We let Rob get a Facebook account on his 13th birthday. It ended up being a fun way to help mark the day: a 13th birthday felt like it was Special and needed Special Things, but it was hard to think of what those Things might be. Saying “Yes, when you’re 13” for a couple of years and then “Okay, YES, today you may!” sure helped. (Facebook doesn’t allow people to sign up until age 13 anyway, but many of our local acquaintances have allowed their kids to sign up earlier using a fake birth year, so Rob has been suffering as many of his friends play Facebook games and talk about being Facebook friends.)

We told Rob that we weren’t really sure how to handle social media stuff with him and would have to kind of feel our way through it and make changes as we went along. We started by agreeing that one of the conditions of him having a Facebook account was that he had to be Facebook friends with me so that I could snoop around if I wanted to. We dithered with the idea of having his password, and told him we might change to that later if with time we felt like being friends wasn’t enough for us to be comfortable.

I wish, though, that Facebook had a different type of friendship link available for parents and their minor children. Being Facebook friends with Rob means that he sees MY status updates in HIS Facebook stream, and neither of us wants that. And also, it doesn’t give me the sort of access/control I want: I want to be able to verify that his privacy settings are appropriate, and I don’t want him to be able to block or restrict me from seeing what he posts.

The parent-child friendship link I’m imagining would be one-way: the child’s status updates and activities would show up in the parent’s Facebook stream, but not the other way around. (Or maybe there could be the option to allow it or not allow it, depending on what the particular parent/child combination preferred.) The parent would have certain limited access to the child’s settings—to the privacy settings, for example, but not to the friend requesting/accepting areas or the likes/info editing areas. The child account would not be able to block or restrict the parent account. The whole arrangement would disconnect automatically when the child turned 18; at that point, either the parent or the child could make a regular friend request.

It seems like one of the main problems would be how to make sure the person trying to get Parent Access to someone else’s account was actually that person’s parent/guardian, and I’m not sure how that could be established. Maybe just by the usual Facebook request format: “X says she is your parent or guardian, and requests parental access to your account,” with buttons label “Accept” and “Deny.”

It seems to me like this would be a nice compromise between “We’re just friends so you can block me” and “Give me your password and therefore get inspired to create a second Facebook account I don’t even know about.”

Leaving fewer than the household-agreed-upon minimum number of ice cubes in the tray. (Our household minimum is four.)

Leaving the toilet paper roll empty, or with less yardage remaining than the household-agreed-upon amount.

Throwing away a roll that still has a half-length on it.

Leaving dishes “to soak” (the quotes here signify “and never coming back to wash them after they’ve soaked”).

Leaving dirty clothes on floor, in presence of laundry basket.

Leaving towels on floor, in presence of towel bar/hook.

Late enough to activate the “Dead by side of road / injured in hospital / we should have more life insurance” sequence.

Leaving removed hairs on display.

Leaving toenail/fingernail clippings on display.

Leaving dishes symbolically on counter.

Being too quiet, in a way that makes the other person tense and nervous.

Not knowing the name of that actress I’m thinking of. You know, the one we liked! In that thing!

Exaggerating illness.

Washcloth falls on shower floor; takes other person’s washcloth instead; does not remedy situation after shower is finished. (See also: towel too wet, forgot to get a towel, etc.)

Going to bed early without saying anything about it beforehand.

Using up the last of something without putting it on the list.

Loading dishwasher the stupid way.

Forgetting to use in-sink disposal before starting dishwasher.

Fingers still on keyboard while “listening.”

Leaving drops of pee on the toilet seat.

Claiming nothing is wrong when something clearly is.

Tracking in slush.

Allowing last sliver of soap to fall to shower floor; leaving it there to turn to mush and/or for the other person to handle.

Eating the last of the leftover pizza without mentioning it.

I finished Then Again by Diane Keaton, and I have mixed feelings.

(photo from Amazon.com)

For the first quarter of the book, I was incredulous: Could she STILL be talking about her mother? Why am I reading her MOTHER’S journals? What is going ON? I definitely was not going to read the whole book. Then I skipped ahead a chunk of pages and saw she was at some point going to be talking about Woody Allen, so I thought I would hang in there awhile longer.

And it was worth it, and I was glad I did: when we shifted into talking more about DIANE KEATON’S life in Diane Keaton’s memoir, I was happier. Ah, Woody Allen! Ah, Jack Nicholson! The stories of how she chose her children’s names! Hot photo of Al Pacino. Stories about her school days and early acting days. Little gossipy mentions of other actors who went on to be famous too. Blissful sigh.

Still, there was TOO MUCH DIANE KEATON’S MOTHER. I realize Diane Keaton wanted to work through something and wanted to make this her mother’s memoir as well as her own, but I’m not sure SHE realized that for the most part readers are interested in the memoirs of people they are interested in. I’m interested in Diane Keaton, and I’m interested in hearing SOME about her mother (as I’m interested in hearing about her father, siblings, friends, boyfriends, kids), but the mother’s journals were…like a really boring blog. Who are we? Why are we here? How can I fulfill myself when all my needs have already been met and I’m still unhappy? Why am I not more important? And then there were the mother’s collages, which took up way more than their share of the photo sections and were like a moody junior-high project. I do think there could be a market for a memoir of her mother and/or a reprint of her mother’s extensive journals/collages, but I’d want it separate from this book.

The rest of it is what I’d expect and/or want from a celebrity book. There was the usual sprinkling of:

• name-dropping that would be considered gratuitous except that it’s part of the reason we’re reading the book
• hints that the celebrity could have been a way bigger success, but chose not to be and/or was forced by circumstances not to be
• humble quoting of other people’s high regard and encouragement
• flattering photos

There is a tone that feels familiar from other books I’ve read by celebrities: a bit of the “bride at every wedding, only person sitting round-the-clock vigil at every deathbed” feeling. Reading such books, I always suspect that celebrity’s siblings would be annoyed at how situations were portrayed.

I came away from it liking Diane Keaton MORE, but also feeling disappointed that she spent so much of the book quoting her mother, who I never came to like/appreciate/admire the way we were intended to. I was not at all tired of Diane Keaton anecdotes and would have wanted to hear a great many more.

I am fretful because there was a misunderstanding at my dentist’s office. I thought they wanted me to go get some orthodontic adjustments for cosmetic reasons, and when I called back to say actually that wasn’t a financial priority right now so never mind about forwarding that paperwork, they mentioned that actually this referral was not about looking pretty, and they used the phrase “If the tooth can be saved,” which riveted me. “If the”! “Saved”! When I’D thought we were talking about The Pursuit of Unnecessary Dental Perfection! (This is the kind of event/reaction that gives a nice snapshot of the type of life someone is living compared to the world average. Is a tooth crisis at the HIGH end of my Life Stresses Spectrum? Then things are going pretty well, global-perspectively-speaking.)

This stressful phrase (“If”!) was on my answering machine, which won’t be clear from the first paragraph because I’d thought it would be simpler not to go into details such as that when I called them I talked to the receptionist, but then she gave my message to the dentist, who then asked a different receptionist to call me back. See how boring that is, and how it seems completely irrelevant? And yet without it there is confusion, because it seems like if I called them to say X, and they responded Y, my answering machine would not be involved and there’d be no Stressful Needing-to-Call-Back element to this story, nor a Not Knowing What’s Going On element.

Anyway, this means I need to call back and find out what on earth is going on. Casting my mind back to the conversation the dentist and I had, I think the tooth in question must be one of my two front teeth. [Update: Yes.] The root is apparently re-absorbing, according to the x-rays. (He didn’t say it was re-absorbing. But he said it was “transparent” on the x-ray. And I looked that up online and found that that probably means it’s re-absorbing.) [Update: Yes, the root is re-absorbing.]

It can happen from trauma or, most often, from orthodontic work. Presumably that’s where the misunderstanding happened, but I’m still not sure what the misunderstanding WAS. Why wouldn’t I have come away from the appointment realizing the tooth was in jeopardy? [Update: Evidently because my dentist hates to deliver bad news and also thinks a patient knows what it means when a tooth’s root is reabsorbing.] Why would I go to the orthodontist about a tooth that might need to be pulled? [Update: The dentist was talking about afterward, if I wanted to straighten my teeth in general. The person he was in fact referring me to was an endodontist, to see if the tooth could be saved. Endodontist said no hope.] If it’s the tooth I think it is, it WAS the one I wanted to go to the orthodontist about: it has shifted down from the other teeth in a way that bothers me cosmetically, but not enough to feel like it Must Be Taken Care Of. [Update: It is actually the other front tooth. The one I think of as “shifted down” is normal, and the one I think is normal is pushed up a bit, possibly because of not having as much root as it should have.] And certainly I wouldn’t want to finally go to the expense and trouble of having that tooth re-aligned with the others, only to have it pulled out.

Also, I’m very stressed about it maybe needing to be pulled. It’s not only the expense (my mom recently looked into the price of replacing one of her own teeth, and the estimate was about $5,000) [update: hers then cost well over $6000], it’s also the shock of not anticipating such a thing AT ALL, even as a possibility (“But I FLOSS!! And I don’t engage in dangerous sports!!”), and the way “having a tooth removed” has old-age associations for me. I immediately think of my grandmother and her fascinating removable-tooth-on-a-piece-of-fake-gums.

I just finished reading Cancer Vixen.

(photo from Amazon.com)

Paul got it for me from the library, and I didn’t think I’d like it. The cover art doesn’t appeal to me at all, nor does the title, nor did the premise: shoe-brand-discussing, name-dropping, “oh no I gained an entire pound” fashionista-who-uses-the-word-fashionista gets cancer, but pulls through it with style and expensive lip gloss.

As you have no doubt cleverly surmised, instead I loved it. LOVED it. It was not only highly entertaining (romance! family! humor!), but also highly informative: here’s what happens when you get cancer; here’s what the various treatments are like; here are some things I hadn’t expected. If I get cancer myself, I will buy a copy of the book and work my way through it the way I used to work my way through week-by-week pregnancy books.

Boy, I haven’t made that sound real appealing, have I? And I understand if it doesn’t sound like something you’d like: I LOVE graphic autobiographies by female author-artists, and yet this sat on my book pile for two weeks because I didn’t want to read about cancer treatments (or shoe brands). I thought it would be boring, depressing, scary, and annoying. Instead I finished it, walked directly to my computer, ordered a copy to be sent to our local library (Paul had had to request it from another branch), ordered a copy of the author’s other book (Just Who the Hell is SHE, Anyway?) to be sent to me, and then wrote this post.

We were so glad to have all your input about movies! It threw things into a bit of a panic, because we’d been almost for sure planning to see Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (my sister-in-law and sister-in-law’s sister were having an Oscar party the next night and hadn’t seen that one yet), but the comments about it were so amusingly damning, it made us reconsider (though we also thought it might be very funny to see it with that mindset: I could picture us dying from stifled laughter during an exceptionally dull scene). But then the whole thing came down to a time-related choice, so our choices were Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which we were pretty sure was going to be dullllllllll, and This Means War, which we were pretty sure was going to be dummmmmmmmb.

We finally had to flip a coin. A literal coin, which we actually flipped in order to choose our movie for us. The coin chose This Means War (the movie the poll also chose), a movie we were considering only because my sister-in-law read a review in Entertainment Weekly that was something along the lines of it being contrived fluff from beginning to end and yet highly enjoyable anyway for some unidentifiable reason.

And YES. What a good explanation! It’s a movie I would have rejected from the poster: Reese Witherspoon in a little black dress standing sassily between two arms-folded hot guys in suits. …Here, let me find it for you:

Not a promising introduction.
(photo from IMDb.com)

The plot is that two guys are competing for Reese Witherspoon’s character. The gimmick is that both guys are CIA agents, so they have access to, like, spy helicopters and driver’s license records to help them win the competition. Plus, they’re both hugely wealthy and connected.

What made me really, really like the movie is that I felt like it was tongue-in-cheek. The action scenes seemed like they were for pure fun and didn’t take themselves seriously: all guy fantasy stuff, with dangling off skyscrapers, leaping from car to car in a car chase, smash-falls onto tables/cars, tonnnnnns of shooting (often while simultaneously firing off witty remarks). The competition for the girl felt like it was funny in part because it was totally inappropriate to be competing in that way. Even the invasions of her privacy seemed like we ALL KNEW it was WILDLY WRONG, which made it very funny to me: it was so unapologetically over-the-top, it was funny in a way mild spying might not have been. And the guys are clearly meant to be enjoyable for the female audience (visually, but also to laugh at / roll eyes at / recognize types).

Downsides, let’s see. Well, none of the three of us girls liked the romantic resolution (which seemed to take itself seriously after a whole movie of unserious), and there was a completely cheesy/condescending line there that still bugs me days later. (I did like the SECOND part of the romantic resolution.) And there were parts of the guys’ characters/histories that seemed like they were there for pure emotional manipulation: oh, he had a tragedy in his past, that’s why he’s SUCH A CAD now, perhaps he can LEARN TO TRUST AGAIN. I also think they tried to overdo the whole “Reese Witherspoon as gawky nerd-type” thing, while still putting her in 6-inch heels in EVERY SCENE, including the one where she is BY HERSELF MAKING POPCORN IN HER APARTMENT, WEARING NO PANTS. And there are some moments of passion that immediately took the movie from “Oh, I should see this with my parents, they’d love it!!” to “NO WAY I AM SEEING THIS WITH THEM” in, like, one second. (That countertop looked COLD, and the careful posing on it looked…carefully posed. And the later casual reference to “five times” made me roll my eyes right out my ears.)

I think it helped tremendously to go into it thinking “contrived fluff.” And it also helped that we went into it expecting to enjoy NEITHER movie option. And it helped that I think both guys are pretty cute, and that I like Reese Witherspoon. I really did enjoy it all the way through, though I’d be a little embarrassed to recommend it.

I am this very hour returned from an Overnight! Of! Fun! with my brother, sister-in-law, and sister-in-law’s sister, and I am half-surprised to be alive. I am not sure if you have already noticed this about my temperament, but I am anxious and morbid by nature. My natural reveries, if left unchecked, are along the lines of “What I would do if there were an intruder/fire and I couldn’t save all the children at once” and “How long could we survive with only the items already in our house” and “What things around the house would be poignant to everyone if I were to die unexpectedly.” So whenever I go away for an overnight and need to drive for a full! hour! on the scary! highway!, my thoughts as I pack my overnight bag are mostly along the lines of this being the last memory the children will have of me.

Nevertheless, here I am, still among the living. And I have come to a fresh realization that I am a country mouse, or actually a town mouse, whatever, but what I mean is not a city mouse. (I think “country mouse” can have negative connotations because of the “mouse” element, so it’s important to remember that the mouse from the city was ALSO a mouse.) I say this because I got trapped in a city driveway. Trapped. In a city DRIVEWAY. Completely stuck. I kept slowwwwly backing the car out, and then another car would slam on its brakes and lean on the horn for a good 10 seconds to punish me for wanting to use a road I couldn’t see, and then I’d scurry back into the driveway. After trembling and trying not to cry for a minute, I’d realize there was no other option: I HAD to back out of the driveway. So I would creeeeeep back out again, and there’d be the screech of brakes, and I’d scurry back in. My brother, my YOUNGER brother, had to come out and RESCUE ME, including patting my shoulder and then DRIVING AND RE-PARKING MY CAR FOR ME while I went into the house and tried to resume normal breathing.

Well. Anyway. I do enjoy VISITING the city, because it is so pretty and there are so many cool buildings, and because it is so nice to be able to walk everywhere (NOT DRIVE) (PLEASE DON’T MAKE ME DRIVE) (THERE ARE ONE-WAY STREETS OMG SAVE ME) on big wide sidewalks, and there are all these restaurants that serve delicious unfamiliar foods, and there are crosswalks with pedestrian signals so you don’t have to wait for traffic to voluntarily stop for you. And there are movie theaters! And so many take-out options! And stores I’ve heard bloggers refer to, like Urban Outfitters! And there are TEA SHOPS!

I had a second revelation this visit (the first one was about being a town mouse, in case you have lost track), looking at my nearly-3-year-old niece and my nearly-6-month-old nephew: THIS is how we bottle it. THIS is how: by spending short amounts of time with other people’s children. I often wish I could have saved some of that overwhelming/frustrating/anxious/boring/endless time with my small children, because it seemed like everyone kept telling me to enjoy it and I KIND OF was and also I COULDN’T enjoy it when that baby would NOT let me put him down for EVEN ONE SECOND and I needed to PEE and I was so TIRED and I smelled like baby barf and I was so hungry but it was time to feed the baby again and I was ruining my toddler’s life because I couldn’t spend any time with him anymore and this baby was probably the biggest mistake I’d ever made but I love him so much and he’s growing up way too fast and one day he’ll get old and die waaaaaaaaaaaah!

My point is that it’s hard to enjoy that, but that once it was over it became a place I’d like to VISIT. I’d like to pop in, pick up tiny infant Rob, and enjoy the way he would! not! rest his head on my shoulder when I held/burped him, instead of having to fret that it meant he would never love anyone and would end up rocking and keening on the streets (one-way CITY streets) as an old man. I’d like to go back and squeeze 4-year-old William and fuzz his fuzzy head and snuggle his snuggly self and write down more of the funny things he used to say, without worrying that the newborn twins were depriving him of everything he needed. And so forth.

Visiting a niece and a nephew is like getting to go back for a visit. It is of course not exactly the same—but since we can’t have that, this is as close as I’ve found, and I will take it. I squeeze my baby nephew’s satisfying baby shape, and I play “Hi! Hi! Oh, HI! Hi! Hi, baby! Hi!” with him, and appreciate the cuteness of his kicky feet and bunchy keeks and feetie sleeper, and it reminds me of my own babies. And I watch my niece playing, and I admire her little ponytails and her baby teeth and her funny dancing, and I am so amused by how every single thing she says is so cute AND so funny in phrasing and tone and pronunciation, and it reminds me of my own babies.

But it’s a VISIT, and I don’t have to potty-train anyone or get up in the night with anyone or worry about which preschool to choose or feel like I can’t put a baby down for even a second or figure out how to fill an endless day or wonder if we’re doing enough / too much tummy time or ANYTHING. It is ALL GRAVY. I assume this is what people mean about grandchildren later on.

I think we should have a poll. My sister-in-law, my sister-in-law’s sister, and I are planning to go see a movie this weekend. What should we see? Oscar-nominated Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy? Oscar-nominated animated shorts? Rampart? This Means War, which my sister-in-law says got an intriguing review in Entertainment Weekly (the gist was that it was contrived fluff the reviewer nevertheless completely enjoyed)? Chronicle? Something else that’s still playing in theaters?

Let’s have a poll over to the right (below the ad). [Poll closed; see results below.] And give the reason for your vote in the comments if you can, because that can be so helpful for determining if we should take the advice or not (“I think you should watch X because it’s SUPER TERRIFYING! I barfed for WEEKS!” “I think you should watch Y because it made me really think about how awful the world is and how there’s nothing we can do about it!”).

Poll results:

I’ve had a policy at my house for awhile, which is that if I decide to drink in the evenings, I have to keep laundry cycling the whole time. I like the built-in safety of this: if I get caught up on laundry, I’ll know there’s a problem.

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I’ve been having dreams night after night about moving to a new house. After it got to the point of incredulous laughter (“AGAIN??”), I looked it up on a dream interpretation site, where I found that it means I’m going through a big life change/re-evaluation, which, no kidding.

But also, in that same category, I found a bunch of stuff about what it means if you dream about bathrooms, especially if there are no doors on the stalls and/or the toilets are filthy and overflowing. The dream-interpretation sites have INTERPRETATIONS for that, along the lines of your psyche is clogged or you need more privacy in your life.

But do you know what it actually means? It means your body needs to pee, and your body doesn’t realize it’s dreaming so it’s about to wet the bed, and your brain is frantically scrambling for ANY reason why your body CANNOT PEE right now. That’s what it means. So that kind of calls the whole dream-interpretation thing into question for me.

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Dilemma: Elizabeth’s spelling challenge words this week include “Dr. Seuss,” but the teacher has spelled it “Dr. Suess.” It’s spelled that way in more than one place, so it’s not just a typo. I’m not inclined to teach her to spell it incorrectly, but if I teach her to spell it correctly, she may get it marked wrong. …Actually, I guess this isn’t much of a dilemma, since the Worst Case Scenario is that she doesn’t get ONE possible BONUS point on her spelling test.

Still. It’s making me a little grouchy. I understand the source of the misspelling (it’s a hard name, even more so because the common nickname Sue is pronounced like the first sound of Seuss), and everyone makes mistakes (you’ll note I don’t blog about every “bring in their Valentine’s” and casual typos on every single memo/newsletter)—but this PARTICULAR word seems like a misspelling an elementary school teacher would be especially/professionally familiar with and therefore extra careful to avoid if she knew she had an issue with it. She’d think, “Oh, yes, Seuss—that’s a tricky one, and I can never remember how to spell it. I’d better make sure I’ve got it right, before I add it to the spelling words list!”

Swistle’s Dad writes:

We’re suddenly starting to plan for a Northwest road trip this May, to include Yellowstone National Park. I don’t know if you’d want to ask this on your blog, but we’re looking for advice on being in Yellowstone either May 9-10 or May 30-31. Does that three weeks make a big difference in weather? Do the crowds start picking up at the end of May, or not until later? Is stuff still closed or inaccessible in early May? Etc. Just an idea if you’re desperate for a topic.