Lump to Professional in 60 Seconds

I'm now in my third week at my new job, and I am hopefully adjusting relatively well.

I've found myself spending what to me feels like a LOT of money getting ready to really settle in at this job--I'm trying to treat it like a career where I will be here for the indefinite future, which means one thing: clothes.

Before my first day, I went through my work clothes, such as they are, and threw out everything that was just too old, dingy, or stained to wear to a new job. This left me with exactly one pair of pants, maybe 4 skirts, 4 tops (not the band, sadly), and a dress or two. This may sound like a decent amount of clothing if you are a dude, but not everything GOES with everything else, and I also have a sad lack of decent shoes to go with everything. Lots of my pre-existing shoes have proven to be life-ruining blister-causers and shopping for shoes is an enormous pain...

The strangest part about this is that I usually try to tell Ben what I am spending money on, and so I have found myself explaining a lot of generally unexplained, unspoken, gender-coded rules for professional women. Ben doesn't expect me to update him every second I spend money, but we both have the habit of just letting the other party know if we spent or are planning to spend, say, over $100 on something--it's just to make sure we both have a handle on how much money's in the system.

Here is what I have figured out:

1. Professional women wear separates. This one's less of an unspoken rule because I specifically remember my mother telling me this years ago. If you're wearing a dress, then you need to be wearing a cardigan or a blazer or something.

2. Professional women wear outfits. This means that you've got shoes and jewelry that coordinate with what you're wearing.

3. You can't wear the same thing every day.

4. What this means is that you have to set yourself up so you have a working rotation of clothes (up to 3 pieces if you're wearing a jacket, shirt, and pants or skirt), shoes, and jewelry that all go with each other. Plus stuff like tights and stockings and whatnot.

So right now I am working on putting together a collection of crap I can wear to work so that I send the right kind of messages about myself to my students and coworkers. It ain't cheap, especially because I generally mail-order a lot of my clothes because I am both a chunk and particular about what I wear.

Anyway, I have been shopping a lot more than I am accustomed to, a fair portion of which consists of me putting things into online shopping carts and then never buying them because I really hate getting stuff when it's not on sale. The silly part is that we have the money for me to do this--with our salaries together we're certainly comfortable enough for me to spend some money to make sure I am presentable at work.

I wish I didn't feel quite so neurotic about this whole being able to pass as a Professional thing, because then I probably wouldn't feel the urge to write about it in my blog. But job stuff is what I've been doing recently, so there you go.

boring update

We're having our first set of visitors come up towards the end of this week, which hopefully means that we'll be more motivated to go and do things out in Montreal. And, you know, set up our futon...

Tomorrow I have a job interview to look forward to. A couple of ladies I've met have connected me with this place, and while they don't have any actual positions available now, something might open up before the beginning of the fall semester--it's academia, so sometimes a job that is a sure thing just evaporates because of funding, and sometimes money is found in a closet and a job materializes. The goal is to go in tomorrow and make a good impression--it looks like it will be the same kinds of things I've done in face-to-face tutoring, with things like study skills and note-taking thrown in for good measure (which is fine because I was already working those things in with the kids I tutored).

I got an application out for some online tutoring last week, which involved having to edit 3 sample student papers. I took a couple days and worked on them on-and-off until they were finished and I was okay with the work I'd done. The day I needed to mail them out, my computer did some kind of system restore and ate them, so I had to redo all three in the span of about 4 or 5 hours.

It's funny how things are all relative--I was stressed about applying for this job, I was stressed about losing all of my careful work, I was stressed about re-doing them in time. About half an hour before my self-imposed deadline, I got a message from my aunt telling me that my father's health had taken a turn for the worse, and that I needed to get in touch with him. And suddenly, all of this job stuff was a piece of cake. I finished the papers up and emailed them back, and I haven't stressed about it since.