Hello Lovely, Good morning. I am always with you and yet we seem to have lost touch. I understand that there are always things to do, places to go, opportunities to seize, dreams to realize and fires to fight but it is almost as if…
Welcome Aboard! Henry Airlines has some great news: You no longer need to wear a mask on your flight with us. Why? Because we are not scared anymore. The government has decided that measurements are no longer needed. No more lockdowns, no more quarantine after…
* I receive many emails on a daily basis and I sometimes wonder why certain phrases are used to start email exchanges. Here I will share some email highlights and how I interpreted or responded to them:
“I hope this email finds you well”
Did the email look for me?
Glad, the email found me.
But I was hiding so well. Damn you, email !!!
“To whom it may concern”
Nobody will read this in a timely matter.
Who will even get this email?
What about if nobody is concerned? Will I ever get a response?
“Trust this e-note meets you well”
Why? What is this even supposed to mean?
“….Urgent!”
Take at least one day to respond.
Start the email with “I hope this email finds you well”
Respond to all other emails first.
“Per My Last Email”
As you all can see,
I have already done this.
Read my damn emails!
“Reply to All”
Seriously, guys!
Who is Xiau Li in HR?
Congrats, you successfully cc’d everyone, so everyone knows I messed up.
“Pre-Meeting Reminder”
I will not attend.
Because I don’t want to attend.
Have fun without me!
“Just a (friendly) Reminder”
Hello, are you there?
You are wasting my fucking time.
Answer me, okay?
“Excellent Idea”
Let’s hear from others.
You are hogging (take or use most or all of something in an unfair or selfish way) the meeting.
Please stop talking, Jay.
“No Worries If I cannot get back to You with the PowerPoint Presentation today!”
But I am worried.
I need the final slide damnit.
Do your fucking job.
“Mental Health Day Participation Request”
If it is bad timing, I can move this new breakdown, and sob at my desk.
I already did this.
Is it mandatory?
“You Must Have Missed That”
I didn’t miss it. I just don’t care.
Your request doesn’t matter.
I will reply never.
“Let Me Check My Agenda”
I cannot do it.
Stop asking me to do it.
I don’t want to do it, okay?
“How Are You?”
I super do not care.
Oh, wow, another get-together?
Just murder me, please.
“I will get back to you as soon as possible”
Get ready to wait.
Prepare another email “friendly reminder”
If you were to die tomorrow, what one thing (or few things) would you be most disappointed that you weren’t able to complete, change, or achieve? Here is some of my wisdom: I don’t need praise or attention to have value. Cultivate twelve people who…
*when things were so much better. Joel: “Mom, how was it back in the days when you were a kid?” When I was a kid, we were tough. We didn’t whine like kids today. Nobody had “peanut allergies” back then. Sometimes people’s throats just closed…
Yesterday we buried my grandmother which was almost as bad as the day she died. Happiness and good cheer felt like distant memories. They felt like something I had lost when she died. But my grandma knew that even in the darkest times, we can still laugh; we can still smile. Those are the times we need it the most. Smiles and laughter may feel uncomfortable because it may seem like you are moving on or forgetting about her. But it only means that you are learning how to live with loss.
Death requires you to reconfigure your expectations around pleasure and joy. Things that previously brought you joy when your loved one was still alive – mundane things such as getting a promotion, having your nails done, or watching a soccer game – may now be tinged with sadness or nostalgia because your grandmother, partner, or mother isn’t here with you anymore. I absolutely do not advise a “fake it till you make it” approach. It may seem counterintuitive, but to access your joy, you must sit with your grief while allowing natural moments or respite. Cry when you feel like it, shout, whatever makes you feel better.
Everybody deals with death differently. A friend told me when she lost her mother and came back home to her apartment, all she was thinking about was survival. She had to remind herself to eat. She was wildly anxious and depressed, and kept asking herself, “How am I going to get through this? Am I going to get through this?” Those were the two questions running through her brain 24 hours a day. She wasn’t ready to talk about her grief or share memories of her dead mother with her friends or family. She needed a break from it all, but she didn’t even know how to express that.
My grandmother had a hard life with tons of work and lots of suffering. Things turned around when she found the love of her life in her early 70s. She enjoyed many years with him by her side before she got sick. And then she got really sick. And then she fell asleep and never woke up again.
If you are going to live a full life of loss, you have to find a way back to joy. Through all of her physical pain, my grandmother was able to access joy. Experiencing joy for most people is often the simplest thing. My grandmother didn’t have a lot financially, but she saved little bits of money throughout the year to fund her joy, which generally centred around celebrations and giving to others. Rarely to splurge on herself. She did whatever she needed to make it happen, even if making it happen simply involved sitting in a wheelchair, or even a hospital bed, bossing the rest of us around in her way that we are all familiar with. She understood on a cellular level that no matter how hard life is, no matter how much grief or trauma you are forced to manage, life is still meant to be lived. My grandmother literally fell asleep while having breakfast. In her last conversation with me she told me, “Daniela, it is time to go. It is time!” I cried and was rather rude and told her that this is not the time yet and that she should remain positive. She just smiled, we said we love each other and she hung up. I felt deep inside that this was our last conversation. Four days later, she passed away. Her commitment to joy is my inheritance.
My son sat next to me in the funeral home today and wiped away my tears when I cried. Bless his heart. His love was exactly what I needed at that time. He smiled at me and whispered, “Mommy, grandma is at a better place now. No more pain. And she can float on a cloud. How awesome is that?”
If you ask those who knew my grandmother what they remember most about her, they will tell you about her smile, how she was able to take over a room with her craziness and funny behaviour, and how generous she was. She was always smiling. Even in the end, smiling-through-the-pain kind of way, but in a way that was genuine and full of love. In the end, she was sick often and honest about her struggles. She knew joy was essential to her survival and any tiny chance of healing.
So, at lunch after the funeral, we raised our glasses to grandma. We smiled and made a couple of jokes. Jokes she would have made. We deserve joy, even if it is at times tinged with grief. Experiencing joy, even in hard times, is one of the many ways I continue to love her. Remembering the good times as much as the bad times.
I hope people get to live a life with purpose and joy. Part of that purpose and even part of that joy is to allow yourself to contemplate the end of your life. I hope people use this article as an opportunity to talk about their worries and hopes and decisions for their end of life and not just feel that this is so terrible to contemplate that the best solution is to not talk about it at all. Facing the end of life together is hard, and nobody does it perfectly; elegance and ease are not required. Being honest is what’s needed.
I miss her. Her noise and the energy and the fun. And the love. She was a very loving person. This was not a cold character; this was a very warm, engaged person. I still feel her presence, but I miss her being in the world.
*an article I dedicate to my brother Thomas Weiss, who I dearly love and look up to when it comes to anything numbers. And a lot more, too. Sometimes it feels like the things we learned in school are useless and nothing drives that point…
Enough with the eggs already! No more chocolate-egg eating! My house is stuffed with chocolate eggs. The church bells next door are ringing again every fifteen minutes so everything is back to normal but there is so much more church stuff going on. My son’s…
Good morning dear applicants,
we are proud to announce that the Literary Ladybug Guilt (LLG) would be open to all applicants even the non-binary.
Non-Binary Defined:
“Some people don’t identify with any gender. Some people’s gender changes over time. People whose gender is not male or female use many different terms to describe themselves, with non-binary being one of the most common. Other terms include genderqueer, agender, bigender, and more.“
While we did everything in our power to get it right, we did receive some pushback on the application process. Comments such as “I am not a woman yet, but soon,” “I am tired of having to misgender myself just to access the already scarce resources for different genders in this world,” and “Will there be separate bathrooms for those who identify as ‘ally'” (see explanation in the picture above), and “Please, can I just use the bathroom in peace” made our evaluation committee stop and take notes. As the chair of that committee, I want to take some time to put your fears to rest.
Some people think that adding “nonbinary people” to our application form while not changing anything about our application process, or internet presence is evidence that we want credit for being inclusive without doing any actual work. Let me be clear: We want to create opportunities for ALL genders. That includes women, girls, men, queer, transgender, transsexual, lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, questioning, intersex, ally, asexual or pansexual applicants.
But listen, we hear you. You, nonbinary people, are super-sensitive about being grouped in with the ladies for some reason, and we want to respect that enough to stop people from making mean Facebook comments about us. Your feedback has led our steering committee to take several steps to make the LLG even more accessible to nonbinary applicants, so we decided on the following rules:
We have also heard your concerns about how your applications are evaluated by a committee that lacks sexual diversity, gender diversity, or racial diversity. While we share your concerns about diversity, we do not have the capacity to expand the committee at this time. Instead, we are making other efforts to include diverse voices in our operations.
We also acknowledge that for some, these efforts will not be enough. If you choose to withdraw your application, please be aware that we cannot refund your application fee, as we have already spent most of our budget on changing all the application form to LGBTTQQIAAP, non-binary and diverse. The other part of the budget spent goes to all those who applied as male and now identify as female and vice versa. Also, all the queers. For any disappointments, we are happy to offer a free ticket to the LGBTTQQIAAP Gala in Austria. It is mandatory to bring a rainbow flag. You’ll also need to help serve the hors d’oeuvres.
For those who decide that the LLG is not the right opportunity for them at this time, we hope you’ll see the changes we make and choose to apply again in the future. Thank you for supporting our mission of creating opportunities for every human being and also making sure those opportunities are branded like an eight-year-old girl’s birthday-home-pick up with a limousine for reasons we refuse to examine.
Gxrl pxwxr!
Yours,
—The LLG Committee
Everyone’s still so scared of COVID. But come on, people. It’s going to be endemic soon enough. And that has to mean, uh, something. Endemic means freedom, more or less. For some time. Sometimes more, but occasionally less. They say less is more, and that will…
