Apt. 11D

Work/Family Blog Conference

For next week only, I'm organizing a blog conference on the topic on work and family. After next week, I'm going to return to my old habit of writing random things.

I've gotten the ear of a group of academics and writers who are very interested in your views on the topic. Instead of sending them a list of links to my blog and other posts in the blogosphere, I'm going to collect everyone's views in one place. These scholars and writers have the power to change the direction of research and focus media attention on this topic. Because most of these influential women are a generation older than we are, they want to know about our experiences. Let's tell them what we think.

This week long blogfest is open to everyone. There will be posts that are directed aimed at women and men, academics and others, singles and parents. I want all perspectives.

Because this is a blog, I'm not going to pretend to be a disinterested moderator. Each post will begin either with a description of my own experiences or with a controversial statement.

Here's the tentative schedule for the event:
Monday -- General Topics Related to Parents and Mothers and Work. What skills has you gained as a parent that will carry over into the world of work? Describe your typical day. Do you feel your work at home is undervalued by society and by the workplace? What obstacles have you faced in holding a job and having a family? What is your childcare situation? In an ideal world, what percentage of time would you spend with your kids and what percentage with work? Is parenthood too hard today?

Tuesday -- Parenthood and Academia. What obstacles have you faced as an academic trying to balance family and work? For the singles, are we a big bunch of whiners? What changes could be made?

Wednesday -- The Guys. What balance of housework/childcare have you arranged with your spouse? For the women, are the guys doing their share? What problems do stay at home dads face?

Thursday -- Feminism and Politics. What's the big deal about having a career anyway? For younger women, were you disappointed that other women never told you how difficult it would be to have it all? Knowing what you know, what advice would give young people? What political and social changes would you like to see? Is Sweden a good model? Are women their own worst enemy?

Friday -- I'm not sure. Something fun, like telling the story of how your kid stuck breakfast cereal up his nose.

Do not answer any of these questions yet. But do give me advice of topics you would like to see covered. If you have a blog, please share this information with your readers. Encourage your friends who normally don't read blogs to participate. Let's see how this works out.

You Try and Take a Two Year Old to DMV

Last night, we were woken twice by a five year who had to use the potty. Both boys were up at 6:00. Steve fed them breakfast and made Jonah's sandwich. At 7:15, Steve ran to catch the bus. I dressed the kids, finished packing the lunch, and wrote a note to Jonah's teacher to find out why Jack's desk was moved far from Jonah. At 8:30, we ran down the block and Jonah boarded the bus. I packed up a diaper bag and head to DMV to register the car. Ian was bribed with donuts as he sat in the stroller. Then over to my parents, where I tried to install Norton anti-virus on dad's computer. Back home to put Ian down for his nap. Shower. E-mail. Organize papers for tonight's lecture at Hunter. Baby wakes up. Feed him lunch. Change my outfits two or three times. Pants or skirt? Then my mom arrived at 2:40 and I ran to catch my bus to the city. (Yes, we only run for buses in this house.)

What was the lecture on? Ann Crittenden discussed her latest book, If You'Ve Raised Kids, You Can Manage Anything: Leadership Begins at Home, for a small group of faculty around a seminar table. (See this Times article on her.) Crittenden says that mothers/parents/ok, really mostly mothers gain all sorts of skills by parenting that can be translated into management later on. All that multi-tasking and prioritizing that I did before the lecture are the very skills that top managers use.

After her short discription of the book, the discussion was thrown out into the audience. There was some discussion about security moms. And then I raised my hand. All red in the face, I said that instead of just looking at all the barriers mothers face in other places, perhaps we should first examine our own profession. Academia is one of the worst places for mothers. I told them my story. And said that other mothers and academic mothers were discussing these issues on line and we were very angry.

Ann and the other academics were very interested in these on line discussions. They all wanted more information. Everyone handed me a business card. Instead of just giving them links to my posts and to other posts at the Invisible Adjunct. I thought that I would organize a one-time-only one week conversation about these issues on the blog next week and notify these writers and scholars about our discussion. Details will follow.

UPDATE: I'm closing comments on this post, because I want everyone to hold their thoughts until next week.

Comments

There are some great discussions going on in my comments sections. Hope that you all join in to the frey. I will this evening. But right now, I'm off to the city to attend a faculty seminar on The Continuity of Care at Hunter College. Ann Crittenden will be speaking. She's also holding a public talk there tonight at 6:30. If you're in the New York City, I suggest going. I'll give a summary of the talk tomorrow.

Can't We All Just Get Along?

Now don't go and tell me that there are no culture wars in America.

From Matthew Yglesias who is annoyed that only the center of the country is called "Real America"

Indeed, it's bizarre that the Northeastern part of the country -- the part that was settled first, the part that led the Revolution, the part that led the nation to victory in the Civil War -- has somehow acquired a reputation as less authentically American than a lot of Johnny-come-lately squarish ersatz states and a big swathe of the southeast that decided one time to launch a violent, treasonous effort to maintain the institution of chattel slavery and turn North America into a British sphere of influence.

And then this from James Lileks:

The Sunday Times is the weekly sermon: let us reinforce your world view, your sense of belonging to the Thinking Class, the Special Ones. Let the Red Staters spend Sunday morning in itchy church clothes at Perkins, dumping syrup all over their pancakes and yelling at little Lurleen not to pour salt down her baby brother’s jumper; you’re in your elegant spare little apartment with a cup of coffee (frothed on top; sprinkle of nutmeg) and a pastry from that wonderful place around the corner (okay, it’s an Au Bon Pain – hell, they’re all Bon Pain now) and there’s some light jazz on the radio. Morning jazz, if you had to give the genre a name. Anyway, it’s a sunny fall morning – well, noonish. Now comes the capstone moment when you lay the slab of the Times in your lap and begin the autoposy of the week....

I would like to comment but I'm busy hanging a flag of the former Soviet Union outside of our house (remember the good old days?), preparing the sushi for my child's lunch box, and dashing off for a brisk Pilates class.

Links

Stop surfing, Laura. You were just whining to your husband how you no time to get your work done. You also have to get the paperwork together for DMV and find nursery schools and that laundry isn't going to do itself.

OK. OK. But first I have post these couple of links and then I'm done. Really.

The missing interview from the NYT article on blogging.
(via Crooked Timber)

An hysterical account of CSI Miami from World O' Crap. (via John and Belle)

I curse you and your funny linking, Belle Waring.

Overrated

Last spring, we lost out on five or six bids for houses in Fancytown, New Jersey. We wanted Fancytown because there were a lot of over educated types there, like us, and a highly regarded school system. Problem is that every New York City expat also wanted to live in that town and we couldn't afford the house of the crazy old man who had a thing for Elvis.

Instead, we moved to Bighair, New Jersey. Bighair is up and coming, but it's not there yet. My block is especially blue collar. My neighbor, Linda, hollers out her window, "Dylan stop biting your bruddah!" And the men leave in their PSEG and constructive trucks every morning.

Steve and I have worried that our kids will be very different from their classmates and that they won't have the same opportunities as the kids in Fancytown. We worried that Bighair High School wouldn't funnel our kids into the most prestigious colleges. Russell Arben Fox posted his concerns about his daughter's education recently.

Gregg Easterbrook just made me feel a little better. InWho Needs Harvard?, Easterbrook writes,

Today almost everyone seems to assume that the critical moment in young people's lives is finding out which colleges have accepted them. Winning admission to an elite school is imagined to be a golden passport to success; for bright students, failing to do so is seen as a major life setback. As a result, the fixation on getting into a super-selective college or university has never been greater.

But Easterbrook says that this fixation with the Ivies is misplaced. Studies have shown that kids who were accepted at the Ivies, but went to the next tier of schools (including SUNY-Binghamton, Kenyon, Oberlin, and several other of my favorite schools) did equally well. All the hasty pudding clubs and celebrity humor clubs of the Ivies did not buy their alums any greater financial success.

Krueger and Dale found that for students bright enough to win admission to a top school, later income "varied little, no matter which type of college they attended." In other words, the student, not the school, was responsible for the success.

Read the whole thing.

The Swing State Voters

A huge effort is underway to register new voters in swing states, like Ohio and Pennsylvania. Democrats have been especially active in minority and low income districts.

I noticed that McSweeney's is having its writers, like Dave Eggers, call up artsy college students to encourage their votes.

Meanwhile, I had the misfortune to catch the senile ramblings of Andy Rooney of 60 Minutes last night. Rooney was babbling something about the fact that he didn't think that nonvoters should suddenly start to vote, since they were almost certainly dumber than he was. He said if you can't name your two senators, you shouldn't vote.

I think if Andy can't get around to trimming his eyebrows, he shouldn't be allowed to vote either.

Talk amongst yourselves.

UPDATE: Perhaps nonvoters aren't dumb, Andy. In fact, they may be more rational than you and know exactly how little impact their one vote will have. Yeah, on the line to buy a lotto ticket, they have calculated that the probability that any one of them will decide the outcome is on the order of .00000001.

The Thrill

Matt Klam's NYT article on bloggers has gotten a fair amount of attention from the blogosphere. Some are ticked off that conservative and libertarian bloggers weren't mentioned. Some feel that he should have gotten into the nuances of the different types of bloggers. They totally missed the point of the article.

What Matt does brilliantly is to convey the thrill and the optimism mixed with self doubt that moves the bloggers. It doesn't really matter what they blog about. Most bloggers, especially those who are complete devoted to their craft, feel that they are part of a new movement. They might not know where this is all leading to, but still their passion drives them to neglect their spouses, skip Thursday Must See TV, and post until the wee hours of the night. The bloggers are fueled by phenomenal hit counts and evidence of urls from the Executive Office of the President and the L.A. Times.

Matt compares the bloggers to the young journalists who followed around the candidates in the 1972 election as documented in Timothy Crouse's The Boys on the Bus. (A damn good book, and my brother better return my copy.) These writers were hungry and talented. R. W. Apple could write the quickest lead. Hunter Thompson was a loose cannon. They also were an incestuous little group that together helped set the agenda for the '72 election.

Those journalists that Crouse followed are still around today. In the Times cover, Jack Germond and Apple stand behind Wonkette at the computer. But their bellies tell the story. They have gotten slow and jaded, while new voice armed with an Airport card are taking their place.

The news media helped create the modern campaign, and now they seem to be stuck in it. The bloggers, by contrast, adapted quickly. By the time the Republican convention rolled around in August, they had figured something out, staying far, far away from that zoo down at Madison Square Garden. They had begun to work the way news people do at manufactured news events, by sticking together, sharing information, repeating one another's best lines. They were learning their limitations, and at the same time they were digging around and critiquing and fact-checking and raising money. They still liked posting dirty jokes and goofy Photoshopped pictures of politicians, but they had hope, and more than a few new ideas, and they were determined to make themselves heard.

And are bloggers setting a political agenda? The jury is still out. But judging from the number of recent articles on blogging, they have succeeded in turning the spot light on themselves.

I guess Matt Klam mentioned my blog on Fox news last night. Anybody know what he said?

UPDATE: Matt, being a huge sweetie, mentioned Apt. 11D on talk radio last night. I knew something was up, because 100 people showed up at 1:00am on a Friday by googling "Apt. 11D."

Read his article in tomorrow's New York Times magazine on blogging and politics.

Also, I'm so sorry if a comment you left mysteriously disappeared. A two year old was left unsupervised in the computer room this morning. A few of my documents are now named "9ou7920/////" and some blog comments were deleted. Time out!

LOCKJAW

So how the hell did I get a nail in my foot? Well, we have a mountain o' crap in the back of the garage. All sorts of angry boards and smelly carpet that had formerly been inside. Feeling ambitious, I was sorting through the mountain o' crap with a plan of carting some of it to the dump. And I made one wrong step onto one of the angry nailed boards. Chuck Taylor sneakers ain't no match for Mr. Pointy.

I hopped into the house which amused the two year old to no end. He hopped in after me. Quick call to the parents for help, because I knew I needed to get a shot before the dreaded LOCKJAW set in. You know, your dad warned you about LOCKJAW when you were a kid, too. Within seconds, your jaw would be sealed shut and you would have to survive on a liquid diet between the gaps of your teeth for the rest of your life.

The doctor had to remove the nail for me. I was thinking of all those Mel Gibson movies where he pulls out arrows from his torso himself after tossing back some liquid courage. Maybe if I had some of that liquid courage around, I could have done it.