Emma Bowen is a student of design history, and a world traveler extraordinaire. She has a master’s degree in the history of decorative arts and design and teaches courses at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City. She can discourse with knowledge and passion on the domestic design of Eastern European nomadic Roma and subversive printmaking during the Mexican Revolution. But she has always had another love: baking. Alongside her design studies, she has maintained a steady stream of catering jobs and special baking projects. (Full disclosure here: Emma baked our wedding cake. It was heavenly.)
I visited Emma in New York a couple of years ago and she confessed to a pie-in-the sky idea: starting a baking business that would deliver treats to people’s homes on a weekly basis. She had a gleam in her eye when describing this plan, but she was in the midst of graduate school and preparing for international travel. I told her it sounded like a great idea, and promptly forgot all about it. read more…
I’ve written before about doing what you love. From the time we are very small we are told to follow our dreams, but what does this advice really mean? It is the stuff of greeting cards and commencement speeches—uplifting but empty. Some people are lucky enough to find a calling early in life—one that leads them down a linear path and results in a lucrative career. But the majority of us muddle around a lot. We guess when choosing majors and jobs. We try to squash our interests into neat categories. We have schizophrenic resumes.
I have recently abandoned the idea of a tidy career. Sometimes I long for a real job title—one that elicits respectful nods at cocktail parties. But if there was really a single job that encompassed all my interests, I think I would have found it by now, so my new attitude is, ‘the more the merrier!’ I am a career polygamist. read more…
Elite education is overrated. I went to an Ivy League university. I enjoyed it. I broadened my horizons, met brilliant people, and had transformative intellectual experiences, just like I was supposed to do. I learned how to study, and where my strengths lie, and that there are things (like advanced mathematics) that I am really not cut out to do. My degree has opened doors for me, and when I mention the name of my alma mater people always look impressed.
But there is a cost to choosing such an ambition-drenched environment. It is a cost that means little when you’re eighteen and itchy, a cost whose full measure I am only learning now. It comes from consistently choosing opportunity over community, among peers who all do the same. read more…
I have a confession: I’m sick of the healthcare debate. But wait, it gets worse. I’ve pretty much been apathetic about it all along. I know I should care. I wish I could summon more bile about it, but I just can’t.
I’m not proud of this, but I also know I’m not alone. In the privacy of backyards and living rooms, some very smart and politically engaged friends have admitted to feeling the same way. I suspect we are symptomatic of the challenges inherent in tackling this issue.
Here are three reasons why I’ve been tuning out:
1. I’m covered–My health insurance is pretty good and pretty cheap. Not great, but certainly good enough that I’m among the majority of Americans who count themselves satisfied with their current health plan. Healthcare is not an issue that keeps me up at night. This is a luxury–I know plenty of people who do lose sleep (and half their paychecks) over it. I recognize that the concerns about cost and quality of care are real, and that the astronomical number of people without health insurance is both a tragedy and a shame. But achieving meaningful reform when most people are satisfied with their personal status quo is always going to be an uphill battle. read more…
An update for those of you wondering how The Mentor Challenge is going: I’ve got one! I asked, she said yes. We’re going to meet in September. I’m as giddy as a girl with a date to the prom.
I also took my student assistant out for coffee to talk about her career goals and what she can do to build her skills and resume in this job.
How’s the mentorship quest going for all of you?
Most people who saw Julie and Julia probably went home thinking about Boeuf a la Bourguignonne, but not me. I went home thinking about blogging.
I recognize that this is Hollywood, but what a tale–ordinary girl has a good idea, starts a blog, writes for a while, and is suddenly inundated with calls from big reporters and offers of book deals. Her life is later made into a blockbuster movie with famous actors.
The key, of course, is the idea. (And also the cooking, I suppose.) Julie Powell’s year-long project of tackling all 524 recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking in her tiny apartment kitchen was surely a gimmick and a stunt, as it has disparagingly been called. But it was a good one. read more…
I have written before about the tradeoffs that are ubiquitous in households with careers and kids. I’m okay with tradeoffs. But a recent article in the New York Times brought up a whopper of a tradeoff–one that will define a generation, and one that our family has yet to fully grapple with: the impact of technology on family life.
My husband and I, like many of our peers, have squeezed and juggled our careers to make it possible for each of us to spend some weekday time at home with our daughter (and, not incidentally, reduce our daycare expenses). This flexibility is a blessing, and also a luxury. But it is not without cost. To compensate for lost daytime hours, we are constantly tempted to sneak work into family times, and we’re able to do that thanks to high-speed internet. read more…
There is a bulletin board in the women’s bathroom at my office. It is full of the inevitable pages from those tear-off calendars, on topics like chocolate and PMS. But today a new printout caught my eye. It had a cute picture of a little boy wearing a crown, and it was titled What Are You the King Of? (It came from the internet, of course–from a blog.)
Basically, the gist is that a little kid shows up to a get-together at the author’s house wearing a crown and announces that he is the King of Pretending, which over the course of the day he proves, in fact, to be. And the take-away lesson is that we should celebrate our talents and cultivate them, rather than trying to shore up our weaknesses. read more…
I’ve been thinking a lot about mentorship lately. I haven’t written about it because most of what I’ve been thinking boils down to this: I want it, and I don’t really have it, and I’m not sure how to get it. And that doesn’t make for a very scintillating blog post.
There’s tons of research showing the importance of mentors, in everything from sports to legal careers to the military. I’ve seen its value in my own life–when I’m focused and jazzed about a project there is usually someone in the wings inspiring me and guiding me and cheering me on.
Mentors are valuable in many areas of life, but what I seek right now is career mentoring. I don’t mean to imply that I don’t have any professional mentors at all. I have quite a few “silent mentors”–people I admire who I watch and try to learn from. But some of them don’t know I exist, and none of them know I am spying on them. I also have friends who I talk shop with–we hash things out and learn from each other. This is more of a peer relationship, though. read more…
An egalitarian marriage is the gold standard, right? Who wouldn’t want to split parenting and household duties down the middle? No archaic gender roles, no downtrodden spouse, no distant parent… How modern! How admirable!
Our family works pretty much this way and I can’t imagine doing it otherwise. We never consciously decided that we wanted to use this model–it just came naturally to us. We’re philosophically committed to equality and fairness. But we are also both opinionated and bad at ceding control, which hints at the flaw in this system. In our house it is exemplified by the Stroller Incident.
When our daughter was a few months old we traipsed out to baby big-box land to buy a stroller. And we stayed there for over three hours. We tested every model in the store. We debated the merits of their size, steering and storage capacity. We agonized over price and portability. Six different sales associates tried to help us, and all, eventually, gave up. We didn’t really argue, but by the time we finally chose and purchased one we were completely fed up with ourselves and each other. It’s just a stroller, for heaven’s sake! read more…