And the nominee is...

The 2009 Okie Blog Award nominees are posted, and guess who is on the list? Mwa! I'm so excited! If you're an Oklahoma blogger, feel free to vote for CariOkie in the best writing category. Click on the CariOkie logo thingy over on the right to view voting rules. If you're not an Oklahoma blogger, you can still enjoy all the great Oklahoma blogs.

21 Gun Salute

"We're dealing with children, they need to be terrified, it's like mothers milk to them - without it their bones won't grow properly." (Sue Sylvester - Glee)

My baby is 21 today. I'm not going to dwell on how old that makes me feel, because today's not about me. Actually, no day is about me. Once you're a mom it's rarely about you. It's all about how to get this creature who was just squeezed out of a very small and heretofore generally unseen part of your body and laid in all her gooey glory on your breast to adulthood. To become a reasonably well-adjusted, contributing member of society. To not pick her nose or her wedgie in public. To bathe regularly, change her underwear daily, keep embarrassing images off of Facebook, respect those in authority, love God, and call or text her mom occasionally. And not necessarily in that order.

Somehow in this crazy whirlwind life we've led she managed to grow up by all accounts and appearances to be healthy and well adjusted. As a family we have made more memories in these 21 years than most people make in a lifetime. And she's just getting started. Twenty-one is an important milestone, and I've been trying to think of something new that I would add to the things I wish for her. But really, my wishes are the same as they have been from that first moment on February 7, 1989.

Now that both my daughters are adults, I suppose my desires for my children have morphed into a more grown-up version.

• Love God. It's THE thing that really matters over the course of your life, not to mention eternity.
• Be transparent. You know I have a thing about that.
• Don't put off really living this day. It's easy to get caught up waiting for something better, something bigger, something...whatever. Don't waste today waiting for that something.
• Forgive, then forget. Unforgiveness rots the soul. Just let it go.
• Find joy in the simple. Sometimes life sucks, so it's important to cultivate the habit of looking for joy in unexpected places.

I just know I couldn't be prouder, couldn't be more impressed, couldn't be more grateful.

Happy 21st, sweet girl.

Culture Notes - some high, some low

So much to comment on, so few brain waves with which to process the information. Is it just me or am I getting dumber as I get older? Don’t answer that if it IS just me. I thought we were supposed to gain wisdom as we grew older. I’m just becoming more aware of how much I don’t know or understand. Maybe that’s the definition of wisdom.

You think I’m talking about the great questions of the ages, don’t you. Who am I? Why do I exist? Why do bad things happen to good people? But no. I’m pondering deep, philosophical thoughts like –

LOST - What the H-E-Double-Tooth-Picks happened on the final season’s first episode of LOST. I am now way “loster” than I was before. I agree with everything my daughter, Angela, texted during the show.

“Holy cow!”
“There are two of them?”
“My mind is exploding”
“The body count is adding up”

Yep, that pretty much sums up my reaction. And like all episodes of LOST, I’m left with more new questions than resolved ones.

WE ARE THE WORLD – I loved that song when it first came out in 1985. How can you possibly listen to that song and not get chills and want to join hands with the universe and sing along? In 1985 I was busy working, my firstborn was gestating (I was preggers), and I was filled with idealism. We all really could make a better world. Here we are 25 years later and they are doing a remake. I’m excited! What’s really weird, though, is that some of the singers participating in the remake weren’t even born when the original was produced. Certainly, many of them were too young to remember it.

THE BACHELOR – There is a reason that guy’s a bachelor. That’s all I have to say on that subject. Those women should run far, far away. OK, I had one more thing to say.

APPLE iPAD – There’s something that has been bothering me about Apple’s new iPAD, other than the obvious junior high-ish things like thinking the next version will be the MAX-iPAD. Then I heard someone on the radio say it looked like their Grandmother’s iPhone, and I knew that was the thing that had been back there in the back of my brain. It looks like an iPhone for the visually impaired! Like large print books! I bet there’s an app for that, at least. Wait, there is! It’s called BigNames. Love it.

LOST is baaaccckk

Tonight we finally get to the final season of LOST. I'm not good at deferred gratification! Seriously, we have to wait until when to see the next season of Glee? Anyway, I wanted to share this map. If The Island had a subway system, this is what it would look like. Love it! Luv it!! Click the image to go to John Cabrera's site - the brains behind the map madness.

Women At Work - Same Song, Second Verse

Remember Lilly Ledbetter? At age 41 she took a job as a manager at Goodyear Tire and Rubber and worked there until her retirement 20 years later. When she retired she was the only woman in her position – the rest being men, of course. Near the close of her tenure someone slipped her an anonymous note telling her she was making significantly less in salary than her male counterparts. Ms. Ledbetter took the company to court, where a jury found in her favor.

The facts were pretty clear – the only factor differentiating her and her fellow managers was her gender. Here’s the kicker though. Goodyear appealed and the U.S. Supreme court ruled in their favor. Apparently, according to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Ms. Ledbetter was required to file a claim no less than 180 days after the first time she experienced discrimination. Um, really? Let’s review. She did not know about the discrimination for 20 years. The company kept salaries a closely guarded secret. There was no way for her to know how her salary or annual raises compared to her co-workers until that anonymous note 20 years later. There is now a new law, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which resets the 180 day statute of limitations with each new discriminatory paycheck.

Think this was an isolated case? Maybe it was more egregious than most, but yes, boys and girls, there is still a significant wage gap between men and women in the wonderful world of work. In the last census, records show that the median income for men was $38,000, and the median income for women was $26,000. If I wasn’t so math-phobic I’d take the time to figure out what percentage difference that is. It’s significant, I can tell you that much. In management-related professional positions, where 51% of workers are women, the median income is $63,000 for men and $42,000 for women. Ouch!

Ms. Ledbetter’s case brings up an interesting point regarding equal pay – the total wage gap between men and women over a lifetime of work. She was estimated to have lost over $400,000 in wages due to the difference in pay. Today, the average wage gap for women in Oklahoma over a lifetime is $387,000 for high school graduates and $601,000 for college graduates. I guess the good news is that Oklahoma has a smaller wage gap than many other states.

Women are more likely to work part-time or take extended periods of time away from work to care for children or other family members. The census numbers are supposed to be adjusted for that fact, but it’s inevitably another reason why wages differ. Here’s one that will chap your hide. Men with children earn 2% more than men without children. Women with children earn 2.5% less than women with children.

It’s a wacky world of work out there! Like many Generation Jones women my age, I could be the poster child for the seasons of women at work. During college I interned with IBM, which was a really big deal in the early eighties. At that time the successful, quickly advancing women in the office were mainly single. The few who had children and a husband came to work exhausted with harrowing tales of daycare drama and midnight crying babies. I couldn’t bring myself to invest the time and energy in what appeared to be a lifetime commitment to this world-wide company. After all, having babies and growing a family was high on my list.

Four years later – now working for a small business, I worked until the day I went into labor and was back on the job six weeks after the birth of my first child. There was a house to buy, my husband was laid off and out of a job for a few months when Angela was an infant…life was life. For the next seven years or so I juggled work with motherhood, trying things like working part time, working from home and starting my own business. You name it, I tried it in an effort to be the primary caretaker of my two daughters.

When I went “back to work” full time I accepted a job where I was, in my own humble estimation, over-qualified and under-paid because of my lack of a track record. I had done all of the things mentioned above, plus having lived and worked overseas, been innovative, creative, entrepreneurial. But I had not been employed in a traditional 8-5, Monday thru Friday, backside in a chair kind of job. What I lacked in experience I attempted to make up in education, earning my Master’s in Business Administration while working full-time and keeping up with two very active children, church, my marriage. The same things many of you Gen X and Gen Y-ers are doing right now.

So after caring for the nation’s children and attempting to find a balance that keeps us from being institutionalized, we find we are quite literally undervalued in the world of work. Pay is the definer of value in that world. Paying women less than men sends the clear message that a woman working is of less value than a man working.

Paying women less than men helps no one and hurts everyone. Men surely prefer that if their wives work they get paid equally. Children whose mothers work outside the home benefit from equal pay. And women, of course, deserve to be paid equally for equal work.

So how do we fix this? Is there a fix? I guess I hope that each new generation is more enlightened than the one before in terms of race and gender issues. Just as each new generation becomes, at least in theory, more color blind, each new generation hopefully becomes ignorant of past reasons to under-pay and under-value. Is that wishful thinking?

And another thing while I’m rolling along here. Can we just get rid of that taboo that keeps pay rates locked away in the file cabinets and in the board rooms? Transparency is key. Let’s get salaries out into the bright light of day and keep each other honest. It’s the best way to correct the inequality and helps us avoid another Lilly Ledbetter.

T-shirt from Zazzle.com. Photos of women at work from the Library of Congress archives. Statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Things to during "Winter Storm 2010"

So if you're stuck in the house today because of "Winter Storm 2010", which, I have to say, is better than being stuck in the office, and if you give up on trying to actually accomplish meaningful work, here's a little entertainment.

The Gary England Drinking Game - while I'm not advocating actually taking shots as the instructions direct, because as The Lost Ogle points out, you will soon die of alcohol poisoning, this is very funny. Maybe you could make it into a bingo game. Or eat M&Ms instead of taking shots. And of course, you have to be an Okie and familiar with our very own millionaire weather man to think this is even slightly amusing. ( I bought one of those shirts for my niece. Yes I did).

From this blog I was highly entertained for about 8 minutes. "Curb Mining" was very popular when we lived in Bulgaria. And in Bethany for that matter!

Blu Dot Real Good Experiment from Real Good Chair on Vimeo.

Visit the home page of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me and catch up on their podcasts, play the Daily News Quiz game, or find out Harry Reid's reaction to the State of the Union address at Wait Wait Don't Blog Me .

Or you could do something old school like read a good book or take a nap. Just don't plan to go to Starbucks. They are closed indefinitely. They closed at 10:00 a.m. so their associates could get home before the weather got really bad. Where do the associates live? Texas? Seriously, they could have waited to close until 10:30 so I could have drown my irritation at my boss for calling me to say we were working from home today AFTER I was in the office already. But no, all Starbucks are closed. So don't go there hoping for solace. Panchos Liquortown, however, is still open and very busy.

Why Women Work

Over the last week or so I’ve been observing women at work as I go about my usual life. Namely women of a certain age. Namely my age. Women approaching fifty. Women born into what is now known as Generation Jones.

One day last week I fell through the rabbit hole. I walked off the street in a small Oklahoma town into the county courthouse and straight into the seventies. Eight women in polyester, lined up, four by four in closely spaced desks faced the front wall. The floor was covered with thick industrial carpet of uncertain vintage, unraveling around a gaping hole where a file cabinet had been removed sometime in the last decade. The women were encased by cinder block, windowless walls, and metal shelves showcasing thick, red-bound books smelling of old paper; land deeds recording the proper and legal owner of every tract of land in the county. Only the flat screened computer monitors on each desk said yes, we are part of the new millennium.

Middle-aged women worked quietly, assisting each other without being asked. “Here, let me carry one of those books for you. Two are too heavy”, one said quietly to her neighbor. As I waited my turn I tried to imagine the life behind each face – what each woman faced at home, why she worked in this particular sisterhood, this secluded cloister.

On Saturday another middle-aged woman served me breakfast at Denny’s in another small town. She was well-groomed, cheerful and helpful, with her coiffed, teased and dyed brown hair. Where did she come from this morning? What causes her to get up each day, willing to pour coffee and serve pancakes to oil workers and travelers?


Friday night the Gen-Jones woman at the hotel desk patiently found her way around the computer program that seemed to momentarily baffle, her nicotine stained fingers displaying chipped nail polish. What had she been doing before putting on her clean, pressed blouse and applying her makeup that would leave that much dirt under her finger nails. Or was that, too, nicotine?


Is this the life these women imagined in their girlhood? As children we watched the confused and confusing world that was the sixties and early seventies. Gloria Steinem, Roe V Wade, no-fault divorce were discussions heard on the nightly news. Yet here we are, nearly 50 years later, perhaps wondering what we have gained. The majority of women work in pink color jobs like the women in the county clerk’s office – poorly-paid bookkeepers, administrative assistants, and receptionists – or in service jobs in hospitals, restaurants and hotels. Eighty-eight percent of people working in health care support positions are women. Seventy-four percent of office workers and 78 percent of personal care workers are female.



I’m going to leave these thoughts out there – blowing in the drafty place that is my mind today. I have other thoughts on the subject of women and work, but for now I have to get on the road. My desk awaits. In the mean time – out of curiosity, why do you work?


Top photo from the Wisconsin Historical Society. Gloria Steinem photo by U.S. News and World Report staff photographer. Statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau.