Face Off

I have a job which requires me to put in nine hours of face time every day. One of those hours is a lunch hour, which I am careful to take. I also have an hour commute each way, so my time spent at home during the week is limited. I am comfortable with spending nine hours at the office (I consider it to be part of the unspoken expectations for a job at my responsibility level and frankly I’m pleased they don’t ask more of me) but my husband objects to me falling in line with the nine hour requirement – he thinks I should work a strict nine to five day, and that no employer or job deserves more than that if you aren’t getting paid overtime. He sort of has a point.

There is history here, too – I once work a job which paid badly and demanded incessant fifty to 60 hour weeks, which I put in. That plus the commute to that job took a toll on my health and on our relationship, so I can see that my husband doesn’t want that to happen again. His fears are understandable, but from my perspective it’s a little frustrating – can’t he see that I learned my lesson from that other job?

From a practical point of view, there’s not a lot of benefit in it for me to insist with my employer on an eight hour work day. At work I have interesting, rewarding things to do that I get paid well for doing. Coming home earlier would just mean I had more time to do the housework. Sure, theoretically I could use extra time to get more writing done, but in practice my husband and I are both such neat freaks that I’d feel too guilty to be able to sit down and write while the house was a mess, so the housework would come first, and housework is such a time suck – there’s always more to be done – that I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to carve out any more writing time than I’ve currently got.

But, you say, this is a dire viewpoint. Maybe my husband just wants to spend more time with his wife. To which I reply, that may well be true – and I’d definitely like to spend more time with him – but my husband, in addition to working full time, is in school half time and plays in a band. Of the two of us, I spend a lot more time at home than he does. And if I can deal with not seeing him as much as I’d like because of his obligations, why won’t he cut me some slack for my work obligations? It’s my career, I’m passionate about my field, I enjoy it, I’m ambitious. And as long as I’m able to maintain a good life-work balance, I think it’s okay to choose to spend 45 hours a week in the office instead of putting up a fight for 40.

So far, though, I’ve been unable to convince my husband of this, which makes me wonder if I am just completely off base. I also don’t know anyone else with this problem, so that’s hard too – I have no model to follow. I guess I’ll just continue to muddle through as best I can – which is what we all spend life doing, so I’m in good company there.

The Second Shift Begins

I'm just sitting down to write this at 10:30. Today I worked from 9 am - 7 pm (my husband had class this evening - after a full day at work - which meant I had the rare luxury of working late, since there would be no one at home tapping their feet and looking at their watch impatiently.)

I got home at 8 and started the second shift. (I don't have a bad commute, mostly sitting and reading on the subway and then a 15 minute walk at the end, but it does take an hour.) Once home, I changed out of and hung up my office clothes and made the bed (which I hadn't gotten around to in the morning) and fed and watered the cats. Then I made dinner (homemade mac & cheese with a bunch of leftover veggies thrown into the veloute and topped with crumbs from the end of a loaf of bread I made this weekend.) I did the dishes as I went along so the end mess wouldn't be too huge. My husband got home from school around then and we sat down for dinner, which was nice. After dinner he finished the dishes while I scooped the catboxes and folded a load of laundry. All of that brought me to 10:30, which is when I finally sat down and started writing this.

I don't really have a larger point to make here, except that jeez, being a grownup is tiring sometime. No wonder I don't have any dang kids; even if I could afford them, I'm tapped out just taking care of the cats and myself and my husband.

9 to 5

So recently I interviewed for a position a headhunter threw my way, and I decided going in that I wanted a certain level of compensation for the job, because it was a lot more responsibility and would also possibly be a lot more work (i.e., more than 40 hours) than my current job.

Fine, right? But here's the female angle: not only do girls have to be sneaky when they negotiate for more money, but I am also the executive in the family - meaning I make most of the decisions and deal with the outside world - everything from insurance to cat vaccinations to wedding registry stuff. That's fine for now, but here's my conundrum: a better-paying, more prestigious, higher salary job would be good in that it had more salary, but would be hard to balance with my role in this marriage. And I don't think a man would get stuck in this position - he'd have to decide to work harder or not when thinking about the job but he wouldn't be averaging 28 hours a week on housework* in addition to increased job responsibilities.

Meanwhile, my husband is clueless that I'm doing so much more than him - he thinks we have split the work equally. And it's hard to argue that point with him without resorting to charts and actual data or a hidden camera, or something. He tries to keep his end up, but he works full time, goes to nursing school half time and plays in a band. It's not as if he's sitting on the couch watching football and lifting up his feet so I can vacuum under them (my first husband actually did this), it's more that he's simply not physically present to help out and, since he's not present, he also doesn't see the work that I am putting in. Dealing with the litterboxes and taking the garbage out are only noticeable if they don't get done, because then the house smells like a garbage barge infested with a herd of feral cats.

It's a hard problem, and one I haven't really figured out yet. I'm sure something will come. In the meantime, I did take the higher-responsibility job, and we will probably use some of the money to have a cleaner come in once a week, to make my life a little easier. I really want Alice, the Bradys' housekeeper. That would be sweet. Unfortunately I don't think I could afford her.




* I am defining housework here as all the non-enjoyable stuff you have to do to keep the house going - cleaning, sure, but also cooking when you don't feel like it or folding laundry or medicating the cats or whatever.

Hello, I'm cute

Now that we all have online profiles, whether it’s something vaguely professional liked LinkedIn or it’s Facebook or just your profile at some Ning site, I’m seeing a lot of photos. Photos of people. Photos of women, ordinary women, confronted with the sudden need to look sexy.

I’m not talking about bikini shots on your CV website or anything ridiculous like that. I’m talking about the pressure to at least look “cute” online.
Because we all know snapshots are so cruel in their variability – you get one where you look great and one where you were having a great time but you look sweaty and tired and horribly old.

Think of the hundreds of work minutes wasted by a million women trawling through photos to find the right one to post!

And as a vain person, believe me I am not immune.

(There’s always the “photo of your kitten” route, but then people like me who forget names get confused. Like there’s a guy on Facebook who friended me with a picture of a – I guess *his* -- dog, and I have no clue who he is. I’m sure I do know him, I could just click “accept” but it bothers me.)

Sweaty palms

So, I had a job interview today. No matter how many times I do it, I have to surreptitiously wipe my hand on my skirt before the obligatory handshake, and hope I don't sweat through my extra-strength deodorant plus dusting powder before we wrap it up. The fact that it was the hottest day of the year in these parts did nothing to help and everything to hinder the situation. I despair of ever becoming confident meeting and talking with new people. Especially people in (perceived) authority. This is me outgrowing the crippling shyness of my childhood.

Despite my jitters, I do give good interview and may, indeed, have caught this job. Another retail position for another "green" company that wants to prove itself in the eco market. At least it is a local shop with some pleasant-seeming people and lots of covetable products. (Would I get a discount? Whee! more stuff!) But... but, essentially another boring retail job. Don't get me wrong, it's been almost a year since I've had a job and I am broke beyond belief; I will jump to it if they want to hire me. My options are slim, and have been for awhile. If it hadn't been for my family and boyfriend this past year, this little mommy-and-daughter boat would have sunk.

It's not that I don't want to work, though I will freely admit to a lazy approach to career planning, which has not served me well. My bad; my fault. I'm (still) working on it. What I do want, however, is a job that is interesting, stimulating, pays a reasonable wage, and acknowledges that it is never going to be the primary priority of my life while my child is. Oh yeah, part-time. Is this a fantasy? Throw in a desire for a little healthcare benefit and it really is beyond reality.

So what are my options? Well, the sitting on my ass for a year experiment is officially a failure. All I did was exacerbate my worst habits and outgrow my clothes. Next plan: back to school. Since my girl is finally enrolled in our increasingly dodgy public school system and I do not have to pay for daycare, a part-time school/work/mom schedule is feasible. I am taking a writing class that is very occupation-focused, a change from the theoretical, liberal-arts-based education I know and love. It is another step in my ongoing search for a vocation I can love and live without sacrificing too much of the rest of me.

In the meantime, back to retail.

Demographic targeting and implicit messages

So, Facebook's display ads use demographic targeting based on all the information you give them - age, gender, marital status, etc. That's totally fine, and when my status was "engaged" I got a bunch of wedding-planning ads - unsurprising. My husband Dave said he saw the same thing.

Now that my status has changed to "married", though, I'm being targeted with ads for pampers and custom bracelets with your kids' names on them. Ew! I'm guessing that my age (30), marital status and gender are what's triggering these types of ads. Funnily enough, Dave's Facebook profile isn't showing him the same sorts of ads at all - he's seeing ads for clothing. And then you wonder why equal parenting - splitting the childcare responsibility evenly between parents - isn't as simple as it sounds ... you've got this whole shitty cultural system telling you in a bunch of different ways that women = responsible for kids = supposed to want kids. Also, of course, that marriage = children. No wonder women and men absorb these messages - advertising is just an obvious manifestation of the phenomenon.

This has another dimension for me personally, which is that I write and run some ads which could potentially appear on Facebook. Not the ads I've been talking about - I'm not currently handling any display advertising or working with demographically targeted ads, but I do advertise with MSN, and MSN has a deal with Facebook for advertising. So here I am, ranting from inside the belly of the beast. Ah, sweet ironies of life.

Work clothes, part three

Back at Cara’s response to my wardrobe – I solve my conundrum at H&M.

I’ve probably shopped at that store in at least half a dozen countries. They didn’t have one when I lived in Budapest, although they do now, and I was there last time I visited, in January.

There are a bunch in the Bay Area now – two in downtown SF, one of which is huge.

Their work clothes are interesting enough that I can still feel a little, um, fashionist going there. I have an H&M suit that I wear very infrequently, so it doesn’t matter that the seams are weak. And most of it seems to be made in Romania and Bulgaria, so I feel almost at home.

It does, though, pander to my materialism. It’s so cheap that I can afford to buy and buy, which isn’t really a good thing. I’m sure I have a pretty big carbon footprint just because of cheap funky tops.

Work clothes, part two

I can relate to Maya's wardrobe conundrum - how do you dress business-casual (that's what it sounds like she needs) and not just look like everyone else, wearing some kind of wide-legged pants and this season's style in floaty tops? When I was in a client-facing role I usually wore a lot of black, nicely fitted, and if I didn't look original at least I didn't hate myself. The dry-cleaning bill sucked, though.

But these days I have sort of an opposite problem. Although I work in an office (a real live cube farm!), it's pretty casual - jeans every day is not a problem, and most of the developers wear a jeans-and-t-shirt sort of uniform. In my company clothing divides along male/female and career lines - men are more casual than women and sales and marketing tends to be more dressed up than dev. Managers are usually more dressed up than us regular folks, and female managers dress up more than male managers. There are individual exceptions to all these rules - I am one of them, totally letting the marketing side down with my slobbiness - but in the main they hold true, and I've seen these roles play out in more than one company.

I love the casual and take as much advantage of it as possible, but it allows me to be lazy - I end up rotating the same three pairs of jeans and my favorite sweaters until it's all way past its sell-by date. And while there's something to be said, I guess, for thriftily wearing your clothes until they've got holes in them, usually the clothes start to look pretty bedraggled long before the holes appear.

It's not really that I can't afford new clothes (although that was the issue for a while), and it's not that I hate shopping (I don't; stuff off the rack usually looks pretty good). It's that I'm lazy and time-impaired. Too time-impaired to consider shopping as a leisure activity (when I could be reading or cooking or blogging or going for a walk or playing with the cats or learning how to knit or sew or whatever; my list of leisure activities is long and ambitious) and I'm too lazy to put together interesting outfits based on what lives in my closet.

Occasionally, if Dave has a show or something, I'll pull an outfit together. But the rest of the time it's jeans and a sweater and no makeup, and yeah my clothes fit and yeah I have a good haircut and yeah my glasses are kind of cute, but as a whole it lacks pizazz. I don't feel cute unless I've at least got a little makeup on and have a somewhat pulled-together outfit. But since I don't have (or don't make) the time for this in the morning (usually too busy medicating cats and blogging), frumpy is my default go-to. Which I'm not totally thrilled about, honestly, but I lack the discipline to dress for success just because I ought to. Even though I bet my dressing badly is actually a factor, conscious or not, in management decisions not to promote me or whatever. So - if I want a promotion, which would be nice at some point, I definitely should start dressing better. This will require me to spend more time on myself (good), focus more on my appearance (maybe good, maybe not) and will require some discipline (ugh).

I will let you know how it turns out, if a promotion shows up despite my t-shirts and jeans. I sort of hate having to think about this at all, because in my head, how I look isn't related to the quality of the work I produce, but in the real world (outside my head), how I look matters a whole big bunch.

Work clothes

A friend of mine started a very good media internship at the beginning of summer. She’s a mother and a grad student and hip, always looks great. But she was carping about needing new clothes to look “proper” for her job.

This is something that I think about a lot. I have to go out and talk to people for my work and the vibe needs to be such that what I’m wearing, how I look, doesn’t get in the way of our communication. I need to be neutral, almost not even there. I want my sources to talk to me as they would talk to themselves in the shower (…wait, most people talk in the shower, don’t they?...) without trying to frame their message to the person opposite them with a notebook and pen.

That’s a complicated way of saying that I don’t want a retiring businesswoman that I’m profiling to look at me and go, ‘Oh, a Temescal hipster, she won’t understand.’

At the same time, I need to feel comfortable in my own professional role, which means not wearing clothes I can’t stand. I want to walk into any interview situation with confidence and grace – and feeling like ‘me.’ Too drab and I feel old (a whole other problem).

So it’s all about the clothes. On one hand, I want to look tidy and respectable, on the other hand I want to look hip and interesting to give my own confidence a boost.

This means, the bigger the interview the more time I spend choosing what to wear, yet I always end up wearing the same things.
Should I be free of props and baggage? Maybe so.

All those pajama blogger types out there have moved past this, of course. They are post-wardrobe.