Burlesque, cholesterol, children and career thoughts

[flexagon]

• I went with heisenbug to see The Slutcracker last weekend... it's a burlesque based on The Nutcracker, which I'd just seen the week before that, so I've gotten to hear plenty of Tchaikovsky now. It was good adult fun. I usually find the occasional burlesque or porn viewing to be reassuring -- it's nice and normalizing to see a lot of bodies and realize that mine is quite representative of the general case. Everyone's got a body, with variations on the same themes... oh, and most women's breasts look smaller after they take their tops off than you might think they'd look. :-)



• Results from my first physical with my primary care physician came back, and they said I had high cholesterol, which surprised me since I eat well and work out like a... well, like a dedicated student of Toledo. I made the office give me the printout of the test results, but I hadn't dug into what to do yet... then bluechromis gave me the best holiday present ever by saying "did you get the numbers? Your HDL is 82? Yeah, you're spectacularly healthy. It's not really about the total." I loooooove having a good friend in med school to cut through the bullshit.



• apfelsingail came to visit and came to acroyoga and gave me a CD of taiko drumming, and made me stretch out my splits. Then the day she left, I went to a party of heisenbug's friends. Even though a huge proportion of this group has remained childfree, the ones who aren't are making up for it: there were 5 small children (and one lonely 17-year-old who I did my best to talk to often). And when all the children were opening presents at once, it sounded like a huge flock of penguins all gabbling away at the same time. I mean exactly like. It was creepy. Still, we walked away from the gift swap with a copy of Pandemic and one of The Game of Things, both of which will be perfect for hosting friends at our place next week, and it was good catching up with the grownups.



• It strikes me that a lot of women in my circles and the bug's circles have been going back to school in their 30s. There's a joke in the bug-circle that "she who dies with the most degrees wins", and there are three women who are each going for their fourth higher-education degree. (There's also a nearly inverse relationship between number of degrees and income, indicating that there is an optimal balance of getting qualified for jobs and getting experience in jobs.) Anyway, it bothers me, despite my support of my own friends who've gone back to get MDs and MBAs: why did the women, but not the men, choose careers the first time around that didn't work out for them? Is it just that the women are more likely to try harder for something that really works, or that the women change more during the first 10-15 years out of school, or did they actually make worse decisions a few years ago? If so, why? I'm not sure I get to talk -- I switched fields immediately after graduation myself, although that seems to have been less expensive and life-disrupting than switching in the mid-30s. It's the gender disparity rather than the individual cases that concerns me. It could easily be a coincidence that this is what I see, with no correlation to overall statistics.

Comments

[nahele-101.livejournal.com]

Why does it bother you that women are going back to school? We have so many options now related to jobs (or we used to...) that changing career paths to keep your head above water seems like a good idea to me.

I've been doing biology work for about eight years now (since graduating in 2004) but I am considering going back to school and doing a BSN.

[flexagon]

It bothers me because these are prime earning/employment years, and it makes me concerned to see my friends losing the chance to accrue net worth during this phase of life.

Also, in almost all cases it's been with the goal of a complete career switch -- rather than getting more training to keep their heads above water, it's been "oh shit, I hate this so much that I'm willing to make a multi-year sacrifice in order to do something else."

[nahele-101.livejournal.com]

I think its better to change when you realize you hate it, then keep going. Screw the money. If what you are doing isn't making you happy AND you can change it, more power to em I say.

Hell, I would think you would applaud them for that reason alone.

[flexagon]

I can applaud and worry about them simultaneously.

I would never, ever say "screw the money". I've been below the poverty line and I don't want that for any of my friends, ever. Luckily, most of them are switching to fields that will eventually be more lucrative than what they're leaving, or have a spouse who can (and is willing to) pick up the slack. So in most cases, as long as they stick with the new career they WILL eventually break even.

[rifmeister.livejournal.com]

I also could've told you that total cholesterol wasn't that important.

[flexagon]

*nods* I kinda vaguely knew it and that's why I made them give me the printout, but I hadn't done research into the actual numbers yet.

[randysmith]

Hmmm. I feel like I drifted into my current career after failing to become a scientist (bailing after three years of grad school), and I'm not complete certain this is the best fit for me either (though I've been doing it for a while now), so I'll be a tentative data point on the "men who choose careers that don't work out for them".

I don't know if this is at all relevant in your social circle, but it's seemed somewhat true in some of my social circles that the background attitude is still a bit sexist in that men "should" find a well-paying job that can support them and their dependents, and "it's good if" women find a well-paying job that can support them and their dependents. I could imagine that translating to women more often trying new things (though I don't like that analysis).

[flexagon]

I think the background attitude you discuss is quite relevant to the bug-circle I mentioned, if not to all our circles in which I've seen this happening. It could be that, because of different/lower expectations or some other reason that is less negative, women just feel more free to switch it up more often. I don't know, though. And this post isn't helping yet, because all 3 commenters on this post so far have been men. :-)

Mechanical engineering didn't work out for me -- I bailed as soon as I got my degrees -- but more because of lifestyle issues that never crossed my mind when I was 18 and deciding what to study. Given lots of chances to work in a city doing design work for things that people use every day, I think I could have been happy in that field.

[randysmith]

Huh--I've occasionally had little tweaks of pull towards mechanical engineering. Probably more towards hobby then profession, but it still makes me curious: What lifestyle issues turned you away from it?

[flexagon]

It turned out that a whole lot of mech e jobs weren't design jobs (a lot of them focus on maintenance, analysis, manufacture...) and a whole lot of them weren't in big cities (where I'd discovered I wanted to be). Machine shops and manufacturing plants and big labs are all more likely to be outside cities, where land is cheaper.

Software, in contrast, is mostly design work, and there are tons of urban jobs. It's also very clean work, compared to the machine shops I grew up in... you don't go home covered in oil, or even needing to wash your hands. That was one of the things I really noticed during my first months of doing software professionally, way back when.

[niralth.livejournal.com]

I'm just one data point, but: I'm a female career woman who supports a stay at home husband and child (soon children). My husband jumped careers several times (without attaining additional degrees) and has settled quite comfortably into stay-at-home parenthood. I jumped careers from mechanical engineering to software a few years after graduation, but without going back for another degree.

From where I sit I think any sole (or primary) money earner for a family would feel a lot of pressure to make the current career "work out," regardless of their gender. I know I do. I can't speculate about the psychology at play in a family where both partners' salaries are required for financial obligations (mortgage, etc).

[coraline]

total cholesterol is useless -- fortunately my doctor was the one to point this out to me (i'm over 200, but my HDL is over 100 and the highest my doctor has ever seen, so she's not worried.)

no answers on the going-back-to-school thing, though i think my social group has the same pattern, though i hadn't viewed it through gendered lenses before now (i don't know why not).

[a-kosmos.livejournal.com]

it's nice and normalizing to see a lot of bodies and realize that mine is quite representative of the general case.

I would have to disagree: you have a SPECTACULAR body.

In my case, I've never actually chosen a career....I've just sort of let it develop organically. Part of this is symptomatic of the humanities background, I guess

[flexagon]

Ha, thank you. :-) You know how things go, though -- it turns out my body has some cellulite, and small breasts, and sometimes I catch an angle in the mirror where the whole composition just looks odd. I'm 99.5% sure that happens to everyone.

I like your organic career growth strategy. Realistically it's hard to do things any other way; after college I gave up on having much of a multi-year plan.