Women At Work
Inspiration on my job hunt from those closest to me, plus The Marginalian's accumulated wisdom, North Korean aggression, A.I. and tragedy, election nonsense, in-flight magazines, and more.
As you may have gleaned from my recent newsletters, I am currently looking for work. I was laid off from my primary job (this is all to distinguish me from being jobless, because I still have some work I do for the university). But needless to say, I’ve been thinking a lot about work lately, as I apply to jobs with something nearing reckless abandon.
But it’s not only my jobs (or lack thereof) and work I’ve been thinking about lately, but those of two of the leading ladies of my life.
My girlfriend recently started a new job. She was much sweeter to me than she needed to be when she got the job, her good news coinciding directly with my bad news. She didn’t owe me that restrained version of excitement, the kind that worries if its appearance is somehow causing another person pain. Of course, if I allowed myself to think only of my woes or allowed the fallacy of there only being a limited amount of good news in the universe to go around, I could have viewed her gain as my loss. But that was never the case, never a temptation, never a reality. I know I’m lucky to have such a conscientious partner, but I was mostly just excited to see her excited. She’s got a wickedly sharp intelligence and is driven; it’s fun to watch her be challenged by a new role that play on skills she already has but requires development of so many more. It’s exciting to learn of the new people in her life, their connections, roles, and responsibilities unveiled to map out the constellations of her new universe. And more than anything, it’s been uplifting to watch her become consumed with the newness of it all. She’ll tell me, “I have seven meetings today,” and I’ll jokingly respond in a deadpan way, “Hold on. Let me check my calendar. Hmmm, let’s see—oh yes, that’s right. I have none.” Some version of that never fails to get a laugh out of her. And while I know on some level I should be resting, taking care of myself, not giving in to constant anxiety because soon enough a job will come along and render those things luxuries for which I no longer have time or space, I can’t help but be jealous of her go, go, go schedule and jam-packed calendar. Watching her work reminds me of how much I like to work, to be busy and have a purpose, and far from depressing me, her new breakneck pace (and her positive attitude about it all because she knows it’s a chance to learn something new) is so encouraging. I want what she has. And she’s been a great comfort by reminding me, constantly, that it’s OK that it hasn’t arrived yet and that it will before too long. Hers is a great faith in me and my work future, whatever it may hold, and that’s just another thing that she gives that I don’t fully deserve.
On the other end of the spectrum from her brand new start is my mom, who’s now in the final week of a 47-year career with a mental health hospital for the state of Tennessee. It doesn’t even seem real, no matter how many times I’ve said it before. It’s a singular feat that not many can claim: to work an entire life for a single department. By my early 20s, I’d had more jobs than she had, and I’ve only added to that figure since.
She retires on Friday, and I know there’s a part of her that can’t really comprehend what that will even mean. I know I will struggle not to call her work number, as I’ve done nearly every weekday since I was about 9 years old, calling to report that my siblings and I had indeed made it off the bus, each of us alive and accounted for. I won’t be able to imagine what she’ll do with all the time gained back, not just the eight hours of a workday, but the nearly two hours spent each day just driving to and from the place.
She’s been sick this week, and it’s affected her ability to go to the office. Nothing to do with her cancer, which has certainly seen her take more days off in the past year than probably the entirety of the 46 that preceded it. But just regular sickness, and one of the first things she said to me on Monday was, “I missed my last Monday.” It seems somehow cosmically cruel that she wouldn’t get to simply enjoy the final week of such a long career as if it were any other week. Like, somehow it will seem worse when (fingers crossed) she feels just fine next Monday, and there’s no work required of her, no drive to make, no 11 a.m. break for lunch, none of it.
But I can’t help but think of the greater cosmic cruelty at play: She first started talking about retiring last year, before my dad got sick. She worked after his passing because it was comforting and familiar when so little else was. And then it made good sense because she was likewise diagnosed with cancer and healthcare and insurance being the twin nightmares they are in this country, work was a safety net.
I wish they had both gotten to retire, together, just to see what that had been like. They each worked incredibly hard for a long time without question or complaint. It’s one of the best gifts or traits they passed along to me: an unshakeable work ethic. They are responsible for this itch I feel to get back to work, this discomfort with being idle for too long, this internal expectation that I’m not doing enough. These feelings are not a given; there are plenty of people I know who are not wired this way. And I like the way I’m wired. I like to work, and I look forward to getting back to it.
These two women mean the world to me. I look at one, in the throes of a new job in a career that’s barely even started yet, and I find motivation, an energy that might otherwise have drained away by now. I look at the other, about to put her drive to work in the rearview for the last time, and I find promise in the satisfaction of a job well done, a rest that’s far more deserved than the one I’m enjoying (enduring) right now.
Work is a weird thing to get all sentimental about, and I know this. But it’s the world in which we live. Since it is and there’s not much I can do about it, I’m glad I have these two that I can look up to for some direction.
Ten Worth Your Time
- The incomparable Maria Popova has been publishing The Marginalian (better known as Brain Pickings) for 18 years now. She recently published a list of 18 lessons on life gleaned from those years, and I just love them so much. Something encouraging to start us off:
“How you love, how you give, and how you suffer is just about the sum of who you are. Everything in life is a subset of one or a combinatorial function of all three. Seek people who love and give generously, who have the strength to suffer without causing damage. (Only strong people are safe people, the measure of strength being not the absence of vulnerability — and “weakness” is just a judgment term for vulnerability — but the ability to carry one’s vulnerability with such self-awareness and valor so as not to harm other lives.) Seek to be such a person.”
- In what seems to be a Russian nesting doll of terribleness, it appears that Russia’s war in Ukraine is getting assistance from Kim Jung-Un’s troops from North Korea. Shortly after the news broke, I was thumbing through a pile of print magazines at my house and just happened to come across July’s edition of Harper’s in which writer William T. Vollmann traveled to the DMZ and, when he turned down his voicey writing tone and let quotes do most of the heavy lifting, detailed South Koreans fearing a coming war with North Korea. “‘On a scale of one to ten, if one is peaceful and almost friendly and ten is there’s going to be a war in five minutes, where would you put the border situation?’’From the perspective of the military, we are still engaged in a war. We never stopped, because we didn’t declare an end to the war . . . there is a chance that it will start again at any time. The possibility is more than five, from the military’s perspective. Sometimes seven, sometimes eight.’” And on a recent episode of The Press Box podcast, The Ringer’s Chris Ryan suggested a morning newsletter called News Items by John Ellis, to which I subscribed and found the first link in the first email to be quoting an analysis done by 38 North from January that said, “The situation on the Korean Peninsula is more dangerous than it has been at any time since early June 1950. That may sound overly dramatic, but we believe that, like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war.”
- Last week, I shared some depressing stories about tech and A.I. Now for one that tops them: Can a Chatbot Named Daenerys Targaryen Be Blamed for a Teen’s Suicide? This New York Times story from tech reporter Kevin Roose is incredibly sad: the details, the outcome, the grief and sorrow of the aftermath, all of it. Roose and Casey Newton also featured the story on their podcast Hard Fork, in a thoughtful conversation about the story itself but also the larger ethics involved in A.I. chatbots.
- Doubling down on sadness (and NYT stories) but Eli Saslow is not to be skipped: Here (in this free gift article), he reports from Springfield, Ohio, where the family of a young boy killed in a terrible car accident sparked a tirade of hate and racism after Donald Trump and J.D. Vance seized on the incident as being caused by illegal immigration. As always, the story is powerful in its sadness and remarkable as a feat of reporting. There are so many times when reading it where I would shake my head and marvel aloud, “How did you get that detail? How did you get that access?” Saslow is truly one of the best in the game.
- Less than a week until Election Day, and NBC News has a great (in terms of reporting and writing; terrible for humanity) story about the Big Lie 2.0. It’s a massive effort already underway to sow the seeds of doubt about the integrity of the election, and it’s genuinely unsettling to think about what it means for Nov. 5 and the following weeks. Relatedly, did you see that election boxes in the Pacific Northwest were vandalized? Instead of dropping in ballots, someone dropped in incendiary devices and burned up hundreds of votes. It goes without saying, but this isn’t supposed to happen here.
- The scary overlap: It’s spooky season, and one of the scariest things about this election (and honestly modern political discourse more generally) is the overlapping and intermingling of certainties. This is a riff on a line from the new movie Conclave, in which Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucchi and John Lithgow are cardinals in the Catholic Church after the sudden passing of the Pope. They must choose a new pope, but mystery is afoot. In the story, Fiennes gives a homily in which he says that certainty is the biggest threat they face. He wanted to advocate for a Pope who wasn’t afraid to admit doubts, because the doubts remind us we’re human. Certainty is an enemy, a sign of a mind no longer willing to accept new information, closed down and shut off. We’ve been witnessing two different certainties for the past four years (and longer, to an extent): those who are certain 1) Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election and only “lost” because it was rigged and 2) a very specific Christian nationalist worldview is what should rule America. ProPublica did a deep dive on Christian Nationalism.The certainty is the scary part though, because you cannot and will not convince these zealots that they’re wrong or that there’s even another side to consider. It’s baked into the messaging that they will be assailed from all sides, so they view conversations like those that happen in a civilized democracy as something to be shut down and avoided. It’s an intractable position, and it’s not in any way interested in the concept of democracy.
- Earlier this year, you might have heard about a trend called “rawdogging” flights: It refers to the concept of foregoing any kind of entertainment on a long flight and instead simply doing nothing—no in-flight movies, no books, no music, some even forego food and drink service. This crazy concept has nothing to do with the death of in-flight magazines, but I thought of it as I read the *Columbia Journalism Review’s* piece on United doing away with its print magazine and joining the rest of the airlines in digital-only offerings. The great shame of it all is that airline magazines were actually great, and they capitalized on a uniquely captive audience to remind people, otherwise too disengaged with magazines to pick one up, that expertly curated topics, stories, formats, photos, and more are a real work of art. Side note: I had no idea that those fancy-pants up in business- and first-class sections had different magazines from the rest of us peasants back in coach.
- Sometimes a profile subject makes a magazine piece unputdownable. That’s how I felt reading this long piece in The New Yorker about rare-book collector/dealer Glenn Horowitz. At times he seems like a charming rogue, at others a downright criminal, but dammit if he isn’t always quotable. It’s a world in which in couldn’t ever imagine ever being a part of—not just because of the high-dollar amounts, but simply the act of laying hands on some of these books and authors’ collected archives seems impossible. The central controversy that frames the story is whether his possession of pages of Don Henley’s longhand draft of “Hotel California” lyrics makes him a criminal is just the entry point to his biography, but as I read about it and the eventual resolution of the case, all I could think about was “Imagine holding the notebook paper on which this all-time classic song was written.”
- Earlier this year, I had a brief spot of panic. I couldn’t find a guitar case at my parents’ house. I didn’t so much care about the case, as what I was 99.9% sure what I’d left inside of it: a Martin acoustic guitar. Back when I was just about to graduate college, I returned to that same house and climbed the stairs to my bedroom to find a guitar on the bed. The sweet combination of my parents’ efforts obvious: my dad had picked out a guitar, what had sort of become a go-to meaningful gift, and my mom’s distinctive handwriting revealed her as the obvious author of the note that was still attributed to Dad. That guitar was a low-level Martin, still very expensive for the degree to which I can actually play guitar but far short of the loftiest of the company’s price ranges. At some point, it developed a crack—probably more a testament to my carelessness in leaving it in an incredibly hot and humid attic-like bedroom since I didn’t have tons of room to have it with me in college than any quality of its craftsmanship—and after the crack, I’d declined to haul it all over the country as I bounced around for the next decade. But after my dad’s passing, I really wanted the guitar. I really wanted to have it, to visit a luthier to see if it was fixable, just to have this sweet memory preserved and my collection of guitars from my dad complete and unblemished. Luckily, I found the case and guitar, tucked away among some of his things. It’s now with me and awaiting my action to get it in the hands of someone who might be able to fix it. That whole backstory was running through my mind as I perused this NPR photo story about the Martin guitar factory in Pennsylvania.
- To bookend this list, I thought I’d return to the 18 lessons on life from The Marginalia. This was one of my favorites, and it resonated with me after recent conversations about this newsletter—why I enjoy making it and what its “purpose” is.
“Don’t be afraid to be an idealist. There is much to be said for our responsibility as creators and consumers of that constant dynamic interaction we call culture — which side of the fault line between catering and creating are we to stand on? The commercial enterprise is conditioning us to believe that the road to success is paved with catering to existing demands — give the people cat GIFs, the narrative goes, because cat GIFs are what the people want. But E.B. White, one of our last great idealists, was eternally right when he asserted half a century ago that the role of the writer is ‘to lift people up, not lower them down’ — a role each of us is called to with increasing urgency, whatever cog we may be in the machinery of society. Supply creates its own demand. Only by consistently supplying it can we hope to increase the demand for the substantive over the superficial — in our individual lives and in the collective dream called culture.”
More From Me
Over on my blog, I’ve been writing about various topics of interest to me.
'This American Life' and The Risk of Oversubscription
Culture Diary
Here’s a collection of what I’ve been consuming in the past week.
The legend for my list was stolen from Steven Soderbergh, where ALL CAPS represents a movie, Sentence Case is a TV show, ALL CAPS ITALICS is a short film, Italics is a book, and bold is a live performance or show. A number in parentheses after a TV show highlights how many episodes I watched. An asterisk after an entry means it’s a rewatch. The source of the movie or show, whether streaming service, physical media, or in theaters, is shown in parentheses as well.