Finding Balance in San Francisco

My 20th High School Reunion

I spent Saturday night at my 20th high school reunion at Crystal Springs and Uplands School in Hillsborough.

My 3 short years at Crystal Springs (oddly enough, I didn't even go there for high school- I instead went to my local public school, San Mateo High) gave me a keystone piece of the academic and social foundation that I rely on to this day. With the exception of my 3 pampered years in the rarified air of Crystal Springs, I spent all of my academic career in public schools.

For me, Crystal Springs was a magical place. When my parents unexpectedly took me there for an interview back in 1980 (the day of the hostages were released from Iran and Reagan's inauguration), I felt like somebody had handed me Willy Wonka's golden ticket. I blossomed and thrived at Crystal Springs. In recent years, I've returned there on a number of occasions to try to discover what exactly that magic was and if there's any way for me to bring some of that magic forward into my current existence.

Part of the magic of Crystal Springs is most definitely the place itself.  Since 1956, Crystal Springs School has been situated in the lovely, affluent town of Hillsborough. At its heart and center lies the crown jewel: a gorgeous, 39 room beaux-art mansion (pictured above).

The mansion, called Uplands, was completed in 1917 for Charles Templeton Crocker (grandson of the railroad tycoon Charles Crocker), as a wedding present for his bride, C & H sugar heiress Helene Irwin. In 1917, Uplands contained 35,000 square feet of living space, a 10,000 square foot basement, 12 bedrooms and 12 baths. It also featured marbled fireplaces, wood-paneled ceilings, a large wine cellar, elevator, dumbwaiter, four staircases and mezzanine level quarters for servants. What a great wedding present! I want to be a sugar heiress!

For ten years the Crockers entertained lavishly several weekends of every month at their "country home," throwing gala parties for San Francisco society. There's definitely a bon vivant sort of glamor that still remains at Crystal Springs. I felt it every day that I attended school there, and I feel it still when I walk into the mansion.

Perhaps predictably, the marriage of the sugar heiress and the railroad-fortune-inheritor didn't last.  For a period of time, Uplands fell into disrepair.  Before the school bought the mansion and 10 acres of surrounding property back in the 50s, the mansion was in grave danger of being torn down.  So it's got that phoenix-like quality about it as well.

Speaking of delapidated mansions, when I go back to Crystal Springs I can't help but think of the horrific Carolands Mansion murder in 1985.   

While we were still both teenagers, a girl who I knew and admired in the class above me at Crystal Springs, Jeanine Grinsell, was savagely beaten, stabbed, sexually assaulted and left for dead in a deserted ravine by the Carolands Mansion security guard, David Allen Raley. Another girl who I got to know after that tragic winter day, Laurie McKenna, survived the ordeal.

I was never quite the same after Jeanine's murder. David Allen Raley killed something in me the day that he ruthlessly took her life. I frequently wonder when that monster will finally be executed, even though I realize that it's not helpful or healthy for me to dwell on it. Jeanine's brutal death instilled in me a deep anger and also a deep terror that affects me still.

Based on some articles published in last fall after David Allen Raley's final appeals were denied, I get the sense that Laurie McKenna (Vanlandingham) has a better handle on the anger/fear duo than I do, which is comforting.  God bless her for moving past it.  Her strength shines through the reporters' words and I respect her immensely.  That said, even though Laurie is zen about it, it would be hard if not impossible for me to forgive David Allen Raley.  I wonder whether the Dalai Lama himself could get me through that one.

Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the monster's death sentence, so he should be one of the first in line when California resumes its executions.  Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

It's all a bit like the shining triumph of Big Brown's exilirating Kentucky Derby win Saturday, followed closely by the shadow of Eight Belles' own moment of glory and then her shocking, untimely death.

The magic and the murder- two contrasting and intertwined pieces of my past that continue to haunt, fascinate and mystify me.

I Interviewed at Axiom Legal Last Week

Axiom Legal is one of the new breeds of service firms emerging in law, accounting and strategic consulting, among others. By structuring its business model differently from that of a traditional law firm (e.g., by not having an expensive partership pyramid to support), Axiom claims to be able to offer "top flight" legal service at a third to half the cost of a "traditional" firm.

I decided to interview there after seeing an advertisement  in a monthly GGMG newsletter. The ad included several photos of happy looking women, with the tagline: "Why Are All These Women Smiling?"  The ad then went on to claim that via Axiom, a rewarding family life and a rewarding career (in law) are now simultaneously possible.  Pretty appealing thought.  Excellent advertising campaign.

The offices are in the Orrick building in downtown San Francisco, and are done up how I imagine a Virgin Atlantic office would look- complete with white shag rugs, funky white lighting and a bevy of cute girls under 30.

The catch:  they base their work days on a 10 hour rather than an 8 hour day.  In other words, 4 days per Axiom standards is already 40 hours = get paid 80% of a normal person's work week, right off the bat.

I also got the distinct impression that there seems to be a high degree of tolerance for the "part time" jobs going (far) over the alloted hours.  Quote from my interview, describing someone working a 3 day a week assignment: "she was consistently working more like 40 hours a week, so we [Axiom] were able to work it out with the client to change the assignment to a 4 day a week assignment, and everyone was happy." 

Another catch:  According to my interviewers, 80% of their work is full time assignments (50 hours/week).  Much of it seems to be intellectual property based.  There currently seems to be a specific need for someone who does patent work, specifically relating to patent litigation, for example.

Per BusinessWeek:

The company offers its services in various areas, including advertising and marketing, bankruptcy, broker-dealer regulations, commercial agreements, compliance, copyright, derivatives and structured finance, employment, ERISA, and financial services

Some have called it a "high end temporary agency," but the Axiom team resists this categorization. The Axiom team instead describes itself as " a groundbreaking legal firm that is changing the way attorneys and clients work." Axiom's website calls it "Onsite Counsel services to our corporate clients."

Axiom clients include:

• American Express
• AT&T
• Bank of America
• Bear Stearns
• Cisco
• Citigroup
• Colgate-Palmolive
• Credit Suisse
• Deutsche Bank
• Dow Jones
• Electronic Arts
• Goldman Sachs
• Hilton Hotels
• Honeywell
• J.P. Morgan Chase
• Johnson & Johnson
• MasterCard
• Merrill Lynch
• MetLife
• Morgan Stanley
• NBC Universal
• New York Times
• Nokia
• Orbitz
• Pitney Bowes
• Reuters America
• Sun Microsystems
• UBS
• Viacom
• Virgin Mobile
• Yahoo!

One of Axiom's claims to fame among lawyers ties directly to that catchy marketing campaign: people wonder if it might just be a more humane place to work.  The no annual minimum billable hour requirement sounds appealing, for example.  Lawyers testing the limits of human endurance at some of the big firms dream of the ever-elusive high paying, high-caliber work environment that also happens to afford the  flexibility to achieve some sort of work-life balance. 

To make sure I got the point, they made me watch their propaganda video when I got there, complete with fathers rolling around in the grass with their children (or it may have been puppies), happy and smiling and nuzzling with their youngsters.  The video is packed full of loving little anecdotal vignettes (hearsay, and all) of thoughtful, smiling lawyers saying pithy things. This video is simply the long version of the snippets they have on their website.  To bring it all home, there are huge, silver screen sized photos of these same cheerful lawyers all over the office.

I did not get the job.  According to them, only 1 in 60 applicants is chosen (would be hard to disprove this, but...), and they may have sensed that I wondered how a 50 hour a week job (minimum- talk to us if you're consistently billing 60 hours a week) affords the flexibility and freedom they put on so high a pedestal in their marketing campaign.  Reshuffling the deck to base the work week on a 50 hour week (and pay your 40 hour/week people 80%) seems... well... unlikely to be a place where I'm going to achieve balance in my life, if nothing else. 

That said, I'm glad I went and saw it for myself.  Not getting the job was a bit of a relief.

ah, the end of the day

My hubs had to work again all day today (like yesterday), and with neither kid opting to nap today, I'm pretty beat.

After I finally got the Mighty Quinn down for the night, I took a deep breath and tried to decide what to do next. With a kid-weary brain, this is harder than it sounds- e.g., earlier today I actually wondered just how many versions of "twinkle twinkle little star" a person can sing in a weekend without degrading all future intellectual thought.

Ideas that leapt to mind:        

* mindless t.v.        
* mindless magazine flipping        
* enjoying a glass of wine, maybe combined with the bullets above        
* surfing the net        
* emailing a friend        
* writing a blog entry        
* starting a new book

but the winner was: taking some mindless online quizzes.

Blogthings is excellent for this kind of numb-mind activity. For whatever reason, I find the whole fortune-cookie-esq personality quiz thing very relaxing. I just took a half a dozen or so of these Seventeen-type quizzes, learning such important things about myself as:

* my blogging personality ("confident and insightful")        
* that I am a "great" girlfriend (and that I should be sure my guy knows)        
* that I can, indeed, change my life
* that Psyche is my inner Goddess        
* that my true love is an Aries (sorry, Capricorn Ryan)

and, happily, I've also not apparently been ruined by American culture (whew).

Here's my results for that one:

You Have Not Been Ruined by American Culture

You're nothing like the typical American. In fact, you may not be American at all. You have a broad view of the world, and you're very well informed. And while you certainly have been influenced by American culture (who hasn't?), it's not your primary influence. You take a more global philosophy with your politics, taste, and life. And you're always expanding and revising what you believe.

Has American Culture Ruined You?

Pondering Star Death

My pre-schooler, Quinn, is learning about things that are alive and not alive at school, so we've recently had many lively conversations about life.

Separately, Quinn has also decided that he'd like to have a son- I believe this is coming from the Lion King. Anyway, we've had various discussions about son vs. sun, which is tricky since Quinn can't yet read, though he seems to accept my explanation about the s-o-n vs. the s-u-n.

This morning in the car Quinn was talking about the s-u-n and asked me if the sun is alive. I paused, and eventually told him no, that the sun is not alive. He then he asked if stars are alive. This got me to thinking- if a star can die, does that mean that it can live? I didn't point out that the sun is a star and elected to just stick with my no answer... but... our sun will eventually die... so maybe I was wrong.

Striving for Peace

This came in Quinn's 'Friday Packet' (electronic) today and it's so lovely I just had to share it:

Maria Montessori + Your Child = Equation for Peace

Throughout history, in all corners of the world, every generation has experienced prejudice, and at no time in the history of mankind has the world not known violence.

Throughout history, in all corners of the world, every generation has needed a leader that could focus a portion of the world community on the value of peace without resorting to violence. Every once in awhile, a leader has appeared and etched an important message in the world's history book, bringing peace to their small portion of humanity while generating a message that all mankind should live by. Each time a leader has appeared and made his or her mark, a little bit of progress has been made in the path to world peace.

Each of these remarkable leaders, based on the conditions and cultures of their time, sought to achieve peace or justice based upon educating their constituency to understand and respect the differences of culture and background in others. In their own way, they stressed the importance of avoiding violence as a solution. Jesus said, "Turn the other cheek." Mohammad said, "A man's true wealth is the good he does in the world." Abraham told his followers, "With justice comes peace." Martin Luther King told the world filled with prejudice that "Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere." Hammurabi set out the first Code of Justice. Moses shared the Ten Commandments with a constituency that first disavowed them before finally understanding and accepting them. Gandhi said to the crowds that followed him on his march against oppression, "Anger and Intolerance are the twin enemies of correct understanding." The Dalai Lama has said time and time again, "We must have compassion for those that do not understand us and those we do not understand. We must look at the world as they see it and inflict reason, not pain." Maria Montessori, who closed her schools in protest against the Fascism of Mussolini spent years in India sharing knowledge with Gandhi and wrote, "Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war."

By providing your child a Montessori education, you are also taking a step towards peace. Although it is unlikely that their generation will know a world without violence, the world he or she helps create will lay a stepping stone that extends the path. Each generation that learns to understand differences in others, that learns to reason rather than to react, that learns to write history with a pen and ink instead of a sword and blood brings the following generation one step closer to a world based on justice and compassion rather than anger and ignorance.

Through Montessori, your child learns so much more than academics. Your child is provided the guidance to understand that all of life is a learning experience and that humanity shares a common planet that must be treated with respect. Your child learns to respect and understand the culture of others. Your child learns not to react with anger or violence, but with compassion and reason when confronted with opposition and ignorance.

Your child learns neither to be afraid of the thoughts of others nor to diminish the value of his own thoughts. Your child learns to think independently of the crowd, and your child learns to express his or her thoughts with words based on reason. The Montessori education you are providing your child is your contribution to the world he or she will inherit. It is an important responsibility that we share with you.

From: Montessori Initiative.

Sleep on It

"Sleep on it," as it unsurprisingly turns out, is an expression that is based on the way that sleep affects memory.  It's biologically a good idea to sleep on it because you may see new connections after a little shut eye.

According to the article below, "slumber seems to boost our ability to make sense of new knowledge by allowing the brain to detect connections between things we learn."  The article also says that "sleep stabilizes memory."

It's one of those things that I've always felt at a gut level to be true, and it's good to have a little science behind it.  Note to self:  sleeping on it is pretty much always a good idea, scientifically speaking.

Click read more, below, to see full WSJ.com article.

read more | digg story

I'm fightin' it today

The past few nights, Jordan has woken up 4 or 5 times in the middle of the night crying (he's been under the weather).  It can take up to an hour to soothe him back to sleep.

So, in 3 words: I'm very tired.

Being tired is particularly hard for me.  Almost without exception, when I'm tired I'm emotional, fragile and negative.  I tend to focus on things like missing yet another light, that person being a jerk, the weather being hideous.

In other words, tiredness is the opposite of looking at the world through rose colored glasses. 

Traffic is harder to deal with.  Check-out clerks are more surly, and slower.  I'm scattered and less efficient.  I find it more difficult to retain information and also to be on time, thus externally reinforcing the cloud of negativity surrounding me.   

About an hour ago I found myself looking in my purse 3 separate times for the parking garage receipt, each time stressing out a little when I couldn't find it right away. 

The day is just more jagged overall.

T minus 35 minutes

My 6 hours of freedom is 35 minutes from over.

Part of me always gets a little sad and anxious at this time, but I try to just accept that and move past it. After all, what's waiting for me is a darling almost-3-year-old pre-schooler who will be delighted to see me (just before he lays down on the floor and refuses to leave school).

These mental-health days are my biggest extravagance and are crucial to maintaining balance in our home.

Our family balance system is burdened with the crushing work hours that Ryan has to put in (he worked both days of the weekend, again) and also lightened by the money that he brings in. It's by no means a perfect system we have at this point, but it is in a certain sense balanced.

Now I just need to figure out how to get it into a better plane of balance, and we'll be all set.

4 Things About Me:

My friend Courtney recently sent this around to a group of college girlfriends. My friends tend to send this type of email around periodically. One of the college-girlfriend set, Cory, just replied a few minutes ago and... since I happen to have a free minute myself....

No doubt most people on the face of this earth (who have Internet access) have gotten an email like this at some point somewhere along the way. When you get an email like this, you're supposed to hit forward, delete the answers I have below and type in your own answers. Then send this to a bunch of people you know, including the person who sent it to you.

The theory is that you will learn a lot of little known facts about those who know you. I put it on the same level as reading my horoscope- something I enjoy doing sometimes.

I'm not answering in the desired technology- what a rebel I am. If you feel like playing along, put your answers in the 'comments' section. But feel free to do nothing as well.

Four jobs I have had in my life:

1- attorney for 2 large, soul-less law firms and 1 boutique yet still soul-less law firm
2- flower delivery person- in L.A. this was fun because everyone was always so happy to see me
3- waitress- many times, from the age of 14
4- door to door book sales person in West Virginia

Four places I have lived:

1- San Francisco, CA

2- Austin, TX

3-Helsinki, Finland
4-New York City

Four places I have been on vacation:

1- Jackson Hole, WY

2- Kenya
3- Thailand
4- Crete, Greece

Four of my favorite foods:

1- pizza

2- sashimi
3- hard boiled eggs (a staple in my fridge)

4- fresh, warm bread

Four places I would rather be right now*:

1- on safari

2- skiing

3- having lunch with Julia Roberts or Elizabeth Gilbert or -what the heck- both

4- In Palm Desert with my girlfriends who are busy responding to this poll (only 4 days left!)

*Like Cory, I'm in a pretty good place -- Jordan is also now peacefully napping away and Quinn is at pre-school. It's one of those precious, free times for me. The house is dead silent- even Shasta Moon is sleeping. The only sound is of me typing. Bliss.

P.S. Quinn's girlfriend Clara just got back from France, much to his delight.  Today is her 3rd birthday and we celebrated with candles and cake last night. Happy birthday, petite Clara!

I love it when it's about to rain

the window here in the living room is gracefully blowing itself open and shut. the candle on my coffee table dances in the intermittent window breezes.  the leaves outside are hurriedly swirling down the sidewalk.  the sky outside is dark and foreboding.  the clouds are grey and threatening.

this is definitely my favorite type of weather.  the electricity in the air, the impending sense that something is about to happen.  it's all very exciting. 

I love the dense smell of the air, the near wetness of it all.