december 4

work ethic

Oooh. I missed yesterday. This does not bode well for the rest of the HoliDailies month. But really. I was on fire at work. Had a breakthrough with a client about their web content (finally!), interviewed a new information architect (love her!) and worked clear through ‘till 8. Got a lot done yesterday.

However. This has me thinking. I mean this, the fact that I work so much. And have no time or energy for anything else. Like eating. Or getting my hair cut. Or getting to the gym. Of course, I think about this all the time, and bitch about it, blah blah blah. But it wasn’t until cubiclegirl wrote about the guys in her office that I realized that may be the life I want, too. Guys who love their wives, their kids, their parents, work at a job that doesn’t keep them up nights and doesn’t call them into the office on the weekend. That sounds positively blissful to me right now.

On NPR yesterday morning they ran a piece about Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues and her new play, Necessary Targets, which was inspired by her experiences in Bosnia. There’s a line in it where a Bosnian woman asks a therapist, whose job she can’t quite wrap her head around, “Do Americans have conversations, or do they only work?"

Last Christmas I met a Russian woman, Elana, at a party. We talked about raising children, her life in Russia (she was a doctor, which in that country is the equivalent of a teacher, she said), how our husbands don’t have close friends of their own. The whole conversation was loosely based on our inner struggles with work life and family life (and I don’t even have kids yet!), supporting our husbands while trying to find our own time. She told me, very seriously, “Americans work harder than anyone.”

I brought all this up with A* last night while we sat on our front porch for our semi-regular smoke and glass of red wine. In was, literally, freezing outside, but sometimes this is the only time we get to have a few quiet moments together, without the phone ringing, without news of war coming through the radio, without frantically trying to keep up with dishes, vacuuming, laundry, cat boxes. What’s going to happen when we have kids?

I told him my memory of my conversation with Elana, the piece on the radio. I told him I realized this was me, that I was so driven to work work work that I actually resent the fact that my body isn’t capable of working efficiently for 14 hours straight.

He asked me if I really wanted to be able to work longer, just to be able to do it, or if I was actually frustrated because I can never get every thing done in a day that I’d like to get done. I told him it was the latter, I want to get more done, but really, if I could work 14, or more, hours a day, without falling down dead of a heart attack at 30, I probably would.

And that’s fucked up.

- december 4