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JHR: Midlife Crises Are Real… And Yes, You Can Emerge the Better for Them

Sunday, April 1st, 2012

Getting older means both having more limitations and also a better sense of how to creatively use those limitations for good. We live in a micro-attention-span world, so if you don’t have time to read my long-winded blog post, take that one sentence as my two cents on midlife crises.

Just to put things in human context, let me describe my weekend. Perhaps due to a bunch of displaced anxiety over a job I’m applying for, I ate too many fatty, carby things. I had leftover corned beef from a St. Patrick’s Day dinner party in the freezer, and I chopped it up to make hash. It was delicious, but exactly what I don’t need right now since I’m working to lose weight (and over time, succeeding). Old habits die hard, and overeating is one of my longest-held bad habits.

On the other hand, I also went to my power swimming class, where there’s a teacher so motivational she makes you move at speeds heretofore unexperienced. She blends the right amount of praise and critique, and offers up little challenges between students. Taking her class is the first time I’ve ever noticed my body becoming hot while I’m in the water. As the woman I was matched with for drills today said to me, “The buzz from this class lasts all day.” For me, it really lasts two days: one day, I feel the heat and the glow of having taken care of myself. The day after, I feel a bittersweet soreness in muscles I didn’t know I had, and wonder why I so rarely use them.

Saturday night, I went to an underground party held in a group of trucks on an industrial street, a spin-off of the Burning Man culture I’ve been involved with for nearly 15 years. People volunteered to drive up trucks in which they ran, for free, little art-thangs: a comedy club; a burlesque show; a maze; a cupcake giveaway. It was charming, fun, and experimental — all things I like.

Over the weekend, I also wrote thousands of words in total for the job application; my blog; and on fiction projects. I don’t really have such a thing as a typical weekend, but this was a very Farai weekend — some healthy, some unhealthy; some mild-mannered hedonism, and a lot of work. I used to focus on the imperfections within my behavior. Now I’ve realized that part of growing up is knowing that nothing’s perfect, and putting into place little failsafes (like exercise classes) so that my weaknesses don’t overwhelm me.

While that transformation is not strictly age-specific, this phase of life is something my peers and I are puzzling through, bit by bit. It includes: death of your elders; once in while, your peers; and sometimes, shockingly, even your juniors. Plus: career and vocational crises; financial reversals; love’s labor’s lost… and paradise regained.

To the extent that I’ve made peace with this process of examination and re-prioritization, it’s because I’ve made peace with aspects of myself both admirable and problematic, weak and strong. Knowing more about your own weaknesses and gaining a sense of rigor, if not mastery, over your behavior is key to surviving a midlife crisis or — honestly — life in general. But in the past few years, I’ve gotten less likely to think I can change my nature and more likely to know I can change my habits. That’s an important difference.

I know I can spend too much on stupid stuff I don’t even care about, so I’ve learned to keep more exacting personal budgets. I know I eat out of anxiety, so I create food logs and have greatly ramped up my exercise, which in turn diminishes anxiety. I meditate regularly. I forgive myself for not being perfect, and give myself permission to make long range plans — knowing not all of them will turn out as I like.

For a few years, I worried so much about getting things right that I was afraid to make mistakes. That fear, in turn, inspired worse mistakes than I would have made otherwise. I do think that part of this correlates to gender dynamics. A friend who reached the top ranks of not one but two professions pointed out to me that men in tough situations who failed often chalked it up to the dynamics of the system and moved on quickly; while women in the same position often blamed themselves and removed themselves from competition for new, equally powerful positions. Another friend who joined the top ranks of his institution found that women and people of color offered promotions never asked for more money, while others did.

Over the past few years, I’ve made significant changes in my habits… and certainly those are ongoing. When I started getting twinges in my knees, I made fitness a priority. Should it have taken pain to get me moving? Well… “should” is a tricky word. Realistically, we all respond to challenges better than to vague “shoulds.” The deadline-driven nature of midlife crises often leads to change. We sense our own mortality, as well as that of those we love, and we must make hard decisions.

So with that, if you’re entering a midlife crisis (or any crisis) know that this too shall pass. In the meantime, just live — breathe deeply and experience the world fully. It will take all of the good, bad and ugly of where you are now to help you craft the next phase of your life; and the next; and the next….

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P.S.: JHR is short for “Jurassic Hipster Report,” the title of a previous blog post from SXSW. I’m going to experiment with doing a series of posts under this rubric. Age ain’t nuthin’ but a number, but how you feel about aging (yours and others’) can be funny, terrifying, enlightening, or all at once.

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Job Watch: Revive Your Spirits After Prolonged Under- or Unemployment

Tuesday, March 27th, 2012

Prolonged joblessness, episodic employment, and undermployment have serious emotional and mental health impacts. (There’s there’s good perspective in this 2009 NYT article.) Of course, this isn’t new. But after what’s been called the “Great Recession” we are beginning to understand it better.

The “Great Recession” is officially over, but its effects linger. An article in the Atlantic, and the accompanying chart, put it this way:

You don’t have to be an economist to know that long-term unemployment is bad. But economists, of course, have their own lingo for just why it’s so bad. They call it hysteresis. The basic idea is that people who are unemployed for too long become unemployable. People lose skills the longer they are out of work, which, insidiously, makes employers less likely to hire them, which makes their loss of skills all the worse. Even when the economy is humming again, they remain in the shadows. Unemployment settles at a new, worse equilibrium. Of course, fewer people working means we produce less as a society, all else equal. We are collectively poorer.

This should terrify our policymakers. Here’s a chart of the average length of unemployment, going back to 1950.

What we need now is to focus not just on job creation and economic recovery, but also and immediately to focus on the emotional and psychological recovery of people who feel defeated by the job market. That aspect of our national recovery can take many forms.

1) Share Stories of Success

It’s important to read, watch, listen to and share stories of success.

One example is a woman I interviewed in Yuma, Arizona, who left her job to take care of her dying father in the South just as the economy was tanking. She had an impeccable work record in as an HR administrator, but by the time she finished caring for her father and returned home, Yuma had a 26% unemployment rate. She was jobless and eventually became homeless, moving into a shelter. But she also used all the skills she’d learned as an HR professional to turn her time in a shelter into a way to give back to others. She was so good at helping her fellow shelter dwellers that the organization eventually hired her. Now she’s back living independently, and continuing to help people in distress. It’s important to note that in addition to the tragedies of this economy, there are many people who are retraining, refocusing, and learning to live leaner and happier.

2) Get help if you find yourself overwhelmed by the jobs crisis.

There are many different support groups and training programs, ranging from Debtors Anonymous (useful for those hit hard by the financial aspects of the jobs crisis) to government and industry retraining programs (one option: Careeronestop.org) to local peer support groups that meet at coffee shops (check bulletin boards like Meetup.com)

3) Realize that you have more skills than you know

BigThink.com gives an example of a puzzle that forces people to think creatively about the tools they have at hand.

To overcome ingrained limitations in your thought, ask yourself the following questions for every object in your problem: 1. Can the object be broken down into more elementary parts? And the often over looked question: 2. Does my description of the part imply a use? By understanding the possible functions of the most elementary pieces to the puzzle, you can arrive at unconventional uses for problems that are constrained by conventional thinking.

The same thinking can be applied in a jobs context. Let’s say that you were a secretary in a high school, and that your job has been cut. Make a list of all the tasks that you did — talking to parents; keeping spreadsheets of students; checking in with teachers and security guards; answering phones — and think about what other fields could use that skillset.

4) Move down or across to move up

Sometimes, through no fault of our own, we find ourselves in a shrinking industry. For example, even as private employment is recovering, public employment in the last year has taken a hit. Sometimes you have to start a new career by making a lateral move, or even taking a cut in pay and title in order to move up. That’s not something to be ashamed of. It can be the first step on a new path to success and stability.

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Like Katnip to the Fembot-Creators: Turning a Strong Actress into a Cliche

Tuesday, March 27th, 2012

Actress Jennifer Lawrence — making headlines and raking in big bucks for filmmakers as Katniss Everdeen, the kickass protagonist of the Hunger Games — has been photographed a zillion times. Most of the time she looks like a normal young woman, or a slightly dolled-up and beautiful young woman. All the interviews I’ve read with the actress make her sound smart and savvy but not jaded.But there’s also a raft of photos that turn her into a Vap — my name for the vapid, open-mouthed pose that some magazine photo editors seem to love. On Twitter, one person compared the Vap pose to a blow-up doll. (Her words were actually a little less printable than that.)

Source: malustudio.com via Farai on Pinterest

 

 

Why do strong women get turned into Vaps? Presumably in order to make men feel they are not only desirable but passive.

Contrast that with Lawrence’s roles as the protagonist of the fine film A Winter’s Bone, or of course with Katniss Everdeen, the hero Lawrence is playing now:

Source: google.com via Farai on Pinterest

 

 

Strength vs. Vap. (I even did a mini-photo-essay on Pinterest about this.) Why are we even living these dualities in 2012? And by the way, Lawrence is not “too big” (read: too fat, or just too human) to play Katniss. Sigh.

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Trayvon Martin, The Long Walk to Justice, and Compassion Fatigue

Saturday, March 17th, 2012

Like so many people, I’ve been following the death of Trayvon Martin, a Florida teen shot and killed by a neighborhood watch captain.


(Above, Martin in his football uniform.)

Here’s what we know so far: a man named George Zimmerman called police saying he’d spotted someone wearing a hoodie who was acting suspiciously. Zimmerman himself had previously been arrested, though later charges were dropped, for resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer. Yet Zimmerman, against the advice of the dispatcher on the 911 line, pursued the unarmed 17 year old and shot him to death, much of which was captured on audio.

The family and scores of people across the nation have been hammering the Sanford, Florida, authorities for failing to arrest Zimmerman. But now it’s spiraling into a media circus, with the grieving family caught in the middle. The audio of their son’s death is heard on news reports and available on the internet. A little known black militia is claiming they’ll make a citizen’s arrest of Zimmerman, which the family doesn’t want.

The lives of young black men are treated with suspicion and casual indifference by too many. For every case like this that makes headlines, an untold number more pass as par for the course. So while many people are asking for justice for Trayvon Martin, I have to ask myself, as a reporter and an American, how we can leverage the anger over individual incidents into a larger restructuring of perceptions and justice. There’s a well-documented bias against black boys and men, ranging from schools to jobs to the criminal justice system. (It’s worth reading each of the linked studies).

So, where do we go from here? It’s easy to work up ire about individual cases, but harder to work on systemic change. Systemic change is a long process, often tedious, with reversals in both the judicial courts and the court of public opinion. (Remember the exoneration of the five young men wrongly convicted in the Central Park jogger rape case? How many times did their faces flash across tv when they were arrested and convicted, and how many of us today even remember their names?)


(Above: the young men wrongfully convicted in the jogger case. To date, none have received compensation for years in prison.)

Too often, the overwhelming statistical evidence of bias is rebutted by citing individual crimes committed by black boys and men — and certainly those are committed, far too often, usually against African-American victims. I simply hope that in the case of Trayvon Martin, the heat of anger is accompanied by the light of justice. Context is a strong part of justice — tracking patterns and calling out bias. The developing field of data-driven journalism has provided some new ways of tracking how different Americans are treated. For example, data journalist John Keefe of WNYC used police and geographic data sets to show that the highest marijuana posession arrest rates in New York were predominately in minority neighborhoods, although national drug statistics show more use of marijuana by young whites than blacks. The WNYC data was used in conjunction with a story on alleged illegal searches.

Logic doesn’t always carry the day. In the case of racial bias in the criminal justice system, there’s sometimes an implicit tolerance for wrongful actions because, in the minds of people who don’t consider themselves morally compromised, it’s just the cost of keeping order in a chaotic society. The more that we can turn the mirror towards ourselves and ask what compromises we are willing to make to feel safe, and who gets wounded, slandered or killed as a result, the more likely we are to change. Laws are critical, yet on some level change has to come as a result of a sense of moral urgency. During the Civil Rights movement, images of hoses and dogs provoked a sense of moral urgency among people who considered themselves bystanders to racial injustice.

Today, books including The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander are drawing the much needed connections that could lead to a national push for reform. But many other tools are needed. Local news is addicted to crime scene shots, which adds to a sense of paranoia. What if that attention was turned to sorting genuine criminal patterns from citizen paranoia? The law, the media, academia — all have a role in reshaping American justice. But in the end, it’s up to us. There’s a beautiful challenge that the writer Aldous Huxley sets out when he wrote, “There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.” To me, that’s not a contradiction to organized campaigns for justice. It’s a reminder — accountability begins with us. The first thing we can do to be accountable is neither to tune out the horror of a shooting like that of Trayvon Martin, nor to let it push us to unfocused anger. Fear and compassion fatigue may be George Zimmerman’s best allies. Knowledge and persistence are the tools we can use spur justice in this case, and in our nation.

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Robert Rodriguez Kicks Ass

Friday, March 16th, 2012

Robert Rodriguez directs movies ranging from Machete to the Spy Kids franchise. Not too many folks can do both child-friendly movies and ones where a guy uses another guy’s intestines as a rappelling line. The fact is that the same guy runs his own film studio; supervises his own effects; and now co-owns a new TV network called El Rey. (Below: images of Rodriguez playing guitar with Tito & Tarantula, whose music was in “From Dusk ‘Til Dawn.” Tito also previously worked on the “Repo Man” score.)

Rodriguez (left) plays with Tito & Tarantula, with the face of Danny Trejo on screen in background.

At South By Southwest, Rodridguez brought out all of his skills in a night of sexy trans-media music and film fun.

Here’s a l’il clip of Rodriguez explaining how he scored “Desperado,” and playing with the band Chingon, another of his favorite collaborators. (Rodriguez, quite the showman, is wearing the same jacket that Antonio Banderas wore in “Desperado.”

Also, the song as produced for film, w/ footage of Banderas, Hayek, Tarantino and Trejo.

Rodriguez also mentioned that he’s re-releasing “From Dusk ‘Til Dawn” in 3D in theatres next year.

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