Tag: On Work

On moving toward money, and meaning.

The Guest Book

So, new ideas are bubbling up around here. I’m fanning my desire to have guest writers at Letters. So today I am going to create a new page called “The Guest Book” which will include bios of my guest writers, as they appear. It will also include my guest writer Wish List, with such names…

An Hour of UnShopping

I just got back from what I like to call “unshopping” — a painful and ludicrous part of consumer culture. This is when we de-stuff-ify ourselves. In this particular hour, I made four stops: To the church recycling dumpster, which takes cardboard and #5s, so I don’t have to throw them away. To return cans…

Time, Sculpted and Consumed

We have time, and we use it up. It is the ultimate commodity in a temporary life. In a creative space, it seems to waiver in form: great gaping hours of fearful emptiness, or ultra-thin slivers of panicked release. Between reading Jon Kabat-Zinn’s “Wherever you Go, There You Are” and Scoutie Girl’s latest post on…

The Look you are Looking For

Blogs are NOT what they used to be– which is mostly good. Fine– I’ll get the bad part out of the way quick– I’m typing this post on my iLhjvd (iPhone) which makes fir Manu typkys (many typos) and a cramp in my left hand. The good change is paired with plethora: ie. The abundance…

Earth Day, Imagined

I found that my iPhone’s App Store “What’s Hot” as Green Apps featured today, as part of Earth Day celebration and I am thrilled. Earth Day is 40 years old today, and now it is almost ubiquitous. Everywhere there are thousands of events, so many that it is impossible to even get to all of…

On Being Easy

A friend of mine from college (found her again via Facebook) recently bought a house with her man in Vermont. Amy is living a rural life, feeding the cats, listening to the wind, recovering when she needs to from the bruises of being a New Yorker. In London, on Oxford Street, it was push and…

No Apologies

The admin in the English Department thinks I am too hard on my students, I can tell by the look on her face. I posted a note on mailbox that it is “Closed for portfolio submissions.” This implies, of course, that I haven’t received all of them, and that some of the students (the ones…

Why We Gave Up

So Colin and I were going to do The Master Cleanse. Which is a great way to lose weight, but not the reason why one should do it. It’s a cleanse, after all, designed for clearing out toxins and getting you healthy. Day one was yesterday and as mentioned in yesterday’s post “Hungryland”, I spent…

Steeling Myself

The good news is that I have completed a semester’s worth of teaching. The bad news is that I must somehow complete a semester’s worth of grading, if I can, in four and half days. That includes those grades that will, inevitably, be less than a ‘C,’ thus requiring these students I have come to…

Yes We Can… Now We MUST!

Let’s enjoy today. To bask in the warmth of the light of change. Let’s enjoy the fruits of our hard work and watch CNN until our eyeballs fall out. Let’s scan the world’s papers to see ourselves, admired through others’ eyes. Let’s hold hands and sing, and high five, and, especially when the cameras are…

Problogger Content Madness!

OK, STOP already. Darren Rowse, the true-to-his-title “ProBlogger,” has tweeted, digged and dumped into my reader the same post, under a dozen different titles, over and over again and I can’t take it anymore! So, to you Bloggers with no audiences, the answer to the repeated and repeated question, “Is Writing Great Content Enough to…

Comments Accepted

Not too long ago, I did something stupid on this blog and changed a setting. That setting made people “login” to comment. The downside of that was that people I WANTED to leave comments got stopped from doing it. The other downside of that was that people I DIDN’T want to leave comments somehow figured…

21st Century Tips to Holiday Office Parties

Maybe I wouldn’t have been so inspired to write this if I hadn’t been rebuffed by UBS, my husband’s workplace, two years in a row now. UBS, that beloved multinational banking behemoth, which hit Working Mother’s Top 10 again this year for super companies to work for, hosts mammoth holiday parties every year for their…

Message from the Leaf Pile

Top 10 Reasons to Read a Blog 10. The blogger is funny, but not funny ha-ha… funny hmmmm. 9. You are bored of internet porn… it is so done! 8. Procrastination is nine-tenths of the law. 7. You hate your boss. Your boss wants you to do something other than browse the internet. You fancy…

While he was running, I stood here still

For Denny, who ran the marathon yesterday Not every To Do list has value, even in completion. Accomplishments fill time. They tire you to your bones, make you sleep better. But they are just done things, sometimes. Stand in this group if you run in circles to wear yourself out, to alleviate the boredom. Come…