Time zoning out

I’m on the West Coast. I have clients in every US time zone, plus several outside the US, and some of my clients are multinationals with offices all over the place. In the last two weeks alone, I’ve needed information from people in Massachusetts, Texas, California, Illinois, the UK, Kuwait, Singapore, and Japan. Sometimes, email won’t do; that means someone has to get up early or stay up late to make a phone call, and that someone is usually me. I occasionally think it would be nice to have an assistant to take the night shift.

This morning I had a phone call scheduled at 10am Central time. That’s 8am my time. Except that when I put it on my calendar, I added two hours instead of subtracting them, so it looked like I was supposed to make the call at noon. As a result, I scheduled another call for 8am, and another at 9am, and by the time I got off the phone, it was several hours after the time I was supposed to make the original call. Now, of course, that person has long since moved on to the rest of his day.

I know I’m not the only person in the world who’s dealt with this. I still sometimes need to remind people on the East Coast that setting up a conference call at 9am Eastern pretty much guarantees I won’t be able to make it, as I’m not awake, never mind caffeinated and coherent, at 6am Pacific. It’s just a fact of life. I need to figure out a better way to deal with it, that’s all.

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A home for the holidays

Every year I do my end-of-year number-crunching right around now. I figure out what I need to set aside for estimated taxes (the bane of the self-employed). I figure out how much I can squeeze out for the retirement fund. And if I have anything left over, I make my donations. It’s good for the budget and good for the spirit, and since the short days and grey skies of December always make me cranky, every little bit helps.

I divide what I have to give in half. One half always goes to an organization that works for women’s health and reproductive rights — often Planned Parenthood, though not always. That’s the issue closest to my heart, and I won’t neglect it. The other half supports an organization connected to the year’s events. Three years ago, a scholarship fund in a friend’s name at her alma mater. Two years ago, the Writers Emergency Assistance Fund, in memory of a friend and mentor who was instrumental in the start of my career. Last year, a progressive political organization, out of sheer relief at the results of the 2008 elections.

This year, I’m making a donation in memory of Rebecca Porter, who died in August, far too young, from complications of diabetes. Among many, many other things, Rebecca volunteered for The Lost Dog and Cat Rescue Foundation of Washington, DC. She was my roommate in college and my friend ever since, and I know first-hand her special knack for finding homes for animals: a tiny, scrawny kitten she found in a parking lot 14 years ago is now a plush, lazy diva who wants me to stop typing this because it’s interfering with my important ear-scratching duties.

If you’re looking for a place to put your donation dollars this holiday season, consider this a gentle suggestion. Or, of course, you could just slide on over to your local animal shelter and bring a new friend home for the holidays. Now there’s a gift that keeps giving.

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Willing lab rats

I am unafraid and unashamed to experiment on my friends. Sometimes that means trying a recipe for the first time and asking them to taste the results. Sometimes it means asking them to read something I’m working on to see if they understand it in the way I’m trying to present it. And sometimes — as this past week — it means offering to take their picture as a way of practicing my portraiture.

My friend Mike and his wife Donna are both exceptionally attractive, so it’s no surprise that their 11-month-old, Matthew, is also a cutie patootie. What was a surprise was how completely comfortable he was with having his picture taken. That child was working it. He was giving it up for the camera. I didn’t even have to ask his parents to pose him. He just did his thing, and I kept snapping.

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Active inaction

Don’t just do something, sit there! – Anonymous

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt obligated to jump in to complicated situations and try to simplify them. It’s not a matter of hubris; I don’t feel like I can solve problems any better than anyone else. It’s more of a fear-driven compulsion. The thought process goes something like this:

Something is amiss!
If no one does anything, something bad will happen!
No one else is doing anything!
Oh no, it’s up to me!
If I can’t prevent something bad from happening, the disaster will be my fault!
(Cue massive anxiety attack with dollop of hopelessness on top. Aaaaand…scene.)

Sometimes, because I’m really good at untangling knots, I really do solve the problem, prevent bad things from happening, and enjoy the satisfaction of a job well done. But all too often, I end up diving into a problem that can’t be solved, even by someone who’s really good at solving problems. And then, when the inevitable disaster occurs, I can’t manage to shrug philosophically and say, okay, I did my best. Instead I spend hours, days, weeks replaying things in my head to try to figure out where I went wrong, while waiting apprehensively for someone to berate me for not doing better.

One of the things I’ve been assiduously working on, therefore, is the art of doing nothing. Of simply standing back, observing the situation, taking stock of my resources, and trying to figure out whether I actually have anything to contribute instead of plunging ahead in a desperate frenzy of “I don’t know what to do, but I have to do something.”

Sometimes you have to do nothing for an agonizingly long time before discerning not just what can be done and how to do it most effectively, or even whether you should be the one to do it, but whether there’s any point in doing anything in the first place. Those are the situations I struggle with the most: the ones where I feel trapped because the answers just aren’t clear, and I’m afraid that if I don’t do something, anything, even the wrong thing, I’ll be condemned for not having at least made an effort.

On the other hand, sometimes the situation forces you to do nothing very quickly. Some time ago, I was sitting in front of my favorite coffee shop when an elderly woman fell down the stairs on the bus and landed on the pavement right in front of me, hitting her head with a horrifying ripe-melon sound and lying there motionless. My first instinct was to jump up and run over to her, but in that millisecond of dismay, I managed to remember that I have only minimal first aid training and would probably do more harm than good. So instead I hollered into the coffee shop for someone to call 911 from a landline. And fortuitously, a nurse was nearby and ran over to take charge until the paramedics arrived.

The thing I’m starting to realize is that my instincts are every bit as good as my intentions. When things don’t go according to (my) plan, it’s rarely because I did something horribly wrong. I just lose sight of the fact that doing everything right improves the odds of a good outcome, but doesn’t guarantee one. Sometimes you get the same results no matter what you do.

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