unit6課文原文資料-文庫吧
2025-07-20 10:05 本頁面
【正文】 a shelf behind her desk that day were at least a hundred jars of strawberry jam, gaily tied with redchecked ribbons. The executive and her children had made the jam and decorated the jars, which she planned to distribute to her staff and visiting clients. When, I wondered aloud, had she found the time to plete such an impressive holiday project? I should have known better than to ask. The answer had a familiar ring: in her spare time. On the train ride home I sat with a jar of strawberry jam in my lap. It reproached me the entire trip. Other women, it seemed to say, are movers and shakers — not only during office hours, but in their spare time as well. What, it asked, do you acplish in your spare time? I would like to report that I am using my extra moments to plete postdoctoral studies in physics, to develop new theories of tonal harmony for piano and horn, and to bake cakes and play baseball with my sons. The truth of the matter is, however, that I am by nature pletely unable to get my act together. No matter how carefully I plan my time, the plan always goes wrong. If I create schedules of military precision in which several afternoon hours are given over to the writing of the Great American Novel, the school nurse is sure to phone at exactly the moment I put pencil to paper. One of my children will have developed a strange illness that requires him to spend the remainder of the day in bed, calling me at frequent intervals to bring soup, juice, and tea. Other days, every item on my schedule will take three times the number of minutes set aside. The cleaner will misplace my clothes. My order won39。t be ready at the butcher shop as promised. The woman ahead of me in the supermarket line will pay for her groceries with a check drawn on a Martian bank, and only the manager (who has just left for lunch) can OK the matter. They also serve who only stand and wait, wrote the poet John Milton, but he forgot to add that they don39。t get to be superwomen that way. Racing the clock every day is such an exhausting effort that when I actually have a few free moments, I tend to collapse. Mostly I sink into a chair and stare into space while I imagine how lovely life would be if only I possessed the organizational skills and the energy of my superheroines. In fact, I waste a good deal of my spare time just worrying about what other women are acplishing in theirs. Sometimes I think that these modern fairy tales create as many problems for women a
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