of my business depends on me, and therefore I have to work all the time. Talk about being out of balance!
This attitude is hard to keep up, and it sucks all the joy out of doing what you love for a living. You might as well get a real job!
The other thing that happened to me this year was that I started spending a significant amount of my free time with Spike. Before, I spent some of that time working on the restoration of my house. I’d work on the house on Saturdays, then edit or write in the evening. Now, the house crumbles around me unnoticed, and I’m with Spike in the evening. We also discovered that dating somehow multiplies your social obligations. Last fall we were amazed to have at least one or two social events planned nearly every weekend from September to December. Spike instituted the seven-date rule: no more than seven dates per weekend. Guess how well that worked? We both claim we didn’t go to that many parties before we met, but we were on the go all season. This year we’re braced for it, but we still have some social see-and-be-seen sort of thing going every night this week. Evenings are my prime work time—once I’ve spent my day procrastinating and making excuses. So, something needed to give.
All these things contributed to my revolutionary business decision to take more time off. Instead of scheduling my day as work from dawn to midnight (okay, noon to midnight), I decided to take designated days off during the week. I’ll spend those days working on other projects, such as my house renovation, or a project my mother and I are doing for the library. If something comes up to distract me, I’ll go with it, and, as Ann said, make up the work later. From the outside, my days probably don’t look a lot different. This shift is more of an inside event. I have given myself permission to goof off when I need to.
And it’s worked! I got more accomplished last week than I have in a single day for a long time. And I had some fun along the way. I painted the bathroom, helped a friend with a work-related art project, and took a few good long walks with the dogs, my mom, and Spike. One memorable evening, I watched Spike catch a trophy bass in our secret pit, accessible only by canoe. I still had time to bake a pie and clean the kitchen and do laundry and meet my deadlines. I even worked ahead on long-term goals. It doesn’t get much better than this.
By embracing my time off, I’ve discovered productivity, and instead of feeling guilty and harassed all the time, I’m actually having a good time doing the work I love. I’m pretty sure that’s what Ann was getting at two years ago. I’m not sure if that means I’m a slow learner, or just stubborn. But I guess the key is that I do eventually learn, even if I am reinventing the traditional business model to suit myself. And isn’t that what entrepreneuring is all about?
My column "Back to the Rat Race" appears every two weeks in Joplin Tri-State Business. This edition was published on September 15, 2009. JTSB is now available online at www.joplintristate.biz.
By Olive L. Sullivan
My decision to hire Mike as a personal assistant is working out well (aside from that whole England incident). We have been busy updating archives and my blog, and next will get to work on the neglected Web site. It has freed me up to concentrate on my clients, which means more income. Right after I hired him, one of my friends sent me a link to Jeanne Robertson’s U-Tube video of how she hired her personal assistant. Robertson is a Southern comic and motivational speaker who is just plain hilarious. Her bit about sending her husband to the grocery store brought tears to my eyes. But the one about the personal assistant hit a little too close to home. I worried, Am I making my business decisions based on comedy sketches? Surely not. Am I making my business decisions so I can write comedy sketches? Yikes!
I mean, Mike and I together are a little bit like Frank and Ernst, or Laurel and Hardy. But overall, it’s going well.
I told Spike I’d made another decision this week that I thought was going to make things go much more smoothly. He was intrigued, but the look on his face became more and more skeptical as I explained it. “So, your big business decision is to take time off?” he said.
Well, it doesn’t sound so smart when you put it that way, does it? But, yeah, that’s it.
Like many freelancers, I have a couple of issues. One is that, if I don’t do it, the work doesn’t get done. I can’t just hire someone to write my column, blog, or edit for me. These are the skills I bring to the table, and I have to implement them to bring in the money. That means if I don’t feel like working, no money comes in. I think we can all agree that’s a bad business decision. I have to work. Unfortunately, the other common freelance bugaboo is procrastination. I was talking to Spike about this, too, and he got it. He gets deadlines. He recalled how, in graduate school, the closer the deadline got for a term paper or dissertation chapter, the more urgent his need to clean the kitchen or mow the lawn. In my case, I sometimes think the housework would never get done if not for deadlines I’m avoiding!
But because I know I have to work to pay the bills, the deadlines do get met. I was complaining to my writing coach, Ann, one day about this very problem. I had hired Ann to help me work through a major book project that I was simply stuck on. She listened to me whine about procrastination and how I simply couldn’t break through it. Then she told me that I could procrastinate all I wanted, as long as I realized I would have to make up the work later. I got through that project, but her words didn’t really sink in until I had already made the decision to take more time off. The part Spike didn’t get is that it’s not so much taking time off, as scheduling time off.
My former procedure was to declare that I had to work from the time I got out of bed until the time I went back to bed that night. Those are my working hours, seven days a week. With that schedule, I have pulled more all-nighters than you can imagine, because if there’s a deadline looming in the morning, I don’t get to go to bed until it’s done. When I was a 20-year-old journalism student, I could pull all-nighters several times a week and just move on. Now that I’m closer to 50 than 40, I can still do whatever I want or need to do, it just takes me longer to recover. So each all-nighter pushes the next project back that much more. But I know many entrepreneurs that have the same attitude. The success of my business depends on me, and therefore I have to work all the time. Talk about being out of balance!
This attitude is hard to keep up, and it sucks all the joy out of doing what you love for a living. You might as well get a real job!
The other thing that happened to me this year was that I started spending a significant amount of my free time with Spike. Before, I spent some of that time working on the restoration of my house. I’d work on the house on Saturdays, then edit or write in the evening. Now, the house crumbles around me unnoticed, and I’m with Spike in the evening. We also discovered that dating somehow multiplies your social obligations. Last fall we were amazed to have at least one or two social events planned nearly every weekend from September to December. Spike instituted the seven-date rule: no more than seven dates per weekend. Guess how well that worked? We both claim we didn’t go to that many parties before we met, but we were on the go all season. This year we’re braced for it, but we still have some social see-and-be-seen sort of thing going every night this week. Evenings are my prime work time—once I’ve spent my day procrastinating and making excuses. So, something needed to give.
All these things contributed to my revolutionary business decision to take more time off. Instead of scheduling my day as work from dawn to midnight (okay, noon to midnight), I decided to take designated days off during the week. I’ll spend those days working on other projects, such as my house renovation, or a project my mother and I are doing for the library. If something comes up to distract me, I’ll go with it, and, as Ann said, make up the work later. From the outside, my days probably don’t look a lot different. This shift is more of an inside event. I have given myself permission to goof off when I need to.
And it’s worked! I got more accomplished last week than I have in a single day for a long time. And I had some fun along the way. I painted the bathroom, helped a friend with a work-related art project, and took a few good long walks with the dogs, my mom, and Spike. One memorable evening, I watched Spike catch a trophy bass in our secret pit, accessible only by canoe. I still had time to bake a pie and clean the kitchen and do laundry and meet my deadlines. I even worked ahead on long-term goals. It doesn’t get much better than this.
By embracing my time off, I’ve discovered productivity, and instead of feeling guilty and harassed all the time, I’m actually having a good time doing the work I love. I’m pretty sure that’s what Ann was getting at two years ago. I’m not sure if that means I’m a slow learner, or just stubborn. But I guess the key is that I do eventually learn, even if I am reinventing the traditional business model to suit myself. And isn’t that what entrepreneuring is all about?
My column "Back to the Rat Race" appears every two weeks in Joplin Tri-State Business. This edition was published on September 15, 2009. JTSB is now available online at www.joplintristate.biz.
Back to the Rat Race
Loving What You Do
by Olive L. Sullivan
I’ve been known to complain about poor customer service, but the other face of the world of work is the person who is working at the job he or she is meant to do. When you meet someone who truly loves the job, it’s a gift to everyone. It doesn’t matter whether the person is a waiter, a blues musician, a politician, a college professor, or a plumber, it’s a joy to watch them.
I encountered several people in this lucky state last week, one of whom was the Sedgwick County judge who performed my son’s wedding.
You may be surprised that you haven’t been reading about the weeks of preparation leading up to the wedding. Weddings are the perfect opportunity, after all, for boosting the economy, and fraught with all the complications that make for good column copy. But not in this case.
I received a text message from my son a couple of weeks ago. It said, “I asked Georgia to marry me.” Because I use a track phone only when I travel, I didn’t get the message for a few days. I immediately called him back.
“I’m asleep,” he said. He works a weird kind of split shift, so it seems as if he’s always asleep. I explained that I’d just gotten his text message. “Yeah?” he mumbled.
“So what did she say?”
“She said okay.”
“So, what are your plans?”
“Mnmph?”
“Do you have a date? For the wedding,” I added, after a long pause filled with gentle snoring.
“As soon as we can afford it.”
“Okay,” I said. “Keep me posted. Good night.”
I assumed that “when we can afford it” meant a couple of years from now. Right now Georgia is looking for a job and planning to go back to college. They live in a “tribe” of five in a three-bedroom house. They want an apartment, a dog, a yard.
No. As a matter of fact, by “when we can afford it,” Frank meant Wednesday.
Even in this condensed timeframe, there was plenty of time for drama. Georgia and I got to talking and came up with a plan for them to come to Pittsburg for a small family ceremony in the back yard, with a family friend officiating. Then Frank’s best man thought he’d propose to his girlfriend and they’d make it a double wedding, complete with dogs as attendants. The best man has an enormous extended family, which made the back yard less practical, because no one could be left out without hurt feelings that would make a soap opera look like a day at the park.
Spike said, “This is insane! Doesn’t anyone else think this is insane?”
I assured him that of course we did, but we could either participate, or they’d do it without us. He seemed to see the logic in that; perhaps he simply gave up on expecting logic.
Frank, who has avoided ceremonies, rites of passage, and crowds his entire life, predictably freaked out. He told Georgia he wasn’t happy about the plan. She huffed, “Well, maybe we should just call it off!”
“I don’t want to call it off,” he said. “I want to get married. I just don’t want a big deal. We haven’t even talked about what we want!”
“We don’t have time to talk about it,” she said. “You have to go to work.” Then she went into the kitchen.
Frank was telling me this on the phone late one night. “So what did you do?” I asked.
“I went to work.”
I knew right then that everything was going to work out.
And it did. They talked, they set a date, lined up a judge, and agreed that I could come. I invited my parents, and we drove to Wichita Wednesday afternoon. We met the bride and groom at their house. They were wearing black T-shirts and coordinating plaid shorts. The groom wore flip-flops. The bride wore sneakers. I said, “Wow, cute matching outfits.”
Georgia looked down at herself in utter astonishment and said, “Oh, now I gotta go change.” She didn’t; we just piled back in the cars and headed to the courthouse.
Frank was a bit freaked out by the sign in the hall reading “Abshire-Williams wedding.” I was freaked out by the fact that the sign led us to traffic court.
We waited a few minutes for the judge to show up, but he soon did.
And he is a man who loves his job. By day, of course, he oversees traffic court, which he referred to as purgatory. His other choice of appointment, probation, he referred to as hell. He said he spends his whole day dealing with people who keep saying they didn’t do it. Weddings are a perk because at last he gets to deal with people who are saying I do.
And Georgia and Frank did. There were some precious moments along the way. For example, the judge asked them for rings, and I had a moment of panic. “Ohmigod! They’re not going to have RINGS!” I said to myself. But they did — Wal-Mart to the rescue.
When it was Georgia’s turn to put the ring on Frank’s finger, he held out the wrong hand, which was not discovered until the ceremony was complete. “Do-over!” the judge caroled merrily. And Georgia perhaps said, “’Til death do us part” with a bit more of a threat in her voice than you usually hear... but it was done. The judge posed for photos with the couple, and told them they had made his day.
by Olive L. Sullivan
I’ve been known to complain about poor customer service, but the other face of the world of work is the person who is working at the job he or she is meant to do. When you meet someone who truly loves the job, it’s a gift to everyone. It doesn’t matter whether the person is a waiter, a blues musician, a politician, a college professor, or a plumber, it’s a joy to watch them.
I encountered several people in this lucky state last week, one of whom was the Sedgwick County judge who performed my son’s wedding.
You may be surprised that you haven’t been reading about the weeks of preparation leading up to the wedding. Weddings are the perfect opportunity, after all, for boosting the economy, and fraught with all the complications that make for good column copy. But not in this case.
I received a text message from my son a couple of weeks ago. It said, “I asked Georgia to marry me.” Because I use a track phone only when I travel, I didn’t get the message for a few days. I immediately called him back.
“I’m asleep,” he said. He works a weird kind of split shift, so it seems as if he’s always asleep. I explained that I’d just gotten his text message. “Yeah?” he mumbled.
“So what did she say?”
“She said okay.”
“So, what are your plans?”
“Mnmph?”
“Do you have a date? For the wedding,” I added, after a long pause filled with gentle snoring.
“As soon as we can afford it.”
“Okay,” I said. “Keep me posted. Good night.”
I assumed that “when we can afford it” meant a couple of years from now. Right now Georgia is looking for a job and planning to go back to college. They live in a “tribe” of five in a three-bedroom house. They want an apartment, a dog, a yard.
No. As a matter of fact, by “when we can afford it,” Frank meant Wednesday.
Even in this condensed timeframe, there was plenty of time for drama. Georgia and I got to talking and came up with a plan for them to come to Pittsburg for a small family ceremony in the back yard, with a family friend officiating. Then Frank’s best man thought he’d propose to his girlfriend and they’d make it a double wedding, complete with dogs as attendants. The best man has an enormous extended family, which made the back yard less practical, because no one could be left out without hurt feelings that would make a soap opera look like a day at the park.
Spike said, “This is insane! Doesn’t anyone else think this is insane?”
I assured him that of course we did, but we could either participate, or they’d do it without us. He seemed to see the logic in that; perhaps he simply gave up on expecting logic.
Frank, who has avoided ceremonies, rites of passage, and crowds his entire life, predictably freaked out. He told Georgia he wasn’t happy about the plan. She huffed, “Well, maybe we should just call it off!”
“I don’t want to call it off,” he said. “I want to get married. I just don’t want a big deal. We haven’t even talked about what we want!”
“We don’t have time to talk about it,” she said. “You have to go to work.” Then she went into the kitchen.
Frank was telling me this on the phone late one night. “So what did you do?” I asked.
“I went to work.”
I knew right then that everything was going to work out.
And it did. They talked, they set a date, lined up a judge, and agreed that I could come. I invited my parents, and we drove to Wichita Wednesday afternoon. We met the bride and groom at their house. They were wearing black T-shirts and coordinating plaid shorts. The groom wore flip-flops. The bride wore sneakers. I said, “Wow, cute matching outfits.”
Georgia looked down at herself in utter astonishment and said, “Oh, now I gotta go change.” She didn’t; we just piled back in the cars and headed to the courthouse.
Frank was a bit freaked out by the sign in the hall reading “Abshire-Williams wedding.” I was freaked out by the fact that the sign led us to traffic court.
We waited a few minutes for the judge to show up, but he soon did.
And he is a man who loves his job. By day, of course, he oversees traffic court, which he referred to as purgatory. His other choice of appointment, probation, he referred to as hell. He said he spends his whole day dealing with people who keep saying they didn’t do it. Weddings are a perk because at last he gets to deal with people who are saying I do.
And Georgia and Frank did. There were some precious moments along the way. For example, the judge asked them for rings, and I had a moment of panic. “Ohmigod! They’re not going to have RINGS!” I said to myself. But they did — Wal-Mart to the rescue.
When it was Georgia’s turn to put the ring on Frank’s finger, he held out the wrong hand, which was not discovered until the ceremony was complete. “Do-over!” the judge caroled merrily. And Georgia perhaps said, “’Til death do us part” with a bit more of a threat in her voice than you usually hear... but it was done. The judge posed for photos with the couple, and told them they had made his day.
At last all that was left was the paperwork. My mother and I signed as witnesses, and Georgia asked about changing her name. The clerk of the court was explaining the process when Frank said, “Can we both change our name?”
She explained that some people hyphenated both names, and that would work.
“No,” said Frank. “That’s not what I mean. See, my dad, he took all the letters in both our last names and mixed them up to form a new name, Miller-Wrabissi. Can we use that?”
Georgia gave the clerk a glare that would have felled a basilisk.
“I don’t think so,” said the clerk. “I’m sure it’s possible, but it would be very complicated and expensive.”
Yet another person doing her job well. Georgia and I appreciated it!
My column "Back to the Rat Race" appears every two weeks in Joplin Tri-State Business. This edition was published on September 7, 2009. JTSB is now available online at http://www.joplintristate.biz/.
She explained that some people hyphenated both names, and that would work.
“No,” said Frank. “That’s not what I mean. See, my dad, he took all the letters in both our last names and mixed them up to form a new name, Miller-Wrabissi. Can we use that?”
Georgia gave the clerk a glare that would have felled a basilisk.
“I don’t think so,” said the clerk. “I’m sure it’s possible, but it would be very complicated and expensive.”
Yet another person doing her job well. Georgia and I appreciated it!
My column "Back to the Rat Race" appears every two weeks in Joplin Tri-State Business. This edition was published on September 7, 2009. JTSB is now available online at http://www.joplintristate.biz/.
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