Archive for October, 2009

On Wednesday I got to go to yet another training…this one was actually an all-day professional development conference for staff at our institution.  Two of the presentations (e-mail in the workplace and locavore/plant-based eating) were disappointing, not because I’m not interested in the topics but because the speakers were terrible.

However, the “Recession-Proofing Your Personal Relationships” and the “Women Don’t Negotiate, But They Should” presentations were pretty rockin’.  So, here I am, passing all my rockin’ new knowledge on to you!  This entry is inspired by the value I got out of the “Recession-Proofing” presentation, and I’ll do one on negotiations next week. Continued

On Friday, I went to a training on emotional intelligence, and I have to say that it was really interesting.  I’d taken a quiz on emotional intelligence prior to this (check out http://www.queendom.com/) and scored not nearly as well as I would have thought, although firmly within the bell curve. One of the results of the training was to make a contract with ourselves (we were given contracts and the trainer is going to follow up with us to hear about the results) and try to do one thing differently for a month to improve our emotional intelligence.  I got a lot of value out of the session, so I thought I’d try and pass some of it on.

Regarding the monthly contract, I chose to allow my emotions to influence my decisions, which I anticipate will be pretty interesting.  Sometimes I get really frustrated or angry and then my emotions make my decisions for me (which is different, I think, from letting your emotions influence your decisions), and the rest of the time I pretty much disregard my emotions completely.  I’m looking forward to the idea of taking a balanced approach. Continued

Gary Stock is author of unblinking.com and CIO of technology innovation firm Nexcerpt, Inc. He’s also an  online dating veteran and an experimenter and critic of the technology and systems behind the online dating sites. I first discovered him after he left a comment on my post about spotting fake Match.com profiles and then reading his Bad Match series of posts about the scams that are rampant on online dating sites. If any readers are doing online dating or are interested in the subject, I highly recommend reading his posts and then checking out this interview. Take the 10′ and read through this entire thing, because it’s packed with good insight and gives good examples of what the online dating experience is like. This interview is broken into two parts.

Continued

So, as I’ve mentioned several times, Jake is really unhappy in his job and would also like to move to another city, since he grew up here and isn’t so much a fan.  I understand, as I moved to Arizona in large part to escape Florida, which I think is a humid, touristy pit of hurricanes, mosquitoes, and despair.  He was going to wait until January and then start looking, since if he doesn’t include months on his resume that’ll give him the appearance of three years. Continued

I finished Eat, Pray, Love and it resonated for me. I loved it. One of the best reading experiences I’ve had this year. In my earlier post about the book, I noted a couple of issues I was having:

Continued

So, apparently there has been a misunderstanding between Jake and I that I didn’t even know about – but that is now resolved.  Here’s the story:

When I was an undergrad in Florida, I was in love with this fellow I worked with.  Let’s call him Brent.  Brent was an MA student in Literature, and to my eyes intelligent, funny, and good-looking.  I had a raging crush on him, which didn’t seem to be reciprocated – which was fine since I was dating someone anyway. Continued