I think Exit Wounds by Charles McLeod is one of the greatest short stories ever. Holy Week by Deborah Eisenberg is another favorite. I loved Black Box by Jennifer Egan. I also like Indian Camp by Ernest Hemmingway:

“Oh, Daddy, can’t you give her something to make her stop screaming?” asked Nick. “No. I haven’t any anaesthetic,” his father said. “But her screams are not important. I don’t hear them because they are not important.”

I must too.

1. I think the most ridiculous part of the piece is the fantasy of mothers that somehow they impact their children to such a degree that it is important for them to forego their own lives, their own importance, their ability to impact the world.

I smirked when I read that she thinks she’s going to impact her rebellious teenage son by just being around more. Oh I so doubt this is true.

It’s an American idea of mothering, and often results in spoiled, maladjusted children.

The most well-adjusted, nicest, quite brilliant, very accomplished, happiest, and most confidant person I know had a mother that conceived him during an orgy. He has no idea who his father is. She raised him as a single mother, was poor, held marginal jobs, he was alone a lot as a child, and he turned out truly dazzling.

The second most well-adjusted person I know had a mother that intensely wanted him to succeed, and put an insane amount of pressure on him. She worked as a high powered biotech executive. His father was an immigrant from a Eastern European country where he was a famous filmmaker, but when he got to America he could no longer get funding for his films (in Eastern Europe all his films were funded by the government.) He was depressed and a failure his entire life. Their son turned out incredible, with no bitterness towards his parents, and is successful, brilliant, and very happily married.

I know a mother who has been a stay at home mother her whole life, is wealthy, a wonderful person and quite involved in her children’s life. Her son is lazy, bored, and entirely without passion.

Richard Branson’s mother was awful, perhaps borderline abusive: she used to do things like drop him off a mile from their house and make him walk home. He turned out well.

My own mother worked full time, was the primary breadwinner in the family, and raised one maladjusted child (me) and two well-adjusted children (my sisters).

So the idea that children need their parents to be perfect and at home is a bit silly. And even by being away the children might miss her, but she’s teaching them other values: the importance of public service. Plus, she can talk to her children every day: email and text them and Skype them.

To give up a high-powered job just because she thinks her teenage boy needs his mummy is insane. And a ruse I think: she really gave up her job because she’d lose tenure at Princeton! And because she wanted to (meaning she wasn’t really fit for a high-powered job). High-powered jobs are hard, and not everyone can handle them. Not everyone is brilliant enough for them. And the Peter Principle means that a lot of people will be promoted into high-powered jobs that really can’t handle them. Family is an easy excuse instead of admitting this to yourself.

Sheryl Sandberg is a wonderful mother and one of the best executives in the country. And she leaves work at 5:30pm.

2. The work world is not structured for women. But it could be. However, it won’t be until enough women make the sacrifice to get into the high-powered jobs where they are able to make these changes.

It’s why almost every Fortune 500 company has a gym, and only a few have childcare. The executives are 50 year old men, their doctors tell them they will have a heart attack if they don’t exercise, they invest in a gym. It will take a woman to do this.

Workplaces were structured for a family unit where the men worked and the women stayed home. The world is no longer like that, and they need to be restructured. It will make corporations more efficient too. A few months ago I started a job where I telecommute unless I have a meeting, and I cannot believe how much more productive I am at home than the office. Also, how much it has impacted the quality of my life. And not only because i’m not spending 30 minutes to 2 hours commuting every day. I do my work when I feel like it, and I meet every deadline. And I’m happy.

Feminism is when you take action in a way that makes the world better for all women, in my definition. And every woman should take responsibility for this in her own way.

But women, the collective lot of us, need some women to be high-powered. We need women who won’t quit, who will go the distance.

I find it disgusting when a woman that has gone to Harvard or one of the other world’s best highly competitive universities designed to train the powerful quits and becomes a mom. She took a space where another woman that was going to go the distance could have improved her career.

3. If women want to “have it all”, like men supposedly do, then they can become like men. Marry a Mr. Mom. Have the best of both worlds. Sure, you can’t get over the pregnancy and the breastfeeding period, so the workplace must truly accomodate this, but other than that men are perfectly able to take care of a family full-time.

In fact, if a woman wants to be high-powered, I think the best move she can make is to marry an unemployable man. A woman I know was in a relationship with a man that got fired from 3 barista jobs, a door-to-door political organizing job, and a few others. (Note: he is gainfully employed in a telemarketing sales job now that he’s kept for nearly a year.) I saw her situation propel her in her career. She took powerful jobs, she climbed the latter, and she negotiated her salary because she was supporting him. Women that marry wealthy men just aren’t as driven.

The truth is that men never “had it all”. Being the sole breadwinner is stressful; they did sacrifice time with their children. Men in high-powered positions sacrifice a lot. If women want to be in these positions, then they have to be willing to sacrifice too.

4. Ah, now this post is as long, wordy, and as poorly written as Anne-Marie’s.

Americans seem to have this unfounded idea that we’re “the greatest nation in the world” when on almost no ranking do we hold the #1 position. In healthcare, we’re #37. In maternal mortality, we’re #39. In women holding elected office, we’re #81. In number of patents obtained, we’re #2.

There are a few areas, however, where we are #1. They are almost all spending-related: we spend more money per capita for maternity care than any other country, and we spend more money on our military than the rest of the world combined. We also imprison more of our population than anywhere else in the world.

blakemasters:

Here are my class notes, typed in essay form, from Class 4 of CS183: Startup. Errors, omissions, and/or poor phrasing are my own. Credit for good substance and wording is Peter’s entirely.

CS183: Startup—Notes Essay—April 11—The Last Mover Advantage

I. Escaping Competition

The…

Lowell, Lowell, Lowell, Lowell /
Corn is the thing he does so well /

Philip Larkin

“…In youth we had pruned our aesthetic emotions hard back so that in man cases the had reverted to briar stock; we none of us wrote or read poetry or if we did it was of a kind which left unsatisfied those wistful half-romantic half aesthetic peculiarly British longings which in the past used to find expression in so man slim lambskin volumes. When the poetic mood was on us we turned to buildings and gave them the place which our fathers accorded Nature – to almost any building but particularly those in the classical tradition.

Whatever secretly we thought about our own work we professed in public to regard it as drudgery and our triumphs as successful impostures on the world at large. To speak otherwise would be to suggest that we were concerned with anyone else’s interest but our own…To write of someone loved of oneself loving above all of oneself being loved – how can these things be done with propriety? How can the be done at all.

Love that delights in weakness seeks out and fills the empty places and completes itself inits work of completion. Love which has its own life its hours of sleep and waking its health and sickness growth death and immortality its ignorance and knowledge experiment and master.

The algebra of fiction must reduce its problems to symbols if they are to be solvable at all. Iam shy of a book commended to me on the grounds that the characters are alive. There’s no place in literature for a live man solid and active…The alternative classical expedient isto take the whole man and reduce him to a manageable abstraction.

Set up our picture plain fix our point of vision make our figure 20 foot high or the size of a thumbnail he will be life-size on our canvas; hang our picture in the darkest corner our heaven will still be its one source of light. Beyond these limits lie the only trouser buttons and crepe hair with which futurists used to adorn their paintings. It is anyway in the classical way I have striven to write.

I had always been a one corpse man eschewing the blood transfusions which most of my rivals resorted to revitalise their flagging stories; moreover I eschewed anything that was remotely sordid or salacious… My corpses invariably were male solitary of high position unworldly and bloodless. I abhorred blunt instruments and features battered beyond recognition.

GV in ‘Death in the Dukeries’ was decapitated but only it will be remembered after he had been dead for some time through other causes. No character of mine ever writhed or vomited. On the other hand while avoiding blood I was tolerable free with the thunder. I despised a purely functional novel as I despised contemporary architecture; the girders and struts of the plot require adornment and concealment; I relish the masked buttresses false domes superfluous columns all the subterfuges of literary architecture and the plaster and gilt of its decoration.

A tenth of my writing or more went on stage effects: sudden eddies of cold air would strike my curtains and now and then when the sequence of emotions I planned for my readers required a moment of revulsion and terror I would kill an animal in atrocious circumstances…….The delicate fibres of a story suffer when it is chopped up into instalments…My ambition was to eradicate moneye as much as I could from my life and todo so required planning…

To produce something saleable in large quantities to the public which had absolutely nothing of myself in it; to sell something for which the kind of people I liked and respected would have a use…Their writing was painful – because I have an unhappy combination of being lazy and fastidious…indispensable austerity [where I write]…I was asleep by half-past-nine. In those circumstances the book progressed well. Family love and independence don’t go together… my father made me an allowance of 30 shilling a week for the first 3 years I was in London and he never forgave me never……..

I had not then learned to appreciate the massive defences of what people call the ‘borderline of sanity’ and I was at moments afraid he was going out of his mind…an element of persecution mania…”

Honestly, I’m not sure whether I’m happy or not. I never think about it. I do think about things I care about, and happiness is pretty low on that list.

I know it is the most modern of feelings to value happiness above all else, but I just can’t bring myself to do it.

Here is a list of things I value more than happiness (roughly in order):

1. Truth
2. Honesty
3. Freedom
4. Good manners
5. Being interesting/Funny
6. Kindness
7. Efficiency/Elegance
8. Beauty (in the world, around me)
9. Power (defined as the ability to change the world into something that’s more how you want it to be)
10. Diligence
11. Generosity
12. Creativity
13. Doing what you say you’ll do
14. Pleasure

Probably happiness is #15. But if any of the above made me unhappy, I’d still prefer to engage in them than be happy.