Dichroic Reflections

in search of a Proper Job

Last night we had company staying over, lots of it: two cousins of Rudder’s, about our age, and three kids who are something like 6, 4 and almost 1. We’ve been getting to see the kids roughly twice a year, which is often enough for the older girls to remember us, but infrequent enough for them to have visibly changed each time.

They are so entirely delightful that it’s almost sad to see them grow up. The oldest now looks, moves, and sounds like a girl, rather than a "little girl". She’ll be reading soon (I gave them my spare copies of two Mary Poppins and two Pooh books, made redundant when I bought the hardbacks) and she can jump off the diving board into the deep end of our pool (with someone to catch her, more for reassurance than anything else). The baby does a lot of grinning and drooling (he’s teething) and managed to dump crumbs off every plate he could reach onto the floor, as we were eating pizza picnic-style. He wasn’t as willing to go to other people as he had been at four months, but made up for it by flashing all six teeth at anyone who would smile back. They are moving to Korea for two years, so we may need to get out there to visit, before they grow out of all knowing.

It was also good to see the adults. One of them, the one without the kids, has had her share of problems and been on some medications that make her very subdued. She was always a favorite of Rudder’s and his brother’s and it’s been good, in the past year, to see her getting back to something like her normal self.

The mother of the three children, who gave up her outside job a year and a half or so ago to devote full time to chlid rearing, is clearly in her Proper Job. She cares for her younger boy and the two girls with love and humor, and seems to have no itch to do anything other than exactly what she is doing, at least for the moment. She does it well, too, as proved by the charm and manners of the children. And note the neat segue to my next topic.

I’ve been rereading Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night, and as always, have been struck by the discussion of Proper Jobs and the architecture of marriage. It seems to hit me harder each time, which may be a signal of something not quite right in my own life. I have managed so far not to read passages aloud to Rudder, but only because he’s heard the best ones at least two or three times now.

I agree with DLS in not wanting a marriage in which one person is the job of the other one. Yuck. Rudder and I have constructed our own more on the Phoebe Tucker model, with occasional reachings into Harriet and Peter’s domain, in its high spots, and I’m very, very happy with that. (If the preceding paragraph made no sense, read Gaudy Night. Then follow with Busman’s Honeymoon. Good for you and tasty, too.)

My problem is more in the P. Job domain. It’s hard to pursue your life’s work, when you still haven’t figured out what that would be. I know some of the parameters: it’s not one of the helping-people professions. I don’t like people quite that much, especially in their weakest moments. It’s not programming or any similar hole-up-in-a-cubicle and keep-to-yourself jobs. I don’t like people that little, though I do enjoy solving technical problems. Words are involved, and writing; it’s not through any great effort of will or self-discipline that I update here every single day except when I’m out of town. But I don’t think I’m a frustrated novelist; I don’t have much itch to write fiction, and I’d rather comment on this world than create new ones.

I got an immense amount of satisfaction in my brief career as a linguistics grad student, and was sorely disappointed when job pressures forced me to drop out. The only Job I can see as an outgrowth of that is professor, though, and I don’t know if I’d like that or not. Teaching grad students, yes; doing research, maybe. Politics of academia and writing grant applications, no.

Maybe my Proper Job is exactly what I’m doing now, writing essays. (That would be more convincing if I actually wrote these entries as structured essays instead of rambling diary entries.) But is anyone paying for those?