The Next Time Around

In the wee hours on Friday morning, we sat outside and watched the Geminid meteor shower. It was a little cold (high 30s), but we wrapped up in blankets, lit the charcoal grill for some radiant heat, stretched out in our zero gravity deck chairs by the pool, and gazed upward. The chairs are positioned so our backs are to the Strip, some 20 miles to the north. To the south, the sky was dark and littered with twinkling stars. I quickly picked out Orion's Belt, the only constellation I can always find. Even before I could find the North Star and the few other constellations I can identify, a meteor shot through the sky.

I've meteor-watched before, but until we moved to the desert (land of incredibly clear night skies), meteor-watching was more a matter of "Was that one? I think I just saw one." Now, there's no mistaking them. I wouldn't say the sky was exactly alight with meteors, but we saw 20 or 30 of them in the space of a couple hours. Each one was beautiful and thrilling - and there's something so intriguing and romantic about the fact that we're only now seeing something that actually happened billions of years ago.

Glaciers in Alaska, meteors, the way cacti get all fat with stored water after it rains, geology, black holes, the space-time continuum - if there is a next life, I think I'll study science instead of liberal arts. I wasn't very interested in science when I was in high school and college in this life, although I did take not one, but two physiology courses at Michigan, the first one to fulfill a distribution requirement, the second because the first was just wonderful. But I am fascinated by science now, from giddy astrophysics to humble biology. It all has an orderliness, a sequential, consequential logic, but also a sort of explanatory magic.

Risks & Rewards

I played blackjack this week with a table-full of hard-core gamblers who considered me a lightweight because I have rules about when I leave based on how much I've won or lost. Apparently, discipline is not the hallmark of self-described "real gamblers." The two men and two women I joined at the table are people I've played with before. I like them because they play well and aggressively, they mind their own business, and they don't complain constantly (as if the cards or the dealer or the casino were on a personal crusade to separate them from their money or as if they were chained against their will to the table). I can't say they ever seem to be having a wonderful time, but they aren't the pictures of misery you sometimes find at blackjack tables, especially on late weekday afternoons at local casinos.

I had a nice run of luck and was within $100 of doubling my money within 40 minutes. The guy to my right noticed me counting my chips during the shuffle and asked if I was ahead. I nodded, then told him I always leave when I've doubled my money. He was astonished and his exclamations prompted a table-wide discussion of how bizarre it is to have a financial goal and to leave when you reach it. They demanded to know if I had similar rules on the downside and were amazed to learn that I do. Each had a story of giving back significant winnings. The stories were confusing, but the motives for continuing to play as big stacks of chips went away included the conviction that the good luck would return (notwithstanding temporary setbacks), the need to catch up with large overall losses (kind of a "we'll make up our losses with volume" theory), and the belief that there was nothing more compelling to do.

I thought it would be tactless to say I don't have overall losses, but I did say that, like them, I could play again the next day if I didn't feel finished and that I wasn't usually up for marathon playing anyway (it's not that challenging a game and, after a while, the house advantage gets tiresome). These statements struck them as crazy. They told me I wasn't a real gambler and we all laughed. When I made that last $100, colored up my chips and prepared to leave, they shook their heads in bewilderment that was, as far as I could tell, not at all tinged with envy. If anything, they pitied me.

I think it's interesting that they consider discipline and limits to be signs of lack of authenticity where gambling is concerned. Could this also be the reason so many people are so risk-averse? Taking the right risks is the foundation of progress and success in every arena, but it's certainly a gamble - and not a particularly good one if you approach it pell-mell, without planning ahead and thinking about consequences. But there's no requirement that you approach it pell-mell. Discipline and limits aren't anathema to the real deal; they're what make intelligent risk-taking possible.

All That Glitters

My neighborhood is alight with holiday decorations. This isn't unusual: the people around here decorate, Vegas-style, for everything from Christmas to Veteran's Day. There is barely a day throughout the year when facades and front yards aren't resplendent with lights, flags so large they could be used as tarps to cover the houses altogether, and, inexplicably, giant inflatable holiday-appropriate figures. Turkeys, ghosts, pumpkins, Cupids, drum and fife corps, penguins, Santas complete with reindeer and sleighs, snowmen, etc. For one three-week period that seemed to last forever and was tied, as far as I could tell, to no widely recognized holiday, an enormous inflated Scooby-Doo stood sentry in front of a house five or six away from ours. In a community where there are rules about what you can park on the street and what your driveway has to look like, this seemed untoward. Especially as Scooby-Doo's posture crumpled sadly due to partial deflation, I considered calling the property management company to complain, but the thought of dealing with them was more offensive than having to tolerate Scoob.

I don't understand the impulse to decorate the outside of one's home. I suppose it could be the outward expression of irrepressible high spirits caused by holidays, but to me it has a show-offy quality, sort of a "Look how far we went!" vibe. Even if it's about giving one's neighbors something to enjoyable to look at as they pass by versus making them green with envy (or nausea), it seems very external to me. Most people here don't even decorate their houses themselves; they hire services to do it. (It's hilarious to watch crowds of these service people swarm all over houses in the weeks leading up to major holidays, then repeat the performance again in the days after as they dismantle everything.) I'd be willing to bet these people also send those Christmas cards printed with their names and in envelopes with computer-generated labels for both the mailing and return addresses - not a shred of personal sentiment anywhere to be found, unless you consider the DNA in the saliva used to lick the envelope to be personal sentiment.

I think the holidays are about what goes on inside the house, not what's hanging from its rafters. Family and friends, good food and thoughtful gifts, cozy sweaters and college football bowl games - those are the things that spell irrepressible high holiday spirits to me. My house may be one of the few non-players in the neighborhood parade of holiday glitz, but it's glowing inside. I certainly hope the same is true of the decorated houses.

Blog, Jr.

The Relevant Articles page on my website is turning into sort of a mini-blog on gender and career issues. Check it out sometime.

Epithets

As I walked to my flight in the Houston airport last Saturday, I happened to notice a bookstore display prominently featuring a book called Why Men Marry Bitches. I've been thinking about this ugly title and the word "bitch" and how it's used ever since. I don't know anything about the book itself (nor do I think I want to), but once the B word was the 5-letter equivalent of a 4-letter word not used in polite company. Not only would it not appear on the cover of a book prominently displayed in an airport bookstore, it also wouldn't describe a woman that any other than the most un-self-respecting of men would marry. It meant a pushy, harsh, nasty, cutting, self-centered, mean, critical and never satisfied woman who was horrible in a particularly female kind of way - an altogether awful human being.

I’m guessing the book uses the word "bitch" in a more 21st century way to describe a woman who thinks for herself, doesn't cut people much slack, and insists - probably vocally and in no uncertain terms - on high standards from herself and the people around her. All of this, of course, would make her "difficult" in the minds of the traditionally, conservatively inclined and anyone else who thinks women should be seen and not heard.

This pisses me off. A woman who refuses to be a doormat or even predominantly a subservient listener (as opposed to an active participant) should not necessarily be labeled difficult. A woman with a mind of her own who is willing to express her opinions and insist on high standards is not necessarily a bitch. A man with the same characteristics wouldn't be slammed with a similarly derogatory term. I understand the classic need for the weak or intimidated to denigrate the strong and the threatening, but come on....

Why has the word come to mean (as my cool new iMac Leopard dictionary widget defines it) "a woman whom one dislikes or considers to be malicious or unpleasant?" That definition covers a lot of territory. The word has evidently become an all-purpose descriptor to apply to any woman who doesn't fit one's personal definition of what a woman should be. It seems to me to have become a misogynistic social statement rather than merely a noun used to label legitimately bad behavior.

Only in Vegas

At around 3:30 yesterday, C. and I joined a couple in their 40s or maybe early 50s at a blackjack table at the Venetian. We played and exchanged pleasantries (where are you from, what do you do, etc.) for 45 minutes or so, then the woman said she had to go get dressed and asked the man not to wait too much longer before he came up to get ready. Turning to us, and with a nice, dimply smile, she said they were getting married at 6:00. We exclaimed congratulatorily (even as I wondered if maybe I'd heard wrong - casinos are pretty loud even two days before Thanksgiving, and what a surprisingly - and wonderfully - casual way to spend the hours before your wedding). Play continued as we asked how they met and the other questions you ask people who are about to get married. They were all smiley and very sweet with each other as they told us their story. After she gave him her chips and left, he stuck around for another half hour, glancing at his watch every five minutes (adorably), told us all he really had to do was shave and put on his suit, won some more money, and then, with more congratulations from us, headed off to get married.

The Farther, The Better

I've written before (here and here) that I love to think about time as something other than a straight line. The notion that the past and future might exist simultaneously with, and influence, the present is both cool and intellectually challenging. I saw the movie Next last night and realized that time and its unfolding also have an impact on thinking strategically and not confusing outcomes for goals.

Next is not a great movie, but it's a good one. Much tighter and more taut than Déjà Vu, although that movie also raised intriguing time issues (in and among all the explosions). Both movies illustrate the sequential, consequential nature of actions and events - how one thing flows from and is shaped by another - while, at the same time, clarifying that the slightest change, including awareness of past and future, can utterly transform outcomes. Next goes several steps further and demonstrates (correctly, I think) that if your goal is too short-term and specific, you'll end up with the wrong outcomes even if you achieve it.

I've always been struck by how willing people are to plow ahead without first articulating what they want to achieve and why they want to achieve it. You need to think ahead and figure out which actions and paths will get you what you really want, whether you're driving a car and will have to turn left at some point (it makes more sense to move into the left lane a block or two before the turn, right?) or you're trying to succeed in your career or retire when you're 45 or whatever. You also have to understand what a goal really is. Many of the things usually labeled goals are actually outcomes - financial security, teamwork, career success, marriage, saving someone from a particular disaster, etc. Set up as goals, things like this, however desirable, won't by themselves make one set of actions clearly better or more effective than another, and they can easily lead to skewed results.

This isn't news to me - I wrote about it a long time ago in Madison, Wisconsin. But I hadn't focused before on time's impact on the distinction between goals and outcomes. The skewed result in Next demonstrates that even something that looks like a well articulated goal may turn out to be only an outcome if you think far enough down the road - and so the farther ahead you can envision, the more directed and pertinent and successful your actions will be.

I Know You Are, But What Am I?

Warning: This is more an essay than a blog post, but I got carried away.

I like intellectual patterns and I tend to see them in very disparate occurrences and situations. Today, it's (a) the recent flap over the 2007 performance of the New England Patriots and (b) women lawyers so timid that they are still - in 2007 - waiting for permission to have rewarding, significant careers rather than grabbing the opportunities in front of them with both hands. To me, both phenomena (and I use the word in two of its senses for the Patriots' performance) are part of a pattern I don't like that says nothing is pure and everything must be measured by reference to what the least charitable someone else might think. They also seem to be part of a pattern that says something about power.

When the Pats scored 52 points against the Redskins, there was a lot of grumbling about running up the score as well as some dire predictions about how such superiority of attitude and dominance of play might well lead to, among other negative repercussions, a deliberate attempt to injure the quarterback. I'm tempted to go off on a tangent about how any such attempt would be reprehensible and possibly criminal or about how provocation does not excuse violent behavior however much it may explain it. And regardless of that 52 points, it's hard to imagine that the Patriots' exceptional play hasn't already turned them into a hunted team that everyone wants to knock off. (Nice try, Colts - and I mean that sincerely.)

But I'm on a different track today. As I watched the Patriots play in Dallas the week before the game in question, it occurred to me that their coach might well be trying to build a perfect football team. His insistent focus on what his talented team could have done better in every game, which is evidently how he coaches and also how his players look at results, seemed beautiful in light of how very good the team is. By normal standards, they were already well past good enough. When I watched the game in question with this notion in mind, it seemed to me that the Redskins were basically irrelevant. The only worthy opponent the Pats had encountered up to that point on the road of the 2007 season was the Pats themselves. They looked to be trying to beat their own previous best and the result was football played gloriously, at a giddily high level.

But to my surprise, the reaction the day after the game was an indignant chorus of how unsportsmanlike and classless it was for the Patriots to have made the Redskins look so hapless. Huh? I suppose the Redskins did look hapless, but isn't that a Redskins issue? Was it necessarily the Patriots' motivation? Their goal? Their fault? Couldn't it as easily have been an unintended byproduct of the superb performance occasioned by their pursuit of football perfection? And, if so, should that pursuit of perfection be hampered by potentially unfortunate byproducts? Frankly, I don't even see what's so unfortunate about this byproduct. If the Redskins can't handle the Patriots without looking hapless, then the Redskins should get better. (And, if they do, they are free to prove it by soundly beating the Patriots the next chance they have.)

It's ridiculous to suggest that the Patriots shouldn't play to the best of their abilities and pursue something extraordinary because their opponents aren't up to it and will look bad by comparison. Why is it unsportsmanlike to do your best in a game that is about winning and entertaining the masses? Why is it more sportsmanlike or respectful to do only what's necessary to beat the other team, then sit back and coast? Is that somehow less disheartening to the loser? And anyway, why is it even relevant in this context how the loser ends up looking or, for that matter, feeling?

I've always believed that too many people worry too much about what other people inclined to think badly about them will think of their behavior - and, as a result, they make cramped, coerced, conservative decisions instead of big, free, innovative ones. I had a boss once who asked me apropos of an interpersonal mess created by a peer's discomfort with the exceptional results generated by one of my groups, "Would it have killed you to make XYZ comfortable with what you were doing?" I was astonished by the question. It wouldn't have killed me at all, but it never occurred to me - both out of respect for XYZ (why would I do him the discourtesy of assuming he had to be managed?) and because I never dreamed that he (or anyone else) would perceive my group's success as a way I was trying to make him look bad. I was just doing my job. It wasn't about him or directed at him in any way; he was completely irrelevant to my motivations, my intent, and my group's performance. But, apparently, I should have foreseen his discomfort and found a way to make him comfortable, too. Sorry to be repetitive, but huh? Why on earth would he think my group's results had anything to do with him? Why couldn't they be purely what they were? Why did my group's success justify his attempt to blame his own feeling of inadequacy on me? Why couldn't he give me the benefit of the doubt? Do we have to correct for the upside of success by slamming the people responsible for it?

And it's not like any of this helps the weaker. A woman lawyer recently told me she wanted to get on an important committee, but “because I deserve it, not because I’m a woman.” I told her she shouldn’t care why she got on the committee. In a place like her firm, where women still don’t routinely find themselves on important committees, it’s silly to turn down a leadership opportunity because affirmative action is or might be behind the invitation. The goal is to get there and then prove via great performance that you deserve to be there, not to wait for the powers that be to recognize that you’ve earned it the “regular” way.

She looked unconvinced and added that she didn’t want “the guys down the hall to hate me because as a woman I got it instead of them.” This, too, is ridiculous. If she has a contribution to make and she’s willing to stand or fall by her performance on the committee, why should it matter to her that a few sour-grapes types may grumble or doubt her merit or think she got an unfair advantage? Does she hate men because they routinely get opportunities, advantages, mentoring that she doesn’t? Does she think they hate each other for this reason? Of course not. She might hate the system, but there’s no percentage in hating the beneficiaries – unless they intentionally work to exclude you. In her case, they weren’t doing that, but her fear that the traditionally powerful would attribute bad motives to her for not doing it their way was very effectively achieving the same result.

I'm thinking all this has to do with the one-size-fits-all relations that are assumed to exist between the strong and the weak, regardless of the particular situation. The strong are assumed to be so at the expense of the weak. The weak are assumed to be at the mercy of the strong and also to be trying to cut them down or curry favor with them at all times. None of these assumptions is inevitably true.

I agree that it is incumbent on the strong not to use their strength to harm the weak and to deploy the advantages of strength appropriately. But the weak have an obligation too, and that’s not to blame the strong for weaknesses they did not cause and are not exploiting. Whether you're strong or weak, there's still room for effort and for excellence. There's still room to pursue great performance, to innovate, to challenge yourself, to stay in the game and succeed spectacularly. If your motives are pure, you shouldn't have to give up in the face of strength or weakness. You shouldn't have to stop and rest on your laurels the instant you achieve the lowest common denominator with which the least capable or charitable of your fellow strivers feels comfortable. You should be able to give it your all, give others the benefit of the doubt, and count on being given the same in return.

I'll Give You Aggressiveness!

Sometimes I wonder if the media is on a deliberate and targeted mission to disempower women. Articles like this one, which states that women don't start businesses as commonly as men because women "aren't as aggressive," are legion. It's basically impossible to read the financial press without being hit in the face by some denigrating depiction of women's abilities, motives, moxie or stick-to-it-iveness.

A statement like "women aren't as aggressive" is just stupid. First, it describes an impact, not a root cause. Second, it's far more likely that women don't start businesses as often as men because the business world is still preeminently a man's world, delineated by male rules, personalities, organizational structures, time demands...and men. It's indisputable that women don't have the same access to big-time networks, financing or other resources. Third, is it even true that men start far more businesses? I seem to recall reading years ago that women-owned businesses employed more people than the Fortune 500 companies combined. Fourth, as Natalie Angier points out in the exhilarating and gorgeously written Woman: An Intimate Geography, watch little girls at play or bands of junior high school girls bully members of lesser social groups and then try to make the case that females aren't naturally aggressive.

You have to wonder if this demeaning characterization of women is meant to be directive or prescriptive. Even if the onslaught is not intentional, the constant attempts to define us disadvantageously are demoralizing. A woman has to be made of pretty stern stuff to withstand them and choose to succeed anyway. To be fair, I suppose statements like "women aren't as aggressive as men" dictate how men are supposed to be, too, and also in a limiting way. But whether or not anyone likes it in the abstract, aggressiveness is a prized characteristic in the business world we've got. Until our organizations and societies and operations demonstrate parity, the impact of these one-size-fits-all characterizations will always be harder on women. Given the current state of affairs, a woman seeking to succeed as an entrepreneur or, indeed, as a businessperson of any other stripe already has a tougher hill to climb. To call women as a gender "not as aggressive" isn't helping.

Secondhand Smoke

Southern Nevada is a great place to live for a lot of reasons, including our almost complete lack of natural disaster potential. No hurricanes or tornadoes, no earthquakes or tidal waves, no volcanoes or floods or blizzards or avalanches, nothing much in the way of precipitation of any sort. We sometimes have magnificent lightning; it lights up with sky with vertical bolts like some Las Vegas stage spectacular, but it's rarely accompanied by rain or even serious clouds.

We do, however, have one geologic drawback and that's our proximity to California with its natural disasters galore. For the last three days, there's been an acrid smoky smell to the air - not unlike in the casinos with tired ventilation systems, but outside. The sun seems to be wrapped in a few layers of dirty cheesecloth. And there's a pall of very nasty-looking yellowish haze hanging over the Strip and other lower-lying areas. Obviously, this is not even in the same ballpark of important or threatening as the actual wildfires they're suffering in southern California, but it's mighty ugly and, in terms of what it means for broader air and weather patterns, it's disconcerting, too.