I chose the name Apolonia for myself when I was confirmed in the Catholic church. The exact procedure is unclear to me, but I know that some of the sacraments require names and godparents and some do not. When I lived in Peru, every life event qualified for a godparent: birthdays, dance recitals, anything. This was generally because godparents were expected to donate a little cash for their godchild, so the cost of every celebration and every child was spread through the community. Rich foreign godparents were especially coveted, so it was not uncommon for people to request that perfect strangers be the godparents to their children. However, even in Peru not every event required a new name, naming events are rarer. This, naturally, produces a feeling of weightiness attached to a naming event.
I felt pressured to pick a good name for myself for my confirmation, something that was meaningful to me. Ideally, it would be aspirational, represent a person or an attribute that I wanted to emulate. The religious significance of the confirmation had me trying to be a pious person. I dutifully looked through names of saints for my new moniker. For this task, my catechism teacher loaned me a large, hardcover, illustrated history of the Catholic Saints. I flipped through the pages with diminishing enthusiasm. There are an ungodly number of saints.
Would I choose Teresa of Jesus, who founded a humble religious order against the opposition of the established church? Or Joan of Arc, who led her men into righteous battle? No. I chose instead a minor martyr who was terrorized by the Romans when Christians were hated minorities. She lived in Alexandria, and was done in by mob violence in a riot over something or other. The mob was vicious, and cruelly killed and tortured many Christians. Poor Apolonia had all of her teeth pulled out. Pithily, the Church has made her patron saint of dentists.
The mob wasn't satisfied by torturing her, they also built a bonfire and threatened to burn her if she didn't renounce her faith. She was an older woman, and at this point she had no teeth. She was being restrained, and asked for her restraints to be loosened. Her captors obliged, perhaps shamed because they were hurting a poor old lady. As soon as they eased up on her, she bolted and jumped straight into the fire. When I read this account of her life and martyrdom, I felt a flicker of recognition. It seemed to me that she was flipping her antagonists the bird by jumping on that fire, and that her stubborn recklessness was a good philosophy.
Within the church, I think the reaction to Apolonia and other martyrs who killed themselves to avoid denouncing their faith or to preserve their chastity is ambiguous. After all, suicide is a sin, but clearly, these were brave and pious people. My own feelings about Apolonia are also problematic. Is it good to identify with self destructive behavior, with scorn in the face of public opinion, with an iconoclast? Why couldn't I have felt moved by the saints who day by day showed kindness and devotion, instead of a saint who made one showy move at the end of her life? What did it say about me?
Friday, December 14, 2012
Thursday, December 13, 2012
A Motherfucking One-Year-Old
I have a child, aged one. She is a joy. If you see me walking down the street on any given day, I probably look like a fool with a smile on my face for no apparent reason. Except there is a reason, and it is her. Which makes my nightly wish to defenestrate her a bit jarring when it inevitably pops into my mind. That's right, every night I experience a desire to heave my young progeny out of a third story window.
It takes roughly two hours of hard manual labor to get the kid to sleep. She weighs like thirty pounds, and after rocking her for a minute my back and my neck start to tell my brain that it's time to die. It would make me feel better if she would take the hint and put in a little effort to go to sleep, maybe lie down or close her eyes or at least shut up. Instead, she likes to take the opportunity to blow raspberries for five minutes straight, or sing happy birthday to me. It's not my birthday. She doesn't know what a birthday is, really. In fact, I think she might think bedtimes are birthdays.
She makes up for my nightly rage-induced headaches in a lot of ways. For one thing, my one year old has excellent taste in super heroes. Show her a Super Man picture book, and she will pee on it, and you, in disdain. But she spends hours a day babbling about Batman. She makes Batman drawings. They look like blobby scribbles, but the fact that she says "Batman, Batman, Batman" while she is drawing them makes it pretty obvious what she was going for. She was Batman for Halloween, and two or three times a week she likes to put on her Batman costume for a while, preferably while reading Batman Hooked on Phonics books or watching Batman youtube videos.
My one-year-old, cooler than me already.
It takes roughly two hours of hard manual labor to get the kid to sleep. She weighs like thirty pounds, and after rocking her for a minute my back and my neck start to tell my brain that it's time to die. It would make me feel better if she would take the hint and put in a little effort to go to sleep, maybe lie down or close her eyes or at least shut up. Instead, she likes to take the opportunity to blow raspberries for five minutes straight, or sing happy birthday to me. It's not my birthday. She doesn't know what a birthday is, really. In fact, I think she might think bedtimes are birthdays.
She makes up for my nightly rage-induced headaches in a lot of ways. For one thing, my one year old has excellent taste in super heroes. Show her a Super Man picture book, and she will pee on it, and you, in disdain. But she spends hours a day babbling about Batman. She makes Batman drawings. They look like blobby scribbles, but the fact that she says "Batman, Batman, Batman" while she is drawing them makes it pretty obvious what she was going for. She was Batman for Halloween, and two or three times a week she likes to put on her Batman costume for a while, preferably while reading Batman Hooked on Phonics books or watching Batman youtube videos.
My one-year-old, cooler than me already.
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Self-esteem
Why should I have self-esteem? Should the things I do (or don't do) have any bearing on my self-esteem? What about my professional accomplishments? What about how other people feel about me?
The way I see it, nobody is perfect, and using any of the above criteria for developing self-esteem seems to bump up against this fundamental limitation. In each case, I would develop a standard for good behavior and bad behavior, good achievements, and the failure to achieve. The good behaviors and achievements would supposedly give me self-esteem. But the converse is always that the bad behaviors and the failures would lead to low self-esteem. In the cases where I don't live up to my standards, I would need to have compassion for myself, which really just means lowering my standards, until there are none. Is this what it means to allow myself to be imperfect?
Does allowing myself to be imperfect mean that I no longer have to try to be perfect? I no longer have to strive to be better than I am because striving to be perfect is doomed to fail? How can I not punish myself for failing, while still trying not to fail?
It must be enough that I try to be better every day, even if I fail some or most or all of the time. How exhausting! But how else could it be?
And if one day I forget to try, or am too tired or angry or sad or happy to try to be better? Should that give me lower self-esteem? Or if I stop trying altogether, or if I go completely in the reverse direction and begin to do things that are morally reprehensible, should I have low self-esteem? If I harm someone, or even kill someone, should I have low self-esteem?
Religion offers some neat principles to answer all of these questions, but from pure intuition or logic or reasoning, I don't really see where self-esteem should come from, or whether it needs to have any basis at all.
From a Catholic perspective (because that is all I know) self-esteem should exist simply because we are children of God. That is, by the simple act of being a human and being alive, I deserve to have self-esteem. My worth derives from God. We should also strive to please God, and to be more like him at all times. When we inevitably fail at this pursuit, there is a nifty way to address the guilt and recrimination that result: by confessing and doing penance and trying again.
This is all very messy and confusing. I'm typing at the speed of thought, but this question plagues me and I would like to revisit it in the future.
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Would You Believe It's All True?
Sometimes life is more fantastic than fiction. In a far away land, there once was a singer who was loved by all of his countrymen. His music played constantly on every radio station. The women of the land were enamored of him. The men all wanted to be his best friend, to be as near to him as possible, the better to be like him. In this country, the politicians sought the singer's favor because the singer held the keys to his countrymen's hearts.
It came to pass that the singer's country experienced political upheaval, and there was a regime change. The new government was totalitarian and viciously suppressed any dissenting opinion. They pestered the singer day and night to endorse their regime, but the singer refused. Worse, though in the past he had been apolitical, he began to sing new songs of freedom and hope. In this way, he made himself an enemy of the state.
On the singer's birthday, a day like any other, he went out to run some errands while his wife prepared a meal. Thus, at the height of his popularity, the singer was assassinated. The news traveled instantaneously all across the land. Everybody stopped what they were doing to mourn the singer's death, and to tell their friends, neighbors, and relatives. Spontaneously, people began to walk towards the singer's house, a well known landmark in the capital city. People were amassing in the singer's courtyard even before the police could inform the singer's own household. His body was brought by police escort to his house where his pregnant wife had been waiting for him to return for his noonday meal.
She pushed through the throngs of mourners, desperate to see her husband, and as the realization spread through her body that he was gone, that she was staring at his empty husk, she fell onto the ground and into the throes of labor. So it came to pass that the singer's birth, death, and the birth of his only child occurred on the same day.
Source: "Pop Music" on Radiolab
I always roll my eyes during movies or books where some exciting event puts a woman into labor, but I guess every melodrama contains a nugget of truth. I have to remember to save this tasty tidbit for a story idea. The child of such a dramatic birth must feel like a child of fate, with some serious expectations on her shoulders.
It came to pass that the singer's country experienced political upheaval, and there was a regime change. The new government was totalitarian and viciously suppressed any dissenting opinion. They pestered the singer day and night to endorse their regime, but the singer refused. Worse, though in the past he had been apolitical, he began to sing new songs of freedom and hope. In this way, he made himself an enemy of the state.
On the singer's birthday, a day like any other, he went out to run some errands while his wife prepared a meal. Thus, at the height of his popularity, the singer was assassinated. The news traveled instantaneously all across the land. Everybody stopped what they were doing to mourn the singer's death, and to tell their friends, neighbors, and relatives. Spontaneously, people began to walk towards the singer's house, a well known landmark in the capital city. People were amassing in the singer's courtyard even before the police could inform the singer's own household. His body was brought by police escort to his house where his pregnant wife had been waiting for him to return for his noonday meal.
She pushed through the throngs of mourners, desperate to see her husband, and as the realization spread through her body that he was gone, that she was staring at his empty husk, she fell onto the ground and into the throes of labor. So it came to pass that the singer's birth, death, and the birth of his only child occurred on the same day.
Source: "Pop Music" on Radiolab
I always roll my eyes during movies or books where some exciting event puts a woman into labor, but I guess every melodrama contains a nugget of truth. I have to remember to save this tasty tidbit for a story idea. The child of such a dramatic birth must feel like a child of fate, with some serious expectations on her shoulders.
Monday, December 10, 2012
On the Nature of Art
I rushed down the stairs. I made sure to keep my hands out of my pockets and ready to grab the railing should I loose my balance and fall, a habit of mine ever since I read about a man who died from slipping on the icy step in front of his house on a cold night (his hands were in his pockets to keep them warm and thus could not break his fall). I ruffled through the contents of my pocket for my subway pass and held it up to the card reader. In the distance I heard the rumbling of an approaching train while the card reader emitted an obnoxious honk in rejection of my pass. Try again, it ordered tauntingly. The same grating honk, my only reward for 'trying again.' I moved to the neighboring gate and held my pass up to its respective reader as the train screeched to a stop a tantalizing 10 feet in front of me. Finally, the reader accepted my fare, and I heard a cheerful 'ding' as the gates acquiesced.
I slumped into a seat on the train, a fifty year old man, surrounded by strangers going the same direction. As I felt the tension drain from me, I wondered if owning a car would aggravate my heart condition more than almost missing the train on a daily basis. I tried to meditate on the clack clack of the train moving on its track.
Suddenly a voice came over the sound system and jarred me out of my trance. "CENTral Squaaare," it proclaimed, in the theatrical manner of a ringleader announcing its star attraction, or perhaps a ghost beckoning me into a haunted house. The conductor had purposely deepened his voice, and held out each syllable of the destination. A group of convivial toursists tittered in the corner, and several grizzled veterans of the city rolled their eyes. I found myself smiling, along with many other riders, at the silly and outrageous conductor, who sounded like a child playing with a toy train set rather than a grown man, a member of a union, a professional working for time and a half.
Then I experienced a rare moment, when the traffic signal in my head turns green, and I have a thought that is both true and causes me to see the world in a new way. The conductor of the subway train broke rank and poked a hole in our somber routine. As city dwellers, we willingly fade into the shadows every time we set foot outside into the urban exterior. We put on our poker faces, revealing nothing, and hope we are not disturbed. The conductor's behavior was harmless, but profoundly out of step with convention, which is why it touched a nerve with everyone on the train. Whatever the reaction, not a soul was left unmoved.
In the end, people are social animals. Our deepest desire is to break through the barriers that separate us, to feel a part of a whole. Most people do this on a small scale, with intimate friends, lovers, and family. But when we do it on a grand scale, when we can reach out and communicate with a large group of people, in a way that is interactive, and visceral, we call this art. When we both lose ourselves and recognize ourselves in a piece of writing, music, or performance, or in a painting, both the consumer and the producer of art are really just trying to be close to everybody, all at once.
As I tried to parse my reaction to the conductor's outburst, I decided I appreciated it, for uniting my fellow riders and I in more than the general drift of our locomotion. In this, at least, he was an artist.
I slumped into a seat on the train, a fifty year old man, surrounded by strangers going the same direction. As I felt the tension drain from me, I wondered if owning a car would aggravate my heart condition more than almost missing the train on a daily basis. I tried to meditate on the clack clack of the train moving on its track.
Suddenly a voice came over the sound system and jarred me out of my trance. "CENTral Squaaare," it proclaimed, in the theatrical manner of a ringleader announcing its star attraction, or perhaps a ghost beckoning me into a haunted house. The conductor had purposely deepened his voice, and held out each syllable of the destination. A group of convivial toursists tittered in the corner, and several grizzled veterans of the city rolled their eyes. I found myself smiling, along with many other riders, at the silly and outrageous conductor, who sounded like a child playing with a toy train set rather than a grown man, a member of a union, a professional working for time and a half.
Then I experienced a rare moment, when the traffic signal in my head turns green, and I have a thought that is both true and causes me to see the world in a new way. The conductor of the subway train broke rank and poked a hole in our somber routine. As city dwellers, we willingly fade into the shadows every time we set foot outside into the urban exterior. We put on our poker faces, revealing nothing, and hope we are not disturbed. The conductor's behavior was harmless, but profoundly out of step with convention, which is why it touched a nerve with everyone on the train. Whatever the reaction, not a soul was left unmoved.
In the end, people are social animals. Our deepest desire is to break through the barriers that separate us, to feel a part of a whole. Most people do this on a small scale, with intimate friends, lovers, and family. But when we do it on a grand scale, when we can reach out and communicate with a large group of people, in a way that is interactive, and visceral, we call this art. When we both lose ourselves and recognize ourselves in a piece of writing, music, or performance, or in a painting, both the consumer and the producer of art are really just trying to be close to everybody, all at once.
As I tried to parse my reaction to the conductor's outburst, I decided I appreciated it, for uniting my fellow riders and I in more than the general drift of our locomotion. In this, at least, he was an artist.
Friday, December 7, 2012
A Death Foretold
There's a great project started by Ryan North (of Dinosaur Comics fame) called Machine of Death. Basically, in one of the comics, T-Rex suggests the premise for a story (check it out!) where a machine is invented that predicts the manner in which you will die. The machine is always accurate, if a little vague. For example, a prediction of Joy could mean that you experience so much joy your heart gives out, or it could mean a lady named Joy shoots you.
People thought this was a cool idea and over 600 people submitted actual short stories. An edited anthology is now available and I've spent the day reading it. It is an excellent writing prompt. What death would it spit out for me, I wonder? Probably diabetes. My reaction would be to cycle between eating ridiculously healthily and binging uncontrollably on sweets, for circa 60 years, I would wager. Or perhaps I would not seek to know my death, and live a dignified life. My husband is rofl-ing after that sentence, I'm sure.
Or, imagine a world where everything is perfectly predicted, and the Machine of Death is actually the shoddiest in a whole series of machines that predict your job, your hobbies, your spouse, how many children you will have, your greatest fear and your greatest desire, all with perfect clarity of meaning. In that world, death is the only great surprise. All works of literature and art would be great tales of unexpected deaths.
People thought this was a cool idea and over 600 people submitted actual short stories. An edited anthology is now available and I've spent the day reading it. It is an excellent writing prompt. What death would it spit out for me, I wonder? Probably diabetes. My reaction would be to cycle between eating ridiculously healthily and binging uncontrollably on sweets, for circa 60 years, I would wager. Or perhaps I would not seek to know my death, and live a dignified life. My husband is rofl-ing after that sentence, I'm sure.
Or, imagine a world where everything is perfectly predicted, and the Machine of Death is actually the shoddiest in a whole series of machines that predict your job, your hobbies, your spouse, how many children you will have, your greatest fear and your greatest desire, all with perfect clarity of meaning. In that world, death is the only great surprise. All works of literature and art would be great tales of unexpected deaths.
Thursday, December 6, 2012
The Thousand Betrayals: The Touch
Anybody who knows me knows that I am obsessed with adultery. Being betrayed by the person you most trust, being humiliated, rejected, and alone... I don't really understand why every book ever is not written on this topic.
I may nod my head and smile when you bring up other artistic subjects like social commentary, and spiritual enlightenment, yeah yeah. But my guilty, indulgent inner toddler wants what it wants. I want the suffering, the treachery, and occasionally, the poetic justice.
Given that I spend minimum half an hour a day imagining scenarios in which I catch my husband cheating on me, I figured I should channel that into productive energy and blog posts. Thus the idea for the series The Thousand Betrayals. Each post in this series will be related to infidelity. It might be a story, or even just a scenario. It might be research on infidelity. It might be celebrity gossip. There are no wrong answers people. This is blogging! And yes, I was wearing a flowing cape and kicking another blogger into a bottomless pit while I typed that.
Today's story: The Touch
It had been a while since we had sex. The dry spells were more common since the baby. We were so busy with groceries and dishes, who was taking the baby to daycare? Who was giving the bath tonight and who was putting the baby to sleep? What about work? We still have to do that? Weeks came and went with barely a peck on the cheek and a prayer for an extra hour of sleep. I knew it wasn't ideal, but I thought we were on the same page. We were a team. We were working together to build something. It never would have occurred to me that there was a problem until the touch.
It happened on his birthday. Idiot that I am, I baked him a fucking cake like Betty fucking Crocker and took it to his office. I walked in after lunch, just when the rhythms of the work day were settling into a steady flow. Typing, and chatting, his eyes smiled when I came in the room. I said hi to Andrew and Jen and Felix. Bernie and Linda were not in that day. Maggie the secretary said the boss was on her way, as his coworkers complimented me on my uneven frosting job. Chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, his favorite. I hate chocolate cake.
I was laying out the dishes and the silverware, fussing at the cake and looking around when I saw Jen come up from behind him and touch him on his shoulder as he sat at his desk. She showed him something on her cellphone. She was smiling, and leaning in. The way he nodded once and then turned back to his computer, studiously, as if trying to ignore her, made my skin grow cold and my palms start to sweat.
That touch. That touch on his shoulder. So familiar, so warm and intimate. How many conversations had they had together, how long had he known her? How many hours had they been alone? I barely knew her name! How could anybody so foreign to me be juxtaposed with the person nearest to me, and touching him? It made no sense.
But it was his indifference that let me know, and once I knew, it was like the wolf blew my house down. I was exposed and raw, seconds from crying. His gaze locked onto my gaze from across the room, the grief written plainly on my face. He looked worried, perhaps panicked. I excused myself and told everybody to sing Happy Birthday without me.
Afterward he came and found me in the bathroom. "What's going on?" he wanted to know. "I think you know," I said. And he did.
I may nod my head and smile when you bring up other artistic subjects like social commentary, and spiritual enlightenment, yeah yeah. But my guilty, indulgent inner toddler wants what it wants. I want the suffering, the treachery, and occasionally, the poetic justice.
Given that I spend minimum half an hour a day imagining scenarios in which I catch my husband cheating on me, I figured I should channel that into productive energy and blog posts. Thus the idea for the series The Thousand Betrayals. Each post in this series will be related to infidelity. It might be a story, or even just a scenario. It might be research on infidelity. It might be celebrity gossip. There are no wrong answers people. This is blogging! And yes, I was wearing a flowing cape and kicking another blogger into a bottomless pit while I typed that.
Today's story: The Touch
It had been a while since we had sex. The dry spells were more common since the baby. We were so busy with groceries and dishes, who was taking the baby to daycare? Who was giving the bath tonight and who was putting the baby to sleep? What about work? We still have to do that? Weeks came and went with barely a peck on the cheek and a prayer for an extra hour of sleep. I knew it wasn't ideal, but I thought we were on the same page. We were a team. We were working together to build something. It never would have occurred to me that there was a problem until the touch.
It happened on his birthday. Idiot that I am, I baked him a fucking cake like Betty fucking Crocker and took it to his office. I walked in after lunch, just when the rhythms of the work day were settling into a steady flow. Typing, and chatting, his eyes smiled when I came in the room. I said hi to Andrew and Jen and Felix. Bernie and Linda were not in that day. Maggie the secretary said the boss was on her way, as his coworkers complimented me on my uneven frosting job. Chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, his favorite. I hate chocolate cake.
I was laying out the dishes and the silverware, fussing at the cake and looking around when I saw Jen come up from behind him and touch him on his shoulder as he sat at his desk. She showed him something on her cellphone. She was smiling, and leaning in. The way he nodded once and then turned back to his computer, studiously, as if trying to ignore her, made my skin grow cold and my palms start to sweat.
That touch. That touch on his shoulder. So familiar, so warm and intimate. How many conversations had they had together, how long had he known her? How many hours had they been alone? I barely knew her name! How could anybody so foreign to me be juxtaposed with the person nearest to me, and touching him? It made no sense.
But it was his indifference that let me know, and once I knew, it was like the wolf blew my house down. I was exposed and raw, seconds from crying. His gaze locked onto my gaze from across the room, the grief written plainly on my face. He looked worried, perhaps panicked. I excused myself and told everybody to sing Happy Birthday without me.
Afterward he came and found me in the bathroom. "What's going on?" he wanted to know. "I think you know," I said. And he did.
Wednesday, December 5, 2012
Location Choices in Couples: The Two-Body Problem
I spent a few minutes (OK, hours) yesterday reading about how to make my blog more popular. It was a funny exercise since I am actively trying to avoid anybody finding out about this blog. The thought of my colleagues or my mother reading this mortifies me. Still, since I want to be a writer and a writer ostensibly has to promote herself, I did a little preliminary research.
Many blogs are not exclusively about navel-gazing, but offer useful advice or information. This is a calculated strategy in order to attract more eyeballs to said blog. In fact, a common approach is to blog about one's area of expertise. Given that I have, let's see, 20 years of education and counting, there must be something I know about. Right? ...Anything? Bueller?
It turns out that my lengthy education has done little more than give me mush for brains but here, for my lone reader's enjoyment (hi hubby!), is something I wish I knew about: the two-body problem.
What is the two-body problem? Well, in engineering/science it is something much more complicated that I am not qualified to talk about, but in social science it is about finding jobs in the same place for two people. Not too long ago married women generally did very little work outside of the household and most married men found jobs in the labor market in order to bring home some wages and support their family. If the husband needed to move somewhere else for a job, the wife and kids went with him, no problem. That all changed last century when more and more women began to work outside the home. Today, most households with married or co-habitating couples are dual income, with both partners working.
So how has this affected mobility patterns? Do people move less? More? Does it vary by income level? I don't know! But here is some stuff to mull over: Alan Benson at MIT has found that women tend to sort into jobs that are geographically dispersed, prior to marriage. In other words, before they get married, they choose careers that exist everywhere (think teachers, nurses, administrative assistants). Men, on the other hand, choose careers that are geographically clustered; they exist in only a few cities (think Wall Street and Silicon Valley). This results in heterosexual couples tending to move for the husband's job since the wife's job is more flexible. Another nasty side-effect is that the wife tends to take a hit in wages every time the couple moves, since she is the "trailing" spouse who is accommodating her partner's career rather than maximizing her own career prospects.
If both partners have geographically dispersed jobs, then the couple seems to move less often. If both partners have geographically clustered jobs it's unclear how things would play out. However, what is clear is that either way solving the two-body problem is easier if the couple lives in a big city. This is supported by Dora Costa's paper "Power Couples: Changes in the Locational Choice of the College Educated, 1940-1990." She finds that educated couples tend to live in large metropolitan areas and argues that the driving force behind this is the co-location problem. Bad news for small cities?
Maybe. But I can see at least one reason that it might go the other way around. If one spouse has a good job in a small city, they might anchor a highly educated partner there. If that partner would otherwise have gone to a bigger city, the co-location problem could be a boon for cities that would have trouble attracting educated workers otherwise. I know of some universities that have academic superstars in their departments who would have been poached had it not been for their spouse's job.
Here are the links to the papers I mentioned:
Power Couples: Changes in the Locational Choice of the College Educated, 1940-1990
Re-Thinking the Two-Body Problem: The Segregation of Women into Geographically Dispersed Occupations
Many blogs are not exclusively about navel-gazing, but offer useful advice or information. This is a calculated strategy in order to attract more eyeballs to said blog. In fact, a common approach is to blog about one's area of expertise. Given that I have, let's see, 20 years of education and counting, there must be something I know about. Right? ...Anything? Bueller?
It turns out that my lengthy education has done little more than give me mush for brains but here, for my lone reader's enjoyment (hi hubby!), is something I wish I knew about: the two-body problem.
What is the two-body problem? Well, in engineering/science it is something much more complicated that I am not qualified to talk about, but in social science it is about finding jobs in the same place for two people. Not too long ago married women generally did very little work outside of the household and most married men found jobs in the labor market in order to bring home some wages and support their family. If the husband needed to move somewhere else for a job, the wife and kids went with him, no problem. That all changed last century when more and more women began to work outside the home. Today, most households with married or co-habitating couples are dual income, with both partners working.
So how has this affected mobility patterns? Do people move less? More? Does it vary by income level? I don't know! But here is some stuff to mull over: Alan Benson at MIT has found that women tend to sort into jobs that are geographically dispersed, prior to marriage. In other words, before they get married, they choose careers that exist everywhere (think teachers, nurses, administrative assistants). Men, on the other hand, choose careers that are geographically clustered; they exist in only a few cities (think Wall Street and Silicon Valley). This results in heterosexual couples tending to move for the husband's job since the wife's job is more flexible. Another nasty side-effect is that the wife tends to take a hit in wages every time the couple moves, since she is the "trailing" spouse who is accommodating her partner's career rather than maximizing her own career prospects.
If both partners have geographically dispersed jobs, then the couple seems to move less often. If both partners have geographically clustered jobs it's unclear how things would play out. However, what is clear is that either way solving the two-body problem is easier if the couple lives in a big city. This is supported by Dora Costa's paper "Power Couples: Changes in the Locational Choice of the College Educated, 1940-1990." She finds that educated couples tend to live in large metropolitan areas and argues that the driving force behind this is the co-location problem. Bad news for small cities?
Maybe. But I can see at least one reason that it might go the other way around. If one spouse has a good job in a small city, they might anchor a highly educated partner there. If that partner would otherwise have gone to a bigger city, the co-location problem could be a boon for cities that would have trouble attracting educated workers otherwise. I know of some universities that have academic superstars in their departments who would have been poached had it not been for their spouse's job.
Here are the links to the papers I mentioned:
Power Couples: Changes in the Locational Choice of the College Educated, 1940-1990
Re-Thinking the Two-Body Problem: The Segregation of Women into Geographically Dispersed Occupations
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Confession
I have always thought blogging was stupid.
It is narcissistic to think that the world wants to read my diary. I take solace in the fact that the internet is large and nobody but my husband knows I am doing this right now. Of course, months from now, years from now, maybe somebody else will stumble on this blog and I have to give them something to look at. Blogging is like reality television, we watch it for the blood in the water. The scandal. We are shameless rubberneckers.
So here it is, the entertainment portion of today's show, my spectacle: I fingered a cat. I did! I stuck my fingers in a cat's anus and got off on it. Can you imagine? I finger-raped a poor animal.
God, I am so glad that I didn't actually do that. Even typing it made me hate myself. But I bet you hated me for a moment, or maybe you were aroused (pervert!). Either way that is some quality TV.
Now for the educational part of the show...what? You thought this was all low-brow? Not so! Thanks to Big Government we have the Children's Television Act of 1990 and I am required by law to broadcast at least 3 hours a week of core educational programming. Never mind that this isn't a television or that I don't intend for any children to see this (ever).
Ok...this is why blogging is stupid. Because I am talking to myself and it's all crazy talk.
It is narcissistic to think that the world wants to read my diary. I take solace in the fact that the internet is large and nobody but my husband knows I am doing this right now. Of course, months from now, years from now, maybe somebody else will stumble on this blog and I have to give them something to look at. Blogging is like reality television, we watch it for the blood in the water. The scandal. We are shameless rubberneckers.
So here it is, the entertainment portion of today's show, my spectacle: I fingered a cat. I did! I stuck my fingers in a cat's anus and got off on it. Can you imagine? I finger-raped a poor animal.
God, I am so glad that I didn't actually do that. Even typing it made me hate myself. But I bet you hated me for a moment, or maybe you were aroused (pervert!). Either way that is some quality TV.
Now for the educational part of the show...what? You thought this was all low-brow? Not so! Thanks to Big Government we have the Children's Television Act of 1990 and I am required by law to broadcast at least 3 hours a week of core educational programming. Never mind that this isn't a television or that I don't intend for any children to see this (ever).
Ok...this is why blogging is stupid. Because I am talking to myself and it's all crazy talk.
Monday, December 3, 2012
Introduction
A crazy thought popped into my head the other day, and I tried desperately to put it back. But thinking is like Pandora's box. The creatures let loose into the world by your brain will never be put back safely and neatly into the the recesses of your memory. They can't be un-thought.
What was this dangerous, insidious thought? Here I was, minding my own business, babysitting my kid at the public library when I thought, I should write a book! A book. The madness of it. I shudder to recall this point in my life because it marks a descent into a world I can not turn back from, a world filled with grief and struggle.
At first, it was a hobby. I did it intermittently, sporadically. Then I thought, I should improve my writing skills. So I took a writing class, and I wrote a little bit more: a handful of pages here, a couple more pages later that week, and a few more next month. Before I knew it, my job, which was perfectly reasonable before, was no longer any fun. I wanted to write. I wanted to be a writer.
What stuns me even now is the rapidity of the transformation. No more than six months between the initial thought and the cataclysmic upheaval of my life. Before that fateful moment in the public library with my daughter, I had often sighed with relief that I wasn't a writer. Who would want to do something so hard, so risky? Not me, I was sure.
Now here I am on the cusp of leaving my career behind, of diving into uncertainty without any assurance that I will be OK, in fact, with the nagging feeling that I will never be OK again.
This is my blog. It is about how I am trying to be a writer. I started it because the Internet says that is what writers do and I am grasping for straws.
What was this dangerous, insidious thought? Here I was, minding my own business, babysitting my kid at the public library when I thought, I should write a book! A book. The madness of it. I shudder to recall this point in my life because it marks a descent into a world I can not turn back from, a world filled with grief and struggle.
At first, it was a hobby. I did it intermittently, sporadically. Then I thought, I should improve my writing skills. So I took a writing class, and I wrote a little bit more: a handful of pages here, a couple more pages later that week, and a few more next month. Before I knew it, my job, which was perfectly reasonable before, was no longer any fun. I wanted to write. I wanted to be a writer.
What stuns me even now is the rapidity of the transformation. No more than six months between the initial thought and the cataclysmic upheaval of my life. Before that fateful moment in the public library with my daughter, I had often sighed with relief that I wasn't a writer. Who would want to do something so hard, so risky? Not me, I was sure.
Now here I am on the cusp of leaving my career behind, of diving into uncertainty without any assurance that I will be OK, in fact, with the nagging feeling that I will never be OK again.
This is my blog. It is about how I am trying to be a writer. I started it because the Internet says that is what writers do and I am grasping for straws.
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