Procrascinating things so that I can update my journal
I took the GRE today, which was exhausting and way too long. But I did well enough to go forth with the arduous process of applying to graduate school. My current top choice is the Women's Studies with a Public Policy Concentration program at George Washington University. I am fairly certain that I can get in, but I am not sure if I'll be able to afford to go. As a contingency, I've applied to the DC Teaching Fellows Program and I've been invited to interview with them this February. I guess I'll have to see how things develop, but I know that pretty soon I'll have to make IMPORTANT DECISIONS and I'm not really looking forward to that.
As part of my desperate effort to reclaim my daytime lifestyle, I had a job interview on Tuesday for an administrative assistant position at an accounting firm downtown. The woman that I spoke with seemed very interested and suggested that I had a very good chance of getting a second interview (those will be conducted next week). I hope I can get this job, or really any other job with regular business hours because my present place of employment is driving me to insanity, bitterness, and exhaustion and seriously depleting me of time that I could spend arranging things. Since I am very fond of arranging things, this is proving to be a serious problem.
I am updating my journal right now so that I can defer composing my grad school admissions essay, which is what I am currently supposed to be doing. I really hate writing those, they always seem to sound so strained and unnatural, causing me to brood over them excessively as I do with all my pieces of writing that do not meet my exacting standards. I have also been trying to come up with a way to relate my work experience in the emergency room to my proposed field of study, eschewing such obvious platitudes as "it has raised my awareness of pressing social problems." I've been struggling with this for awhile (hence my failure to compose the essay to date), but it has just ocurred to me that the experience that I should try to elucidate comes not from the job itself, but rather from the experiences of my coworkers and the social environment in which they operate.
Most of my coworkers are women and nearly all of them are mothers. They face some unique challenges and are forced to bear some difficult burdens as they attempt to reconcile their domestic and professional responsibilities. The ones that are married complain that their husbands expect them to assume the full responsibility of taking care of the house and the children even as they are working full-time to meet their family's financial needs. One of my coworkers revealed that her husband berates her for not taking enough care of her appearance even though she is exhausted from working full time, studying part-time, cooking, cleaning, and taking care of her young children. Her husband's only responsibility is his job, but he continually refuses to pitch in, claiming that household duties are his wife's "natural" responsibility. My unmarried coworkers with children face their own set of problems. They have to make sure that their kids are in daycare or with relatives during the time that they are at work, and, consequently sometimes have to readjust their work schedule to fit their babysitter's availability. Our boss, however; is not very understanding about last minute changes and has reprimanded women for missing work or coming in late for family reasons. She has also repeatedly scheduled one woman to work weekends even though this woman has made it clear that she has a very difficult time finding an affordable sitter for her kids on Saturdays and Sundays. These issues faced by working mothers at my hospital are at least partly attributable to their socioeconomic status. A lot of these women lack the education necssary to get a better job or do not have the financial resources to leave their demanding spouses. I lack the energy to fully describe the specturm of issues relevant to correctly interpreting this situation, and I am not sure whether I would be capable of accurately analyzing the interplay between gender and class here, anyway. But I am writing about these things nonetheless because they bother me and motivate me to acquire the intellectual faculties necessary to analyze them and propose possible solutions.
Now I shall stop because this entry is far too long and far too rambling to assist me in composing my essay which has to be direct and concise. But the reason that I decided not to hit the delete button is that the problems that I've discussed here are important to me from an academic, professional, and personal standpoint and so I would like to maintain a record of my inchoate thoughts on the subject.
As part of my desperate effort to reclaim my daytime lifestyle, I had a job interview on Tuesday for an administrative assistant position at an accounting firm downtown. The woman that I spoke with seemed very interested and suggested that I had a very good chance of getting a second interview (those will be conducted next week). I hope I can get this job, or really any other job with regular business hours because my present place of employment is driving me to insanity, bitterness, and exhaustion and seriously depleting me of time that I could spend arranging things. Since I am very fond of arranging things, this is proving to be a serious problem.
I am updating my journal right now so that I can defer composing my grad school admissions essay, which is what I am currently supposed to be doing. I really hate writing those, they always seem to sound so strained and unnatural, causing me to brood over them excessively as I do with all my pieces of writing that do not meet my exacting standards. I have also been trying to come up with a way to relate my work experience in the emergency room to my proposed field of study, eschewing such obvious platitudes as "it has raised my awareness of pressing social problems." I've been struggling with this for awhile (hence my failure to compose the essay to date), but it has just ocurred to me that the experience that I should try to elucidate comes not from the job itself, but rather from the experiences of my coworkers and the social environment in which they operate.
Most of my coworkers are women and nearly all of them are mothers. They face some unique challenges and are forced to bear some difficult burdens as they attempt to reconcile their domestic and professional responsibilities. The ones that are married complain that their husbands expect them to assume the full responsibility of taking care of the house and the children even as they are working full-time to meet their family's financial needs. One of my coworkers revealed that her husband berates her for not taking enough care of her appearance even though she is exhausted from working full time, studying part-time, cooking, cleaning, and taking care of her young children. Her husband's only responsibility is his job, but he continually refuses to pitch in, claiming that household duties are his wife's "natural" responsibility. My unmarried coworkers with children face their own set of problems. They have to make sure that their kids are in daycare or with relatives during the time that they are at work, and, consequently sometimes have to readjust their work schedule to fit their babysitter's availability. Our boss, however; is not very understanding about last minute changes and has reprimanded women for missing work or coming in late for family reasons. She has also repeatedly scheduled one woman to work weekends even though this woman has made it clear that she has a very difficult time finding an affordable sitter for her kids on Saturdays and Sundays. These issues faced by working mothers at my hospital are at least partly attributable to their socioeconomic status. A lot of these women lack the education necssary to get a better job or do not have the financial resources to leave their demanding spouses. I lack the energy to fully describe the specturm of issues relevant to correctly interpreting this situation, and I am not sure whether I would be capable of accurately analyzing the interplay between gender and class here, anyway. But I am writing about these things nonetheless because they bother me and motivate me to acquire the intellectual faculties necessary to analyze them and propose possible solutions.
Now I shall stop because this entry is far too long and far too rambling to assist me in composing my essay which has to be direct and concise. But the reason that I decided not to hit the delete button is that the problems that I've discussed here are important to me from an academic, professional, and personal standpoint and so I would like to maintain a record of my inchoate thoughts on the subject.