Entitlement, China and Other Things

You know you're getting on in years when you hear yourself talking about "young people these days" and their sense of entitlement -- as someone who's recruited and worked with people now in their 20s (and to be fair, as with all generalizations, there are some very clear exceptions), I think there's something there.  I once had someone suggest that in a self-review that they should get an exceptional rating because they showed up for work every day (imagine the rating if they had actually worked while they were there!).  There are so many philosophies out there nowadays on child rearing, from Tiger Moms to the coddlers;  here is a great article about trends that a psychologist is seeing in young people today.  Where is the pain of growing up of yore, where you could actually not get a trophy because you sucked at sports and didn't deserve one?  Where is the humility and sense of reality you get from the experience of losing?  Raising Self-Reliant Children in a Self-Indulgent World: Seven Building Blocks for Developing Capable Young People is one of the best books I've read on how not to raise a brat.  Unfortunately, my enforcement of its principles is probably weak.

I've recently started reading Mao's Last Dancer, Li Cunxin's autobiography of how we went from a poor (and I mean, poor) peasant boy in rural China to being selected for the prestigious national ballet school.  I'm only halfway through the book (but based on the movie previews I know that love and defection ensue), but what really stood out to me about his description of his childhood was that despite being part of a loving family (without being coddled), and perhaps even because of his poverty, he had his head screwed on right.  Anytime you want to recalibrate your view of hardship, pick up a book about living in Mao's China.  

Of course, this book has nothing to do with child-rearing.  I've just twisted it here to fit my topic of choice.  It does give a good picture into the mindset and environment of communist China, and actually reminds me a bit of some companies at which I've worked.

On the topic of China (yes, this post is going to ramble), I also recently ready Peony in Love: A Novel.  Let me just say that it wasn't at all what I expected, but like all Lisa See's works of historical fiction, was an enjoyable read while painlessly educating you on various events, customs and philosophies (in this case, of dead people).  

Recently I started reading Louisa May Alcott's Little Women with my daughters.  I think I last read it when I must have been 8 or 9.  But I was struck each time the mother (who, I strangely didn't recall, they call "Marmee") spoke, at how she addressed my own sense of entitlement.  A lot to learn from that old Mrs. March, there is.

Liquid Breakfasts

I love breakfast.  I love eating, and breakfast is the first thing you get to eat every day.  I love bacon. Eggs.  Butter.  During the week, though, breakfast is a lot less fun.  For me, it's a rushed time, and with my new job I am usually on a call with an international group of people at an ungodly hour.  I need to be able to prepare something that can be done in increments as I hit the mute button periodically, and it needs to be quickly consumed.  But it also needs not to be disgusting.  I'm a snob like that.

So here's a little meal that my friend Patricia suggested.  It's actually surprisingly good.  You'll need (the stuff I took an ugly photo of with my cell phone):

• Almond milk (about a cup or so...though I don't usually measure so you might have to experiment here); I've tried unflavored as well as vanilla and they both work fine
• 1 Banana
• 1 Avocado
• Whey (I don't really know what this is except that Little Miss Muffet ate them with curds in a nursery rhyme) -- but at Patricia's suggestion I got MRM brand 100% all natural whey in Rich Vanilla
• (optional) Flax oil

All you do is slice up the banana and avocado, add in about a cup of the almond milk, a squirt of flax oil and a scoop of whey, and blend (I have a handy little Braun hand blender that makes this easy).  You can add in ice if you want it to be more smoothie-like, but I'm happy with it so long as everything else is cold.  The whey protein makes it filling -- unlike with smoothies, this one tides me over til lunch. There you have it -- healthy liquid breakfast!

Bumble & Bumble Dry Shampoo

If you're wondering why I haven't written for a few months, which you're probably not unless you're me, the person who reads this blog, then I will tell you.  Somehow, weeks after I left my last job, I ended up at a venture-backed company.  That means that I am no stranger to the 16-hour workday.  And better yet, I can start my day as early as 3:45 AM.  Needless to say, this has shifted my priorities a bit.  I am now willing to pay 40x what I was previously willing to pay to save myself a minute or two. 

So I know I am the person who said that the best dry shampoo I found was the $1.99 corn starch from the grocery store.  And that was true back then -- but it does take some work, especially when you have black hair (though perhaps I won't for long -- in the past few months I've seen a frightening emergency of gray -- very wiry, gravity-resisting grays), to make it disappear.  Enter the Bumble & Bumble hair powder (pictured here in black, but I actually got the white, imagining that after a harrowing day at the office I would have worked a black-colored powder all over my face by the end).  It smells like nothing (all the others I tried smelled revolting once put on my hair).  It sprays a really fine mist so you don't end up looking like Wolfgang Amadaeus Mozart.  And yes, it costs about $40 from my local salon, but you can get it on Amazon for cheaper.  Totally worth it to me for the extra few seconds it buys me in the morning.  I've started running too (which warrants a separate post -- those of you who know me will now also know that hell has frozen over and pigs do fly), and this is a great post-run time-saver.  And so far, no clogging of the nozzle which was a real problem with the Oscar Blandi dry shampoo.  Thank you Bumble & Bumble for letting me sleep in until 3:46 AM!

Rancho Valencia

A couple of months ago, I had the Best.  Day. Ever.  Me and four of my friends spent the day at Rancho Valencia , in Rancho Santa Fe (California).  Despite the picture on the spa website, rest assured that there is no requirement to stand in an outside shower half-naked.  To the right is another picture of the resort, right outside the relaxation room.  I didn't take that picture.  In fact, woman in the picture isn't even one of the friends I was with that day.  The woman in the picture is my friend Alice, who went to Rancho Valencia on a totally different day, and who has no idea that I've nabbed her Facebook photo for my own selfish purposes.

From what I hear all the Auberge resorts are to die for, and the service is spectactular.  Rancho Valencia in particular has a seasonal "quench", which is a service that varies by season that's 60 minutes long and costs $100.  It's great value when you consider that you have access to the resort grounds, which includes a huge, gorgeous relaxation room with a big fireplace and silk tea bags, yoga classes, pool and hot tub, and cabanas for lunching poolside.  Even though the place was only minutes from where we live, we felt that we had escaped to a serene paradise where our sanity could once again be restored.

Next on my wish list?  Solage Calistoga, which is affiliated with Auberge.  Best saved for when I'm making money again, but I am pretty sure from looking at the website that I should be living there. 

Ippolita Wonderland Party Ring

Recently, I was up in San Francisco, and was shocked at how little plastic surgery I saw.  Living in SoCal I had largely forgotten that most people are not actually blond and that the average 50-year-old woman doesn't naturally have the full, perky breasts of a Barbie doll.  I saw people with...brown hair.  Boobs that didn't resemble globes.  Facial expressions.  And they were eating food.  Really good food.

While we were in SF I celebrated another birthday...one that is precariously close to a rather large number.  I started realizing that I had outgrown certain things.  One of those is the hope that someday I'd be perfect. I'm appreciating that being flat-chested means I can sleep on my stomach.  That my stick-straight hair can only really successfully be stick straight.  That my inability to do just one thing at a time enables me to, well, do more than one thing at a time.  And I've come to know that I'm officially too old for some of the clothes in the catalogs I still get, and no matter what anyone says it's ridiculous for a woman of my age to be wearing a micro-mini.

One thing for which you can never be too old, thankfully, is jewelry.  While the world most likely no longer appreciate viewing a large swath of my thigh anymore, they'd surely enjoy a well-positioned delicacy made of semi-precious stones, something that says "maybe I can't wear short skirts and over-the-knee boots anymore but I can afford better costume jewelry now".  I saw this Ippolita Wonderland Party Ring in the Bloomingdales catalog, juxtaposed to a stack of a dozen or so rock-candy bangles with gorgeous hammered workmanship and thought, yeah, that still works.  At $795 a pop you'd hope to be going to a lot of cocktail parties to get your money's worth, but nice work, Ippolita -- the online photo doesn't do it justice.

Custom Drapes

I was unhappy today.  I took three days off since the kids start school next week and my plan was to spend time with them.  Which so far has involved letting them watch DVDs, play on the iPad or otherwise independently eradicate the house of any semblance of decency (did I teach these people that it was ok to throw used tissues on the ground when you're done blowing your nose?).  Partially because I must not be a very good mom.  And partially because there was stuff going on at work and my boss called me and I had to look at spreadsheets and think and write emails.  But really I just wanted to think about custom drapes.

A few weeks ago I went over to my friend Stacy's house and was struck by how adult her house looked.  She has a kid, but I didn't see any puke or juice on her sofas, nor did I find any booby traps made of string on the way to the kitchen -- her house was completely pulled together, with her furniture going with her decorative accents and most importantly, seeming to belong in her house.  When I got home I felt like my house was really juvenile (and not just because of the artwork made by the juveniles in my household, haphazardly taped onto walls with scotch tape, which I only occasionally find in places like under the bathroom sink or on top of a Build-A-Bear).  I've given up on having nice furniture for now -- at least until my kids stop walking on the sofas and the youngest of their friends becomes older than three.  But the drapes -- the drapes I can do!  So I've been looking into designers, stalking their websites, and learning about the differences between custom and ready-made drapes.  And custom drapes done right (that would be, not the way I've made them in the past) look full, have good heft, and look really great.  But I've also seen some bad custom drapes -- so I've chosen to go the designer route to get a referral to a good workroom.

The other thing I've learned about custom drapes is that they're expensive.  Will my life be way better once I have them?  One can hope.

Melaleuca and My New Non-Toxic Life

After a couple of months of dry-heaving from stress, I've started to re-examine my life and have decided that I should really focus on the living part.  One thing that's helped me feel a little more sane is de-cluttering and streamlining.

Enter Melaleuca, The Wellness Company.  A co-worker of mine recently introduced me to the products.  They're non-toxic, concentrated (and thus space-saving: I took back four ginormous bottles of toxic cleaners like Cascade and Jet Dry that I could barely carry -- and a single normal-sized bottle of Melaleuca's Diamond Brite did the job far better), effective (who knew natural products could be even better than harsh chemicals?) and economical (much, much less expensive than buying non-toxic products through regular retail channels).  A lot of the products serve multiple purposes, like the Tough & Tender all-purpose cleaner, which is also a fruit and veggie spray, or their toothpaste, which can also be used to polish silver.  Their vitamins are far superior to grocery store brands -- I started getting up early to do yoga in the mornings -- and my husband asked that I buy him some of these vitamins because he's never seen me with this much energy!  No more headache-inducing fumes after the cleaners come, no more giant Costco containers that don't fit on my shelves, and no more paying extra for companies' advertising and distribution costs (Melaleuca is customer-referral-only, so you get better value).

I've still got a long way to go before I'm as streamlined as Jay Shafer, who is apparently making it all work in a 89 square foot home -- and I'm pretty sure I'll never get there (where would I put all my handbags?).   But this is a pretty good start. 

Method Dish Liquid and Alice.com

My least favorite kind of stress is the kind that makes you randomly gag and wretch during the day, struggle to retain composure, and makes people wonder if you're trying to hide a pregnancy. I'll save the details for the novel that will render my financial success a foregone conclusion (please, magic book deal people, I'm sure I can think of something you'd want to publish!), but I found myself craving something very comforting...and yet very cheap.

Two weeks ago I was up in San Francisco visiting my brother and sister-in-law, who live the lifestyle of the people you'd imagine live in the spaces shown in the CB2 catalog. They had this Method Dish Liquid in the kitchen and I strangely found myself finding excuses to do the dishes. The pink grapefruit scent is perfect -- calming, soothing, not quite as sharply citrus and energizing as lemon but somehow spirit-lifting and happiness-inducing all the same. I also bought the all-purpose cleaner and have been cleaning a lot more...for fun! Equally non-toxic as my home-made cleaning agents, they smell a million times better than my vinegar-y concoctions. And they made me feel...better! Like, a lot less stressed...and just by washing dishes!

You can buy it pretty much anywhere nowadays, but one easy way is via Alice.com. Alice's prices are very competitive, and best of all, shipping is free AND you don't have to leave your home. Alice, your online domestic helper, will send you reminders to refill certain things at intervals that you specify. It's a great idea -- and once Alice gets a critical mass of inventory so that I can take care of all my household shopping online -- I will gladly fully outsource all of that to Alice. Worth trying out -- the more people that try it, the more leverage they'll have to get products.

Mastering the Art of Cooking (so that you can master the art of eating)

I'm taking this week between Christmas and New Year's off from work, and I am very, very happy. I think that one of the things that contributes most to one's quality of life is the ability to sleep until one naturally wakes up, as well as not having to scream at people to brush their teeth and comb their hair and eat breakfast while packing their lunches in order to get them sent off to two different schools. It's times like these that I fantasize about moving to a cozy mountain cabin, free of television, where we'd subsist on the land and the land alone. With my stamina for physical labor we'd surely starve, but what is food when you have love? (As a side note, for Christmas my very kind husband (who apparently does read my blog after all) surprised me with the LV Tivoli PM...spectacular! So even though the mountain life might be quiet, the deer probably couldn't fully appreciate the Louis, so maybe we're better off being part of society after all.)

This week I've been thinking that although I wouldn't make a very good stay-at-home mom, I would indeed make quite a good stay at home person. There would be thousands of activities I could explore, none of which need to be revenue-generating: I could paint movie sets, knit hats and experiment with butter all to my heart's content. This week, I did something that I never usually get to do: watched movies. I watched The Devil Wears Prada (I told you, it's been a long time since I've watched a movie), which was basically like my experience on Wall Street but with more attractive people and nicer clothes, and Julie and Julia, which I really didn't think I'd like but which I found quite entertaining. I love to cook. And even more, I love to eat. But lately I'd been feeling like all the new cookbooks I'd seen were recycled variations on everything I've already tried. The best go-to cookbook I have is The New Best Recipe from Cook's Illustrated, which, aside from providing the best recipe for cooking well-known recipes, gives you scientific detail, and results of kitchen testing, resulting in a fascinating course on cooking. For entertaining, I love Charlie Trotter Cooks at Home from which all my dinner party greatest hits are spawned. But after watching Julie and Julia, being properly and overtly influenced by the media, I flipped through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and it's far flung from the cookbooks of today -- no pictures, just recipes. But in looking through it, it did pique my interest -- Julia (and Simone and Lisette) did do her own kitchen testing a la America's Test Kitchen, and it can't hurt to have the classics. She also provides helpful and effective substitutes for French ingredients that can be found in American grocery stores. I've linked above to Amazon, which currently has a great deal going -- a 2-volume set, hardcover, for $39.98 (56% off list price). So at that price, the risk is pretty low, and should pay for itself with a single use (think at least $100 for a party of two to dine on anything close), so go ahead -- follow my lead --and buy lots of butter.

Skinny Jeans

I have discovered one thing more humiliating than trying one swimwear. And that would be shopping for a pair of skinny jeans. Not only painful, but physically exhausting as I breathed irregularly and wrestled myself into these vacuum-sealed contraptions. You can see at right what they're supposed to look like. Cute with pumps and boots, right? Totally not cute on me. Today I tried on some Paige Petites (which I was sure would fit me but didn't), some J Brands, and a number of others I can't recall, all of which resulted in an unsightly bunched-at-the-knees and horizontal lines on the back-of-the-thigh-look. It did not look like the picture to the right nor like the woman who was helping at the school morning drop-off who had the perfect skinnies with gorgeous boots, who inspired me to start this painful quest. I can't quite figure out the problem -- is my butt too small or too big? Do I need to have bigger hips? Thanks to my friend Nina, I have been on a handbag-leggings-skinny jeans rampage. The bags always work; the leggings look fine, but the skinnies -- can't seem to get them to work. Are they really that different from leggings anyway -- and will my life be incomplete without them?

I was with my 4-year-old daughter, who accompanied me to the Komen Race for the Cure this morning (and we Sat in the Park and Ate Cookies for the Cure because we had to park so far away that she was spent by the time we got to our team tent), and she was able to pick out 6 outfits, all of which looked good on her, even with the Princess Leia double-buns she had requested as a hairstyle this morning. She even did a 3/4 pivot while checking herself out in the mirror for full effect. So maybe I should give up on the skinnies and just focus my energies on clothing my kids.