Data entry as Buddhist meditation

Today, I finished filing all of Banfield's unfiled OSHA logs for the past four years!!  That may not mean anything to...well, anyone, but this project I've been working on for two months is finally over.  I did four years worth of OSHA reports for 442 pet hospitals in 37 states.  And probably no one will ever look at them again.  But!  I did personally gain something from this project, I think. 

First of all, I often thought about Buddhist monks who will do one single, simple action all day in order to reach a meditative state--for example, hitting a gong with a mallet all day long, or repeating one word over and over again.  I thought about the actions and keystrokes that I repeated time and time again with each OSHA form with only slight variation, and hoped that on some level what I was doing was meditative.  Once I got past the frustration and monotony, I think I did learn something about patience and repetition.  (And I balanced silence with listening to a lot of music and books on tape.)

Second of all, I typed a lot of dates.  On each OSHA form, I typed in every "date of incident," every "date of birth," every "hire date," and every "date of closing," so for the past two months I've revisited countless days between 2006 and 2009.  In a strange way, it became a sort of tour of those years of my life.  While we were celebrating my Dad's birthday in Idaho in 2007, someone in Mississippi was being bitten in the face by a pitbull and lost two weeks of work.  Around the time that I was graduating from high school, a hospital on the Eastern seaboard had almost every employee exposed to leptospirosis.  Someone in Michigan got their first job out of Pet Nurse school on my 19th birthday. I guess it was sort of surreal to think about what myself and my loved ones have been up to, and to realize that countless people across the country were simultaneously living completely separate lives with completely different problems.  That sounds kind of obvious when I say it out loud, but it is the specificity of all of these stories that made that seem overwhelmingly real to me.  After all, I read the stories of at least 1000 injured employees of one company, which actually is not that many when you think about how many people there are in this country/this world.

All of these dates also began to form almost tangible patterns.  Three people at this one hospital were hired on 6/6/06, a woman at that hospital was injured on the same date at the same time two years in a row and probably never realized it, a seemingly disproportionate number of people tend to get hired around the time of their birthdays, and the coincidences go on and on and on.  I sometimes wished I was that guy in "A Beautiful Mind," because there seemed to be so many strange patterns and syncronicities in the things that happened and the dates they happened on, and I bet if I was a genius and/or a schizophrenic I'd find some incredible mathematical formulas that could explain all these things. 

...Or it could mean nothing.  Or it could mean that if you take a step back from looking at each individual story, each individual detail, if you take 100 steps back from each human experience, our collective lives form a big, beautiful pattern... like countless grains of sand in a mandala.

Women who Rock: Part 2 (Meet the Co-Queens)

The initial pioneer-esses have broken into Rock!  The blues mistresses crooned the inital battle cry, a couple brave ladies took up the mighty Axe, and one or two more joined the ranks with the power of Country. 

Now what?

...girl groups.  Yikes.  I mean, on the bright side more and more ladies were getting involved with this new-fangled music, but things got pretty Sugar Pop-y for a while.  Let's just move on, shall we?

There are two women who, to me, totally revolutionized what women could do and say with music:

Janis Joplin and Tina Turner.

I've gotta start with Janis Joplin because I fell in love with her first.  There is absolutely nothing that can compare with her total freedom of spirit, raw blues instinct, and raspy screech.  She sounded like she drank whiskey from the bottle and smoked cigars as soon as she could walk, and she sang from the fathoms-deep depths of her freakin' soul.  Her songs also contained an insight and intelligence that female singers hadn't possessed before--certainly not in their songwriting, anyway.  Check out Get it while you can, one of my favorite songs of hers.  I won't even begin to go into her bio, because many people have done a much better job of documenting her life, and google will yield you a wealth of info.  There is supposedly FINALLY going to be a biopic about her starring Amy Adams entitled "Janis Joplin: Get it while you can" in 2012.  We will see if it actually happens though...There appears to be some behind-the-scenes drama over who gets the biopic.  Zooey Deschanel was supposed to play her in another flick a few years back, but that fell through.

Anyway!  In the parking lot of a Taco Bell somewhere in central Oregon, my friend Jamie told me about Tina Turner's incredible life story, and piqued my interest in this incredible woman who, like Janis, has been called by various publications at various times, the "Queen of Rock and Roll."  Since then, I have discovered that Tina Turner is an awesome and inspiring human being, as well as an incredible entertainer with a voice that ROCKS.  (<< I don't know what I like best about that video... The costumes, the dance moves, or Tina Turner's high level of badass. My favorite might actually be the tall white guy.)  Anyway, check out her biopic "What's love got to do with it?"

Personally, there is no way that I could choose one of these two fabulous, revolutionary women upon whom to bestow the crown designating the "Queen of Rock and Roll," so I hereby giving them matching crowns, and thank them for fully bringing women into the world of Rock. 

Things I've learned at work.

At the risk of jeopardizing my employment, I am going to talk about my job.  Hopefully, the good things that I have to say will make up for the bad, and my stint as a "Temp Workers Compensation Coordinator at Banfield Pet Hospital Central Team Support" won't be terminated before the set date of January 27th.  As you may have gleaned from my illustrious title, I do temp work for the corporate office of the largest chain of pet hospitals in the country (that's right - corporate pet care) on the Worker's Compensation team.

There are almost 800 Banfields in almost all 50 states - they run all of the hospitals in all of the PetsMarts across the country.  Banfield is also owned by Mars - turns out Mars makes way more money on pet products than on candy bars.  Isn't it interesting, that after ranting about corporate corruption in my last post, I admit that I work for a huge corporation that mass produces something as intimate to home life as pet health?  How do I justify this?  I don't know.  I pay my bills and can boast employment and financial independence.  What is that worth?  Something.  But Banfield itself is actually quite a moral company.  The pet health plans are good and affordable - the services are good.  Banfield has developed its own IT system that allows for easy immediate access to a pet's medical records nationwide.  So no matter where you go, Vets have access to an accurate medical history.  Banfield also uses this wide network to issue a "State of Pet Health Report" annually, utilizing the size of the company to gather, analyze, and diseminate lots of useful information.  This can lead to better research, public health information, and better preventative care.  This is probably good for human health too, since it's probably good to have healthy pets in a country where we're obsessed with living intimately with small carnivorus animals. 

Actually, I know exactly how I justify my job. I am getting to know intimately the 8-5 routine that has run this country for at least the past 60 years.  In fact, one reason I started this blog is to report on my findings as I test out this life that many, many people live.  Here are some of my findings so far. Expect more to follow...

1. There are 8 people on my team, ages 30-60, and 6 of them have been divorced.  3 are remarried, 2 are single moms, and 1 is singularly odd.  They all have fascinating stories and are beautiful people, but I don't feel I have the right to get much more specific with the details of their lives on the internet.

2. Hardly anyone within at least a 20-cubicle radius of me seems to care too much about their job.  Everyone gets along, people are super laid back, people like the compnay, and everyone likes the perks of working at Banfield (benefits, flexible hours, decent pay, good cafeteria food), but almost everyone seems to find fulfillment outside of work and some people nurse a private misery which is worn either blatantly or under wraps.  I think it's just hard to feel a burning passion for bureaucracy.  There are so many good people here, but I'm so heartbroken each time a new person inadvertantly feels the need to make an excuse as to why their life is what it is.  "I am the least talented person you'll ever meet."  "My IQ is not high." "I didn't kiss enough ass."   "I put on makeup everyday to remind myself of the beauty I once had." "No one likes their job." (These are all, essentially, direct quotes.) Everyone has their own reason for being here, and people seem generally satisfied besides these flashes of self-disappointment, but it just makes me think - This is the lifestyle that a couple billion people in the world are envious of?  We make money so that we can try to spend it on things that will fix the unhappiness created by our jobs.  I'm not convinced that that makes sense. 

3.  As far as I can tell, my job is pointless.  I have been through various emotional stages once I realized this.

Shock and Denial: "What? I have spent 300 hours filling out OSHA forms that no one will ever read?  Someone will read them someday and be so thankful that I existed!"
Pain and Guilt: "Most of my life is a total waste of time.  I am a leech on society."
Anger and Bargaining:  "Dammit!  I'm gonna start a blog on company time! Then you'll see!"
Depression, Reflection, Loneliness: "I am going to die in this cubicle with only OSHA logs for company."
The Upward Turn: "Wait a minute, worse things have happened to better people."
Reconstruction and Working Through: "If all these people can survive this, so can I!  I'm gonna  do fulfilling things outside of work that will contribute to my real career."
Acceptance and Hope:  "It's just a day job, and I'm already halfway through this assignment.  I'm gonna be at a sweet-ass grad school next fall."

Occupy Wall Street - my internal debate

When the protest first began, I sat in my quaint Portland apartment with a couple friends playing the self-indulgent critic.  As we discussed the impending shutdowns the protest would trigger in public transportation and other city mechanisms, we agreed that the true frustration with the idea was the vagueness of it all, as well as the fact that the "true" 99% can't afford to take a week off of work and drive their Toyota Priuses down to a protest to camp out .  Working on NE 82nd St., the people that I see every day on the way to work range from hookers and pimps to blue collar workers, and also represent one of the most racially diverse crowds in the city of Portland. (Of course, I work in a schmancy corporate office as a temp/paper pusher, and come from all of the privileged background colored by white guilt and Catholic guilt that a young liberal must admit to.)  My point is, most of the people in this neighborhood are completely unaffected by this protest, and they are perhaps the people who are most affected by this so-called cause. 

Here you have crowds of self-righteous liberals waving the banner of "We are the 99%!"  ...Now that the protest has spread, it is difficult to unravel what is meant by this, as it appears to mean different things to different people... Presumably, it is in reference to the fact that 1% of Americans own about 38% of the nation's wealth.  To this outraged "99%," I have to point out that the US as a whole constitutes about 5% of the world population and holds about 27% of the world's net worth.  Given, this is skewed by the highly affluent 1% of Americans to some degree, but my gut response to all of this 99% stuff is that, as citizens of this planet, Americans are the most materially privileged by leaps and bounds.  I worry that the protest just makes us look like whiny rich kids on the world stage.  99% of the 5% are upset about their slice of the 27%... if that makes sense.**

It's not like I disagree that Wall Street has become fundamentally corrupted.  I am not going to say, as some virulent critics have remarked, that the protesters hate capitalism and the free market system.  On the contrary, Wall Street has made a mockery and a whore of capitalism through corruption and greed, insidiously draining our economy of any freedom by placing an absurd amount of power into the hands of a handful of WASP middle-aged men who control the financial systems of this country (consequently the planet) through ludicrous financial maneuverings, and who then use that profit to control the legislature which allegedly represents "the people."  They then use this control to maneuver laws which will continue to support their rampant corruption and control of the economy, and the end result is an endless loop controlled by a small population that maneuvers way above our little heads.  I can't disagree that 99% of Americans are completely flacid politically and economically in the shadow of these financial giants.  I can't disagree that the mass political ambivalence of the American people for which we are so often criticized springs from the fact that we are completely powerless in the political arena without multi-million-dollar lobbies to represent us.*** 

Ahhh.... And this is the point in my reflection on this that I am swayed that, however self-righteous and somewhat short-sighted the Occupy Wall Street movement seemed to me at first,  I think that a lot of good can spring from it.  Given that the protesters do not seem to me an accurate sampling of the "99%," given that their cause is frustratingly vague and unfocused, and given that I am instinctively repelled by protestations without specific demands, our current system is so nauseatingly f-ed up that it is refreshing at least to see a passionate public push against it.

What it needs now is a little more knowledge, insight, and leadership to make specific demands for what needs to be changed on Wall Street and in Washington.  It needs to go from a dull, ignorant roar to an articulate accusation.  From a scream of outrage to an argument for a cause, losing none of the passion of the initial protest.

I stole this link from Zach, because I think it's a great article offering much better criticism and advice for the movement than I ever could.  I don't pretend to be an expert on economics or politics, but the insight seems sound and timely to me.   Ch-ch-ch-ch-check it out.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/my-advice-to-the-occupy-wall-street-protesters-20111012




**I got my stats from Wikipedia... whatever, it's a well-cited page. Judge for yourself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth
***This rant brought to you by my own observations and opinions. Don't get me started about how this financial corruption manifests in our food systems... I've been on this soapbox long enough for one day and I'm really just rambling at this point.

Women who Rock: Part 1

Lately, I've been listening to a lot of music by women.  The way I figure it, I am a woman. And I wanna hear how modern women express themselves through music.   Not like, the way a pop diva does, by singing songs which are half the time written by men, and most of the time singing about the Y-chromosomed sex in a questionable way. (i.e. "My Humps" by good ole Fergie Ferg.)  Lately, I wanna hear music that is totally the creative baby of a woman, and not with the end of giving a dude a stiffy. 

So I've been wanting to write about some of the badass musicians I've discovered on this journey, but this whole journey begins a long time ago.  In my History of Rock and Roll class with Dr. K in college, I was impressed that, during the birthing pains of all things Rock, we studied practically no significant contributors who were female.  Because there were practically no significant female contributors. 

One of the first things Dr. K said in this class was, "Rock and Roll is... Rhythm and Blues played by white people."   When rock music first came to be, it was because Rhythm and Blues was being born in America and white people got really stoked about it and tried to participate.  As far as the nuts and bolts go, the instruments and chord progressions of the genres were the same, but the stylings were different.

Anyway!  There were a few women on the ground floor of rock, starting with pre-R&B blues and jazz singers like Bessie Smith.  Most of these women were black, both because blues was essentially invented by African-Americans, and because it was a bit more widely acceptable for a black woman to sing about love in speakeasies since African-American ladies were already so marginalized by society. 

The first woman to really begin to break out of the lady-blues/jazz-singer mold, and therefore, my first "Woman who ROCKS" was...

1. Memphis Minnie - called by Groves dictionary "the only significant female blues instrumentalist."  One of the first guitarists to take up an electric guitar, and definitely the first woman to do so, she was a hard-drinkin, hard-fightin', tobacco-chewin' woman you didn't mess with, and she contributed innovations in rhythmic accompaniments to the beginnings of rock and roll.  Thank God that the Mother of Rock and Roll was a total badass.

In order to totally make that stylistic jump from Blues and R&B over to rock n' roll, we've gotta add some white chicks to the mix.  First, was...

2.  Wanda Jackson.  Known as the Queen of Rockabilly, Wanda has the honor of being the first woman to record a rock n' roll song.  Unfortunately, the "scandalous" rock music that she got her start with was never that successful, and her money-makers were pop hits as well as country and gospel stuff later in her career.  I once made the unilateral decision one summer that Let's Have a Party would be the official party song, and every time we got drunk my dear, patient housemates had to endure me blasting it and insisting that we were about to have a hoot n' a holler. 

The most commercially successful early woman of rock was the adorably precocious child star...

3. Brenda Lee.  But really, her commercial success came from the fact that she, like our charming super star Taylor Swift, was way more country and pop than she was rock.  She also discovered much earlier than Wanda the advantage of going in a pop and/or country direction.  Check out this saccharine little number, her biggest hit:  I'm Sorry .  While she was kind of a rocker when she was a kid, she smoothed out her sound considerably by age 15.  Make sure you stick around for the spoken word section of I'm Sorry.  Priceless. 


These three ladies were the first significant female contributors to rock-and-roll-badassery, and all Women who Rock today owe at least a little sumpin' sumpin' to their daring contributions to musical history.  Let the saga continue...

C.K. Williams

So I don't really have anything to say to the world right now.  But I do really like the poet C.K. Williams, and I desire to somehow archive/highlight some of his work.  So here is a poem by him, so that I have it at my disposal.  Stop reading if you're having a good day. It's not chipper. If you're feeling "rainy," read on.

I think this is especially interesting in light of Rollo May's book "The Courage to Create" which addresses in one chapter the idea of creativity and death.  Some of the things he talks about are...

• The urge to create is interrelated with the mortal's yearning towards immortality, and the ability of the mortal to be god-like in the act of creation.
• The gods (God) is/are jealous that humanity ate from the tree of knowledge and fear that we will also eat of the tree of immortality.  Creativity is therefore a sort of confrontation with the gods, using our stolen knowledge of truth.
• "Creativity is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his or her world."

 I think it's interesting that Williams' is captivated by death in this poem.  Read on, if you wanna.



The Hearth

1

Alone after the news on a bitter

evening in the country; sleet slashing

 the stubbled fields, the river ice;

I keep stirring up the recalcitrant fire,

but when I throw my plastic coffee cup

in with new kindling it perches intact

on a log for a strangely long time,

as though uncertain what to do,

until in a somehow reluctant, almost

creaturely way it dents, collapses,

and decomposes to a dark slime

untwining itself on the stone hearth.

I once knew someone who was caught in a fire

and made it sound something like that.

He’d been loading a bomber and a napalm shell

had gone off; flung from the flames,

at first he felt nothing, and thought

he’d been spared, but then came the pain,

then the hideous dark—he’d been blinded,

and so badly charred he spent years

in recovery: agonizing debridements,

grafts, learning to speak through a mouth

without lips, to read Braille with fingers

lavaed with scar, to not want to die...

Though that never happened....He swore,

even years later, with a family,

that if he were back there, this time allowed

to put himself out of his misery, he would.

                                                                                                   -

2

There was dying here tonight, after

dusk, by the road: an owl,

eyes fixed and flared, breast

so winter-white he seemed to shine

a searchlight on himself, helicoptered

near a wire fence, then suddenly

banked, plunged, and vanished

into the swallowing dark with his prey.

Such an uncomplicated departure;

no detonation, nothing to mourn;

if the creature being torn from its life

made a sound, I didn’t hear it.

But in truth I wasn’t listening, I was thinking,

as I often do these days, of war;

I was thinking of my children, and their children,

of the more than fear I feel for them,

and then of radar, rockets, shrapnel,

cities razed, soil poisoned

for a thousand generations; of suffering

so vast it nullifies everything else.

I stood in the wind in the raw cold

wondering how those with power over us

can effect such things, and by what

cynical reasoning pardon themselves.

The fire’s ablaze now, its glow

on the windows makes the night even darker,

but it barely keeps the room warm.

I stoke it again, and crouch closer.

                —C. K. Williams, The New Yorker,

                                                  March 3, 2003