The Cinderella Complex Revisited

No school for the kiddies today. When I got up Quinn was playing Connect Four and Catherine was playing with her Cinderella stuff.

I got to work late, and realized I had forgotten to approve my peeps timesheets. Oops. I also apparently missed a 10 AM conference call that they called to tell me about around 9:15 AM. Nice heads up there. Anyway, today was all about telling various people about the program I'm working on as I'm trying to bring the people that will be doing the actual work up to speed. You would think that after going over this stuff like 5 times with different people I would have it down to some kind of science, but such is not the case. Each time I feel like I'm winging it and spewing out information stream of consciousness style. Oh, and I got the new schedules for the program and my budget has been seriously cut. Nothing like being able to see the looming disaster ahead of you.
Ginger took the kids out on errands today. They grabbed lunch from Wendy's and came by my office to have lunch with me. The kids did their normal whiteboard drawing routine plus some created some pulleys with the window shades cords.

I got home around 7, and everyone was already up (no big surprise there), and Ginger was cooking dinner. So I played with the kids for a bit while dinner was cooking. I saw that Catherine the Destroyer had already managed to break the plastic pieces of the new Cinderella stuff that allowed the two dolls to dance across the floor. To be fair, maybe it was Quinn. All I know is that recently it seems that the lifetime of any toy in house is in serious jeopardy in the presence of the twin engines of destruction that are Quinn and Catherine. The Angelina plastic doll house furniture that she got for Christmas has already fallen prey to the inadvertent Godzillas. I tried to repair the plastic Cinderella stuff using that PVC glue, but it wouldn't actually hold. I found that a little odd, but strangely after smelling the glue for a while, I found I didn't care as much (that stuff is pretty strong). Going to try again tomorrow maybe.

Dinner was some Greek chicken dish with olive oil in it that made it taste a bit lemony. There was also Ginger's famous and extremely delicious carrot souffle. The dinner came with the option of having feta cheese on it. Ginger asked me beforehand if I wanted the cheese on mine, and I said no because I didn't really know anything about that cheese (I should have went with the whole "Sorry dear, the migraine diet doesn't allow that kind of cheese, although since she knows about the migraine diet that could have seriously backfired on me). Later when we were putting the kids to bed, I came downstairs to fill their juice cups, and I could have sworn that a cat had pooped somewhere in the kitchen based on the smell. I eventually tracked it down to the cheese. Ginger claims it doesn't smell like that, but to me it smelled like some form of poop and in my mind, something that smells like poop probably doesn't taste good.

From here on we're entering semi rant mode, so be warned. This whole Cinderella thing used to worry me. I mean, after all, I'm a modern educated male (as much as some might argue differently), I supposedly know the trappings of how it's actually a story telling women that they need to be taken care of instead of being independent. I mean it's all there in that Cinderella Complexbook, right? I bought into all that and it bothered the crap out me that Catherine liked the stuff so much (not that there was a thing that I could do about it mind you). Anyway, I was thinking about it this morning in the shower (isn't that where all the really great ideas come from), and it occurs to me there are other interpretations one can make and it may not be as gender biased as I let myself first believe / be convinced. Here's the deal, Cinderella works her butt off for little to no reward, holding onto hope that the work will be it's own reward. She puts in hard hours, and does a ton of thankless jobs. Not only that, but she's getting paid crap. One could almost see this as a parallel to working in today's market place really. So then what happens, she gets to go to the ball, and there is noticed by the Prince. Now I realize at this point in the story, none of the work she's done necessarily facilitates or influences the affections of the Prince, but I'm ignoring that fact because it doesn't help prove my point. The Prince then searches her out (ok, it's actually the Prince's dad who makes one of his toadies search her out, but go with me here) and marries her. At this point she leaves her old life behind is well taken care of for the rest of her days (or so we're led to believe at the end, for all we know they fight, she divorces him and takes half of everything and moves to the Caribbean wherein she cavorts with locals, but that's not where I'm going with this). Anyway, back to my analogy, the Prince basically comes in and acquires her. Almost like a large corporation might acquire some small company wherein the employees who own stock or are otherwise invested in the small corporation benefit immensely and become rich and never have to work again. When looked at from that point of view, Cinderella actually represents the American Dream at it's finest and everyone can be Cinderella. Cinderella can be seen as an allegory of the employee working at the small company, who is hoping to get acquired / bought out so that they can retire to a life of leisure. At least looking at it this way makes me feel better about Catherine liking it so much (and makes me wonder where the heck I left my glass slipper).