bread 🍞🥖🥐 & 💦💧🌊 water

Hello my dears,Before I dive in to the rambling, an announcement! I'll be doing another workshop for the UChicago Graham School in early November: Wednesday 11/7 at 6pm Central, to be exact. It's called "Work Is Other People" (sorry-not-sorry, Sartre) and it's all about ways to collaborate with your most frustrating colleagues. You should join me! It's FREE, and if you're not local, you can still register to participate online. I'm really looking forward to it, so tell your Chicago-adjacent or computer-savvy friends.I also have ~*~*some personal news*~*~ as the kids on Twitter say: I got a promotion in my non-Businesslady “real job,” as in, what actually pays my bills and gives me standing to give other people career advice. That whole process has been quietly underway since late April (although it really got going in mid-June), and if you’re wondering why I haven’t sent out a newsletter since July, it’s at least partially because I was devoting a lot of my writing energy to painstaking revisions of my job description.I’ve been promoted before, but this was my first time approaching my manager and asking them to make it happen. (My previous professional level-ups were either conferred on me from above, achieved through applying for a new role, or—hilariously—mentioning to my boss in passing that someone else had “senior” in her title and getting the unexpected response of “we could do that for you.” It was a different time, by which I mean, 2013.)Even when you have a supportive manager (which I do) and a healthy sense of your own value as an employee (which I…try to have), a promotion isn't the simplest thing to navigate. In fact, it’s arguably harder when you DO like your boss, because part of making your case is saying—however politely and implicitly—“I don’t think my work is being adequately recognized.”Fortunately for me, after more than four years writing as Businesslady I’ve more or less internalized my alter ego—or at least, I feel obligated to follow whatever advice I’d give another person in my situation. And I can be much more blunt with myself than I am with letter-writers. “Dear me, I want a promotion but don’t want to go through all the work of making it happen.” “Well, also-me, how 'bout you suck it up and do that work anyway, since you’ll be happy you did in the long run?” Tough love, but she makes a good point.While there are a few reasons behind the subject line I selected for this particular dispatch, it started after the promotion became official and I considered what it meant for my status as a “breadwinner” in our household. (To be clear, I am not the “primary breadwinner,” but I used to be back when my spouse was in grad school so it’s a minor victory that I’m no longer making significantly less than him now that I’m part-time.) “Breadwinner” is one of those words that you can use for years without a second thought, but which suddenly becomes strange when you subject it to scrutiny. I mean, imagine explaining it to a non-native English speaker who hadn’t encountered the term before. “You say that people who have jobs are…winners…of bread?”I don’t mean to impugn a nearly 300-year-old term (surely you’re not surprised that I looked it up) and honestly, even if you forget that “bread” is a slang term for “money,” that first part makes sense: work helps you acquire sustenance. It’s winner that I take issue with. Anytime “winning” is invoked, it means losing’s also in the picture, and that the outcome is at least partially dependent on luck. After all, if your victory was a foregone conclusion, can you really say you “won” at all?But breadwinners (at least those of us lucky enough to have a steady income) aren’t rolling the dice and hoping we’ll get paid. It’s expected. It’s part of the deal. So screw the notion that we’re “winning” anything: we earned that bread fair and square.It’s this kind of mild, benign entitlement that you’ll need to channel if you want to persuade someone to promote you. And needless to say, with this new achievement under my belt, I’m definitely tackling “How to Promotions” in a future column, so send me any questions you have about convincing higher-ups to recognize you more robustly. (You can just reply to this email! And of course, questions on any other career-related topic are always welcome as well.)Speaking of columns, I’ve continued writing those too! Here’s one about disentangling yourself from tasks that were never supposed to be part of your job in the first place, and another about what to do if your boss takes away a perk that has a huge impact on your quality of life (in this case, working from home). My next column will also be about working from home—kind of a how-to primer on the remote work LiFeSTYLe to which I’ve grown accustomed—so if you’re interested, now would be a good time to follow me on Facebook or Twitter. I’ll share it in a tinyletter eventually, but who knows how long it’ll be before the next one.By now I'm getting close to the usual word-count of these missives and while I've (arguably over-)explained the whole "bread" aspect of the title, the "water" half remains shrouded in mystery. I'm sure you're all beside yourselves with curiosity.Well—in the vein of taking my own advice and seizing opportunities for relaxation whenever they materialize—last month Doug and I made the impromptu decision to rent a cabin in the Adirondacks. We kayaked on a sunset-pink lake (I've somehow become someone who loves to kayak) and I spent many long, restorative hours looking out at that same lake and a mountain, past a roaring fire of my own creation. That's where the ~water~ part comes in. The picture below captures me at the height of this experience: no makeup, #nofilter, not even a particularly "good" photo. Just the pure contentment of a woman who isn't thinking about anything else besides the moment she's currently in. There's one last "bread and water" association too, and that's this Ani DiFranco song that I loved intensely as a first-year college student, so much so that I still maintain a deep fondness for it today.Hope you manage to drive out of the range of your anxieties this weekend and find ways to nourish both your body and your soul.

~court

P.S. Know someone who'd be interested in a comprehensive, thoughtful, and pun-filled treatise on the games and social culture of the 19th-century United States? Have I got the book for you! (20% off with code PJ55, and rumor has it that Amazon has it even cheaper.) Or if you're looking for a lighter read, I've heard good things about this career guide. Buy 'em both and see if you can decipher all the references in our respective acknowledgments and dedications!