From time to time I have a look at the search strings that have brought readers to this blog. Looking at some of the recent queries, I can’t help but wonder what kind of blog this would be if these described my main focus:
Category Archives: Personal
The blogger’s hypothetical imperatives.
In the midst of the ongoing conversation about managing career and housework and who knows what else (happening here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and likely some places I’ve missed), ScientistMother wondered about one of the blogospheric voices that wasn’t taking an active role in the discussion. She mused in a comment at Isis’s blog:
Do we ever get a post from DrugMonkey about how he does it? He has kids and a wife (who I think is a scientist) but he rarely talks about balance issues. I’m sure its been an issue. Until the MEN start talking about its not going to change.
When DrugMonkey demurred, she followed up with a post at her own blog:
You have stated on your blog that you believe that gender equality in science is a good thing. Yet you rarely talk about some of the balancing issues or the parental issues. I have the link up that shows you think its important. Yet outside of that post originally done 2 years ago, you don’t talk about fatherhood or balancing fatherhood and partnerhood with science.
In the discussion in the comments following her post, ScientistMother quotes from the post from the DrugMonkey vault she has in mind:
The work-life balance minefield.
That all said, as a woman in science, it is sometimes disheartening to almost never hear an article suggest that a woman in science discuss household duties with her partner and split them evenly. The author of your article makes the statement that women bear the burden of household labor, but until scientists begin to tell other scientists that this isn’t right, women are going to continue to leave academic science for fear of not being able to “balance” work and family.
You can be right and be practical at the same time. These need not be mutually exclusive. I also think that you need not choose between achieving tenure and advocating for social justice. And, until you stop choosing, the pipeline is going to continue to leak like a sieve.
–Isis the Scientist, “A Response on Men, Women, Housework, and Science”
I feel compelled to add, as I have written in many blog-post comments over the last few days, that I deeply respect the value and autonomy of individual relationships — and this, too, is an important part of this calculation. Asking a woman to do more because she is a woman is never fair. But personal relationships are not appropriate places for philosophers or career advisers to lurk. It’s up to each couple — not me, not feminist critics, not tradition — to negotiate housekeeping, childcare, or other domestic responsibilities, and the other aspects of personal relationships. The goal is for those choices to be freely made and not coerced. So men, and women: It’s up to you and your partner to set the terms, but please make sure those decisions are made as freely as can be achieved.
–Jim Austin, “A Special Message for Men: Do Your Share”
While a robust internet discussion about careers and home-life and gendered division of labor has been going on, I have been sitting on the sidelines. (And baking cupcakes and making other necessary preparations for the joint birthday party we hosted for the Free-Ride offspring this past weekend. Plus wondering if this is the year that the social judgment will be spoken aloud, whether by someone outside the family or by one of the sprogs: “How is it that you can make them share a party like that rather than giving each of them a distinct birthday party close to their actual month and day of birth?” How indeed.)
It’s not that I don’t know something about trying to combine a career with family and obligations outside that career (although balance is not the right word to describe that kind of task). But it is hard to speak of these experiences without someone feeling as if my “is” is intended to have the force of an “ought”.
And that jump is pretty hard not to make, given that one thing that girls and women in American society are socialized to do pretty darn reliably is to judge other girls and women (and, of course, to judge themselves as girls or women). Is there a downside to a particular option? We will find it, even if it is just hypothetical. (And laboring under the burden of hypothetical downsides can be its very own downside.) We can speak about what works for us individually, but do so with the awareness that it might stop working, at which point we have to figure out some other option.
Question for the hive mind: 5 AM is sneezy time?
This is a blog post that I more or less composed in my mind early this morning when, at 5 AM, I awoke with a runny nose and started sneezing.
Just like I have every morning at 5 AM for the past month and a half.
Rabbit update: the great outdoors.
When last we checked in with Snowflake Free-Ride, our intrepid white rabbit had not yet found the courage to venture all the way to the end of the drawbridge from her hutch.
Well, on Tuesday, Snowflake got the bunny equivalent of a screened porch. This seems to have been enough to convince her to come on out.
An open letter
… to the elder Free-Ride offspring’s trumpet teacher.
While I am generally accepting of your choices as far as the pieces you are having my child learn how to play, I have a small bone to pick with you this evening.
Earth Day 2010: change I can believe in.
First, let me refer you to Sharon Astyk’s excellent post on what has become of Earth Day. If I had the time or energy to pay much attention to Earth Day as a particular day of observance, I think I’d share Sharon’s grumpiness.
After all, paying attention to our impacts on our shared environment just one day out of 365 is not likely to make much of a difference, and buying stuff as a strategy to deal with our over-consumption of resources (and the pollution that follows upon the manufacture and transport of that stuff) seems pretty perverse.
That said, I’m going to take this Earth Day as an opportunity to notice some sustainable changes in the direction of treading more lightly that I’ve made in the past year. This isn’t quite rising to the level of Mike Dunford’s Earth Day resolutions meme, in which the sprogs and I participated last year. Resolutions are good, but sometimes when you set a goal and then fail to live up to it, you throw your hands up and kind of give up.
Giving up, I’d argue, doesn’t do much to help. On the other hand, noticing places where you imagined change would be painful and it turned out not to be might actually help motivate more change.
Here are the changes that have stuck since last Earth Day:
CSU budgetpocalypse: what lies ahead.
I think I’ve mentioned once or twice that the California State University system (of which my fair campus is a part) has been experiencing a bit of a budget crisis.
Well, while there may be glimmers of hope for a recovery in the rest of the economy, we seem to be on the cusp of things getting much, much worse.
Old school geekery.
Dr. Free-Ride’s parents, Duke and Super Sally, have been working hard to shed some of the material goods they have accumulated in the last several years, on account of they are planning a move to smaller living quarters.
Of course, this means that they shipped several boxes of stuff from their current place to Casa Free-Ride. There’s some sort of conservation of matter principle at work here.
Not that I should complain. For one thing, half of those boxes are actually Uncle Fishy’s. For another, there’s some stuff cool stuff in the boxes that are staying with us.