nightmare

I had an incredibly difficult time falling asleep last night. Seeing as I exercised two days in a row for the first time in three weeks (due to my ridiculous cold) and that my arms were still sore from climbin on Saturday, I thought that this would be a non-issue, as I assumed I would be exhausted. But alas, no.

What was I thinking about that kept me up late at night?

Virginia.

Yes, that's right. The state of Virginia kept me up last night. I wish it were that these thoughts of Virginia were a result of me having recently visited Colonial Williamsburg, remembering a really beautiful hike, or visiting Christina in Reston, but no, that was not the case.

What kept me up at night was the news I had read recently about the "transvaginal ultrasounds" that the Virginia legislature just passed as being required of any woman that is considering getting an abortion. Oh, that, and the fact that Virginia was also going to allow its policemen and policewomen to serve as immigration agents and check for immigration status when stopping anyone for anything. Oh, and that dumb personhood law that they passed, too.

The idea of being forced to subject myself to a transvaginal ultrasound after having battled with myself to make a painfully difficult, mature, very private decision about my body and my life makes me feel physically ill.

The idea that someone can be pulled over a speeding ticket and then subject to an immigration status check, and even deported, just because of the color of their skin, their appearance, or some stereotype makes me want to cry.

The state of Virginia, hell, the state of the United States of America is that it/they is/are ridiculous.

like looking into a mirror

Someone posted this great article from The Washington Post this morning, titled "A Love Note to the Workaholic." I've been called a workaholic at times, and I've pushed it aside, not agreeing with the tag. "Workaholic," after all, means "one who loves work," does it not? And I don't think it's a LOVE of work that keeps me thinking about my to-do list and checking calculations and phrases in my mind when my head hits the pillow at night - it's a desire to make sure I did it all right.

I didn't think this article applied to me, but after reading the following passage, I realized it did:

"We start to manage situations and micromanage the people around us, not just at work but in the rest of our lives as well. We make what is uncertain certain, no matter what the cost. We basically stay so busy that the truth of our lives can never catch up. We look confident on the outside and feel scared on the inside."

I don't know if I've ever read or heard of such a perfect summary of the way that my mind works. In fact, I don't think I even knew this about myself until I read this explanation. Order, control, organization, planning, and a sense of preparedness are all things that I've learned that I value. There was a time when I thought that I was more of a risk-taker, more spontaneous, a little more reckless...but that must have just been me in my teens when being reckless still meant that I came home to my parents' home each night!

Now, I think I'd like to give myself a bit more credit than this - I'm not terrified all the time, but I do think of all the possibilities, assess all the potentials losses, outcomes, and risks, and it is for this reason that I make detailed packing lists and write events into a planner, try to tie up loose ends before I leave the office, and do my best not to leave things to chance.

Anyways. It was just nice to see someone make sense of what I know about myself :)

sick

I took a sick day today; thinking that the ill feeling I had this morning was just a result of grogginess, I went to work anyway, and then promptly left the office and got home to climb back into bed before 10:30 am. I then slept for 5 hours straight before waking up and still feeling kind of poopy.

Part of the reason that I feel so run-down is that I've been working my butt off on a major report on social and demographic trends and the gender pay gap over time, and the deadline was on Friday...meaning last week and the week before, as well as the last few weeks before then have been really REALLY intense days at work. I've been learning an awful lot, however, and I was able to write a full chapter of the report (on low-wage work and the gender pay gap).

After months of data analysis, outlines, drafting, more data analysis, tables and figures in Excel, and writing and editing...we finally submitted a draft to the Women's Bureau!*

*the draft is confidential until published by the Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor, but should anything final come out of it, I will let you know!

adventures in the kitchen

One of the Christmas gifts I got this year was a wonderful cookbook called Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison. When I was studying abroad and I had regular access to fresh and local food from the weekly farmer's market, and I had the time to experiment with new ingredients and recipes, I thoroughly enjoyed my time in the kitchen learning about new flavors and combinations of food items. It was there that I learned how to make a vinegar reduction, how to eat preserved lemon, and what to do with a jerusalem artichoke.

Since then, I've had the chance to continue working on my cooking and kitchen savvy, both as something fun to do during my free time here in DC as a working adult, and also in order to survive. One simply cannot subsist on take-out pizza and things from the convenience store...especially when one lives without a car or bike in such a food dessert as the Bloomingdale neighborhood of NW DC.

And so, this combination of factors has motivated me to have much more fun with food, grocery shopping, and my three meals a day, leading me to create all sorts of delicious things, that I'd like to share with you!

Mushroom risotto

ingredients: arborio rice, vegetable stock, scallions, yellow onion, parsley, white mushrooms, lemon zest

Polenta cakes w/tomato sauce and salad

ingredients: pre-cooked polenta, eggs, bread crumbs, tomato sauce, oregano, garlic powder, sugar, salt, pepper, spinach, garlic, lemon juice, mixed greens, green goddess dressing

Kale chips

ingredients: kale, olive oil, salt

Portuguese kale soup

ingredients: kale, white potatoes, cannelini beans, vegan chorizo, vegetable broth, white onion, crushed red pepper, salt, pepper, lemon juice, rosemary, garlic

In other words...YUM :)

Happy New Year! 2012!

It's hard to believe that I've already been in Washington, DC for a year and four months. I can't decide if it's that time flies when you're having fun, that time flies as you get older, or if time flies when you find yourself living your life day to day and have lost some sight of the bigger picture. But that's the great thing about the New Year. In the end, it's just a construct, some way that we've tried to make order and sense of the various actions that we go through during a lifetime, and when it rolls around and shocks us as we realize how much time has passed, it gives us a chance to either speed up or slow down, as we feel is needed.

This year, I have more resolutions than I can list, but I can tell you that it covers a wide range of tasks, a number of different areas of my life, and I think I'm in for a year of exciting new developments and progress. Here is a sampling of the resolutions that I've made, some that you may find boring or bizarre:

1. Floss every day.

2. Apply for graduate school; PhD programs in social policy, economics, or sociology.

3. Begin saving for retirement.

4. Write more letters. Not emails. Letters.

5. Try not to burn bridges.

6. Host more dinner parties and game nights.

In a strange way that may not be decipherable, all of the many resolutions that I've set for this year come together to help me accomplish one major personal goal: to stop being afraid. Fear of decisions, fear of loss, fear of pain, fear of fatigue, fear of repercussions, fear of stress...it's all combined to cripple me in one way or another over the past year and a half that I've been out of college, and it's about time for me to get over it all. I guess what I've learned about adulthood is that life as an adult has an immeasurable number of challenges and hurdles that no one ever tells you about, but growing up isn't about anticipating them or being prepared, because there's no way you can. Growing up is about learning how to meet the challenges and hurdles while keeping sight of life and living at the same time.

To ring in the New Year, Christina and I hosted a New Year's Eve dinner and game night at my house in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, DC:

I got to try out my brand new cookbook and made risotto w/lemon, scallions, and parsley, and braised fennel, and Christina made roasted brussels sprouts, strawberry shortcake, and her incredibly popular fiery sweet mashed potatoes. Everyone else contributed, as well, with delicious corn muffins, cupcakes, broccoli w/sundried tomatoes and balsamic vinegar, champagne, and sparkling cider to top off the meal!

Best wishes to all for a happy, healthy, and productive 2012!

Thanksgiving

I am thankful.

I am thankful for my incredibly supportive and loving family, my brilliant friends, my encouraging mentors, my job, the fact that I can feed myself and have a place to call home, and that I can afford to go home to see my family for the holiday. I am thankful that I am not cold, that I had the chance to spend four self-centered years in pursuit of a bachelor's degree, that my mind is functional, that I am safe, that I am healthy, that I do not struggle with mental health issues, that I can see, that I can hear, that I can speak, that I can move, that I can taste, that I can smell, that I can read, and so many other things.

For all of this and so much else, I am incredibly thankful.

Perhaps it is the fact that I have spent the past 15 months working on policy issues related to poverty, health and well-being, equity, and unemployment, but I find myself becoming increasingly incapable of being appreciative of one thing or enjoying some wonderful experience without thinking immediately of the many that are experiencing the want of some basic need or experiencing terror, pain, sorrow, the polar opposite at the exact same moment.

Call me a pessimist, a naysayer, a negative nancy (or norman, why can't the negative person be a dude...tangent), if you'd like, but I will be thankful for this tendency of mine to be thankful and aware at the same time. It keeps me grounded, it keeps me connected with the rest of our society, and keeps me motivated to do something outside of the day-to-day.

Thankful.

dots and funnels

Andrew Carnegie is credited with inventing vertical integration, a type of management control that condensed multiple steps of supply chain into one owner, allowing for more control over the production of the output as well as a head-on confrontation of the "hold-up problem" in which case production halts due to delays at one step of the process. After all, aren't the worries of a "hold-up" eliminated when in order to hurry along the production of a book all you have to do as a book designer is go next door to yell at the people copy-editing to tell them to hurry up so you don't have to wait any longer for the final version of the text?

However, ideas evolve, and so, naturally, vertical integration has also gone through iterations and modifications as new types of organizational needs have come to be.

In my experience working with and observing non-profit organizations, I believe that I have identified two such iterations of vertical integration or the accumulation of multiple steps of production into one organization for the sake of efficiency.

I present to you...

dot integration

and

funnel integration

dot integration is as it sounds: concentrated in one point. Non-profit organizations are as they are classified to be, non-profit, not-for-profit, and such, are often looking for ways to cut costs and increase efficiency. So, for these organizations, vertical integration makes sense. Keeping processes of production at home may allow for reduced spending; one could imagine that a researcher who wrote one publication may be asked to copy-edit another's report, for example. However, when this gets brought to an extreme, I believe the management control configuration looks more like a dot.

Example: A research assistant might double as a receptionist because she can work anywhere in the office as long as she has a computer with Stata and Microsoft Excel and also triple as a tech assistant because she can Google quick computer fixes while managing the internship program.

funnel integration is linked more to the movement of "funneling" something from a wide opening into a tiny stream. This has more to do with executive-level management than anything else. For the sake of consistency and quality control, it makes sense to have the head honchos of an organization keep their eye on overall operations. It keeps things moving and allows for a group to present a unified image.

But when I say "funnel" I don't mean fine sand passing through a delicate hourglass -- what I want you to visualize is trying to get fruit salad through a funnel that was designed for use exclusively with liquid chocolate in order to put pencil-thin detailing on top of a cupcake. That is funnel integration.

How does this apply to non-profit organizations and start-ups? Well, with these more intimate institutions and projects, the leader or founder is clearly going to be more emotionally attached to the lower-level operations of her or his staff, resulting in some levels of micromanagement and meddling. The founder of a small tech start-up might feel particularly sensitive about the organization of her new office's supply room though that's technically the job of the office manager. That's natural. But again, take it to the extreme and you get funnel integration.

Example: A president of a small research organization may require every single publication or product created by his highly-qualified and educated research team to be reviewed, critiqued, edited, designed, and reviewed four more times by him before being released. On top of this, he is peculiar about what kind of key rings are used for the office bathroom keys, how many rings you allow the phone to ring before you pick up, and how long it takes for you to press the buzzer when he arrives at the front door even though he has his own key.

Here are examples of the potential for disaster that lies behind each of these ridiculously stupid management control structures that every single freaking non-profit in DC ends up using because the entire city is populated with ridiculously educated, perfectionist, workaholic, unsympathetic, cold, jaded graduate degree-holders, and because the system is so much THE system that no one dares to try and take a crack at reinventing it:

dot integration disaster:

The research assistant, being the only research support staff member for her tiny organization is responsible for fact-checking and formatting almost all of the publications that are produced in a given month. However, during this month, she is also responsible for hiring the interns that will become the research support during the academic year, and the only way she can sanely finish her research assistance tasks is by getting interns, but it's her job to get the interns and she doesn't have time to do that because she has to help with research-related tasks. During this time, the network crashes and everyone freaks the fuck out because all their work is now inaccessible, and the research assistant can't work on hiring interns because all her time is taken up by her research assignments, but she can't do them now because the network is down, but she's the one responsible for fixing the tech issues and can't because really she's not a techie and her only response to tech problems is to Google things but the network is down. AND THEN THE ORGANIZATION TANKS.

funnel integration disaster:

The president will scream at you and harangue you if you do not show him everything that is to pass through the organization's doors and be released to the public because his expertise and his self-identified perfect word choice are crucial to add that "sparkle" to each publication. Therefore, all blog posts, statements, press releases, correspondences, newsletters, research briefs, reports, event flyers, internship descriptions, blurbs, website text, in-office memos, staff contact lists, blah BLAH blahhhhhh must be read by him. And every single piece that is reviewed will go through approximately 15 iterations and so every promised product to a funder or outside organization will be late. In order to keep the organization going we need to keep a good reputation with funders. But late reports are viewed poorly. But your president has to read everything. So everything is late. So then you don't get funding. But everything is still late and eventually you get so little funding you can't produce anything.

AND THEN THE ORGANIZATION TANKS.

Theorizing complete. Good night.