Thursday 2013-05-02, 12:00am
Twitter as a labyrinth of people who vaguely known each other talking past everyone around them.
Twitter as a labyrinth of people who vaguely known each other talking past everyone around them.
One lesson to take from Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Not even a fairly average entry into the world of corporate advice books is immune from double standards.
Recently I was seated with four moms about my age at a baby shower. Some worked, some didn’t, but they had children in common. When the conversation moved on from sitting in a car for two hours to let a child sleep and dealing with other moms at daycare to ripping vaginas and cord-cutting, I reminded the ladies we were eating. They looked at me like I was an alien. Then one of the women asked me what I’d normally be doing on a Saturday—they had already reeled off lists of classes and activities—and I said, deadpan, “Yoga, then… whatever.” They laughed, all in on the big joke that I had nothing important to do. I wanted to say, “I might spend three hours on the phone with my mother trying to convince her to move to a single-story house, because I worry every night she’ll fall and kill herself.”
The workplace comedy 9 To 5 was an HBO staple when I was a kid, and I remember its more screwball scenes vividly—Lily Tomlin’s Violet Newstead, decked out like Snow White and surrounded by animated fauna, cheerfully sweetening her boss’s coffee with poison; Dolly Parton’s Doralee Rhodes, decked out like a cowgirl, whipping her lasso; Franklin Hart Jr., played by Dabney Coleman, swinging from the ceiling after an attempt to escape from the prison in which he’d been placed by three of his employees. The 45 of Parton’s peppy theme song, with the percussive typewriters and lyrics about (male) bosses serving as underminers who had the added bonus of being unpleasant, was one of the first singles I owned, and a bit of a rallying cry when things at my most recent gig got particularly unbearable thanks to politicking from self-interested, just-competent-enough colleagues. But when I watched it on a recent Saturday night, I was taken aback by how downright radical it seemed even now.