I totally stole this from K.:
Category: The Shadow Knows
New use for iPhone
NY Times tech columnist David Pogue and his estranged wife.
Therapy
I was surprised to find that so few men are in the profession. (Two of the best therapists I had were men.)
When I’ve had female therapists, they were a little too “there, there!” for me. Always wanting to soothe and support (I have girlfriends for that) when frankly, I needed someone to kick my ass, challenge me, get me into gear. (This one therapist was much more interested in having me maintain my then-relationship than I was. I realized later that she enjoyed hearing my stories — because I’m such a good storyteller! She wanted to hear more every week, she thought we were a “wonderful” couple. We weren’t. I was there to untangle and disengage, and she insisted I try to adjust instead.)
Anyway, since my communication style is more male than female, I seem to do better with men. I mean, we do get into emotional stuff — but it’s not the main focus. Until I read this article, I didn’t realize that I’d beaten the odds by having a male therapist.
How to spot a psychopath
I’ve dated a few people who score toward the high end. How about you?
‘I love women. So what?’
Apparently Mr. IMF assaulted a maid in Mexico, too.
Republican family values
I know, you’re shocked too, right?
Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver, separated after she learned he had fathered a child more than a decade ago — before his first run for office — with a longtime member of their household staff.
Shriver moved out of the family’s Brentwood mansion earlier this year, after Schwarzenegger acknowledged the paternity. The staff member worked for the family for 20 years, retiring in January.
It never fails to astound me, the number of grown men who wouldn’t think of using a condom — which is a lot cheaper than child support.
Living dolls
I’ve never understood women who treat their daughters like little dolls, putting on makeup, getting their ears pierced and dressing them like fairy princesses and/or sluts instead of like little kids. It’s kind of creepy.
Hallmark moment
I was in a store with a friend the other day and we passed a display featuring items that proclaimed “Live, Laugh, Love” — a phrase that was okay the first time someone used it, but has now become a million-dollar industry of triteness. You can even buy wall decals!
My friend looked at it and sneered, “Die, Cry, Hate.” Which cracked me up.
Yep
What Krugman says. The torture isn’t about sadism. It’s about egotistical assholes who need to see themselves starring in their own private action adventure.
Dead suit walking
From Newsweek,via Mary at Pacific Views:
Many of these guys may be great on the back nine but totally lack the skill set to get them through anything like this, says Judith Gerberg, a Manhattan-based executive career coach. “If you went to the college of your choice, married the woman of your choice, and bought the house of your choice, you’ve never dealt with rejection. You’ve never had to develop fortitude.” She gives her clients a chart with all the hours of the day, because corporate types are used to having other people color-code their life. If not quite the Great Depression, it is certainly the Great Humbling.
But the problem facing these white collar workers isn’t new and isn’t only a problem for the guys. Just go back and read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bait and Switch from 2006 where she lays out what it feels like to be an unemployed white collar worker in the 21st Century USA.
[I]n Bait and Switch, she enters another hidden realm of the economy: the shadowy world of the white-collar unemployed. Armed with a plausible résumé of a professional “in transition,” she attempts to land a middle-class job — undergoing career coaching and personality testing, then trawling a series of EST-like boot camps, job fairs, networking events, and evangelical job-search ministries. She gets an image makeover, works to project a winning attitude, yet is proselytized, scammed, lectured, and — again and again — rejected.
Bait and Switch highlights the people who’ve done everything right — gotten college degrees, developed marketable skills, and built up impressive résumés — yet have become repeatedly vulnerable to financial disaster, and not simply due to the vagaries of the business cycle. Today’s ultra-lean corporations take pride in shedding their “surplus” employees — plunging them, for months or years at a stretch, into the twilight zone of white-collar unemployment, where job searching becomes a full-time job in itself. As Ehrenreich discovers, there are few social supports for these newly disposable workers — and little security even for those who have jobs.
The Newsweek piece describes the networking sessions, the boot camps and the career coaches. And it describes how the men they talk to believe that somehow it is their fault that they haven’t found a job.
Perhaps we should do more to build up our social supports instead of blaming the victims again. Or maybe even put some focus on jobs.
“Don’t work for free,” I’ve always advised my friends. “Take your lunch hour. Don’t kid yourself that your boss will be grateful if you eat at your desk, he’ll only expect it all the time. Don’t be any more loyal to your company than they are to you, because they will drop you in a hot second if it makes their bottom line look better.”
And you know, most of them didn’t believe me.
In an odd sort of way, I feel lucky. Being periodically unemployed, living so close to the edge for so long and having a political and social context for all of it has left me better prepared than most. It’s been so long since I expected life to be fair, I can’t even remember.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s been difficult, and it continues to be painful. (Today I started obsessing over how I can afford to get my car inspected in July.) It’s no picnic. But at least it’s not the shock to my system it is to so many others.
It’s much worse for the control freaks I know — people who wouldn’t dream of coloring outside life’s lines — who are totally disoriented now. I hope they get their sea legs, because only the strong are going to survive.