Monday, April 9, 2007

A bunch of different kinds of update.

A what does Seth Stevenson Look Like Update - I google-imaged Seth Stevenson but all I got were stills from the commercials he's reviewed. Which is like thirty different kinds of post-post modern. In my mind he is now a chimera with the faces of the Mac ad guy, the BK king and a bowl of soup from Malaysia.

A what does Violet Do Instead of Playing With The Dog Update - I read this post on this obscure little blog I found. It is by a "No Nym," not by the main blogger who is some professor chick? Or something? Here's what happens:

This blogger-academic types says, I found a job that does not crush my babies in to paste and my getting perspective on what I WANT as opposed to what grad school told me I want helped with that. Everybody normal is all yay, then everybody crazy is all, why did you even have babies if you didn't want them to be crushed into paste, because I mean, there are plenty of us academics out here who would be totally willing to crush our babies into paste for the right job, and you are just wasting everyone's time and gumming up the works but not with baby paste which is actually good for the works.

Observations and Commentary:

Uno) I am the child of one and a half normal academics, one half Indiana Jones and zero stay at home parents. I totally did not turn out being paste.* Sometimes, we ate lots of mac and cheese because no one had time to cook anything else, but sometimes we also went to the zoo or played Candyland. This is all, I think, more about parents – and parents’ marriages – then about babies, who tend to grown up into dysfunctional nuthats like the rest of us no matter what, though they do need to be fed and not beaten, no matter what. Parents want to feel good about what they are doing for their children, but a lot of jobbsers count on encouraging feelings of inadequacy that ripple throughout an employee’s existence. I think it is supposed to be motivating. **

Dos) However, I kind of sympathize with the crazy people, because whenever anyone talks about their own experience, I read that as a criticism of mine to the extent it differs. And I guess, if someone" had peed in your coffee that morning, you could read the post as a little bit of The Secret-Style you are the engineer of your own destiny think happy thoughts blah zee.
He could have gotten only one of those job offers, or none at all, and then there would be no happy story about how he told the fancy robber baron school that no way no how was their steel mill getting built on his pristine farm, nuh uh. But. There would still be a story there about how there is a whole lot of weird professional dogma that got all put up in our brainpiece and it’s a liberating exercise to reject it, even if it’s still just you in your hovel rejecting.

Tres) I am really, really curious about bringing up family stuff being a no-no in interviews, causing bad reactions in hiring committees and the like, only because I hear about it often and from people whose perception of their own experiences I trust, and I’ve seen what seem like its effects on the broad social level and in my own brainpeice, but my actual experience with jobs/schools etc. has been v. much the opposite. I’m literally incapable about being anything but totally candid about my personal life, because I have a huge huge mouth and am obsessed with myself, and will have been talking to total strangers (whom I need to impress because they own my job) about my reproductive decision making within thirty seconds of meeting them. I applied for a very staid-sounding scholarship at Big Shot Professional School for Big Shot Profession and it was all corporate corporate corporate, and one of the interviewers, who was wearing cufflinks and everything was chatting to me about his granddaughter, and I was literally like, “I’ll have to get started on kids in school, because I want like thirty.” I got the scholarship. And that is one example out of many. My theory is that corporate types in cufflinks find me a charming breath of fresh air because I am and they are like, let’s give our money to the flighty girl with the runs in her stocking and see what enchanting indiscretions she commits with it, and that if I were someone who were more like them or didn’t have runs in my stockings, the dissonance between my persona and my family concerns would make them all who does she think she is? Or maybz, because I know Goodman Beekeeper is all babies all the time, and I know I can count on him to hold that shit down no matter what, I don't display any anxiety when talking about this and that works in my favor? Or maybe I have just dealt with awesome people so far?

*My brother, on the other hand, starved to death during MLA ’89.

** The academics of whom I am the child, upon hearing that I was considering applying to X-Subject PhD programs were like, so, what about nursing school? And then all their friends revealed a secret desire to have gone to nursing school. And these are some people who have totally won the professor game. Meanwhile, my friends in nursing school really like it. I am not going to school for X-Subject.

3 comments:

Rusty B. Schwartz said...

i briefly dabbled in x-subject myself. i learned the cyrillic alphabet, but then i quit.

scoop said...

good stuff. i even like the parts that aren't about me!
if you still want to know what i look like, you could always just email me: adreportcard@slate.com

Violet said...

"i even like the parts that aren't about me!"

That's like, communist.