Career, Babies and Marriage

The internet is somewhat blowing up over this recent article by the controversial Penelope Trunk.

She tells the world to get pregnant at 25 if you want a high-powererd career.

Well, I happen to be 25, pregnant and desiring of a high-powered career. I just had my 25th birthday, and I am in my mid-twenties now. I'm very pregnant, and I see myself as the director of some department on a university or college campus in my forties.

Clearly, I had to read this article.

Here are some highlights:
I loved that women are coming forward to say that it is literally impossible to have a high-powered career while you have young kids, if you want to be involved in your kids’ lives. The best thing older women can do for younger women right now is to tell the truth. It’s hard to tell the truth because if you are trying to do the high-powered job and the kids, you will kill your career by admitting that it’s impossible.

But here’s the truth for women: You should not plan your life so that you work until you’re 30 and then have kids, and also have a huge career. Because you will be taking care of kids during the very time when all the men you worked with are working harder and longer hours than ever before. Men who have kids are in a great position to climb the ladder. They have wives at home. Women cannot go full speed ahead until the kids are grown up. Slaughter has great evidence for this. But you should be able just to look around and see that this truth. My favorite example: All the male Supreme Court Justices have families. Two of the three women do not. And the one who does, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, did not start her career until her kids were grown.

Slaughter lays out a great plan. It’s tucked into the article, among a lot of other calls to action. But she says, if you want to have a huge career, have kids when you are 25 so your kids will be grown when you are 45, because there will still be time to have a huge career.

This also means women will need to start dating men who are older than they are. This also seems like a good idea. Men, of course, love younger women. But more than that, women who are in their twenties are in their prime in terms of self-confidence. They are physically very desirable, and they are doing better at work than men. Men, on the other hand, are at their nadir of self-confidence in their twenties. They are not making money, which is something that is very valuable on the dating scene. And they are not doing as well as women at work. Men look way better in their 30s when the women have left the workplace and the men have a more solid grip on their earning power.

So look. Here’s my first post directed solely at Generation Z women: Spend the years from age 20-25 focused on getting married. There is no evidence that doing well in school during that period of your life will get you worthwhile benefits. There is no evidence that waiting longer than 25 makes a better marriage. And there is not evidence that women who do a great job early in their career can bank on that later in their career. There is evidence, though, that women who focus on marriage have better marriages. There is evidence that women who have kids earlier have healthier kids, and there is evidence, now, that women who have grown children by age 45 do better at getting to the top in the workforce than all other women with kids.

You can bet I'm forwarding this article to my two (younger) sisters.

Escape Your Date, My First Flash Game

This semester, I took a class at Ursinus College, thanks to Bryan who teaches there. It was awesome! My Photoshop skills really improved, and I learned so many new tricks.

Then, we got to the Flash portion of the class. It was tough, and I'd never done any coding in my life. In the last week of class and three days into finals, I spent 8+ hours. The day before my project was due, I came in a 8am and stayed until 7pm, got dinner, stayed until 4am, came back at 7:30am and stayed until it was due at 1pm. Needless to say, I threw my heart into this. There are so many hours of work in this project, and I am proud of it.

You shouldn't think that just because I put more than 100 hours into this project, that it's anything exceptional. A real Flash pro could make something better in half the time. But, because it was requested (shout out to Remi Treuer), here it is.*

*There is one bug that I couldn't fix. Deal with it!

You can also find a copy (with less bugs) here.

Lady Fitness

With summer months and bikini sales approaching fast, I've been really serious about working out.

I've found a beautiful hour and a half of my day at the gym. I drop in, sign up for my treadmill, hit the mat for some strength exercises, then hit the treadmill for interval training and then stretch for a good fifteen minutes. It's wonderful. I get a chance to read all my magazines that sit dusty on my coffee table, think about all the crazy things happening in my life right now, listen to my awesome 90s hip hop mix and enjoy the solitude in the presence of lots of women getting theirs.

The whir of the treadmill belt, the beat of women's sneaks on the machines, the light murmur from the weight area, the Destiny's Child bumping in my ear: it's perfect. It's my escape, and it's also my means to a bangin' bikini body. Summer of 2010 is the summer of hot.