#One Hour Workweek (trope)

[inspectorspacetimerevisited]

The young people who earned the opportunity to come to AceSpace

are ‘forced’ to work literally one hour per day, during which their social-media devices recharge themselves. Such a difficult life it must be!

[rivkathetechie]

Rating books I read this year:

“Red, White, and Royal Blue” by Casey McQuiston. 8/10, I love my dumb American boy with a literal Prince Charming. Don’t care about anything I love it so much I’ve listened to the audiobook 5 times this year.

“Iron Widow” by Xiran Jay Zhao. 10/10. All of this. Perfection. This might as well be a XJZ fan account. Yas Empress let’s destroy the patriarchy 💖

“A Touch of Darkness” by Scarlett St. Clair. 5/10, so many tropes but it’s aight. Decent smut but nothing to write home about. I’m just a sucker for enemies to lovers.

“A Touch of Ruin” by Scarlett St. Clair. 1/10. I hated Persephone and everything was just so… ugh. Bad. Went from questionable and tortured love interest to “I can’t justify this fucking douchebag.” Didn’t finish because it made me so mad.

“She Drives Me Crazy” by Kelly Quindlen. 7/10, cute sapphic YA. Tropes are tropes for a reason. Cute as hell tho.

“Neon Gods” by Katee Robert. 9/10. Tropes are tropes for a reason, love this take on Hades/Persephone. Preferred the smut here to St. Clair’s work, way preferred Persephone’s characterization here (I became a Persephone connoisseur in 2022 I guess.)

“You Go Your Own Way” by Eric Smith. 6/10 Enemies to lovers trope and a dorky main character I kinda identified with. Ending felt rushed but it’s alright. Love the audiobook narration. Very quick read so it’s great for commutes.

“Today, Tonight, Tomorrow” by Rachel Lynn Solomon. 8/10. Literally EVERY trope (well, feels like it) and very pointed “meet cute AU” moments that felt very self aware. Props for well done incidental Jewish rep that bucks stereotypes and doesn’t involve Chanukah.

“The Golem and the Jinni” by Helene Wecker. 10/10. Might be the best book I read this year. A 20 hour audiobook and I listened to it twice in a workweek. It was so good. SO good. Multiple rounded characters. Could be a bit convoluted and confusing toward the end if you weren’t paying attention, but I was so invested. I give this audiobook to people who want to get back into fantasy novels.

“They Went Left” by Monica Hesse. 6/10. Heavy. Good, made me cry, wish a romance hadn’t happened. I disagree with my library insisting this is YA, felt more adult than the “general audience” of “The Golem and the Jinni.” The twist destroyed me. I was a broken person for like 10 minutes working in a laboratory trying not to cry into a beaker. 9 hours but heavy enough to last a while. Would be a good emotional rollercoaster for a long train or plane ride.

“Sweet Ruin” by Kresley Cole. 7/10. It isn’t good, per se, it just gets the rocks off. Decent enough and fun to have a desirable protagonist with an accent like mine.

“The Way of Kings” by Brandon Sanderson. 4/10. I just can’t get into Sanderson. Hot take, I know. Did not finish.

“Gideon the Ninth” by Tamsyn Muir. 10/10, love my funky space lesbians. I recommend this book all the time when someone wants a cheeky protag. The audiobook is awesome. I was SO invested in this and I can’t believe I waited so long to read it.

“The Bone Clocks” by David Mitchell. 6/10. Very well written, I was just struggling to stay engaged with it while working. Some of the lulls made my brain check out and I would miss critical exposition. That said, very complex, great if you want to read waaaaaaay too into a book.

“A Hunger Like No Other” by Kresley Cole. 6/10. Once again, it doesn’t have to be good. It just has to be.

“The Lies of Locke Lamora” by Scott Lynch. 2/10. I hated this fucking book. Hot take in my friend group, especially since I read Rothfuss and Hearne. But I just hated it. I couldn’t get my teeth into it and couldn’t care about the characters. Did not finish.

“No Other Love” by Harper Bliss. 6/10, cute and sweet. Love a short sapphic read. Unremarkable but good.

“The Chosen” by Chaim Potok. 10/10, one of my favorite authors. He just don’t miss. Heavy at points but I love it.

I probably missed some but here we are. Ones I could remember off top.

[rambletron]

i know we all think Kim K suxx for the "nobody wants to work anymore" commentary which, as broadly as she put it, is definitely lame and untrue but guys... i literally work with people who ask for *less hours* and *same pay*. they wanna work 4 hours a day and get paid the same as the 8 hour people. i've never seen this before in my 20+ years of professional life. people are upset with our 4 day workweek we have (4x8 mind you) because they might have to come in on a saturday once per month.

i shit you not, the people in this town Do Not Want To Work.

remember the portlandia trope, "this is where young people come to retire"? that's my town. i wish i was joking. one girl said she "couldn't imagine" having a 40 hour work week. like couldn't imagine it - ironically her schedule is 40hr/week but she just leaves early every day so it's not sinking in.

i work on a team of 12 people - that's our whole company. 10-12 people. these assholes signed on for a job they *knew the parameters of* and then checked out as soon as they passed the probationary period. it's so incredibly fucked for the rest of us who have to constantly pick up after their leisurely foibles and firing & rehiring is so incredibly expensive and hard because, as per above, no one here wants to work. one of the people we interviewed for ENTRY LEVEL ADMIN turned it down because she didn't like that she only had 3 weeks paid vacation WITH ZERO WORK HISTORY.

like are people's brains being rotted by socialist memes? i'm so flabbergasted by this.

brb leaving my analyst desk to go do data entry so i can stay here for an extra hour while people leave early and enjoy the weather

[toongrrl-blog]

The Mommy Myth: Threats from Without (Part Two)

Let’s get a little lighter...

Clair Huxtable was a fantasy for women: her life ran smooth, she had a loving husband, adorable children, a successful career as an attorney despite how hard it must have been to get leave and keep her job in the 1970s, she was gorgeous, stylish. The Cosby Show (believe it or not) was the top program for women 18-49 and #1 in the Nielsens from 1985 to 1990. Despite the feel being a throwback to the 1950s, it did have wisecracks about kids and raising them. The first season captured family life with a messy coffee table and toys in the living room, the bathroom was lived in, and Theo’s bedroom looked like a mess. Clair and husband Cliff made mistakes: overreacting to a goldfish dying, being tough one minute and indulgent the next, and somehow one of their daughters dated this dude. It seemed to coexist with Erma Bombeck, a humorist who wrote columns like “At Wit’s End” and “Up the Wall” and books like The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank, I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression, and Motherhood, The Second Oldest Profession. She joked about how after childbirth “every new mother drags from her bed and awkwardly pulls herself up on the pedestal provided for her” and made fun of the Supermom trope who “painted the inside of her garbage cans with enamel” and “delivered her son’s paper route when it rained”. She even offered this truth:

No mother is all good or bad, all laughing or all serious, all loving or all angry. Ambivalence runs through their veins.

Back to Clair, we hardly saw her at work or lie down after a hard day at work and she used the “wait till your father gets home” method of discipline. She’s still a revolutionary character and her husband was involved with their children as she was, a fantasy in the Ted Wheeler Eighties (a offshoot from the Don Draper Sixties), while Boomer and younger Silent Gen fathers were more involved in their childrens’ lives than their fathers (no bringing home the bacon doesn’t count, if a Mom did that, we’d say she was neglecting her kids) fathers still spent an average 20 minutes a day with their kids and 70% of fathers did not assume the following responsibilities: buying kids’ clothes and supervising baths, to name a few. In the influential and bummer The Second Shift, Arlie Hochschild that after a 40 hour workweek (and sometimes more hours) it was Mom who scrubbed the toilets, cleaned out leftovers, did laundry, and chauffeured kids to soccer or Little League while Dad laid on the sofa watching TV and was clueless about laundry detergent and clothing sizes. Or it’s up to older siblings (mostly likely big sister) who takes care of the younger siblings.

Media loves catfights: movies, TV shows, comic books, music, Disney movies (special category), and it gets imitated in life with some toxic interactions with other women and in politics. The subtext of the 1983-1984 media panics over child molestation at day cares and kidnappings were an indictment of women going out to work or otherwise not putting their autonomy in the back burner for their children, while there were stay-at-home moms threatened by working mothers, the magazines exaggerated these resentments with articles like “Women vs. Women: The New Cold War Between Housewives and Working Mothers”  by Nancy Rubin in Ladies’ Home Journal. Well Housewives were referred to even more as “homemakers”, which gave way to “full-time mother” (passive aggressive much?), allowing moms to feel superior about spending lots and lots of time with their kids without much respite or covered up what I call “Stay at Home Mom in Name Only” (you know it, she’s a housewife, but spends little time with her kids). Parents magazine called them the “new traditionalists” who “choose” to be “a mother”. Good Housekeeping upped the ante with their late 1980s “New Traditionalist” campaign where women with active careers made a career of solely raising their children to be super successful (yeah living vicariously through your children, that’s healthy). Women’s magazines also forgot that feminists wanted “housewife” to be a compensated choice but this language of choice became a way for working mothers to be dissed. Also what’s to say about the challenges of re-entering the workforce after the kids were “old enough” (which was a strong suggestion)? Also in “Don’t Call Me Supermom”, the writer Jean Marzollo urged women to realize there is something “repulsive about the image of a man cleaning a toilet bowl” and that “Any woman who makes her husband do such a job is, well not quite a woman” (way to have our back Jean!). The New Momism had two messages: Be constantly vigilant, but fun and easy-going with your kids and now the Celebrity Mom who is prettier than you, richer than you , more stylish than you, and loves being a mom more than having a career compared to your overworked or dowdy ass boozing it up!