[It turns out that if you’re taking a blog from Blogger to WordPress using the WordPress import thing, all your drafts get published. So I’m going through 250 drafts to see if anything is worth saving before I delete. Short answer: no.

But I kind of liked this one that I wrote after a former male classmate on Facebook made me angry with some comments I didn’t feel like I should respond to, right after a former female classmate activated my empathy center. At the time, I decided not to publish it because it makes such sweeping generalizations: clearly not all guys are casual about it, and clearly not all girls are being sensible about it: it was just these two individuals I was thinking of. But I feel pissy about it anyway.]

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I am feeling a bit pissy this evening about how my former MALE classmates are in no danger of running out of chances for little heirs, while my FEMALE classmates are counting years and panicking.

It is making me feel further pissy that some of the males in question seem to have a “I stuck a piece of myself into someone and look what accidentally happened!” attitude about the whole thing, whereas the females are taking folic acid just in case and carefully looking for a quality, intelligent person of good genes and good character who will be a good co-parent and good co-provider. A crappy lack-o’-plan appears to be succeeding, genetically speaking, while a good and sensible plan seems to be tanking.

WHERE FAIRNESS HERE? It is an extremely pissy situation.

I tried another of the appetizer recipes for a get-together and I am ready to make a report! This time I tried Emily‘s party bread, which a friend of hers posted about here.

I was worried because the party was 15 minutes away; I could have done the second heat-up at her house, but I felt nervous about that and preferred not to, so I took the bread directly from the oven, put it into a bag, and ran from the house. It was just fine for the party: not piping hot, but still plenty warm. If I keep going to these get-togethers, I might buy some sort of insulated transportation bag.

Next time I’ll bake it longer: the cheese in the middle hadn’t melted. But the edges were great. People kept going back and picking at it more. There were about seven of us there, I think, and we ate about half the loaf—and that was with six other appetizers to choose from. It seems like it would be a nice flexible recipe that could handle a bunch of different kinds of seasonings. I’ve added the recipe to my recipe box.

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Okay, so what I really want to talk about is that these get-togethers are getting me all agitated, and I don’t know if it’s good or bad. It’s really hard to tell the difference between “Getting outside your comfort zone! good for emotional stretching and growth! relationship/community-building! change of pace! social needs! wheeeee!” and “This is not a good fit for me, and is resulting in distress and agitation instead of the good things that might be experienced by a different person.”

And sometimes in a situation there might be the additional issue of telling the difference between “Not everyone is going to get along with everyone, and one of the benefits of a group is that it’s good for us to have experience dealing with people we wouldn’t have chosen and/or people who have different views on a subject” and “Yes, and that can be true of dealing with the rest of the people in the group because they also have upsides, but this particular person is a humorless, strident, pushy, aggressive, oblivious ASS, and contact with her should be severely limited, and she ruins the entire event so maybe these alleged group benefits should be experienced with a DIFFERENT GROUP.”

…Okay, just typing that out was a big help. I think I will continue to get all RILED: it’s not only a matter of there being one person I find challenging, it’s even MORE an issue of general overstimulation (TONS OF PEOPLE! TONS OF TOPICS!), plus all the usual party issues of “Did I talk too much/little, was I boring, did I say something I shouldn’t have, did I keep killing the conversation, was I too quiet/loud?” But overall, and for now, I want to keep going anyway.

Plus there’s this issue: if she’s so awful, why is she still in the group? Maybe I’m the only one who finds her insufferable. Maybe everyone else finds her sufferable.

And even with the insuffering, the good outweighs the bad. Just for starters, these are the moms of kids in Rob’s grade. EXCELLENT INSIDER INFO AND NOTE-COMPARING. And also I do like THEM. And perhaps I will learn some tips on how to deal with the particular sort of person I mentioned, since there seems to be no world shortage.

I also noticed two other things that lead me to wonder if a Difficult Person can actually enhance a group:

1. You know that thing about friendships being based on shared dislikes? Another guest and I made a huge leap in friendship over one single “o.O” facial expression.

2. I noticed that the one strident person’s strident views seemed to make everyone else more open to the concept of assorted views. Like, a conversation might be getting a little intense and divided—but then Stridentella lets loose with her views, and suddenly everyone else is saying things like “Well, different choices make sense for different families.” It’s like she shows us a caricature of how our own views were shaping up, and that makes us all want to back away from that.

You know what’s incredibly frustrating to launder? Anything filled with down. It floats like a duck. Water rolls off it like….water…off a duck’s…. I think I see the problem. But how to get our down jackets clean, then? Mine is aqua and it might as well be white for how clean it stays, and Henry’s is dark blue but he has nevertheless managed with effort and ingenuity to make the dirt really represent.

I looked around online for awhile, but got frustrated by all the non-answer answers all written in the same format (paragraph about the benefits of down! paragraph asking the question about washing! paragraph failing to resolve the issue! paragraph congratulating ourselves on resolving the issue!) and gave up. How would a person go about washing a DUCK, is perhaps the question we should be asking.

Right now I have the coats floating on top of the water in the washing machine (“soaking”), and periodically I go shove them under the water in frustration, and that is going to have to be good enough.

It was only very, very recently (this school year) that I figured out what to do if I was in a group of people standing around (like, at preschool pick-up), and I was talking with one person in the group, and another person came and stood nearby and seemed to want to join the conversation but seemed tentative about it, like they were afraid they’d be butting in. (Answer: Turn to the new person, say, “We were just talking about [how different the bus system was when we were in school / the big storm expected Friday / the stupid parking situation],” and then start looking back and forth between the two faces while talking.)

When I figured that out, I felt like it was something a lot of people would have already known in an “I just knew; I had no idea it was something anyone needed to be taught” level. But I also didn’t learn until high school that if someone says, “How are you?” you’re supposed to say, “Fine! How are you?” A date taught me, after his dad asked me how I was and I stood there grinning in a friendly but mute way. My date said laughingly, “…You can TELL him!” I was mortified for years, but now look at it as an illustration of how socially comfortable my date was: that he not only didn’t stand there sharing in the awkwardness but also he took swift, friendly, laid-back action to fix it. And I’m sure the date’s dad didn’t care, any more than I would if it were one of my kids’ friends, so I’ve stopped feeling that sink-into-the-floor feeling over it. (It’s nice to know that feeling can fade after…a couple of decades.)

Where was I? Oh, yes. So, there are a lot of social things I encounter where I wonder if this is another of those things where most people know already how to deal with it and I need to find out what it is, or if it’s something most other people struggle with too. Like, I know from reading blogs that MOST people struggle with how to “ask out” a new friend candidate, so I wouldn’t feel strange about struggling with that too. Today’s issue is one I’ve seen mentioned enough to know I’m not one of a tiny minority or anything—but I also think that getting a lot of different responses would be very helpful to show me the range of what society considers normal behavior.

So here it is: If I’m going for coffee for the first time with a new friend candidate, and it’s at the kind of place where a waiter comes to the table, what do we do about the bill? Does one person say “separate checks, please,” or no? Do people share a single check, then glance at the bill after, round up their own share to the nearest dollar, and leave the change on top of the tip? Do people just split it down the middle, even if they ordered different things (surely not, and yet I’ve heard it complained about)? What about leaving the tip: do people discuss how much it should be and each put down half, or does each person just put down their own little stack without consulting the other? If one person puts down a lot more tip than the second person was planning to, doesn’t that make the second person feel pressured?

This is for the FIRST TIME, at a waitered-table restaurant, with someone new, where you don’t yet know how they’d prefer to handle it: how do YOU handle the situation?

I read two books. Now I will say things about them.

(photo from Amazon.com)

Data, A Love Story: How I Gamed Online Dating to Meet My Match, by Amy Webb. My sister-in-law’s sister mentioned this book, and so when I saw it at our library I got it. It’s about a woman who, as you can see from the title, was frustrated with online dating and figured out work-arounds to get what she wanted.

I thought it was a good story and that she had some good practical advice that would be likely to work. But I found her so off-putting I could hardly stand it. I wrote four paragraphs saying why, and then deleted them because if the book showed anything it’s that we all have types we’re drawn to and types we’re repelled by. And also, I felt like a lot of what I didn’t like wasn’t really HER, it was her showing off for her book. Like, if I got to know her when she wasn’t trying to impress us so hard, I might love her.

(photo from Amazon.com)

The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern. I read this because I kept hearing so many different reactions to it. I liked it, mostly. I liked fairy tales and magic a lot when I was a child, and it’s fun to find something along that line for grown-ups. I thought the language kept slipping into “Look how beautifully I’m writing/describing! Look how I’m making the magic COME ALIVE for you!,” and also I haaaaaate second-person singular (“You go through a door. You wonder what you’re going to see,” etc.) but I just skimmed those parts. (Most of it was NOT in second-person singular.)

…I feel like I’m not successfully communicating that I really liked it. I did like it.

The term “middle-aged” is a little awkward, because it’s a tactful euphemism for an older group than it seems to describe. If the typical U.S. human life is, say, 78 years long, then age 39 should be solidly middle-aged—but that’s not what we mean by the term. We actually mean something more like “well past the middle, but the term elderly isn’t right yet.”

I think of middle-aged people as being in their 50s or 60s or so—but it’s a stage of life more than an exact age. It’s a stage with no young kids in the house anymore (unless it’s grandkids), but no need yet for walkers, or for those chairs that help a person stand up. When a middle-aged person gets sick, we don’t think, “Uh oh, hope it doesn’t go to the lungs.” We don’t worry much yet about broken hips, but there are plenty of lost bifocals. No one is talking about whether it’s time to take away a driver’s license or “think about a home,” but there is talk about retirement. There are of course myriad exceptions (a guy in his twenties might have bifocals or have bad lungs or need to use a walker; a guy in his 60s could have little kids with his young wife), but middle-aged is a general term, so I’m speaking of the group it describes in a general way too.

I have a new proposal for terms. I was thinking about how middle-aged doesn’t describe the middle stage of life: it’s more like the third out of four (childhood, adult, middle-aged, elderly). Then I noticed another euphemism for age, which is the “senior” in “senior discount” and “senior citizen” and “seniors residence.” And the combination of “four stages” plus “senior” made me think of how we mark high school and college grades: freshman, sophomore, junior, senior.

We’re currently using senior discount to include people over 65 or even 60 or 55, so we’d have to change that. “Senior” would now be used the way we use “elderly”: deep wrinkles, white hair, fear of broken hips, nursing homes, walkers. Then we could use “junior” to cover the category we now call “middle-aged”: bifocals, falling necks, kids are grown, menopause, needlework about having the fun grandchildren first. Early/mid-twenties (depending on personal maturity rates) up to middle-aged would be called sophomores. And children up to their early/mid twenties would be freshmen.

If we’re going to use euphemisms, it’s nice to have them TIDY. And I also like the way this system automatically implies a gaining of knowledge and experience, rather than an increasing fumbling with new technology and change purses.

Do you remember when my mom and dad were on a road trip and wanted to find my mom’s old childhood house, and we all squinted at an old picture trying to figure out what the house number was? Well, there’s an update on that post, because my mom found some old postcards that had the address on it. We still don’t know what the OTHER number on the house is, or why there ARE two numbers—but I see two mailboxes, so maybe it was a multi-family unit, or maybe it was a rental and one box was for the landlord, or maybe one mailbox was for the newspaper and the other number was a word and not a number, or maybe there was a re-numbering of houses and the old number hadn’t been taken down yet, or maybe there was some other system in place that isn’t familiar to us 60 years later, or ANYWAY AT LEAST WE HAVE ONE NUMBER. And seven people in the comments section were right about it!

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Our microwave broke, which completely surprised us because that has never happened before. And just like when the power goes out and I keep thinking the downtime would be a great time to get caught up on email, I keep finding myself bumping up against the no-microwave issue in a way that makes me feel repeatedly derpy.

I’m accustomed to making a pot of coffee, taking a cup, turning the coffee pot off, and then microwaving cups of cold coffee throughout the day or even the next morning. This morning I got out a mug, put milk and cold coffee into it, walked toward the microwave—and then stood there trying to figure out why this idea no working.

Also, I’ve been cooking more new stuff, and with new stuff comes more leftovers, and this week we have an unprecedented number of them. Paul and I had no fewer than FOUR conversations yesterday evening about how he was going to heat up some leftover lasagna to eat when (1) there was no microwave and (2) I was using both oven shelves for the children’s fish-sticks-and-star-tots dinner. We just could NOT figure it out. He was going to have to…WAIT? and then WAIT MORE? instead of just putting it in the microwave for two minutes?

Sometimes when I encounter an issue of household-related brokenness, I ask Paul to look into it and fix it. Other times, either because I’ve asked him and he hasn’t, or else because for some reason I don’t want to ask him, I like to try to take care of it myself. In those situations I find it bolstering to first pretend to myself that I am living in this house as the only adult. In that case, would I call someone to fix it, or would I be able to manage it myself? If the latter, I give it a try. In this way I have recently replaced a toilet seat and….some other thing, I forget what.

Recently one of my bureau drawers was making a scraping sound/sensation every time I opened it or closed it, and also it was feeling increasingly scrapey to open/close. I wasn’t sure what that could be, but I applied the “What if I were on my own?” concept, and I thought I’d be too embarrassed to call someone in without even LOOKING for an issue, so I looked for an issue.

The bureau in question. The middle drawer is the one that’s making a scraping sound.

I took out the scrapey-sounds drawer.

What’s this? I see a screw sticking out in a way it doesn’t seem like it should be.

Oh, you can’t see it? Here’s a closer view. Definitely sticking out.

I can use a screwdriver, no prob.

That’s more like how it seems like it ought to look.

No more scraping sound! I AM VICTORIOUS!

This is fun: there’s an update on an old post! Jessica wrote to us in April 2011 asking how a second child would change things, and recently (okay, almost 2 weeks ago, I SOMETIMES GET A LITTLE PROCRASTINATEY) emailed to say how things turned out! I put the update on the post itself: Reader Question: How Does a Second Child Change Things?