A stay-at-home mother should never be compensated by society for sitting at home doing laundry.

If her partner decides that she is worthy of a token salary for doing the laundry, then it’s the partner’s personal and private decision to compensate her. If her adult child decides that her staying home provided a tangible benefit that should be rewarded, then that adult child can retroactively compensate her accordingly.

If you think it’s acceptable, or even mandatory, for society to compensate full-time parents, then you had better equally support those same stay-at-home parents compensating their children if they do a shoddy job.

Every other job is tied to performance and deliverables, isn’t it? 

Then maybe you should stop selling your companies to Microhoo or Google.

You should definitely stop building new companies that have selling to Microhoo or Google as an exit strategy (or worse, goal!).

Over the last few years I have heard people voice an increasing amount of displeasure with the existing literary canon, pointing out that most items within the canon are included because the general population has poor taste and/or no appreciation or understanding of truly great writing.

Fine. Agreed. I’m a lot more misanthropic than they come, and I have raised an eyebrow over many a “classic.” I question whether Emily Dickinson was a poetic genius or actually had no grasp of the proper function of an emdash. (She was a shut-in…) I’ve read every page of Salinger in an attempt to find a single redeeming sentence, and failed. (Holden Caulfield needed a good spanking.) Every time I see “A Farewell to Arms” on my bookshelf I’m overcome with an urge to teach Hemingway how to write a complex sentence via ouija board.

The existing canon gives us a common language with which we can communicate about literature to others. When I read “Prague” by Arthur Phillips, I immediately fell in love with its Fitzgeraldesque prose. I knew to recommend it to others who loved Fitzgerald and knew not to recommend it to the Hemingway fans. (I also gifted it to a new friend only to discover he was in the Hemingway camp — oops!)

Without this “alphabet,” so to speak, it would be substantially more difficult to find new books that I want to read, or to suggest new books to others. Each novel I picked up would be a complete gamble, and given that I had a lot of trouble putting down a half-read book — even if it’s Salinger! — that would translate into a lot of time wasted on lousy books that could be spent reading good books.

Perhaps an even more compelling reason to sample the canon: you’ll know not to name a children’s bedroom set “Lolita” like our friends at Woolworths:

The Lolita Midsleeper Combi, a whitewashed wooden bed with pull-out desk and cupboard intended for girls aged about 6, was on sale on the Woolworths website for £395.

Whereas many mothers were familiar with Vladimir Nabokov and his famous novel, it seems that the Woolworths staff were not. At first they were baffled by the fuss. A spokesman for the company told The Times: “What seems to have happened is the staff who run the website had never heard of Lolita, and to be honest no one else here had either. We had to look it up on Wikipedia. But we certainly know who she is now.”

At first the store refused to withdraw the product. It said that although it wanted to appeal to the family market, “we also have to respond to customer demands and follow current trends.”

As one of the few people who apparently read the book (which remains one of my all-time favorites to this day), I would like to remind everyone that Lolita didn’t even lose her virginity to her step-father. I’m not saying it’s right for a man to court and kill a woman to have sex with her 12-year-old, but little Lolita already knew the ropes.

Speaking of the canon, am I the only person who saw the commercial for LOST where a fat guy fell off a hill and shouted, “Piggy!” (?)

At least one commenter also read the book:

I can’t wait to see Woolworth’s new line of Humbert-Humbert men’s reclining chairs.

Maybe I have a little faith in humanity left…

I’m very seriously considering starting an anti-National Organization for Women blog. Maybe one already exists. (*Googles*) Not as far as I can tell. There needs to be one. The mere word “now,” previously an innocent chronological reference, has been tarnished forever.

For the record, I am horrified by the thought of Obama OR Hillary becoming President. But I am particularly horrified by the suggestion that I should consider Hillary to be more qualified than Obama for anything besides an annual pap smear on the basis of her gender.

Apparently NOW (New York State chapter) believes that Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama instead of Hillary is a “betrayal” of women. The only thing that stopped me from losing my (delicious) banana smoothie lunch was the fact that the press release was clearly written AND approved by people with fifth-grade writing abilities.

The full text (directly from their website):

Women have just experienced the ultimate betrayal. Senator Kennedy’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton’s opponent in the Democratic presidential primary campaign has really hit women hard. Women have forgiven Kennedy, stuck up for him, stood by him, hushed the fact that he was late in his support of Title IX, the ERA, and the Family and Medical Leave Act to name a few. Women have buried their anger that his support for the compromises in No Child Left Behind and the Medicare bogus drug benefit brought us the passage of these flawed bills. We have thanked him for his ardent support of many civil rights bills, BUT women are always waiting in the wings.

And now the greatest betrayal! We are repaid with his abandonment! He’s picked the new guy over us. He’s joined the list of progressive white men who can’t or won’t handle the prospect of a woman president who is Hillary Clinton (they will of course say they support a woman president, just not “this” one). “They” are Howard Dean and Jim Dean (Yup! That’s Howard’s brother) who run DFA (that’s the group and list from the Dean campaign that we women helped start and grow). “They” are Alternet, Progressive Democrats of America, democrats.com, Kucinich lovers and all the other groups that take women’s money, say they’ll do feminist and women’s rights issues one of these days, and conveniently forget to mention women and children when they talk about poverty or human needs or America’s future.

This latest move by Kennedy, is so telling about the status of and respect for women’s rights, women’s voices, women’s equality, women’s authority and our ability – indeed, our obligation- to promote and earn and deserve and elect, unabashedly, a President that is the first woman after centuries of men who “know what’s best for us.

Worse: In a second press release, they liken anyone who does not wholeheartedly support Hillary to a GANG RAPIST. (Or, in their uneducated words, a “ganged” rapist.) What delusional freaks! I don’t even know how to begin to touch on that vile garbage. Clearly (and thankfully) no one involved in the creation of that gem has actually experienced sexual violence (or perhaps even Real Life).

In case they take it down, and to avoid being accused of selective copy and paste, here’s the entire piece:

We’ve all witnessed scenarios where, on the playground little girls are being taunted by little boys while both girls and boys stand idle, afraid to speak up or even cheering. Or, in the workplace males tease young and older female co-workers; make obscene gestures, inappropriate comments, laughing and expecting (often correctly) that everyone will join in. Then there was that movie where Jodie Foster portrayed the true story of woman who was ganged raped in a bar while others looked on and encouraged the realization. Still others pretended the rape didn’t happen. In short, gang raping of women is commonplace in our culture both physically and metaphorically.

This past week, we witnessed just such a phenomenon involving men who are afraid of a powerful woman. Hillary Clinton, in her quest for her Presidential nomination, has in fact endured infantile taunting and wildly inappropriate commentary. Indeed we have witnessed almost comical attacks by John Edwards who in turn sided with Barak Obama as both snickered at Clinton’s “breakdown,” which consisted of a very short dewy-eyed moment. Now John Kerry, who should certainly know better after his own “swiftboating,” has joined the playground gang.

But here’s the news. Every woman knows how it feels! There are those who will dismiss, defend or even shame those around them into believing that we progressives are making a mountain out of a mole hill. But that’s the game plan of the patriarchal system that has persisted for millennia. Because they can’t frighten Hillary they’ve decided to control her with the time-old trick of patriarchal ridicule. Women, you know what I mean!

Pundits want to know what happened in New Hampshire. Why didn’t the polls see it coming? How could they have gotten it so wrong? Well, aside from the thousands of women and progressive men who made calls from their homes, dropped literature, and held house parties for undecided voters, the truth of the matter is…women get it! That’s why, when women in New Hampshire could vote in private, they came out in droves for Hillary. They’d seen more Hillary bashing than had Iowa’s women, and the polls stopped too early to measure their collective reaction. What happened is that women stood up and said “We’re fed up and we’re not going to take it anymore! We won’t sit idly by and watch, while you gang bang one of us.” One woman told me she didn’t even want to vote for Hillary because she feared that her campaign would be the most dreadful blood bath in the history of politics. I asked her “if Hillary is willing to stick her neck out for us, should we not be brave enough to stand strong behind her?” She agreed and said of course she would vote for Hillary.

We have waited a long time to see our first truly viable women presidential candidate. And what we see now during the debates is what women and girls have experienced from time immemorial. But it seems John’s recent alliance with Barak sent a clear message to women everywhere. The message is that if a woman gets too powerful, she can count on the good ole boys ganging up on her. Hillary is a powerful, strong and intelligent woman and she deserves our support. Let us remember what we as women’s rights supporters, are charged to do: SUPPORT WOMEN!

And I, your writer,certainly speak from the belly of the beast. I was in Iowa for ten days with other feminist leaders, donating our personal time and money to help with Hillary’s campaign. And in spite of our shortfall in Iowa, we did make a difference. Our efforts gave Hillary second place in the precinct we walked. Let me tell you why.

Our job on caucus night was to transport eight women from a nursing home to their caucus site. These were eighty-to-ninety-year-old women who came out in the cold weather and climbed into our vans to stand for Hillary. As we talked with glee about the possibility of our first women president, we were overjoyed to hear stories of their dedication to making it happen. One woman said “I never thought I would live long enough to see a woman president.” Another woman said “It’s about time; we need to have a woman as our President.” These were women who were born around the time that women won the right to vote. They’d heard first-hand stories of that struggle from their mothers and grandmothers. They fought long and hard to see a day when they could have their own credit cards, own their own homes and be in control of their own bodies. They remember all too well when it was legal for a man to beat and/or rape his wife because she was HIS property. They remember when “rape” was ignored by people in the community and law enforcement officials. “She must have done something to deserve it” was common language in those days. Today we still see variations on this same behavior, more subtle perhaps, through success of our efforts, but nonetheless still abusive.

Now those senior citizens we transported stood tall for Hillary, and want us all to know that to have a woman president is to send a clear message to little girls everywhere: “Yes, you can do great things and even become President of the United States.” Those senior citizens really get it!

So let’s not let young women and little girls down, whether it’s on the playground, in the workplace, or in the political arena. Young women need role models. They need to know they can be powerful and control their own lives. By putting Hillary in the Oval Office we send that message loud and clear for all to hear. Little girls everywhere need to know that to be important they don’t have to emulate Brittany Spears or other similarly-exploited women. We can do it!

Think about the legacy we’ll leave behind when we support Hillary Clinton for President of the United States. Let’s put a stop to the psychological “gang banging” of women and girls. Let’s stand up and be counted by way of the hard-won votes we can now cast!

Marcia A. Pappas, President, NOW New York State

Whoa. I just realized that Marcia Pappas, the illustrious author of the aforementioned two chunks of political garbage, is the PRESIDENT of NOW New York. This does not encourage faith in the voting prowess of NOW members.

The only time I feel ashamed to be a woman is when I read stuff like this.

When you let a week go by without being at Inbox Zero, and allow 127 (mostly important) emails to accumulate in your Inbox, you will somehow mistype a GMail macro shortcut and DELETE all of the emails in your Inbox, and then have to individually look at all 2787 emails in your Trash folder to hunt down the important ones, and be left wondering what important ones you still missed. (I know of at least two emails that I lost for good.”Frustrating” is an understatement.)

If you’ve been expecting a reply from me, and don’t see one by tomorrow, it might not hurt to drop me another email. Sorry. I’ve learned my lesson!

I am officially out of my storage unit as of yesterday, and the very last box I loaded into my car brought back some fond memories.

Two years ago, I had a prescription overnighted via USPS from Walgreens. Tracking showed that the package had arrived, but it was nowhere to be seen. I left a very polite note in my mailbox for the postal worker, inquiring as to whether she remembered seeing it. She left a note in return that yes, she had my package, but she wasn’t sure it was for me. I leave another note asking what I can do to prove the package is mine (??). She then leaves another note that says, verbatim, “I’ll get to it when I get to it.” She finally delivers the package a full five days later.

I could have written to her supervisor, but I wanted a more satisfying revenge for her incompetence.

So I went to the post office down the street and mailed myself a box of dictionaries, which the postal worker then had to carry up two flights of stairs to my apartment. Since we had only communicated via notes up to that point, she didn’t put together who I was, and was all friendly to me, making a joke about how heavy the box was and how far she had to climb.

My reply: “It’s a shame they give women these jobs.” Silence.

Every week, I mailed myself that same exact box of dictionaries, with my address clearly listed in both the TO: and FROM: sections. Every week, she had to climb those stairs and bring it to me.

Moral of the story: don’t mess with my package delivery.

If you don’t know what Startup Weekend is, please crawl out from under your rock and head over to the Startup Weekend website.

Going in I had grand goals of this being the first really cohesive, successful, ahead-of-schedule, profitable-out-the-door Startup Weekend. This bubble burst when I remembered that I hate working with large groups of people. This isn’t to say I dislike a single person within a large group, just that my entire personal and professional philosophy revolves around executing plans with the smallest number of people necessary, and expanding only when necessary. Starting off with 120 people was … new to me.

I was reminded once again that leaders are not self-selected and instead rise naturally within their environment. The first night there was a separate project manager group (of over 20 people), which I volunteered to be project manager of. (Talk about unnecessary hierarchy!) As the “managers” independently thought up task assignments and milestones, leaders within each of the other groups rose and did the same thing, and by the end of Friday night each group was literally hours ahead of the arbitrary milestones the project management group had set for them.

If we didn’t have a 54-hour time limit, of course a core team should define the problem, specify roles, set milestones, and designate team members to take on various tasks. But we did have a 54-hour time limit, and the entire team was not going to spend all of Friday night (the equivalent of three months’ time!) waiting for direction. Instead, they leaped into action, which is exactly what they should have done. In my eyes, this made the existing project manager team unnecessary. The fact that most of the project managers from Friday didn’t even return for the rest of the weekend, or arrived late/inconsistently, made it even clearer to me that assigning outside managers who were not deeply ingrained in a specific group was not the way to go.

When I got home late on Friday night, I shared my frustration with alums from other Startup Weekends, who shared that no separate project manager team had even existed at their events. I ultimately decided that first-thing Saturday morning I would suggest to the project manager group that we disband and be absorbed into teams of interest because every team already had leadership. No one disagreed with me, and that was that.

To the person or people who decided to bitch to the rest of the group that I had “fired” the project managers: speak up or shut up. I’m not a dictator. You were free to disagree, and you didn’t, which made it a team decision. You irk me, and your infantile behavior will be remembered should our paths ever cross again.

What I think would have worked best, and what I would like to suggest a future Weekend consider, is to divide into skill teams (design, UI, development, legal, biz dev, and marketing) and have each team decide on one representative within the first hour. Those representatives would then make sure their groups had something initial to do (like choose a programming language, for the dev team) while the reps quickly defined their respective areas and checked for overlap.

The other main divide I noticed was because of people’s differing goals for the weekend. Some people just wanted to schmooze, others wanted to treat this as a practice exercise, and others wanted to be serious about the idea’s potential. It would be an interesting experiment to divide people by their goals, too. Ultimately I decided that since most people who were sharing strong opinions one way or another weren’t going to be involved past Sunday, most real decisions would be made by the remaining core team, and I’d look at it as more of an exercise to find out who I worked best with.

From this new perspective, Startup Weekend blew my mind with wonderfulness. I have coffees and dinners scheduled out for weeks with interesting, hard-working people. The *worst* case scenario is I’ve made some new drinking buddies to bounce ideas off of. I can live with that worst-case. I got to know my existing Twitter friends Deepak, Lindsay, and Matt even better and converted Andy, Matt, Nathan, Bruce, and Aviel to the Twitter cult (or at least bumped up their Kool-Aid consumption).

I also got to learn a lot. It’s not everyday I get to sit next to a Wharton MBA and build financial models. My time on the finance team was hugely rewarding and gave me new ideas and perspectives on a lot of the existing models I have for businesses in my Idea Box. I’m SO glad I chose a group I was not all that familiar with, as opposed to an area I had a lot of experience with.

Would I do it again? Yes, in a heartbeat. But what I’m most looking forward to are the relationships that are going to stem from this initial weekend.

A million thanks to Andrew Hyde who is all-around awesome, intelligent, and talented and without whom Startup Weekend would never have existed.

Shawn tagged me in a meme and I wasn’t sure where to respond. Now that I have a spot where my more personal stuff won’t impede others’ productivity, here we go…

1. I have a horrible sense of direction. North? East? What are those? (Perhaps to make up for this, I am *really* good at remembering a route I’ve already traveled once, even years later.)
2. I don’t believe in past-life regression, but if I did, I’d be positive I used to be a Hungarian woman. This implausible hunch started when I randomly picked up the DVD of Marta Meszaros’s “Adoption” and felt an uncanny sense of familiarity with the background images. (Why was this Cold-War-era Eastern European flick at the Hollywood Video in downtown Salt Lake City? I’ll never know.) But here’s the kicker: when I spent a week alone in Budapest the following year, I didn’t get lost — not once.
3. I am horrified by the sight of wide-ruled paper, which makes shopping for new journals very uncomfortable.
4. As a pre-teen, I danced in parades dressed as a monkey to promote a local children’s amusement center.
5. I last saw my biological father when I was in high school, and he still doesn’t know that I know who he is.
6. Growing up, I always wanted eight children. (Now that I am a grown-up, I want zero.)
7. I have never lived in just one place for longer than nine months.
8. I love hospitals. I volunteer at hospitals frequently because I enjoy simply spending time in them. I even love the food. I think it’s the combination of cleanliness, technology, and sense of security.

What are eight things I don’t know about you, Christine, Vanessa, Keith, and Jay?

TNT Planet Me (whatever that is) has a full-page ad in the Jan/Feb 2008 issue of Ode Magazine suggesting that wearing flip-flops (aka not wearing socks) can save up to three loads of laundry each year.

I bet this is a great example of someone mentioning an idea in a brainstorming session that was so boring everyone leaped onto the thought without thinking it all the way through, just to get out of the meeting.

(I hate brainstorming meetings. If you have no ideas, you shouldn’t have a meeting. Email an idea-seeking memo and if, and only if, someone has an idea, then hold an idea-fleshing-out meeting.)

Let’s think this through for a moment. When was the last time that sock volume affected your total number of laundry loads?

Maybe, maybe, if you have a big family, and you all wear extra-thick wool socks in the summertime (WHY?), you could accumulate enough of a sock pile to warrant its own load.

Socks are small. If your washing machine is full, you just stuff the extra socks in there, or you stick them in other loads. Are there really people who run sock-only loads (besides the Duggars)?

I’m all about little changes that contribute to a greater good (or decrease contribution to a greater bad, or just make life more efficient overall.) This is not one of them.

Basing your entire initial campaign on an ineffective idea is not a great start, folks.