bearing blog

Pants. Pantyhose. Duck and cover.

Remember Simcha Fisher and the Great Pants Debate?

I was reminded of this the other day, because I think I have stumbled upon the Working Woman's Version of the Great Pants Debate.

It is this 2010 question about pantyhose at the popular business/HR blog Ask A Manager.

A reader writes:

"Perhaps my question is a bit trite, but do I have to wear pantyhose to an interview? I hate pantyhose. So much so that I haven’t owned or worn any in at least 10 years. I usually just wear slacks to an interview, but I bought this killer new suit, and it has a skirt, so the issue has come up again in my life."

Ask A Manager's blogger, human resources professional Alison Green, replied:

In general, no. But there are some industries — fewer and fewer of them — where women are still expected to wear pantyhose.  Are you interviewing in a particularly conservative industry? If not, bare legs are fine these days. Go with a closed shoe though.

If you’re not sure if the office is particularly conservative or not, you could play it safe and err on the side of pantyhose. (Or you could decide that if they have a problem with you not being squeezed into waist-to-toe nylon, it’s not the culture for you anyway.)

So far, so good, right?

Wrong.  Green had to close comments, and the controversy was forever after referred to as the "Great Pantyhose Debate of 2010.

Notable from the comments was Mike:

Well no one expects me or the other guys to be wearing the stuff so why should the rest of the office have to?

Are there still places that balk at the thought of women choosing to wearing pants as well?

Ah, Mike.  So refreshing, the naivete.

 

 

Justice Sotomayor appears on Sesame Street.

Cute.

I like the discussion of the case in the comments at the Volokh Conspiracy.

"Since Goldilocks entered a house, one would assume that she falls under at *least* Criminal Trespass in the 3rd Degree...That’s in New York.YMMV, of course."

"But would Goldilocks have any defense that she acted in the distress of being lost in the woods? Not to mention that as a minor child, it is less likely that she could face prosecution so much as her parent’s could be charged with negligence…"

"Too bad Thomas wasn’t the guest justice; he could have tossed the case on standing, as Little Bear could not have been recognized as a person in 1789 and thus has no rights that the courts are bound to respect."

"I am surprised to learn that Sotomayor is the first SCOTUS justice to appear on the show given that I have all along assumed that Souter was at least half-Muppet."

 

 

" I'd call for all the chemists who've ever worked with a hexanitro compound to raise their hands, but that might be assuming too much about the limb-to-chemist ratio."

Organic chemist Derek Lowe has another edition of "Things I Won't Work With." 

This post includes a description of how the organic chemist goes about deciphering compound names, which makes it worth a look if you like language.  He also gets in a reference to Verdi opera, incidentally.

I hope he writes a book called "Things I Won't Work With" someday... I would pre-order it NOW.

Choosing peace, or something like peace, anyway.

ChristyP sent me a link at just the right time for me yesterday.  The post, from a blog I'd not seen before (Steady Mom:  On the Journey toward Intentional, Professional Motherhood) is short enough that I'm just going to repost it.  Here you go (permalink here):

A few days ago I sat down in the morning, per my usual routine, to make my daily to-do list. As often happens, there were more items to do that day than there was time for the doing. 

Anxiety and overwhelm began to threaten me, though I tried to ignore their taunts.

Still the nagging thought kept creeping back, "How exactly am I going to get all this done?"

Suddenly God whispered to my heart. What He said surprised me, changed my outlook, and altered the entire direction of my day--of all my days. He said,

"Choose peace over productivity."

Peace is the goal of our days.

Peace is THE goal of our days.

At the top of your to-do list, write it - Peace.

If anything tries to threaten your goal, it gets crossed off immediately. Don't worship at the altar of busyness and allow the very heartbeat of your family to suffer.

Let me spell it out as a reminder for us all:

Laundry isn't more important than peace.

Cleaning isn't more important than peace.

Homeschooling isn't more important than peace.

The family budget isn't more important than peace.

We're better off getting only one thing done in an atmosphere of peace than crossing off multiple tasks weighing fretfully on our shoulders. I know, because just this morning I forgot the lesson already, and paid the price by handing over the mood of our home. It wasn't worth it.

What will our children remember when they leave our homes--how busy Mom was or how joyful she made them feel?

Choose peace over productivity.

Yes, this is nothing new.  Yes, this is absolutely a message I've heard before in one form or another and attempted to assimilate.  Something about the way it's put, though, makes me want to tape it to my bathroom mirror.  Well, I'll do the next best thing and stick the blog in my RSS reader for a probationary period to see if she says anything else I like!

She has a followup post, on What Choosing Peace Does NOT Mean:

Here's what choosing peace does NOT mean:

- staying in your pajamas all day

- reading blogs when you should be playing with your kids

- feeding your children chicken nuggets every night

- spreading piles of laundry around the house

- leaving dishes to pile up in the sink all day

- ignoring your children because you just can't take the bickering anymore

[cough, erm, yeah]

- letting mess accumulate while you chant "I'm peaceful, I'm peaceful."

...

Choosing peace does mean:

- That people are more important than tasks

- That you have adequate expectations of yourself, depending on what season of life you're in

- That you try to stop what you're doing to look your children in the eye when they interrupt you...

We will not find peace at the end of our to-do list. That effort has a name: striving. It promises peace, but in the effort required it steals the very promise away.

This is one of those things that I, personally, need to be reminded of again and again and again.  

Once for a friend's wedding shower I gave her a little hanging tile, made up of mosaic bits that spelled out, "Peace begins at home."  I was thinking mainly of raising children "peacefully" at the time -- I think my oldest couldn't have been more than two -- I was still developing my style of discipline (aw heck, aren't I still?) and I'm sure that's what I was thinking about, about raising kids nonviolently in an atmosphere of love so that they wouldn't grow up to perpetuate senseless violence.  I wasn't at all thinking about serenity in the home in the moment.  Only about somehow engendering "peace" there and sending it out into the world to do its work.

Even at the time, I'm not sure that "peace" is the word I would have used, precisely, to mean what I sought then and what I still wish I had.  (I thought it was a good choice of word for what my friend would want, though.)  It is too worn from overuse, especially in world affairs; connotes too much the relationships between and among large groups of people, and not quite enough the relationships between individuals.  Connotes for me, too much, the state of avoiding conflict rather than the state of dealing productively with conflict or even the state of living blissfully without conflict.

"Peace" isn't, I think, the name of the thing that is the goal of my days.  However, either Steady Mom and I are both longing for the same thing, to which we choose to give different names, or else her reminders are bound to produce both peace and the thing that I want.

I'm still not sure what word would be better.  Maybe I am just looking for "love" in its active sense.

Anyway, I'm going to mark this blog and read more.

UPDATE:  Melanie responds with a very insightful post.  Go read!

I don't wear makeup and I don't like makeup ads.

But this makeup ad campaign is pretty cool.  From Kara at Mama Sweat:

On a cold April morning I was in Central Park with about 10,000 other woman for the EIF Revlon Run Walk for Women and participated in the free makeover Revlon offered at the finish line. Who turns down a free makeover? I just filled out a short form about why I consider myself a role model, got my hair pouffed, then my photo taken.

After the primping I ran back to my hotel and thought noting of it until Revlon contacted me months later to say I had been chosen for an ad campaign that would run in People Magazine.

Click the link to Kara's website here to see the ad.

Rerun week, post 3: Short Communication: On Toast.

I'm posting reruns this week.  Today's post is from August 2005.

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It is unquestionably evident that the peanut butter toast must be bisected twice along the diagonal. 

This produces four (4) isosceles right triangles, in the case of square toast.  (Applying this method to rectangular toast produces two obtuse and two acute triangles, which does not affect the following analysis.)  Experiments indicate that the triangles are, predominantly, eaten beginning with the vertex opposite the two equal angles.  Current theory holds that the driving force for this behavior is the phenomenon of crust rejection, which is not universal among toddlers but is nevertheless common enough to warrant its consideration as a general case.  Then crust acceptors can be regarded as a special case of the generic toddler, which will be treated at the end of this report.

By the time the crust (which I define self-consistently as that part of the peanut butter toast that is inedible to a crust rejector) is reached, and laid down on the plate, its configuration is approximately linear. 

Since the toddler's face is a convex curve (which can be approximated as a paraboloid for the purposes of contact mechanics, viz. the theory of Hertz), it is tangent to the idealized crust at a single point.  Compression of the curve against the crust (as if to obtain the last bit of jelly) can expand this point into an ellipse, of course, but any such ellipse is finite and limited, as the force of compression increases with the 3/2 power of the contact area.  (The value of 3/2 assumes elastic contact, which is, of course, preposterous, but can be excused on the basis of the fact that my textbook on non-Hertzian contact mechanics has gone missing.)

The competing technique that has the most support is to bisect the toast twice, parallel to the sides.  But this practice, though well-grounded in theory (chiefly because it produces four congruent quadrilaterals that may be conveniently stacked, regardless of the aspect ratio of the original toast, and thus appeals to the toddler who likes making little sandwiches), fails miserably in the laboratory setting. 

For the toast is highly likely to be consumed along the path of least resistance, which clearly begins at the only crust-free vertex of each quadrilateral and proceeds across the toast until the crust is reached.  But the crust of such a quadrilateral extends along two adjacent sides of the quadrilateral, subtending a right angle.  Whereas the linear crust produced using the double-diagonal-bisection method is tangent to the toddler face in the absence of compression force, the crust produced in the double-parallel-bisection method conforms to the toddler face even in the case of  very small compression force, and even in the most idealized situation is guaranteed to make contact in at leasttwo separate locations.  At each of these two locations the situation is comparable to that of the single contact in the double-diagonal-bisection method.

Therefore, the double-parallel-bisection method can be expected to result in toast-face contact over approximately twice the surface area that would result from the double-diagonal-bisection method.  Accordingly, twice the amount of peanut butter will be transferred from the toast to the face. 

The author of this report, therefore, recommends that the double-diagonal-bisection method be employed for all crust-rejecting children.  Crust acceptors are exempt from this recommendation.

 

Rerun week post #1: Can we think outside the "thinking outside the box" box here?

I'll be running reruns this week.  This post is a rerun from May 2006.

+ + +

Rich Leonardi on the trend of face-to-face confession:

The decline in the popularity of Confession roughly coincides with the rise of the face-to-face confessional. (Whoops, I'm sorry; I of course mean "Reconciliation Room.") The intention of this innovation was to create a more welcoming, less intimidating environment than was offered by the supposedly cold, dark, screen-divided little room of tradition. Yet I suspect most people of parenting age have not-so-fond memories of sitting in a padded chair in a "Reconciliation Room" across from their parish or school priest and embarrassedly baring their souls. Or not baring -- far better to mumble a sin or two, say an act of contrition, and clear out of there.

It has always flummoxed me --- what on earth made pastors and church architects think that people would feel MORE comfortable confessing their sins face to face with their parish priest, than anonymously?  The RCIA teachers years ago couldn't explain it to me either, back in that university parish with no confessionals at all --- confession was only by appointment in the priests' private offices.

What was the idea?  That putting a "wall" between the minister of the sacrament and the recipient damaged the character of the sacrament, somehow?  But the wall is porous --- the only blocked sense is vision.  On the penitent's side of the wall hangs the crucifix --- and it's Jesus who ultimately absolves.  Isn't it possible that the image of Fr. Joe or Fr. Mike might itself be a wall that obscures?  Aren't we often freer and safer behind closed doors?

This is rather cynical, but maybe the sex-abuse scandal will help bring back the confessional.  I'm sure that many people by now , whether rightly or wrongly, don't feel very comfortable sending their nine-year-old into the priest's private office for ten minutes.  That unwelcoming "wall" between priest and penitent is probably starting to look like a better idea.

From a 2002 article from OSV:

Duncan Stroik, a professor of architecture at the University of Notre Dame who specializes in churches, told Our Sunday Visitor that he knows priests who were so concerned about their safety and/or their reputations that they have had windows or stained glass installed in reconciliation rooms. Some even have installed exit doors, alarms or telephones. Stroik noted that the traditional confessional with separate rooms had probably come about for good reason....

Rolf Rohn of Rolf R. Rohn & Associates in Pittsburgh told Our Sunday Visitor that he has had requests for more observable confessionals [note:  I think he's using this term to mean "reconciliation place" in general -- E.] because of the safety issue. He related a story about a disturbed woman who began screaming at the priest in the reconciliation room and blocked the door. Indeed, news reports indicate that priests have been attacked and/or robbed in confessionals. Hence, Rohn likes to design reconciliation rooms with a second door emergency exit.

How very welcoming and conducive to spiritual peace!  Instead of that pesky wall, we've installed panic buttons and emergency exits.  Oh, and by the way, now it's not just the priest who can see you --- anyone can see you through the window.   Have a Kleenex.  Feel free to open up.   

My big beef with the OSV reporter is that she let architects be the experts about what a confessional issupposed to look like and feel like: 

"One thing is for sure," Rohn said, "the guidelines for building a confessional are that it should be very, very open, inviting, with all kinds of imagery of reconciliation. Whether it’s the woman at the well, or the prodigal son, or the woman with the coin, there should always be a space in front that allows people to pray and meditate to some kind of theme. So it isn’t just a box anymore. It has to have an environment."

James McCrery of Franck Lohsen McCrery Architects in Washington, D.C., and New York, emphasized that the setting for the sacrament should be inspiring.

Are these guys even Catholics?  Have they ever experienced the sacrament themselves?  Doesn't say.  Seriously:  considering the nature of Confession, what is wrong with a small private room, a place to kneel, and a crucifix on the wall?  Isn't it weird that while the architectural trend for the church as a whole has been to remove decoration and beauty, stripping it bare and creating a "place of emptiness," suddenly the confessional (the ONE place where the attention of the worshipper is meant to be INWARD) has to have lots and lots of imagery?

"There should always be a space in front" ---outside the box? --- "that allows people to pray and meditate... [I]t has to have an environment."  Duh.  We used to have those.  Very elaborate, they were, with lots of imagery.  We called it the sanctuary.

Related: a good post from 2003 by Fr. Rob Johansen about the confession in general, and also this oneabout face-to-face confession in specific.  Incidentally, canon law requires that confessionals with grilles be made freely available, and permits either priest or penitent to insist on anonymous (behind the screen) confessions. 

 

 

Remember that homeschool-room show and tell....

...that I said I wanted to see, but didn't want to set up?

Well, Dorian Speed of  Scrutinies and Convolare Design  stepped up and got it going for me on Flickr.  And thanks to her prodding, the pot has been sweetened (note to self:  send Dorian money) and there's a prize!

Here's the goods, as posted by the fabulous Ms. Speed and slightly adapted by me for posting here:

Okay, homeschoolers, let’s rally to the cause. Some of us may be vaguely contemplating the beginning of the school year, while others may have kept on going over the summer. Regardless, I’m sure we would all enjoy a bit of creative inspiration when it comes to organizing our school areas. Whether it be a dedicated schoolroom, a bookshelf, or a really cramped minivan, we  would like to see how you’ve set up your space.

It’s a contest! Except not really! Maybe it’s just a drawing!

To sweeten the deal, we are running a not-a-contest drawing. We’re going to fill a Flickr photo pool with your submissions, and randomly choose one photograph on Monday, August 22. The winner will receive a $20 Amazon gift certificate.

The Rules:

The general theme is “Schoolrooms, or how our existing rooms accommodate schooling.”  Examples would include:

•  storage solutions for small spaces
• solutions for multiple children (do they all work together or do they need separate spaces?)
• ways that an area can multi-task, e.g. a table serving both for dining table and schooling table
• if you have a dedicated schoolroom, just photos of how it is laid out
• how you’ve chosen to arrange decor and interior design given that your home is also a school
• any sort of functionality you’ve come up with that works really well and is worth sharing (or works not so well and you want to crowdsource)
• furniture hacks
• underground lairs, if any

Deadline is 11:59 PM Central Standard Time on Sunday, August 21.

It doesn’t have to be a recent photo. 

You may enter as many photos as you’d like, but each photo should be of a different aspect of your homeschooling setup – so, don’t post three photos of the same shelf taken from different angles.

If we can get at least 25 different contributors and at least 100 photos in the pool, I’ll dip into my Secret Prize Fund and add another $10 onto the value of the gift certificate. 

How to Enter:

If you’re already using Flickr, you can click here and add photos. I am moderating all submissions, so they won’t immediately show up as being added to the photo pool. If it’s been more than 24 hours since you added a photo to the pool and you’re still not seeing it, shoot me an email.

If you’re not on Flickr, you can send DORIAN an email: dorianspeed AT gmail.com with photos attached. Please use “homeschool photo” in the subject line.

 

Feel free to post questions here in the comments as well.  

And bother other people about it too.

Because the second half of August is EXACTLY the right time to be entering homeschool room competitions.

(Go on.  Run off to Office Max first.  We'll be waiting.)

 

Alternatives.

Probably on account of hearing it so much when I was growing up, I like to have an alternative to "Because I said so."

Around here, we like to say "Because I am arbitrary and capricious."

How about you?

Flattery.

Four-year-old daughter:  Mama, on your next birthday, will you start to be an old lady?

Me:  Hmm.  No, no, I don't think a thirty-seven-year-old woman is generally regarded as an old lady.

Her:  When does it start then?  When you get your very first wrinkle?