Roger O Green

Stress, and time management: related

No, I don’t like doing things at the last minute. Don’t like rushing to the airport, to the train or the bus, or to get to the movies on time.

New York Erratic, who needs to blog more – just noting – wrote on March 20, 2014, at 7:29 am:

What was the greatest job stress in the last year?

And the answer had I written it at that moment would have been: “IT’S RIGHT NOW!”

I’ve alluded to The Daughter’s mysterious ailments, which have been largely mitigated and only partially explained, and would take a lot more detail to discuss, involving talks not only with doctors but with school officials about making accommodations for the fact that she missed so much classwork.

The math and spelling homework she kept up with, in large part, because I was writing it for her; she was doing the intellectual work, but the pain in her upper arm made her handwriting/printing totally illegible.

As if my concern about her were not enough, I had my own stuff to do. Let’s throw in another NYE question here:

What do you do about time management issues?

In general, I like to do things early. If I have a deadline of a month, I like to do it as soon as possible. There are two basic reasons: 1) I’m enthusiastic about it in the beginning; later, as I muddle through it, I get bored and unfocused. 2) I get stressed about approaching deadlines. It weighs me down.

I had three specific things I needed to do in the month of March. In the usual course of going to work, doing some of it at lunchtime, or after work, it all would have been completed weeks earlier. But the last week in February, I missed at least two days of work. There were 21 workdays in March; I went to work all day only five of them, taking a total of 7.5 sick days (only 0.5 related to me, the rest to The Daughter), and two vacation days, neither of which were purely used to vacay.

Item #1: I had agreed to take the minutes of the February 24 meeting of the Friends of the Albany Public Library. If you’ve ever taken minutes for a meeting, you recognize that that the sooner they are done, the better. I could not pawn them off on someone else because of my cryptic shorthand. On March 17, I’m being asked for them, and I just throw up both my hands in despair. Not having a usable computer at home at the time, and not having time to go to the library to use a public machine, I had no real options.

I FINALLY finish them on March 29, just before the March 31 meeting, too late for anyone to actually review and read, or to act on the items that minutes remind people they’ve agreed to do. Not incidentally, the minutes I took for the March 31 meeting were done on April 2.

Item #2: I had agreed to give a talk at the Community Loan Fund on March 27 about business reference resources that are free or cheap. I so infrequently get out of the office that I was really looking forward to this. The talking part was not the issue; it was putting together the handout sheet. We had one from about three years ago, but some sources had changed, and new ones needed to be added. On March 24, I’m STILL working on the sheet. If it wasn’t for my colleague Alexis, I never would have finished it.

Sometime around March 18, one of my sisters called me, and I was telling her about all of this stuff. She said, unhelpfully, “Why don’t you postpone some things?” I obviously had not made clear that ALL I HAD BEEN DOING was postponing things for – at that point – the past three weeks. She thought I should reschedule my dental appointment the next day; I thought that was a terrible idea; by not taking care of myself, I’d be unable to take care of my daughter.

One of the things I HAD postponed, from February 24, ostensibly a vacation day that began The Daughter’s ailments, was getting a haircut. I FINALLY got one on March 22, so that when I went to my March 27 gig, I didn’t look like Grizzly Adams anymore.

Item #3: I had this reimbursement program for medical expenses in 2013. I had put in $2500 because we kept thinking The Daughter was going to get braces, but she didn’t. So we had to get reimbursed whatever receipts we could find. We also had $1800 for the afterschool money to get back. I mailed it on March 27, and it was received on March 31, the very last day of eligibility, or we would have been out all of that money.

No, I don’t like doing things at the last minute. Don’t like rushing to the airport; the debacle of June 2009 STILL rankles me. Geez, I just reread what I wrote there, and I left out what inane thing we were talking about; I wrote about THAT months earlier. Don’t like rushing to the train or the bus, or getting to the movies on time.

I should make the distinction here between avoidable and unavoidable problems. I’m OK with the stuff you wouldn’t reasonably anticipate; things happen. Tree falls in a storm, blocks the road: unavoidable. Someone gets sick: unavoidable. Power outage: unavoidable. Trying to squeeze in one more task that makes everyone late: totally avoidable.

Are there some non-work activities that take precedence, and, if so, which ones and why?

I check my e-mail. I get blog comment notices that needs approval, bills that need to be paid, my sisters’ and nieces’ posts to Facebook, news and weather and traffic bulletins, info from the Daughter’s school district, ideas for my work blog.

Obviously, taking care of The Daughter trumped work in March.

I TRY to take off one day a month for mental health, but that’s not always been the case. February 24, as noted, I tended to The Daughter. March 31, I went to work to fax the last of those reimbursement forms.

The Lydster, Part 121: The nutritional value of Froot Loops

Raisin Bran is probably the better choice than the Froot Loops, but not so much better as I thought.

I want The Daughter to eat well, but if she wants an occasional box of Kellogg’s Froot Loops, a “sweetened multi-grain cereal,” I might buy it if it’s on sale. The Wife was complaining that she had made that choice for breakfast when she replied that it was healthier than the Kellogg’s Raisin Bran I was eating. Let’s look at the side panels:

SERVING SIZE: 1 cup (FL-29 g, RB-59g)

Calories: FL-110, RB-190. Advantage, FL.
Saturated fat: 0.5g, RB-0g. Advantage RB.
Sodium: FL 135 mg, RB-210mg. Advantage, FL.
Potassium: FL-35mg, RB-390mg. Big advantage, RB.
Total carbohydrates: FL-26g, RB-46g. Advantage, FL.
Dietary fiber: FL-3g, RB-7g. Advantage-RB.
Protein: FL-1g, RB-5g. Advantage-RB.

Then it’s all those minimum daily requirement percentages.

Most of them are the same, with these exceptions:
Vitamin C: FL-25%, RB-0%. Big advantage, FL, although it’s undoubtedly some additive.
Calcium: FL-0%, RB-2%. Small advantage-RB.
Phosphorus and magnesium: FL-0%, RB-20% each. Advantage: RB.
Zinc: FL-0%, RB-10%. Advantage-RB.

Finally, it’s the ingredients. Froot Loops’ first ingredient is sugar. The second is corn flour blend (whole grain yellow corn flour, degerminated yellow corn flour); the first sounds OK, but the other? It has a lot of items I’m not exactly sure what they are, especially for the coloring. Raisin Bran starts with whole grain wheat, raisins, wheat bran before it gets to sugar.

I’ll still suggest that the Raisin Bran is probably the better choice than the Froot Loops, but not so much better as I thought.

Information with a Bun and the Sexy Librarian trope

“To move in public spaces and do their jobs, librarians — along with schoolteachers and nurses — had to wrap themselves in an aura of absolute respectability. “

My blog in the Times Union local newspaper, with content, often reprinted from this blog, or noting stuff of primarily local interest, is called Information Without the Bun. Came up with this title in about five minutes when the blog coordinator, Michael Huber, insisted on a name. The title was to evoke two ideas: 1) having the meat without a hamburger bun, and 2) the antithesis of the stuffy, usually female, librarian that shushed people all the time.

Recently, I saw Dustbury link to an interesting article called Unpacking an Erotic Icon: The Sexy Librarian, which got me thinking about that trope. In linking to the article, Dustbury proclaimed: “I thought it was because she was, um, smart.” Yeah, me, too; I find smart women almost inherently sexy. I tend to root for the good female JEOPARDY! players when I watch the show.

The article by Dustin (Oneman) delves a bit deeper:

While the role of librarian has existed for a good long while… the modern librarian, the modern female librarian, dates back to the late 19th century and specifically back to Melvil Dewey, he of the decimal system that bears his name. Dewey was a strong advocate for the use of women as librarians, not out of any sense of gender justice but because, as proprietor of a company that sold a system of receiving, cataloguing, shelving, finding, and checking out books that promised to transform the library into a hyper-efficient book-lending machine, he felt that men would chafe under the monotony of the job. Women, he felt, were ideally suited to the mindless task of working in a modern, Dewey-ized library.

Bringing women into public life in the late 19th and early 20th century was not, however, without challenges. Women who left the domestic sphere were branded disreputable, their bodies assumed to be offered up to the (male) public. Actors, dancers, mill workers, field hands — all took on the aura of the prostitute…

To move in public spaces and do their jobs, librarians — along with schoolteachers and nurses — had to wrap themselves in an aura of absolute respectability. Unlike factory workers, actresses, store clerks, secretaries, and farm workers, who dwelled in the working classes or in the bohemian demimonde of the arts, librarians, nurses, and schoolteachers moved among the middle and upper classes. No hint of disrepute could be endured, and their respectability was secured by thoroughly de-sexing themselves through clothing, behavior, and hairstyle.

Particularly hairstyle.

Thus, the female librarian (and nurse, and schoolteacher) with a bun was a symbol of chastity, respectability. It was, I’m guessing, necessary to be taken seriously in the job they did. Because men are, well, like men often are.

The question remains, though, of why these icons have survived even as the reality of these professions has changed radically, shedding the desexualizing camouflage as women have gained more acceptance in the public sphere…

But the sexy librarian is still very much with us. She exists in movies, TV shows, commercials, porn, adult magazines, erotica, and the fevered imagination of men who date librarians. She quite often gets in the way of real librarians doing their jobs.

I DO know female librarians who have talked about embracing the sexy librarian trope, though, in a way to counteract the bun lady trope because it’s difficult for patrons to take bun lady seriously. And control of the sexy image is, in its own way, empowering to them.

Dustin, I imagine, would disagree:

In the end, the icon of the sexy librarian is about disempowering women who dare not only to move through public spaces but to exercise power, however limited (through the iconic librarian’s iconic “shhhh!”), by unveiling and conquering the sexual being hidden beneath her unassuming exterior. The image of the sexy librarian reminds us that, regardless of their appearance or accomplishments, women are first and foremost sexual objects. And that’s pretty much business as usual for American masculinity.

Hmm. So this gets me to wondering whether the title Information Without a Bun was an inadvertent sexist title. (I HAVE been accused of thinking too much on occasion.)

America redux, and not knowing everything

I shake my head sadly, looking to the ground mournfully, showing pity to these poor deluded fools.

Mr. Frog, in the comments:

Interesting that your daughter goes back to the things that scare her. I do that, too. Have you ever seen Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal? I was so afraid of that movie–despite it being one of my favorites–until literally a few months ago. I should write about that…

No, I haven’t. I’m not sure why, exactly, but when it came out, it just didn’t appeal to me, so I never even wanted to see it. It seemed, from a trailer, maybe, to be too…dark? By now, it had all but left my consciousness. I wouldn’t NOT see it, but it isn’t on the list of films I must watch, though you’ve made it more interesting to me. Wouldn’t watch it with the Daughter, though, until I had seen it first.
And yes, you should write about it.

Another example for me is E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. I HAVE written about that: at age 5, it scared me so bad I was basically traumatized. But I became fascinated by stuff like UFOs, which led me to reading books about ACTUAL science. Then when it was re-released when I was 9, I loved it, and now it’s my favorite movie. It makes me cry badly, but in a cathartic way.

Odd thing about that film. Saw E.T. at the time and loved Drew Barrymore screaming, loved the classic Spielberg broken family, anti-authority motifs, even the Reese’s Pieces product placement. I just didn’t like the ending, the bikes in the sky thing, and I haven’t ever seen it since then, so I could not specifically tell you why. I was willing to believe the alien, but not that. It played at the local second-run theater, the Madison, in early April, but I just didn’t have time to see it. And I would rather have seen it like that then on video.

(Sidebar: there was some story on CBS Sunday Morning recently about the decline in the movie box office. Some twenty-something they interviewed was so smug. “I can watch movies at home. I can pause it when ever I want to…” And if you can pause it, for me, it isn’t watching a movie; it’s watching a video – I use the term generically.)

If I can ask a follow-up to Jaquandor’s question about America: do you worry that it’s too late to change course? I don’t want to get too doomsday about it, I’ve just been reading too many things lately that seem to be adding up to a depressing future. Of course, I have mental disorders and that seems to be the way I process things a lot of time (“catastrophizing” is what my therapist calls it).

Is it catastrophizing when the levee has broken? On one very big hand, the news is grim. We live in an oligarchy. It’s not just that economic disparity is unfair; it doesn’t make much economic sense. One hundred people poor/middle-class people will buy 100 gallons of milk, while two rich guys will buy two, or maybe three. The tax structure is totally screwed up. The SCOTUS is corrupt. The environmental stuff is scary.

If I opt to be positive, it’s not a function of being a Pollyanna. I just don’t see the point, for me, to think the worst. I mean, maybe things will suck, but hey, what if they don’t? (Yes, this is the reverse corollary to my pessimism rule that when things are looking TOO good, better check for the rusty lining.)

But what if the 99% get really ticked off enough to dump the oligarchs? One of the narratives about the Occupy movement was that it was a failure; I think not. Polling shows that people at least RECOGNIZE economic inequity is taking place. Younger people appear, in the main, to be less racist, less homophobic. Demographics alone will help get rid of the old guard eventually. Wish I could give you something more bright and shiny, but that’s all I got.

Jacquandor observes:

Hmmm. Greg makes an interesting point that I hadn’t considered: Europe literally had to rebuild itself virtually from scratch twice in thirty years, while it can be said that America is just finishing building itself the first time. So I wonder if the disconnect is between those of us who think it’s time to start rebuilding what isn’t so great now on the one side, and the “Bah, it’s just fine” thought process on the other.

Yes, getting your infrastructure destroyed (see also: Japan) means you have to update it.

Certainly, the United States felt that it was rather impervious to real harm, having not one, but TWO, oceans protecting it from most other countries. There was a great tradition of isolationism in the country for the majority of its history. Although there were always chicken hawks, even to this day, that seem to think that invading – Syria! Ukraine! – is the way to go.

Maybe it’s also geography that changes the calculus. French people pick up stuff from Germany and Spain and Belgium. But the expectation is that anyone coming ALL THE WAY TO AMERICA should become American, even though it takes a few generations for the Irish, then the Italians, et al., to become white, in the eyes of those who were as already in the country.

The answer to the recent Quora question also applies here: Why is the desire to travel internationally so low for Americans? Expense and limited vacation time, for two. Plus the vastness of the US may make folks less inclined. “Why go to Paris to see the Eiffel Tower, when I can go to Las Vegas to see a replica for far less?”

Maybe this Quora question too: Why do Americans seem to be shallow and superficial while Europeans seem deep and pensive in general? Assuming the premise to be true, it may have to do with Europe’s longer, and more difficult history.

Tom the Mayor asked:

Have you ever heard Frank Sinatra’s version of “Being Green”?

I OWN Sinatra’s version of the song on some album, probably a compilation. Still prefer the frog’s version.

New York Erratic wants to know:

Can I still ask Roger anything?

Yes. Yes, you can. And you may.

Here’s one that’s somewhat important: you’re very smart. How do you cope when people treat you like an idiot and/or get an attitude when you don’t know literally everything?

We’ll assume, for the purpose of this question, that I AM very smart. Yet I don’t know that people always knew that. Here’s a bit I’m sure I mentioned before but bears repeating in this context: Before I was on JEOPARDY!, I was at a party and I was noting how alpacas are better-tempered than llamas, something I had researched as a librarian. My factual statement was dismissed as “male answer syndrome,” which frankly irritated me. I DID know that fact!

Then, in 1998, I appear on a game show. I win ONCE. Suddenly, people believe I’m smarter than I actually am. Here’s the thing; I prefer it to being perceived as less smart. Oh, there are people, mostly techies, who are astonished by what I DON’T know, but I decide they’re being schmucks.

Every once in a while, I’ll get this from people online, but most of them really ARE schmucks. I’ve been very open about my deficiencies. When they THINK you know everything, – which is impossible – it is THEY who appear unreasonable when confronted by my, or anyone’s, limitations.

I mean, what don’t I know? There are three categories: stuff I wish I knew but am resigned not to know (technology, languages); stuff I don’t care to know (Which Kardashian is married to whom, et al.); and stuff that I need to know for a particular purpose. That third group is what I try to utilize all day long. Stuff that people interested or trained in a particular field have learned. If I get a question about the physical nature of the earth, I’m contacting YOU, because you know way more than I do. What I know as a librarian is where I can find the information (usually), not know it off the top of my head, though there are obviously a few things I’ve picked up over the years.

I don’t know much about cars. Can’t make coffee, but then don’t DRINK coffee. I am extraordinarily bad at collating; it’s not that I think it’s beneath me, or something, it’s that I don’t do it well. But for most topics, I can hold my own as well as any layperson.

Part of the answer is that I spent enough time proving that I AM smart not to give it short shrift. That perception that perhaps I was not might have been because I worked at a comic book store, or because I eschewed wearing suits and ties, or some other reason. Having fooled people into believing I’m smart, I’m not all that willing to give it up.

Here’s the difference between you and me, NYE. You’re a lot younger than I. So the real answer is I really don’t give a damn about their attitude anymore. As suggested, if they think I should know EVERYTHING, and a bit of that DOES come with the J! territory – and they’re nasty about it, which HAS happened – then I shake my head sadly, looking to the ground mournfully, showing pity to these poor deluded fools. (You may recognize this as the Mr. T philosophy, rendered more politely.)

Billy Shakes would be 450

“It was Shakespeare who inspired Berlioz to write what is his single greatest symphony and work in general.”

My church was going to be celebrating William Shakespeare’s 450th birthday on the First Friday of this month, but it got canceled. Still, I have been on the lookout for celebrations of the same. Without searching, I came across these:

From JEOPARDY! episode #6804, aired 2014-03-27 SHAKESPEARE REWRITES THE BEATLES

“The lady is enamored of thee. verily, verily, verily”

“Wilt thou still require me, wilt thou still provide sustenance unto me, roughly midway through my 7th decade?”

“Aid me if thou canst, I feel sorrow…& my gratitude is large for thy presence here”

“Assemble forth, all ye jesters, speak thusly… hark! Thou must conceal thy amorousness”

“I believe I shall be melancholy, I believe it shall be anon…the woman who disturbeth my temper is leaving hence”

(Answers below)

Open Source Shakespeare. Very useful.

Shakespeare’s Beehive: analysis of newly discovered dictionary that Shakespeare owned and annotated.

The first edition of William Shakespeare’s plays, published in 1623 – one of the two most important books in the English language (the other being the 1611 King James Bible) will go on public display for the first time ever, at the bard’s birthplace.

William Shakespeare’s Star Wars.

Shakespeare through Infographics, a creative undertaking by Meryl Jaffe.

Why Shakespeare fits with Syria tragedy.

“It was Shakespeare who inspired Berlioz to write what is [for Jaquandor] his single greatest symphony and work in general. It’s his third symphony, Romeo et Juliette.”

William Henry Ireland tried to make his father’s dreams come true by acquiring for him the stuff of Shakespeare.

The narcissism of King Lear.

Melanie’s Own, Private Shakespeare Garden.

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

Beatles/Billy Shakes J! answers:

She Loves You
When I’m 64
Help!
Ticket to Ride
You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away