The brown dress project is so cool. The author's insights are amazing, her creativity is definitey something I'd like to emulate.
Other interesting links in a similar, though less performative, vein:
Frugal for life
Money and values
The Frugal Dutchess
mr. s and I were talking about BlogHer a bit more last night. Class and status and all that hoohaw, and about my effusive admiration for the women who so fearlessly (key word) write in their blogs every day, while I... do not. Some writing is easy for me, once I begin, but there are too many days when I haven't been writing anything at all. He countered with a comparison of what I'm writing versus what others are writing, and yes of course academic writing requires more work, it is more labor intensive and thus "valuable", but that's not the point I was making.
I know that my current position looks good from the outside, but there are a couple of things that prevent me from valuing it as much as other people seem to at times.
1. Money/occupation. The currency of the realm is professionalism (evidenced by income) and that's something that I don't really have because I'm in school. No real job, no child (parenting is important work), and no completed dissertation. Until it's finished, I feel like I'm in limbo, which kind of sucks. I know that writing the diss is my job, and that what I need most right now is an attitude adjustment about its value, but what I am on my worst days is a kid who's still in school.
2. Output vs. consumerism. Yeah, someday I'll be a doctor, but so what? Right now, I'm not, and I don't really value the process as much as others seem to, because there are a million people who have more and better stories than I do (just as there are a million people who could say the same about me), but they are telling theirs. Their stories and thoughts make me think, and I'm grateful to and for them.
What most impressed me about the various bloggers I met is that they are actively getting something outside of themselves on an almost daily basis, creating rather than consuming, and on days when I've only done the one rather than the other (or at least a much more balanced mix) I wind up feeling like a failure. (This is not unusual among dissertation writers, by the way. It's part of why the process is so awful.) Articulating this issue is one way of making peace with the process: there will be days when I don't write, and I need to stop equating my own output with personal worth.
This relates back to the apples and oranges point that mr. s. was trying to make above. My bind has been that I've been admiring the amount of work and thinking I see being done by the amazing women I met last weekend, while devaluing the type of interior work that I've been doing and need to continue before I'll have anything to write. Valuing both takes away from neither.
