A Random Assortment

~ An old professor of mine writes about the tension between self-focused pursuit of excellence and other-focused family life. From her article, "No happy harmony: Career and motherhood will always tragically conflict":

Both the ethical imperatives I’ve described—“must work” and “must stay at home”—reflect noble desires, the one for talents fully used and the other for the vocation of motherhood. But I worry that both are too often promoted ideologically, prescribed as answers to the anxieties young women naturally feel about what they should do. This problem is especially pressing for those high-achieving college students I have been describing, who cannot imagine doing anything—be it career or motherhood—halfheartedly.

It’s the tacit denial of the tragedy of the human condition that I’ve come to resent in the contemporary literature about “balancing” career and family. This literature is full of demands for Justice and Equality, its authors motivated by ideas of social perfection: to finally place a sufficient number of women in the ranks of management and government and to effect true gender equality in the workplace as a whole. Engaged on a quest to change the world, they write with a fervor generated by a political ideal and employ the language of political advocacy, as if the divided desires of our souls can be unified by Reform and Revolution. There is a solution for everything, they imply; we just haven’t found it yet.

But this simply isn’t so. I know from personal experience that this conflict in the soul does not go away, no matter how pleasant and accommodating our colleagues may be, or how flexible our schedules. We are limited, embodied creatures. These limits mean that we cannot do everything to its fullest extent at once, and certain things we may not be able to do at all. The tragic aspect of this is that both excellence and nurture are real, vital goods and that the full pursuit of one often, and perhaps inevitably, forecloses fully pursuing the other. 

This is very interesting. I think that my complaints might be small: A) While I certainly don't think that life is some Edenic ideal, I also don't think it's a tragedy. I don't think that God calls you to things that are impossible. Complicated, yes (and full of trade-offs); impossible, no. B) I think that all of this is true for men. I think it does men a disservice when we discuss work/family tensions without them. Aren't we all called both to be excellent and to serve others, both in our family and in our community?

~ Ah, "The Newsroom":

Sorkin is often presented as one of the auteurs of modern television, an innovator and an original voice. But he’s more logically placed in a school of showrunners who favor patterspeak, point-counterpoint, and dialogue-driven tributes to the era of screwball romance. Some of this banter is intelligent; just as often, however, it’s artificial intelligence, predicated on the notion that more words equals smarter. Besides Sorkin, these creators include Shonda Rhimes (whose Washington melodrama, “Scandal,” employs cast members from “The West Wing”); Amy Sherman-Palladino, of “The Gilmore Girls” (and the appealing new “Bunheads”); and David E. Kelley, who created “Ally McBeal” and “Boston Legal.” Sorkin is supposed to be on a different level from his peers: longer words, worldlier topics. 

I thought that Sorkin's method (which it's delightful to compare to "The Gilmore Girls"!) worked much better in "The West Wing." In "The West Wing" it felt fresh; in "The Newsroom" it feels just like the same old thing in a new setting. Like "The Gilmore Girls," when you rely on just one form of dialogue, it gets old and stylized after a while.

And, while some actors can get the method, some can't: Olivia Munn (Sloan Sabbith)'s delivery frequently makes me cringe.

Sure, there are over-the-top pious, pull-at-your-heart-strings lectures that are scattered liberally throughout the show, but it's the dialogue that really gets under my skin.

~ The birth story of a friend, filled with (good) drama and entertainingly told (the best kind of birth stories are the ones where the mother makes it to the hospital just in time). On her conversation with her husband on the way to the hospital:

(For the record, I distinctly remember speaking at least two other times: once to tell him he was doing a good job driving (it seemed like an appropriately encouraging thing to say at the time) and once when he (in helpful birth-coach mode) tried to encourage me to relax, and I told him that my being tense was holding the baby in. I stand by this statement.)