flexagon | Burlesque, cholesterol, children and career thoughts

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.