Sunday paper

The Sunday paper is more Mary’s thing than mine. Most weeks go by without my touching it except to toss it along with the other accumulated recyclables into the bin by the garage.

It’s not that I don’t like reading the paper but rather, I just don’t like reading this paper. The Seattle Times has for a long time been one of my least favorite media channels, partly because it’s Seattle-centric (okay, I get that) and partly because its editorial positions leave me cold.

One of the things I like about frequent business travel is that in most of the hotels I visit, copies of USA Today and whatever the locals read are there for the taking. I enjoy the expanded view of national issues and events that only a newspaper offers and the local papers are invaluable in helping me understand the region in which I’m working or teaching.

Anyway, this morning dawned cool and breezy, a lovely morning and after feeding the mongrels and making coffee, I asked Mary for a quick look at the front page – the Times in bed being something of a ritual for mi esposa. And I thoroughly enjoyed what followed.

I read the long, lead article on the growing marijuana industry in newly-pot-legal Washington State. And let me just say this about that - $60.00 for an eighth ounce makes me wonder just how much more potent is the current crop as compared to the fifteen-for-a-three-finger-bag weed that was passed around on Tuesday evenings during Monty Python at Lance’s house gatherings?

It was fascinating, actually. And worrying. I’d no idea how big the business of toking had gotten. And the combination of big money and psychotropic  drugs is, as I say, worrying. I learned a lot from reading the article.

Another piece highlighted the efforts of a black IT techie to bring more blacks into the tech world. I put that one aside to read more in depth later and you may well hear of it again in this blog. Fascinating.

The obits were of interest mostly for the sake of confirming that most of the recently departed were older than moi by at least ten years.

I really did enjoy the morning spent reading the paper. But I’m not likely to make a habit of it. Much as I prefer paper books to electronic versions in my NOOK, the electronic reader is here to stay. And I find myself progressively less enthralled by news of current events and the devolving political scene than by TED Talks and blogs on topics of particular interest to me.

The demise of the home delivered ‘paper’ paper is the fault of folks like me who’ve stopped subscribing and thus make the medium less attractive to advertisers. I get that.  But I’m not inclined to read a generally unsatisfactory rag just to help keep an industrial anachronism alive.

I’ve moved on. And this morning, I was reminded both of what once was (the in depth article from which I actually learned something) and what has come to be (most of the articles were not of interest and not well written).

Sorry, Times. You’ve lost me. And we can both agree that’s a shame.

Indolent

Lazy, slothful, inert, sluggish, inactive, torpid.

I do believe we’ve found a one-word description for Odin the Large and Lazy.

Indolent.

I came across this word whilst reading Pride and Prejudice.  Jane Austen uses lots of words like indolent, words that are still around but not very commonly used. Most of them I understand well enough to let the flow of the thought sweep me along. But indolent, I’d always thought I understood but had never actually checked. And it was critical to understanding the plot device of the moment.

So this time, I looked it up. (Turns out, I was right, by the bye. Sniff!)

I looked up indolent. And immediately thought of Rachel’s favorite canine.

As I write this, he is stretched out on his dog bed about six feet from my right foot. Thoroughly engaged in enjoying whatever doggie dreams are flowing through his walnut. And other than breathing in and out, and that only occasionally, that’s about all he’s doing. Inert is pretty much spot on, descriptively speaking.

It’s not as if he didn’t come by his break time honestly. He had a busy day. He studiously observed me having morning coffee, then stood guard (okay, laid guard) while I swept and vacuumed. While I was putting up the molding in the family room, he was in constant standby and while I steamed the kitchen floor, it was he who ensured that no birds, squirrels or raccoons invaded the backyard.

He had a hard day. Ever vigilant. The fact that he discharged most of his duties from a prone position in no way detracts from the magnitude of his exertions.

His fatigue is manifest.

He deserves the occasional sojourn into indolence.

Self-disclosure

I try very hard to be judicious in avoiding intermixing what I do for a living with my private writing, for several reasons. First, I have to be very careful not to let the thought police at my company think they have the right to edit my personal blog. Then there’s the fact that I teach in this area and I’m careful to separate what I believe and choose to put in these musings from what I know to be true and am willing to advocate for as a laborer in the field. And of course, I spend my work days and way too many of my non-work days on this topic, so it’s nice to use this blog to explore other thoughts.

But tonight, I find myself thinking about self-disclosure of disabilities.

I had a long conversation recently with a young women who is struggling with the idea of telling her boss and the folks at a local college about her learning challenges. It’s a big decision in her mind because while she is dependent on accommodations to test into her master’s program, she is fearful that sharing this information will make an unenlightened admissions counselor doubt her ability to succeed. And it’s a fairly selective admissions process. (I should interject here that I work with LOTS of people in her chosen field and she would be a natural.)

The other side of her dilemma is that she hasn’t discussed her problem with her boss, even though both the boss and the company for which they both work would most certainly be very supportive of her aims. The problem is that she told me. And I can’t help her without sharing information she provided me in confidence. And of course I am barred from violating this trust by both law and probity.

This is a frustrating place to be and one in which I find myself all too often. Folks living with disabilities are frequently reticent to open up about their challenges due to deep-seated fear of discrimination. And the sad truth is that this is a very reasonable fear. Even well-meaning (but ignorant) people will unintentionally discriminate against people living with disabilities. For example, there is a gentle tendency to discount people we see as somehow less – less capable, less discerning, less…whatever. We so generously give folks the ‘benefit of the doubt,’ and it’s that doubt that’s so damning.

Less well-meaning folks openly discriminate against folks living with differences. And many of them – a couple of VERY well known movie stars and several politicians come to mind – are in a position to cause loads of harm. It’s very difficult for a person with a cognitive or learning disability to be brave when people around him are cracking up at Ben Stiller’s much publicized ‘retard’ jokes.

It’s ironic that if all the people living with physical, mental, or emotional challenges fully self-disclosed, a lot of the discounters would find that they have already been working with, next to, among folks with all sorts of disabling conditions. And they do so quite successfully on the down-low, which only demonstrates that disability is an attribute, not an identity. And in the vast majority of cases, a simple accommodation can make all the difference. And for many of our co-workers, there are accommodations in pace that we never recognize as such, simply because of language – we never identified this person as having a disability.

It is one of the best things I can say about this country that people like me are employed specifically to help level the playing field. It’s one of the gravest indictments and saddest failures of our society that it’s necessary for anyone to do what I do, originally as a volunteer and now, for a living.

A friend and colleague likes to say that meaningful employment is one of the greatest social programs. And I believe she’s spot on. Without a job, we feel disconnected, cast loose, excluded and unwelcome. A job brings not just a salary and benefits but inclusion, validation, an opening into the circle of life. And employment, or not, is frequently a fertile field for expression of our prejudices. People should be hired or not according to their ability to do the job, given appropriate training and reasonable accommodation.

We struggle with that word reasonable and well we might. But some decisions should be easy. Some folks can’t work around fluorescent lighting. Or sudden loud noises. Or strong perfumes. Others might require swing room for a chair or simply permission to stand and stretch every twenty minutes or so.

A person with some types of learning disabilities may need to be able to pace their intake and many times this can be accommodated simply by allowing the person a little extra time, such as by adjusting their work schedule, etc.  In production situations, the entire accommodation may be accomplished solely by altering the arrangement of the work area. Or raising or lowering the work surface.

Yes, there are folks who need fully supportive chairs and special computer stations in order to work and we should accommodate those needs, as well. I knew a guy who was a combination front desk and phone attendant, human resources clerk and payroll specialist for a small company on the Oregon coast. I spoke to him fairly frequently over several years and it was not until I went there in person that I realized I had been working with a guy who spent his days in a fully supportive motorized wheelchair with sip-and-puff controls. It hadn’t made any difference because I’d not been aware of any difference between this guy and the other faceless folks I’d dealt with by phone and e-mail. And having met him, it still made no difference.  Because he did his job and did it well.

This guy was a vital contributor to his company and his boss made clear that they would have been in the deep water without him. He was utterly competent. Also utterly dependent on certain technological aids to, well, do just about anything.

The thing is, at most companies, this guy would never have been hired. Because neither most hiring managers nor this guy himself could have foreseen how very little it would cost to hook him up with the tools he needed to do his job.

And the knowledge that this is so frequently the case, accompanied by the entirely human fear of rejection, is what prevents this young woman from coming out from behind the protective veil of privacy.

I don’t blame her. But I hope I can help her change her mind.

Sorry for the silence

Been doing some other writing of late. Can't say I didn't warn you.

This is not goodbye

I lost another friend recently. His name was Farley Mowat and I learned a lot from our association.

He wasn’t a member of my family and I never met him. But he had a way with his writing that opened worlds for me.

Children of the Deer allowed this pasty white suburban kid learn about the Inuit and also about social justice – or rather, lack thereof. But for whatever reason, it would be years before I would again share time and attention with Mr. Mowat.

I believe it was my brother who talked me into seeing the movie version of Never Cry Wolf. It helped that Charles Martin Smith played Mowat in the film but it was the story itself that grabbed me. So within the week I had found a copy of the original book without the movie edits and read it overnight. And the conversation was renewed.

This book was and remains controversial among wildlife naturalists, conservations and especially ranchers whose image of wolf predation were at odds with his findings. And maybe they have some good points. But anyone on any side of the discussion would have to admit that Mowat forever changed that discussion. Never again will the Big Bad Wolf mythology define our view of this long misunderstood and irrationally feared mammal.

Mowat did his research without tracking devices or fancy datasets. He simply went out and lived among the wolves in their own range. And noticed. With neither assumption nor prejudice. And then he turned his observations into a book that is both accessible to non-scientists and undeniable to the scientists themselves.  

Somewhere in my used bookshelf pruning I came across a much-thumbed copy of The Grey Seas Under: The Perilous Rescue Missions of a North Atlantic Salvage Tug. A veteran of the Sicilian Campaign during World War II, it would have been understandable if Mowat had simply cranked out his own war memoir and then moved on. Instead, he chose to chronicle the wartime exploits of oceangoing salvage tugs and the heroic people who crewed them.

Mowat told real stories about real life. In real language. I could not have learned what I did through him by reading any other writer.

 Believe it’s time I looked up some more of his books.

It's a dog's life?

At least, I’m hoping that’s the case because if this isn’t a dog’s life it’s mine, and I don’t want this to be mine.

I speak, of course of the chore(s) attendant upon maintenance of canine cohabitants, of which we have two fewer than Sherree but still, that’s two more than we would need to have should I decide to retire from dogitude, or to be more blunt, servitude to or for dogs.

I have been home for a bit over an hour as I write this. Home being the term I like to use rather than referring to my evenings here rather less kindly but much more accurately than I might. Such as if I called evenings in this place, say, my second job, the chore fest or simply, my indenture.

In this little bit more than an hour I have neither eaten nor consumed liquid refreshment. I have changed from my day job clothing to my evening servitude ensemble which consists of clothing that I don’t mind getting covered with dog detritus. Doggy floss. Hair.

The dog hair of which I speak is easily identifiable as such using visual criteria:

·         It is not silver, therefore not mine;

·         It is not auburn, therefore not Mary’s or Two’s;

·         It lies about the floor in clumps great and numerous, as this is – you guessed it – shedding season.

So my evening thus far has been taken up with vacuuming dog hair, brushing out the dogs’ coats which is not that much fun since neither dog is much in favor of the process, emptying the vacuum cleaner and of course, providing water for the dogs who have let me know with both stance and expression that being brushed is thirsty work.

How did the canine come to be our best friend? Or is it just that we’re their best friends and we go through a self-defensive transference in believing they return the favor.

I love my daughters’ dogs. But I also love Sherree’s dogs and they have the advantage of being at Sherree’s. When daughters leave home, dogs remain.

Shedding.

And begging for stuff.

Snakes don’t shed. Oh, wait, yes they do. Nastily.

Damn.