UNEMPLOYMENT

My spouse is retired.  He receives several pensions.  His health is no longer A+.  He "works" as a recruiter for a Fortune 500 company that deals in financial products. He is productive and useful but can come and go as he wishes.  He enjoys it.  He likes to talk.  He likes to feel persuasive.  He likes to "shoot the shit".  He likes to tell stories --- most specifically, sea stories.  This job is ideal for him.

They receive resumes primarily from Career Builder which is a service of Chicago Tribune newspaper.  He will take 50 resumes at a time and call the applicant.  Of fifty, 48 will go to voice mail.  That is how vested in the job search the applicants are.  After he receives voice mail twice for a single person, he will usually text message them.  About sixty per cent of the text messages get answered.  This is an interesting illustration of the way computers have changed our lives, but that is just an aside.  Out of one hundred percent of the people he has contact with, thirty percent will say, "I am not interested in that kind of work." Or, "I can't see myself doing that kind of work." This reeks to me of a sense of entitlement.  He has encountered this reply so frequently that he has a rote rejoinder available which often opens up a discourse.  He asks how that compares with what they are now doing which is usually nothing. 

Of the small amount of positive feedback he gets, which would mean people want to come in for a "training" session telling them about the company, its resources and opportunities, (It is not Amway.) the figures once again fragment.  Maybe fifty or sixty percent of those people will agree to come into the office.  About sixty per cent of the people that actually are given an appointment to learn more, which is really all that is on the table at this point, will not show up.  Of the people that show up, about eighty per cent of those enter the employ of this company.  This is actually six to ten people a week.  After that, it is out of my husband's ken, and other variables come into play which may be worth analyzing, but not by this company as they do just fine with these odds. 

When people talk about how hard it is to get a job, no one mentions how selective certain people are, how entitled other people feel, and how lazy some of the job seekers are.  My grand daughter, who, to be polite, can best be described as a flibberty jibbet, was recently "handed" a full time job with a major US corporation that has plans to expand to Europe and offers a wonderful benefit package. She doesn't like the 45 minute drive to work. But she might stay there.  Her Blue Cross ID and her dental insurance card came in the mail today. 

"You can't please 'em all." (Joni Mitchell) 

The last two full time jobs I had, someone knocked on my front door and said, "So and so needs a such and such.  Want it?"  One was short-lived.   One lasted six years and was 'plum". The full time job before that, I walked into a light manufacturing plant in my neighborhood and said, "Are you hiring?"  That job lasted six years and was an incredible amount of fun.  They also paid my college tuition, but I had to turn down their other benefits as my husband had them.

Reality check time. 

Photo Attribution:  ohsoyoureawhat.com

Lemmings

Just had an interesting discussion with Lou, in itself headline worthy. Re: politics. How can supposedly bright people still support, or ever have supported Obama? Of course we know about the "He gimme money" crowd but here we speak of friends, relatives, people of authority and repute. I contend they MUST know he is a doofus and there must be another ego related reason they still "believe". What do you think?

Life?

For the second time in less than one year, one of my husband's siblings, this time his youngest sister, has been found dead, alone, in their residence.

My husband is, well, part of a family that I don't understand.  They are so pompous, so self-righteous.  I have filed for divorce three times.  I have not followed through out of fear and inertia.  I often say I made a choice and I have to live with it.  I do not want to be a savior for anyone except maybe myself, but I know if my husband had not married me, he would not own the amazing roof over our head and he would likely be found or already have been found alone.  So alone.

He had a bout of heart failure recently that changed him.  His brain was starved for oxygen for an unknown length of time while hospitalized for another condition and mistreated.  Now he seeks my company more often.  He shows more respect for my words and thoughts. He at first would not acknowledge the loss.  But the other day he called a lawyer friend.  I asked what brought him to that point and he said, "They fucked me up."  They did.  I knew it some months ago.  It was sad to hear him say it, and it is very sad to realize that my company is more bearable to him because of it.

Excerpt From Anymore

CHAPTER TWO

She always knew she had to go West.  North would get too cold, South too hot, and East would be big cities.  Anyone left that might not be so nice would think that holing up in the city would be the best idea.  Not for long, Deanie knew.  Her instincts, that she had always known were worth following, told her West was the way to go.  She would worry about that big River when she got there.  If she got there.

She certainly had no reason to hurry.  The first few days, she felt on edge, but the closer she got to the wooded areas, the more comfortable she felt.  Still, the further apart the houses and stores were, the less she had opportunities to eat and drink.  She was learning what she needed to take and what she needed to leave.  She was going slowly, a few miles a day.  Resting often because she was a little too anxious to sleep well at night and not quite back to one hundred percent since that awful flu.  And constantly keeping her guard up was really exhausting. But she soon began to relax and get used to the rhythm of her days.

It seemed most of her energy was spent on learning how to be unobtrusive, learning not to leave a trail, learning not to impact any area she lingered in.  Whether it was an animal or a predatory human, Deanie wanted to be sure she knew they were there before they knew she was there.  She was sharpening her senses and becoming aware of dangers and obstacles almost before they were apparent. She wasn't just alert and intelligent. She was lucky.

Advisory

In case you are a retailer or SEO salesman or someone else offering me something I may have been lusting after for many years, please be advised that if you send me a message, text, or email, and it has my name on it, I WILL NOT sign in to open it. You already know who I am if I got your message. If you need to calculate rate of success or reply on your outgoes, hire someone to code that in there. You want my money or business, curry my favor.

goethe

The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Good Rank!

Thanks guys!

depression

From the Rumpus,  a site with varied interesting offerings:written by Katherine Sharpe, an excerpt.

Having a melancholic humor presented obvious challenges, but there were plenty who recognized that a touch of melancholy could be a good thing. Aristotle believed that from the ranks of the melancholics came society’s artists, scholars, and visionaries. If a person’s melancholic bent “is quite complete, they are very depressed,” he wrote in the Problemata,around 350 B.C. “But if they possess a mixed temperament, they are men of genius.” He concluded: “All those who have attained excellence in philosophy, in poetry, in art, and in politics had a melancholic habitus.”

Moderation

My blog doesn't inspire many comments.  I wish that it did, but as I have said before, it just isn't that kind of blog.  I do have a few friendly bloggers who leave a comment when they stop by.  I wish more did.  I would appreciate it and enjoy it.

I have to apologize to the few regulars who are kind enough to leave a comment, but I am going to have to enable moderation.  I hate to do this.  It seems unfriendly.  But my blog stats are going through the roof and it is almost all some spammer that leaves a goofy, badly translated comment every five minutes.  I try to revert the blogs they pick to draft to discourage this, but they just pick another.

After visiting the forums where this is discussed frequently, I find that there is no way to block these spammers.  I think they are called web crawlers.  I cannot enroll in ad sense because of them, and I can't make them go away even if I find their IP address.  So, because they all recommend it, I am employing moderation.  I hope it won't discourage you from visiting.

Moms, Kids, Blogs and Schools

Now, this, I do not think, is a case of me being lucky.  I have had my share of evil and/or ignorant teachers in my own school experiences.  And, in terms of being a mom or a mom-substitute, (grandma)  I have met a lot of teachers and a lot of school administrators on every single level.  I have met teachers  that would go so far out of the way to advocate for my child that they should be nominated for sainthood.  I have had teachers with whom I have developed social relationships of long-standing because of classroom interaction with respect and knowledge involved that transferred over into friendship. (Yeah,  Obviously not a creative writing teacher, eh?)

On the other hand, in the case of a particular special needs child of mine, I have had an entire high school faculty band together and tell me things about the education of my child that were actual lies.  They played on my naivete and did a disservice to my child -- and anyone who ever interacted with her -- that has had, and will continue to have,  life long impact. They did this because it was a particular time in history when laws were being changed and their reputation as an excellent, very large, very well-respected school was on the line because they were unprepared to cope with our needs. We were cheated out of services and training and opportunities that should have been given to us, and, after the fact, when I found out about it, there was nothing that could be done to change it.

But that is really a small, not very small, but small part of the story.  There is a big deal going on in the "blogosphere" that is called "mommy blogging".  Most of the mommy bloggers have sponsors that will pay them to blog about products or pay them to allow ads for products and services on their blog sites.  They have conventions that the sponsors pay for and it seems to be a glorious thing, overall.  For the blogger and for the sponsoring enterprise. 

Long ago, when I was new to the blog world, I actually had ads on my site.  I was amazed that, if I talked about my canary, a bunch of ads about bird breeders and equipment and services would show up on my blog.  This stuff is old school now.  If you have any experience with facebook, you already know that if you send an email, even through yahoo or g-mail, and mention the word "divorce", six ads from divorce lawyers will show up on your facebook page. I don't have ads on my blog anymore because I have been banned, (for interesting but inexplicable reasons) so maybe my remarks are tinged with bitterness.  But, I am not really a mommy blogger or a humor blogger, or a book blogger.  I am genre resistant.  This is also a problem with my authorial adventures.  I write stuff that cannot be crammed into a genre, and apparently, if you are not listed under a particular genre, you float around the troposphere, unnoticed and under appreciated.  (Bitterness, again.) 

But. . .  I have noticed a common thread on some of these mommy blogs that seems to be getting stronger and stronger.  Teacher bashing and school system bashing.  And it seems to be a good idea to run with because the blogs that accentuate this subject matter are getting a lot of play.  So I want to tell a really sweet story that I have repeated many times -- a story I would like everyone to hear and share, and maybe inspire people to write about some nice stuff that teachers and schools can do.  Nobody seems too interested in that aspect.

I have had my daughter's twin girls in my care since they were three.  They are now 25, and damnit, it looks like I am stuck with them.  But that is another story for another day. They have had some very rough patches in their lives, and, in the years from age one to age three, there are some gaps that are kind of horrifying for me to even think about.  But they are now gorgeous young ladies and have some amazing successes.  If you knew -- well, you just have to take my word for it.  I am proud and amazed at what they have become.  

They had what is called "selective mutism".  At the time I was living through this I never heard those words.  I wish I had.  But it is probably another case of being on the cusp of change. Anyway. . .They went to Headstart for two or three years.  They never spoke a word.  We kept them in the same classroom.  Not the same actual room, but together in what ever school they were attending.  I did a bit of research and even talked to some older sets of twins about whether it was better to put them in the same room or separate them.  So in kindergarten they went to separate classrooms.  They never spoke.  

In first grade a gym teacher called our house and said she was doing a special project and wanted to ask the kids specific questions about certain aspects of phys. ed and could she talk to them.  They each spoke to her on the phone at some length, and when next I saw her, it apparently blew her mind.  I am sure to this day that there was no special survey, that it was just the talk of the school about whether or not these girls had voices at all. Then in second grade, still separate classrooms, one of the teachers  approached me and said she knew "twin one" could read because she did so well on the tests, but she had to hear her read.  The other twin's teacher seemed to have no problem, probably appreciated a silent six year old, and never brought up the subject. 

So I talked to twin one and said, "When you read, hold the book up in front of your face like this, and you won't see the children and you won't be nervous."  I don't remember if I used the word "children" or "nervous" but that was the gist.  When it was next her turn to stand at the front of the room and read aloud, she tried this little ploy and read beautifully.  When I came to pick them up, the teacher was telling me of the success and we were both crying and hugging each other. I think the only other time I felt that way was when one of the other victims of my parenting attempts received her college degree.

  

By and large, teachers are amazing people.  The personalities and situations they deal with do nothing to promote the actual educating process.  They are just things the teacher has to figure out how to deal with in order to get some educating in there.  With some of the kids.  Some of the time.  It wasn't that long ago when teachers were given great respect and honor.  Now all anyone pays attention to is if one might be a molester or a free loader or a marriage wrecker.  Okay.  I have run into all of them at one time or another, and I choose to remember the really amazing and wonderful things they can accomplish.

Look for that.  Stop the bashing, Okay?

Image attribution:  www.123rf.com