Dress Code

What do you think about dress codes? Do they make sense in school, restaurants, or places of business? Why or why not?

Once upon a time, there was a twenty-something young woman who lived in a land ruled by a former actor and full of people dressed in power suits, sporting big hair, and hefting filofaxes.  She landed a job at a large insurance company, and on her first day, was handing a large stack of forms to sign.  Some allowed the former actor and his agencies to take money from her paycheck to pay for exciting projects named after George Lucas movies.  Others warned her against telling the competition any deep dark insurance secrets.  At the bottom of the stack was a dress code form which she signed after looking at her watch, then the title of the form, then back at her watch as she realized she was going to miss the coffee truck on the plaza if she didn’t hurry up!  So she signed on the line and ran in her black pumps to catch the elevator, never realizing her thirst for hot caffeinated drinks would lead to a workplace fashion disaster.

Approved suit colors:  Blue.  Black.  Gray.  Brown.  Muted stripes are acceptable in approved colors.

Pants on women are not acceptable, nor are bare legs.  Heels must be at least 1″ high but not higher than 3″.  Hemlines must be no higher than above the knee nor lower than midcalf.

How do I remember all of this?  About a month after I was hired, I purchased a beautiful lavender suit at Nordstrom’s Rack.  I’m sure it was sent to the Rack because of it’s unapproved color, but it was April, and while the temperature wasn’t going up that much in Southern California, our heroine was a Jersey Girl and used to greeting spring with open arms and pastel colors.  Also, as part of a push to hire female junior account executives to bring gender equality (but not salary equity) to the insurance workplace,  I could never afford a decent suit at Nordstroms proper.

I bought the suit.

Monday morning staff meeting, I strut in wearing the suit and some fabulous ivory heels.  I sit near the back with the other juniors.  The room quiets.  My boss begins the meeting by looking at me and saying, “I’ll see you in my office after the meeting.”

Oops.  Written up and sent home for violating the dress code.

Fast forward through the 90s and “Casual Friday” replete with khakis and polos for guys, dress pants (yes, pants in the workplace!) for girls.  Then the internet boom with it’s Casual Everyday that included not just jeans but shorts.  My last job was as a Computer Department Manager at a logistics company in Edison.  Jeans and work boots, baby, jeans and work boots!

I discovered how much more productive I could be when I didn’t have to worry about appropriate attire.  I also noticed how far we’ve come when Nancy Pelosi showed up at the new Congress in, you guessed it, a lavender suit!

These days I wear jeans 178 school days.  On the first day of school, I wear a dress.  It’s still summer as far as I’m concerned, and it’s a nice way to start the year.  I wear a suit on Career Day since my ecommerce class is in charge and also required to dress up.  This year, I sported white sneakers with my grey pinstripe as we set up – I’m just too old and out of practice to spend an entire day in 3″ heels!

Otherwise, as a Technology Teacher, jeans are the dress code of my industry – where did I put my black turtleneck? My students don’t respect me any less for wearing jeans so I can lay on the floor and check their stop motion animation sets and shots or crawl on under a table to figure out why a computer isn’t accessing the internet.  They respect me for who I am not what I wear and recognize my appropriate choices.

… and appropriate is the correct word for students.  I could talk about our ban on flip flops (yes, really), but my only request regarding student attire is that they dress for school not a frat house.  I’ve had quite a few male students this year with a fine sense of style, and I appreciate the relatively modest dress among the girls at our school.  Looking out at a group of students and seeing a Snooki-wannabe is never a good thing, so while I’m all for a liberal (or no) dress code, I appreciate appropriate.

Stress

What’s the best way for you to blow off some steam?

Cooking.

No, really, I love spending a Sunday afternoon in my kitchen or a few weeks in the summer working my way through a cookbook.  I completely got the entire Julie & Julia story back when it was just a blog.  I may be vegan, I but appreciate what that project did for her.  I haven’t spent much time in my kitchen in the last two weeks, and I’m suffering.  Leisurely preparation of food, especially if I have NPR on the iPod, is my favorite way to relax after a crazy day or week.

Sometimes, I just crave lentils. Here’s a recipe I make a lot because it’s quick, delicious, and even better for lunch the next day.

Red Lentil Curry

1 cup red lentils
1 to 1 1/2 cups veggie stock (depending on your desired consistency)
1 medium onion diced
4-6 garlic cloves chopped (depending upon your love of garlic)
1 Tablespoon cumin (or more, I love cumin)
1 Tablespoon curry powder (or more, I love curry)
1 tomato diced
chopped cilantro

Saute onions in a medium saucepan in olive or vegetable oil until almost soft, then add garlic for a minute or too. Add cumin and curry (I just keep adding until it smells as strong as I would like). Saute for another minute or two, then add stock. I don’t like mushy lentils, so I tend to add a cup of stock, but if you like your lentils with more liquid, add a cup and one-half. Bring to a boil, then add lentils.  Cover, reduce heat to simmer for about 10 minutes.  DON’T cook for too long or you’ll end up with a mound of mush.

To serve, top with diced tomatoes and cilatro.  Serve with pita bread brushed with olive oil and toasted in the broiler.  I cut mine in fourths with the pizza cutter – instant, vegan naan!

Business

NaBloPoMo Daily Prompt:  If you could start any type of new business, what would it be?

I started voxpopnj last February after the success of AsburyPop in November of 2009 and a few social media workshops at the beginning of 2010.  I was all set to take the local social media scene by storm… and then was asked to produce a short movie for the ProjectTwenty1 Film Festival that August.  Having no idea what this entailed, I said yes.

I’m glad I did, but it sent my vision for voxpopnj way off course.  When I reflect upon what I want my business to be, I realize I should concentrate on what I both love to do and do well.  I started this blog to get back to writing; I have a B.A. in Writing from Rutgers, my Dad paid good money for it, and I love to write, so that was an easy choice.  I also love web design and development and over the past few years, have done very little in that area even though the vast majority of my work experience is in that discipline.

That’s going to change in 2011.

Got a website you want designed?  Need a custom wordpress layout?  Not sure how to manage a social media campaign?

Maybe voxpopnj, the “new” business I started a year ago, is the answer.

Bullies

Nablopomo prompt:  Tell us about your first encounter with a bully, then tell us about your last one.

If my heart belongs to Top Chef, my mind belongs to Mad Men.  An intelligent, contemplative, multi-layered cast of characters inhabit the world of early ’60s advertising, and while much has changed in the work place, some things remain the same.

Like adult bullies.

I’ve grown to love Joanie, I truly have, and her marriage exposes all of the flaws and gender bias of the Eisenhower era.  She may sport the gloss of Jackie Kennedy, but she’s as much a post-war woman as Betty Draper.  In the first season, she was the woman I loved to hate. Peggy was so me in my first years in the corporate world (and it doesn’t help that my mom’s name is Peggy).  Eager to please, full of trust, Peggy and I were ripe for women like Joan, rapacious and almost sociopathic in her need to dominate and terrorize the other women who worked with and for her.

I met Joan when I worked in the newly formed Employee Benefits division at AEtna in San Diego.  Her name was Marcia, she owned a parrot named Pakalolo (it was the 80s) and a condo on the water with her husband. Her two daughters were just as terrorized as those of us in her office; on the rare occasion they stopped by, you could see how they both tried to fold in upon themselves to become as small as possible to avoid her notice.  I may have been a Junior Account Executive (aka a Senior Account Executive’s indentured slave), but I cowered in fear every time Marcia stopped by for a “talk”.  Those TPS Reports bandied about in Office Space hit a bit too close to home for me.  In my AEtna days, Marcia collected all of the sales reports, and loath be the employee who didn’t prepare his or her data to company specs on the newly purchased IBM Displaywriter!

Fast forward to my days as the Marketing Director for a local engineering firm.  Joan was the Accounting Manager.  We were on the same rung of the management ladder, and we got along quite well being newly married with our first born children on the way.  I was lucky that time; the adult bully set her sights on other women, most notably a newly hired mechanical engineer with few social skills and painfully lacking in any sense of style.  The other women in the office (myself included) did our best to run interference for this victim, but we were no match for Joan, and that young engineer quickly left the firm.

Every workplace has a bully, or at least that’s been my experience.  In recent years, our society has spent a significant amount of time and money addressing the issue of childhood bullying.  As a teacher, I’ve been to numerous training sessions about bullying, what it is and how to respond, but I’ve never received any information, training, or support regarding adult bullying.  In Adult Bullying: Perpetrators and Victims, author Peter Randall states:

Adams (1992) has made the point that bullying at work is one of the greatest sources of stress put upon employees and that organisations in general have been slow to recognise this.  Managers have suggested to me that one of the reasons for this is that bullying is not accepted as a credible label for the kind of abuse that people experience at work or in the community at large.  It may be that the term bullying carries with it too strong an association with childhood and difficulties victims experience at school or on the way to school.  This leads to it being denied as a stressful circumstance within the realities of adult life.  ’It may happen to children but it doesn’t hapen to grownups’ could well be the underpinning attitude. Indeed, Adams (1992) also makes the point that victims are often not dealt with in a suppportive fashion; instead of being assisted in freeing themselves of the attention of the bully they are often expected to ‘pull themselves together’ and ‘not take any nonsense’.  What to a victim may seem to be a horrendous, stressful form of persecution may to the observer be nothing more than two or more people who do not get on together.

I don’t remember any experiences with a bully in my public school years, but I met Joan in various incarnations throughout my adult life in the workplace.  As the seasons go by on Mad Men, we understand what motivates Joan, and she becomes much more empathetic and sympathetic.  However, when you are confronted with Joan (or Pete Campbell) in a workplace devoid of Don Draper and Bert Cooper, it’s infinitely worse than cowering before a bully on the playground.

At work, there’s no teacher fresh from a bullying inservice to try their hand at defusing the situation.  All the victim can do is fold in upon themselves to become as small as possible to avoid her notice.

Letters

The last two nablopomo prompts ask a blogger to write 2 “letters” to themselves, one an apology for an event or decision in the past, one describing what’s going on now that the writer doesn’t want to forget.

I thought about the first letter much of yesterday.  While I can come up with a few decisions I’ve made in the past that I regret, most of them occurred before I had my children, and if I made a different decision, the children I have might be different or not exist at all!  Overall, I am happy with where I am at in my life, and the things I would change are either entirely up to me – exercise and lack thereof at the top of the list – or I can’t change no matter how much I want to – leaving New Jersey for instance.

If I wrote a letter about what’s happening now that I don’t want to forget, I’d probably cross that line of confidentiality I’ve mentioned before.  I’m comfortable sharing 90% of the events in my own life but try very hard to honor and guard the privacy of people close to me.  So this letter will remain unwritten or at least not appear on this blog.

Reflecting upon what might be in these letters confirmed that I’m where I want to be and on the right track!  Now to review my goals from #reverb10 for the first #reverb11 blogpost!

Trinity

Today’s first prompt (I have to catch up): If you could take over the life of any character from a book or film and be them for a week, who would you choose?

Trinity from The Matrix. Kickass pleather and vicious hacker skills.  Why WOULDN’T I want to be Trinity?

(My first thought was Nancy Botwin because it would just be so much fun to be Nancy, but the prompt says book or film, not TV.  Sorry Nance!)

Creativity

Today’s NaBloPoMo Prompt: Tell us about three ways you express your creativity.

I’ve never thought I was creative.  To me, creativity is more art than craft, and I’m all about craft. The high point in my art career occurred in junior high.  Selected to attend Saturday art lessons at Carnegie Mellon’s Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh, I spent two school years carpooling into the city, fighting motion sickness, and attempting to draw.  When we moved to New Jersey, I left the program and accepted that fine art was not for me.

In my thirties, I discovered web design and development.  Moving from computer programming to internet technology was an easy migration. I was lucky enough to begin working with @mswas way back in the mid-1990s when tables where the newest layout option, and Amazon looked like CraigsList.  She introduced me to Roy G. Biv, Homesite, and basic database integration.  (Ok, that last part is a stretch, since I came to that job from a database management environment, but SQL is way more fun on the web.) I created a number of database driven websites from one used at cell towers by technicians to an inventory system for a logistics company.

Then I became a teacher.

No one is more crafty and creative than a teacher.  You try to keep 20 really smart high school kids interested, motivated, and on task for 85 minutes each day.  For example, today I taught eCommerce using @LisaSonoraBeam‘s incredible approach to business plan writing for right brain people at 7:30 a.m., Character Animation in 3D with Blender at 11:30 a.m., and Stop Motion Animation at 1 p.m.  Granted, stop motion is really clay and paper mache and tempera paint but wait until we start taking those 1500+ photos and pulling them in to Final Cut!

Here are some covers my eCommerce students completed today for their visual journals as part of the business plan project:

I express my creativity through technology, teaching, and technique.  Over the weekend, I expressed my creativity by redesigning the voxpopnj website.  Tomorrow, you’ll find me in my classroom creating new ways to inspire my students to learn more about themselves through the subjects I teach.

And technique?  I said I loved craft over art!  The newest craft I’ve learned is knitting.  I recently finished my first scarf and started another one for my daughter.  Now I just have to learn more stitches so I can attempt one of those wonderful projects on ravelry!

Procrastination

I’m participating in National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) in February.  This month’s theme is character. Today’s prompt: Tell us seven things you do when you procrastinate.

In order of preference:

1. Twitter

2. WordPress

3. Gmail

4. Punk Rock Kitchen

5.  Etsy / Ravelry (depends on my bank balance)

6. Peapod (best website ever for working [single] parents)

7. Stumbleupon

Here’s a visual:

(Yes, I should’ve been grading when I made that rather poor image.)

I don’t remember how I procrastinated before the internet.  Probably having actual conversations with people face to face.

Character (and lack thereof)

I’m participating in National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) in February.  This month’s theme is character. Today’s prompt: Think about someone who annoys you. Write a list of everything you don’t like about them, and then write a list of all the things that you’re grateful that they’ve shown you about yourself.

I think this person goes beyond annoyance, but my readers can be the judge.  Characteristics of this person that “annoy” me:

1.  Manipulator

2.  Liar

3.  Gossip

4.  Vindictive

5.  Petty

6.  Intolerant

What I learned:

1. Trust should be earned not given freely.

2. Gossip is cruel, unnecessary, and darkens your outlook on humanity.

3. Most people have their own best interests at heart, not yours.

4. Just because someone else slips into crisis mode, you don’t need to follow them.

5. People who manufacture crises to solve themselves and look good are useless when faced with an actual crisis.

6. Sometimes, walking away is the best thing you can ever do.

Favorite Character

I’m participating in National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) in February.  This month’s theme is character.  Today’s prompt: Who’s your favorite character from a book, play, film, or other work of art?

I read this prompt early this morning and was at first thrilled.  I love movies and books and began thinking about what character I truly favored among all the various films and stories I’ve experienced and enjoyed.

I thought some more.  Then I realized just how hard this was going to be.

Stage One:  Villians are more interesting than heros.  Hans Gruber, the villian in Die Hard was my first choice in answer to this question.  You have no idea how many students come up to me and say, “Did you know Snape played the bad guy in the first Die Hard movie?” That led me to ponder what a wonderful actor Alan Rickman is and think about his other movies, which led me to Love Actually where he plays a cheating husband (and Emma Thompson gives the best portayal of a wife realizing her marriage is ending ever put on film).  I thought about my favorite actor, Javier Bardem, and all the roles he’s played, and I realized that, for me, characters in movies are inseparable from the actor who portrays them.

Tom Hanks is always Tom Hanks, and Bruce Willis is always Bruce Willis (ask me some other time the significance of my choosing those two actors).

Stage Two:  I can’t remember a time when I didn’t read, but I do remember the time before HBO, VHS, and DVR.  A character in a book has no actor associated with him or her.  I admit, I sometimes cast various characters as famous actors, but that’s because the author’s description brings to mind that actor.  So many characters presented themselves, from Nayir in my current read Finding Nouf to Joel Campbell in Elizabeth George’s What Came Before He Shot Her. However, I found myself thinking in terms of authors this time and not their characters.  I began listing the names of writers – Salmon Rushdie, Sue Grafton, Elizabeth George, Kim Harrison, Zadie Smith, Reinaldo Arenas, Roberto Bolano … and Arturo Perez-Reverte.

Stage Three:  My answer is:  Teresa Mendoza in The Queen of the South by Arturo Perez-Reverte. A girlfriend of a narco who goes to prison then rises to the top of the drug trafficking world primarily for revenge? She’s a villian, a girl gone bad for all the right reasons.  Her story begins, “The telephone rang, and she knew she was going to die.”  It’s Godfather II with a Spanish woman in the lead.  Over 400 pages later, I wish I were the anonymous reporter with her tale to tell in a third world bar.

I bet Penelope Cruz will play her in the movie.  Oh, wait, Kate Del Castillo (a.k.a. Pilar on Weeds) plays her in a Telemundo “super-production” of the book.  Funny, Nancy Botwin was my “runner-up” answer to this prompt!