Yes, I would tell you that your baby was ugly.
I’m not going to lie to you about an ugly baby. Really, I’m not.
Putting my t-shirts where my mouth is.
OK, so I’ve created a line of snarky, satirical t-shirts for sale at CafePress. Just click the link below or to the side of the site page below the search button.
For now, it’s just one design. But later, I’ll add more.
And, honestly, I’m not really an Obama hater. I’m just dismayed at how quickly people started to turn away from Obama after things got rough. Change takes a lot of actual work, no matter what type we’re talking about.
Meaningful work isn’t supposed to be fun. Or easy.
Top signs that our friendship might not work out.
In the days of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and all the other social networking sites, I feel like I have more “friends” than I’ve ever had in real life. That being said, the Dunbar number would suggest that we can only keep track of so many people. That number goes up and down, depending on who you are, but there is a limit to how many people you can actually befriend in real life. For instance, if I saw you a minimum of one time per year to maintain our friendship and I didn’t double up with a group event, I could only have 365 ‘friends’, right?
Look, I don’t know about you, but I’d be pretty pissed off if I only saw my friends once a year. The local ones that is.
The truth is, most of us are forced into being ‘friends’ with people for the sake of convenience.
That woman in your mommy group who is always bragging about her life – but who is also the mother of the only boy your own son doesn’t throw rocks at during playgroup.
The guy in your office who is a serious douche-bag – but who is also the project manager and the key to your promotion.
Oh, hell, most people in your office – no?
For the sake of clarity, I’d like to lay out the signs that our ‘friendship’ is more of an ‘acquaintence’. Or, alternatively, that I just can’t be your real and true friend. Because these are signs that we have fundamentally different value systems. You aren’t ‘wrong’ if you fit any of these, I just don’t agree with you. So, here we go.
- You are a vegan. Vegetarian? No problem. Vegan? That lifestyle is too high maintence for me. And you are probably too optimistic about changing the world for me, too.
- You are an infallible optimist. My cynical self – who is, by the way, sometimes also optimistic – just cannot get behind always ‘looking on the bright side’. I’m very, very glad that people like that exist, I just don’t want to grab a coffee with them.
- You love Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, the Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan’s music. If you just ‘like’ it, then I can simply ask you not to play it within my earshot. If you LOVE it, I wouldn’t do that to either one of us.
- You deny that whatever age you are over 30 is “old”, or maintain vehemently that you are still vibrantly “young” or “cool”. Ugh. Do you have Flo Rida playing in the background now, too?
- You talk about how amazing your children are for a disproportionate amount of the conversation. I think this should be based on age. If your child is under 5, I want under 5 minutes of conversation about how much they love cheerios or how great they are doing in pre-K. If they are 16 and sneaking out or already thinking about joining the Peace Corps, then we can discuss them for up to 45 minutes. That shit is at least interesting.
- You thought the last 30 minutes of Battlestar Galactica was uplifting, or you actually shed tears watching it. See sign #2.
- You consider yourself a “green” person and you want to talk about it or, God forbid, tell me how I could improve my own choices. I don’t care if you just bought a hybrid, wear organic or recycled clothes, or are in other myriad ways reducing your “carbon footprint” (one of the most overused phrases of all time). I know you think it makes me a bad person, but I just don’t think that it’s going to do much. See “rest of world minus Europe” for examples.
- You hate Republicans. Or China. Or anything else that is supposed to be “all bad” and “ruining it” for the rest of us. I’d rather talk about the ways in which all political parties are self-serving and the U.S. is “ruining it” for everybody. Don’t we know more about ourselves than other people anyway?
- You namedrop. Does this need an explanation? Oh, and I include philosophers that you’ve read.
- You placedrop. I don’t need to know how long you lived or stayed in Paris or Guam or Istanbul.
- You believe that vaccination causes autism. This just tells me that you have your own religion-like belief system, and aren’t that happy about not getting polio or measles anymore.
- You believe in God, but in a crazy way. In the way that suggests all other religions are going to ‘hell’, or make you stand out on street corners with placards.
- Your favorite book is On the Road. Or Ulysses.
- You get all snobby about reality shows or gossip sites or glossy mags.
- You haven’t read at least three books this year. I’d prefer that it wasn’t Twilight, but I can’t be too picky these days, now can I?
- You actually use the terms “hella” and “for real” in your sentences.
- You speed (over 10 miles over the limit) or drive aggressively. My entire family died in cars, I’m not befriending anyone else destined to go out that way.
- You smoke pot everyday or every weekend. Not that I’m judging you. I couldn’t care less if you toke. I just don’t like to be around people when they are high. It weirds me out.
- You drink alcohol every single day. It also weirds me out. And yes, I count beer and wine.
- You use botox, have had plastic surgery, or own a bag or shoes worth more than $400. You are too vain for me, and I’m pretty vain myself.
OK, that’s it. I could try to come up with more, but I think that these hit upon most topics. What are your own signs? And don’t kid yourself, you have them. You just haven’t articulated them.
40 is definitely NOT the new 30.
And I should know, since I’m turning 37 in two weeks.
I’m not being ‘age-ist’ exactly, but I do think that people should stop deluding themselves that 4o is no longer middle age. (That is, unless you plan on living to be 100, but even then you cannot stretch the definition further than 50.) Or that 40 is “young”.
If you are 40, you are not “young”. You may be “young at heart”, “young-thinking”, or “youthful” for your age, but “young” you are not. Why keep kidding yourself?
Here’s the latest news, hot off the presses:
Mental powers start to dwindle at 27 after peaking at 22, marking the start of old age, US research suggests.
Professor Timothy Salthouse of Virginia University found reasoning, speed of thought and spatial visualisation all decline in our late 20s.
Therapies designed to stall or reverse the ageing process may need to start much earlier, he said.
His seven-year study of 2,000 healthy people aged 18-60 is published in the journal Neurobiology of Aging.
Now, before you freak out, there is ancillary evidence that not ALL mental powers fade after their peak at age 22. (Yes, your old eyes read that last sentence correctly. Fading begins at the ripe old age of 22.) But, have no fear. The old adage “with age comes experience” is still very much supported by the evidence.
Things like memory stayed intact until the age of 37, on average, while abilities based on accumulated knowledge, such as performance on tests of vocabulary or general information, increased until the age of 60.
So, as someone about to turn 37, I guess I’m going to have to accept that my memory is going to start fading, too. I should have known that my new fetish for brightly colored PostIt notes did not appear out of nowhere, people. Lately, I’ve been forgetting to do at least 10% of the things I said I would do. For me, that’s a marked increase. (Note: I don’t have kids, so I think that you can give yourself a break here if you have them and have already been forgetting things for several years.)
I am just not the same chick I was at 17 or 27. Hell, I’m not even the same hot mama I was a mere five years ago.
At 37, my ankles crack, my shoulder sometimes aches for no knowable reason, and I often find myself wondering what it is that I am doing after I have stopped one task to do something else (especially if I have to change rooms). My hair is graying at the temples and I have begun to question my own personal ban on Botox or other facial injections. My thighs and my butt – which were never robust – have begun to sag so low that I now completely understand the term “saddlebags”. (Side note: Again, no kids. I can’t imagine what I would look like naked if I had ever given birth. But, then again, at least there would be a valid excuse for the devastation.)
So, I’m here to attest to the fact that 40 is not the new 30. That’s bullshit.
That being said, at 37 I feel more like myself than I ever did at 27.
But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to go back sometimes, to 27.
I’d also be lying if I said I didn’t sometimes relish the fact that I’m long past all the nonsense that so often comes along with “youth”.
Bette Davis once said that there are some days that the only thing that makes a woman feel better is a glass of champagne. I think we all know what I’ll be doing on my birthday this year. If I can still remember what day of the week that is. . . .
Alcohol is not my friend.
During the past few months, I’ve been furiously writing and trying to get all the requirements for my PhD out of the way. In that time, I’ve probably imbibed about 10 gallons of wine – most of which was consumed a glass or two at a time. Lately, though, alcohol and I have been not getting along. Our friendship, I think, has just about run its natural course.
I first had a beer at age 18, at a keg party, and I hated the taste of it. In fact, I tried different kinds of alcoholic beverages and hated every single one of them. Like coffee, I think that it’s an acquired taste. The tastes of adulthood – or at least that was how I conceptualized it back then. At 18, it seemed important to ‘act’ like an ‘adult’ – whatever that meant. Now, I still feel like I’m acting like an adult most of the time, but I realize that a good performance has nothing to do with beverages.
I think that, deep down, you probably know you have a small problem if you have a drink or two every night “to relax”. Moderate drinking is medically defined as one serving of alcohol per night for men. Any more than that and you would be a ‘heavy drinker’. Yikes. Light drinkers have one to two servings per week, just for comparison’s sake.
Last night was a friend’s birthday party. There was wine everywhere, and I knew that I probably shouldn’t drink anything, but when she offered, I immediately caved in to peer pressure. Apparently, peer pressure extends well beyond the cut-off of high school. I drank one glass, then poured myself another small glass. By the end, I think I had about four or five glasses of wine.
I went home, managed to write from midnight until 2am, and then had a shitty night’s sleep. I always have a shitty night’s sleep when I drink more than a glass of anything alcoholic. And as I tossed and turned, at some point in the middle of the night, I thought to myself: “I’m an asshole.” I simply cannot drink anymore. My body does not like it, and I do not like it when my body revolts.
My dad was a functioning alcoholic. Kept a steady job, got promotions, paid his bills. But, also, drank every night (2, 3 or more whiskey on the rocks). And, occasionally (it was more than I would like to admit, anyway), kept me up until 3, 4, or 5am drinking and telling me stories. Or yelling. There was always a fair share of yelling.
My mom never drank. When she did, I hated it. She would only have a glass or two on holidays, but it always went straight to her head. She was a giggler, and it weirded me out. It just didn’t seem like my mom anymore, you know?
So, I have no idea why I ever thought it was a good idea to drink. Ever.
Here are some statistics from Gallup to sober you up:
1. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines “excessive drinking” as an average of more than one drink per day for women, and an average of more than two drinks per day for men.” (at this rate, I am excessive)
2. “Nearly a third (32%) of Americans say that drinking has been a cause of trouble in their families. Interestingly, women (who are less likely than men to drink and to report drinking too much) are slightly more likely than men to report that drinking has been a problem in their families (35% compared with 29%).”
3. “There were nearly 20,000 alcohol-induced deaths in 2001, the last year for which data are available from the National Center for Health Statistics. And these numbers do not include deaths resulting from unintentional injuries or homicides, many of which may indirectly be related to alcohol use.”
4. “The 2006 poll showed 71% of American drinkers said they had an alcoholic drink in the last week, which is significantly higher than the 54% who said the same in 1996.”
5. “Also on the rise is the number of drinks Americans are drinking. The poll shows those who drink alcohol report drinking an average of 4.5 drinks per week, compared with 2.8 in 1996. “
Are we stressed out? Working too much?
I’d love to see the numbers now, in the midst of the worst economic crisis to hit the U.S. in decades. I’m betting that the numbers for alcohol consumption are up (and, now that I think of it, I’m betting that gambling rates are up, too).
I’m cutting myself off. From now on, I’m going to try to be one of the 37% of Americans who completely abstain from drinking. I’m tired of being in the other camp.
I think modern, upper-middle-class American parents are crazy.
There. I said it.
A good friend of mine (who is a dad) posted a blog entry from the New York Times’ “Motherlode” column. It details the results of a survey of 1000 ‘normal’ women who are members of an online mothers’ community. Basically, women are mad at the fathers for not taking enough responsibility for parenting or for doing chores around the house. The writers – both at Parenting magazine and the blog – make it seem like this is an epidemic of anger, corroding the American family.
The writer details the problem thus:
We carry so much of this life-altering responsibility in our heads: the doctors’ appointments, the shoe sizes, the details about the kids’ friends. Many dads wouldn’t even think to buy valentines for the class, for example, or know when it’s time to sign kids up for the pre–camp physical, or that curriculum night is next Thursday at 7:30 and you need to hire a sitter and bring a nut-free vegetarian appetizer that can be eaten without a fork. Even moms who work full-time take it upon themselves to store all this data in our already overstuffed heads. We’re the walking, talking encyclopedias of family life, while dads tend to be more like brochures.
What to do about it?
I proffer an unpopular solution: Moms and Dads both need to stop making their kids the absolute center of their lives.
Seriously. No one should have to worry about self-making “a nut-free vegetarian appetizer that can be eaten without a fork” and bring it to a school function. Or obsess about their children’s schedules or the details of their children’s lives and friendships.
Really, middle-class and upper-middle-class moms? No, really, really?
How did we get here?
When I was growing up, my mom knew who my best friends were (count three names here, maybe), whether or not I did my homework, if I needed new socks and underwear, and if I seemed healthy and happy – and that was it. She had absolutely no interest in elementary or middle school drama, or PTA meetings, or baking me a 19-tier cupcake tree for my birthday party (a tradition which, by the way, didn’t even begin until I was old enough to remember them).
My mom had a life.
Admittedly, sometimes I wish she had been less dramatic and crazy, but I actually appreciate the fact that I did not grow up with an endless litany of “activities” and “playdates” and “extra-curricular classes”. No, I don’t know how to play the piano. But I did learn how to play the clarinet in school band. No, I didn’t take soccer. But somehow I remain thinner and in better shape than some my friends who did, so go figure.
Years ago, I visited Newport, Rhode Island, and took a tour of several of the old Vanderbilt and Astor mansions. You know, the ridiculously luxe “summer” homes of the fabulously wealthy during the late 1900s and early 20th century. In the Vanderbilt home, I learned that Mrs. Vanderbilt obsessed over her children’s education and up-bringing. They were, after all, the future of the Vanderbilt name. In particular, she erased the line between herself and her oldest daughter. Her daughter’s life was the property of Mrs. Vanderbilt herself, and she managed it with military precision. To the point that the girl grew up in a gilded cage of her mother’s fashioning. In the end, she married a man with a “title” that she didn’t even like, all because her mother planned it.
Was this poor, little rich girl priveleged? Yes.
Did she have everything that money could buy her, including the best education? Yes.
Was she any happier? No. By all accounts, she was one seriously depressed young girl.
I’m glad that my mom and dad didn’t pore over my life looking for ways to make it “better” or to give me a “head start”. Somehow, and without a single extra class or tutoring session, I made it into the top medical anthropology program in the country. I think it’s because my parents did something great for me – they made it very, very clear that I needed to take responsibility for myself.
In the end, I learned to craft my own life.
I learned how not to be bored, how to entertain myself, how to self-soothe.
Maybe the reason modern mothers are so angry is that they are giving too much to their children in the first place. Maybe they are angry because secretly they want to be the dads for once, to take it all less seriously. Maybe they are angry because they can’t give themselves permission to be less-than perfect as mothers.
Scale it back, I say. Don’t do some of the “stuff” you are doing – the “stuff” that you think is absolutely integral to your child’s future happiness or intellectual capacity. It isn’t, and that I can promise you.
This is from an article in the London Times:
In her book No Two Alike, Judith Rich Harris, an American psychologist, writes that children just want to fit into the popular culture in which they are being raised, which might not be quite what their parents have in mind.
“In the long run, it is what happens to them outside the parental home that makes them turn out the way they do,” she says. And while most parents know this instinctively, we carry on resignedly making arbitrary rules, labelling things “good” or “bad” with a randomness that reflects our prejudices but baffles our children.
And I’ll leave you with this, an old article from the Boston Globe, to ponder:
Leave those kids alone
The idea that adults should be playing with their kids is a modern invention — and not necessarily a good one
(Illustration/ Aaron Meshon)WHAT COULD BE more natural than a mother down on the rec-room floor, playing with her 3-year-old amid puzzles, finger-puppets, and Thomas the Tank Engine trains? Look — now she’s conducting a conversation between a stuffed shark and Nemo, the Pixar clown fish! Giggles all around. Not to mention that the tot is learning the joys of stories and narrative, setting him on a triumphal path toward school.
A “natural” scene? Actually, parent-child play of this sort has been virtually unheard of throughout human history, according to the anthropologist David Lancy. And three-fourths of the world’s current population would still find that mother’s behavior kind of dotty.
American-style parent-child play is a distinct feature of wealthy developed countries — a recent byproduct of the pressure to get kids ready for the information-age economy, Lancy argues in a recent article in American Anthropologist, the field’s flagship journal in the United States.
“Adults think it is silly to play with children” in most cultures, says Lancy, who teaches at Utah State University. Play is a cultural universal, he concedes, “but adults aren’t part of the picture.” Yet middle-class and upper-middle-class Americans — abetted, he says, by psychologists — are increasingly proclaiming the parents-on-all-fours style the One True Way to raise a smart, well-adjusted child.
There is now a concerted effort to spread adult-child play beyond its stronghold in the upper- and middle-classes of wealthy countries. To this end, many cities and states support programs of some sort. Massachusetts will give the Parent-Child Home Program, which has 33 sites in the state, $3 million this year (up from $2 million last year). Through the program, staff members visit the homes of low-income residents and offer tips not just on good books for toddlers but also on “play activities” for parents and kids. Likewise, the eminent Yale psychologist Jerome Singer has partnered with a media company to devise imaginative parent-child games (examples: “My Magic Story Car” and “Puppets: Counting”) that librarians and social workers can teach to low-income parents.
Lancy is concerned that specialists behind the movement — psychologists, social workers, preschool teachers — are too aggressively promoting this intense, interventionist parenting style to low-income parents, and that they are are too quick to claim that adult-child play is crucial for human development. He doesn’t quite rule out that some interventions may improve literacy — though the data are murkier than the psychologists admit, he insists. But the programs, with their premise (as he sees it) that a whole class of people is simply parenting badly, leave their advocates “open to charges of racism or cultural imperialism.”
. . .
One inspiration for the article, Lancy says, was that he kept coming across accounts of parents who felt guilty that they did not enjoy playing with their children. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman and the economist Alan Krueger, both at Princeton, have found that parents routinely claim that playing with their kids is among their favorite activities, but when you ask them to record their state of mind, hour by hour, they rate time spent with their children as being about as much fun as housework.
In his article, Lancy draws on decades of ethnographic work to show how rare parent-child play has been in the world. The Harvard anthropologist Robert LeVine, for example, observed in a 2004 paper that among the Gusii people of Kenya, “mothers rarely looked at or spoke to their infants and toddlers, even when they were holding and breast-feeding them.” (So much for the universality of peek-a-boo.) On Ifaluk Island, in the South Pacific, tribespeople believe that babies are “essentially brainless” before age 2, so there is no point in talking to them.
The goal of the Yucatec Maya is to keep babies in a “kind of benign coma,” through bathing and swaddling, so that parents can leave them and get work done. As recently as 1914, the US Department of Labor’s Child Bureau advised parents not to play with babies, for fear of overstimulating their little nervous systems.
I’m supposed to be writing a memoir.
What am I writing? A memoir or a pathography? A kind of autobiographical story about my own illness, or about the effect of my parents’ coterminous sicknesses of addiction, depression, malaise, heart disease? Is scholar David Morris correct when he tells us that illness defines us, or “tells us who we are”? In part, I think that he is. It is not when we are healthy and happy that all of us come to know who we truly are or what we can become. Rather, it is in the depths of illness or suffering that some of us discover ourselves as if for the first time.
Illness has a kind of taboo around it. When was the last time you heard anyone mention their cancer or HIV status or a bladder infection in public – at lunch with their coworkers, at a 40th birthday party for a friend, at Christmas over a cup of eggnog? There is something unseemly about being sick, something shameful about being overtly unhealthy or ‘abnormal’. Many of us seem pathologically convinced that though we ourselves are not normal, a perfectly ‘normal’ and happy existence is out there somewhere. Only it remains – for some inexplicable reason sent forth from the gods or fate or our less-than-perfect childhoods – inaccessible to us. We spend enormous amounts of time trying to be healthier and happier, but with mixed results. But what if we could move past a world entirely divided into twos, where one side was good and the other bad? What if we could live in the messy middle of things?
Scientists have recently discovered that good and bad are not easily distinguished at the microscopic level, even with the aid of the best science available to mankind. Viruses are everywhere, more numerous and more unique on a genetic level than anyone had ever previously imagined. Remnants of viruses exist in the uncanniest and most unwelcoming of places – in frozen tundra, at heat vents buried deep in the sea, and in our own human genetic makeup. Some scientists think that ‘junk DNA’ like viral remnants might actually be the sole foundation for our own human immune system. In other words, we are currently using old viruses to fight off new viruses. In a sense, then, humans are a collection of walking viruses with hats, shoes and cell phones. We exist now as part of the larger virosphere, one in which every location on our planet shows vestiges of viruses, and viruses are perhaps the oldest ‘living’ things on the planet. A virus is almost certainly our collective ancient ancestor.
This is less shocking to me; I have always felt a kinship to viruses. They feel like part of my skin, like I myself might be a virus in disguise. I was sick a lot as a child, and – in my family at least – I was often invisible. Growing up, I had the distinct impression – at times horrifically validated – that no one wanted me. But somehow I was resilient enough to change along with my environments. I was vulnerable, but tough. I survived my past. I learned from it. Just like a virus.
In the next few weeks, I’ll be dusting off my pens and getting down to the daily grind of writing 500 words per day. Last semester, I was inundated with teaching and writing academic articles and going through the bureaucratic hoops of my PhD program – so I never wrote anything that mattered to me on a personal level. Also, I was terrified of writing the narrative of my life.
We are, as human beings, supposed to be inherently drawn to telling stories about ourselves and about the world. We are ‘narrative’ producers and consumers. A memoir is a story that is somehow supposed to combine history and memory. But as anyone can tell you, history and memory are both less than perfect forms of ‘non-fiction’ (to say nothing of James Frey and Stephen Ambrose – just to name two famous people who either fibbed or plagarized in the crafting of their ‘narratives’). Our memories are at least 50% fictional, even if we never realize it ourselves. And history? We all know that adage by heart.
I have no idea how to structure the story of my childhood. It makes no sense, on some level, even to me. Even now. Even in the bliss of so-called ‘emotional distance’ from the events.
I also love my parents. And I hate them. And that feels both true and wrong all at the same time. I want to both protect them and to reclaim my rights as their only daughter. I still struggle with the silence of having been an invisible particle in my parents’ turbulent lives, of finding my own voice through their – and my own – past. Since both of my parents are dead, I have the last word – quite literally. However, I also am a keeper of their memory. Upon a parent’s death, a child comes to slowly but inexorably embody that parent. They live inside me – quite literally on a genetic level, and metaphorically on the level of memory. My parents infected me early. Anatole Broyard – the literary critic for the New York Times who died from prostate cancer in 1990 – once wrote that telling the story of his sickness had ‘detoxified’ him. It was a way to reclaim the narrative of his life away from his disease, a refusal of Broyard’s to become cancer. Perhaps by doing the impossible task of writing my life, I, too, can reclaim it from my parents. I am more, in the end, than the product of their diseases.
Awful Things People Have Said to Me This Week
I’m not sure if Facebook, blogging, and digital social networking in general are all making people less socially savvy than ever before, or if the generation just a bit younger than me (say 4-10 years) never learned social etiquette at all. Or maybe they just don’t give a damn. Either way, people have said some fairly suspect things to me this week, and I’d like to share them with the digital world for fun. It’s me getting them off my chest without having to blow up or get in someone’s face.
First, I should start with some background. This has been a personal “best week ever”. I passed my oral exam – the first one to do so in my class – and I advanced to ABD (all-but-dissertation) status. Then, I found out that I have been accepted into the Norman Mailer Writers Colony for the new journalism course. All scholarship and based on merit alone.
Here are the various responses – taken out of context in our conversations, but still as bad as they sound – to my good news:
That, trust me, is just a sample of the whole. I would bore you by repeating comments that were all-too similar to the ones above. If these were said in malice, then they would have made more sense. Instead, they were all said in a faux accent of “I’m so happy for you!” mixed with a smidgeon of “you bitch”.
Honestly, it stresses me out. I don’t like fake people. I also don’t always love the level of competition that comes along with being in this program.
Graffiti in our shared graduate teaching room:
That’s a bit much, don’t you think? (Especially when Livermore Labs is under a mile away from us. Or adding in U Chicago or Harvard. Those people aren’t exactly dummies, no?)
Youth, inexperience and insecurity – what a powerful combination.
April 11, 2009
Categories: Uncategorized . Tags: bitchy comments, competition, generation gap, snarky comments, social networking, social skills . Author: tmacphail . Comments: 2 Comments