There Ain't No Devil, It's Just God When He's Drunk

I've been thinking a lot about my employment situation, and I think that the reason I feel so insecure in the job market is because of how increasingly you job has come to define who you are as a person. Since I still don't have that idea of what my lifelong career is, it's almost as though I don't know how to define myself, and all of this has left me wanting to just hide inside and never emerge. And making me loathe all those friends I had back at university doing engineering or the sciences who now have jobs in those fields and are constantly referring to themselves and their behaviour as 'so like an engineer', or as 'such a chemist.'

So last night, as I was getting myself ready for bed, I got to wondering how things have changed that make us use our jobs as indicators for who we are. Certainly it wasn't always like this? And that got me to thinking about my grandma. Anyone who reads this (or has since the beginning) knows I have a love/hate relationship with my grandma. Love when I'm away, hate when I'm in physical proximity. But I also love history and grandma is a living piece of it.

Grandma just turned 93. She was born in 1916, meaning she lived, if not saw or remembered, World War One, the Great Depression, Women's Suffrage, World War Two, the Civil Rights movement, and the election of the first black president. And perceptions have certainly changed during the course of her life. Growing up, women didn't work the 9-5 (unless they were slaving away in mills and factories and dying of malnutrition, or trying to eek out a living as a secretary or shop assistant in a large urban city). Middle class women were mothers, wives, and fighting to get their vote to count as a people.
In 1934 my grandma went to university. Not to further her career, but just to learn because she was interested. She majored in History and Zoology,just for fun, and god knows what she actually learned because she has no idea what the mitochondria is or how its function in all cellular creatures is pertinent to life. I think she just memorised animal names and locations while studying how amazing America is. Regardless, it was obvious that university was what middle/upper middle class women participated in, but was in no way a stepping stone to a career. After uni, grandma continued to live at home and help out with the family, but it was 1938 and you can guess what was coming around the corner. When war hit, granny joined the Marines and was stationed out in the Mojave desert working as a meteorologist along side a whole phalanx of women. My grandma was an example of a change taking place in the US. Rosie the Riveter was born, and women were being called upon to work, to fill the positions originally occupied by men, and were getting a taste of what it was like to be heard and used for the knowledge they had and for what they could do. In fact, after the war, it seems as though the whole working mentality of the US changed. Xenophobia and the Red Scare had caused the US to turn inward, proclamations of 'Made in the USA' were announced from all the shops, and the American car industry boomed, with thousands of people taking to the interstates to 'see the USA in [their] Chevrolet's!'. The blue collar worker was looked to with respect, and there was pride to be had with any occupation.
After the war, my grandma went back to univeristy to do a masters in History. She never finished because she met my grandpa and chose marriage over a degree. I asked her about this a lot, and her response has always been that college was something that occupied her time, and that being a wife and eventually a mother would take up more time than being a student would. To her, the choice was an easy one since again, education was not a pathway to a job. She did work, however. For a few years, grandma worked in an accountancy firm helping people prepare their taxes and keeping track of finances. But ask my grandma what she was, and she will always say a Homemaker. Not a marine, not a financial consultant, but a wife and mother. Ask my grandpa (born 1908) and he labels himself a Czech American. Jobs were what you did to put dinner on the table, but now what defined you.
For my mom's generation, it seems as though work was a means to an end. In the beginning, at least. My mom has said that grandma used to try and pursuade her to be a secretary or waitress or teacher, but the children of flower power had other ideas, at least until the 80s where new innovations in technology and Reganeconomics encouraged a renewed fevor in business models. Slowly, our parents and now our generation are finding themselves defined by an occupation. We're workers. We wear suits, answer blackberrys, and organise spreadsheets.
And since I don't have a job, it's like I don't have an identity. Or at least one I want. I don't want to be defined as 'receptionist,' 'book fetcher', 'secretary,' or 'assisant'. And it's infuriating!
So which comes first? Will knowing who you are first without a job lead you to find a job that matches your perception of who you want to be, or do you find a job first that then shapes the way you percieve yourself?

Okay, enough blathering... MURRAY VICTORY IN WIMBLEDON! Come on!