Awards are pleasant things, and are given for many things, including to adults for perfect attendance, as I found out recently. Being awarded something is a pleasant and exciting concept. It intrigued me enough that I was willing to waste some time on it with Google. I wanted to know when the first award was awarded.
Privacy was the subject in two posts in two blogs I read recently, both written from two points of view. One was decrying the lack of privacy in today’s world, though it was a reminder that privacy is, and always will be an illusion, unless we manage to live like the early trappers, and get lost in the forests somewhere.
I once learned that paramedics, and cops, despite their training and good intentions, don’t have to rush in where angels fear to tread. It is in their contracts or something, that if they don’t feel safe, they can let you lie there like a plucked chicken, waiting for the roaster.
I had heard that many women, and even men, hate women who are beautiful. There is some question as to whether the Republican Party, made up of both men and women, hates women. I’ve never been sure that this hatred of beautiful women was absolutely true; is it based on scientific evidence, and does this theory hold water for beautiful women, too? Do they also hate other beautiful women, or do they just feel like a member of a club?
The other day a complete stranger accused me of condoning murder because I didn’t want society to revert to the coat hanger technique of birth control. This is the kind of knee-jerk reaction I’ve come to expect from many people who are right of center. There is something intrinsically wrong with misinterpreting someone’s comments about contraception, and accusing them of such a thing. It was one of those ‘huh?’ moments, until I realized that the person was a white male and probably hated me because I am beautiful!
I received this in my Pan Am crew mailbox one day. I think any worker can relate to this!
This is a ‘teaser’ article about Pan Am captains from my Pan Am book, My Pan Am Years: The Smell of the Jet Fuel and the Roar of the Passengers’ which is available on Kindle.This post generated so much controversy on a social media site among former flight attendants, some of whom had the audacity, the temerity, the gall, if you will, to tell me to cease and desist from telling ‘my crazy stories’ that I decided to re-post it here. The denial of the truth is a poisonous pedagogy-
Charles Bronson had nothing on Pan Am flight attendants. If the pilots messed with us, and it was almost always the captain who did the messin’, because he was the captain, doncha know, we had our little ways of getting even. This is a prime reason, besides the very good one of just being a decent human being, that you should learn how to behave yourself and treat other people with respect 
and consideration. It doesn’t matter what that person does for a living; a street sweeper or the person busing your table in a restaurant is earning an honest living, and making your life better. Their job is as important as an accountant’s, a doctor’s, or a lawyer’s. I don’t want to live with dirty streets or walk into a restaurant filled with unbused tables, and no clean dishes.
I was a field interviewer for the National Survey on Drug Use and Health and the Research Triangle Institute for three years. 
I left last year in October. This is my story:
Being a field interviewer certainly isn’t for everyone. The Research Triangle Institute, and in particular my supervisor, Katy Vuncannon, had agendas that only God will eventually know. I’m sure there is someone who knows the agenda over there, but they ain’t talking!
The American Institute of Consumer Studies, in partnership with LHK Partners offered an opportunity as a potential field interviewer. I was searching for supplemental or full time employment because, not being incognizant of the passage of time, I could see summer and a subsequent lack of employment on my immediate horizon.
‘Voila!’ I thought to myself. I had worked as a field interviewer for three years, and have years of experience in sales, customer service, travel, and communicating with people from diverse cultures. The job sounded like a good fit for me, being a knock-on-strangers’ doors around the country and asking them to go through an hour or more of a consumer survey, so I applied. Let me state before I start that I was not paid by the American Institute of Consumer Studies for the first, and most difficult steps of the hiring process.
Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot about how our brains start to age and lose the capacity to keep even the most inane conversations afloat by about the age of 45. It used to be thought, in our fog of denial, that this wouldn’t happen until much later in life. Then, that changed to warnings about hitting sixty, and being prepared to forget where we put our car keys. It seems we are becoming obsolete earlier and earlier, according to the scientists whom we pay to tell us bad news.
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This last week on ‘A Woman’s Guide To Everything’ radio show on Blog Talk Radio (http://www.blogtalkradio.com/gigijwolf/2012/01/05/a-womans-guide-to-everything-a-long-island-christmas), I talked with a friend who has been a stay-at-home mom for the last twelve years, and will soon go back to work outside the home. She has found a job, and I jumped at the chance to get her insights on the show, because she has turned some of the tenets of the recent surveys I’ve read on their ears. What was especially encouraging was that age didn’t appear to be a disadvantage, and her experience seemed to count. (The browser address for the episode keeps reflecting another episode I did with Carl Dascole, but it is actually the ‘Back To Work’ episode).