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More notes from the Stepford academic
Jan. 17th, 2005 12:54 pmWell, I'm stepping forth into my second week of my life as a Stepford bitch. My SINK is still SHINY, my evening routine means that I always get to eat a nice breakfast and have two cups of coffee in semi-leisurely fashion and that the children toddle off with a packed lunch every single day, thus saving me money and them a dose of cholesterol-clogged school fry-up. Today I also dusted the dashboard of the Golf (111111111 -- say no more).
To respond to something that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cathexys said in a tig:
Housework is never-ending. This is its bane. There is often no sense of achievement: you wash, you put away -- and the next morning there's a whole new heap of smelly underpants, and they're not Jude Law's! I am currently thinking that I must simply work with this fact. To tackle never-ending jobs you need a different approach from tackling ending-jobs. You need a routine that goes on auto-pilot and just does it. This is why the Stepford Club is so slyly effective: the act of SHINING THE SINK looks and feels, to all intents and purposes, like a one-off job with an end. Shine sink and bingo: achievement! This is perhaps the secret: to break the overall never-endingness down into little tasks that have an end and convey a sense of achievement.
Housework is not the only job that is never-ending. In bizarre ways, housework resembles academic work. Well, only in bizarre ways. Academic work comes in two parallel strands: research and institutional. Institutional is, in many ways (for me, at any rate) the easier. It is teaching, marking and admin. It has a beginning and an end. You set an essay question, you mark the essay, you hand the essay back: closure, achievement, the job is done. You write a lecture, you give the lecture: achievement! Research, on the other hand, is not at all that way. It goes on and on and on. It is self-driven (or, in my case, non-driven). It is lonely and isolated. The sense of achievement is rare. Even if I write a page, I am still plagued by feelings of inadequacy: what, only a page? Is it good enough to be published? Is it hopelessly ill-argued and not very well read? Is there a point at all? Who cares about this topic???
And you write one thing and get it published, but then the next day the dirty underpants of academia just haunt you yet again: well, that was one little thing but I need three more for the Research Assessment Exercise and I'm 42 and have hardly a handful of publications to my name and my last book was reviewed by a tiny number of journals that nobody reads and my last royalty cheque was eighteen pounds (hahahahahahha) and... and...
You can start to appreciate how SHINING THE SINK suddenly becomes a not-very-unattractive alternative option!
Housework is undervalued. This comes, in my experience, in two strands as well. Domesticity is housework, and domesticity (in my case) is also motherhood. Now, motherhood I can't do 24/7 but I can do it for quite a lot of the time and if I only had to do the motherhood thing without the household thing, I'd be laughing. It's the combination of the two activities (ah, to be genteel and rich and live in Jane Austen's day). Now, to return to the undervalued thing. Motherhood is ideologically overvalued out of all proportion but when it comes to the actual people who benefit from it, i.e. the children, I think they value it absolutely as it deserves. So I myself do not feel undervalued as a mother,on the contrary. (When I've been depressed I have often felt inadequate as a mother but that's a different issue.)
Now housework. I am in two minds here. On the one hand, yes, it is undervalued, if by that we mean invisible and underpaid. But then (and this is me) I believe it deserves to be valued fairly lowly. I don't think it's a wonderfully worthwhile activity and I find it faintly ludicrous to want the act of SINK SHINING to be 'valued'. It's simply a chore, and it's got to be done, and I'm just grateful to the Stepford Nags for nagging me into doing it (without the ideology, please). But on the other hand, it is not undervalued. In my house, at any rate, t'h is delighted if the kitchen counter is clear and the dishwasher emptied. So what if I've frittered away my day doing No Marking and No Writing of My Book? I've done SINK SHINING, hooray! He is much more dismayed if I confess to having LJ'ed for hours and to having written Dudley/Draco (well, I know a lot of you are dismayed by the Dudley/Draco but that's another point again, *gg*). So in that sense, housework is valued over porn writing. It is, at any rate, easier to defend doing housework to the world at large (i.e. the world outside of slashdom) than it is to defend writing fanfic. (Not to mention even defining fanfic to the world at large.)
Do you see my dilemma here?
This is what I want to work on next. I've conquered the housework guilt globe around my head (so far!!!); now for the fanfic guilt trip. And then on to the final frontier: how to conquer SHIRKING THE BOOK.
Bye for now, folks. Am actually in t'reference library. Have decided to copy Stepford Club's method of doing 15 or 10 or 5 minutes at a time for library activities, also. 30 minutes of marking, and then 20 minutes of LJ, and then 30 minutes for lunch, and then a bit more marking, and perhaps another foray into LJ...! Hah, maybe I'll even progress to fic this way. Do you think this method will work?
I've always believed that academic research is the one type of activity that can't be done in 15-minute bursts but perhaps I'm wrong there? Anyone out there who can say me nay or yay?
P.S. Had it out with t'h on the mobile (big apology fest on both sides) and am not angry any longer, in case you were wondering. :-) God, we are both such angstypoots; it's a wonder we were allowed to mate.
To respond to something that
cathexys said in a tig:Housework is never-ending. This is its bane. There is often no sense of achievement: you wash, you put away -- and the next morning there's a whole new heap of smelly underpants, and they're not Jude Law's! I am currently thinking that I must simply work with this fact. To tackle never-ending jobs you need a different approach from tackling ending-jobs. You need a routine that goes on auto-pilot and just does it. This is why the Stepford Club is so slyly effective: the act of SHINING THE SINK looks and feels, to all intents and purposes, like a one-off job with an end. Shine sink and bingo: achievement! This is perhaps the secret: to break the overall never-endingness down into little tasks that have an end and convey a sense of achievement.
Housework is not the only job that is never-ending. In bizarre ways, housework resembles academic work. Well, only in bizarre ways. Academic work comes in two parallel strands: research and institutional. Institutional is, in many ways (for me, at any rate) the easier. It is teaching, marking and admin. It has a beginning and an end. You set an essay question, you mark the essay, you hand the essay back: closure, achievement, the job is done. You write a lecture, you give the lecture: achievement! Research, on the other hand, is not at all that way. It goes on and on and on. It is self-driven (or, in my case, non-driven). It is lonely and isolated. The sense of achievement is rare. Even if I write a page, I am still plagued by feelings of inadequacy: what, only a page? Is it good enough to be published? Is it hopelessly ill-argued and not very well read? Is there a point at all? Who cares about this topic???
And you write one thing and get it published, but then the next day the dirty underpants of academia just haunt you yet again: well, that was one little thing but I need three more for the Research Assessment Exercise and I'm 42 and have hardly a handful of publications to my name and my last book was reviewed by a tiny number of journals that nobody reads and my last royalty cheque was eighteen pounds (hahahahahahha) and... and...
You can start to appreciate how SHINING THE SINK suddenly becomes a not-very-unattractive alternative option!
Housework is undervalued. This comes, in my experience, in two strands as well. Domesticity is housework, and domesticity (in my case) is also motherhood. Now, motherhood I can't do 24/7 but I can do it for quite a lot of the time and if I only had to do the motherhood thing without the household thing, I'd be laughing. It's the combination of the two activities (ah, to be genteel and rich and live in Jane Austen's day). Now, to return to the undervalued thing. Motherhood is ideologically overvalued out of all proportion but when it comes to the actual people who benefit from it, i.e. the children, I think they value it absolutely as it deserves. So I myself do not feel undervalued as a mother,on the contrary. (When I've been depressed I have often felt inadequate as a mother but that's a different issue.)
Now housework. I am in two minds here. On the one hand, yes, it is undervalued, if by that we mean invisible and underpaid. But then (and this is me) I believe it deserves to be valued fairly lowly. I don't think it's a wonderfully worthwhile activity and I find it faintly ludicrous to want the act of SINK SHINING to be 'valued'. It's simply a chore, and it's got to be done, and I'm just grateful to the Stepford Nags for nagging me into doing it (without the ideology, please). But on the other hand, it is not undervalued. In my house, at any rate, t'h is delighted if the kitchen counter is clear and the dishwasher emptied. So what if I've frittered away my day doing No Marking and No Writing of My Book? I've done SINK SHINING, hooray! He is much more dismayed if I confess to having LJ'ed for hours and to having written Dudley/Draco (well, I know a lot of you are dismayed by the Dudley/Draco but that's another point again, *gg*). So in that sense, housework is valued over porn writing. It is, at any rate, easier to defend doing housework to the world at large (i.e. the world outside of slashdom) than it is to defend writing fanfic. (Not to mention even defining fanfic to the world at large.)
Do you see my dilemma here?
This is what I want to work on next. I've conquered the housework guilt globe around my head (so far!!!); now for the fanfic guilt trip. And then on to the final frontier: how to conquer SHIRKING THE BOOK.
Bye for now, folks. Am actually in t'reference library. Have decided to copy Stepford Club's method of doing 15 or 10 or 5 minutes at a time for library activities, also. 30 minutes of marking, and then 20 minutes of LJ, and then 30 minutes for lunch, and then a bit more marking, and perhaps another foray into LJ...! Hah, maybe I'll even progress to fic this way. Do you think this method will work?
I've always believed that academic research is the one type of activity that can't be done in 15-minute bursts but perhaps I'm wrong there? Anyone out there who can say me nay or yay?
P.S. Had it out with t'h on the mobile (big apology fest on both sides) and am not angry any longer, in case you were wondering. :-) God, we are both such angstypoots; it's a wonder we were allowed to mate.