Author Archives: Christene

Work For It

I have been a Britney Spears fan since she became popular about fifteen years ago (give or take). I have liked the majority of her songs, but I enjoy them for the sound and beat. When I want to feel inspired, or use music to express something I cannot do otherwise, I generally resort to Tina Dico or classics that have maintained their status not just due to their sound but also their message.Britney may have had a message at one point. If she did, I never got it. She is just fun.

However, her latest song came out, and for the first time, I felt inspired by Britney’s music.

For those of you who haven’t heard Work Bitch (the video is embedded below), the message is simple, but often overlooked: if you want to succeed, and have the things in life you want, you have to work for it.

You wanna hot body
You wanna Bugatti
You wanna Maserati
You better work bitch
 
 
You wanna Lamborghini
Sip martinis
Look hot in a bikini
You better work bitch
 
 
You wanna live fancy
Live in a big mansion
Party in France
You better work bitch


Her words are simple, grammatically incorrect, seemingly superficial, but actually quite accurate.

Yes, there are those who work hard but seem to be getting nowhere, never appreciated for their endeavors. And granted there are those who have things handed to them, with bitterness ensuing from others towards their welfare. But for the most part, those who we deem successful have worked hard to get where they are, even if they may no longer have to work, and can now reap the rewards of their labor. 

Even those who are not thought to deserve their wealth can be lumped into the working category. We have all heard the arguments against athletes and celebrities. But how much work have they put into their craft? They may have natural talents, but even those talents require thousands of hours of practice to perfect.

Not everyone can reach such extremes of success, but even many who do have the talent, intelligence, or myriad other skills, don’t become successful because they are too trapped in looking at the end result and incapable, or unwilling, to fathom what it entails to reach it.

Any time you want to see results, or achieve a goal (big or small), it won’t happen magically overnight. The higher you want to get, the more you have to climb.

A large part of the misconception is due to what is portrayed, which is the end result, ultimate success, without being privy to the journey there. Britney is one of the few in her genre who more or less details the reality – she doesn’t simply sing about how fun it is at the top, but rather points to the road there.

Success is a process, and it starts with work.

P.S. On a completely unrelated note, when I first heard this song I misheard a part of the lyrics as “Call me the Governor.” That is not what she is saying, however, I still think that line is awesome, and I may just begin using it. Yes folks, call me the governor.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/ConfessionsFromTheCrib

Too Much?

I am not sure where I got this from, but I have lived for a very long time with the idea that I must do everything, and do it well. Anything short of perfect is failure. For years I have been successful at balancing my life between work, school, family, and everything else. Which made it very difficult to admit that I am overwhelmed. Almost as if every semester brings on a new level of stress (yes, I live my life in semesters), adding a little bit more every time, unnoticeable at first, until I look back to a year ago and realize my workload and responsibilities, even outside of school, have tripled.

So I stopped sleeping, stopped functioning properly, and I think even my body is reacting to and rebelling against it. My hair either started falling out, or I am pulling it out, not sure. Thankfully I have plenty of it. But even more difficult is admitting to myself that I need to ask for help. I cannot in fact do it all, and somehow that is going to have to be okay.

What can I offload somewhere? Well, work is work, school is school, my kids are a priority, and the list continues with things that I can’t give up, and can’t really get help with.

I looked around and realized what I need help with is where I live. It is a mess. I mean, it is not dirty, since I am never home to get anything dirty. I guess that is a perk of being at work seventy hours per week. There are still stacks of things on the floor, things that need to be put away, an infinite amount of clothes, shoes, books, and general stuff, and I have a very finite amount of storage space. As in, none.

Tomorrow I am seeing Mary, and picked a place down the street to have dinner. We were all excited and she was going to come over for the first time. I panicked. Where do I shove everything? Well, she will want to see the rooms, so piling the kids’ room ceiling high won’t work. This is a project I was going to undertake during winter break, but now, now it needs to get done. There was a time in my life when people would randomly show up at my house, and I would open the door with snacks and coffee and drinks. Now I stand by the door, blocking entry to everyone but Tanya, afraid to let anyone see how the person they all believed to be so put together has privately fallen apart.

Mary wanted to change venues, and we are actually going to meet in the valley. Crisis averted. But it made me realize where I can actually get help. So, after I (finally!) get everything in order, and put things where they belong to where I won’t barricade my door in terror at the idea of someone seeing what I have done (or haven’t been doing), I am going to get a cleaning lady once a month.

Yes, I am a woman, and I have lived my life believing that as a woman I have to keep house. That is my domain, and even if I can’t do anything else, I need to be domestic. Which is why it was so hard to come to terms with the fact that that is exactly what I haven’t been doing, and even harder to accept that I need help with it. How can I need help with something I was born to do? Ultimate failure. And I have to deal with this, move on, and hire a cleaning lady.

Again, I am never home, so as long as I lightly maintain the cleaning she will do once a month, everything should be fine, and I can open my doors to friends and family (my mother has not set foot in my house, partly because she doesn’t drive freeways, and partly because she is highly judgmental and I will never hear the end of it).

In February I will get hired help. In the meantime I will figure out where to put everything. I don’t want her to clean around my piles. Buying some furniture to put things on and into would probably help.

And with the idea of asking for help, if anyone speaks Swedish, Finish, Dutch, Danish, or Norwegian, I have some bookcases that will need assembly…

Object Fetish

I am writing my statement of purpose for a second school, realizing that it must be altered each time more than I had originally thought. What is my purpose? Depends where I am applying. They want to know who I want to work with at their institution and what I want to work on. So I look through the faculty pages, find what everyone specializes in, and research the ones closest to my own interests. At the school I am writing my current statement for there is only one professor even moderately close to what I am considering.

My interests in medieval manuscripts may have been relevant sixty years ago. Such studies were huge in the 40’s and 50’s, with entire five, eight and ten volume sets being written and poured over in all corners of academia. The professor who had originally gotten me into this had himself written his dissertation on the topic in the late 50’s at the height of manuscript frenzy. I was at an institution that was still at the residual end of these studies. It still is, but less so. When applying to them again I didn’t have to alter much. My interests are the same now as they were then, simply with more finesse and better honed, and this school still has the faculty and resources to properly help me develop it further.
The other schools however require a little more finagling on my part. So at School B, after having read some of this professor’s works and skimming others I realize that the closest I will get to a medieval manuscript while working with him is by looking at the object itself.
My fascination with manuscripts is odd in that it relies on a very narrow take of manuscript studies. I am more concerned with the building aspect, the logistics of manuscript creation, than anything else. So why not extrapolate it further? This professor works with literature as a commodity fetish. The physical book, as a personal possession for private use becomes an object of interest in and of itself, independent of the actual text it contains. Isn’t that what my whole obsession with manuscripts is? A niche fetish concerned with the object itself? Sort of.
I had always thought it was a rather bizarre fascination, especially since so few others share it, and looking at it this way made the most sense. I had never thought of manuscripts or books as commodities, but if you consider their origin and the purposes for which they were written, and later pressed, and sold and disseminated, it goes far beyond the sharing of ideas via text. The work’s relevance becomes interwoven and oscillates between the actual text contained and the fetishism of the physical object with enjoyment derived from its personal possession and use.

About eight months ago I wrote this post. I didn’t know it then, but I essentially outlined this very theory in my own relationship with literature.

Maybe I am more tactile than others, but when I love a book, I don’t just love what it says, but the way it feels, and smells, how it becomes worn, my marginalia sometimes faded and reapplied, the way I highlight sections, and the cover. For me reading is a physical experience. Even after I got my Kindle I rarely if ever use it, and when I do it has more to do with not wanting to carry a book around, but I probably still have a copy of it at home. So if I have this kind of experience with mass produced paperbacks, how can it not be argued that a similar fetishism didn’t exist with medieval manuscripts that were far more elaborate and meticulously crafted? The process of creating the manuscripts as taken on by different scribes (most manuscripts were created by a series of scribes, each with their own specialty, such as letter writing, head letter writing, illuminating, coloring, etc.) was a process in which each one took pride, and the ownership of such works harbored a similar pride. However, despite the length it took to create these pieces, manuscripts then were not treated as they are now. For us they are rare and must be kept in certain conditions, but then they were simply a part of the household, written in, played with, and (some might argue) defaced in a similar fashion as what I do to my own books when scrawling notes across pages or otherwise altering them. I don’t do these things because I don’t believe my books have value, but simply because that is how I enjoy them most. Just like others six and seven hundred years ago interacted with their manuscripts, writing across gold-leaf illuminations, and scribbling on the edges of nearly perfectly penned text. In fact you can trace ownership of some manuscripts simply by tracing who had written in them over the years (e.g. Lansdowne MS of the Canterbury Tales).
And since I apparently really like working my way into a corner, I will narrow the argument down even further to solely look at the ways in which this fetishism moved from manuscript to novel. Not that other texts weren’t being similarly commodified, but I think the relationship between owner and manuscript is most closely paralleled between owner and novel (taking into account that most manuscripts were not in fact stories, or thought to be fictitious in the least). This latter part relies on the amount of enjoyment derived from the work in consuming it, and also possessing it. The novel is a form of entertainment, and sometimes, depending on the point in time you are looking into, it was a secret pleasure to be delighted in behind closed doors. The mere possession of a book, much less a novel, contains a rich history, and as private libraries became public, acquired by historians and museums, the commodification of books becomes of central importance.So I guess I am not really altering my interests as much as repositioning them to be looked at from a different angle. Interesting.