The Panda Bear on Her Envy of the French and the Mistakes of Her Youth

The Panda Bear was at a meeting this week where a woman said in France everything closes down in August and takes a month off.

Whenever, the Panda Bear wants to feel sorry for herself, she will complain that she has worked full-time consistently and with good attendance since 1993 and to her a month off from work seems like a remote impossible dream.

The Panda Bear has heard of other European countries that shut down for a month but seem to be in worse economic condition than France where the Panda Bear in a typical American superior fashion can say their economy is in a mess from their shorter work hours.   However, the French seem to be functioning as an economy though they don't have as many consumer as the US.

The Panda Bear doesn't even dream about a month off every year-even a month off every five years would be nice and she finds it hard to believe that either the US economy or the companies she works for would suffer that much from her taking a month off every five years.

The Panda Bear admits that as a typical American she has been frustrated when things are closed in the United States.   However, recently she has started to feel that when services are open extended hours she is also working longer hours.   The Panda Bear is starting to feel that Americans need more collective down time.

The Panda Bear remembers when in Massachusetts all stores used to be closed on Sunday.   Now there is hardly any holiday that everything closes down.   It used to be that everything was closed for Thanksgiving Day(which is in November) but now that is starting to change and stores are now open for people to shop.

The Panda Bear would prefer to live in a society that had fewer consumer goods but more leisure.

The Panda Bear is regretting the errors of her youth.   When she was young she was very serious, shy and anxious to settle down.   When the Panda Bear was young she had a hard time having fun.   What a wasted youth!!!   The Panda Bear should have been having enjoying herself.

Now the Panda Bear would like to have fun but is unable to have it because she has so many responsibilities.

The Panda Bear on the Death of Father Panda and Franklin Roosevelt

On Monday June 4, 2012, Father Panda Bear(the father of the Panda Bear) left this world after an illness of three weeks.  He was 89 years old.   His funeral was yesterday June 7, 2012.

Father Panda was a quiet man.   He had a PhD. in physics and was a very smart and intellectual person.   He was devoted to his work in theoretical physicians and Mother Panda(the Panda Bear's mother).  The Panda Bear was his only child.    He had no grandchildren.

Father Panda was also a very good person.    He was disappointed that his scientific work did not get the attention that he felt he deserved.    Perhaps somewhat naively, both Father Panda and Mother Panda believed that all one needed to do to get ahead was to work hard and be good and what you do.  The Panda Bear believes that it is often the egotistical and self-promoting who get ahead in this world.

The Panda Bear will share with her readers the speech she gave at her father's funeral.    While the Panda Bear mentioned in that that Father Panda was a Franklin Roosevelt Democrat, she did not make to much of it because she did not want her father's funeral to become political.

Father Panda loved Franklin Roosevelt and hated Herbert Hoover.  Father Panda who lived through the Great Depression believed his family would have starved without the New Deal.   He said none of the recessions that the Panda Bear has lived through was as bad as the Great Depression where there was no such thing as a social safety net until Franklin Roosevelt put in the New Deal.   Father Panda also believed that some conservatives really felt people should starve though they did not always come out and say it.

Father Panda hated big business and the political right.

Here is the speech the Panda Bear gave in honor of her Father:

I have the difficult task about saying a few words to celebrate the life of my father.   How can anyone’s life be summarized in a few words?Instead of focusing on the biography of my father’s life and I want to focus on a few of his personal traits that should be remembered.

He was a child of the Great Depression and a Franklin Roosevelt Democrat.   He would tell me stories of people seeing people starving in the streets and people losing their money in the banks before there was the FDIC insurance.   For him (and some others in that generation) Franklin Roosevelt was their hero who saved them from the calamity of the Great Depression.

As a theoretical physicist obviously my father was a very smart person.   He was extremely informed person.   However, it should also be remembered that my father was a good, conscientious and responsible person.   He always tried to follow the moral and ethical course of action.   He was a modest and unassuming person.

He was a physicist and his work was important to him.   His tools when I was younger were pens and graph paper and as I got older it was the computer.   He liked working by himself on complex formulas.

Next to my mother the great love of his life was his Macintosh computer.

My father liked being an active and involved person.   I think he would have liked the fact that he was seen as doing very well before his final illness and that he left this world on a high note.

I would like to tell the people in this room the things he talked about after he fell and hurt his head in his final few weeks of his life.    I think it shows a lot about his character.

He was worried that he was going to die which neither me nor my mother thought he would at the time.  He said he did not want to be an invalid.   He said he was not pain.

Once when I visited my father in the hospital he was able to talk about the Russian Revolution and could identify a picture of Kerensky, who wanted a parliamentary democracy for Russia on the television screen.

He told my mother she was best thing that ever happened to him and was concerned about her welfare.   I promised my father that I would help my mother.  He worried when my mother stayed late at the hospital.   One of the last things he told my mother was that he had a nightmare that she needed something done and there was no one there to help her. 

    

I remember my last conversation with my father.   It was just after he had been transferred to the Mass General ICU.   I called the nursing station before work.   I knew my father was very sick but still did not think he would die.    The nurse said he was awake and feeling scared.   I did not go to work that day and went to see my father.

When I came to the hospital he was awake.   The television was on so we talked about different television shows.   We finally settled on a show that showed pictures of nature.   We talked about the different animals on the TV screen and at times he laughed and smiled.  I told him I was reading a book about the founding of Facebook and how it made Mark Zuckerberg not seem like a very nice person.  

 

My father reached out and kissed me a couple of times and told me he wanted me to go to Europe.   Finally he said “Panda Bear please go-I want to take a nap.”   Those were the last words he ever said to me.

May my father, Father Panda, rest in peace.

The Panda Bear on the Status of her Blog American Overwork and the Ill Health of Her Father

The Panda Bear wants to let her readers know that she has not abandoned her blog.   Her father has been critically ill for the past two weeks.   She plans to restart her blog once the health status of her father is resolved.

Her father who is 89 fell down the stairs and broke his pelvis and has sustained a brain injury.   While he is not brain dead, he has sustained a brain damage.   Yesterday, he appeared to be totally unconscious.

He is in the intensive care unit at The Massachusetts General Hospital.   The Panda Bear spent a couple of days with her father in the unit of the hospital.   She was impressed with the list of specialists that were working on her father to deal with his health.

Probably as a result of his fall, the Panda Bear's father has sustained a heart attack and brain seizure.   The brain seizure has set the Panda Bear's father back in terms of mental cognition.

The Panda Bear Blog is in part of blog about American overwork.  The Panda Bear gets very angry at supposed "experts" who aren't on the clock telling us average folk that we simply imagine that we are overworked.

It is the most stressful time of year in the Panda Bear's line of work.   The Panda Bear wants it noted that many American workers are going from work to personal stress.  While the Panda Bear's employer has been good about giving the Panda Bear time of from work, it should be noted that this is coming from the eighteen days from the Panda Bear's "Benefit Time" which is a combination of personal, sick and vacation time.

Nowadays, jobs are hard to get.   In life and death discussions with the physicians the Panda Bear will be waving company leave of absence forms so her job can be protected under the American Family Medical Leave Act.

The Panda Bear now must get ready for her tasks for the day and see her very ill father on the first holiday of the summer.

The Panda Bear on Bullying, May Day, and Time Famine

The Panda Bear Blog is a blog about average people struggling with average problems.

The Panda Bear reconnected with another friend from her childhood who also was bullied.   The years she would have been bullied would be from about 1968-1972.   The Panda Bear and all her friends remember that the schools did nothing to stop bullying.    The Panda Bear is glad that school bullying is now talked about.   She does not remember it being talked about she was a child.   The Panda Bear has had these conflicting memories of feeling like she was the only child ever in the history of the world who was bullied and at the same time if she saw other children being bullied she would have the feeling that she was glad it was not her.   Even if bullying has not stopped in schools, the Panda Bear thinks it is an infinite improvement from when she was a child that it is now being discussed in classrooms.   That the schools did nothing to stop the bullying made the Panda Bear feel that the bullies were somehow right.    The Panda Bear also feels that it is too bad that all the bully victims could not get together and simply ignore the bullies.   The bullies seemed to have better group organizational skills than the bullied.

According to this article in the The Nation, more people in the US are celebrating May Day.   The article gives a interesting history of May Day.   The Panda Bear things more needs to be done to celebrate and honor achievements of average people.    The Panda Bear is hearing of "employee appreciation" events where the higher ups pretty much say they think they are more important than their workers.   In the Panda Bear's opinion, employee appreciation should be where  managers appreciate the ordinary workers.   If upper management feels they are superior to the workers they should be tactful enough not to say in front of them on worker appreciation events.   To the Panda Bear this behavior is both rude and stupid.

In a previous post, the Panda Bear said the purpose of her blog was to chronicle the rising hours of work and how it was not good for society.   The Panda Bear feels it would be nice for people who feel time stressed to be able to band together to find solutions both on a societal and personal level.  Furthermore,  the Panda Bear believes that many of the "experts" in US society have an incomplete understanding of the average worker.  

In her last week's post, the Panda Bear discussed a study by authors associated with Harvard, Yale and Wharton Business school about how volunteering made time stressed people feel like they had more free time. To get the full text of the study click here.   The authors describe the problem of time stressed Americans quite accurately here:

Despite medical advances that have lengthened the human lifespan and technologicalinnovations that have automated many chores, Americans report feeling more  time-constrainedthan ever (Carroll, 2008; Robinson & Godbey, 1999). Many, in fact, perceive themselves asvictims of a “time famine'

– having too much to do and not enough time to do it (DeVoe &Pfeffer, 2011; Perlow, 1999). With waking hours largely consumed by work, precious minutesremain for the daily list of to-dos, including exercise, cleaning, and socializing with friends and family (Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, 2004). Not surprisingly, some 85% of parents wish for more time with their children (Bianchi, Robinson, & Milkie, 2006), and twice asmany Americans would prefer two weeks of vacation over two weeks of extra pay (Honoré,2004).Most relevant to the present investigation, people’s sense that time is scarce decreases their tendency to give time to others. Darley and Batson (1973) showed that seminary students late to discuss the parable of the Good Samaritan hurried past a suffering confederate. Similarly,Levine (1998) found pace-of-life to negatively predict prosocial behavior in cities around theworld, with the chronically time-constrained inhabitants of places like New York being leastlikely to spend time helping strangers.

  
However, the Panda Bear feels it is simplistic to say that people would feel less time strained if they "volunteered".

In future posts, the Panda Bear will analyze her free time to see how much she wastes.