Tales from a White Collar Recession or is it a Depression?

A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose your job.   (Anonymous Economist)

Last week a friend of mine was laid off from her high paying management job.  It sucks. With three kids in tow and a husband who is an entrepreneur it will be hard for her to make up for that loss. Firing the cleaning lady, laying off the nanny and eating mac and cheese isn’t going to cover the missing six figure income. 

Another friend of mine, in her mid-fifties, just got laid off from the world’s largest software company.  She is the lead bread winner in her family and has made a lot of dough in the past.   Her husband has been Mr. Mom most of their married life due to a serious, ongoing but manageable illness.  She has two teenagers, one in a swank private school and the other heading off to college shortly.  It sucks.

Houses are popping up for sale in our coveted white collar neighborhood like pimples on a teenager.  It leaves me to wonder “is everyone getting laid off?”   It rattles my nerves to hear the stories about well educated, well heeled friends, and friends of friends who have been given “pink slips.”  They are people like me who thought that somehow they would be sheltered from the economic downturn.   

The talking heads on the networks and cable stations are advising people to “retrench,” and “hunker down.”  Let me remind you…these are war terms.   With mortgage payments equaling 50% of a household income…people may have to retrench or hunker down in a different neighborhood.   

I know Obama and his peeps are saying this is a recession but when I see my hard working neighbors putting their houses up for sale because someone lost a job it makes me wonder if it isn’t a little worse than we’re being told.   

Good article if you’re wondering if this is a recession or a depression.

Frittering the Time Away Twittering

I just signed up for www.twitter.com. Just the name itself makes me think I might be frittering the time away twittering. That said, I now have a presence on, www.twitter.com; www.facebook.com; www.linkedin.com; www.sallybjornsenwrites.com; www.sallyreps.com; www.sallyreps.blogspot.com; www.sassystepmother.com; www.friendfeed.com; www.blogcatalog.com the list goes on and on. I think I’m covered. Whew! I hope that’s it for a while. Not sure I want to learn anything new after all that registering, posting and pass-wording.

I am not entirely sure why I am in all these “cyber places.” I guess it’s because all the voices—the talking heads, the magazines, the blogs, my tech savvy husband, my tech obsessed teenage boys, my painfully young IT guy, tell me that I should be. I’m not convinced that all this posting, “social networking” and twit, twit, twittering will pay off, but I’m there, here, here, there anyway—for insurance. After all, the last thing I want is to miss the speeding techno bus. For now, my presence on the socialnetworking-twitterorama- blogosphere makes me feel….secure? Vulnerable? Exposed? Over exposed? Lemming-ish?

Last week my wet-behind-the-ears tech guy almost feel off his chair when I asked him “what exactly does a twitter do.” He tried to convince me that somehow I was tragically missing out on the opportunity to keep all my followers, business contacts and friends up to speed on the daily moments of my life (I hate to disappoint). So whether or not using twitter and all that other stuff makes me money, makes me known or makes me overexposed, at least for now, my tech guy will be happy.

What is Work? Where is Work?

Today my six year old son made a pronouncement, “I figured out what work is?” My husband and I looked at him with curiosity, since neither one of us is entirely sure what we actually do. “Work is talking on the phone, sending e-mails, texting, making estimates, going to meetings, and having conference calls—sometimes with the phone on mute for five hours.”

Well, I guess you could say that about sums it up.

In the not so olden days, when work was somewhere else other than a laptop on the kitchen table or the screen on an i-phone, it was easier to understand. My dad left the house every morning, dressed in a suit and a cloud of aftershave and didn’t return until 6pm. He went to work—a mysterious place, in a big building, behind a big desk decorated with pictures of me and my siblings in awkward stages of our youth.

Occasionally, on the rare Saturday when Dad needed to tie up some loose ends, we were allowed into the inner-sanctum of his office. With the promise of “it’ll be just a sec.,” my brother and sisters and I fondled paper weights, shot staples at each other and made rubber band slingshots while we waited for dad to finish whatever he was doing. Eventually, tired of flying paperclips landing on his desk Dad sent us to the copier room for some real fun. There we smashed our faces and hands on the Xerox machine photocopying ourselves for hours. It’s no wonder that I ended up in the “photography” business.

If at six years old I was asked what my dad did everyday at his job I would have said, “He wears a dark suit, goes to a big building with a copier machine in it and bosses people around. Sometimes he goes away on an airplane for a few days, which is great because when he’s gone we eat weenie wraps and waffles for dinner. When his friends from work come to our house they like to drink, smoke cigarettes, and stay up really late.”

Now, when either my husband or I say we’re going to work my son isn’t sure where or what that means. It could imply that in pajamas one of us is going into the bathroom to talk to a man about a horse and to send a text. It could also connote going up to the bedroom where the wireless signal is better than it is in the kitchen to crank out an e-mail in bed. Or it could imply a trip to the market with that weird thing in our ear, or it could suggest going into the “den” and closing the door for an eternal conference call. Regardless of which room the “work” takes place, it means a lot of shushing and hand waving indicating that silence is required.

They say, those people who say things, that kids tend to follow their parents lead when it comes to career choices. I can imagine Cameron, our little guy confessing to a school counselor, “When I get big I want to be an e-mailing estimator who takes conference calls in pajamas, sends texts at the park and makes deals with a weird thing in my ear while driving the car to a little league game.

Is The Great American Diet Part of the Slow Clothing Movement?

Last night as I was rummaging around in my closet looking for something to wear it occurred to me that I have given, thrown or recycled a lot of clothes over the past ten years. Darn, I’d love to have some of those items back, and if not the items themselves the time it took for me to shop, clean, futz and manage them into my wardrobe. Especially now since I am no longer able to purchase any new apparel. I remember vividly, an amazing and probably overpriced DKNY sweater coat. A sort of retro 20s style with velvet accents. I wonder who’s wearing that gorgeous garment now. I wish I were.

This morning, right on the heels of my closet rummaging, I read an article in the NYTimes magazine about storage and consumerism.  By 2005, according to the Boston College sociologist Juliet B. Schol, the average consumer purchased one new piece of clothing every five and a half days.  

This eye-opening statistic got me thinking about a “slow clothing” movement. There are official slow food, slow money, slow travel and slow sex movements these days. Why not a slow clothing movement? I wondered.  And is The Great Amearican Apparel Diet the beginning of it? 

 I googled “slow clothing” and “slow fashion,” and guess what…we’re slow to the movement. People have been blogging about this for a long time. “Wear local,” they say—is that like a sweater made with Fido the family dog’s hair? Or does it mean belting your neighbor’s old drapes and wearing them as a topper, a la Maria Van Trapp? Maybe we could learn from the Hispanics who wear huarache sandals made from repurposed flat tires? Buy from a thrift store and then remake your own, the experts suggest. Sew the arms of one sweater to the bodice of another, cut off pants and make them into a patchwork skirt, turn a tube top into a Rasta hair band. I am envisioning a renaissance fair.

In one article I read in the Christian Science Monitor, the author challenged US households “to create a single outfit for every man, woman, and child that is homemade.” Going back to a bygone era, she also suggested that people mend and darn their clothes.

Good idea for those people who:

a.) Know the meaning of darn in this context.

b). Know how to darn or sew http://www.ehow.com/how_648_darn-sock.html

c). Have a sewing machine. ( Investment Tip: Buy Singer, Ticker Symbol: SEW, you heard it here).

Darn (as in Darn-it), I wish I had that DKNY sweater coat  and that brown Liz Claiborne maxi, corduroy coat from 1987, and let’s not forget the blinding Neon Obermeyer ski jacket I bought in 1992 to match the bottom of my K2s. Looking back, I admit, it was a wasteful, hedonistic and consumer-centric few decades—but we looked good.

Now, with my apparel budget cut to the quick and my participation in The Great American Apparel Diet, I am left fantasizing about my old wardrobe. I imagine a lovely waif of a “slow clothing movement” girl prancing down the runway of life in my old clothes and my Guess booties. I trust that she appreciates where her wardrobe began. I really hope, upon further reflection, that the “slow girl” hasn’t sewn the arms of my Obermeyer ski jacket onto the bodice of my brown Liz Claiborne Courdory Maxi coat. But if she has, all I can say is “you go–slow girl!”

The Boy’s to Blame

This afternoon, my six year old son hit a six year old girl and then proceeded to throw her to the ground. I watched with horror from a distance, wondering if I was witnessing a vaudeville act or a testosterone infused taekwondo move. The scream that erupted from the little girl confirmed that they were not play acting. I was aghast. The little girl’s parents, who I sort of know in a “hi, how are you” sort of way and not in a “hey let’s go have a bottle of wine and get schnockered way,” were dumbfounded.

I ran toward the fracas screaming, “Cameron, Cameron, what are you doing?” I yanked on his arm and pulled him aside. Yelling apologies over my shoulder to the little girl and her parents, “I am so sorry, so so sorry. I’m embarrassed. Please, I am so sorry. He didn’t mean to do that. He’s usually such a sweet boy.”

When I was out of earshot I dug my fingers in my son’s fleshy upper arm, “Listen Mr.,” I said wagging my finger two inches from his face for effect. “Never, ever, ever, beat up a girl. “But mommy, she threw dirt in my eyes and bark dust at my back and called me names.” “Well Mr., I don’t care what she did; there is never a reason to hit anyone, especially a girl. My son looked at me with a puzzled expression. “Why is it worse to hit a girl than a boy?” “Well,” I said walking him toward a park bench for a heart to heart, “when it comes to physical conflicts between a boy and a girl, no matter who starts the fight, the boy will always get blamed. “That’s not fair mommy,” Cameron complained. “She started it. You didn’t see her hit me first. She’s always mean to me. I couldn’t take it any longer.” I looked across the playground as the little girl’s mother consoled and protected her from the evil force standing on the other side of the play structure. All I could think is, “this is my little, sweet, baby. He didn’t mean to hurt your bratty little girl. By the way, she provoked him,” and then I realized that all that background noise and excuses didn’t matter because when it comes to hitting–the boy’s always to blame.

Weather Days from Hell

I have a bee buzzing under my trendy newsboy bonnet in the form of the proverbial Seattle “snow day.” It’s every working mother’s nightmare. The robo call comes at 6:30am, “Hello, this is a message from the Seattle Public School District. There will be no school today due to snow.” And if the powers that be are hedging their weather bets you will get the call—“Hello, this is a message from the Seattle Public School District. There will be a two hour delay today.” They might as well say, “This is the Seattle Public School District and your day is Fu#%ed.”

Now, if you’re not from Seattle you may not get this but we don’t have bad weather here. Oh sure, once in a while it snows so mcuh that we can get a sled to go downhill. But this happens about once every two years. Our snow days come in the form of one to two inches of very wet sno cone slush. In my book this is no reason to close school. I think we should have a “four inches or bust” program. I have been told that the knee jerk closures are due to our country’s litigious nature. “Imagine if someone fell on the way to school,” they say.

We are robbing our kids of the opportunity to forge ahead in inclement weather all because the fear of being sued. What will our children be able to hold over their grandkid’s heads when they’re old and gray? “I walked a mile to school in snow up to my waist. Wait; hold on…no I didn’t. When it snowed I stayed home, watched cartoons and tortured my mother while she was trying to get work done on the computer.”

This year we have had four snow days and five late start days. In our house the child care is pretty evenly divided between my husband and myself. My more flexibile work schedule, however, usually means the task of caring for our son on a snow day falls smack dab in my lap. I’m just thankful I don’t punch a clock and work for the man. Try telling your male boss that the ½ inch of melting snow on the ground means you won’t make it in to the office. You might as well just say “I can’t come to work because I just started my period.” Maybe there is a reason why dads get promoted more than moms do. Maybe the snow day in Seattle is really just a male conspiracy to keep working women barefoot and pregnant—with frustration.

And the Whales Kept on Swimmin’

I recently returned from a seven day trip to the Sea of Cortez. Well actually, some people prefer to call it the Gulf of California but I think that’s kind of misleading, especially for those who are geographically challenged and equate the Gulf of California with The OC, Sea World and South Coast Plaza.

The sea of Cortez deserves its exotic name for many reasons, least of all it’s lack of shopping malls, fake boobs and man—made glamour. For those of you who want to specifically put this place on the map, it is the body of water that separates the Baja California Peninsula from the Mexican mainland and it is absolutely paradise!

Geography aside, it was a trip of a lifetime. We saw so many dolphins, whales and sea lions that on the forth day at sea my first grade son complained, “I’m tired of whales.” We saw Blue–Footed boobies, Pelicans, Vultures, Egrets and Osprey. We snorkeled with baby sea lions, kayaked in mangroves, ate s’mores on the beach and found new constellations in the sky.

But the best part of the trip was the fact that we did not have access to radios, newspapers, blackberries or televisions. We barely had internet service and when we did it required a lot of money and patience with very little reward. While Obama was giving his speech to congress about the fragile financial precipice that we are perched upon we were adjusting shutter speeds to capture a blue whale’s enormous fluke, (by the way, the blue whale is the largest mammal to have ever lived on earth!) When the stock market hit 7,000 we were high-fivin’ the rare sight of a 70,000 lb. mother Gray whale nuzzling her 15 foot, 3 ton bambino. I was on an unintentional technology vacation and a CNN fast. I cleansed the nasty talking head toxins from my brain, banished my blackberry reflex and ousted my online obsession. And you know what…I was fine. No jitters, cold sweats or hallucinations. No one died, the world didn’t end and the giant whales…well, they just kept on swimming. http://www.expeditions.com/Destination44.asp?Destination=287