Weird Science: Freelancer Pheromones

Check out this Nasonov gland. Oooh Baby.

I’m not exactly exposing my Nasonov gland to entice my fellow honeybees into an empty hive, but, these past couple weeks, I’ve had the sneaking suspicion that I’ve got some sort of major pheromone thing going on. While the particulars are still mysterious to me, the cause is obvious – I’m planning a vacation.

Ask any freelancer you find on the streets (it won’t take long, the streets in Minneapolis are lousy with them) to tell you when they experience the biggest uptick in new business, when the most enormous projects get set in motion, and they will answer, to a (wo)man: Three weeks before I leave on vacation.

I’m planning to head to New York next week, and I can’t beat the customers away with a stick. I’ve had a least two phone calls lately that start with “Remember me?” People I haven’t worked for in years have developed sudden, urgent needs for my snappy, sparkling prose. Really? I want to say.  Where were you in the middle of January when I was considering taking on a side hustle as a barista, just to keep cat food on the table?

This must be some complicated kind of science ju-ju, I’ve found myself thinking, because not only does it seem to be attracting customers, but it convinces them to linger, sort of the opposite effect of that classical-music-in-the-convenience-store-to-deter-juvenile-loitering experiment. Because while I’ve noticed that my services are certainly being engaged with incredibly increasing frequency, I’ve also noticed that The Damn Projects are Never Done.  Quick-turn web copy gets a new client direction and requires an entire rewrite. A normally agreeable editor suddenly thinks that just a few more sources will do the trick. I’ve actually heard, for the first time since December (the last time I left town), that phrase that chills the blood of creatives everywhere:  What else have you got?

Many people become freelancers for the utterly stupid reason that they want to “be their own boss.” Sounds great in theory, but I’ve discovered that I’m probably the worst boss I’ve ever worked for – and after a lifetime of agency work, I’ve had some doozies. Nortie the cokehead, Frank the stapler-thrower and Brenda the walking ashtray have nothing on Julie Kendrick, Slavedriver. I am demanding and unforgiving and just a little bit sadistic. I schedule interviews with Canadians at 3 p.m. on a beautiful Friday afternoon. I make myself get up at five a.m. “just to polish the copy one more time before it goes to the client.” Plus, I never take me out to lunch, or tell me “good job,” or offer beneficently, “Take the afternoon off, honey.  You’ve been working too hard.” As if.

Worst of all, I never, ever say “no.” I can’t even turn down the pro bono stuff, even when I am convinced that my brain is going to explode all over the board meeting, necessitating a messy cleanup, but probably a very nice funeral. Trust me, I’ve tried. I form my lips into a little cat butt of “no,” and all that comes out is the chimp-grin of “yes.”

Of course, I love my clients, I’m happy for the work, and it will all get done, somehow, before that flight takes off next week. And there’s one thing that’s more certain than the pre-vacation pheromone attraction – I’ll probably spend all of July reorganizing my file drawers, because nothing is less appealing to a client than a freelancer who has just returned from vacation.

How I Know it’s Summer (by a mother of teenagers)

 

The Brassiere That Was Left on the Chair in World Headquarters

When I see a crocus in the front yard, I know it’s spring. When I find mystery shoes strewn across the living room each morning, I know it’s summer.

Other people may find this to be a season of relaxation and renewal, a chance to slow down and savor life more fully. For me, summer is a season of wonder, as in: “I wonder who ate the four pounds of bananas I bought yesterday?” or “I wonder why the front door was left wide open all night?” or, on a recent Monday morning, “I wonder why a bright green brassiere is slung over the back of the chair in my home office?” I don’t think even Don Draper had to cope with that sort of thing at work, but at Kendrick Works World Headquarters, it’s just part of going with the summer flow.
 

 Let's see him explain the Eternal Mystery of the Milk Carton

As a journalist, I love those five Ws, but in summer, I use them much more at home than I do at work. I don’t really use them with the hope of eliciting information, but more as a general pre-senility sputter of exasperation, which often begins, “WHO in the world would ….” I keep asking the question, but I always know the answer. The answer is, not me. I continue to ask anyway, with the sort of cosmic curiosity that keeps me determined to understand why any rational human would return a carton of milk to the refrigerator with only one teaspoon of liquid remaining, and not write “milk” on the giant grocery list (pen attached!) that is hanging just inches away. It’s a mystery that would baffle a Talmudic scholar, at least after he stopped sputtering. It is written in the Torah that the sputter always comes before the question, right Rebbe?

Sometimes, I stop asking questions and take action. On that grim Monday morning in question, I put down my cup of coffee, got the tape dispenser, and marched down the hallway from World Headquarters to the perp’s bedroom. I taped the offending brassiere, dangling like a pre-burned effigy of teen sloth, in the offender’s doorway. (The cup size was my DNA-quality evidence of guilt in this particular case, sort of like an episode of CSI: Sputtering Mother Edition.) Was the brassiere slinger ashamed when she finally woke up and saw the evidence? We don’t do shame in this teen household, really – it’s either punishment or no punishment, and decide quick because I need the car keys.

  These people do not have teenage children.

As with every other aspect of mothering, I find that I survive summer better if I lower my standards and stay flexible. Besides, this sort of constant adjustment to new information is good for me, sort of like living every moment while balancing on a BOSU. I tell myself that it’s fun to have days that are high on variety, if low on personal satisfaction and basic hygiene. If I’m sitting in the living room at nine o’clock on a Friday night, enjoying a moment of respite, and ten theater kids show up at the front door, summoned through the silent teen antennae of texts? Oh well, and of course I’ll turn on the oven for pizzas. If I’m surprised by the New Guest Stars in my kitchen every morning, the ones who arrived to sleep-over after I went to bed?  There’s always room in the blender for another smoothie, right?

Of course, I write this in June, the month of summer hopefulness. By August, the twitch will be back.  Two years ago, in August, I ate a spider (Another story; another blog). By this August, I’ll probably be popping that brassiere into the blender, along with the rest of the smoothie ingredients. And I won’t even ask “Who?”

The Thanking Season (Nowhere, Nowhere)

Emma, just home from Beiing, tells me that the proper response to a thank-you in Chinese is, instead of words that translate to “you’re welcome,” a phrase that literally translates as “nowhere, nowhere.” The idea, she says, is a sort of general deflection, as if to refuse credit for the action entirely. I imagine a constant stream of heartfelt thank-yous bouncing off their intended recipients and perpetually ricocheting around the country. With an estimated current Chinese population of 1,352,701,483, that makes for a lot of homeless thank-yous.

This month kicks off the height of the height of our thanking season, when all those shower, wedding and graduation gifts will require a written expression of gratitude, at least according to the rules established by somebody’s mother and taken up as a cause by everyone else’s mom, through the ages.

A hefty portion of these missives have arrived in my mailbox over the years, and surprise, I’ve got some opinions on the matter. Like many other communications that aren’t a thumbs-only creation, and don’t allow for abbreviations and emoticons, the thank-you note seems to be a dying art. And at this point I hope I don’t sound like one of those cranky relatives writing in to Dear Abby, back when there was an Abby to write letters to, about how those gol-derned grandkids never send thank-you notes for all those itchy sweaters and instructional reading that’s been gifted to them over the years.

The best thanks-yous, of course, somehow have actual gratitude in their soul. Intended as a social nicety, a thank-you note can be twisted into a mean-spirited box to be checked off one’s social to-do list, and that doesn’t do anyone any good. The nicest monogrammed stationery and the absolute best penmanship can’t hide a bitter heart that’s never known a microsecond of true gratitude, and yes, as a matter of fact, I’ve seen more than a few of those soulless examples in my day.

But a written expression of appreciation can still be done beautifully, even in our illiterate and ungrateful times, as I have also witnessed. I still remember a thank-you from a high school graduate, delivered about five years ago. It arrived during one of those freak seasons when everyone I knew seemed to have a 17-year-old, and, since a high school graduation is usually the one (and only) time that Minnesotans will invite anyone into their home for a celebration, I’d been writing a lot of checks and eating a lot of cake that summer. This boy’s note was so refreshing that I still remember the lede. It began with a sentence that went something like, “First, can I just tell you that the most important thing was that you came to our house to celebrate with me and my family? It feels so great to be supported by friends like you as I start this next part of my life.” It was so sincere, and so fresh and so rare. He seemed to have understood why we drove all the way to St. Paul on a Saturday night, and he got to the heart of the matter, which had nothing to do with another check to add to his college fund.

It doesn’t always work so well. That was the very same summer when the thank-you communication from a very close family friend, a kid who had grown up alongside my kids, arrived in mid-August. It was a sheet that had been composed and printed from a computer, torn in half, and it read, entirely, “Thank you for the gift. I will use it at college.” The name was typed. I immediately predicted a bright corporate future for this young man, at least until the SEC hearings.

The intention of thanking, like so many other things, can be turned on its head and made into something else entirely. I still remember the wedding invitation from a couple who seemed involved in a power struggle of the sort that usually involves Third World countries, tanks and epaulets. About ten months after their wedding, a note arrived. Dispensing with the usual niceties, it launched directly into a screed about how the other half of the couple was supposed to write exactly fifty percent of the notes, per their agreement, and she hadn’t done it, and now he was shouldering this massive burden all by himself, which was why the note was so tardy. Oh, and thanks for the place setting of china.

We humans are so resourceful that we can drive each other crazy with anything, so I suppose thank-yous are no exception. Somehow the etiquette gods have decided that gratitude is best expressed in the form of a three-by-five-inch notecard, handwritten, black or blue ink, please. No space must feel more massive to a worn-out new mom, a depleted bridezilla or an antsy graduate than that vast emptiness. I usually deliver new baby gifts (a multi-pack of batteries, and don’t laugh until you’ve needed to refill that damn swing at 3 a.m. and have run out) with a “Free Pass,” telling the mom that she’s absolved from the need to write one more thank-you note during her daily five-minute allotment of free time. 

Perhaps, given the general misery surrounding this issue, it’s an idea that could be taken up by more givers, who could learn to embrace the little Zen koan of “nowhere, nowhere,” before the wrapping paper on their gift is even torn away, or before the check (this year, for $20.12, arriving this month in bank accounts all over America), is even cashed.

Nine Cigars, Nine Scotches and Plenty of Pink Silk Underwear

 

It’s wonderful to remember the service of our U.S. soldiers on Memorial Day, but today I’ve been thinking about the best half-American friend that the U.S. ever had – Winston Churchill.  I just finished reading another biography of him, and I loved mulling over all the stuff I already knew and finding a few tidbits I hadn’t run across before.

The author was another super-hottie boyfriend of mind, J. Rufus Frears, (see photo at left) who tossed in all sorts of juicy tidbits, such as the fact that my boy Winston drank nine scotches and smoked nine cigars each day, starting with breakfast. That doesn’t include the staggering amounts wine and champagne he had with meals, but I think it’s a nice round number for the man who stood alone against what he always sneeringly called the “Naaaahzees.”

Churchill's father was a bug-eyed, egomaniacal, syphilitic gasbag. His mother was a beautiful and narcissistic tramp, reported to have have slept with 200 men.  Neither of them seemed to have wasted much thought or effort on Winston. He was a washout at academics, and on the annual parents' day (Randolph and Jennie never came), the boys would enter the hall in order of academic achievment. Winston always walked in last, and people laughed at him.  From this miserable start came his incredible greatness, and that's just one of the reasons I love him so much.

Dr. Frears failed to mention one of my favorite bits of biographical data, which was Churchill’s penchant for wearing pink silk underwear. It’s one of those facts which you may not make much of at the time, but which will begin to color your understanding of every single event of World War II. Just knowing that the “Never Surrender” speech was delivered by a bloke wearing pink silk knickers just gives the whole thing another perspective entirely.

My other favorite Churchill story has to do with his dangerous wartime Atlantic crossings on the Queen Mary (he was always listed on the passenger manifest as "Colonel Warden”). On one particular crossing, there was a great likelihood that they’d be attacked by U-Boats. When told of this, Churchill got quite agitated – not about the need to keep himself safe, but over how he wanted his lifeboat to be equipped with a machine gun. Imagining himself stranded in the mid-Atlantic, with the wreck of the Queen Mary all around him and with the Naaaahzees circling like sharks, he didn't want to go down without a fight. That's my boy Winnie.

I never hesitate for a moment when people play the hypothetical living-or-dead dinner party game.  I would have Churchill to my right for all eternity (fortified, of course, by many naps on my part and a big ol’ jug of Diet Coke to help me stay awake). Perhaps I love him even more when I realize how impossible he’d be for our careful, coiffed and moderate times.  He was short (5' 6”) and he was fat (215 pounds). He drank. He smoked. He always told the truth. He never held a grudge. He did whatever he thought was the right thing, even when everyone else told him he was wrong, and even when it hurt his career.  He was much more brave than he ever was careful. It got him in trouble during his times; it would make him impossible in ours.

With a c.v. like that, he couldn’t get elected to the position of dogcatcher in the 21st century. but how could you not want to be represented by someone who understood what really matters in life: "We live very simply -- but with all the essentials of life well understood and provided for -- hot baths, cold champagne, new peas & old brandy."

On Memorial Day 2012, this Yank is lifting her glass of Diet Coke and saying, thanks, old boy. Well Done.

Sex! Alcohol! (Or Something Like That)

Four moms in a room?  Eight opinions, all of them contradictory and at least half of them involving a significant waggle of pointed fingers. As someone who makes it a point never to use “parenting” as a verb, I do find that other women tend to keep up a steady stream of vitriol towards the, um, “momming” choices that others make. The incoming missives from every other country tell us  that we’re just plain doing it wrong (Eskimo moms knit whale blubber booties! French mothers teach their children how to debone an ortalon before preschool!) And that lady on the cover of Time magazine, giving her son a last nip of breast milk before he heads off to college and switches to beer? Seems like everyone has a quick thousand or so words they want to share about her particular mom choice.

As soon as I’d jumped into this mom gig (the job that sucks up your entire life and tosses you out like a spent shell a mere 18 years later, just like real corporate America), I realized that I was not a good fit with the other mommies. I liked my kids just fine, but I seemed to lack the requisite number of opinions. I couldn’t really work up enough passion in discussing my choices for diapering, sleeping and eating, let alone have enough energy left over to tell other moms why they were doing it wrong. I’ll let you know, from hard experience, that “whatever” is never, ever the appropriate response at a Mommy & Me session. It sends off signals of weakness that causes the other mommies to emit low, snarling growls of displeasure.

I’ve spent many years since assiduously skirting the hot-button issues, realizing that revealing any of my mom-choices would leave me open to the wolf pack. When a mommy talked about co-sleeping, I brought up the extortion racket – aka jewelry party – she was planning. When she brought up breastfeeding, I looked down, pointed and chirped, “Cute shoes!”

But it turns out that there’s no statute of limitations on telling another woman that she’s doing it all wrong, so, sixteen years after I celebrated my first Mother’s Day breakfast-in-bed, I found myself at the center of an opinion maelstrom.

The mom choice I’d made seemed pretty simple:  Emma wanted to spend her junior year of high school studying in Beijing, and I said, “Sure, sounds like fun.  Just let me sell that extra kidney to fund this adventure, and you’re good to go.” On her end of things, the experience has been a great one, and she’s due home in a couple weeks with a mastery of Mandarin, a globally minded set of friends and a much broader worldview. 

On my end of things, however, the finger pointing continues.

It started before she even got out of the country. I mentioned Emma's plan to another mom and – I am not making this up – the first two words out of her mouth were “Sex! Alcohol!” I thought that perhaps she’d suddenly changed the subject and was telling me about her weekend, but it turns out that no, she was just sharing her conviction that, as soon as the plane arrived at Beijing International, those exchange students would be getting busy and getting plastered. I thought of telling her that, so far as I remembered, sex and alcohol were not the sole province of the Communist Party (much as they’d like to get exclusive rights for resale to us weak imperialists), but I just smiled and nodded, something that I found myself doing more and more in the ensuing months.

I began to realize that my experience – letting my little bird fly to her homeland – was an incredible mirror into the motivations and secret worries of all the moms around me. There was a fair contingent of open, adventurous types who saw it as great fun for Emma: “This is a life-changing experience! Good for her!” There were those who focused, positively, on how I fit into the picture: “What a great mom you are for encouraging her to do this!”

But  there was a long line of disapproving mommies queuing up behind Mrs. Sex & Alcohol. While I was on my volunteer shift at Crisis Nursery, a staff member asked about Emma while we were all riding with a herd of two-year olds in the elevator. In that tiny space, I got two immediate and emotional reactions – one staffer got all misty-eyed at the thought of Emma's opportunity, and the other one practically shouted, “No way! No way would I ever let my kids get that far away from me!” 

During a pause in a customer lunch, I brought up Emma’s impending trip, and the woman I was with visibly started, asking quite seriously, “Does our government even allow that?  Because of, you know –" and here she lowered her voice and looked furtively around the company cafeteria to whisper  – “communism.” She seemed convinced that I was in cahoots with Obama, that Kenyan, to arrange these godless shenanigans.

After this steady drip of other people’s opinions had soaked me to the skin, I found that I could begin to ignore it, and even have a little fun. Sometimes I’d bring up the topic just to see what the reaction would be. It was often unpredictable and usually very interesting, and I found big bundles of mom-emotion lurking behind the most mild-mannered faces.

I’ll need to keep that attitude in mind, because one of the things Emma is doing this summer is attending a recruitment camp at the Air Force Academy, with a thought to applying there for college. In the highly pc circles in which I move, there isn’t a statement more guaranteed to freeze faces with displeasure than the words “Military Academy.”

In fact, one brilliant friend has already unfurled her Mom Flag and declared hotly, “People in the military get killed, you know!”

True, but at least they aren’t having Sex & Alcohol, I wanted to tell her. Every mom knows that those are just for exchange students, not soldiers.

On Strike

Agreeableness can only take you so far, and sometimes being a good girl is a bad idea. It’s the person who sits down, holds tight and refuses to budge, the one who says “no more,” who usually ends up living a life that always seems to have the extra sprinkles on top.

Mary Katherine is a great example of a good girl who goes bad when necessary. She perfected the idea of the General Strike several years ago, when we were visiting Disney World, which is the ultimate “Fun, Dammit” location. Everyone you look, parents are beating hot, crumpled, weeping children, shouting that it’s time for fun, dammit, because they already bought the 24-hour-Hopper-Pooper ticket and no one is leaving until they squeeze every last morsel of activity from it. The whole place feels less like an amusement park than a hostage situation.

Turns out Mary Katherine, age five, thought so, too. After two days of humid trudging in the Park That Won’t Let You Go Home Before Midnight, Day Three dawned, and I tried to rouse her. Consulting my list, I informed her that we had several super-magical rides & adventures to tick off our Required Fun Chores before lunch. Calmly and sweetly, she informed me that she wasn’t going anywhere. “I’m staying in this bed,” she said. “I’m going to color in my color book and watch movies and not leave the hotel.” I gasped. As a lifelong rules follower, I could only stand back and admire this tyke. She was standing up to the Disney Industrial Complex. I did everything but applaud. And then I slid into bed with her and fired up the DVD player.

I’ve always found that moment to be a touchstone for me, a time I can return to as an example that you don’t have to be big or loud or mean to get what you want. You just have to be very, very sure. I spend most of my days making sure that everyone else has enough napkins for their Life Banquet, but every now and then, I try to employ a bit of the Mary Katherine Method in my own world.

My most recent example happened in Beijing. There were four of us following Emma around like baby ducks, confident that she knew what she was doing, since that’s what she kept telling us. Most of the time, things went well, but it turned out that she was a Mamma Duck who liked adrenaline a little bit too much for anyone’s good. The first day we left our hotel, she marched us across the traffic-signal-free equivalent of a 10-lane highway, one where cars were making rapid, screeching turns into our oncoming path. 

It was nerve-wracking, she admitted when I protested from the other side, but it was just The Way Things Are in China. By Day Two, I was beginning to break into a cold sweat the minute I was in the hotel lobby, just imagining the terror outside. The next day, I announced, “I am not going to cross that street again. I suggest we try turning in the other direction when we leave the hotel and see if there is a traffic light somewhere in this city so that we can cross more calmly.” 

Emma scoffed and told me that I wasn’t being appropriately Chinese. “If I have to spend the rest of this trip in the hotel, I will,” I said, “but I am not crossing that street, in that spot, again.” I had learned the secret from Mary Katherine – know exactly what you need and be very, very sure.

When we left the hotel the next morning, Emma avoided the speedway and allowed us to turn left. Within two blocks, we  found an underground pedestrian throughway that led directly to our subway stop. Emma shrugged. I could tell that it didn’t seem like as much fun, and that she thought I was soft and weak. Too bad, I thought, as I reached for Mary Katherine’s hand in the stinky and safe tunnel. I had finally learned how to go on strike, and I was feeling proud of myself.

I thought back to that day with Mary Katherine at Disney World.  I had asked her if she wanted to have breakfast and she’d warily said, “If I have to take a shuttle bus to breakfast,  I’m not hungry.” We’d walked -- on too-wide paths, past overly artificial lagoons, but still. We had lingered over waffles and a Barbie coloring book, just laughing. I’d bought her an enormous and impractical lollipop in the gift shop and told her it was her breakfast dessert. We’d watched more television, lolled in the pool and napped through a thunderstorm. It was the day she wanted to have, and she wasn’t afraid to insist that she be allowed to have it. 

It's a lesson I'm still learning. But every now and then, I have enough strength to remember that what seems inevitable, often isn't. And it just takes one "no" -- a very, very sure "no" -- to shut it down and start over.

Naughty

“Of course we can write on it; that’s why Sharpies were invented,” I said. Maren’s face lit up. Even when you’re a very good girl, there’s no denying the universal appeal of naughtiness, and here I was, poised with a juicy marker to scribble on the ketchup bottle. Her mother had never told her not to write on ketchup bottles with markers, I could almost hear her thinking, but something that much fun just had to wrong.

My favorite kindergartener and I had been spending the afternoon together, and instead of doing dumb grown-up things like shopping, complaining about our lives and whining about our health, we’d been using the doctor kit to give pretend shots to the Chihuahua, dressing up a fleet of naked Barbies and reading Arthur books to each other. Now, instead of spending an overpriced happy hour in a crowded bar, we were sitting in the kitchen, preparing to tuck into a feast of pigs in a blanket, applesauce and milk. But when I opened a new bottle of ketchup, it seemed to have collected some pent-up energy, shooting all the way across Maren’s plate and landing right at the rim.

So I got out a pen and wrote all over the ketchup bottle. “Squirts Really Far,” I wrote. “Good for Food Fights.” The delicious evil inherent in even thinking about a food fight made her clap her hands together.

They say never to do anything with a child that you don’t want to keep repeating every day for a year, but I’d started this little arts and craft session, so I was happy to oblige when she asked for seconds of applesauce and then wanted to write on that label, too. I provided testimonials (“Tastes good.” – Maren) and some serving suggestions (“Eat two helpings!”) The defaced bottles were the first things Maren wanted to show her Mom when she was picked up, and I could tell that every foodstuff in their household would soon be getting the Sharpie treatment, possibly including bananas.

Although my children would be happy to offer long testimonies on my mediocrities as a mother, the truth is that I’m really saving myself for grandmotherhood. I love to taunt them with tales of how I’ll feed their kids potato chips for breakfast and let them watch unlimited brain-rotting television. “You can’t do that!” they usually shriek, and I just chuckle darkly. I’ve learned just a couple things about children, and one is that they love, love, love naughtiness – not necessarily being naughty themselves, but watching others cross the line.

I remember reading aloud the Betsy-Tacy series to Mary Katherine a few years ago. Even writing more than seventy years ago, that Maude Hart Lovelace knew the kind of naughtiness that would thrill kids. I got to the point where I could tell how great the evil was by how still Mary Katherine would become, as if she was afraid to miss a word. When the girls pretended they were beggars, she did not move for long, long moments. And the night when I read about how the girls cut each other’s hair, I looked up to discover that Emma had crept into the room and was sitting on the edge of the bed. This naughtiness was too good to miss.

Mary has always loved a good villain, and she liked to skirt right up to the edge of badness in her day. After seeing The Best Christmas Pageant Ever one year, she spent the next several months “playing Hurdman.” She would become a member of that play’s rabble-rousing family, and I would be expected to register shock and horror at her naughtiness. “The Hurdmans have just covered the cat with peanut butter!” I would gasp, and she would run around the house for a while, and then inform me that she’d just burned down the school. “Oh, Hurdmans!” I would wail, and her angelic face would light with glee.

Why is evil more fun than goodness? I’m sure I wrote a paper or two about it in grad school, and I’m sorry to report that I think Paradise Lost was involved in at least one of them. These days, though, I’m keeping it simple.  Make a kid laugh and figure out a new way to kill time that seems naughty, but is really harmless. That’s what I call a good day.