Then I talked to my genius mom:

Me: How’d you do it?

Mom: It helps to look in the mirror at first. When I first started trying to wiggle my ears…

And then I stopped her because, although I knew she could wiggle her ears, it had never occurred to me that at one point she couldn’t wiggle her ears, had wanted to wiggle ears, had made it a goal to do so, and had practiced until she succeeded. !

Me: Wait, wait, WHY did you want to learn how to wiggle your ears?!

Mom: Hmmm… I don’t remember now… but at first I could only just barely see them moving. You know when you move your head out and back like you are an Egyptian?

Me: Yeah

Mom: Well, try and move the front of your face out front while you try and hold the back of your head in place.

Me: Wait… this feels really weird…

And then, wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles, I could squeeze my back scalp muscles together and wiggle my ears.

“Walk like an Egyptian!!”

If you ever need to giggle, try a little wiggle. We were talking on skype and I was very seriously showing her my progress, while she was wiggling her ears too, “Look, look, did you see my ear wiggle!” Then we both started laughing.

The funniest part about this, to me, is imagining my mom looking in the mirror and trying to wiggle her ears, and going about it with the hard working dedication that she applies to most everything. Ahhhh…. funny.

Update 4/15/08: It really works! After just a day of doing the scalp exercise, the horizontal lines in my forehead are significantly reduced! I got those lines young due to my face actually freezing in that expression. :) I hadn’t been able to relax my face consistently enough or do anything else to get rid of them. WOW. This is a truly amazing result, especially after just one day.

Enjoy your beauty, don’t let them quash it. Promise yourself that no matter how comfortable or uncomfortable other people might be with your appearance, that YOU will love and accept yourself.

Many of us have experienced at one time or another that HAIR can be our own personal inferiority-complex-inducing nightmare. There is a growing hair acceptance movement. (I think Lorraine Massey might have kick started it.) I don’t know if you’ve noticed it. It’s aimed at the curly girls who’ve often had a hard time of it.

I want us all to love our own hair, however funktified it might be. If you are anyone besides our beloved super straight haired sisters, you will be able to find great advice at Naturally Curly.

Naturally curly has a hair resource page that rocks. It gives styling and product suggestions for every type of hair except stick straight hair. I highly recommend looking at this simple page and discovering what type of hair you have. They also offer a lot of product recommendations. If you go to the forum page, people give great advice about cheap alternatives that you can buy at a health food store or make at home.

What are your Christmas stories? I don’t even know if I have Christmas stories… let’s see…
About 8 years old: Some one rings the bell. We open the door, there is a big box almost as tall as my head in wrapping paper! The top is open! 4 kids jumping up and down and screaming! I pull out a cheerleader barbie doll from the box. Pure excitement. Our moms are embarrassed.  They look at each other. I don’t care. What food is in there?!!

About 6 years old? A man knocks on the door. I answer. I’m in my pink nightgown and robe. The man asks in a strained voice if my dad is home. He is wearing a dark jacket. He has dark hair. I am innocent. I walk up to my parent’s bedroom to tell my dad that someone is at the door for him. I am first startled when I turn around and find that the man has followed me up the stares and is standing behind me in the hall. Uh oh, maybe I should have shut the door. He yells at my dad. They move into the living room. He knocks my dad into the Christmas tree. He knocks our Christmas tree down. Hey! You knocked our Christmas tree down! I think someone calls the police. Later, I feel somewhat sorry for that man. He looked so sad.

Masculine? Masculine. Ah, there’s the rub. The real double bind: feeling masculine.

The feelings I have when I feel masculine do not fit in with the definition of masculine. I do not feel like a man or a boy. What I feel when I’m feeling masculine is unfeminine, in the artificial sense of the word. The meanings and associations that have come to form around the word, feminine, have nothing at all to do with the actual living, human female being who does indeed grow hair, bleed and heaven help us, now and then doth posses and odor less than floral in bouquet.

The artificial female-the one that is held up for women in our society to emulate, smells flowery (always), is very thin, polite, dainty, delicate, pure, clean and hair free in all the required hair free places. Any deviation from one or more of the above requirements tips the scale over into the realm of unfeminine. Many deviations lead us down that dreaded road toward, masculinity…

It is a scale. Have you ever noticed that very petite women can be “firecrackers.” It’s like, they are petite enough that they can also be loud and opinionated and be seen as “feisty” instead of “bitchy” and still be a “feminine” “firecracker” rather than “emasculating.” (The qualities that men label “emasculating” say a lot about what men’s inner masculinity/femininity scales are like and what qualities they need to compare themselves to to feel masculine.)

I am tall, strong, hairy, and don’t wear make-up. I also have an hour glass shape which, combined with my long hair, tipped my scale safely towards feminine. Then my feet started hurting, so I started wearing clunky supportive shoes. Then I cut my hair.

The shoes and the short hair seem to have tipped my inner scale and it is teetering towards “masculine.” I don’t like this, in case you were wondering.

The teetering scale is probably why the size and gender of the people I’m around can tip it one way or the other. This is lame. I need, to totally mix my metaphors, to re-set my feminine set point so that it includes more of who I am, or to just not care. I want to feel comfortable in my skin again no matter who I’m around.

The feeling of masculinity even made me wonder if I might be bi-sexual. I’ve scanned my memory and my emotions for sexual feelings towards women. (There was that one dream.) After such a scan, I have to admit that I am safely on the side of heterosexuality. I only want to have sex with men, and that’s the definition, right?

The only cure for feeling masculine? Being around men; strong men, with muscles. What a relief! I feel little again. I notice how curvy I am. My voice gets higher. I feel comfortable in my own skin. My face feels sweet and angelic, not masculine. Isn’t it strange? My embodied definition of feminine must be: “smaller” which I can only be in comparison. What a lame definition of feminine. I wish our culture didn’t put that kind of lameness on women. I wish I hadn’t absorbed it.

There is another person who works here who is not my boss but is about at my boss’s level. She was the boss of the person, who quit abruptly, who used to be in my position. I learned this slowly over time and it made sense of the previously puzzling decision to place me in the department I am in. She micro-manages the people under her to the hilt. In fact, they are required to cc her on every work email they send out. Interestingly though, she seems to have no idea about what is actually going on or about what her people do.

I’m mostly in a different area than her, thank goodness, but I’ve been given a talking to twice by her. Today I was prepared, but last time she literally didn’t let me speak and I had to close the door after she left and cry (just a little) in frustration. It made me want to quit. Today I was given a talking to for handling a confusing situation well. She told me that in the future, I should ask her or someone else in authority what to do. This highlighted the contrast between her and my boss so well. If I took the whole story to him right now, he would be impressed at my initiative and problem solving skills and tell me to keep up the good work. She is just mad that she wasn’t kept in the loop, I suppose.

I could make this whole post a bullet point list about good and bad bosses. In this case I think it comes down to:

Good boss

• Wants to give his team power.

Bad boss

• Wants to take power away.

pss: If anyone from my work ever sees this, I’m talking about a different job.
pss: I think I will make a list.

I told my co-chair that it was time to get things going. We still had an official vote to cast, an exit survey to fill out, and a flower activity to do. When people turned their exit survey back in to us, we gave them a flower. Then asked them to exchange flowers with people who they wanted to express appreciation to. They could keep exchanging flowers and were to always only have one flower. (This worked really well by the way- it was the brainchild of my awesome co-chair.)

Oh yeah, give a person a flower and a compliment and they will start to soften. I had no expectations, and was surprised to hear people say that I bring a loving energy into the room, and am kind, friendly, (and praise worthy and of good report. ;) (It’s like they saw through my gruff beer swilling exterior to the big teddy bear inside.) Then we announced that our unopposed candidate for co-chair was unanimously voted in and she gave a speech. My co-chair and I promptly sat down. “We’re done!” she whispered to me. I felt a little like we had perpetrated a scam on the incoming leaders. “We get to sit down now!”

Then the new co-chair gave my co-chair and I big bouquets of flowers, count on her to do something thoughtful like that. She also handed us cards that everyone signed! That surprised me. “We should thank our steering committee” I said starting to feel slightly generous. My co-chair thanked our committee, thanked everyone for coming, and invited everyone to return to socializing.

“Wait,” an older woman said, “I have something to say.” “Oh hear it comes.” I thought. This woman had complained by email before and was to me the most irksome type of complainer: the non participating complainer. I held the air in my chest. “I just want to say,” she said “as someone who isn’t involved in the nitty gritty of the group and just occasionally comes for the showy stuff, that you people make it really easy to come here. No matter how long I have been away, you always make me feel loved and welcomed. Thank you.” A space opened up. Some unknown tightness melted and my beer swilling, gruff doppleganger faded away. I took a deep breath.

A couple more people thanked us publicly and then people went back to talking. I was relaxed and talking to people with out the tension of defense.

The last person I gave a flower to while we were doing the flower activity was my co-chair. I looked in her eyes and we both started to cry. “You taught me about serving rather than taking.” I told her. “I’m so glad you asked me to be your co-chair. I wouldn’t have said yes to anyone but you. I’ve learned so much from you.” “I’ve learned so much from you!” she said. She told me that I was so kind and was really a good person in a deep way. I was surprised she could see my kindness. I’d been feeling so gruff. “You are so kind and yet you are so opinionated!” She said. I laughed, “I am so opinionated!” I think we both had open suprise in our eyes, amazed that maybe the other person admired us as much as we had been admiring the other.

I drove home from the party with deep breaths of air circulating through my lungs, feeling like a weight had been lifted off of me, feeling deeply relieved, lightly bewildered, and happy.

Even though I was dealing with adults, I could relate to the harassed look mothers of young children sometimes have. Like a young mother, sometimes the only thing to do to get relief from being pulled at and demanded from is to institute some discipline. We set rules and boundaries, and I went from feeling harassed and unappreciated to feeling gruff and curmudgeonly.

It wasn’t all bad, I enjoyed leading the meetings, especially as the new format for our steering committee meetings cut them down from a couple meandering hours to one very productive hour a month. Our goal was to empower people in our group, and soon people realized that if they complained they better also be ready to step up and do something about it. This brought out leadership in some unexpected people, and they started to take ownership of the group, which is what we wanted. I loved working with my co-chair who has natural leadership ability and who I continually learned so much from.

Still, with my new job, the downsides of being a leader, and the suprisingly upsetting behavior of a guy at our church who I have been feeling harassed by, I was ready not only to be done with leadership in our group, but maybe with our group altogether.

Happy Birthday to you ,
You are a ram too,
I wish you love and happiness!!
And moons that are blue!

I created this drawing in dreezle, then took a screenshot, then downloaded Painter 25 and copied the screenshot into it, then saved it to my desktop, then downloaded Art Rage and imported the saved screenshot into it, painted over the screen part of the screen shot, and finally uploaded it to blogger. MY COMPUTER SUCKS.

1. Make everything as convenient as possible: convenient haircut, under 10 minute meals, convenient transportation. Make it as easy on yourself as possible.
2. You work for you. Do your best job you can for your company, and remember to keep your list of accomplishments updated and to keep your eyes open for opportunity. Don’t misplace your loyalties. Don’t bond to an entity that can’t bond back, and while doing your best job now, remember your long term goals.
3. Choose your tasks with awareness. As set in stone as job descriptions sounds, there is usually some leeway to follow different paths. Sometimes women are used to being in support positions and helping someone else achieve their dreams, even at work. Make sure you take what leeway you have in your job to create. Be the architect of your own dreams.
4. Decide not only what you will do, but how you will do it. I like to ask myself, how can I make this fun? I realized today that for me it is fun to have friendly relationships at work. Asking myself, “How can I make this fun?” reminded me to seek out human contact even though I was feeling shy.
5. Add pleasure to your daily routine. Do you just love a certain author? Get the book on tape to listen to while you drive to work. Put a postcard size replica of your favorite painting up in your cubicle.

I don’t know how parents can take care of their kids and work full time jobs. Working parents of the world, I salute you. Future husband, please start doing something that you can earn enough money working part time at and still help support our future family. I’ll work on that too.