Purse Search, Purse Hell

Still haven’t found a summer purse. Can’t carry the black leather tote in the summer because I’ll poach the phone in a black bag. So I’m on the lookout for a summer tote.  But aliens have invaded the brains of purse designers, making them design backs with enough buckles, straps, and whip ends to win the Preakness without a jockey. And never fear them breaking delicate ankles. The bags I saw tonight were thicker than the skin of a politician cheating on his wife. Who needs to be carrying a bag with an 8-inch bottom?  Get an LL Bean tote if you need that, but please give me a tote that doesn’t make me look as wide as a street sweeper.

In fact, here are some rules for all you purse designers to sell on Etsy, Ebay and store outlets:

1. Stop using magnets. Please. I know they are cheaper than zippers. They also mess up debit cards, metro passes, hotel room keys and iPhones. And no, I don’t want to carry my iPhone in a separate bag. One, good, big bag will do. I looked at 300 bags tonight, and two of them (both priced at more than $300) were magnet free.

2. Use a lining that isn’t black. I don’t want to have to carry a flashlight to find something in the dark recesses of my purse. Use a lighter lining–tan, gray, red. Just not black.

3. If you are going to add a cellphone pocket, please measure a cellphone first. And not just yours. Measure an iPhone, too. The purses I saw tonight are apparently designed for gum-chewers, as  the pockets were neither deep enough nor wide enough to hold my cell phone.

4. All those samples from Restoration Hardware you’ve attached to the outside of the purse can be exchanged for a decent outside pocket. It’s where I’d like to put my keys or cellphone, or my boarding pass or even that tower of precarious bills, change and receipt that the grocery checker  balances on your palm, leaving you to walk out of the store carrying because you need both hands to put it away.

5. If you are going to build a vertical purse, please put a lot of pockets on the walls. Otherwise, everything falls into the dark bottom and bulges. I already have a body that looks like that, please make my purse more practical.

6. Make the strap adjustable. I know the Size 00 you designed it for can get it over her tiny shoulder, but if the strap is so short that I have to apply antiperspirant to the bag  to be able to wear it without ruining it, the strap is too short.

7. Give the top a closure I can use with one hand. No magnets, please. In addition to the problems in Item #1, a magnet shuts the middle, leaving both ends open, inviting the pickpocket riding next to me on the Metro to help himself. A zipper is the best. A zipper that closes from both sides is best of all.

8. Please don’t tuck that extra foot of lining you have leftover into the bag. A lining that fills up the bag and hides half the contents of the bag is no friend to those of us in a hurry to find the checkbook.

9. If you are going to use a double handle, measure carefully. If they aren’t the same size, the longer one will keep flopping off our shoulders.

10. Many women like to carry a magazine or a file folder in their bag. Please don’t make it 1/8 of an inch too short. Make it fit, or make it a lot smaller. Don’t be a tease.

–Bags, from top:  Red, shiny bag: Antonio Melani Small Hobo Bag $199.00 at Dillards; turquoise pleated bag: Prada Tessuto Gaufre Hobo $1,195.00 at Neiman Marcus; taupe multi-pocket bag: Plenty by Tracy Reese Multi Pocket Drawstring Hobo, $335.00 at Nordstrom.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer who carries a journal, colored pencils, an iPhone, and a book in her purse. She is convinced that the right purse is out there, with clean lines and no frou-frou. See Quinn’s website at QuinnCreative.com

Time, Measured in Spices

Standing at the kitchen stove, cooking supper, I reached for the pepper grinder. Almost out. When I bought the jar that stored pepper as well as ground it, I was horrified at the expense. “Oh, well,” I thought, by the time I need more pepper, I’ll just use the peppercorns from the pantry.

I remember not wanting to buy large quantities of paper towels, toilet paper, detergent. I wouldn’t be in the apartment long. I refused to buy spices, as it was a waste when my husband would be joining me shortly, and I’d have my kitchen back.

So when I ground the last of the pepper tonight, I counted how long I’d been out here alone: Six months. Half a year. The house is still on the market (C’mon, St. Joeseph!), I talk to my husband on a cell phone, and I have no TV, no real furniture, and most of my art supplies are packed in boxes in the basement across the country, waiting to be moved.

I’ll admit I’ve purchased art supplies. I simply caved around month three, and have added to them since then. But the spices just did me in. I’ve ground my way through entire jar of peppercorns, waiting.

No doubt, other women have waited longer. I was one of the women who waited for a husband to come back from Vietnam. The best way to tell that story is to say that the one I’m waiting for now is not the same man I waited for then. It was a long time ago.

Day by day, I’m changing and so is he. No longer all that young, we are learning how to live apart, how to do without, how to create independent lives. None of these lessons are ones I wanted to get advanced skills in. Neither do I want to move back. I like it here.

So we are caught in time. Him there, me here, running out of spices.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and training developer in communications topics: writing, giving presentations and dealing with the corporate culture you find yourself in. She is also a certified creativity coach. (c) 2008 All rights reserved.

When You Are In The Wrong Job. . .

Once upon a time I had a job that paid very well. Almost from the beginning, I began to see some problems. My boss was often vague and unclear, and I worked hard to protect the writers whom I supervised.

Then, one day, my boss vanished. He was there on Friday, gone on Monday. There was a reorganization, and a new boss appeared. During the first week, she asked me at least a dozen times if I minded that I now had a female boss younger than my oldest child. Each time I said (truthfully) that I was happy for new leadership and clear direction.

All went well for a while. When my boss encouraged me to exercise (I was an early morning gym rat at the time), I thought she was concerned about life/work balance. Turns out she thought I was fat. (I prefer to think of myself as “sturdy.”) She never said it directly to me, I overheard it in the bathroom one day, when she didn’t see me in the last stall.

When she began to set work goals I could not meet, I began to work harder and longer, but as I jumped through one hoop, it would be discounted and the next hoop held up. Some of them seemed to be on fire. My boss wanted me to push out one of my direct reports because she wasn’t bright enough (she was plenty smart) and another one because he didn’t have the right “corporate image,” which translated as “looks geeky and is overweight.”

The last year of my time in that company was torture. I began to believe that I could not do anything right. Some of the people who worked with me began to see the writing on the wall and avoided me. After years of a good relationship with one direct report, she reported me to human resources because the plant in my office had outgrown my title. (Yep, in that company you could have plants only if they were in accord with your station. Big, important plants were for corner offices only.)

I was especially slow on catching on. I worked harder, longer, and desperately. In the end I left because I was going to be pushed out. I took a job at less pay, in a smaller company, and eventually opened my own business doing what I know and what I love: coaching, writing, and leading workshops

Some jobs are not worth the money you get paid, even if it’s good money. There are times you have to save your own life and leave a job that is eating your soul alive.

Jennifer Alvey, a smart woman who left the practice of law when it began to suck her soul out, now helps other attorneys who are unhappy leave their work. Don’t wait until you develop ulcers or serious health problems. And if you are ready to leave the law, drop by Jennifer’s blogsite.

–Image: Shrewsbury-ma.gov

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach who helps people in transition, including from one job to the next. (c) 2008. All rights reserved.

The Oxygen Mask

She was struggling as the middle layer of the sandwich generation. Kids in college, still needing a safe haven; elderly mother in another state, not doing too well.

When the phone call came in the middle of the night, it was time to drive through the darkness into the heart of the struggle. Mother may die, that would be awful Mother may live, that would also be awful. Because mother can’t be alone, needs help, doesn’t want to accept help. The story’s pages are smoothed by thousands of worried hands who have written down the words of struggle: what do I do now? How can I take this on and have it end well?

Because I’ve made that middle-of-the-night drive myself, I suggested the one thing sandwich women forget: take care of yourself first. You can’t help anyone else if you aren’t functioning.

As most women, this is not easy to hear. We are used to taking care of everyone else first. As I asked how she could take care of herself, there was a pause. Then a slow, smiling voice came back, in the singsong of a flight attendant:
“In case of emergency, reach for your own oxygen mask first. Put on your mask before helping others around you. The bag may not inflate, but oxygen will flow through the mask. Tighten the straps and make sure you can breathe. Then help others.”

She knew what to do. She would be fine.

Image: firesomeonetoday.com

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and a certified creativity coach. She is also a transition coach, who helps people reinvent themselves to cope with new careers, situations, and people in their lives. See her work at QuinnCreative.com (c) 2008 All rights reserved.

Tortillas and Passover

There is not a matzoh to be had in Mesa. Well, not quite true. I could have purchased a case, propped up against the old Easter Peeps and Paas egg-coloring kits. And I’m not overly concerned that in Mesa, many people think Passover must be the same time as Easter. The city was founded by Mormons, and their 114,000 foot temple is a major site in the city. About 80 percent of high-school graduates in the Mesa/Chandler area identify themselves as Mormons. To Mormons, Jews are “gentiles,” which always makes me smile. And if you want to talk about persecution and immigration, Mormons can add a big chapter to that book.

But there I was, on the second day of Passover, having been in five grocery stores in Mesa and not turning up a small package of matzoh. There was no other Passover food available, not even a display, not even dusty bottles of gefilte fish on a shelf next to Ramen noodles in the “International Food” section.

What to do? Matzoh is unleavened bread, made in haste, by a people who were not wanted in the area. So it seemed to me that a great stand-in for the bread of affliction would be tortilla. Flour tortillas to be precise. They are made without a leavening agent, and cooked one at a time, made at meal time to be eaten. It was a good match. I purchased a pack of the kind you have to finish yourself.

If you compare the picture, the largest difference seems to be the shape.

When I got home, I wanted to prepare a Passover snack, so I turned the front electric burner on “low” on the electric stove and tossed a tortilla on it. Flipping it over to keep it from sticking to the heating burner, I got a good facsimilie of a hot tortilla. I buttered it, sprinkled agave sugar on it along with cardamom, cinnamon, corriander and, yes, a few grinds of red chiles. Hey, it’s a tortilla. I then rolled it up and enjoyed a wonderful Passover snack, while contemplating all the peoples in the world who are pushed from one geography to another, who choose a better life in a place different than the country of their birth. It seemed a fitting thought for the day.

Images: matzoh: www.exploratorium.edu, tortillas: www.sacatomato.com

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and workshop leader who teaches communications, including writing, giving presentations and corporate culture. See her website at QuinnCreative.com

April 15th in Consumer Nation

It’s April 15, 2008. Tax day in consumer nation.

The whole idea of being a consumer nation is one I’m uneasy with. Sure, choice is great. But being a consumer forces us to become experts in everything we want to eat, use, drive, build, and care about. Marketing and advertising overload is not there to help, but to persuade. There aren’t objective experts anymore. If you want to buy a car, you have to become your own car expert, and fend off the half-fact, half-truth of the car salesman. Becoming an expert takes time, and sorting through information we don’t have a background in is exhausting. We fight with information overload, become inpatient and make poor choices.

I’m not so sure we should have turned our lives into a giant consumer experience. Medicine was easier when the doctors were experts and we consulted with them. Now our health care is a consumer experience, and we have to cut through marketing, advertising, and hype to choose our medical care. A large number of people are diagnosing themselves from TV ads, and doctors, ever in a hurry to spend no more than 7 minutes with a patient, are giving us what we, the consumer of medical care, want. This scares me. A lot.

When you go into a doctor’s office, you are likely to be asked what websites you consulted to reach your diagnosis. Why am I doing the doctor’s work? I don’t have the training or the expertise, and while the Web has 100 million sites, many of them are poorly researched, badly written, confusing and incomplete. And it’s my job to figure out the complex working of the biological system that’s my body? And I’m still paying huge health insurance premiums?

Before I follow that line of reasoning, I’m going to pass on a gem I unearthed about where your taxes are going: For every dollar you pay in taxes, 4 cents goes to education. Ten times that, 40 cents of every dollar, goes to running the war in Iraq.

We are a consumer nation, and knowing how we spend our tax money is a clear view of what we think is important. It forms our culture.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer who runs workshops on various communication topics–writing, speaking, creating presentations. See her work at QuinnCreative.com

Lesson from a Breadknife

Dad was a scientist. To be precise, he was a rocket scientist. He loved us, but until we were able to hold a decent conversation, his love was limited to providing for us. My predominant memory of him is the back of his head, studying and writing. We knew not to bother him. But occasionally, he became involved in our lives through science. Sometimes it was physics, sometimes biology.

We baked our own bread. My French mother wasn’t about to bring cottony, tasteless, insubstantial white bread into the house–it couldn’t hold up to sauces, her powerful sandwiches or the rigors of French Toast. Our homemade bread had texture and a crust that eliminated the fear of gingivitis and replaced it with a fear of the scouring action of chewing a crust that would leave the roof of your mouth throbbing.

One afternoon, I was in the kitchen slicing the bread. It was fairly fresh, and not given to slicing well. I was shredding more than cutting. My father came into the kitchen, observed what I was doing and said, mildly, “That knife is a saw. Less pressure. More action.” I quit pressing down on the knife. I used my upper arm to saw the serrated knife blade forward and back. Magically, the lesson in physics worked: the action allowed the serrated blade to do the work. Almost no downward pressure was necessary.

This principle, like “take care of the edges,” works well in daily application as well.

–Put pressure on yourself and the project disintegrates. Take some action and the project moves forward, almost by itself.

–Put pressure on your story to tell a lesson, and it becomes pedantic filler. Let the characters take action, and your story is memorable.

–Put pressure on your kids, and they fall apart, howling in protest. Put consequences into steady, reliable action, and hard downward pressure isn’t necessary. Action is far more powerful when it repeats consistently and predictably.

–Put pressure on your client, and they will crumble and turn into client-dust. Put action in your promises and deliveries, and your clients will be firm and square, and just what you want to work with.

–Put pressure on your art, and it turns into a chore. Put action into your art, and it makes meaning in your life.

–Quinn McDonald is a certified creativity coach and develops and runs workshops in business communication. See her website at QuinnCreative.com

St. Joseph, Sell My House!

‘Twas the longest of winters, and clients were few,
The house in Virginia (4 beds and 2 loos)
had been on the market so long that I doubted
we’d sell the damn thing before daffodils sprouted.

And missing my sweetie, the cats and my bike
I pulled up Google, found a map, took a hike
to the barrio mercado, to the Santeria I went
With a mission to find the Mover of Kent.

The Santerista-priestess knew why I came
She brought out the statue, I never gave out his name,
She prayed over St. Joe, quite vivid and bold
And told me he hated staying out in the cold.
But I was to bury him face down in the dirt
And a little prayer and promise sure wouldn’t hurt.
Facing the street by the real estate sign
He’d sell the house, and all would be fine.

So I sent him first class all the way to Virginia
My hopes were so high, I can’t even begin ta
tell you the prayers I sent with that guy
to send me someone who was eager to buy
my house and bring me my husband and cats
So Kent buried him right, and that, now, is that.

I promised St. Joseph if he sold the house
and brought me my bike and my far-away spouse
That I’d build him a shrine in my new desert home
And honor his gaudiness and never would moan
about plastic and likenesses injection molded,
No, I’d be happy and honor him, hands nicely folded
and feet bare and ready for desert-hot days
And I’d tell the glad story and heap on the praise.

I’m hopeful and already designing the shrine
I will build him to honor the end of the long-waiting time.

–Image: cat and shrine, Quinn McDonald.

Quinn McDonald lives (alone) in Arizona, while her husband (and the cats) are in Virginia. She decided to solve the difficult real-estate market with the knowledge she gained in graduate school. . .folklore. There is a common belief that a statue of St. Joseph, buried head down, facing the street, next to the real estate sign, will sell the house. It can’t hurt. Watch this space for updates on the house. A qualified buyer should appear any day now.
(c) 2008. All rights reserved.

Goodbye, Martha

She was beyond old, and a little deaf. She had grown tired of the cold in Illinois and come to Arizona to warm up. She was a night owl, I could hear her TV when I walked past her apartment on the way to the laundry room.

One day, hearing the radio alarm on when I passed her apartment, I wondered why the alarm was ringing in the middle of the afternoon. I picked up my mail at the communal boxes, and heard the alarm on my way back. I knocked on her door. Nothing. I knocked harder. She came to the door, and looked at me smiling.
“It’s good to have youngsters in this place,” she said. I smiled back, it’s been many years since I could have been a youngster, but to her, I was.
“Your radio alarm is ringing,” I said, “so I came to check on you.”
“It is?” she said, “Well, I wonder what it wants.”
I turned it off for her, and chatted for a few minutes.

She asked about the canning jar that sits by the bougainvillea shrubs during the daytime. I explained that it contained a solar battery that charged in the sun, then the jar glowed at night, and I used it to cheer me up in the dark.
“We all need one of those,” she said, “Something that soaks up sun in the day.”
In March, she began to make plans to return to the East.
“I can’t manage by myself anymore,” she said, “so I’m going back to the cold.”
She gave me her ironing board and iron, and I planned on giving her the canning jar, so she could take some Arizona sunshine back with her.
Yesterday, she sat down in her apartment and died of an aneurism. She won’t have to go back to the cold. She won’t have to endure the broiler-heat of July here. I hope that wherever she goes, her generous and cheerful spirit will be happy, and that she will have a bit of Light to enjoy.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach. She lives in Mesa, AZ. See her work at QuinnCreative.com (c) Quinn McDonald, 2008 All rights reserved.

Scent and Sensibility

Ahead of my car rolled the water truck. We haven’t had rain in a while, and in the still desert air, dust is the enemy. Without rain or a strong wind, dust floats in the air, too light to settle, too heavy to float away. In the dust lives a mold that causes a serious flu-like disease that has killed people and weakened even more. So all dust, anywhere must be sprayed down. So the water truck is ahead of me, spraying the streets of Mesa.

I can smell the wet streets. It is a distinctive wet-dirt, pavement, hot day smell. It is both dusty and sharp with gasoline and oil trapped in the pores of the street. The scent instantly transports me back to childhood summer. A thousand miles away, it smelled just like this when it rained or when a farmer drove past, his wet vegetables tracing a water line on the road.

The sense of smell has the amazing ability to link us anywhere in our past, more realistically than any other sense. Perfumers make the most of it. Christopher Brosius, creator of CB I Hate Perfume, has created a group of perfumes that don’t so much create a scent as invoke memories. His Black March smells exactly like rich, wet earth turned over for planting in the Spring.

Demeter Fragrances has hundreds of flavors and scents (you can really only taste sour, sweet, bitter and salty, the rest is smell) you can use to transport you through memory.

So I was surprised when I tried on a scent called Li Altarelli, from the perfumer Stephanie de Saint-Aignan. Using the sample vial, I tipped it on my wrist, recapped it, gave my wrist time to dry, and sniffed, and smelled. . .nothing. I held my wrist away, took a few deep breaths, and tried again. Still nothing. Maybe a faint lemon waft.

Well, OK, I’d rather have it be nothing than a scrubber. I finished what I was doing, picked up my bag and headed out the door. As I turned to lock the door, I noticed an amazing fragrance, both fresh and cool. It had a hint of something else. My memory flashed to a childhood vacation on the Gulf Coast, and then, oddly, to a tarot card reading I had once in New Orleans. That scent had been sassafras, but I was not smelling sassafras. I sniffed the place I’d put the perfume, and suddenly a breeze was blowing off the ocean, and I could hear laughter and was filled with simple happiness. It was a memory that was lovely, but not mine. And it was connected to an old man in New Orleans whom I didn’t know.

The next day I tried the vial again. The scent took a while to appear, and this time is was a walk in the forest in which I’ve never been. I seem to be recalling memories I don’t have, or my mind is creating scent-images for me, based on bits and pieces of the fragrance. I have no idea why, but then again, I seldom question these things, just write them down and wait for the answer to be revealed.

When the vial ran out, I did something unthinkable. I ordered a full bottle of this magic stuff, expensive as it is, because I want to see where it transports me. What it creates in my mind through my nose. Whose memories I come up with, and where it takes me. When I find out, I’ll let you know, too.

—About the Blue Smoke image: it’s from cheekybikerboy at flickr, protected by creative commons

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach. She is also a niche perfume lover, with a large collection of largely-unheard of scents. See her work at QuinnCreative.com