Marrieds: Too Good to Poop with the Rest of Us? July 10, 2011
Posted by Onely in As If!, Food for Thought.Tags: family restrooms, married restrooms, married toilets, Schiphol airport
9 comments
Thanks to our Copious Reader Eric for flagging this gem. According to CNN, Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport offers special toilets for married couples.
Why might this be? I can think of two reasons:
Reason 1: Married people cannot successfully perform their elimination functions unless their significant other is by their side holding their hand saying, “Don’t worry, dear, I’m here, you can do it, just relax and push!”
Reason 2: Married people, being married, are supremely mature and considerate public-toilet users, so they should not be forced to share porcelain with us seat-spraying, poop-spattering, flush-forgetting single types.
I think we can all agree that Reason 1 is pretty ridiculous, which means that Reason 2 must be right. Therefore the next time I transit Amsterdam, I plan to pull a wedding band and blowup man-doll out of my backpack and go undercover into the Married Couple’s Restroom (MCR). What do you think I will find, Copious Readers? A gentle smell of lavender? Ming porcelain toilets with silken rotating seat covers? Japanese rock fountains? Will I finally fulfill my longtime fantasy of finding a public toilet sparkling enough to wash my face in?
Of course there’s always Reason 3 for the MCRs, the craziest reason of all: (more…)
New York Legalizes Gay Marriage: Celebrate, But Remember Singles June 28, 2011
Posted by Onely in Food for Thought, Heteronormativity.Tags: Mark Grisanti, married rights for singles, New York marriage
6 comments
Yay! Previously homophobic (and possibly still homophobic) Senator Mark Grisanti breaks a deadlock in the New York State Senate’s vote to allow gay marriage:
Who am I to say that someone does not have the same rights that I have with my wife who I love or have the 1300 plus rights that I share with her? I vote in the affirmative.
This sentence could also easily apply to single people who are deprived of those same rights (caveat/clarification: the 1300 rights Grisanti mentioned are 1300 laws in the federal code that reference marital status, and not all of them favor married people, although the vast majority do).
I’m amazed how people can advocate for Rights and Social Justice while playing right into a system that inherently disparages (the single) half of the population. Actually, I shouldn’t be amazed, because until a few years ago I was one of those advocates.
We at Onely have said it before and we’ll say it again: yes, everyone should have the right to marry, but marriage should not be privileged over other lifestyles.
–Christina
Photo credit: rikkis_refuge
Newsweek Author Double-Dips in Singlism and Sexism June 10, 2011
Posted by Onely in As If!, Food for Thought.Tags: Christopher Dickey, female police officer, marital status on the job, newsweek, NYPD Special Victims Division, sexism in media
5 comments
Check out this Newsweek article by Christopher Dickey and see if you can spot the problematic paragraph, then tell me what that paragraph’s content has to do with the theme of the piece. Really, I’m not being sarcastic–I want to know if I have some serious reading comp problems. I read the article twice, some sections several times.
Despite an apparent blunder into sexism and singlism (described below), the article tells an intriguing story, briefly profiling the NYPD’s ever-shrinking Special Victims Division and some of its officers. (The SVD does the important work of catching sickos who commit sex and hate crimes.)
Does an SVD investigator’s gender or marital status impact his or her ability to do this job or affect the way the officer approaches the job? Sure, possibly (though not necessarily). Dickey doesn’t overtly discuss this topic, but he does touch on the extent of female presence in the unit. And that’s fine. What made me uncomfortable was this:
‘Leave my perp alone,’ said Liz Gutierrez, the only woman detective left on the squad. Gutierrez keeps her tightly curled hair cropped close around her head, wears little makeup, and carries a gun, of course, under the jacket of her pantsuit. She’s single, she says, but doesn’t volunteer more.
Facebook, Scourge of the Onelers, Part 2 May 8, 2011
Posted by Onely in Food for Thought, Heteronormativity, Just Saying., Pop Culture: Scourge of the Onelys, Singled Out, Take action, Your Responses Requested!.Tags: relationship status is inadequate, sign our facebook petition, stop the singlism
14 comments
Continued from this post…
Got your attention?
After Lisa conducted her Facebook experiment, we wondered, why is it that people can write anything they want on Facebook for their “religion” status, but not for relationship status?
It seemed an eminently reasonable question, so I posted an eminently reasonable article and petition on Change.org asking Facebook to tweak their script a tad. I’ve included excerpts from the article and petition here, along with some of the comments they generated. As you’ll see, on the niche topic of singles’ advocacy, what is eminently reasonable to one person may be hellfire-and-damnation to another, even in a community of supposedly progressive thinkers.
From the article: Tell Facebook “Relationships” Comprise More Than Just Sex Partners:
Facebook allows us to write whatever we want in our profile’s “Religion” box — even Peanut Butter Cups. So why, for our “Relationship,” must we choose from a pre-set list of nine choices: single; in a relationship; engaged; married; it’s complicated; in an open relationship; widowed; separated; and divorced? [Update: in February 2011 Facebook added two more relationship options: “in a civil union” and “in a domestic partnership.]
Facebook needs to make the Relationship status a write-in field. I at least want the option of flaunting of my relationships with my cat or my hairdresser. But there are serious, bigger problems at stake here.
By forcing users to choose one “relationship” from a narrow range of options centering around marital status and sexual habits, Facebook perpetuates our society’s entrenched mate-mania, which over-worships the sexual-couple-unit, and marriage in particular. This bias devalues other important relationships. It devalues platonic friends and non-spousal family members. And it devalues people for whom conventional coupling/marriage is either not appealing or not an option. . .
From the Petition:
Dear Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Heiliger,
Please make Relationship Status a write-in field, as you have done with the Religion option. Since 2007, at least six Facebook groups have formed to advocate for broader definitions of relationship on the site, yet Facebook still requires users to choose from a short pre-set list of choices centering around marital status and sexual habits.
Facebook’s current Relationship menu perpetuates our society’s entrenched mate-mania, which over-worships the sexual-couple-unit, and marriage in particular. Mate-mania is more than an irritating cultural quirk. It is actually codified into government policy. In the U.S. legal code over 1000 laws mention marital status, favoring married couples by a wide margin. This bias devalues other important relationships. It devalues platonic friends and non-spousal family members. And it devalues people for whom conventional coupling/marriage is either not appealing or not an option.
That’s not what Facebook is about. Facebook is about facilitating connections–all kinds of connections. . .
A word about Change.org: I wrote for them for a year and really enjoyed the experience. Change.org is a powerful and successful liberal forum advocating for social change on a range of important issues, from women’s rights to gay rights to animal rights to human rights to environmental protection, largely through the use of online petitions. Every day hundreds of thousands of change-minded, open-minded readers browse, comment on, and sign the petitions. The Change.org community prides itself on thinking outside the box and advancing the rights of the disenfranchised.
When I wrote the post, I imagined that Change.org’s progressive readers would appreciate my claim and respond in kind by signing the petition. Instead, the commentary was surprisingly negative, and only 200 readers signed the petition – even though the post and petition received more than 9,000 views. So why did it receive an overwhelmingly hostile response from commenters? Is it because they were unimaginative faux-progressives who only became liberals to piss off their right-wing parents or because they think they look good in Birkenstocks? Not at all. They cared deeply about other social issues, women’s rights in particular. In fact, they cared so deeply about women’s rights that a prime complaint about the petition was that it wasn’t feminist enough. Take for example the following two comments:
I think the cause of women’s rights needs to be taken seriously, and complaining about this type of stuff is a sure-fire way to lose points in the seriousness column.
I fail to see how that has to do with women’s rights, when that is affecting more than just women.
For people who haven’t yet thought critically about the cultural, governmental, and commercial biases toward couples, complaining about couple-mania is like complaining that the earth revolves around the sun. And why would anyone do that? Lisa commented on the article, explaining why Facebook’s relationship hangups were, in fact, a feminist issue:
The problem … has to do with the normalizing of romantic/sexual relationships as primary to a person’s identity. Because Facebook regulates the categories through which we define our online identities, it appears abnormal — and in the case of “relationship status,” impossible — to want to define one’s own identity according to our own terms, rather than Facebook’s. Thus, calling for a broadening of what “having a relationship” might mean — as Christina does here — appears abnormal to some.
Readers also challenged the article by saying that there are other (separate but seemingly equal) ways in Facebook through which you can link your status to friends/relatives/pets/etc, so they wondered why we needed to be able to do this in the “relationship” field. In response, Lisa explained why this was so, feeling rather startled that such an explanation would even be required for people who, judging from their participation in Change.org, would already have a basic understanding of the rhetoric of discrimination:
Facebook’s regulation of which relationships are “possible” or “intelligible” participates in unjust systems of thought and action that attempt to regulate one’s ability to be recognized in larger culture as an individual deserving of equal rights…. While one’s online identity on Facebook may not seem to matter all that much in a local/individual context, I’d argue that Facebook’s popularity means that when it regulates particular aspects of a user’s identity as “normal,” that regulation trickles into the thinking/actions of the general public.
As of April 9, 2011, the article had received 9,582 views since its inception in December 2010. Over 200 of those viewers signed the accompanying petition. And the other 9,000? Well, as we’ve seen, a number of them found the whole concept offensive. As is common with online petitions, a good proportion of the readers may have been too lazy, hurried, or cautious to hit the “sign” button and fill out their personal information (as I have often been). Regardless, almost 10,000 people now may think just a bit more critically when filling out their Facebook profiles.
— CC
Facebook: Scourge of the Onelers, Part 1 May 4, 2011
Posted by Onely in Food for Thought, Just Saying., Singled Out.Tags: facebook, relationship categories, singles and stigma
10 comments
In March 2011, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg posted his relationship status on Facebook for the first time. He is now officially “in a relationship.”
From this, we understand that he is in an exclusive, romantic relationship with one person. We don’t take it to mean that before he was “in a relationship,” this billionaire social networking mogul previously lived a life without any relationships – that is, without any significant social interactions.
That’s because the rhetoric of “relationship” has been hijacked by our obsession with so-called “soulmates.” Nowhere is this more obvious than on Facebook, where the “relationship status” menu contains pre-set choices that all have to do with coupling or sex.
Intrigued and also a little irritated, Lisa and I – both moderate Facebook users – decided to conduct a couple experiments. Lisa changed her relationship status to “in a relationship” out of the blue, and I started a petition on Change.org calling for Facebook to make “relationship status” a write-in field. In this post and the next, we describe what happened:
Several months ago, Lisa suspected that changing her relationship status on Facebook would “garner more attention than anything else I’d ever posted.” And it did. In her post describing the experiment on Onely, she explains:
Not only did my relationship-status-change draw three unqualified “likes” and eleven comments, but I also received three inquiries via text message, five private messages from friends wanting to know the “scoop,” and even one question about it at the end of an otherwise-serious phone call with my little brother. Considering I only have 130 “friends” on Facebook, that’s a pretty decent amount of attention — certainly much more than I’ve ever managed to solicit from anything else I’ve done on Facebook.
What’s more, two of the private messages were sent from friends who I haven’t seen or spoken to in the last six months, and although I replied graciously and honestly to their inquiries (I told them both it was a joke, sorry to disappoint (!!), told them a little bit about my current life and asked them about theirs), I haven’t heard from either of them since. The message I’m getting from this silence? A relationship-status change is everyone’s business.
The problem is, my experiment is flawed because my Facebook friend base is biased (my real-life FB friends know about and appreciate my pro-single status), and some of them even knew I was thinking about the experiment in advance.
To collect a bigger dataset, Lisa asked readers of Onely to do the experiment and report back their results. The results varied. Some readers reported that the relationship-status change didn’t garner any significant response because, as one reader put it: “either my friends know me well enough that my [relationship-status] change was some sort of play/experiment. Or they’re not the frenzy kind.” And others, such as the following reader, reported that breakups garner the most attention: “When i split up from my girlfriend … I … actually found some friends … that’s when I got [the] most comment[s]…. nearly 60 people joined in the conversation – you know what they say, ‘there’s no news like bad news.’”
But most of the readers who participated in the experimented reported impressive results:
So six hours in, I’m already wanting to renig. But I’m staying strong. Here are the results: 6 likes, 8 comments (2 comments also liked), 3 comments are congrats, 5 are wanting details.
“Kim is in a relationship with a hurdy gurdy player ;)” and 24 hours later: 11 likes, 4 comments (4 comments also liked), 4 comments are congrats and who???, 1 text, 2 phone calls.
My FB status was changed to “in a relationship” for about 28 hours or so. During that time I received 2 texts, 2 phone calls, 1 FB message, 11 “likes” and 9 comments.
What’s more, many of our readers noted that the experiment had made them reflective about the attention drawn by the change in status. One wrote, after hiding her relationship status after 24 hours of “being in a relationship,” that “I think that I’ll just tell everyone I am in a relationship with myself, because really I am. I’m in the middle of doing a lot of hard internal work and dating is out of the question during this time.” And another commented that “I felt uncomfortable with all the commentary and deleted the post.”
Given the importance people place on Facebook’s relationship status, and given the influence of the corporation in our culture, Lisa and I were bothered by the fact that “relationship status” focuses only on sexual couplings (or uncouplings). Why, we wondered, can people write anything they want for their “religion” status, but not for relationship status?
*** To Be Continued! ***
— Christina (and Lisa)
Single? Don’t Be! (Or, Christina becomes a Onely Hero) May 1, 2011
Posted by Onely in Dating, Food for Thought, single and happy, Singled Out, STFU.Tags: heart-to-heart dating service, not bitter, single, singlism sucks
5 comments
Since starting Onely, I’ve become attuned to the subtle singlisms of society.
But what I call “attuned,” some people might call “bitter.” Singlists (people who regard singles as less worthy than couples) commonly use “bitter” to describe those of us who question our culture’s unconditionally pro-coupling status quo–whether our tones are calm, vehement, or vituperative.
So I tried very, very hard to keep my voice friendly and upbeat when I called the Heart-to-Heart dating service to tell them that one of their advertisements was singlist. I think I was successful in my efforts to stay nice, but I certainly had no success convincing the representative that the ad was problematic.
Here’s what happened:
While sitting at a stoplight on a busy road, I noticed outside my driver’s side window one of those signs with the little metal sticks for legs, as you might see advertising politicians before an election. But this sign was for a dating service. It said, in big red letters with a heart where the “O” would be (awwww),
“Single? Don’t Be!
Heart-to-Heart (###-###-####)”
If you’re reading this book, you probably already see the problem.
Don’t be single! In common usage, “Don’t” precedes an action/situation that makes your life or others’ lives unsavory. (Don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t eat the yellow snow.)
Don’t be single! There are better ways to be!
I don’t hate dating services. They can connect people who want to find life partners or people (like me) who just hope to go out and have fun. But I’d prefer that the services advertise themselves without denigrating any particular group. It would be so easy:
“Single and looking?
Heart to Heart! (###-###-####)”
Easy! So, I called them. To tell them how, by changing two words, they could make the world a little less singlist. The call Did Not Go Well.
As I’ve said, I was so very nice. I greeted the rep and said I wasn’t actually calling for a date, but rather with an idea for their advertising. I said, more or less, that I felt their ad made some uncomfortable assumptions about single people and that there were other ways to communicate their message without assuming that being single is an inherently bad thing. I suggested, “Single and looking to find a partner?” (which isn’t pithy, but that’s why I’m not in advertising).
At first, she didn’t understand. I tried to explain my point several times, in several ways, all of which were perky and positive (I thought). At some point I said something about them “trashing singlehood,” and that resonated with her. She said, “Ohhhh, I see what you’re saying!”
Success! No, wait, not so much. What follows is a loose transcript of the conversation, in which she dug in her heels and defended Heart-to-Heart’s advertisement as if it were her dissertation. I typed as she spoke. (Please note that I couldn’t type fast enough to record all her words, but I got the gist.)
In her first breath, she said: “[The text on the sign] is what we want to say. . . Single is a problem. . . If you’re single and not happy, we can partner you up. . . In today’s economy two incomes are better than one.”
Wow. I had to decide which of these ignorant statements to address. I chose “if you’re single and not happy, we can partner you up.”
Patiently, I tried to explain that the whole problem was that they didn’t specify “single and unhappy,” or “single and looking for someone,” but instead, they just said “single.”
She replied, “If you’re not looking to find anyone, then don’t call us.”
That’s absolutely fine, I said, still optimistic. But they didn’t say “call us if you’re single and looking to find someone.” They said, “don’t be single.” In choosing these words, I explained, they were trashing all single people, even those who didn’t consider their status a problem.
The rest of her words speak for themselves:
“The reason that we trashed [singlehood] is we don’t want people to be single. We want people to think about being single to think about being alone. . . so we are trying to trash it. . . And we are getting tons of calls and people walking through our door – so it’s working for us.”
I took a deep breath, maintaining my cool. I didn’t want to give her a chance to call me bitter. So I said, in the sweetest tone I could muster (while making white-knuckled throttling motions with my hands), “Well, it’s something to think about!”
And she said, “Well, thanks for your input. I’ll pass it on to our management.”
HAHA! Just kidding. No she didn’t. She actually said: “Ok, but it’s working for us so I don’t think we’ll even give it a thought.” (The emphasis this time is mine.)
But it’s too late. My phone call made her think about it. And even though she’ll try to dismiss it (perhaps she’ll complain about “that bitter single woman” to her colleagues and friends), my complaint was voiced. That’s progress, and that’s why I’m not bitter.
Emerging from Hibernation… Onely’s Back!! April 28, 2011
Posted by Onely in Food for Thought, single and happy.Tags: copious readers rock, still single and happy, we love bears
2 comments
Okay, yes. We know. We’ve been gone. We suck.
And we’re sorry!
But we have lots to say and are gearing up for a GREAT summer of posts and news. To keep you happy, here are some teasers:
- Christina and Lisa have more to say about Facebook, including a long-awaited update on the great Facebook experiment!
- Christina tells a dating business what’s wrong with their advertising!
- We recount our Copious Readers’ best responses to the question: “So, Why Are You Still Single?”
- Lisa reports on finishing one great Onely adventure (Hint: she’s a doctor now!) and preparing for her biggest Onely adventure yet! (Hint: It’s international! And it’s semi-permanent!)
- We discuss the economic consequences of being single in America!
We have a bundle of excuses for our relative absence over the last month (or — gasp — more), but we’re sure you, our Copious and Patient Readers, aren’t interested. Instead, we’ll beg for your forgiveness and encourage you to check in again at your leisure this weekend.
In the meantime, please tell us — what have you been up to in your illustrious single-and-happy lives?
— Lisa and Christina
Hard Core Onelers: Hired Hermits March 11, 2011
Posted by Onely in book review, Food for Thought, Great Onelies in History, Reviews.Tags: hermit, victorian england
9 comments
Welcome to the latest installment in our series Hard Core Onelers, where we feature people who take independence to new or interesting extremes. Today’s subject: Hired Hermits.
Copious Readers, what would it take for you to become a hermit?
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. Doubleday, 2010. (Onely recommends: Read this book. It’s amazing.)
For a time [at estates in Victorian England] it was highly fashionable to build a hermitage and install in it a live-in hermit. At Painshill in Surrey, one man signed a contract to live seven years in picturesque seclusion, observing a monastic silence, for 100 pounds a year, but was fired after just three weeks when he was spotted drinking in the local pub.
An estate owner in Lancashire promised 50 pounds a year for life to anyone who would pass seven years in an underground dwelling without cutting his hair or toenails or talking to another person. Someone took up the offer and actually lasted four years before deciding he could take no more; whether he was at least given a partial pension for his efforts is sadly unknown.
Queen Caroline had the architect William Kent build for her a hermitage at Richmond into which she installed a poet named Stephen Duck, but that was not quite a success either, for Duck decided he didn’t like the silence or being looked at by strangers, so he quit.
Copious Readers, would you be a hired hermit? For how long? Under what sort of parameters? Before I’d make my decision, I’d need the answers to a few simple questions:
Do people have to journey through the woods and up a mountain to see me? Am I confined to the cave/cottage or can I frolic in the nearby fields too? Does the public come to watch me do my hermitting? Do I get food delivered or must I rely on my gardening and snare-making skills? Am I allowed to trim my nails and nose hairs?
I thought long and hard and decided I could last at least five years under some combination of these conditions. Time to nap! Time to write! Time to do backbends and tree pose! I would only need just a few meager possessions:
–toilet
–tub
–skylight
–warm babbling brook running through the cave floor
–some bags of cashews
–journals
–memory foam mattress
–ceiling fan
–heated floors
–my MacBook
–wifi
–my cats
–$20,000 year stipend (good cat food is expensive)
–make that $60,000 (good cat food is really expensive)
–access to medical care (assuming the doctor makes cave calls)
–visits from my family and friends (depending on the conditions set by the estate owner, these might have to be clandestine, involving parachutes and balaclavas)
Rich estate-owning readers, want to add a touch of whimsy and mystique to your premises? By following the few simple guidelines above, you can have your very own Onely hermit, with crisply groomed nose hairs.
–Christina
Photo credit: aug.edu
Great News for Single Americans! (but you wouldn’t know it if you listened to the news) February 6, 2011
Posted by Onely in As If!, Food for Thought, Heteronormativity, Pop Culture: Scourge of the Onelys, Singled Out, Singles Resource, We like. . ..Tags: advanced directives, gay rights = singles' rights, hospital visitation rights, know your rights, LGBTQS, Obama pro-single, singles, singles get to redefine family too!, singlism in the media
13 comments
To the delight of LGBTQS (that stands for lesbian-gay-bi-trans-queer-single) advocates everywhere, federal regulations now require that hospitals must grant all patients, no matter their marital, sexual or religious status, the right to define who they count as “family.”
Thanks to President Obama, the Code of Federal Regulations 42 CFR 482.13(h) and 42 CFR 485(f) requires that all hospitals in the U.S.:
(1) inform each patient of his or her right to receive visitors whom he or she designates, including a domestic partner, (2) do not restrict or limit visitation rights based on sexual orientation and gender identity, among other factors and (3) ensure that all visitors have full and equal visitation rights, consistent with a patient’s wishes. (– Human Rights Campaign)
Whoo hoo! Great news for singles, right? We certainly think so — but you wouldn’t know it if you relied on the media to explain. According to most reports I read, the major stakeholders are lesbian and gay couples. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but … ummm … what about lesbian and gay singles? Or … ahem … what about all singles (asexual, heterosexual, polyamorous, widowed, divorced, whatever).
Singlist media strikes again! Because it completely ignores the remarkably equalizing ramifications – for all Americans – of this new law, it upholds the couple-centric, heteronormative bias that all LGBTQS folk are trying to overcome. So you can see what I mean, let’s examine the following report posted on ABC’s news site shortly after the regulations came into effect: (more…)
New Years’ Resolutions — It’s Never Too Late! January 26, 2011
Posted by Onely in Food for Thought, single and happy, Your Responses Requested!.Tags: late new year, life transitions, new year's resolutions, thank goodness I'm single, welcoming uncertainty
18 comments
Yeah, yeah, whatever. Onely’s a little slow on the uptake. We’re 26 days past the new year already — duh! But given the maddening developments in my life since the *real* new year, I’m inclined to start from scratch and designate today, January 26th 2011, my official new year.
Since Christina and I began this blog, I’ve been enrolled in a wonderful doctoral program in Louisville, Kentucky. I have enjoyed constant support and intellectual engagement from my peers and mentors. I have grown in so many ways — as a person, as a teacher, as a scholar. In fact, it’s hard for me to imagine the development of Onely in any way separate from my journey in graduate school.
But my formal education is coming to a close — I’m set to graduate in May — and with that closure comes transition. The academic job market hasn’t been easy, and at this point I have no idea where I will be in six months, even in three. I have become comfortable with my life here, but I’ve also been looking forward to moving on and finding some security. I thought I’d be moving toward the ideal – an assistant professor position at a great university – and instead I find myself confronting the reality – the market is glutted with equally qualified candidates who have similar dreams, and I don’t have any control over how they compare to me.
Unfortunately, my “ideal” may not work out after all, and it’s been somewhat unsettling as I identify other “ideals.” The thing is, I’ve begun to remember that there are alternatives to what I thought I’d been aiming for this whole time — there are other “ideals.” Within this academic world I live in, you wouldn’t think there is anything to do but teach college students and publish lengthy papers in academic journals. In fact, that’s what I’ve basically assumed since beginning this program.
But that’s the culture of the academy, not of the world. And as I consider other paths, I’m reminded not only of who I was (what I believed, valued, desired) before this doctoral program, but how far I’ve come — not only professionally, but also personally. My original “self” is still intact; it’s just become a little more nerdy and a lot more satisfied. I’m beginning to wonder why I was dead-set on a particular future when, in fact, there could be many: I have this amazing degree (well, almost have it, knock on wood) and have accumulated years of teaching, research, writing, and editing experience — all of which can be used in new and exciting ways I couldn’t have predicted.
These last few weeks, as I’ve been rejected by institutions and people I unconsciously idealized for the last four years, I have begun to explore — and get excited about! — other options. Admittedly, it’s been difficult to explore these options without feeling like I’m somehow giving up or letting my colleagues down, and so I haven’t felt entirely open to this exploration, in spite of the fact that I keep returning to it. My conclusion: the process of letting go – even if it’s not permanent – is painful, no matter how rich the future promises to be.
So my late-January New Year’s resolution, official on January 26th, 2011, is as follows:
I welcome the uncertainty of the present and open my mind to whatever possibilities inhere in the future. After all, I could not have predicted them without letting go. And I could not be so welcoming if I were not Onely.
Copious Readers, what are your late- (or early!) January resolutions, and how will your Onely mindset help you maintain your resolve?
— Lisa
Onely.Org 