I Say it Therefore I am

I finish this week with a few quotes of note, to me anyway. The first comes from a blog called Orangette written by a talented writer named Molly Wizenberg. Molly, who needs no plug from me because she is doing so well on her own, was a Ph.D. candidate when she changed course and started a food blog five years ago. Today, she has a book published, A Homemade Life: Life Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table, a monthly column in Bon Appetit Magazine where I first encountered her, and she and her husband are opening a restaurant in Seattle. Give her a try, because she is phenomenal, and, if you want to know who I aspire to be, (other than the Ph.D part and the fact that she’s on a different coast); I think she’s my next generation dream alter ego.

In the FAQ section of Orangette, Molly addresses her decision to change her career and writes:

“I decided, I would just get a job doing whatever, and then write after hours. I told a journalist friend of mine about my decision, and being very wise, he suggested that I start a blog. It would help hold me accountable, he said: having a blog would force me to sit down and write regularly, even when it felt difficult.”

While we all know I came to this blog with a little less planning than Molly, as I was reading this quote a wave of recognition flowed through me. This week it has been extraordinarily hard for me to come up with subjects for Middle Passages. Yet, I kept plugging, surprising myself really (especially on Monday). Last night at dinner I patted myself on the back, telling my husband and daughter how proud I was that every day, when I thought I couldn’t do it, I forced myself to sit down and write, because just as Molly’s friend suggested, I was “holding myself accountable.” That dinner comment though, came out before I found the quote on Orangette.

The next reference, which Molly also led me to, is: “Be bold, be daring, and be willing to fail and you will succeed.” This comes from a blog she links to: The Amateur Gourmet, written by Adam Roberts, another “foody” who has also written a book for sale: The Amateur Gourmet. The quote speaks to me because here I am, three months later, typing at the computer when on the surface, you’d think I'd be out chasing another recruiting job. There is, I suppose, some risk inherent in attempting to move forward in a way not related to what appears on my resume. Instead, I’m submitting articles hoping for publication and applying to writing jobs on the strength of four whopping writing credits. Another smart person, although I don’t know who, said something like “The only thing worse than failure is the failure to try.” So thanks Adam for reminding me of that. I’m putting your phrase in my back pocket so I can take it out to read once in a while.

Last but not least, a quote from yours truly, from Tuesday’s blog: “Could the mere act of identifying myself as a writer in print make it true?” Those who read on Tuesday will know that during an outplacement seminar my subconscious presented me with a “professional title” that my conscious mind desperately wants to believe. So, after calling my own little bluff here in this blog that day, I changed my Middle Passages Profile on Thursday morning to: “Writer and business professional…” Last evening (Thursday night) I checked email, and found a note from an editor from my favorite niche magazine, accepting my latest essay for publication in their next issue. Imagine that.

Do you think if I tell you about the creamy risotto I made last night using the leftover drumsticks and sausage from earlier in the week, with chopped green peppers, fennel and beef stock because I didn’t have chicken, it will make me a food blogger too?

A Difficult Dish

Sometimes I think I’m way behind as it pertains to technology, after all, I’m still trying to figure out Twitter. Then again, perhaps not. In a phone call this morning, a friend directed me to a commentary that appeared in The Boston Globe today. The topic of Christopher Muther’s essay; “Antisocial Status” was whether Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have “turned us into a nation of…narcissists,” and focused on his temporary decision to withdraw from what he called “self absorbed,” Facebook updates.

Now, we all know that my Facebook membership is in its infancy and I’m in test-drive mode. But although my three “friends” and one trivial comment have dangled out there with no response for almost a week now, I’ve had a little more experience through my daughter, who like every teenager, is a Facebook addict. Occasionally, and I mean occasionally least I become a “Facebook Stalker” she lets me look at some of the comments and pictures on her friends’ “walls.” And I get it. It’s nice to stay in touch, to keep up, to feel involved with what is going on.

I hadn’t, however, read The Globe article before leaving the too quiet house this morning to develop a little interaction of my own. After taking a long walk, I treated myself to a cup of coffee at the French café located in our town center. There I plunked myself down at a wrought iron, marble-topped table, unfolded the paper and read Mr. Muther, who notes: "If I thought my friends were interesting, Facebook has taught me otherwise.” His cynicism was ultimately reined in during a conversation with Hal Neidzviecki, author of “The Peep Diaries; How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors,” who counters that tedious updates on Facebook are not authored by self absorbed people, but by people looking for a “human connection.” Mr. Neidzviecki says:

“There’s a certain charm to [Facebook] status updates of ‘I’m making soup.’ These things have a beauty to them because they’re little domestic details of our lives. Once upon a time we lived in villages and everybody knew that someone was making soup. Now we live in isolation…In certain ways you could say that these are…gestures that bring us together.”

So the intriguing part of all of this is that as I was reading, the six professional looking women crowded at the table beside me started discussing Facebook and LinkedIn. The café was packed today; there were a lot of dialogues going on and I couldn’t catch every word. But as I stared intently at Mr. Muther’s article so it wasn’t obvious that I was listening, it became clear that they were trying to understand the use and effectiveness of on-line social and professional networking.

Here is a confession. Any time I am sitting alone in a public place, I am thirteen again, too shy to intrude upon conversations with people I assume are better, smarter and more important than me. On top of that, there’s that darned good manners thing with which I was raised. Had I though, mustered up some nerve, this is what I would have said: “Hey guys, I’m new to Facebook, but I’m sold on LinkedIn. After three clicks yesterday in a networking capacity, I found a job to apply for that I would never have remembered if it weren’t for a visit to the on-line network. As for Facebook, well, I’m feeling a bit more reserved, but know that I could go home right now and reach out to high school and college friends if I wanted to advertise the fact that I’m looking for support in a career search.”

In this world where we are disjointed, too busy, secular, withdrawn and removed from each other, any method used to engage other humans is probably a good one. Of course, it might have resulted in a step ahead in the networking game if I’d had the courage to make my point in person. Maybe I would have done better if the topic had been Minestrone.

The Real Thing

Had I known what was in store for this morning, I would have reserved the name of last Friday’s post, because after today I know the real meaning of “On-Line Angst.” Which is to say that a writing job for which I have questionable qualifications but have seen several times in the last month, popped up on my screen this morning via a circuitous route that started with a stranger’s LinkedIn profile. I’m all for listening when life presents a less than understated hint and when I decided to apply, an on-line application was the only method accepted. Almost two hours and several eternities later, I pressed “Application Complete.”

As one of the principal project managers involved in implementing the on-line applicant tracking system in my old job, I am respectful of employment processes and recognize the need in this click-to-send world for screening out non-qualified candidates. After filling out the on-line application form in addition to attaching a resume and a cover letter, I was perfectly satisfied with the request to attach three on-line writing samples, except that the few samples I was able to retrieve before hastily departing my old office are not in the software applications requested. After cutting, pasting, submitting and failing multiple times, at the end it was less about applying and more about playing a game to see how tenacious (a word I use on my professional biography) I could be.

The answer is “tenacious enough.” Ultimately, after submitting the one writing sample that I had in Microsoft Word, then creating and attaching two Microsoft Word documents containing hyperlinks to my other two samples, I was allowed to press send. While not in the style or format requested, I’m feeling a bit cynical here. That job has been up for well over a month, and as a former recruitment professional I’m thinking I know why. A cumbersome on-line application process is scaring candidates away--it is a fine line between screening unqualified applicants out, and screening everyone else out too. So I’ll go for some optimism here. Considering a possible dearth of candidates, perhaps someone will click on my links.

It’s a stretch though. I have plenty of experience being inundated by candidates, and I know, at least from a recruiter’s point of view, how important it is for job applicants to play by the rules. The networking gurus will tell me that I need to find someone other than an HR person to send my resume to. And I hear them. Until I do though, I don’t expect anything to come from this foray into on-line exasperation. When all was said and finally done however, I awarded myself a victory medal. After all, job or no job, tenacity ruled and an inflexible system failed to beat me.

Am I?

Today’s subject relating to the job search is “Professional Branding.” If you look at my profile on Middle Passages (down at the bottom of the left column) you will find the following: “I am a professional with strengths in writing, communication, leadership and talent acquisition.”

That “brand” if you will, is a broad-based description of my professional persona that I developed a few weeks into unemployment via coaching from my outplacement consultant. The goal is to repeat that little blurb until I can say it with confidence, because the statement is how I should be introducing myself in networking conversations. Were I a bit more specific in my career goals, or better said, when I become a bit more specific with regard to my career goals, the statement should become less ambiguous too.

This topic sits at the forefront because I just returned from a seminar on professional branding at the outplacement firm, presented by the same career counselor who works with me. While he has reviewed the information covered in the seminar during our weekly one-on-one appointments, my theory was that extra attention to the matter wouldn’t hurt and the meeting presented an opportunity for networking.

To no surprise, as a class exercise we were each asked to pull together a short statement reflective of our professional brand, just as I had two months ago. The idea of this phrase is not to focus on what you were, as in “I was a Senior Recruitment Manager for a billion dollar retailer” but to define who you are, including the talents, attributes and skills that you want to market in seeking your next position. Notwithstanding that I had already developed the statement above; apparently I need a bit more practice, as my message didn’t roll off my tongue today or out of my pen for that matter. During the brief time offered, I scrambled to recreate my professional brand statement and wrote the following: “I am a writer and business professional with skills in project management, leadership and talent acquisition...” Coming home, I compared today’s statement to my previous words, noting the subtle variation from two months ago when I was “a professional with strengths in writing…”

Perhaps, a slight aha is called for here.

I took two things away from the meeting today. The first was a reminder that in networking, it is not who I was, but branding who I am that’s important. The second thing is that three months, a whole lot of self-analysis and seventy-five Middle Passages posts after I lost my job, I may be almost confident enough to change the order of my words. Could the mere act of identifying myself as a writer in print make it true?

Oh to be Jean-Luc Picard in the old “Star Trek: The Next Generation” series so that I could simply say: “Make it so, Number One.” What’s life though, without a bit of risk? So, if you are interested, you better look at my Middle Passages profile quickly, because it’s possible that it’s about to change.

Squeaking this One Out

After volunteering with the seniors which is the scheduled activity that gets me up and out on Mondays; I returned home knowing that at the top of the to-do list was this blog for which, over the weekend not a single idea percolated. In hopes that it would resurrect my absent creativity, I opened up Pen on Fire by Barbara DeMarco-Barrett and leafed through the pages, sure that one of her writing prompts would generate an idea. Per her suggestion, I researched a topic on the Internet, choosing the town owned Lightkeeper’s house which happens to be the location where we hold the Monday senior coffee cafes. Perched upon a hill over which daffodils planted by the garden club currently bloom, high above lobster boats swaying slowly at their moorings, the location is a frequent site for receptions and parties. On Google though, I found little related to it (hence my picture above). There must be no town supported marketing for the hall because there is no dedicated website explaining how the house (to my knowledge, the former home for the keepers of the Minot Ledge Lighthouse) came to its current incarnation.

It felt like a dead end to me (or at least involved more research than I had time for today), so I looked to Barbara for another exercise and discovered a suggestion to create lists on various topics in order to spawn writing ideas. The only list in my brain at that moment was called: “All of the things the cat does that annoy me.” Hmmm, not relevant to this blog, I’m thinking. So, again at the suggestion of Barbara, I wound up the timer for fifteen minutes and started free writing—typing whatever came to my brain. Oh dear. For the most part, you don’t want to know. But then, I did get this:

“Today is May 4th and I just realized that this is my brother-in-law’s birthday. He is forty-nine and that sounds young. Someone asked me today how I feel about being fifty. My answer was that it wasn’t worrying me until I lost my job and other than in that context, it still doesn’t. I do fret though when I think of people looking at my resume and instead of reading my name, seeing the word “Dinosaur” printed on top. In that regard I feel like I’ve already inhaled a huge portion of the pizza-pie that is life, and swallowed a lot without chewing.

The woman who asked me the question happens to have two years on me and four almost grown children. She remarked that she finds her age “liberating” which I understand. As moms of “getting-to-be grown” children, life becomes less about providing for our offspring, driving them places, focusing on their educations or simply fixating on them. As our kids gain independence, the time we spend with them becomes more give and take and conversational; the fact of being a parent and in charge takes a backseat to the development of a mature relationship with our children. Unexpectedly, in addition to being mothers we find ourselves traveling back to that almost forgotten time before we started raising families. I don’t know if I’m saying this right, because there is nothing in my life I love more than helping my daughter grow. The reality though is that being in active parenting mode is so far in importance beyond anything else in the world, that other things tend to fade away. Perhaps the next stage is that some of those things that have traveled off to the shadows will find their way back into view.

I may be fifty, but age is so much less about years and more about perspective. One of the women at the senior coffee this morning came in ramrod straight, smiling and greeting everyone with warm eyes, her white hair meticulously combed page boy style. At these coffees, as I shake hands with seniors I don’t know, I try to soften the “professional recruiter” grip that has been my trademark for so many years. This woman though, stepped over to me in her spring yellow jacket and white tailored pants, reached for my hand and gave it a robust pump as strong as my own. When we commented about her lovely coat, she chuckled and confessed: “You know what? This coat is thirty years old.” It turns out she’s ninety and among other things, still models clothes for a charity fashion show. As I watched her greeting her friends and pouring her own coffee from the linen covered refreshment table, I was relieved to see how much more there may be yet to come."

The Week in Review (12)

Things I have Learned:

This line, which I stole from the Facebook wall of one of my (now) three on-line friends made me chuckle (Thank you JJ). “If your glass is half full, you need a smaller glass.”

Even though there are critical comments that will last forever attached to the online version of “His and Her Unemployment,” they cannot mitigate the many phone calls, letters, emails, comments and Linkedin messages that have been positive, encouraging and supportive. I’m holding a big glass on this one, and the liquid measures well beyond three quarters.

Even a traffic jam is a joy on the first hot day of the year.

Every comment on this blog is cause for a mini-celebration.

If your garden needs water, wash your windows, because without exception it will rain the next day.

When the blueberry coffee cake that was the cause of so much angst two weeks ago shows up in a picture in the local paper looking delicious, any lingering frustration fades away. Now, if I could only remember to wipe up the dregs of icing, still congealed on the front passenger car floor…

On-line Angst

I laughed out loud after my daughter created a Facebook account for me on Wednesday and about thirty people from my high school class popped up. I’ve dragged my feet about social networking and when two of my dearest friends/college roommates joined Facebook and suggested I do so too, even though the thought of regular contact with them appealed I still paused. After all, we have email.

However, in addition to the encouragement of these friends, in my recent networking activities, the pervasive theme with regard to finding either success as a writer or a job (or with any luck some combination of the two) is that it’s all about exposure. Therefore I’ve embraced LinkedIn and have plenty of contacts there, and Lord knows I’ve opened myself up to anyone who can find me via Middle Passages. I’ve even included a link to Middle Passages on LinkedIn. (How’s that for techno-doublespeak?) On top of this, I’m a Google maniac, searching everything and everyone, including myself, and I’m out there in some pretty direct ways. If you Google me right now you’ll find my LinkedIn profile, an on-line story with regard to our daughter’s adoption, and the recent Boston Globe Magazine article that highlights the fact that I am unemployed. Given that all that intelligence on yours truly is already public, what more is there to make me cautious about Facebook, other than my fear that it could become obsessive (which judging from the time I’ve already spent looking up people, is legitimate)?

Even though I’m smart enough to withhold unflattering pictures or comments, I am aware that with membership a certain loss of control arises, so the openness of Facebook continues to worry me. But on Wednesday, after one more person told me that from a career networking and writing point of view, Facebook could be an additional asset, I gave in.

Once registered though and scrolling through profiles of my high school and college classmates, I suddenly understood my anxiety. Before I logged onto Facebook, the “world” that discovered me on the Internet was either professional (via LinkedIn) or for the most part, anonymous. For example, there is a comment on-line related to one of my articles in Adoptive Families from a stranger, which in an odd way felt safe to me, at a time when most of my family didn’t know I had written it. A little harder to swallow were the seven comments on-line from the recent Boston Globe Magazine article, a few of whom didn’t appreciate my take; and one that was particularly nasty. I inhaled deeply on discovering those, but could move on with limited alarm because I didn’t know the authors. After all, these are the sort of “one time hits” for which I have to develop a tough hide if I’m going to continue writing. By joining Facebook though, I’m opening myself up to people I know with opinions that matter to me and whose criticism, if received, will sting. I guess it behooves me to ensure that in what ever way I appear on the Web, I can stand up to any scrutiny my on-line persona may encounter.

So as of two days ago, you can find me there in social network-land with my two friends and another link to Middle Passages. I think though, that rather than industriously “friending” old acquaintances, I will just sit back for a while and see what happens. The “on” line between my personal and professional selves is feeling pretty blurry these days. God knows how I will cope when I figure out Twitter.