Day: 19 April 2010

two really rather awesome moments

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Don’t you just know these two scenarios, drawn from 1000awesomethings, a blog that’s been turned into a book of 1000 awesome things, published on Friday:

Greyhound_panel_van_lo

#997 Locking people out of the car and then pretending to drive away. My Dad was a big fan of doing this. Most Dads are.

#527 The night before a really big day.

Stare at that ceiling. Sweaty palms, white knuckles, deep breaths in bed.

Maybe the ring’s stowed away and the reservations are made. Maybe the results are coming in and everyone’s coming over. Maybe you’re buttoning down for a new job or following your heart and leaving an old one.

As the moonlight shines in your window excitement bubbles in your brain.

It’s almost here.

Love this. I get excited the night before Big Things. I hope I never stop getting excited in this way. Christmas Eve, sleeping on the family room floor at home, I get that sense of  anticipation and specialness described above. Kind of dorky. Yes.

Before a big, scary job, I’ll go and stare at the sky, or sit in the dark, and think about the enormity of things. And the incongruency.

Me?!! The Bigness? !! Wow, how does this fit? The fact that I’ve been plunged into Something Big feels so incongruent that I just can’t put it down to my own doing. It feels bigger than a work of my orchestrating. It feels inevitable, preordained, destined by a force bigger than me. And very, very special.

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what your surname says about you (if you’re a woman)

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This is kinda interesting. Something I wonder about a bit. New research says when a woman changes her surname when she gets married, or hyphenates it, she’s judged as more feminine, in the painfully stereotyped sense of the word.40674_1_468c

Surname-changers were seen as more dependent, less intelligent and less ambitious, according to the study by Tilburg Institute for Behavioral Economics Research in Holland. Participants were asked to judge a hypothetical woman based on five categories: caring, competent, dependent, intelligent, and emotional. When she used her own surname, she was branded with more “powerful” terms.

The worse bit? How it affects pay:

“These judgments affected the chance that a woman would be hired as well as the estimation of her salary: compared to a woman who kept her own name, she was less likely to be hired and her salary was estimated considerably lower”

…about 861 Euros/month lower.

I’d add this: It’s a disaster when it comes to your Google rankings.

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mondays…they can be hard (but, here, some tweaks to make them better)

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I think Mondays are a struggle because it’s s hard to get the momentum going again. Like peddling away from a standstill…when your knees have gone flaccid. Plus,  there’s a discernible sense of “lack”.

stressedA lack in impending reward… because, have you noticed, we don’t reward ourselves on Mondays with that walk in the park at lunch or a slightly early finish to go to yoga. We punish ourselves on Mondays. We overlay Mondays with dread and ‘get back on track’ expectation – a punishing gym session, the start of a diet, getting on top of emails.

Hmmm, some tips to have a life bigger than such a rut? Gretchen at The Happiness Project shares a few good ones:

1. Avoid getting the bends, I. One friend used to hate the frantic rush of Monday mornings, so now she doesn’t try to do any “real work” until after lunch on Monday. She eases into the work week by checking email, reading professional email newsletters, and doing more substantial tasks IF she feels like it, but doesn’t consider herself “at work” until 1:30 p.m. The result? She gets about as much done as she did before – she just feels less pressure.

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