| Thanks, Anita, for all your help with the colors. Hopefully you will be able to read much easier now. :)
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My latest attempt at productivity has me scheduling every minute of the day. The purpose of this, as opposed to just deciding each moment as it arises, is to tap that part of me that needs to check off every item on the list. Today, day 1, has been a success. Though, the day isn’t over yet and Day 2 is, well, a whole other day.
So maybe it will work, and maybe it won’t. In the past it’s worked for a day or two and then something happens to interrupt my carefully planned schedule and the whole thing deflates. This is the hazard of a person like me not having a job.
While I’m on the topic, I think I’d like to mention that not trudging off to the office every day is all right by me. My life right now feels similar to that of a novelist who takes an excessively long time to complete a work; it is always a work in progress. Perhaps the publisher would be calling daily to warn of the approaching deadline. I’m too goody-goody for that - too much respect for authority. I never even turned in homework late. Maybe what I need is a publisher or some other authority figure telling me to do stuff for them. I can do things for other people, just not for myself.
It bothers me that other people don’t see my life as I do. It bothers me that it means they are putting me into a role schema that does not fit ME. I dislike being thought of as the "homemaker", "wife", "dependent". I always tell people, when they ask me what I do, that I’m "hanging out" or "on permanent vacation" or even "leading a novelist’s life." I don’t think they buy it. I think they think that a woman, who is not working, married to a man must be assuming a role that is associated with the stereotypes of "wife". I am uncomfortable with the socially defined characteristics of "wife" and feel reluctant to ever use that term to describe me. I have to though. I’m in Korea. Maybe the problem is that I’ve been here too long and the Korean perceptions of what "wife" is are getting me down. This subject is depressing me.
Sooooo….
Besides running a bunch of errands, doing computer stuff, and altering a pair of pants, I managed to read a bunch about pervasive patriarchy in the workplace. (I was trying for more alliteration, but it didn’t work out.) That makes me sad, too, to think of how much more work there is to do. Most notable about what I read has to do with the notion of "ideal worker" and how that ideal is "male" despite the numbers of women in the workplace. Examples: Companies want people who can work overtime, or take a trip, or relocate, without hassle. This can only be accomplished by people who either a) have no family, no household crap to take care of; or b) by people who have someone else to manage a household for them. That the majority of women in the workplace have children and are the "manager of the household regardless" means that they cannot live up to the standard of "ideal worker." This is so obvious when stated, but easily overlooked otherwise.
Did some reading for a topic I’m considering writing about. I’m afraid to mention it for fear I won’t follow through.
Choice excerpt from A Confederacy of Dunces:
Ignatius pulled his flannel nightshirt up and looked at his bloated stomach. He often bloated while lying in bed in the morning contemplating the unfortunate turn that events had taken since the Reformation. Doris Day and Greyhound Scenicruisers, whenever they came to mind, created an even more rapid expansion of his central region. But since the attempted arrest and the accident he had been bloating for almost no reason at all, his pyloric valve snapping shut indiscriminately and filling his stomach with trapped gas, gas which had character and being and resented its confinement.
The mind control cemented into my brain by a lengthy education is bugging me to put a citation here if I’m gonna write a bunch of quotes, but I’m too lazy. I got the title of the book down, that’s good enough.
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