I was trying to make room in the filing cabinet, and I found a folder labeled School. In that folder were some test results I had no idea I’d kept. Back in college, I changed my major about six times the first year, and finally at the suggestion of my sixth advisor went to the Career Center to do some vocational testing. Here is the result of a test that is apparently called the Strong Interest Inventory of the Strong Vocational Interest Blank. It is supposed to determine which of the six vocational types (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional) a person is interested in.

NONE strong interests! That seems about right.

There’s a second page that divides occupations into lists, sorting them by how similar I am to people in those occupations. I have no matches in the “very similar” category. In the “similar” category, I have six occupations: photographer, lawyer, librarian, broadcaster, public administrator, banker.

In the “moderately similar” category, I have eight occupations: advertising executive, reporter, elected public official, store manager, public relations director, social science teacher, Chamber of Commerce executive, and marketer.

In the “very dissimilar” category are ALL THE REST OF THE OCCUPATIONS. A lonnnnnnnng list. It includes all the medical professions, most of the teaching professions, all of the science and engineering professions, and also things such as forester, carpenter, mathematician, and police officer. Nopes all around.

While all of this is a little discouraging, not to mention not very helpful, there is a sense in which it is comforting to see that I have been the same all along: low interest in pretty much everything, no feeling of having various possible paths to contented employment. It’s one of the reasons I didn’t feel like I was wasting decades of career growth by having a lot of kids: I didn’t have anything I particularly wanted to do anyway.

But it makes it hard to figure out what to do as the kids get older. Surely I will not still be sitting in the house without a job after the last kid is gone? And yet, my job experiences so far are not giving me much hope. Well! Still many more occupations to attempt!

On the How Did You Choose Your College? post, Missy asked if there could be another post where people say what their major was and what job(s) they got with that. She says: “Part of the reason I think it is so hard for kids to pick majors is ‘what kind of job would that be’?”

I agree. One of Rob’s potential majors is theoretical math. Not applied math: theoretical. And definitely my question there is what kind of JOB would that be?

Also, I think it’s so interesting to see how there can be a huge gap between major and job: sometimes they are (or seem) almost completely unconnected.

So let’s talk about that today, in whatever way applies to you. For example, maybe you can say, “This was my major, and here are some of the jobs associated with that major.” Or maybe you can say, “This was my major, but this is where I ended up, because etc.” Or maybe you can say, “This was my major, and there are NO JOBS, so I went back for schooling in this other thing.” Or maybe you will want to tell what happened with someone else. Just, whatever you think applies to this discussion.

Here is what I would rather not see, if we can avoid it: fighting about whether it’s better to go with a major that is attached to a definite employment path, or whether it’s better to follow one’s heart/interests regardless of future employment possibilities. It seems clear to me that the answer to that dilemma is “Sometimes one way is better, sometimes the other way is better, and it’s super-hard to figure out in advance which way is best for an individual person and their individual interests/life.” I’d rather stick, if possible, to stories about “This major —-> this job.”

Things are not good right now, are they. I think I’m going with links.

1. The ACLU has a good article on the right to peacefully protest, but the format is annoying because you have to keep clicking to get to the next item on the list. Still, it is a good list, if you are wondering about what is allowed and what is not, maybe because you are planning to participate in a protest, or maybe because people in your Facebook feed are acting as if it’s illegal to do so, or maybe because people in your Facebook feed are acting as if protesters don’t have to follow any rules at all. (Perhaps you are extra-lucky and you have BOTH kinds of people in your Facebook feed, fighting each other as you try not to let it make you want to start digging a hole for the bomb shelter.) Know Your Rights for Peaceful Protests. Here is a PDF version that doesn’t make you click to get to the next item: PDF Know Your Rights.

2. Sometimes it is hard to know where to send money to be HELPFUL: should the money go for legal support, or for education, or for the families of people affected? Should I send money to put out current fires, or would the money be better spent on preventing future fires? I can easily end up spinning my wheels and doing nothing. When I am overwhelmed by choices but want to do SOMETHING, I like to send a check to Plan International. They’re a non-religious charity that works on the very basics of making the world better: water, food, medical care, shelter, and not getting sold into slavery.

3. Or, here is a list of charities in the Human & Civil Rights category that Charity Navigator rates 4 stars (the highest rating). But I feel a little overwhelmed even with a pared-down list like that. Too many choices. On the other hand, I find it soothing to see how many people are working on making things better.

4. This Craig Ferguson quote:
“…Ask yourself the three questions you must always ask yourself before you say anything:
1. Does this need to be said?
2. Does this need to be said by me?
3. Does this need to be said by me now?”

This item makes me wish I were more of a think-outside-the-box person:

It is a piece of hemmed cotton fabric, with a button on one end and a buttonhole on the other. A non-zero amount of work went into this item, considering it was only used to wrap around a pile of four napkins I bought on clearance for $2.98 at Target. It seems as if it could be USED for something, rather than tossed in the trash after I harvest the button.

Elizabeth tried to use it as a cat collar, with comic results.

Speaking of Elizabeth, she went to a day camp this past week and had a great time. On the last day, there was a performance/show/demonstration-type thing for parents, and the camp director got a cool high school girl to be the judge of the competitive part. Elizabeth was PISSED that at the end of the judging, everyone got the same ribbon, with the judge declaring herself unable to pick among so many wonderful competitors.

I was explaining to Pissed Elizabeth on the way home that although I too dislike the “Everyone’s a winner!” kind of thing, in this case it would have been tough to do otherwise: some kids were in their sixth year at this camp, while others were in their first; some kids were going into 8th grade and others into 2nd; etc. We talked about it for awhile, Elizabeth mostly seeing it from the campers’ point of view and me mostly seeing it from the camp director’s point of view. We agreed on the idea of doing a variety of prizes that let everyone get a ribbon (which appeared to be the goal) while still letting kids feel as if the prizes were real. Things like “Best costume,” “Most poised,” “Funniest.” You wouldn’t even need to come up with the categories ahead of time: the judge could think about each child’s performance and pick what was the best part of it and make the ribbon for that. This would be hard with a really big group, but in this case there were only six kids.

This week it’s Edward and Henry’s turn for day camp. Normally this camp is hosted by our town’s elementary school, but this year our school couldn’t do it, so we had to join with the next town over. At drop-off, I was reminded how much I dislike new/unfamiliar things. At our elementary school, I know exactly how to get there, exactly where to park, exactly where else to park if the usual parking is full, and exactly which entrances are possibilities. I know my way around the inside of the school, and I recognize/know the teachers, and I recognize a lot of the teenaged counselors. But this morning, I had to wing it. It went fine, of course it went fine, but I was surprised at just how disorienting it is.

I was describing this book to Paul and Rob, and the three of us together came up with this: that it’s like The Bourne Identity (in which someone wakes up and has to figure out who he/she is, and also why he/she seems to be well-equipped with cash and skillz) + Men in Black (in which someone is recruited into a secret government organization that fights the weird/supernatural/alien) + X-Men (in which there is a world where certain people are born with interesting abilities). I felt so pleased with us for summing it up so clearly and evocatively. Then I was looking at reviews, and basically everyone was saying the same thing. So. Well, it means there’s CONSENSUS.

(image from Amazon.com)

The Rook, by Daniel O’Malley.

I found the book extremely enjoyable, and kept wanting to go back to it. The writing was a little rough in places, and I have never liked the exposition-via-letters gimmick (NO ONE would EVER go into SO MUCH DETAIL in a letter, NO MATTER WHAT the situation was); but the former felt like first-book issues, and the latter was easy enough to go along with in this case where it seemed justified.

I love it when a character is put into a situation that would be hugely tense and upsetting for almost anyone—but then turns out to be able to handle it.

Last night I dreamed I was pregnant. SUPER vivid dream, including running my hand over my rounded tum and thinking about names. (I was thinking, “Funny how I think I am just DYING to choose a name, until I actually have to choose one.”) Seven or eight years ago, I would have woken up and cried that it wasn’t real, and maybe spent the day brooding and eating fudge. Today I woke up IMMENSELY RELIEVED that it was a dream. I mention this in case you are where I was seven or eight years ago, feeling as if you will never be able to live a happy life unless you have another baby, and wondering if that feeling will ever go away. I can offer only one anecdotal “yes, it will” data point, but here it is if it helps.

It is partly made up of sensible things: I am now older than I would like to be for a pregnancy, and the gap between my youngest and another baby would be MUCH larger than I’d like it to be, and at this point I don’t want to start again at the beginning. It is also partly because the other children have gotten older, and I’ve thought, “Ohhhhhhhhhh, wait: I wanted a lot of BABIES, but I do not necessarily want a lot of three-year-olds or a lot of fourteen-year-olds.”

But I think it is mostly that The Feeling went away. I think it is a mistake to underestimate the role biology plays in a passionate desire for children: some of it is because children are neat to have, but a lot of it is a species-benefiting biological set-up that isn’t necessarily in the individual’s best interests. I remember when I was crying about the situation to my OB/GYN (he asked during a check-up if we were planning more children, and I burst into tears), and I asked if the baby cravings ever went away, and he said, “I don’t know. I can only tell you this: that older women no longer talk to me about it.” That’s not entirely comforting: my guess is that older women stop talking about it because it’s an option that’s no longer available. But now that I am a bit older myself, I am revising that guess to include the idea that when the option is no longer available, for most of us it also stops being so appealing. Biology stands down and lets most of us stop pining.

Still, I do think we should have had a sixth child, back when Paul said no. At this point that child would be six or seven, and I think that would have been great. And also, I do think that Paul saying no to another child, when I wanted one so badly I felt I could not live a happy life without one, had a lasting, non-positive effect on our marriage. I’m not saying he could have said anything else, if he really felt that strongly about it; and maybe if he had given in to what I wanted, perhaps it would have had some detrimental effect in the other direction; and perhaps there was NO possible happy outcome from that deadlocked situation and there would have been a negative effect no matter what we’d decided. But regardless, I don’t think back to that time and think it went the way it should have, or that he was right. He has never been good at thinking ahead to the future, so I don’t feel he made a decision based on a good evaluation of the situation; and he made me feel that when it comes down to truly important decisions in our shared life, it’s his happiness over mine.

I cannot figure out how to balance the children’s need to continually talk to me with my need to not have children continually talking to me. We are on Year 18 of this struggle, with no resolution in sight.

Older women tell me that the solution is to wait until the children are gone and then to wish fervently that I had not wished this precious time away. This does not seem like a satisfying solution. Furthermore, it indicates to me that there will be a mental transformation of some sort, a transformation that will render me unable to remember with any level of accuracy what this time of my life was like. That is discouraging. Already I have seen the early signs of it: I look with damp-eyed nostalgia at women shopping at Target with babies and toddlers, thinking fondly of how when I was in their shoes I would keep shoving goldfish crackers into little mouths to keep them from continually talking to me.

Well. Nothing brings this issue to light quite like summer vacation. Soon the children and I will gather to have our annual discussion about summer goals/plans, and I hope to find a way to say to them that every word from their lips is like precious gems to me, but could we stop the practice of dispersing those gems in every-90-seconds increments, a practice that makes it so that the only way I could survive the incessant interruptions with my mind intact would be to sit, motionless and receptive, doing nothing else but waiting for the next child to talk to me?

Furthermore, the other day I did an experiment that was even more disheartening. It was morning, and I’d had an idea for a post, so I was working on that while the children were getting ready for school. They were interrupting me SO INCESSANTLY that a literal LINE had formed. So I thought, like the sensible, patient, reasonable mother I long to be: “This is clearly not a good time to try to write. I can write later. I don’t need to SET UP a situation where I will be driven crazy.” I stopped writing, I went into the kitchen to be available to the children—and no one talked to me. I waited 10 minutes, doing various little tasks, and not one single child talked to me.

So I thought it was probably like the lines in Target, where first no one is in line and then suddenly a dozen customers all appear at once. I had just hit a little flood of children-wanting-to-talk-to-me, but now it was over. I returned to my computer, started writing, and I am not exaggerating even one tiny morsel when I say that within 30 seconds a child was talking to me. And then another child. And then a third child.

So I thought, okay, the LULL was the anomaly. I went to the living room, and I sat in a chair doing nothing. That is, I just Made Myself Available. AND NO ONE TALKED TO ME. I waited another full ten minutes. NO ONE TALKED TO ME.

I returned to my computer. The children appeared and started talking to me.

It was like a JOKE. It was like a SITCOM. It was like a FAMILY CIRCUS comic. It was as if there were a sensor in my computer chair that set off little activation switches in the children’s brains. It was one of the most depressing experiments I have ever performed.

Hi Swistle, could you do a post about what comics you read? I started reading Dumbing of Age because you mentioned it in a post once and I really love it. And I think it was you that mentioned Bad Machinery too, and I love that too. I’m going through a bit of a reading slump where I’m struggling to find a book that I feel like reading more than a couple pages of, but I realized I still enjoy comics, especially the sort that tell an on-going story. So I was hoping you might have some more recommendations.

Thanks

Nancy

This is a great idea: I want suggestions TOO.

Here are the comics I currently read, of the sort that tell an on-going story (those are my favorite kind, too):

Dumbing of Age

Bad Machinery / Scary Go Round – This one seems to do several different sometimes-overlapping comics, in batches. I’ve never figured out what the pattern is, or which series is named what: I just go with it.

Questionable Content

Alice Grove

And here are the comics I currently read, of the sort that don’t tell an on-going story per se:

Dinosaur Comics

Hark, A Vagrant!

Robot Hugs

xkcd

Nancy and I would like to know what comics YOU read—particularly the kind that have a long-running storyline, but also the kind that don’t.

This morning I am thinking about two things that are more like one thing, or at least two things with significant overlap.

The first thing is when someone wants something very reasonable, something it would not be weird to expect to be able to have, but can’t have it. Like when someone really wants to get married and have children: no one would say to a child with that goal, as we might if the child’s goal to be a world-famous actor and then President of the United States afterward, “Oh, well honey, that’s a GREAT plan, but it’s a good idea to have a BACK-UP plan, just in case.” Marriage/children is a normal thing to want, and a normal thing to get, and yet there are lots of great people who want those things and can’t get them.

The second thing is when someone has something very desirable, something a LOT of people want but can’t have, and doesn’t want it. Like how I am married to a man who likes to cuddle at night, but I can’t sleep with someone touching me. I think of that episode of Friends where the guys are discussing ways to get out of a cuddle, because all their girls want to cuddle. Meanwhile there’s me, using those tips in vain. It feels so wasteful, and also so hard to complain about. Like saying “Ug, I just HATE having all this MONEY.” Or when the hairdresser is using the thinning scissors on my hair, and the elderly ladies getting perms to make their thin hair look thicker are squinting at me with envy and resentment. I’M SORRY I DON’T WANT WHAT YOU WOULD KILL FOR.

It’s on my mind right now because I want something that seems reasonable to me, something that does not seem weird to expect to have if I want it, which is to live near my parents. Furthermore, that seems like something a lot of parents WANT: they complain that their children live so far away, and nag them to live closer. My parents were in that group: my mom was very persistent about trying to get us to live near them. And then they got what they wanted, what LOTS of people want, and ALL their children moved close to home: my brother moved from across the country to live an hour away, and I moved from across the country to live .3 miles away. I wanted to live where I was already living, and I really didn’t want to move to the location where my parents lived, but my parents wouldn’t move to where we were, so I made that trade.

And now my parents have moved almost as far away as they can get and still remain in the same country. They still live here for part of the year, but that’s only because we’re here: they would like to move permanently to the new location. I could theoretically still have part of what I want: if my primary geographical goal is to live near family, which it was when I could still move freely, I could dig out all our roots, sell our customized house, take all the kids out of their schools, take us away from all our friends and hard-won social groups, leave my brother and sister-in-law and niece and nephew and sister-in-law’s siblings, and follow my parents. I could keep doing that every time they moved. Or, my parents could move back here, choosing live-near-family preferences over geographical ones. This is like saying that someone who really wants marriage and kids could have an arranged marriage, or that someone who doesn’t like cuddling could accept being cuddled because that’s what someone else would want.

I have taken to heart the thing about how instead of teaching our daughters to escape being raped, we should be teaching our sons not to be rapists. You’d think a big national rape case would provide excellent material for talking to our sons about not being rapists. But no, unfortunately yet again what we have is excellent material for talking to our daughters about how to escape being raped.

It’s especially frustrating because I just recently read somewhere that it feeds into rape culture to say “This is something that happens to women in our culture.” This makes it harder for me to tell my daughter what I want to tell her, which is the actual truth: this IS something that happens to women in our culture.

Furthermore, “in our culture” is only accurate if we mean “in our timeless worldwide human culture,” because this is an ancient worldwide problem and not a local or recent one. We are in fact fairly lucky if we live in a time period and part of the world where at least theoretically rape is against the law, and where a victim of rape is not put to death for the crime of being raped, or forced to marry her rapist. So lucky!

The basic timeless worldwide problem we are dealing with is that a certain percentage of humans, almost exclusively male humans, are rapists who don’t see anything wrong with raping, and don’t seem to learn otherwise no matter what we do. And that another certain percentage of humans, some overlapping the first group but many not overlapping, will defend those rapists and instead attack the women who have been raped.

And so two terrible things happen to a woman who is raped: (1) she is raped, and (2) she is blamed for it. (Well, at LEAST two terrible things. Other options include not being believed at all, having to deal with a pregnancy resulting from the rape, having to deal with an STD resulting from the rape, having to deal with the extensive and multi-layered psychological fall-out of being raped, etc.)

There is a big element here of that thing people do when they are scared and want to feel safe: if we can find something that the victim did, and if that thing is something we ourselves can avoid, then we have made a magical protection spell around ourselves. There have been plenty of articles written about how women have to live their lives constantly worrying about being attacked/raped by men, so I won’t go over that again here. But if you are living in that kind of constant fear, it is natural for certain superstitions to arise: if I don’t walk alone in the dark, if I walk confidently, if I stay in a good part of town, if I wear the right kind of clothing, if I don’t step on a crack, if there are an even number of steps between here and where I live, if I don’t let my foot dangle over the edge of the bed—if I do all these things right, I don’t have to be so scared because the bad thing won’t happen to me.

It’s too bad a self-soothing mechanism can so easily lead to saying “SEE?? You forgot one of the rules and THAT’S why you got raped! It’s YOUR fault! WHEW: that gives me some relief for my distress.” It’s an understandable panic/fear reaction, but education helps: as with the problem of the bystander effect, the solution is to know it exists. As soon as you know it’s a Thing, you’re much less likely to be tricked by it.

Well. What I needed was a version of all this that was geared for a 5th-grade girl. Sometimes getting started is the hardest part. What I started with was saying to her that there was a news story right now that was making me even more worried about her and her friends. Then I went slowly: we had about a 35-minute car ride, so even though the next few paragraphs may look as if I sat there ranting and lecturing and talking too fast, it was pretty casual, with lots of responses from her.

I told her that a man had raped an unconscious woman, and that he still didn’t seem to think he’d done anything wrong except drink too much, and that the judge had decided he shouldn’t be punished too much because that would have a negative effect on his future, and that a lot of people were saying it was the woman’s fault for being unconscious. I reminded her of the statistic that approximately 1 out of 6 women will be sexually assaulted, and that it’s likely that number is wayyyyyyy too low because of how many assaults go unreported, and that the majority of sexual assaults are done by a man the woman knows (which contributes to under-reporting and feelings of self-blame). I hope I adequately covered how very Not Your Fault a sexual assault is (even if you liked the guy, even if you were flirting, even if you were drinking, even if you were wearing sexy clothes, even if you participated willingly with other physical things, even if he’s your boyfriend, and so on), but we will return to that subject again and again over the years.

I told her that it was sickening and crappy that she would need to be taught how to decrease her odds of being raped, but that here we were. I mentioned the thing about teaching your sons not to be rapists, but that this situation in the news was not helpful, and she agreed. We talked about using the buddy system, and not letting your drink go unattended, and keeping an eye out for other women—strangers as well as friends. I told her about that other story that’s been in the news, about the women who were eating in a restaurant and saw a man put something in another woman’s drink, and they told the woman and also the waiter and also the police. This is the kind of thing we can do to help each other. Or if you see a girl at a party, and she seems drunk and you see guys circling her as if she is prey, you can help her back to her dorm/apartment or into a taxi or WHATEVER. If she won’t leave, you can go stand next to her. You can get some of your good guy friends involved. You can call campus security to help you. We also touched upon the topic of rape kits.

That was around the time the car ride ended, so I’ve left it there for now.