bearing blog

Liturgy of the Hours.

A while back I blogged about A Mother's Rule of Life by Holly Pierlot.  It's on my mind today because I finally got it back from a friend who had borrowed it, and I mean to reread it.  In short, it's a guide to help you get your priorities in order:  God, health, marriage, children, work.   It's probably the most effective get-your-life-and-home-in-order tool I've ever tried, especially in combination with the routines developed by the Flylady.

I've been neglecting my Rule for a while.  But one aspect of it has stuck, to my great astonishment.  When I developed my Rule I decided that I would make time to pray some of the Hours.   And despite all the other laxities that have crept into my life, I've managed to keep up Morning Prayer, almost every day. 

This is not, I swear, because of a great deal of dedication on my part.  I've almost been forced to do it.   I have actually noticed that I have a better day if I pray the Morning Hour before I do anything else.  (Well, almost.  The first thing I do is get myself a cup of coffee.)

Nor do I mean that I am more spiritually content or have a purer heart or any sort of thing.  I mean this purely empirically. Pray Morning Prayer:  get stuff done, get through homeschooling, read stories to children, house is cleaner, dinner is done on time, general feeling of satisfaction at the end of the day.  Don't pray Morning Prayer:  dawdle around on the Internet far too much, neglect my stuff, yell more at the kids, get homeschooling half done before giving up, resort to plopping kids in front of The Incredibles, dinner gets started late if at all, end day feeling resentful and generally unsatisfied.

Why?  Why?  I could spout pious maxims about the importance of putting prayer first, but my scientist brain casts about for another reason.  Is it the comfort and transition of a waking-up ritual?  Is it the sort of mental state, semi-thoughtful, that it puts me in?  Is it just because it prolongs the morning coffee as I have to sip between stanzas and antiphons?   

The effect seems to be independent of my state of prayerfulness.  Sometimes I really enter into the prescribed prayers and psalms; they strike chords in my heart and seem to be speaking right to me, or they seem to express my own soul's true lament or praise or petition better than I could have myself.  Other times my lips move and I say the words as if out of mere obedience, I seem to have said the same thing fruitlessly before many times, and my mind wanders constantly to the concerns of my upcoming day and my long to-do list.  Yet it doesn't seem to matter.  Even just going through the motions improves my day.

Lots of times I pick up the breviary with contentment and look forward to the few minutes of prayer.  Some days I don't have that contentment or that anticipation.  But I pick the thing up anyway because I will be sorry if I won't.  It's like, oh, making breakfast for myself or something.  I don't always feel like cooking, but goshdarnit, I have to eat.

Astonishing, I tell you.

UPDATE:  Interested in learning to pray with the Liturgy of the Hours, a.k.a. the Divine Office?  Click here to go to the next post, for some background and tips for getting started, that is, how I did it.

SAHMs and the Church. Part 4.

(Part 1.  Part 2.  Part 3.)

It is hard to figure out what God wants from us mothers, these days, when it comes to career choices.

I know from experience that there is a great temptation to say, "He wouldn't have given me this interest if he didn't want to call me to this career path," or "He wouldn't have given me the opportunity to have such a great education if he didn't want me to use it."  It is a compelling argument, or at least it seems to be.  And there is certainly some truth, because surely God sometimes calls us with an inspiration, a fascination.  Surely God sometimes knocks with an unbelievable opportunity. 

But everything, for a Christian, has to be laid at the foot of the Cross.  Here is the life I thought I was going to have.  Take it, Lord, and give me the life You want me to have.

We don't know, until we lay it at His feet, what He wants us to do with that interest.  Make money?  Maybe.  Or maybe it is meant for us to be a pleasing avocation to distract our minds from what will be our daily work. 

Maybe the expertise we have gained through our education will drive a brilliant career.  Or maybe it will enable us to serve others instead.  Maybe it will lie dormant for many years, to flower later in an unexpected way.

We don't know, until we lay it at his feet.

I am afraid that a lot of us, especially women, who choose to lay down the life we planned, will pick up a life that is very different.  I certainly have.  Trained as an academic engineer, I am instead a homeschooling homemaker.  I have no idea whether my doctorate will ever gather anything but dust.  I don't know if it was a mistake to finish it instead of dropping out and devoting myself sooner to caring for my kids, who were both born when I was in school.  Occasionally I lie awake at night and feel just a little touch of misery at my vanished credentials.

But I do have  a certain peace about where I am now.  I know that I am giving more of myself to my vocation this way than I would be if I worked.  And --- let's be frank --- what did I like most about my life as a student?  Eating lunch in restaurants, doing work in coffee shops, being around other people, concentrating hard on something.  I can still do all those things, maybe not as much as I once did, but often enough to feel refreshed.   (Oh, and the other people I'm around these days?  I enjoy their company, which I chose for myself, a lot more than the company of most folks I worked with.  Nothing wrong with them as people, of course, but... now I'm among friends.)

For me, this choice was a no-brainer, as soon as I had the courage to face turning it over to Christ.  Oh, it was so hard, but from this side looking back, it seems as if it were easy.

Let's make a deal, Gentle Reader.  You try to imagine yourself turning your life over as if it were easy, and I'll try to remember how hard it was before it was done.

SAHMs and the Church, part 3.

(Part 1.   Part 2.)

Even though there is no mandate in the teaching of the Universal Church that mothers avoid work that separates them from their children, there are two strong forces in Church teaching that encourage what we in the U. S. would call "stay-at-home mothering."

----   The first is the nature of a vocation.  There are two broad categories of vocation:  vowed matrimony and vowed celibacy.   Vowed celibacy can be expressed in a variety of vocations:  to the priesthood (for men), to a contemplative order of nuns or monks, to an active order, in consecrated virginity (for women).   In all of these, we are called to make a free gift of our whole selves to the service of our vocation.  Why? All vocations are nuptial, like a marriage, because all of them point to the final union of the Church with Christ who is called the "Bridegroom."

I have seen some claim that there is a "vocation to the single life," but this is an error; to my knowledge all vocations call you to a vowed life.  Making a free gift of your whole self to the service of your vocation requires a vow.  There is no vow involved in "the single life," ergo it cannot be called a "vocation."  Singleness is a period of discernment of vocation, not a vocation of itself. 

(Is that fair?  After all, many people remain single and unvowed through no fault of their own.  True.  Some people are called to marriage yet find no suitable mate, and some are called to priesthood yet cannot qualify, and some are called to religious life yet aren't accepted to any order.  I  suspect this is a sad effect of original sin.)

Speaking specifically of the vocation to marriage:  Giving your whole self to that vocation means that different people give different gifts, but in each case it's all that you are.   Once we are married, everything we do (after the things we do for God alone) is supposed to be, directly or indirectly, in service to the family.  If we work, we work in order to serve our family.   If we spend time relaxing, we do so in order to refresh ourselves to better serve our family. There is no room for mere self-fulfillment here.  Certainly, there's space to enjoy your own pursuits, but it can never be done at the expense of the family.  Self-improvement must be done always with an eye to how it helps the family as a whole.   This isn't a self-immolation, incidentally.    When you serve the family, that doesn't mean "serve everyone's interests except your own."  The self is part of the family, after all, and activities that benefit the self --- in its proper order within the family --- serve the vocation of marriage.

This understanding of vocation prompts us to consider our balance of work in terms of what best serves the family.  The primary purpose of marriage --- the begetting and education of children --- prompts a certain prejudice in favor of what best ensures the proper raising of the children.   

Without question, children are best raised by someone who loves them, who cares about their success, who wants them to grow up to be saints, who is committed to forming their moral character.  In most cases, that's their family.   Mother, father, perhaps grandparents or other extended family members; maybe godparents, or exceptionally close friends who are "like family." 

Economics matter, too.  Maybe, after crunching the numbers and carefully considering the day care options available to them, a parent or parents will regretfully decide that they have to resort to some kind of extrafamilial or institutional day care.   But if they are committed to their vocation, to giving their whole self to the vocation, they do it because they believe it is giving all of what they have at the time; they'll compensate for what is lacking as best they can; and they'll strive to escape to better circumstances. 

--- The second area of Church teaching that impacts stay-at-home mothering is the theology of the body.    You may have noticed that the above argument from vocations concludes that family should care for children.  It doesn't conclude that women should care for their children; it suggests that the dad should stay home, or the mom should stay home, or the dad and mom should take turns, or the parents should choose a loving and moral caregiver of either gender from among their closest family and friends. 

The theology of the body (which is much larger than just this issue) proclaims forcefully that the differences between men and women that are written in our biology, in our bodies, are important.  That men and women are not interchangeable.  That we have a certain "vocation" expressed in our bodies, a vocation to manhood or to womanhood.  Manhood intersects with marriage, and the intersection is different from the intersection of womanhood and marriage.  Manhood intersects with celibacy, too, differently from womanhood's intersection. 

Look at women's bodies:  we are called by our design, if we have children, to nourish them when they are babies.  A more studied look at the biology of motherhood and babyhood reveals that we and our babies are so closely linked by design as to be one only "organism"  --- not just during pregnancy, but for the first few years of life.  Sure, we can snip that thread anytime we choose by forcibly weaning and forcibly separating, but that's not the way our bodies are designed to be, and it's a lot nicer for both mother and baby to go with nature's flow.

(And recall always that work outside the home must still serve the vocation of marriage by supporting the family.  It should not be excessive, and should allow for adequate time with the family, because fatherhood is more than just cash production, too.)

There is a presumption inherent in the vocations of womanhood and of marriage that the mother gives herself primarily to caring for her babies.    Again, that's a presumption, not a hard line.   There surely are circumstances in which both parents giving their whole self to the vocation of marriage means that Dad is caring for babies and Mom is off doing something else, if not all of the time then some of the time.   But it has to be done in those cases in service to the family.  Dare I say, too, striving for better circumstances?  "Better" being circumstances in which Mom cares for the babies?  It's kind of hard to write that!  But if vocation is to mean anything, and if the body is to express our vocation, then we have to strive always to live out our vocation more and more perfectly.

That's babies.  What about older children?  My children are still very young, so I don't know from experience if the inherent mother-child biological connection remains in some form after children are grown past babyhood.   It's possible that there's no presumption that mothers should be the ones primarily charged with older kids.    I lean towards the idea that, past babyhood, children begin to be formed in their own vocations.  Fathers play an enormous role in forming kids for their vocations, because they make a bridge between the family and the outside world where the vocation is to be found.   This is a good reason to be terribly critical of an economic system that separates the family during the "workday."  (Another reason, of course, is that it leads to this situation where women agonize about whether to "stay home or to work!")

UPDATE.  The conclusion is here, in Part 4.

SAHMs and the Church, part 2. Why doesn't the Church just tell us what to do?

Yesterday I wrote that the Church hasn't (to my knowledge) issued a universal teaching on the morality of women's staying home with their kids.   I gave one reason why I think that's so; today I'll write another.

No, the answer to who will care for the children? appears to have been left up to us --- to the family.  In part this is, I believe, because of the high esteem the Church holds for the family.  It is not that the question of who will care for the children  may be made lightly, that one answer is as good as another.  It is certainly a moral question.    But it is a highly individualized question.   The "right" answer depends heavily on circumstance.  And no one knows a household's circumstance more intimately than the family who lives there. 

This isn't relativism.  The moral principles involved do not vary from household to household.  But the balance of tensions between them can vary, and so the application can, too.  In her wisdom the Church has not dictated the application of the principles (to my knowledge), so that the individual family, the domestic Church, can weigh them and decide.  The Church has not set a strict duty on us; but she has not limited that duty either.  Some Catholics probably wish there was a clear teaching.  It would certainly make the decision easier. 

There's an analogy here to another area:  family size and spacing of children.  The Church tells us in Humanae Vitae that natural family planning may be used if there are "well-grounded" or "serious" reasons, including reasons that "aris[e] from the physical or psychological condition of husband or wife, or from external circumstances."  But the Church has never specified exactly what kinds of reasons are "well-grounded" and "serious."   

This confuses some Catholics who sincerely wish to follow Church teaching.  I moderate an NFP e-mail list; every so often we get a question from someone who wants us to please tell him or her what is an acceptable reason to space children. We don't have health insurance right now or my youngest is only three months old and my periods have already returned  or I just feel like I really need a break or We just got married and we aren't adjusted to living together yet  or I'm taking antidepressants or....

What they are looking for is a "yes" or a "no" --- any answer will do, it seems, as long as it's clear.  And that's exactly the kind of answer the Church doesn't give.  She cautions us that our reasons must be good, implying that some reasons are not.  She arms the family with calls to borth "prudence" and "generosity."   And then she allows the family to work out what that means in their own circumstance.

I think the question of who will care for the children? is that kind of question.  It has great moral weight, and yet the individual family has the responsibility of weighing it in a correct understanding of their circumstance, according to a well-formed conscience, and in harmony with Christian principles.

More in a subsequent post about those principles.

UPDATE:  Here's Part 3.

SAHMs and the Church.

Yesterday I was thinking about the Christian duty of a mother to care for her own children (if possible).   What is the force of that duty?  Is it objectively wrong to make other arrangements?  Is it a virtuous ideal that should be ever striven for, but is not actually a practical necessity?  Is it not really a duty at all? 

We Catholics don't have, as far as I know, any kind of mandate in Church teachings on the subject.  There is no Woman, thou shalt not work outside the home.  There is no condemnation of day care, nor admonition against a father's caring for children while a mother earns money. 

Part of this is because the question "Should a woman stay home with her children, or should she work?"  would be meaningless to a large number of Catholics.  First, we are a trans-cultural Church; what the universal Church teaches must apply to Catholics in Uganda, in Brazil, in the United States to the poor and the rich alike, in Syria, in Poland.  Second, we are an ancient Church; we pre-date the Industrial Revolution; and while practical applications have varied, the moral principles on which they're based don't.  In this "democracy of the dead" the Saints speak loudly.  And for most of Christian history, in most places where Christians live, woman's work in or near her home, just like man's work in or near his home, has been an obvious and indispensable economic contribution to the welfare of the family. 

The mommy wars are so recent, and so confined to Certain Classes of People in Certain Countries, that the Universal Church has not bothered to speak about them in any detailed way that I am aware of (perhaps individual bishops' conferences have; I don't know).

More on this later in a subsequent post.  I'm leaving for Adoration of the Blessed Thanksgiving... and if that's Greek to you, I mean the Eucharist, of course.

UPDATE.  Here's Part 2.

"I can't cook." One reason why some may think so.

I often wonder about people who say they "can't cook."   My wondering usually goes like this:  Can't pretty much anyone, if he is unhampered by serious learning disability, follow a recipe? 

I mean, I understand that there's a gift to recipe creation.  Let me give you an example:  Suppose a person opens the fridge and the cabinets and surveys the interior of each.  She thinks:  hmmm.  I have arugula.  And a pomegranate.  And some anchovies.  And some pecans.  And various bottles of oils and such.   And some Parmesan cheese.   Many perfectly intelligent people, confronted with this particular melange, would not have the slightest idea how to make dinner in this situation.  But another sort of person would immediately think, "Aha!  I can make a salad out of all this!"  This would not make the second person any better, just different, from the first person.  (A better person would know to leave out the Parmesan and anchovies.)

Leaving that aside, though, why do so many people say they can't cook?  How hard can it be to read a recipe, buy the ingredients, take them home, and... follow the directions?

Mark has suggested that the problem is selecting the right recipes to cook --- recipes that are consummate with the cook's experience level, available time, and equipment.  That is part of it, I think.  But it occurred to me today as I prepared to cook dinner that maybe the problem isn't following a recipe.  Perhaps the problem is following multiple recipes all at the same time. 

I have been cooking for years.  Tonight I am making a new recipe for hunter-style chicken (chasseur, a French relative of cacciatore)  that appeared in the Nov/Dec 2005 issue of Cook's Illustrated.  (Link does not go to recipe, sorry.)  I'm also serving noodles; roasted green beans; and salad.

So anyway, when I started thinking about dinner this afternoon I picked up the chasseur recipe and thought something like this: 

How long to cook the whole thing?  5 minutes sauteing the chicken breasts on one side, 5 minutes on the other, then the mushrooms and onions in the same pan for 8 minutes (let's say 10).   Add wine and deglaze, that's about 3 minutes (let's say 5) and then the whole thing simmers for 25 minutes.  Chicken roasts at the same time for only 15 minutes.  So that takes 25+5+10+5+5 = 50 minutes.  About an hour.  So I want to get that chicken in the pan about 6:00 for a 7:00 dinner. 

I can wash the greens and make some kind of  salad [n.b. No pomegranates in this one] while the sauce is simmering --- no need to worry about that.  And the noodles just cook on the stove top.  That's no problem, because the chicken will only take one burner.

Now, what about the beans?  Can they roast in the oven alongside the chicken?  [Check recipe] The chicken goes in at 400 degrees [n.b. Fahrenheit], but the beans really need 450 degrees.  I could do the beans for longer, but would they brown enough?  Better do them first.  I can reheat them at dinner time.  They take 20 minutes.  The chicken needs 10 minutes in the pan, and I'll need some time to prep too.  So I'll heat the oven to 450 and roast the beans while I do the prep and start the chicken in the pan.  When the beans are done I'll turn the oven down to 400 and start the chicken roasting.  

Now, none of this is fundamentally difficult to understand.  I'd like to think that anyone could figure this out given detailed-enough recipes, plenty of pencils and paper, and a whole afternoon to plan it.  But who would want to?    I sure didn't do it that way.  I have a lot of experience.  It took me less than five minutes to decide, just from looking at two recipes, exactly what steps to take and in what order.  And that doesn't even include the many unconscious decisions that went into things like choosing the right side dishes; deciding that  400 degrees might not work for the beans; substitute sherry for the brandy I don't keep around; not trying to flambe the sherry; testing the pasta for doneness... you name it.

It's so easy to forget, once we've gained a skill, how much learning lies behind it.

Defying the critics.

Ann Althouse pointed to this quote by Jean Cocteau:

"Note just what it is about your work the critics don't like, then cultivate it.  That's the part of your work that's individual and worth keeping."

There's some discussion in the comments to her post about whether this is always, sometimes, or never true, and under what conditions.   I think it's probably sometimes true.

How do you know?  Perhaps it has to do with how much you respect the critics in question (and if the only reason you don't respect them is because of what they say about you, you should probably re-evaluate that.) 

I put this post under "New paradigms in homemaking" because that's my main work right now.  In general, after all, a mother's choice to stay home attracts a great deal of criticism (to be fair, so does the choice to work outside the home).

Of course, I don't have too many critics of my homemaking in specific, and the ones I do have (at least the ones who would say so to my face) are uniformly critics I respect.  I am picturing the following conversation:

MARK:  I think you should wash the quilt on the kids' bed.  It smells like pee.

ME:  I suppose I shouldn't expect someone like you to understand my art.

Nevertheless I think I'll keep the quote in mind...

Blogging bearings.

When I first started blogging, soon after I went home, I named my blog Re-engineering and planned it to chronicle my transition: from the career I'd planned in academia, to the part-time work-from home one I would be cobbling together.  For fun I would comment on science and tech in the news.  I congratulated myself for giving my blog such a clever name.

After a little while I found that I didn't actually want to write anything in Re-engineering, at all.  I went days without posting.  I told myself that I was too busy.  Eventually I had to admit that Re-engineering was boring.

But I had already paid for many more months of Typepad.  So I deleted everything I'd written and renamed my blog, and now I look forward to posting.  I wake up in the middle of the night and make mental notes about something or other I should blog about (of course, I never remember them in the morning).    

What's the difference?  I didn't stop writing about engineering.  One thing I like about Bearing Blog is that I still write about technology --- it's part of my makeup by this time --- but under the new name I have permission to let it be a part of me, not the focus of my entire life.   And I do enjoy writing about engineering, mathematics and the like, much more than I enjoyed it when I tried to make it my whole blog.   You'll see it represented up there in the masthead (scroll up), as definition number three.  This was, in fact, the definition of bearing that inspired the name.  I originally wanted to make the title a pun on the term "journal bearing."  But I didn't think most people would get it.

The other definitions of bearing have turned out to occupy much more of my attention:

bear - ing n.

1. the manner in which one comports oneself;
2. the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit;
3. a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~ ];
4. pl comprehension of one's position, environment, or situation;
5. the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  I no longer think myself clever for having come up with a good blog name.  Instead I am grateful that my first idea, a bit too obscure for most, led me so unexpectedly to a collection of concepts that I can mine endlessly for material that's fun to write. 

And the funny thing is, these days, bearing seems as good an organizational concept for my life's work as any. 

• I have a character of my own, a bearing, to develop and improve. 
• I am a mother, laboring to bring forth my offspring (and a laborer more generally, hoping my works are fruitful). 
• I want to get my bearings, that is, both knowledge and correct perspective.  Also I'd like to give it to everyone else. 
• I am a Christian: I participate in the bearing of the cross. 
• And because you can take the engineer out of engineering, but you can't take the engineering out of the engineer, I can't resist the machine-part analogy:

I am a part of the Machine, of the System of the World.*  But where some might say we are all cogs,  I say that at least some of us are bearings, supporting weight, cushioning blows, transmitting forces, smoothing the paths of all traveling parts, turning and turning each in our own races, all of us levitating on and enveloped by and anointed in a sheen too fine to see.  That grease comes in from the outside, injected by some invisible technician or watchmaker; but in the end it's the small bearings that transmit the supply from part to part.  More than any other part, we need it to do our job, and our job is to pass it on to whatever parts are nearest.

The title of a blog does turn out to be significant, and not just because it's the name of the link that readers might or might not click on.   Giving it a lot of thought, making it the perfect name for what I wanted to do, didn't work for me.  Instead, I let my name-impulse guide what the blog was to become.  Something to think about, all you newbies.

_____________________

*With apologies to Isaac Newton and Neal Stephenson.

Watch this space.

This used to be our side yard, with a lovely white picket fence.  Now the fence panels lean to one side, and the posts stand alone.

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Here's a crooked view of the lot from the street.  Off to the left you can see our existing duplex.  To the right is a tree with leaves turning yellow...

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It's the river birch.  I like to put my hand on its smooth, cool, translucent bark. 

Sadly, it's not long for this world.  That's because it is growing in my future dining room.

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Oscar and Milo don't mind.  They like the wooden stakes with pink flags that the surveyors put in.

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When you get your land surveyed, you sometimes learn interesting things about your neighbor's houses. This fence is actually a couple of feet inside our property line.  The addition to the neighbor's house, a little bit wider than the red door that enters it, goes right up to our property line.  Not only do we own their sidewalk, we own the grime on their siding.

It's not the neighbors' fault.  They bought the house with the addition already there.  Mark talked to them yesterday and they struck a deal where we would let them keep a strip wide enough to get from front yard to back yard, and they would let us cut down one of the trees.

Sorry about the placeholding dots.  I'm still trying to figure this out.

To nonmarket, to nonmarket, to buy a fat pig.

A reasoned, if dry, economic analysis of the social costs of highly-educated women leaving the workforce, from Becker-Posner Blog:

Even at the current very high tuition rates, there is excess demand for places at the elite colleges and professional schools, as shown by the high ratio of applications to acceptances at those schools. Demand is excess--supply and demand are not in balance--because the colleges and professional schools do not raise tuition to the market-clearing level but instead ration places in their entering classes on the basis (largely) of ability, as proxied by grades, performance on standardized tests, and extracurricular activities. Since women do as well on these measures as men, the student body of an elite educational institution is usually about 50 percent female.

Suppose for simplicity that in an entering class at an elite law school of 100 students, split evenly among men and women, 45 of the men but only 30 of the women will have full-time careers in law. Then 5 of the men and 20 of the women will be taking places that would otherwise be occupied by men (and a few women) who would have more productive careers, assuming realistically that the difference in ability between those admitted and those just below the cut off for admission is small.

While well-educated mothers contribute more to the human capital of their offspring than mothers who are not well educated, it is doubtful that a woman who graduates from Harvard College and goes on to get a law degree from Yale will be a better mother than one who stopped after graduating from Harvard.

But I have to try to be precise about the meaning of "more productive" in this context. I mean only that if a man and woman of similar ability were competing for a place in the entering class of an elite professional school, the man would (on average) pay more for the place than the woman would; admission would create more "value added" for him than for her....

I like this kind of analysis, which bypasses emotional appeal and goes straight for the costs, very much.  He has some intriguing ideas (involving gender-blind tuition raises). 

But perhaps the bit that stuck in my mind most was a new (to me) term to describe what women who leave the workforce are doing:  "nonmarket activities."

Forget all this nonsense about "working mothers" vs. "non-working mothers," or the slightly-too-precious (and linguistically useless) "every mother is a working mother."  Forget, too, the under-descriptive "housewife" and "homemaker" and the patently untrue "stay-at-home mother," even though we Internet users are all familiar with the term SAHM.  No, no, we finally have an answer to that loaded question...

--- So, what do you do?

--- Oh, nonmarket activities mostly.

I'm a nonmarket activist!  No, wait, a nonmarket activities specialist!  No, wait, I'm in... nonmarketing.  Nonmarket research!

Sometimes I just kill myself.