PS: Follow me on Twitter!
*************************
Let your school-age children loose in the kitchen and this is what you get. (Simple Bites, via Addicted to Canning)
Do you have a "friendly incompetent" on your restaurant or retail staff? (Food Woolf)
Why it's both immoral and inhumane to oppose GM crops. (Mark Lynas)
Recipe Links:
Delicious and easy: Ginger Scallion Noodles with Shrimp. (Kalofagas) Bonus: Kalofagas Lamb Ribs.
A snap to put together: Chickpea and Eggplant Masala. (80 Breakfasts)
Off-Topic Links:
"Most women are past the idea that they measure themselves by money. But women are instead using respect as our measuring tool, which is just as dangerous." (Penelope Trunk)
Unlike fish, we humans have the ability to change our own water. (The Angry Therapist)
Do you have an interesting article or recipe? Want a little extra traffic at your blog? Send me an email!
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
6 comments:
Great reads this morning but the "Friendly Incompetent" was fantastic and really hit the mark! Going to share this one!
Thanks Colleen. Yep, Brooke over at Food Woolf is highly, highly reliable. She always writes good stuff.
Enjoy your weekend!
DK
I had to read the piece by Penelope Trunk, who I've never heard of before. And maybe that is proof that she is right: if a woman doesn't choose career over everything else 100% of the time, she is invisible.
But at my advanced age and after 23 years of doing the same work, work that might be considered a career except there is not chance for advancement *and that is precisely why I have stayed with it,* I just want to say ...
whence comes all this suffering? Why do women OR MEN care so much about what other people think?
Should I care what people think about my choice of work? If so, why?
My choice of work really does influence someone else's level of respect for me - I know this to be true. The fact that I have a well-paid office job grants me high status than if I had a low-paid service job.
But the job is incidental. It is not a personal quality. And it is my personal qualities (both natural and learned) that permit me to do this work.
So ... to what extent do we use a person's work as a shorthand expression of their personal qualities? What extent is appropriate? Is it useful, socially, to employ this shorthand?
As you can see I don't have many answers. I frankly don't give a sh*t what most people think of me or my life choices. I kind of feel bad that other people suffer over this so much.
Great comment Chacha. Really interesting thoughts.
I think one of the problems is how our culture celebrates fame, financial success and things like that. It makes us conclude that if we *don't* have these things, we're invisible.
But nobody's invisible. We all have our realm through which we can impact the lives of the people around us. It doesn't have to be solely through the professional realm.
I guess this has become super clear to me in the past few years as I've left the corporate world (and left behind the implied power and status I used to get from being in that world). I am grappling with these issues to some extent too.
DK
I thought that Penelope Trunk was ineteresting. I have also come to a point in my life where I try to care less what people think. Try.
But I do care. And I worry about the expectations. I'm an engineering manager. And I'm good at my job. And over the last 3 years, I have been pressed (by my company) to "move up". But I have a son and I didn't feel comfortable taking on jobs that would be 60+ hours a week, so I declined. I only took one promotion that I felt I could keep to a regular work week.
Then I had a second baby and cut back my hours, at the same time they give me MORE work. It's a struggle...work, and other working women sort of "expect" me to climb the ladder and break down barriers, especially in my industry. I am just not interested in doing that. I'm 42, and maybe when I'm 55 and my kids are older (and if I'm not unemployable by then), I'd be happy to be a director or a VP. But right here, right now, I want to be home by 4:30 pm so I can nurse the baby and cook dinner.
I remember being in my 20's and defining people by their work. I see people in their 20's who still believe that hard work is all it takes to succeed and make money. Nevermind that work, and life, aren't the same thing. My dad had a job that he enjoyed, but mostly, it was something that paid the bills. It didn't DEFINE him.
On a tangent, it still bugs me to read a lot of conservatives say that people who are poor are deadbeats, need to work harder, hey I went to graduate school... you know, not everyone can go to graduate school (for various reasons). And even if everyone here in the US was amazingly smart and hard working...SOMEBODY has to bag groceries, clean the toilets, and flip the burgers. I don't see how having those kinds of jobs should make you "less" of a person (or less deserving of healthcare).
I see a lot of engineers in their 50's and 60's, supposedly the "unemployables". Then ones who are gainfully employed are either men who have climbed the ladder or women. The women tend to be more flexible. They have leaned back to have children, changed jobs. They are more likely to still be in engineering, and built same-level skills instead of ladder-climbing skills.
The men who DIDN'T climb the ladder are harder to employ, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's just the limited # of people I've worked with.
I could quit my management job right now and go back to the fab processing wafers, and be deliriously happy.
After reading the comments on Penelope Trunk's blog I had to go back and read it. Wow! It is so on target...
Might not be the same take away that everyone else had but looking back on the stalled career I have now I think of the 100 hour work weeks. Of the school trips missed, dinners not cooked, birthdays and graduations that were missed. It is so sad that all that time was wasted at work. Yes, I did have to support the family but at what real expense?
One day I finally realized that I really didn't want it to read on my tombstone..."She worked a lot"! So is my career truly stalled or am I just heading in the right direction?
Post a Comment