This Time I Know What I Think

I shouldn't let Judith Warner get to me. I should roll my eyes, say "there she goes again" with a tolerant smile, let Judy be Judy, and do something worthwhile with my time (and goodness knows I have enough worthwhile things to do today). Except I can't, because just as she is her, I am me. So rather than argue with her in my head, I might as well spew it here, get it out of my system, and go on to my worthwhile day.

So here she goes again with the dire plight of American girlhood. I'm down with the Daring Book for Girls props--it's #1 on the charts at our house, and even S was reading choice bits aloud to me last night. The problem starts when she begins lamenting the fact that nobody else cares about our poor girls, around paragraph 10. I'll spare you my "it's not that bad" schtick, based as it is on dubious anecdotal evidence about the kids I know--oh and, uh, facts like girls graduate from high school at higher rates than boys, girls are more involved in school, Title IX has led to a huge increase in girls participation in sports, etc. (sorry, I just cannot keep finding links, I must get to the worthwhile things I need to do).

Instead, I want to point to two problems with her analysis, both rooted in this paragraph:

Peskowitz, who has a Ph.D. in ancient history and religion, may find it a thrill to apply her professional knowledge to teaching girl readers about “Queens of the Ancient World.” Other mothers may find similar ways to communicate the passions of their lives – poetry, or chemistry, or camping — to their girls via the “Daring” book’s pages. Yet, while all this will undoubtedly strengthen individual mother-daughter bonds, I wonder if it will have any wider effect. What power can any of us – moms and daughters, adrift in the cultural mainstream — have against the hugely seductive, hypnotic machine that has brought us Paris, Miley, Lindsay and more?

First, are we really supposed to believe that only women with Ph.D.'s who are passionate about poetry, chemistry, and camping care about their daughters? I think not. Has Judith Warner has ever talked to a WalMart clerk who desperately wants her daughter to succeed in school? Has she listened to the women in inner cities who are speaking up against violence and begging for alternatives for their kids, girls and boys alike? And for that matter, do you think she has actually watched Hannah Montana? Yes, it's Disney, and I have my Disney critiques, but you can do a lot worse in the role model business than Miley.

Which leads to my second problem, which is about the nature of pop culture and its consumption. It is, I believe, a highly elitist (I know, pot, kettle, and all that) perspective which holds that pop culture is just a "hugely seductive, hypnotic machine," something the ignorant masses simply imbibe without thinking, while we intellectuals watch them, understanding them better than they can possibly understand themselves. From this perspective, if stores are selling revealing costumes for little girls, then little girls must believe that all they are is sex objects. But if you actually get in the trenches with kids and pop culture--hell, with people and pop culture--you will see that the consumption of pop culture is often--not always, but more often than people think--a dynamic event. Kids take what they're given, but they transform, critique, rework, and appropriate--hey, just like smart rich people do, just like, dare I say it, Judith Warner and her daughter might do. Except, maybe not, because they are too busy putting up their hair with pencils and bewailing the state of the rest of the world.

And now I really must get on with my day, which I hope will turn out to be worthwhile.

I Should Care

Last time I said "It doesn't matter who gets elected, let's just get this over with," it was December 2000, and I was very very wrong. And yet I'm still having trouble getting invested in this election. Of course I desperately want a Democrat to win (though I know any Democrat who could get elected will break my heart), but basically I think the Democrats are all bearable and the Republicans all suck. I'm not naive enough to think the overwhelming suckiness of the Republicans means they don't have a chance--Republicans are like the Yankees: they have too much money and they always have a chance. But at this point the question is which Democrat, and that's where I'm having a hard time caring, and feeling kind of guilty about it.

The thing is, in 2007, anyone who could get to the point of possibly being elected president is so different from me that it's hard to get excited. They'll all just say whatever it takes to get elected, they're all in bed with big business, and they're all trying to be as careful and with the pack as possible. You can track the nuances if you want, and you can come up with rationales for one or another, but does it really matter?

And that's the point at which I slap myself across the face and say "don't go down this road again, these things matter," only it's really hard to figure out how and why they matter. Is Hilary too calculatingly unprincipled? Too toxic for a general election? Uh, yeah. Is Obama too inexperienced? Too passively entitled? Um, yup. Is Edwards too out of the loop? Too hypocritical? Probably. Is Richardson too far behind to make a difference? Likely. Are any of these dealbreakers? I have no idea.

At this point, I'm kind of sick of Edwards and leaning toward Richardson, but then would I be once again throwing away my vote? Do I wish I was still young and passionate and throwing myself into campaigns?

Eh.

For more useful political analysis, try here.

Edited to add: I didn't even realize that I was characterizing the candidates with negatives...that seems to say something about this campaign: it's about who's the least bad. Interesting, too, that my characterizations veer between presidentability (like that one? yesterday I invented protocolian) and electability, though I think that has to do with the lack of differences between the candidates.

The Idea of Order

A few months ago we seriously considered buying another house. The house had big pluses and small minuses, but when we looked at the inspection report from the previous purchase, we realized it had very big minuses, and just said no. The salutary result of this experience was that we fell quite in love once again with our current house, kind of like when you flirt with someone else and it makes you realize that your boyfriend is the right person for you.

We also resolved to make the improvements that our house needs to be perfect (here's where the boyfriend analogy falls apart, because you cannot make the improvements that a boyfriend needs to be perfect--and truly the house won't be perfect either, but few things are). We have reconceived our renovation plans so that they are more practical, i.e. affordable, and even though we'll lose the big kitchen, we'll gain lots of other spaces and have room for guests galore. (I'm also resolved to make one very impractical renovation and turn the enclosed sunroom into a real porch, which is the kind of backwards thing I'm known for--like quitting a job other people would sell their souls for and moving from one of the most affordable parts of the country to one of the most expensive.)

Renovations are still a few months off though, so for now we're dealing with the little things that drive us--OK, me--nuts. Like the CDs.

I'm not sure you can imagine the CD situation, if you haven't seen it. We have a small sunroom (not the porch-to-be) off the living room which is currently TV room, guest room, and music room (this would make you laugh if you saw it, because really it is so small) (post-renovation it will just be music room, and I can't wait!). It had two CD shelves that held maybe 1100 CDs. But the input of CDs to the house is enormous and unstoppable, plus there is a bad habit (note passive tense) of not putting away CDs, and the result was that the floor and the windowsill (lovely wide shelf-like windowsill) were piled with stacks of CDs. Maybe a dozen stacks? Maybe 30 or 40 CDs per stack? Maybe falling over approximately weekly, leaving the floor tiled with CDs? You can imagine my frustration, disgust, and annoyance, which I tried not to channel at others...OK, I didn't try very hard.

But yesterday the perpetrator of things CD annoying transformed into the perpetrator of CD goodness, bought a new CD shelf (plain, at the unfinished wood store, of course), and put away all the CDs! My joy it is unbounded. Except that, believe it or not (oh, believe it), all three CD shelves are now full, and I fear the cycle only begins again. For the moment, though, I will rejoice in order restored.

Cemetery

Swimming has taken over our life. We are at the pool four days a week. Each girl swims three times, M from 5-6:30, E from 5-6. On Mondays, only M swims, and E and I go home. On Thursdays, only E swims, and M and I hang out, because home is not worth the drive for an hour. On Tuesday and Friday, I have an hour to myself, before I go get E at 6, shower her in the locker room, and wait for M to be done.

This would be a great time to work, except that Swimming Town is pretty much bereft of places to go--the library is a possibility, but down an annoying rush hour road, and I hear there is a Starbucks in the other direction which M and I are going to look into tomorrow, but that's about it. So lately I've been using that time to go for a walk, or to run, which are actually lovely ways to use the time, except soon it's going to be dark, but I'm sure it's the kind of neighborhood where I can walk in the dark, only then it will be cold, but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

One place my walks and runs have taken me is the Swimming Town cemetery which is huge and beautiful and strikingly still in action. We have a cemetery a few blocks from our house where we ride bikes and play hide-and-seek. There are a few newish graves, and some graves have flowers, but mainly it is pretty 19th/20th century, and feels very much like the past, which is how I think of cemeteries.

But in Swimming Town, the cemetery, which is really quite vast, goes back at least to the early 19th century, and maybe further--I haven't fully investigated the little fenced off plot which seems to have the oldest graves--but it also has plots for all the 20th century wars (haven't seen an Iraq war section--that would totally make me lose it), and yesterday in the far corner I saw a lot of 2005s, and there are big swaths of lawn for the future.

I often see runners and dog walkers there, but I also always see cars at graves, and people standing by graves, so it is a very present kind of place. Yesterday, I saw a new grave covered with flower arrangements. There were pictures of a one-year-old boy propped against the stone, which had the name and dates of a grandmother. I hope it was the grandfather who died, and the pictures of the boy were just to keep him company, but somehow I don't think so.

Death is my greatest (and omnipresent) fear, and the idea of the full disappearance that cremation entails is just too much for me, so I know I want to be buried. But where?

In this day and age, cemeteries so often seem so abandoned. My grandparents are buried somewhere in the outer reaches of New York City, one set, I think, in New York, the other in New Jersey. We only go when someone else needs to be buried, and now I think everyone who will be buried there is gone, so I wonder if we will ever go again. Certainly not if I don't even know where they are. L is in a beautiful cemetery in City, perhaps the most beautiful cemetery in the world, but I don't know if D, E, and L ever go. We don't, though now that I think of it, maybe we will, I'd like to show the girls that cemetery, and have them know that L is there.

People move away and leave their dead behind. But not so much in Swimming Town, it seems.

I suppose this is the kind of problem we should think about in advance, but it's just so hard.

Edited to add: This post has nothing to do with Halloween. It's just what I was thinking about yesterday afternoon as I ran through the cemetery. Then I posted it, and then I saw something else and remembered again that it was Halloween (how I could forget, given my children's excitement, is a sign of my true lack of interest).

Little Women

E has been reading M's copies of Beth's Story and Meg's Story from the Portraits of Little Women series--and you probably already know this, but my position on prequels, sequels, and abridgements is that they are A-OK, so long as they are upfront about their status, and E's reading of these is a perfect case in point: she really is not ready for the full book, and I think in fact is next going to tackle the abridgement that was my childhood copy, which I only realized was abridged when I went to read it to M when she was around seven, but she--now we're back to E--is falling in love with Little Women, and these books will bridge her right to the real thing, just like the Little House picture books led her into the novels.

But this post is not about literary principle, it's about Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, and more broadly about sisterly attributes.

Of course the question of which sister E resembles came up, it is sort of an innate kind of thing, there must be a gene attached to the gene for reading which is the gene for identification and sorting of real people by fictional characters. But at any rate E asked which sister I thought she was like, and I said Beth--not that she is musical or sickly, but that she is very alert and somewhat shy and gentle--except when she's not, oh my god, did I just call E, the feral maniac child, gentle? OK, but this actually supports my point: E said that she thought she was like Amy, and we did not have time to get into why, and I'm sure it has nothing to do with pickled limes, but I said I thought she was a combination of Amy and Beth (spoiled, baby of the family, observant, loving), and then we started talking about M, and realized that she is a combination of Meg and Jo (loves fashion, domestic, responsible, adventurous).

And that made me think that perhaps there are a series of sisterly attributes, or perhaps I should say sibling attributes, and if there are only two of you, they sort out among the two of you, and if there are four of you, they sort out among the four of you, kind of like differentiation of labor--is that even a real thing? You know, if there's one person in the restaurant, they cook and serve and do dishes. If there are two, one cooks and one serves and probably they both do dishes. Three: cook, serve, dishes. With four, you get to divide up the cooking. At seven, probably, you get a host.

Then again, when you get to a dozen siblings, I think the characteristics start to double up, like in Cheaper by the Dozen, where the kids are in groups: big sisters, little boys, etc.

Anyway, just a thought.

Aesthetics

I grew up under a regime of modernism. Mies, Wright, the Glass House: that was architecture. Our kitchen table was Saarinen (white laminate--it's in my basement, waiting till we renovate the kitchen) and the chairs were Thonet (black with padded seat--in the attic) (I look at the prices on those today and gasp). My dad built our bookcases and beds--boxes with mattresses on them, I have never slept on a box spring--and painted them in red and blue lacquer. Marimekko was the house fabric (we got one of these nightgowns every Hanukkah--me, my sister, and my mother) (again, the prices!).

Antiques were for people we didn't know. Rich people. People in the country. I couldn't imagine why people wanted antiques, or what they did with them (how ironic that modernism is now vintage).

I shouldn't say regime, because that sounds like oppression, which it wasn't for me (perhaps for my mother, who embraced ethnic folklorica after the divorce, but I was gone by that point). Modernism is another part of my childhood which inhabits me, or perhaps, I should say, which I inhabit. Sometimes my modernism is indistinguishable from minimalism: I have slept on a mattress on the floor in more homes than I'm willing to admit. I suppose you could also call it cheap, which is, of course, its own irony. I built my first bed--a box with a mattress. These days I sleep for the first time on a bed with a headboard, but it's just a slanted piece of wood above a platform.

Our kitchen table is butcher block, our dining room table is Danish, we are too lazy to build our own bookshelves, especially because we need so many, but we buy plain shelves from the unfinished wood store and stain them oak. M and E have the red and blue lacquered shelves, and E's dresser is a plain square, lacquered green. Our dishes are plain, as is our cutlery, though we do have a nice collection of funky martini glasses (but isn't that just the decorative side of modernism?).

Though I was something of a hippie when I was young, and had my share of vintage (when vintage was the 40s), for a long time now my clothes have had the simplest of lines and vary as far as solids, stripes, and flowers, though at least I am no longer monochromatic in black. I can manage pleats, but shirrs and flounces make me cringe (on me--I love them on other people, and I try them on, but I just can't do it).

I do, in theory, love rambling Victorian houses, my grandmother's china with the gilt rims and violets, and billowy canopy beds. But those loves remain theoretical, except at seder.

Lately, though, my friends have been pushing me into new aesthetic realms. I need a bag--my current bags are a vertical rectangular turquoise leather tote, big enough for a folder, but not a laptop, and a horizontal rectangular orange canvas tote, big enough for the kitchen sink, but finally too dilapidated for anything but the beach. A is going to make me a bag. She has come up with this and these, and I am in ecstasy. I need a website, and Local K insists on designing it. I envisioned white space and monochromes, but she has come up with colors and textures and off-centeredness, and I love it.

My guess is, these new loves could be assimilated into a broad conception of modernism, crossed with retro, which of course modernism now is. But I think my point is not about aesthetics after all, but about the value of trusting other people's judgements, especially when your own are so consistently limited.

This is, perhaps, the most elitist post in the history of this blog.

Favorite Post-Game Quote So Far

"Year after year," Henry said, "the Yankees will be Halliburton." [link]

If he had just gotten Britney, George Eliot, and Dave Alvin in there, this blog would no longer need to exist.

Good Times Never Seemed So Good

So good! So good! So good!

Actually, I'm one of the people who thinks it was better last time. Or at least, I was more thrilled last time. But in the bottom of the 9th, after we'd woken the girls up to see the end of the game, as Papelbon ground out those outs (don't you think that inning was a metaphor for the whole season?! we're ahead, but it's close, and it's still nerve-wracking, and then we play kick-ass ball and WE DO IT! I'm still an old school sucker for nail-biting), I was pretty damn happy.

Yes, it's good the second time.

And now I am ready for a baseball break.

Except there are two small matters that need to be taken care of:

1. Mike Lowell--Yes. Yes! YES!!! (World Series MVP?! Come on Theo, just do it.)

2. A-Rod--No. No. Please please please please, put away your charts and statistics, and just say no.

(But what I really want to know is, did Beckett dance with Papelbon?)

Edited to add: I guess not, but man, I love this team.

My Little Paragon of Self Awareness

E (after weeping all the way home from an apparently unsatisfactory evening at a friend's house): I know why I'm crying. Because I'm hungry.

Scott Boras Tries to Prove He's Not the Anti-Christ

And fails.

Defensiveness in the Face of the Liberal Media

Defensiveness Stimulus #1: Alice Waters

It started with the Times magazine and the piece about the single mother browbeaten into cooking a la Alice. And I first got defensive on poor Kelly's blog. Here's the thing: I'm all about Alice, truly. And I do a lot of what she wants us to do: I go to the farmer's market, and I know lots of farmers, and, oh, I don't know what all she wants us to do, eat organic, have family meals, I do all that stuff. But still, I am not good enough, because my children eat six pounds of frozen peas a week, and I want to make my food fast, and I want to use my microwave, and the bottom line is: cooking is not my meditation, I do not like to cook, I value lots of things, like I even value cleaning the sink, but my meditation is going for a walk or a run, and my life really does have meaning and I'm sorry, Alice, I'm sorry!! REALLY, I AM SORRY! Can you just leave me alone with my quesadillas now?

[Here's the quote that set me off:

Get out of that mind-set and tell yourself cooking is a meditation. I like to do it. It's relaxing for me to come home -- it truly is! -- and wash the salad. I love to see the salad in the sink. To spin the salad. I like to dry it. I like to pound to make a vinaigrette with my mortar and pestle. I enjoy grinding coffee and putting it in the filter and warming up the milk. It's part of a ritual that gives my life meaning and beauty.

Bah.]

Defensiveness Stimulus #2: Corinne Maier

I know, you've never heard of her. She's French, that's why. She's French, and she wrote a book about how women shouldn't have children. And I say bully for her, right on, you go girl. The contemporary pressure for maternity is absurd, as is the fetishization of the baby, not to mention the fertility industry (go find your own links, you know where they are, you can start with Babble). Except, well, I always wanted to have children, and I like having children (except when I don't), and I think that even with children I'm doing pretty well on the feminist front.

Fine, you say, it's your choice to have children, and isn't feminism all about choice? Ah, but when it comes to other choices, I am not so sanguine, am I not? Changing names? Other choices I won't bring up so as not to rekindle old fires with dear friends? I insist, in those cases, that the perpetrators of choice must Acknowledge the Feminist Implications of Their Choices.

Yes, but I acknowledge the feminist implications of my choices, and I support Maier and my childless friends in their choices. Except, not so much. I mean, I am totally fine with people not having children who don't want children, but my ambivalent friends? I've been known to tell them it will be worth it. My unhappy friend who chose not to have children because it would interfere with her work? I think she made the wrong choice.

Can I reconcile my inconsistency? Should I just go hide in the dark cave of motherhood? Will I ever be able to show my face in France again? How about at French farmer's markets? With my children?

I think it's time to go to the supermarket and buy me a stack of tabloids and some chips.

Okajima and Papelbon

That's all I have to say.

Okajima and Papelbon.

It's worth saying again.

Okajima and Papelbon.

Time for bed.

Thanks to Okajima and Papelbon.

Taco Bell? Taco Bell?

What is with the Fox announcer interviewing the Taco Bell dude in the stands, while Schilling is pitching?!? Do we now get product placement in our ball games? Who thought that was a good idea?

Oh yeah, it's Fox.

New Internet Addiction

My favorite game online.

My scores are usually in the top part of the middle, between 1/3 and 1/2 way down. The thing is, they use every word in the dictionary, and a lot of them are just collections of letters I've never seen before, and I know a lot of words. So I don't see how people get the top score, unless they play all the time and learn those ridiculous (non)words, or they just stab at all plausible collections of letters as fast as they can. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just not my thing. But I'm getting better, and I think this will only help me beat my brother-in-law and K and D's son by even bigger margins than I already do!

Because, you know, it's not like I don't have enough to do...

For Those of You Following Along at Home

It's done.

Amy Winehouse's new hit

(#2 on the British charts this week) rocks the world.

OK, you could call it a Mark Ronson hit, and it's a Zutons song, but I'm all for covers.

Here's the video which had me confused until I figured it out.

Here's audio.

Here's live and acoustic.

Every time I listen to it, any which way, chills run down my spine.

A Whine

This was my ninth evening in a row of solo parenting.* And I was completely on my own from Wednesday before kids woke up to Sunday after they went to bed.** And I have had a semi-sick kid since Thursday morning (including E home most of Thursday and all of Friday). And I am so close to finishing a huge project, and all I want to do is work, but instead I am taking kids to swim team and making them dinner and supervising their homework and putting them to bed.

I am really sick of my kids. And I am not being very nice to them. And E is particularly high-spirited and chatty these days, and I just want her to shut up and finish her dinner. And M is mopey and not feeling well, and I am trying hard to be patient, but we both know I am failing.

And that's it.



*Necessary disclaimer to show I am aware of my privilege: Many parents are on their own all the time, and they have it much worse than I do. People whose houses are burning and people in Iraq have it worse too. But I'm just me, and this is how I have it.

**Factual disclaimer: There were grandparents involved on two of those nights, but I was still the only parent.

Papelbon Dances Again

The multiple layers of screen mediation on this one kind of boggle the mind, if one feels like thinking critically about postmodernism. But I don't.

By Special Request

This guy says what I was trying to say. This guy is full of it (and I'm just praying the Red Sox don't go after A-Rod, because if they do I will have some serious difficulties). And I don't know what Selena Roberts' problem is (uh, sour grapes?).

So, yeah, we did it. I have to say, I was much more gleeful on Saturday night than on Sunday. Sunday was a bit of a slog. Then Dustin Pedroia reminded us what's it all about. But the locker room celebration? Why did they present all the plaques in the locker room instead of on the field? So we could keep an eye on the popping champagne corks? You know how I feel about that. It all just felt a bit flatter than winning the division, which was kind of what I was trying to say too.

Then sometime this morning, and I don't remember when, probably while I was reading the umpteenth article (why the first or third or eighth article didn't do it, I don't know), but long after I opened my inbox to the thrilled emails, the excitement hit. WE DID IT!!!! And Dustin Pedroia is what it's all about.

(And Jacoby Ellsworth, who can't be more than 14, and Jonathan Papelbon, who I've decided is Bill Lee reincarnated, which totally works for me, and Coco Crisp, who so totally deserved those last two out of three outs, and Youk YOUK YOUK!!!!).

I love this team.

About Me, Cryptically

One thing about me is that I am hopelessly pessimistic. I am always certain that the worst will happen, even in circumstances where the worst is no big deal. Every single time I follow directions (I mean it: every single time), I'm sure they are wrong. I know the cake won't work. I won't get the job. Nobody will come to the party.

In my 43 years on the planet, this negativity has been disproved many more times than not, infinitely more times, in fact. So I have taken to keeping a constant IV of cognitive behavioral therapy dripping into my veins. I think I know things will not work out, I tell myself, but the high likelihood, given past performance, is that they will work out, so I must remember, I tell myself, that this is not what I KNOW but what I FEEL, so I proceed as if things will work out, even though I know that I feel they will not, and that my feeling feels like knowledge, and then they usually work out, and I am on to the next potential failure.

It works, most of the time, but it would be so much easier to see the world through the lens of sunny optimism.

Another thing about me is that I am certain that I Know Better. Than who? Than everyone.

Remember that scene in Broadcast News? Actually, it's two scenes.

The first scene is the one where Holly Hunter tells the cabdriver where to go. I used to always tell the cabdriver where to go--ON THAT EXACT SAME ROUTE. And then I thought, this is ridiculous, you are way too controlling, just let the damn cabdriver go, and he went hopelessly wrong and got us in terrible traffic on some convoluted route that cost way more than mine would have cost and took longer too.

The other scene is the one where William Hurt tells her, sarcastically, that it must be terrible to always know better than everyone, and she weeps and says, yes, yes, it is terrible. And I wept too (OK, maybe not, I'm not so much of a cryer [crier?] at movies, but I felt her pain, truly I did). Because it is terrible: you always know better, and people are always doing things wrong, and if you tell them how they could do it better, you are an ass, and if you don't tell them, you go crazy over how badly things are being done, and it's just terrible all around.

Now this is another one where I basically know the difference between what I KNOW and what I FEEL, but I won't explicate it, so I don't get twisted up in some other insane sentence, and I've learned, or rather, I'm learning, or at least, I'm trying, not to constantly proclaim to the world my Greater Knowledge of Everything. These days I am in fairly regular contact with someone who is certain they Know Better, and truly, it is excruciating to be around this person, and I hate to think that it could be excruciating to be around me, though I KNOW and FEEL that often it is.

At any rate, just as I am trying not to succumb to or articulate my general perspective of doom, I am trying not to force my Better Ways of Doing Just About Everything onto those around me, but can I just say that it is very, very difficult. Truly, it is.

Now, go cry for me, Argentina.

What M's Up To

Learning to do this.

Apparently all the kids are doing it. And it's the #1 song in the country.

Who knew?

I hereby give up my role as the #1 pop culture arbiter in the family.

Donatella and Iggy

Together at last.

It's Just That Kind of Day

The end of my rope is within sight, and at this point, what is going to push me there is THESE DAMN FOX ANNOUNCERS!!!!!!!!!! And I can't turn them off, because then I have to watch straight through, and THIS GAME IS JUST WORKING MY NERVES!!!!!!!!

Good thing there was an inch of vodka left.

Edited to add: See? That's what I meant. This is not a team that folds. And I'm still down with Manny--because, for god's sake, it is not the end of the world if we lose, and the man had two hits, and the single was as close to a home run as you can get, and what happened in Pakistan today is so much more important than what happened in Cleveland. But still, I'm relieved, and now I'm going to bed, and after all, tomorrow is another day.

Before Game 5

(I know this day has been overblogged, and really I think I must go on a blog diet, but there is a bit of an excuse, because I was just settled in for a solid day of work, with clear achievable goals, and then at 10:30 the phone rings and it's the secretary at E's school and, well, you can guess the rest of the story, so I got a tiny bit of work done, in between reading Heidi aloud and playing board games, and, well, some blogging. But this post really must be written before 8 p.m., so here it is, and that's the end of me, for now.)

I'm going to go out on a limb and say: I agree with Manny.

[OK, I'm spending too much time here, and hitting too many registration pages, trying to find the perfect link, but probably if you care at all about this post you know what he said, and if you don't, well, here's the money quote:

“We’re not going to give up,” he said. “We’re just going to go, play the game and move on. If it doesn’t happen, so who cares? It’s always next year. It’s not like the end of the world.”

And this is the one that people aren't talking about so much:

“Why should we panic?” he said. “We got a great team. If it doesn’t happen, good. We come next year and try to do it again.”

Both from the NY Times.]

Lucy asked me the other day to write the definitive Red Sox post, encompassing my feelings about this year and what it's like to be a long-term Red Sox fan now that everyone has gotten on the Red Sox Nation bandwagon. This isn't going to be that so much except, well, maybe part of that.

Anyway, here's how I feel: This is a great team. I love this team. And this team, in my book, has achieved: after the Yankees came back and that disastrous series in Toronto, they did not collapse. Last year's team would have collapsed (hell, they'd already collapsed). Want to talk about the 90s? Let's not. This team took first place way the hell back in whenever, and they kept it. They won the division. THEY WON THE DIVISION. That's just huge. And they slaughtered the Angels. And these Cleveland games? They've been hella good baseball (though I must admit that I've had the TV on in the sunroom and sat in the living room, where I can hear, and see the reflection in the glass double doors, and run in for the replay if I need to, but watching? Way too stressful.)

Do I want them to win tonight? Of course. Do I think there should be heads on a platter if they don't? Definitely not. This is a team that is not going to go gentle into that good night. Think Papelbon, Lester, Buchholz, Ellsbury, Pedroia. Think Beckett, for god's sake. Youkilis. And the old guys still have it too (no comment on Schilling, except that we will be forever grateful).

This isn't the Red Sox who always end up losing. This is the Red Sox who win, and sometimes they lose. They're still a great team. I still love them. But the Curse is gone. And I'm not sure these newbies to Red Sox Nation can truly appreciate that, but I do.

I'm leaving out the role of class, race, and nostalgia in the constitution of Red Sox Nation, but a girl can only blog so much. And that's it for me.

Edited to add: OK, I do have one more thing to say: regardless of all this positivity, Eric Gagne has got to go. And that really is it.

Oh Man, Britney

Britney, Britney, Britney.

I have been so trying to defend you (in my heart). I do believe that they are out to get you, and you are not fat, and your new album may very well be good, though it's not my thing, and that stripper video is just silly. My kids see me naked and I drink in their presence, and I'm a good mom, so maybe you can be too.

But come on, honey, if you want the kids, just do what the judge says. If you don't want the kids, just give them up. It wouldn't be the end of the world. Yes, K-Fed wants them in part so he can get as much of your money as he can, but he's also got the house, the nanny, your mom, seems like he's giving them an OK life, and the judge is watching him too, so he'd have to keep giving them an OK life, especially if he wanted to keep the money.

And if you're just continuing this custody charade to keep yourself in the public eye (as this video might suggest--I mean, just stay home already), well, honey, I'm just not sure I can be on your team.

Middle School Tidbits

M: Eighth graders are HORRIFYING.

I've been meaning to update on middle school, but haven't gotten to it, in part because of my privacy policies (only write things about my children which I would be OK with them reading, and this is not a hypothetical stance, because M does read my blog, if erratically) (feel the need to restate policy because of recent discussions about people who do not share policy and behave, in my opinion, quite egregiously toward children's privacy, and no, I'm not talking about anyone who reads this blog) (I'm pretty sure).

Basically middle school is going great for M. The bus is fine, she has made tons of new friends, she likes her teachers and classes (for the most part), and she is definitely learning. She wrote her first five-paragraph essay, and while I am ambivalent about the pedagogical implications of that milestone, it was a very nice essay, and she could not have written it last May. She is also prone to sudden outbreaks of Latin, and she was all excited to see an article about Del Tha Funkee Homosapien, because now she knows what a homo sapien is.

She is also quite delightful these days, and I do think the middle school independence and excitement has something to do with it. She loves to pick E up from school, and is very patient about getting her snacks and playing with her. She does her homework completely on her own, with only the occasional reminder that the day is moving on and now might be a good time. She is doing killer swim team workouts with nary a complaint. And she still sends me "I love you" texts, just about daily.

So, middle school: all good.

Except not quite. I am not so thrilled with the school, generally speaking. The physical plant is appalling, her history teacher is a psycho who should have retired long ago (I can say this here because she agrees), and the pedagogy, well, let's just say that inquiry, experimentation, and independence could play a little (a lot!) more of a role. Oh, and the discipline thing is just ridiculous. There's a teacher--not in M's cluster, thank goodness--who gives detention when kids put their heads on the desk (and seems not to realize that if she is giving five or six detentions a day, THIS POLICY IS NOT WORKING). And M was really excited not to have her cluster meeting yesterday, because, according to her, all they do in cluster meeting is yell at them. Nice.

But this is all a preamble for the question of whether middle school health centers should be allowed to prescribe birth control without parents knowing. To which my answer is: hell, yeah. And I'm a middle school parent, and it would be fine with me if the nurses at M's school prescribed birth control to her without telling me. So there.

Now, I doubt this would happen, because M and I are pretty communicative, and I am annoyingly intrusive. And it certainly wouldn't happen now, because M is on the still-a-kid side of the sixth grade spectrum. But there are some sixth graders--OK one, and yes, it's the one you're thinking of, if you know the sixth grade cast of characters--who might very well be in a position to need birth control, and would be unlikely to tell their parents. And those eighth graders? Remember what M said? They're horrifying, which does not mean that they are bad or scary or ugly, but rather that they are very big and grown-up, which to a still-a-kid sixth grader is, in a word, horrifying.

So we get back to the old debate, and I know where I stand: if kids are going to have sex--and they are--they need birth control, and if they aren't going to talk to their parents--and many of them aren't--they should be able to get the birth control on their own. Even in middle school. Even my kid.

Who Thought of That One?

S is a purist--tiny cups of espresso and Gray Goose straight up with a twist--but I'm all for foofy drinks--Cosmos, iced chai lattes... I also love anything pumpkin (pumpkin muffins!) and I'm a big fan of mocha (mocha chip ice cream!). But a pumpkin spice white chocolate mocha latte? I think not.

What I'm Thinking About Right Now

Oh, I am very annoyed, and trying very hard not to get in a rage, and I think the suppressed rage is fueling the annoyance.

I should be thinking about soldiers in Iraq or children without healthcare, but instead I must figure out the date for M's bat mitzvah. Clearly we have been put at the end of the queue, as someone else has gotten the date and time we requested, and that is what I am not going to get in a rage about because, well, because there's just no point. If people request the same date, someone doesn't get it.

But now we have a choice of two dates. One is the original date, but a Havdalah service. And not only that, but M's closest religious school friend has her bat mitzvah that morning. The other is a month before M's birthday, a morning service, but a friend of hers, whose mom is a friend of mine, has the Havdalah service. I've called my friend and asked if she'll hate me if M has her bat mitzvah the same day as A. I suppose I should call the other mom too.

I could go on with my thoughts, but who cares. Oh, what the hell. I think my preference is for the morning service, because we can have the bat mitzvah, then have a lunch (I'm thinking--the one positive thought of this day's forced rumination--about the nice restaurant at the end of the street), and then that's it. No evening party, which I don't want anyway. When I had my bat mitzvah, we walked ten miles to synagogue barefoot in the snow, and then just had everyone back to our house for lunch. Obviously that's not going to happen, largely because we couldn't possibly fit everyone in our house, but I see no reason to go berserk, just because that's what happens these days (ha! tell me that in 18 months). But at any rate, I don't think there are that many families that would go to both A's bat mitzvah and M's, mainly the B-P's and perhaps the M-F's. And M could go to A's bat mitzvah if she wanted, though presumably we couldn't, given out-of-town guests, and their friends could easily go to both. I do think that's really my preference, so long as it won't permanently sever my friendship with R.

If we did the Havdalah service, I'm guessing we would conflict with H's party, because they seem the evening party types. People say Havdalah service bat mitzvahs are lovely, but I've never been to one, and I'm feeling a bit traditionalist about this.

The problem is, this is the kind of decision that you have to keep dealing with. Lots of decisions you make and then it's over, you're going with your choice and that's that. Which is what will happen here, too, but no matter what, M will be having her bat mitzvah on the same day as a good friend, not in our ideal circumstances (different time than we wanted or different day than we wanted), and we will have to work with that.

Oh, my god, I am just the most spoiled person in the world to have such things I need to worry about. But S is on an airplane all day, and hopefully will get my text on some layover and call me, and this decision needs to be made, like, today, because I guess there are people even lower on the queue than us who need to solve their bat mitzvah date problems, and may hone in on one of our dates if we don't nail it down quickly, and now I am just boring myself, as well as you, so that's enough of that.

Hope, Will, and Modern Medicine

I'm following this story because he's a friend of Postacademic's, and because it's the kind of story I follow. His apparently brilliant recovery, so far, though it will be a very long time, is so reminiscent of my cousin's from his bike accident--which I think must have been just about a year ago, as he WALKED out of the hospital at Passover, six months after he arrived and was told he would never walk again, if he survived, which many doubted. Modern medicine has its problems, like everything does, but its power, when effectively operative, is unsurpassed, and I'm greatly thankful for it (not just as my cousin's cousin, but as someone who might very well have died in childbirth without it, but I've told that story too many times).

But there's also something about some people. I know it's a narrative we construct retroactively--my cousin and this guy I don't know seem like the most special of the special, and their recoveries (knock wood) thus become that much more evidence of how special they are--and I know many special people do not survive terrible circumstances, but still...well, I don't know what. I guess it's nice to see that sometimes good things do happen to good people, even if they happen in the aftermath of terrible things. (Oh dear, this is just hopelessly incoherent of me, but it's really all I can say, except that I'm so glad my cousin lived and is home with his children, even though he's still in pain and will never be the same, and I hope this guy's friends and family will be able to say the same, except maybe even better.)

A Raggedy, Rambling Post About Girls, Moms, and Some Other Stuff

I tried to write a post about race and class in the first grade, but it collapsed, because after I listed all the ways the girls self-segregate by race, I came up with a half dozen examples of cross-race friendships, and when I self-consciously admitted that E says mean things about the girls of color in her class, I realized that she quite likes the girls of color from her class last year, and her best friend is a Chinese boy, for goodness sake, and as I thought about it, I realized that the birthday party which inspired the post had seven white girls and four girls of color and they all played together gleefully. So the kids are more complicated than the ideological mother allows them to be (OK, in not writing the post, I guess I am leaving them to their complexity).

The one thing, though, that I did not manage to disprove for myself is the fact that the white, middle-class girls whose moms are active in the school are all friends--my line was going to be "and thus power perpetuates itself" and then there was going to be something else, I think in a different sentence, about "despite self-awareness and the best intentions," and then the kicker was something about how the only way to really address white privilege and racism in the lives of one's white kids is to put them in environments where they are distinctly the minority, and we weren't willing to accept the ramifications of doing that in the East Coast Big City area, so basically we have to live with our inadequate choices (I mean, we can do other things, but that's the bottom line).

But back to the girls and their moms. Or rather, back to the moms.

I don't tend to engage with the blogosphere, but lately I've read a couple of bloggers complaining about unwelcoming moms, especially unwelcoming PTO moms, and dozens of commenters agreeing (and a few commenters offering alternative interpretations). And I'm thinking, too, about being accused of being a Queen Bee mom by that person who used to know me. And then there's this Jane Dark post which raises a point I've always wondered about: if everyone was an outsider, where are the insiders? which is relevant, though the connection may not emerge sufficiently clearly.

My thoughts are certainly in part defensive. I'm sure I look like an alpha mom. If that person who used to know me saw me at my kids' school, she'd probably be satisfied with her foresight. If you saw me at school, you'd probably hate me. I'm friends with the power moms, and I call the principal by her first name. I bake from scratch, and I run the theater program. I'm always chatting with someone, and my nice white middle-class daughters have lots of friends and get good grades and are beloved by their teachers, who also call me by my first name. See, you have met the enemy, and she is me.

But here's how I feel a lot of the time: shy and terrified. And here's how I know so many people: because I found a really cool project to get involved with, and because I stood outside school before the bell rang, and sat on the sides of fields, and you see the same people over and over, and eventually you smile, and then you make idle chat, and then at some point you realize that you know each other.

B, the PTO treasurer? I used to think she was totally mean and scary, but enough tee ball, enough soccer, a few necessary emails about school business later, and we're not drinking buddies, but I know that she's a nice person who just wants what I want: happy kids and a good school.

Or take J. J is a bonafide PTO mom. She organizes the carnival, last I heard she was vice-president and she's probably president by now, she even hosts luncheons. But she's also one of the coolest people on the planet: she's into Sylvia Plath, loves to hike, can drink all of us under the table, and is totally shy. I mean, come on Dawn, you're the scared-of-the-PTO type: isn't J the best??

I think a lot of it comes down to the difficulty of entering new situations. There may be some people who just love entering a room full of people who all know each other for the first time, but I am not acquainted with any of them. Basically, it sucks. Their familiarity seems across the continental divide from your alienation, totally unachievable. But the fact is: they were all new too, once, and then they kept coming, and eventually they weren't new anymore, and they understood how things worked, and had their own roles, and maybe they weren't best friends with everyone, but it was OK. My prenatal yoga class? Totally terrifying the first time I went: all these hugely pregnant moms who not only knew each other, but knew what a downward dog was. Fast forward four months, and there I was hanging out after class with all the other nine-month-pregnant fat chicks, while the still-svelte five-monthers eyed us with wary terror.

I've entered two schools and two Hebrew schools, and each time I've been terrified and alienated, but in three of the four I found my place, and in the fourth, the fact that I didn't has as much to do, I'm sure, with my ambivalent lack of engagement as with the power mom posse (who were good friends with a lovely friend of mine, and I'm sure would have been fine if I'd had the energy). I have totally failed to find my place in some important professional situations, remaining terrified, alienated, and angry on the sidelines, but, again, my ambivalence about those situations was so powerful it was probably radiating off me, signaling "Crazy woman in your midst. Stay away."

I'm not saying all moms are angels. I'm just saying that a lot of the hostility toward the figure of "the PTO mom" is a manifestation of our own anxieties and insecurities, and it is within our power to rewrite our high school scripts.

That's all.

I Am My Mother, With Google

I just did it again. I clicked on the URL of the Jezebel post on Lourdes Ciccone, cut and pasted it into an email, and sent the email off to M with the subject line "skinny jeans!"

Hacking into M's email account (is it hacking if you know her password, and she knows that you regularly look over her shoulder while she emails?), I see that in the last few weeks, I have sent her two online boggle games, two videos, an article about tweens online, and a blog about making cool stuff out of Ikea products. And that's only what she's saved in her inbox.

Yes, where my mother once sent me a steady stream of clippings in the mail, I now forward M a steady stream of emails, websites, articles, and blog posts. And it's not just M (which means maybe my mom sent those clippings to other people too??). I send them to my sister, S, my friends, and even my mother, though she has ridiculous difficulties trying to open links, despite my patient tutorials (my mother is not a technological laggard, she can manipulate listservs and email with the best of them, but in the battle of Mom vs. computer, computer definitely has an edge).

Is there a point here? Beyond the like-mother-like-daughter thing, and the how-technology-transforms-our-everyday-pursuits thing? Hmm, let me try to formulate one. There is something, at the very least in our family, about communicating through culture, about the medium of the clipping or the link serving as a means of affirming shared interests, or at least an embrace of what interests the other. It's a way of establishing intimacy: you may not be here right now, but I know what you like, and I'm thinking of you, and I'm sending you this because I know you will like it and because I love you (it can happen by phone too: yesterday I called my mom to tell her about a headline I knew she hadn't seen). Yes, the clipping and the link, they are not just information, but affection.

Honestly, the clippings sometimes used to annoy me (sorry, Mom). The blizzard of paper, and what do you do with a clipping once you've read it? That seems like a question with an obvious answer: you throw it out, just like you throw out the newspaper (OK, put it in the recycling). But now I see why I couldn't just throw them out: because they were proof that my mother loved me, not that I needed proof, but you certainly don't want to throw it out!

So I'm glad that M keeps my emails in her inbox. And I'll redouble my efforts to help my mom open her links. And if you feel like sending this blog post along, well, feel free.

Anosmia

I wonder if I have always felt a bit apart from the world because I cannot smell it.

There's Always Something to Complain About

M: That Dan Shaughnessy guy, he's mean even when the Red Sox win.

Un-Knitting

A long time ago, I spent New Year's Eve with a man who was not my boyfriend, but became my boyfriend a few months later, to the dismay of my then-boyfriend. We spent the evening eating, drinking, and lying barely platonically on the couch, and I knitted. In the morning, I had to rip out all my knitting.

[The subtext of this post, which will be of interest only to Libby, is that I returned to Clapotis after several months absence and discovered that I somehow missed dropping a stitch, so I need to rip out several rows, because I am compulsive, which in Clapotis, well, let's just say it's causing another (temporal) gap in my knitting.]

[I think that S, who was then my ex-boyfriend and nowhere near my husband, stopped by that night too. And I have no idea why recent posts seem to be revisiting my love life ca. 1984.]

More on Lessing

I'm so pleased that everyone seems to be so pleased about Lessing, not least of all herself. The Independent reminds me of The Fifth Child which is one of the most horrifying books I've ever read, testifying again to Lessing's power as a writer.

Edited to add: Oh my god, I just love her and I love Jezebel for, well, I just love Jezebel and I've been having the urge every day to blog about how much I love Jezebel, but I've stopped myself because I've already been there done that, but Jezebel and Doris Lessing, together at last? I mean, I am overcome with delight.

Freud and Edmundson

Mark Edmundson is so smart, and I've been quite loving his pieces on Freud in the NY Times, and this Bookslut interview is just great. I wish I could say I was looking forward to reading his book, but the fact is I know I won't have the stamina for it, so I'm not even going to try.

[I like the intro to the interview almost as much as the interview. One of my problems with Freud has always been the idea that our psychic structures are formed by early childhood experience. For me this is very not true: I slightly dated a guy when I was about 19 who turned out to be a pathological liar, and ever since then I have basically doubted every single person I encounter, which is to say I am ready to believe that anyone is a liar, and I don't think there is anything in my early childhood that this doubt reaches back to, but it has become a fundamental part of how I see the world. But I see now that I have been misunderstanding Freud, who actually holds that our psychic structures evolve as we develop, and now I can happily say that I learned something today.]

Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize

I think this is just a great award. Like a lot of people (I'm guessing), I've abandoned Lessing since she's gone all mystical science fiction on us (a mistake? someone tell me those books are great, and maybe I'll give them a shot), but the Martha Quest novels? the short stories? The Golden Notebook? That is great and important writing, aesthetically and culturally.

I first read The Golden Notebook in the early 80s, when I was taking a semester off from school to be full-time political and attempt to recover my college-stifled love for books. It completely rocked my world (which shows what a baby boomer I am, at heart, despite my perch on the exact demographic cusp between baby boom and Gen X). She was struggling with the tension between politics and literature. I was struggling with the tension between politics and literature! She was questioning the efficacy of narrative form. I was questioning the efficacy of narrative form! She was trying to figure out who she was and the place of desire in her life. I was trying to figure out who I was and the place of desire in my life (even though I didn't call it desire back then, I think I probably called it boys)! Indeed, I think Anna's madness helped forestall my own.

I re-read it in the mid-90s, wondering if it would still work for me, and while the identification had evaporated, the book blew my mind yet again.

Congratulations, Ms. Lessing!

The Perennial Shoe Dilemma

Is it too early for boots?

Edited to add: Saw seven pairs of boots today. Mine come down from the attic tomorrow. (When did I become such a lemming?)

Aren't You Glad He's Not Your Dad?

I'm no big moralist, but he lost me when he took the joint.

Potluck Oppression

Once they were a great thing, the potlucks. It was before Food. And Foodies. We would call everyone and say, "come on over, it's a potluck," and the food would arrive (it was just food, not Food), and the beer would arrive, and we would eat and drink and drink some more and do some more stuff and be so happy that our social life was so easy.

Now, though, not so much. Now I want you to invite me over and cook me a good meal--I'm happy to bring a chocolate cake or a bottle of wine--or I want you to come over and I'll cook you a good meal, OK, S will cook you a good meal, and you can bring the salad, or the bottle of wine, and we will eat and drink and be happy, and only one of us will have stress and pots to wash. But the potluck, in this age of children and Food and too much to do, I am not so up on.

My sister, she lives a life of potlucks. She puts some flowers on the table and buys a couple of gallons of cider and the beautiful food pours in and everyone eats (her crowd doesn't drink so much) and the children frolic, and there is potluck joy in the world. At least that's how I imagine it. Me? If I were invited I would be stressing out about what to bring and how my contribution would pale before the others and what will E eat and I don't even have time for this and I forgot to bake a chocolate cake last night and it's 4:00, so what can I possibly bring that will be worthwhile, and yet I have standards such that I can't just go out and buy something, and forget it, we're just getting a pizza and staying home. Maybe we'll invite a friend over to share our pizza.

My sister even goes to potluck weddings, though she has long since agreed that this is a terrible idea.

The worst is my synagogue. It's all about potluck at my synagogue. It's bring the bagels, and if not the bagels, a challah, and if not that, a casserole, or a dessert for the oneg, or all of the above. This Friday is first grade consecration, which means something for the potluck dinner before and something for the oneg after, and R already bagged the challah, and I am just so not up for this.

Truly, I am a terrible, hostile, non-communal, selfish human being, and I will suffer forever in a hell of other people's potlucks.

Schadenfreude, etc.

It's hard not to feel (a little) bad for the Yankees, after that drubbing. And it seems (a little) anti-climactic to move on without facing the Yankees. And poor Joe Torre, I mean, after all he's done (then again, I don't know that he's done all he could have done).

But overall?

ROCK ON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And on the personal side: there is someone I am hideously, nay, embarrassingly, competitive with. And this person has an accomplishment I lack. Only I have just discovered that this accomplishment is hollow. And my joy it is unseemly.

An Amazing Sentence

That night was nothing but getting to know how smooth your body is.

I suppose it's uncouth to wish someone had written that sentence to me, given that Ted Hughes wrote it to Sylvia Plath, but still...

From Hughes' letters, excerpted in the Telegraph, link from Jenny.

Zen and the Art of Parenting

I always forget.

We arrived in the country late, after detouring to meet K and J and have dinner with N who had decided not to go with us.

Everything was fine the next morning. E went off with some of her favorite people, M hung with her peeps, and I planted an entire bed of garlic with a bunch of moms and thought about Kelly.

Then things started to fall apart. After lunch, I wanted to sit on the porch and read, but E was on me, over me, around me, determined not to embrace any of my suggestions for alternative activities (play with a friend? climb? read her own book?). When it was time to decide on an afternoon project, we entered total collapse. I knew what I wanted to do, and it was not what M and E wanted to do. I tried to find something they wanted to do, knowing I would have to do it too, and resenting the fact mightily, but that effort was singularly unsuccessful. Finally, unilaterally, I decreed that the afternoon project would be a nap.

M acquiesced, realizing, with the maturity of eleven, that the problem was exhaustion, but E, oh E. E was positively operatic in her resistance. The wails resounded through the valley. Everyone else got to do something fun! She never got to do anything fun! She was NOT TIRED!

Which of course meant that she was tired, though I must admit that the prolongedness of her resistance made me doubt my eleven years of parental experience. Finally I told her that if she could stay quiet for ten minutes and was still awake, we'd go do something fun. The sobs eventually stopped, and three minutes later she was asleep. She slept for an hour.

I was supposed to go running with K, but I didn't. I took the girls swimming instead. And took a walk with them to the barn, because that's what they wanted to do. And they both were delightfully cheerful and charming, and we had a very nice time.

And I remembered, yet again, that sometimes you just have to go with what they need and want, regardless of your own desires, and when you do, everyone ends up happier.

In Which I Attempt to Connect the Dots Between Bush and Myself in a Post Nobody Will Comment On

I've been thinking about the news, and I've been thinking about work, and this morning I realized that there are connections between the two, and the president is an out-of-touch ass. I don't think this post is going to be as coherent as it could be, because there are a couple of extraneous points I want to make, but here goes (at least I'm leaving out this morning's Dan Shaughnessy rant, which S told me was not appropriate for first thing in the morning).

I don't understand why people are so shocked about Blackwater. The account of what happened in Nisour Square on September 16 is appalling, but 1) Americans with guns in Iraq and Afghanistan behave like this not infrequently, and 2) Americans with guns in Iraq and Afghanistan, and most other places where Americans have guns, are often mercenaries. Doesn't everyone know this? It's horrifying and embarassing (nationally speaking) and wrong, but it's been the case for a long time, and certainly for this whole war. Halliburton/Blackwater: two sides of the same outsourcing privatization which the politicians and the press, at least, have not only known about but been complicit in. So why the sudden outrage? We all should be in a constant state of outrage (in fact, I am, but I need to keep it suppressed to function in daily life, though it spurted out again when I read about secret torture authorizations).

Speaking of privatization, not to mention outrage (yay, I forged a segue), the president has, as promised, vetoed the State Children's Health Insurance Program, and he claims it's a matter of principle:

The policies of the government ought to be to help poor children and to focus on poor children, and the policies of the government ought to be to help people find private insurance, not federal coverage. And that's where the philosophical divide comes in.

While some people may be surprised about the privatization of the military, the privatization of health care is a piece of the fabric of our daily lives that Bush is trying to preserve, not produce. So there's my segue. And now I'm trying to make another segue that links this to me, and I'm failing, so I'm just going to get on with the things I want to say and eventually we'll get to me.

If the theoretical underpinning of Bush's veto is privatization, the explicit issue at stake is how we define poverty. The new bill says SCHIP should be available to families earning up to 250% of the poverty line. Up to now it has been 200%.* The current poverty line for a family of four in the 48 contiguous states is $20,650. This means the new bill wants to make SCHIP available to kids in families that make around $52,000 a year.

Right now we are buying private health insurance, because I'm the one with the professional responsibility for health insurance (restaurants? health insurance? ha!) and I don't have a job. We're paying around $750/month (not sure of the exact amount, S pays the bills these days in a fabulous shift of domestic labor that I've meant to blog about, but haven't) for extremely mediocre health insurance. Big deductible, big co-pay, and no dental which is really bothering me given the position of E's new teeth. We decided to go for lower monthly payments and bigger risk because our income is down now but we have some savings and, most importantly, because we have an extended family with the means to help us out if crisis comes (knock wood).

So we have the cheapest private insurance you can get, really, and it comes to $9,000 a year, which means $10,350 pre-tax, for families at that 250% point (which we are significantly above, but now this isn't about me), which means those families are paying 20% of their income in health insurance. Does President Bush pay 20% of his income in health insurance? I think not. Does he have any idea what it's like to try to make things work for a family of four on $52,000, especially in an expensive urban area? I think not. Certainly it's much harder to make things work on $25,000, no question, but the poor have things like SCHIP... OK, now I'm turning into a John Edwards clone making the middle-class argument, so I'll turn back to me.

I have to make a decision in the next few days about what I'm going to do next. I've been torn all along between finding a job and striking out on my own. I now have an opportunity which would be the linchpin of striking out on my own: a reasonably-paid long-term consulting gig doing work that interests me with people I like. In 2-3 days a week it would provide me with a sizeable chunk of the money I need to make each month, leaving a good amount of time to make a theoretically achievable amount of money. But it does not have health insurance, and while these people would like to have me consult with them full-time, they will never be able to give me health insurance for reasons I won't get into (and no, Phantom, this would not make a good novel).

OK, I don't have a conclusion. There are a lot of other factors going into my decision, like the seductive possibility of the best job ever right around the next corner (hasn't shown up yet, but it could!), but if we had national health insurance, there'd be one factor I wouldn't have to worry about. Not that the president cares about me.

*Edited to add: I'm not sure I'm exactly right on the specifics of these figures, though I did read them somewhere reputable (good newspaper, not sure which), but I don't have time to figure it out, and I think my overall point still holds: Bush does not want to expand eligibility, but the populations to whom he does not want to expand definitely could use SCHIP.

I Think I've Found My People

My new love for Jezebel is summed up in this sentence:

The story ends happily, with the law firm Cleary Gottlieb's managing partner Mark Walker, who wasn't at the lady luncheon, sending everyone an email pointing out the stupidity of the Glamour editor and of fashion magazines and yeah pretty much all the things we here at Jezebel hold so near and reviled.

"Near and reviled": EXACTLY.

I pointed out to S last night that I am hopelessly superficial. Pam Thompson, on the other hand, is deep and meaningful and literary and political and non-gluten and all the things I've always thought I would be a better person if I were (I know that sounds like snark, but it's not). Anyway, she has a new book and a new blog, so check them out.

Have You Seen Papelbon's Jig?

It's a sight to be seen. (Truly, I was as thrilled as the next fan when they were celebrating Friday night, but, the grown men shaking up the champagne bottles and holding them out from their waists while they sprayed white foam all over each other and the crowd? Uh, does nobody else think that's a little, well, you know...)

The Expansive Worldview of David Brooks

Right, the whole problem is the English professors. Uh, didn't that argument go out around 1999?

Current Small Problems

My head still itches. Five people have checked me--including two school nurses and two teachers--and found nothing: no lice, no nits. I have done Nix twice and mayonnaise/white vinegar once (same as the girls who no longer seem to itch, as well they shouldn't given how often I combed them). I don't itch as badly as I did at the beginning--and it's not sympathetic itching, because I was the one who itched first--but I still itch.

I can't find a bathing suit for E. She needs a good racing-type suit for swim team, and the stores are all out, Speedos start too big, and Tyr is way too expensive.

I need a babysitter. I suppose, in the interests of political correctness and familial harmony, I should say we need a babysitter, but really I need a babysitter, because for the most part S is at work, which means I need back-up for things I need to do and an easy escape for things I want to do. Most specifically, I need babysitters for October 24 and 29, one being a have to do, one being a want to do. But I also would like to see a movie, go out to dinner with a friend, go to a meeting without bringing the girls, have a life. Our most excellent babysitters (best friends who both have cars) have gone to college. I had two graduate students lined up, but neither has a car and they are both ridiculously busy--I've given one of them five dates and she could do only one, which I turned out not to need. We know a few high school students, but it's a bit awkward because they are the older siblings of M's friends, plus their parents are friends of ours, and they are only in 9th and 10th grade, so while they have potential to be good babysitters for E sometimes, I can't exactly keep them till midnight on a school night while I go see a band. (The car thing is important because I can't take a babysitter home and leave the girls alone asleep in the house, though I suppose I could if it was just in the neighborhood, but the grad students are not in the neighborhood.)

The Weather Makes Me Nervous

This fall has been too beautiful. I worry that the next catastrophe we can't imagine is coming, and someday we'll say, "remember how beautiful it was the autumn of 2007, before...." Just like they talked about the perfect summer of 1914, and we always remember the blue sky that morning.

I have approximately zero interest in Eric Clapton

but this is the kind of thing I just love.

What We Saw Today

A troupe of Morris dancers.

Three brides.

A pair of 11-day-old twins.

Eight ducklings.

Two bagpipers.

DUUUUUUDE!

Watching the NESN anchors watch the Fenway fans watch the end of the New York-Baltimore game on the scoreboard: surreal.

Winning the division: priceless.

Hilary Duff's Decolletage

Hilary Duff's boobs are totally bumming me out here, both aesthetically and conceptually (the aesthetic should be obvious, if your vision hasn't been totally deformed by porn, and the conceptual is the fact that a quite adorable starlet who is not even 20 feels that she needs to get implants).

I know two teenagers, both 18, I think, who have the most remarkable breasts. R's are quite huge, with cleavage to bury yourself in, and she parades them majestically upon her chest in the skimpiest of tank tops. A's are mid-sized, on the small end, and perky, kind of pyramidal. They are punk-hippie girls (yes, in 2007, that locution is possible) who wouldn't dream of implants. I wish I could feature them in a public interest campaign: Real Is Better (RIB, for short). Or perhaps Bring Out Our Breasts, or Believe: Ourselves, Our Breasts (you can do the acronym yourself).

[Despite blog appearances to the contrary, I am actually getting a lot done this morning. I'm just rewarding myself with breaks for my favorite mainstream press outlets.]

Edited to add: Sorry, the link's messed up, and I can't seem to fix it, but you can get the gist from the text (just imagine grapefruits at about the collarbone level).

Blackwater

Paul Krugman is spot on today too. (And I'm liking his new blog , even though for some reason I can't find it right now??? Hello? NYTimes website design team? You have some work to do.)

Capitalism, people, the problem is unbridled capitalism (under which I lump privatization, consumerism, class warfare--indeed, we might say that Kid Nation and Blackwater emblematize the sorry state we've [long since] arrived at.)

Kid Nation

Haven't watched it. Don't plan to. But Ellen Goodman waxes thoughtful and convincing on it here. I know we lost Molly Ivins, but with Ellen Goodman and Katha Pollitt, we're still holding on.

I'll Take a Week by Myself in the Maldives Now

S has had two days off since we returned from our vacation September 4. One of those was Yom Kippur (he worked the morning of Erev Rosh Hashanah and the evening of Rosh Hashanah). In addition, he has had a small handful of evenings off. Maybe four. I think he's been averaging 80 hour weeks (that's cross-referencing the 85 hour weeks with the weeks when he gets an evening or two, or even a day, off).

Here are some things I have done on my own:

- at least 20 bedtimes

- approximately 20 lice combings

- visits with his parents, my parents, and my sister

- two soccer practices and a half dozen swim practices

- a lot of homework supervision

- opening day parent meeting at Hebrew School

- two meet-the-new-principal meetings

- two school open houses

- I'd say 90% of the shopping (food, cleats, goggles and swim caps, etc.), laundry (including multiple loads of potentially lice-infected sheets and towels), cleaning (100% on that), and cooking (not so much)

- almost all of the cranky child coping

I'm really kind of over this. As Mary Poppins says (in one of our favorite quotes), "Patience falling, tempers rising."

(On the positive side: M and E are getting along well, for the most part, and I can leave them alone when I need to, which makes logistics easier than they used to be.)

Me

Recently someone I apparently used to know wrote about me (real me, not blog me) pretty harshly on her blog. In essence, she said I was a racist Mean Girl, and she hoped I hadn't grown up to be a Queen Bee Mom (implying, of course, that I probably had). I have no idea who this person is. A few candidates have been identified and exonerated, to my great relief, so I'm guessing it's someone I didn't really know. And given the circumstances and the company I kept back then, I can totally imagine why she would have thought I was a racist Mean Girl.

Of course, I prefer not to think of myself as a racist Mean Girl, but I am strangely undisturbed by her post. OK, honesty: I'm disturbed enough that I've got my friends trying to figure out who she is, and I'm writing this blog post, but I am not the devastated weeping wreck I might have been, say, 15 years ago when this person seems to have known me. I have no urge to call her out and tell her that I Am Not Mean, and Some Of My Best Friends Are Black, and if she'd seen me at the meeting I went to this morning, she would know that I'm the Good Kind of White Liberal.

I think I've come to accept, really just in the last few years, that I am who I am. Most people who meet me think I'm funny, smart, energetic, effective, occasionally moody, and perhaps a bit too outspoken. A few people who meet me think I'm an arrogant bitch. And, you know what? Those are basically two sides of the same coin: me, depending on your perspective. You know what else? Most of the people who don't like me? I don't like them either. In fact, I can't think of anyone I really like who dislikes me--now that might still leave me a devastated weeping wreck--which suggests that I am fully capable of being nice.

As for the racist thing? I try, I try my best. I get it a lot, and sometimes I don't get it, and I'm willing to be called out, but the fact is, if you're a liberal white woman trying to do some good, you're going to get called racist, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad.

I always try to be the best version of myself, I don't always succeed, and that's all I can do.

My Glamorous Life

Tonight S and the governor are dishing up the restaurant's specialties at a benefit that teams local celebrities with the chefs of their favorite restaurants.

Oh wait, that's S's glamorous life.

I'm taking E to swim practice and going to the middle school open house. Yeah, baby.

Jennifer Garner

So I'm one of those people who likes to think Jennifer Garner is One Of Us. I mean, come on, she's married to Ben! (The post-J Lo, back-to-his-roots Ben!) And she shops at the Farmer's Market! In jeans and a t-shirt! She has that cute little girl, and she takes her to the playground, and she goes to Fenway Park (OK, that's Ben's influence, but she looks like she's having a good time).

I mean, she seems like the antithesis of, say, Tom and Katie, with their endless courting of the paparazzi.

Except then I start to wonder. Actually, I started to wonder a while ago. I was thinking about playground pictures. Denise Richards's playground pictures are obviously staged so as to garner [sic] maximum publicity. Denise poses; Jen plays. But if she didn't want the attention, don't you think she could play at home?

Then this evening I saw her in a Neutrogena commercial. Does she need the money? Or does she just want the publicity? Neutrogena: clean, classy: the Jen image.

But is it all just an image?

The Hegemony of the Testing Establishment

In nine years (cumulative) of public schooling, we have been, for the most part, highly satisfied. The caveat to this satisfaction is that we have bright, compliant children who love school and their teachers and do well on tests. So satisfying them, and by extension us, is not that difficult. But we have been lucky to have five fabulous principals and only one dud teacher. Sure the girls are occasionally bored or annoyed, but I don't have a problem with that: sometimes life is boring and annoying, and learning to stick your nose in your book and ignore it is an excellent skill (one I've certainly mastered).

I occasionally peep over the fence at the creative, integrated, child-centered curricula at the private schools where people I know teach and send their children, and I worry that I am depriving my kids of the kind of education I believe in, but, you know, they've done lots of cool stuff too: built a doghouse for a Habitat for Humanity House, written long stories about trips to London and New York, planted seeds, taste-tested apples, built beach dioramas and put on a play about tidepools and gone on a field trip to the beach, played Bingo in Latin, surveyed their classmates about who likes ice cream and who doesn't. Fun stuff.

Sometimes, though, I am reminded that I have signed my children up for a dozen years of testing, to little real account, and it makes me crazy. Today was one of those days. E's math homework was absolutely appropriate: which dog has more spots than the dog in the doghouse, continue the pattern, which picture has five crayons. Except that at the top of some of the problems it said "test prep," and the kids had to identify which answer was correct by coloring in the little circle (A, B, C, or D) under the answer. I had to explain to E that this was what she was supposed to do. M's spelling homework included analogies. Analogies? Help you learn to spell how? Oh yeah, they don't, they just teach you to take the SAT, and prove nothing at all about your intelligence except that you can do analogies.

Makes me crazy, I tell you.

I Knew It!

All we need is Manny. And Youk, don't forget Youk.

S is right. Dan Shaughnessy truly does hate the Red Sox. You don't write sentences like the opening of the third-to-last paragraph. You just don't do it.

You can say 3, though. Can you say 3?

Forget Brooklyn

Oh, hooray, an excuse not to read all those books I feel guilty about not reading--you know, the ones by all those Jonathans and all them. (I know, must read Jonathan Lethem...someday.) (The reason I trust this guy is his take on The Lovely Bones which I could not even read, though I tried, and which I simply could not believe was such a bestseller. And though I did love A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, his critique is spot-on.) (I suspect he kind of loved it too, despite said critique.)

How to anow yore alder sister

(By E.)

1. Do not do what yore sister says.

2. be a brat.

3. Lie in yore sisters bed.

4. Get her relly agre so she hits you and gos to her room.

5. buy somthing with yoer own money that she wanted to buy with her own money and do not let her play with it.

6. Steel yoer sisters cloth.

Editor's note: Each of these tactics has been tested in our home laboratory. Indeed, this list was written on the yardsale whiteboard that is the subject of #5.

I can't tell you how happy I am

that the Yankees lost this afternoon.

It's going to be a long week.

In case you're counting, the number is 5.

Notting Hell

Lately it seems that just about the only topics of conversation amongst the 30/40something privileged parent set (which would be my set) are kids (corollary: schools), real estate, and infidelity. Notting Hell proves the point (though the point might need to be revised to feature the ULTRA-privileged, which is certainly not my set).

When I first saw notices about Notting Hell, I swore I wouldn't read it. I've given up mommy lit, right? Especially cute marketing mommy lit. But there it was on the shelf in the library, and before I knew it I was reading it, and then a day and a half later I'd finished it, and, you know, a few days later, I'm still thinking about it, which means...well, I'm not sure what it means, except that it's worth a blog post.

So Notting Hell is about super-rich yummy mummies who live on a communal garden in Notting Hill. They get all worked up about the super-rich Americans rebuilding their garage, they have affairs, and one of them tries to get pregnant. They also go out to lunch, do yoga, talk about feng shui, and enjoy (or pretend to enjoy) various annual communal garden events (member meeting, sports day, bonfire night). It's not the best-written book on the block, but, honestly, while I noticed the awkward sentences, I didn't really care--it's just not that kind of book. It also uses commodities as a shorthand for characterization, but, again, I didn't really care--it was just that kind of book. What kind of book? Trashy, eminently readable, all in all quite fun.

The chapters alternate between the first-person narratives of Clare (wealthy, uptight garden designer trying to get pregnant) and Mimi (poorest person on the garden, chaotic freelance writer and mother of three, including eleven- and six-year-old girls whom M became quite entranced by after I read her some funny passages--she kept asking me whether there was anything new about Mirabel and Posy). One thing that was strikingly skillful about the writing was that you got quite different senses of Clare and Mimi in each of the narratives, that is, from their self-presentations and the way they talk about each other, yet both those senses make sense--i.e. the book nicely shows the gaps between how we see ourselves and how others see us.

One thing that was strikingly odd about the book was that it went along in quite a jolly way with some angst but little heavy morality--and then all of a sudden, CRASH, Mimi is heavily punished, by her husband who has been the most easy-going of the bunch. Part of the goal, I assume is to make her husband, who doesn't care about the status obsessions of Notting Hill, a hero figure, that is, to turn farce into social critique. Except that her husband is aloof from the status obsessions of Notting Hill because he is old money (i.e. we're not talking Marxism). When Mimi and her family move to the country, all their problems are solved (i.e. the status-conscious materialism of Notting Hill was the problem? and punishment is really reward?) except that Mimi still describes everything she owns in name brands (satire? it's all just the same and punishment and reward are irrelevant concepts?). In other words, the book ends with some heavy narrative incoherence (or maybe it's coherence of a higher order?), but, you know, that's OK too.

As for those name brands and name drops, which are the novel's dominant motif: it was absolutely blatant how they function as a construct for reader identification. The book does include a glossary in the back (I wonder if the British edition has one too) which identifies all the shops and code words of yummy mummy Notting Hill life, but clearly the book's intended audience--or at least one intended audience--is those who can nod knowingly when Clare puts on her forget-what-they're-called boots or Mimi lunches at the E&O. And I, of course, totally fall for it, because I know what Agent Provacateur is! And I've been to that bakery! And aren't I lucky that even though I'm not a Notting Hill yummy mummy, I can read books about them! Ah, fiction...

So yes, though I'm sure it wasn't the author's intention, Notting Hell made me think about how fiction works, and I always like that.

[Sadly, I just had to give up on a new book by an author whose last novel I quite loved. In this one the main character is predictably unidimensional (i.e. the plot will obviously be generated by the need to make her multi-dimensional), and the bad use of pronouns and proper nouns is just too annoying to get past. The narration is third person limited (I think that's what it's called--I should know what it's called!--when it is third person but from the point of view and inside the thoughts of a single character), and the story totally focuses on the heroine, so it would be OK to use "she" most of the time, but instead the author keeps sticking in her name, including in the middle of quite short paragraphs that have begun with her name and continued to be about her. It just drove me crazy. I suppose you could say that this novel also made me think about fiction, and it certainly has a higher purpose than Notting Hell, with lots of big concepts like forgiveness and love, as well as politics, but...either I am once again proving myself a thoroughly superficial person in my fiction predilections, or Notting Hell is good at what it does, and this other book just isn't.]

[Edited to add: Oh dear, maybe I should have stuck with the abandoned book longer. But it's too late now, already returned it, and the review isn't compelling enough to make me want to take it out again...but I do feel bad now.]

Newspaper Reading

This Modern Love essay did little for me overall, but I loved the part where she woke up her sister:

It was late, but I called my sister anyway, letting the phone ring until I woke her. “Hello?” she breathed.

“Turn on your computer,” I said. After I directed her to his page, we sat there in silence, our phones pressed up against our ears, our breathing uneven.

“Oh, my God,” my sister said.

“Oh, my God,” I agreed.

My sister and I would so totally do that.

Here's a horrifying piece everyone should read. As I've said many times, sometimes I feel like I just live my tiny little life in total denial of what's going on around us.

And if you want horrifying in a tiny little way, here you go. I spent yesterday afternoon on the sidelines of a soccer field covered with six year olds. I can't even imagine.

Most Excellent Bumper Sticker Spotted on My Morning Run

Where are we going?
And what am I doing in this handbasket?

(It was a perfect morning for a run--just a nip of chill in the air, the river and pond were glassy still--and I felt perfectly in tune with my legs.)

In Which I Am An Unrepentant Feminist

I pretend to understand when women get married and change their names--of course you want to share your children's names, sure it's easier, how nice of you to want to make your husband happy--but really I don't. On a certain level I don't care--I have remained friends with many women, most of them younger than me, who have changed their names--and the power of my aesthetics over my politics is visible in the fact that the one good reason I can see for changing your name is hating the original name and delighting in an excuse to jettison it. Bottom line, though: if you are of my fortysomething mom cohort, and your parents did not bestow upon you a moniker like Turdimsprezechelheimer and you have changed your name, I not only don't get it, but I will always feel like there is a fundamental difference between us. And, you know, there usually is.

In No Longer Red State Capital City Suburb, there was me and J and J and L and Dawn and a few women I worked with, and that was pretty much it for original name holders. All the neighborhood moms had taken their husband's names, as did all the younger women we knew who got married. And J, J, L, Dawn, and the women I worked with? Smart, older feminists, who got what I was saying. The other women? Nice women whom I liked a lot and was happy to hang out with, but from whom I felt, fundamentally, different.

And this is one of the many reasons I feel at home in East Coast Big City. I think I can say that virtually every fortysomething mom I know has kept her name. Some of them have even--how anachronistic!--hyphenated their children's names. And we are not even the only family who has given their kids the mother's name. (In fact, one of the few truly annoying moms in my circles: has her husband's name. Though, now that I think of it, to counter that, one of the nicest moms I know has her husband's name--but she's also in her mid/late 50s.) These moms? I like them, I'm happy to hang out with them, and they get what I'm saying.

So, yes: job, house, and financial travails aside, I'm still glad we moved.

(This post was inspired by receiving the Hebrew school directory and noticing that the parents have different names in just about all the Town families--which is not the case for the families from Fancy Republican Town Next Door--and then going on a Yom Kippur hike with a bunch of neighborhood families and attending a break fast with a bunch of 6th/1st grade families, all of which families had moms who kept their names, all of whom I quite adore.) (J, I wish you had been there!)

Edited to add: I'm totally down with both members of a couple changing their names! (See Jackie's comment below.)

I've Fallen In Love

With a shoe. That I can't afford. And probably don't need, though I kind of do. I mean, I don't need that particular ridiculously expensive shoe, but I could definitely use a shoe (actually two) to wear to work. If I had work.

As M would say, with great dramatic effect, "It's traaaagic!"