just stuff.

even though i’m not graduating, i’m still feeling the heavy pressure (anticipation?) of grad school, acceptance letters, making choices – all that good stuff. i’m accutely aware, with every thing that i produce now, of how the consequences will weigh on later. i think i’m learning to make the right choices, but i know i’m learning to love academia and appreciate the opportunities.

last night at work i met the most interesting woman, who joined me in the hotel lobby after a few glasses of wine. she was waiting for a blind-date and i was, of course, doing next to nothing and we chatted about astrology and dating and, most interestingly, a woman’s right to choose in the realm of career and family. it was funny and strange(!) to have such a candid conversation, but she was a libra after all. she gave up her academic career to marry an unsavoury man and produce a wonderful daughter – whom she described as intelligent beyond her wildest conceptions and hugely talented at playing music and writing (and only eight-years-old!) – and while she never explicity expressed regret, she hinted that she felt that she had missed out on something after not choosing that other path, the ominous and always looming other path.

i’ve already been thinking so much about career and family, the roles we fill and desperately stray from, especially after that last issue of bitch which was so mother-centric. it’s funny to imagine that we are still fighting and trying to scrub away those stigmas of motherhood vs. the other and pitting the two against each other. or else touting that other option of everything all at once which is unrealistic and conforms to a whole other set of ideologies about women. it seems silly that such a pressure, the pressure to choose and make the right choice – according to your social scene, community, family, whatever – is still heavy and out there, affecting women in their late twenties and early thirties. we’re not so enlightened! but at least we’re talking about it and not entirely banishing the creative and unconventional women to obscurity and that has to mean something.

i worry sometimes that we’re regressing to a time i’ve never known in my short life, where women are assumed to take on conventional roles. because for every interesting, crafty, resourceful, intelligent woman or mother or student i meet, there are ten more women right around the corner who still see higher education as the way to, or hinderance of, their mr. right. and there is a generation of girls growing up, only a few years shy of graduating highschool, wearing tee shirts that say blondes have more fun or my boyfriend is out of town and that shifts the debate entirely. i would love to believe that the way of life being sold to the younger generation is just a faze but it has all the markings of a new culture, one to be appropriated by girls and women for years to come. i don’t want my choices or future or femininity, for that matter, sold to me in a glossier package and i definitely don’t want to see a regression for those who come after us.

without trying to plug or push some feminist agenda this: www.themissgproject.org is seeming more and more like the educated choice. to rewrite the structure of and content of education could change the bigger picture! i can’t wait for a time when there are more answers than questions and choices not grounded in ambivalence and dominant ideologies.