My former roommate, who is now in his mid-50s, went back to school last year. He actually has a few degrees under his belt but he determined that he wanted to become a teacher. He’s had a successful career as a writer and an actor and decided that he would really love to teach drama. So he ordered his old transcripts and applied to the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. He graduated this June and is now on his way to being a high school teacher.

I know from talking to him that many times he felt unsure about making this drastic change, but in the end, I think, he is happy that he has done it. It’s very brave to go back to school later in life. I remember, when I was an undergrad there was a lady named Dorothy, who had retired but was taking painting classes because she always wanted to be an artist. She was really good and never seemed to be intimidated by the fact that most of us were one-third her age.

There’s a great question and answer in the July issue of salon.com, “At 56 I Want an Art History Degree,” that may be a good read if you’re wondering what to do to make a drastic career change.

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Jowita

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I went to school with a girl who got an important job before any of us. She said, jokingly (?) that she got the job because she wore a shirt that showed her cleavage to the interview. ‘Til this day I don’t know if she said this to provoke a reaction or if it’s what happened. We wondered if she was going to drop out because she had a job. Fortunately, she stayed in school for the rest of the semester and graduated with the rest of us. Wise choice.

In Betsy Perry’s column, Our Spy On The Upper East Side: Flirting In The Workplace she talks with (brave? naive? cynical?) candour about, well, flirting at work and putting up with sexism and all kinds of other un-fun stuff in order to get ahead at work. She writes, “I have flirted through job interviews and intense business meetings and considered it part of the way I did my work.” She suggests that flirting is simply a necessary evil in some professions, a technique that may help you get ahead and that it’s much better than doing something more extreme.

Come on. Whatever happened to just getting good at your job and moving up that way?

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Jowita

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It may seem hard to reinvent yourself when you’ve spent time doing one thing all your life. When you’re in your late teens or early 20s the world seems to be filled with possibilities, but the older you get the harder it may seem to take advantage of these. But why do we give up on our dreams so easily when we hit the so-called grown-up stage? If you don’t take some risks, you shortchange yourself.

The column Career Blues? Here's A Way To Be All That You Can Be talks about people who have given up their careers to do something that they truly believe in. It reminds me of a friend who went to a law school, passed his bar exams and . . . decided that he wanted to be a writer instead. He gave up a lucrative legal career in order to sit and scribble away somewhere, hoping that someone would be willing to publish him. Years later, he’s a bestselling author with books published all over the world. He even sold movie rights to his last novel.

Who knows what motivates people to go from being a lawyer to a writer or a business owner to a medic as one woman in the article did. And who cares, really? The point is that lots of happy people take control of their own lives. The important thing is to realize that it’s not necessarily too late to change. Take smart risks. Have no regrets.

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Jowita

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The Globe and Mail has an interesting article, Buddying Up to the Boss on Facebook, about bosses who are friends with their employees on Facebook. The article talks about a manager who broke up with her boyfriend and changed her relationship status on her Facebook page so that everyone at work knew about what happened –- they all got an update through Facebook’s news feed. The same manager also wrote on her page about her feelings about the breakup, which made the whole thing even harder to handle, both for her and her employees. The article also talks about a boss who made comments about the photos of an employee. The boss made fun of the way the employee danced and the look he had on his face in the pictures. The employee found it weird, too close for comfort. Most people are not too happy when the line between professional and friendly is so blurred.

Being friendly with your boss in a virtual reality is tricky to navigate, and not everyone is comfortable with the relationship. Here are some suggestions on how to benefit from the situation instead of getting bogged down emotionally.:

• Keep your Facebook page clean and don’t include information that you’d rather not give out to colleagues.
• Create two different accounts - - a professional one and one for your family and friends.
• Respect a no – -if a person doesn’t want to be a Facebook friend, take the hint and don’t pester him or her.

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Jowita

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I love writing this blog. My amazing co-workers always send me great stories about employment that I can write about and I love exploring all the work world news myself. Since I’ve started this blog, I’ve started to pay more attention to how employment is affected by what’s going on around the world. It’s not that I didn’t care before -- I did; it’s just that I never paid attention to how economic or technological changes affected people’s jobs. Even jobs like mine.

For example, I had no idea that some bloggers get paid based on the number of hits their blogs get. I know that it’s good when blogs are popular. A professional blog advertises the publication it’s associated with and (hopefully) brings in more readers. In other cases, a blog can serve as a medium to sell independent advertising. You can actually make decent money from your ramblings if people read you a lot. But I was surprised to find out that that some bloggers work on commission, such as the ones who work for Gawker which pays them based on traffic.

The article Gawker Cuts Staff Pay Rate For Second Consecutive Quarter says, “With the current traffic success of Gawker comes a downside. The company, which hands out blogger pay on the traffic for each writer's own blog posts, has been paying out bonuses each quarter to nearly all the regular editorial staff of Gawker. ‘We've broken the site budget,’ Gawker Media owner Nick Denton told the staff in an email yesterday. The only answer, from the company's perspective? To keep getting more traffic -- but to pay the producers of that traffic less for each pageview. So for the second and now third quarters of 2008, the company has reduced the rate of pay per pageview.”

I keep imagining people working 27/7 to get pageview hits and my brain hurts. I can come up with one a topic a day ... but seven?

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Jowita

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I’m supposed to be diplomatic, just, concerned with aesthetics but also shallow, egotistical, etc. Some horoscopes suggest I would make a good lawyer or . . . an interior decorator. I’m a Libra. An air sign. I’m also a snake according to Chinese astrology. This means I may be unfocused (as an air sign) manipulative but intelligent (as a snake) artsy (as a Libra) and blah blah blah. I really don’t care and haven’t paid attention to it since I was a teenager.

However, in places like India, Brazil or China, astrology plays an important role in the workplace. Steven Mark Weiss was recently interviewed about his book Signs of Success: The Remarkable Power of Business Astrology for The Globe and Mail's article, Hey, Boss, What's Your Sign? Weiss says that people are skeptical about astrology in the workplace. “But if there wasn't something remarkable about how certain sets of personality traits seem to be found in people born under different signs of the zodiac, it would not have been so fascinating to so many people for centuries."

Weiss claims there are clusters of personality traits specific to different signs. You may want to know about these traits when working with other people.

Here’s how Weiss analyzes Leos:

Strengths: Charismatic, radiant personality
Weaknesses: Can be poor with detail and overly theatrical
Won over by: Flattery and sharing credit. Presentations should stress how essential and exciting an idea is.
Famous Leos: Martha Stewart, Henry Ford, Malcolm Forbes

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Jowita

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Sometimes I read something and I am rendered speechless. Not just from shock -- often it is because I simply don’t know how to feel about something. I don’t know if it’s good or bad or just plain crazy. Japanese employers punishing their employees for being overweight leaves me speechless. It’s wrong. But does it also make sense on some level? I can’t say. I am speechless.

The article Japanese Firms Face Penalties For Overweight Staff says, “All employees over 40 -- about 56 million people -- will be required to take the test to determine whether they are at risk of metabolic syndrome -- symptoms associated with being overweight that, if left unchecked, increase the risk of strokes, heart disease and diabetes.”

That’s right. Japanese employees will be required to fit a certain standard. Male workers whose waistlines go over the recommended 33.5 inches will be given diet and exercise plans and, in urgent cases, told to see a doctor.

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Jowita

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When I worked as a freelancer I used to joke that there was no finish time. Actually, I wasn’t really joking. I was serious -- there was no finish time. As a freelancer, I worked on weekends, evenings, and in the middle of the night. So what that I never had to leave my house to go to work? I was always working anyway! Why? Well, because, technically, I could always be working. The more available I was, the more assignments I would get and the more assignments, the more successful as a freelancer I was.

The Globe and Mail article Why Are People Emailing Me? that I talked about yesterday gave an Inbox strategy that could help people juggle the tricky business of always seeming availablewithout getting too worried about those urgent emails coming at you at all times of day and night.

• Set boundaries by adding a line to your email signature tag that says how long it takes for you respond to emails.
• Check with people who are emailing you. Do they expect you to answer right away? You can even ask before replying.
• Talk to your boss –- tell him/her you need downtime to . . . recharge your batteries!
• Talk to others -– figure out how your co-workers deal with responding to emails this and see if you can start a dialogue about email expectations.
• If you can’t handle the number of emails get out and find a less demanding job.

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Jowita

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One time I went on a date with a BlackBerry lover. We sat and chatted and once in a while he would look at the green-glowing screen that lay between us and his eyes would light up too. He picked up his Blackberry a few times and quickly typed, holding up a finger as if apologizing or telling me to shut up, or I don’t know what. He said he was supposed to be available until 10 p.m. so that’s why he had to have his BlackBerry on. Regardless of season, time of day or activity -– my lawyer friend (did I mention he was a lawyer?) had to be available. Even on a date. I didn’t make a big deal out of it because I wasn’t that into him, but when I thought about it later, I realized that his inability to be fully present was one reason why I wasn’t that into him. It seemed that there were three of us on the date -– him, me and his BlackBerry. I’m so old-fashioned.

In the Globe and Mail article It’s 11 p.m. Why Are People Emailing Me? Stephanie Whitaker writes about the new trends in global communication. Things have changed. It used to be unusual to reply to a business email right away, now it’s something that is expected. People send out and receive emails at all times -- if you don’t reply right away, you might be considered unprofessional or rude or simply not up to your job. My date was obviously a part of this trend and I hope he finds a woman with a BlackBerry -- he seemed like a nice guy and deserves someone he’s compatible with.

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Jowita

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When I first moved here, five years ago, I couldn’t believe how lucky I was – I had access to the world. Yes, the entire world. After years of living in a sleepy student town, it seemed I was in the middle of a metropolitan storm. I dove right into the many art events, shops, and cultures and food from all over the world. I could hop on a streetcar and go to Little India, stay on the same streetcar and end up in Chinatown, stay on it even longer and make it to Portugal or Poland. I could get a bottle of real Mexican tequila or a bag of seaweed sheets and stop for a glass of bubble tea; I could hear music from Iran and the Philippines or Croatia. I could buy a real sari from India or a Pashmina shawl from Nepal.

According to Cottage in the City, Toronto is home to more than 100 cultures and is considered to be the most multi-cultured city in the world by the United Nations. But it’s also home to great art galleries, cheap (or free) art festivals and lots of other exciting events – especially in the summer. (Check out our guide for all kinds of fun listings!)

There is lots to do here. First, starting at the Toronto Harbourfront , every weekend you can check out the International Marketplace where you can taste fantastic international cuisine and buy things from all over the world. Or, if you’re in a truly shopping mood, you can visit Kensington for Pedestrian Sunday. Last summer, I’ve witnessed many a times pedestrians joining in a Capoeira dance performance. It was the hottest thing that summer and it's happening this year too. But if you’re more into sitting you can always get a pass to the Toronto Fringe Festival and check out the national talent performing and acting original plays. Or you can grab a blanket and head out to High Park to see a more established playwright, Mr. William Shakespeare, and The Dream in High Park .

If you’re more of a hiker type, do take advantage of Greater Toronto Area Parks and Gardens. My personal favourite is taking the ferry to the Toronto Island where I get to enjoy a whole day without cars or even a swim at the beach.

Ttyl

Jowita

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