AVENGER

Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor are too busy lifting weights, squeezing into star-spangled spandex, and saving the universe from Nut Jobs.

I'm going to have to take care of these injustices myself.

Be Avenger.  Righter of Wrongs. Retaliator (say it like Arnold: "Re-tahl-ee-ay-TOR!)

Challenger of Outrageousness. Nonsense. Absurdity.

Call me QUINGINATOR.

It's Frustrating Friday. The royal robe is being swapped for a crusader cape.  The crown for a mask.

Swoop with me, then, into madness.

In the workplace.

Americans work more than anyone in the industrialized world. More than the English and  French. Lots more than Germans and Norwegians. We even put the Japanese to shame.  

We work longer days, take less vacation, and retire later. More than 35% of us now work on weekends, too. Dr. Gerardo Marti, a sociology professor at Davidson College, says, “Work is no longer confined to the office ...it bleeds into our time at home, our commute, even when we’re on vacation. It’s harder and harder for us to segregate our work identities from our home lives. For many people, the two have become one and the same.”

People like yours truly.

In Why We Work on the Weekend, author Clair Suddath interviews a NY video producer who works weekends - on her laptop, or checking e-mail on her phone. Why? Because everyone else does. “It’s probably not that necessary, but I like to be ‘on it,’” the producer says. “Plus, we seem to have a culture in my office where everyone tries [to be] the last one still working.”

But more than a century of research has proven that shorter work hours actually raise productivity and profits -- while working overtime lessens them. Knowledge workers can only put in six productive hours in a day, and manual laborers, eight. 

Sheryl Sandberg – No. 2 at Facebook and Forbes’ fifth most powerful woman in the world – used to hide the fact that she left work every day at 5:30 p.m. to have dinner with her children.  Why? Because her colleagues (and the public) might wonder if Sandberg is committed enough, working enough, serious enough to be successful. 

We shouldn't question Sandberg. We should applaud and emulate her.

Swooping to the courts:

To be delivered to The U.S. District Court in Greensboro, N.C., asap: 

Dear John,

It didn't seem possible to empathize more with your wife, Elizabeth, than in those last few years of her life when she was so publicly forced to confront your betrayal, infidelity, mistress and child, a prying public, her insidious cancer and inevitable death. Who could have imagined that headlines- more than a year after her death - would be filled with tales of her collapsing on the pavement outside a private airplane hangar as she confronted you; screaming, crying, exposing her chest to a husband who ".. didn't have much of a reaction."

The fact that the public is privy to these stories - told by aides under oath - is almost as shameful as the fact that your daughter must sit behind you in that court of law and suffer her mothers' indignities - and your disgracefulness - so publicly. You have quite possibly out-done every dishonorable politician in history.

Wish you had saved some of the donations from your 101-year-old heiress, John, to bribe the judge for closed court proceedings - and spare your deceased wife, your children, and the public from this spectacle. 

Kudos to your hair for weathering the storm spectacularly.

Swooping to the Vatican:

First the black-robed Powers-that-Be sent Cardinal Bernard Law packing - to run a gorgeous Basilica in Rome - rather than inhabit a prison cell in Massachusetts.

Then they issued a report stating that ordaining women as priests is nearly as grave a threat to the church as pedophilia. “Sexual abuse and pornography are more grave delicts, they are an egregious violation of moral law,” the Vatican’s internal prosecutor Monsignor Scicluna explained. “Attempted ordination of women is grave, but on another level, it is a wound that is an attempt against the Catholic faith on the sacramental orders.”

And now, in a Doctrinal Assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, they are chastising American nuns for straying from church doctrine and adopting "radical feminist" views.

Disobedient nuns who focus on social justice issues and education, rather than broadcasting church doctrine.

Radical sisters who work tirelessly for the poor and marginalized - individuals who are invisible to other parts of the church.

Never mind that Vatican II asked religious orders to modernize, which for many nuns meant focusing on and responding to the needs of their communities. Forget that, as Sister Joan Chittister, a prominent Benedictine nun, says, ".. the sisters are — in the streets, in the soup kitchens, anywhere where there’s pain. They’re with the dying, with the sick, and people know it.” 

The changes made a half-century ago have fallen out of favor in Rome, and the Vatican expects all religious to fall back in line.

So Rome has ordered Seattle's Archbishop, along with two other bishops "who are the church's authentic teachers of faith and morals" (as opposed to women who are inauthentic teachers of faith and morals?) to begin monitoring all operations of the LCWR.

Those good old boy bishops - bona fide instructors of faith and morals - will review "all policies, all speakers, all conferences, all publications and all letters of support," for the more than 56,000 nuns in the LCWR. 

LCWR members can agree to work with Rome on making the mandated changes, or they can choose to form a new organization independent of the church's hierarchy.

Dear Sisters, make a list of your grievances.

Your groupies will help you pin copies of them on every church door.  

Let's begin with St. Peter's Basilica. 

Rome, anyone?

QUING Hereby Decrees:  Disturbed by the Absurd? Cope with the Cape.