Coming Out Against MLM

I’ve made a conscious and personal decision not to support any MLM (multi-level-marketing) style businesses any longer. These used to be known as pyramid schemes, but the bad connotations associated with that name have caused the companies set up that way to spawn a new one.

You know the gist; person at the top of the pyramid creates a product (which may be good or bad) and instead of retailing it the traditional way they encourage people beneath them to become their consultants; marketing their product usually via social media to friends and family. Each person in the downward tiers of the pyramid filters money up to the top. The people standing at the very top of the pyramid can indeed make a great deal of money; but those outliers do so at the cost of every consultant that they convince to stand beneath them.

There is a constant string of consultants on the bottom tier signing up, spending a pant load of money (they usually cannot afford to waste) on startup costs and convention fees, then dropping out as their personal business founders and the vast wealth promised to everyone by the few folks standing at the top of the pyramid fails to materialize. Those consultants are the ones whom the company founders make most of their money from; and I am sick and tired of seeing good people who I like, love, and admire being victimized this way.

Some of these MLM companies sell decent products; even products I have purchased and appreciated over the years. Some of them are just snake oil – pure and simple; usually promising effortless weight loss and even going so far as to claim that essential oils draw the attention of protective angels and other such nonsense. Honestly, the product and its merit (or lack thereof) is not the point.

From a simple business standpoint MLM’s are not a good idea. In doing research about business and marketing I know that businesses pay market analysts a lot of money to accurately predict how to find the sweet spot where there is enough of their product out there for people to buy, but not too much that excesses of it are sitting unsold on shelves. MLM’s don’t take this into account at all, they skip this step entirely. All consultants are encouraged to sell as much as possible and acquire as many new consultants working beneath them in the pyramid as possible with no analysis whatsoever of when each consultant’s personal marketplace of friends and family has become over-saturated and exhausted. So unless consultants keep going out and making new groups of friends and family, their current supply, however interested they may be in the product, is going to run dry. This is why people may initially make some money as an MLM consultant only to see sales dry up over time.

I find the tactic of encouraging people to hard sell to friends and family to be dangerously damaging to relationships. Since most MLM consultants are busy, hardworking women who need to earn extra money for their families they primarily damage female friendships and the support systems that these women desperately need. I find this unconscionable and I will not support it.

Most infuriatingly, I dislike how some of these MLM’s try to appeal to people’s religious convictions; convincing them that their business practice is God’s will for their life and enhances God in some way. As I recall, Jesus had some fairly strong words about utilizing faith to forward commerce.

Allow me to be clear; it is not the consultants in these schemes that I am criticizing. It is them I am imploring to get out of these hurtful, futile business practices before they can further be taken advantage of. Cut your losses and get out now. I have stood by and watched so many good, hardworking, intelligent people be taken for a ride by these companies over the years that I cannot in good conscience stand by any longer without saying something.

MLM’s are bad. I would go so far as to say that the business model they follow is exploitative and evil. The only way to force the practice from the marketplace is to stop supporting it; both as a consultant and a consumer. So even if an MLM company is selling literally the best product ever invented; I will not purchase it any longer. I implore anyone reading this to do likewise.

That Awkward Moment You Realize Your Dad's in the Illuminati

Just before Christmas my Dad asked me to carry and deliver a trophy for him to someone at the company where I work.

It’s a bronze cup, 103 years old, engraved with the name of the organization and the names of all the previous winners over the past century. There’s a silver and a gold cup too (and possibly others) and the others are worth considerably more than the bronze I’d been asked to deliver.

The organization is called ‘The Mixers Club’, and they consist of the movers and shakers of Philadelphia industry who get together now and again to play golf, eat and drink fine food and drink, and decide how things are going to shake out insofar as local business is concerned.

In short, they’re our local branch of the Illuminati.

And my dad is one of them.

So I did what I thought was the only proper thing having come into possession of one of their holy relics; I captured it pirate-style on behalf of the office grogs of the world. Currently, I’m using it to decorate my cubicle. I had a Santa hat on it for Christmas, which was quite charming.

So far there’s been no backlash on account of my theft, but if you don’t hear from me for an extended period of time then I’ve probably been… grrrk…

Fnord.

Seasonal Defective

The most difficult part of the year for me falls between January 2^nd and whenever spring arrives. The triple-threat festivities of Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas are all packed away and there’s nothing to do but wait it out. A two to three month period of lingering cold, dark, and grey is just not my thing.

Snow is pretty, but when it hasn’t freshly fallen everything just looks very dead (I know the trees are just asleep, but they still look dead). Additionally with my long commute a fresh snowfall usually means driving danger, hassle, and long waits in traffic ahead.

It’s hard for me to stay warm during this time. I’m okay when I’m actively wrapped up in a lot of blankets and planted firmly in front of a space heater, but outside of those circumstances it’s not a question of if I’m cold, but rather how cold am I at the moment. I really, really don’t like being cold. It bums me out.

I like to walk outside, but the abovementioned aversion to cold stops me. I also don’t like to walk after the sun is down so since the sun is down all the time in winter there’s precious few outside walks to be had.

When I get home from work, it’s cold and dark. I am having really serious difficulty getting changed into lightweight workout clothes and leaving my house in the cold darkness at 7PM to go to the gym. I really want to, I know it will make me feel better, but in the moment I’m struggling against a profound desire for space heater induced hibernation.

I’m really struggling not to gain more weight, both because of my decreased physical activity and because being cold and huddled under blankets makes me want to eat nonstop. I’ve no need for additional blubber like a bear but my appetite doesn’t seem to want to be convinced.

A friend recently sent me an article about the wonderful Danish concept of hygge (pronounced “hoo-ga”) which means a good deal more than just getting warm and staying warm during a long winter. The Danes know how to not just survive the winter but embrace it with, “a relaxed, cozy time with friends and family, often with coffee, cake or beer.” Hygge, apparently, cannot really be described, it must be felt.

I need to learn to feel it. But I also need to feel my way off of my butt and back to the gym before I become permanently hygged by my couch.

Legends Football League

I just found out about the LFL and I’m simultaneously pleased and depressed about it.

I’m not a huge sports fan. My favorite sporting event to watch is the Olympics, but I’ve also been a fan of ice hockey over the years. I prefer watching women’s sports to men’s and the Olympics offers me the most of that since professional sports is still very much a man’s domain. The enjoyment of these things makes one of my favorite sports teams the women’s Olympic ice hockey team, and yeah it’s depressing that I only get to see them on TV once every four years. Athletic women are fast and agile which makes them particularly exciting to watch in a hockey game.

To be clear: I do not think women and men should ever play contact sports against one another and I am not advocating throwing women into men’s teams. The physiological differences between the two genders are too distinct to make that anything but a bad idea. But why are there no women’s professional leagues? I just don’t get it. I’m just as happy (actually more so) to watch two female ice hockey players body-check each other into the wall and I don’t understand why women’s professional sports (aside from tennis) remains apparently unmarketable. Athletic go-getter women impress the heck out of me because I’ve always wanted to be one, and I’m only just now in my 40’s learning how interested I am in honing my physical athletic skills. I spent my entire childhood wimping out to the tune of, “oh I couldn’t possibly do that!” Well, better late than never.

So when I discovered the LFL (Legends Football League) and that women are actually playing badass, full contact, tackle football against one another – I experienced a moment of glee and entertained the possibility that I might actually become a football fan!

Then I found out that their uniforms look like this:

It’s not that they don’t look spectacular, they do. Those players have the kind of physique I can only dream of having. But I can’t watch a football game with people dressed like that. I’ve seen clips and these women hit hard and hold nothing back, which is awesome, but when I watch I’m perpetually cringing over how foolish it is not to wear proper protective gear during a violent, full contact sport and wondering if they’re constantly distracted by the imminent danger of popping out of their bikini top.

I did a little digging, and apparently the LFL used to be called the Lingerie Football League and the entire purpose of it was hinged on the hope that one of them would pop out of their top, and fans could buy opportunities to tackle or kiss one of the players (that might still be going on, I’m not sure). So the fact that they re-branded the name and switched to sportier, beach-volleyball type uniforms is actually an improvement. However from what I was able to learn the players are still unpaid volunteers, so despite getting it’s start as a sex-selling sideshow this sport still isn’t apparently making enough money to support full time players’ salaries (or all the owners are just extraordinarily greedy, I don’t know).

And these women are talented enough that they should be able to earn a living being athletes! There’s a lot of women who are good enough and young girls should be dreaming of growing up to be professional athletes if they want to with at least the opportunity that the dream may one day come true.

Granted, the window of opportunity for anyone to be a professional sports player is extremely small, I think about the same odds as becoming a professional actor. But women’s sports are still so unpopular that (again, outside of tennis or being an Olympian) it’s not something that young women usually even consider beyond extra-curricular activities.

I love watching women play sports, and I’m far more interested in that then watching men. Am I the only one? Why are women’s sports still unpopular enough that we don’t have a women’s league Super Bowl, World Series, or Stanley Cup? I’d tune in.

I hope the LFL reconsiders what its players are wearing and eventually takes them as seriously as these impressive athletes deserve. I’d be there on Sunday nights, cheering them on. And I’ll continue to dream of my professional women’s ice hockey league while I wait patiently for the Winter Olympics to come around again.

Does Your Body Speak To You?

When I left my house this morning it was 10◦F outside. I had on so many layers (five to be exact) that I resembled Randy from A Christmas Story.

I can't put my arms down.

This made reaching the steering wheel somewhat problematic.

Ironically on our actual Christmas Day two weeks ago, I had all the windows of my house open and a t-shirt on as I wrapped gifts. The weather in Pennsylvania has been somewhat bi-polar of late.

This is not the point of today’s entry, however.

Over the years I’ve heard the people around me say things to the effect of, “my body was telling me...” followed by an astute observation about what they were feeling/sensing and what it meant. I always listen to people who say such things with fascinated mystification, as throughout my life I’ve never really been on speaking terms with my own body.

This is probably because what I most often say to it are things like, “you’re not good enough” and, “you look awful.” So honestly, if I were my body I wouldn’t want to speak to me either. I’m kind of a jerk.

The week before Christmas as I was attending my usual Zumba classes, I noticed that getting through the hour of jumping/dancing/shimmying was much harder than it should be. I’ve been doing this since August so my stamina has increased substantially. Then, the Saturday following Christmas, the itching in my throat began that signaled an oncoming cold.

Last night, back in Zumba class and feeling close to my normal level of stamina again, I finally (much belatedly) realized that the unusual exhaustion from the week before Christmas was actually my body telling me, “hey – jerk face – you’re getting a cold soon.”

Not that knowing this could have prevented the cold, medical science still has no recourse against that virus other than to help alleviate the symptoms. The important thing is that I correctly identified something that my body was actually telling me. Granted, I identified it after the fact – but it’s still progress toward being able to listen to the subtle queues that clue me in to what’s going on with me rather than just acting like a floating head with zero connection to the meat-vehicle that carries my brain from place to place.

This is useful because my disconnection from my body is part of what causes poor eating choices for me. Instead of listening to the signal that says, “I’m full” I just keep on eating at times. Instead of being able to figure out what a craving means and how to properly satisfy it I simply default to my go-to addiction tendency toward sugar combined with fat. Sometimes I’ll graze on a variety of different things but find satisfaction in none of them (while consuming far too many calories) because I can’t correctly identify what it is that I really need. Cravings, after all, are often our body’s way of telling us that it needs a nutrient we’re lacking at present.

If I can get in better touch with my body, if we can get on speaking terms, I stand a better chance of avoiding crave-induced binges.

Also, I'm freezing.

The Legend of Dog

At some point in my life I encountered a legend about why dog is man’s best friend and most faithful companion. It went something like this:

When Man fell from grace, and the great chasm of fear opened between he and the rest of the animal kingdom, Dog bravely jumped the gap for he could not bear to be parted from his friend.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? I’ve scoured Google but I cannot seem to find it now, nor figure out its exact origins. It’s reminiscent of Native American folklore, yet also seems to allude to Christian tradition. It’s entirely possible that it was dialogue spoken by one of the characters on the TV program Northern Exposure, because it sounds precisely like something that would have appeared on that show.

Unfortunately I cannot remember where exactly I heard it.

Regardless, it's been on my mind of late.

Subversive Hair

I get bored easily with the way I look. This leads to frequent, and sometimes drastic changes in appearance. When I’m considering a change I ask myself a couple of questions:

1)      Do I like it?

2)      Does Ted like it? He is, after all, the person who looks at me the most so yes – for me that means he gets a vote (as I do for him).

3)      Will it hinder me in a job interview?

That third one is an unfortunate necessity as I’m looking to switch careers. And humans, being the creatures we are, do judge one another (often negatively) based on a non-traditional hair style or color. I’m hoping that third consideration can eventually be removed from the list.

That’s pretty much all I think about. If the answer to the first two is yes and the third is no, then I just go for it. I don’t think about it any further than that. I don’t know why I don’t wonder, “can I pull this off?” like so many others seem to. I’m not a particularly self-confident person, I just figure: its hair. It falls out every day, it grows back every day. If I hate a color I’ll dye over it, if I hate a cut I’ll grow it out. But then, I never seem to hate anything. I’ve either got particularly easy hair to make look nice (at least to me) or my self-esteem about my head is in fact better than I give myself credit for.

Right now I’m sporting a pixie cut because I can wake up, roll from bed, run my fingers over my scalp and go. I do not have to put it in a ponytail when I work out or worry about sweaty strands getting stuck to my face. Also its August and I love the summer breeze on my neck and ears. I love riding with the car windows down and not having strands of hair whip me in the face. Also, I think it looks really cute.

When I go for a cut I take in a photo that I like to show my stylist, who is a genius at duplicating photos onto my head. As I was searching the internet for photos of pixie cuts I kept blundering over article after article (they felt like warnings) stressing that I am planning for the haircut that men hate to see more than any other on a woman.

I couldn’t help but wonder why? Also, who are these guys? I don’t know any of them. Are they just ghosts that marketing execs are creating to make sure women keep spending a metric ton of money every month on hair care product or do they really exist?

Appearance preferences don’t bother me, everybody’s got a right to one and they don’t have to justify it. I’m a big girl who wears a bikini and some people really don’t want to see that. It’s totally cool, they are not required to look at me. But the short haired thing feels different somehow. According to what I see online, it’s even more widely disliked than the idea of a curvy girl in too little spandex. Personally, I’ve only seen this preference among women. Countless times since I’ve gone subversively short, a woman has looked at me genuine longing and said, “I wish I could wear my hair like that.” But for whatever reason, be it that they feel it won’t look good on them or because someone significant in their lives would be seriously unhappy about it, it seems as unattainable to them as the moon.

Whether the widespread occurrence of disdain for super-short hair on girls really exists or not, I don’t give it a second thought for a few reasons. For one thing I’m old enough, and overweight enough that I’m a bit of a societal ninja anyway. The only person who’s hit on me in the past decade is Ted. Sometimes I remember being twenty and what the admiring glances felt like with some regret, nobody wants to grow older after all – but I have to admit that being an invisible woman is a good deal easier in many ways.

Beyond that, since I simply don’t understand the concept I can’t find a compelling reason to care. At most, I feel the vague curiosity that led me to write this article, asking the questions: Why does short hair feel a little subversive on a woman? Why is short hair not feminine? Why is it not beautiful? Why is seeing the graceful line of a woman’s neck or the shape of her ears a bad thing?

I can’t answer. Neither can Ted because he’s a mystified as I am.

Maybe somebody out there in the ‘net-verse can shed some light.

As for me, I'll be out riding with the windows rolled down...

The Rude Reader

What is so tempting about a person reading a book?  When I see a person reading a book I don’t even say hello to them, I let them be unless they choose to look up and engage.

I have a stressful, non-stop, mentally exhausting, detail oriented job.  When my lunch break rolls around I want nothing more than to stick my nose in a book and be somewhere else for a while.  I live too far from where I work to go home at lunch time so I sit in the break room with my food and I read.  Every day.

Today one of the sales guys came in as I was reading and attempted to strike up conversation with me.  My responses were short and distracted and my attention repeatedly returned to my book.  It took several tries and caused me to lose my place each time but he eventually took the hint and left me to my book.  I don’t want to be rude like that, I just want to read in peace.

Shortly thereafter a co-worker came in and began to chit chat with me as my face was firmly planted in my book.  She continued to chit-chat, and I continued to read.  She then opened the microwave and exclaimed over how disgusting it was inside.  I continued to read.  Then another co-worker entered and she commented to them (in jest) over how disgusting the microwave was and how it was all my fault, since I determinedly continued to read instead of getting involved in her chit-chat.

This resulted in me essentially ignoring comments directed at me, which was awkward.  I don’t want to be rude or cause awkwardness, but I don’t know what else to do anymore.  I don’t want to talk about the microwave.  I just want to read.

Why do people refuse to leave people alone who are reading?

In desperation, I plan to put up a sign that says: “please do not disturb – I am reading.”

What would you do?

Air Conditioning: A Rant

I live on the wrong continent.

I say this because I have been told that there are places in Europe that don’t automatically refrigerate every indoor space the moment the temperature outside goes above 70◦F.

When I was a kid, summers were hot and they were supposed to be hot.  We liked it that way.  At night, the windows were open and there would be a fan stuck in at least one of them, humming away with a comforting summer tune and circulating balmy air through our darkened bedrooms.  During the day we wore shorts, drank water, went swimming, sat in the shade, and ran through sprinklers.  I was never cold.

It was heaven.

It was only after I moved out on my own at the age of 24 that I first experienced life with an air conditioner, and even then it was only in my bedroom so that my poorly ventilated second story room got enough air in it on the hottest of summer nights.

It’s May now, so I have to carry a coat all the time.  When I go indoors I put it on, when I come back out I take it off, wincing at the instant headaches that having to cycle repeatedly through warm, then frigid, then warm, then frigid environments cause.

I work in an office building, so I bundle up in layers of sweaters all summer long.  I sit at my desk shivering, often working with gloves on, gritting my teeth over the money being flushed away in an endeavor to make me as uncomfortable as possible.  When I leave work at the end of the day I breathe out a long sigh of relief upon walking into the parking lot and getting to feel the sun for the first time.  I get into a car that’s been sitting enclosed in the sun all day and actually revel for a few seconds in the feeling of intense warmth before rolling the windows down.

I’m cold, to varying degrees, all winter long.  Then I’m cold to varying degrees all summer too.

Look, I’m not advocating sweltering to death if someone is elderly or infirm.  I know that people die every summer because of excess heat and poor ventilation and I don’t want that to get worse.  But would it really kill corporations to cut the budget by building office windows that OPEN and allowing fresh air and fan ventilation on spring and fall days?

Do we really need to run air conditioners on full blast inside hermetically sealed buildings in April?  In March?!  It’s making us all soft; unable to use or even recognize the natural ways our bodies have of regulating fluctuations in temperature.

Human beings were not meant to live like this.

How to Kill an Albatross

On January 24^th 2013, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection made it illegal to dispose of televisions via municipal waste disposal sites (in other words they cannot wind up in landfills because they are bad for the environment).  What this meant is that most trash pickup companies stopped taking them from customers, even for an additional fee.

This small historical detail is going to become more significant as this story goes on...

Recently Ted and I acquired a shiny newfangled flat screen HD television.  We got it as an unexpected blessing, secondhand and for free.  After hooking it up, we were duly impressed by the difference that HD really does make in picture quality.

The downside was, we now had to find a new home for a 36” old fashioned CRT television which works just fine, but weighs roughly the same amount as an NFL Linebacker in box form.

Not wanting to throw away an item that works (and not yet knowing that throwing these things away has recently become impossible in my state) I posted the Albatross on Facebook a week ago with the attached picture, offering it free to a good home.

A friend of mine suggested I try Freecycle, so I quickly investigated and just as quickly signed up.  I had no idea this awesome service existed with the sole purpose of getting rid of items for people who no longer want or need them and getting them to people who do.  No money, no strings attached, just people getting rid of stuff and people getting what they need.  Within an hour I had an ad posted and was ready to find a new home for Albatross.

Before any of the Freecyclers had a chance to react, however, an old acquaintance popped up on Facebook offering to take the set off my hands.  Delighted by how easy that turned out to be, I took the Freecycle ad back down immediately.

I then spent last weekend trying unsuccessfully to arrange a pickup time with my acquaintance, who I finally found out on Sunday evening was too busy to come get it.  I figured that was okay though since I didn’t really need Albatross out of my house until the following Saturday the 26^th, also known as Tedmas: the annual observance of the celebration of Ted’s day of birth.

After pestering and pestering and… pestering this entire past week I found out at 4PM on Tedmas Eve that my acquaintance was not, in fact, going to come get Albatross from us.  After having not run the Freecycle ad for it all week, I now had about twelve hours to somehow dispose of a CRT television so heavy that it generally takes three adults of Herculean strength to move it around.

Panic mode – ENGAGED.

I spent the next solid hour calling everybody: my trash company, other people’s trash companies, thrift stores, and every recycling center listed in the yellow pages for my town and the three towns around me.  The only people remotely willing to entertain so much as the possibility of taking this thing was Best Buy, who would even come get it from me… for a hundred bucks, but only if it was a few inches smaller than 36”.

Near tears, I inquired of the sympathetic lady at Waste Management just what exactly a responsible citizen was supposed to do to get rid of one of these things legally and within the boundaries of the new Pennsylvania laws?  Dismantling it myself and hiding it piecemeal in the trash was starting to seem like the only way out.

Finally, she directed me toward the Environmental Protection Agency.  Call me a paranoid Libertarian if you want, but going for help to the United States Government who had enacted the law that was busting my butt in the first place just hadn’t really occurred to me.

Turns out, that’s exactly the right place to go.  Since they’ve made it completely impossible to legally dispose of these things in the trash, they now have arranged community pickup days where you can take them and drop them off, free of charge.  Had I only called the County in the first place I’d have saved myself quite a bit of trouble.

The thing is, why did I have to make forty phone calls to find that out?  Shouldn’t the very first recycling center who refused me have known about it?  Each and every time I was refused, I immediately asked the Customer Service Rep if they knew who I should call instead to solve my problem.  Usually they said they had no idea, but occasionally they’d suggest a different recycling center.

One suggested I call the TV manufacturer and ask them, so I called Zenith and did just that.  They directed me toward three different repair centers in my area who, “should be able to help.”  Could they dispose of a CRT TV?  Nope, nope and nope.  Did they know of someone who could?  Nope again.

Why don’t people in this industry, who know immediately and with harsh finality that they absolutely cannot help, know who people should go to instead?  The collection events are fantastic but if people are clueless to their existence it’s not going to do anybody very much good.

It also turns out that there was one of these collection events at the library at the end of my street just last weekend, but we missed the boat on that one and will now have to take the Albatross for one final car ride (not to mention figuring out how to lift it into the car) on Tedmas morning.  Definitely not the way we were expecting to start the celebration, but hey – at least it won’t be in residence in my dining room any longer.

So the takeaways here are this:

1)      Freecycle is very cool and you should use and support it.

2)      Unless you are aware of the one approved method for doing so, the government has made it a colossal pain the butt to get rid of electronic items.  Which makes me wonder if a lot of people, after trying and trying and TRYING to dispose of them legally aren’t maybe giving up, dismantling them, and hiding them piecemeal in their trash or dropping them off high cliffs somewhere.  The blinding efficiency of the United States Government at work, as usual.

3)      If you have a CRT television and you need to get rid of it – call the Environmental Protection Agency.  Nobody else will help you.  Seriously.  Nobody.  I’ve done the legwork.