When I wrote about fear and violence, people thought I might like to read more books about fear and violence. I didn’t want to read MORE about fear: I’m scared enough ALREADY, and I was still recovering from the flu-like symptoms of the Sam Harris article I’d read. But I am susceptible to such pressures, and so eventually I put both The Culture of Fear and The Gift of Fear on my library list.

I tried The Culture of Fear first, but after two page-sides I didn’t read any more. It was all questions, and I could answer all of them. Why oh why are we more afraid of airplane crashes than car crashes, when car crashes are more likely? Why oh why are we so bad at estimating the statistical likelihood of bad things happening to us? Yes, yes, I took Psych 101 too.

I put it into the library return bag and turned to the next book with a feeling of impending relief: I could perhaps dismiss this one just as briskly, and then I could turn my attention to more pleasing subjects. Yes indeed, the book opened with a Very Scary Story. I’m not reading this stuff, I don’t need more scaredness, I can safely ditch it.

…But I skipped ahead, to AFTER the scary story, and within half a page I was reading it with no intention of stopping. And I just finished reading the whole thing, and here is my conclusion: it SEEMS like the book will be scary and will make you more scared, and that it will make you think about things you don’t want to think about–but I ended up feeling a REDUCTION of fear (which is his goal/intention), as well as a dose of logic to counter future fears. There are occasional scary illustrative anecdotes, but you can skim/skip them if you want.

His main points:

1. It is very unlikely that anyone would want/try to hurt you.

2. If they DO want to, there are signals they’re likely to send you first.

3. Here are the signals.

I found that within the first chapter I felt FORTIFIED against guys who seemed like they were just trying to be nice and yet gave me the creeps. The author says that a decent man will not approach a woman in a scary situation (deserted stairwell, dark parking lot), or try to convince her to accept help or whatever after her first “No”—and that if he IS a decent man but just beyond-clueless, he needs to be taught by your reaction that his behavior is scary. Before reading this book, I would have been the woman getting more and more anxious as I tried to be gracious and not look like a weird freak-out. Reading it was like that scene in The Matrix where people get teaching programs uploaded to their brains: I am SCHOOLED.

For those of us who are often fretful and anxious, he lets us know that we are indulging ourselves in magical thinking: we’ve unconsciously noticed that the things we worry about don’t happen, statistically speaking, and so we unconsciously start to see a false correlation: if we worry about bad things, bad things don’t happen! Meanwhile, such thoughts make us more vulnerable to the few things that actually could hurt us, since we’re in the habit of thinking we’re being silly by worrying. Already I’ve noticed a difference in my anxious thoughts: when one occurs to me, I try to evaluate it for legitimacy—and the thought “This is magical thinking” is embarrassing enough to help knock the thought out for a bit. I’m not sure if even over the long-term I’ll be able to learn to effectively evaluate legitimacy, but it seems worth practicing.

Unlike in The Sociopath Next Door, the author doesn’t point out a problem but leave it pointed-out-but-unsolved: he gives specific tests for determining the actual danger-likelihood of situations, and then specific instructions for how to handle them. (He claims not to like checklists, but BOY he likes acronyms.) I found that while/after reading it I would think “ALARMED THOUGHT AS I RECOGNIZE A DANGER SIGN!!!” followed by “Wait. Does this person meet any of the qualifications for actual danger? No.”

My favorite new term is “Scriptwriter.” It applies to people where you feel like it doesn’t matter what YOU say, they go right on with the script in their head. I’ve noticed this in issue-based arguments: I can argue with what someone has just stated, but it bounces right off them and they go right on with their next point. Or someone is upset with me and I think “I just need to explain/clarify what I meant and then this will all be over,” but instead everything I say adds fuel to their fire and they don’t seem to be hearing me at all. It’s a Scriptwriter: the person IS NOT hearing what you’re saying, and it’s safe to disengage from the discussion knowing nothing can be accomplished.

Now I’m going to say a whole bunch of complaining/critical things, so many that it will make it sound as if I didn’t like / don’t recommend the book. So keep in mind that I DID love the book and DO think you all should read it, and that sometimes it takes a disproportionate amount of space to mention small complaints/criticisms.

I did feel as if what he was trying to teach other people was something that came naturally to him—and that as with all things that come naturally to us, it’s hard to teach someone else. “Here’s how to draw perfect life-like portraits!” It reminded me of people who say they think people should “just be” less anxious: it first reveals to us that they don’t suffer from that problem themselves, and secondly that the problem they DO suffer from is a lack of empathy and a lack of understanding about temperament. He thinks we should just learn which situations are genuinely dangerous—but I don’t think he realizes that a good part of that may be something not everyone can acquire. He gets a little frustrated, I think, that we’re not getting it. “Just draw it so it looks exactly her nose!!”

I also thought he was lacking some science/statistics for his anecdotes. He tells us the times when he thought danger was likely and it DID happen, and times when he thought danger was unlikely and it DIDN’T happen—but he leaves out times when he thought danger was likely and it DIDN’T happen, and times when he thought danger was unlikely and it DID happen. He might think this makes him more credible (because it seems to portray a 100% success rate), but it made me question his credibility completely (because I know he CAN’T have a 100% success rate, so it makes me wonder how much he’s leaving out).

And his stories about other people’s encounters seemed to contain a self-proving “duh” element: If they felt a pang of fear and checked things out and found them okay but they weren’t okay, DUH they didn’t look hard enough. If they felt a pang of fear and thought it was real but it wasn’t, DUH they were letting their imaginations run away with them. Whatever the outcome, the implication was that if it went well it was because they were following the author’s ideas, and if it went poorly it was because they weren’t.

In particular there was a story about a mother waiting with her son pre-surgery who kept having “CANCEL THE SURGERY” flash into her mind. She ignored that, and of course her son died in surgery. But…when Elizabeth was going to have her tonsils out, I REPEATEDLY had that same thought flash into my mind, and I didn’t cancel the surgery, and Elizabeth is fine. Again, the self-proving: if her son had been fine, this anecdote wouldn’t be in the book, or would be in the book as an example of us misinterpreting anxiety as actual danger; because he died, it seems as if it proves the author’s point about listening to signals. But what percentage of the time are those signals right? A very small percentage, is my guess. And not always something we can evaluate for legitimacy: in this anecdote the doctor was incompetent, but how can I evaluate that as I wait with Elizabeth in pre-surgery? I can still kind of get his point, but it’s undermined by the absolutely zero chance that I would in this case cancel the surgery and interview the doctors (at which point they would confess to me that they were covering for another doctor’s problems), and by the high likelihood that both I and my child would be feeling/acting weird and uncomfortable in a pre-surgery situation whether the doctor was incompetent or not.

Furthermore, his lead story niggled at my mind. He tells about a woman who had been raped, who realized when her attacker closed her window that he intended to kill her (because why would he mess with her window if he was actually going to leave her unharmed as he had just claimed?). But my question is: Wouldn’t he have closed her window before raping her? (Maybe he thought people would ignore rape sounds but not killing-with-a-knife sounds?) This bothered me throughout, and I felt similar issues with other anecdotes. They seemed overly obvious—which undermined their realness. I think the author hasn’t realized what my children haven’t realized: that presenting a 100%-in-favor-of-yourself/obvious story is actually LESS believable than a mixed story where you admit some error/doubt. His stories may in fact be true just as he’s telling them, but I had to constantly battle thoughts of “Wait, that doesn’t sound quite…true.”

His attitude about violent children and children who grow up to be violent is like this: “I’m NOT saying parents are to blame for violent children…but all violent children have violent parents, and if you don’t want violent children you shouldn’t be violent to them DUH.” And the problem is that the parents who were/are violent will not be reading this and thinking “Oh my goodness! I never realized! It’s all my fault!”; and meanwhile the parents who are NOT violent to their children-who-nevertheless-turned-out-violent will take it to heart and feel even more blamed than they already feel, as well as perhaps wishing they WERE violent so they could deal out a beating or two to this guy. It reminds me of the school notices that come home sharply rebuking all of us for the actions of 1% of parents: the 1% doesn’t care and isn’t going to change their behavior because a memo tells them to, and the 99% gets hurt and upset and resentful at spanked even though they’re being good.

He also does that thing that made me reject the first book: offering an incredulous “Why oh why??” that I feel has a reasonable answer. For example, he wonders why oh why a man would carry a gun and say it was so he could help others in an emergency, but not carry a trach tube. And when the man says he could never cut into someone’s throat, de Becker mocks him for being perfectly willing to put a bullet into someone instead. But I think that IS reasonable: there is a huge difference between being willing to injure someone who’s attacking us, and being willing to injure someone in a medical crisis. I would feel comfortable using a knife to cut a rapist, but that doesn’t mean I feel comfortable performing an appendectomy or even a mole removal. These are completely different things, and it’s not fair to accuse someone of being irrational if they’re willing to do one and not the other. I get his point that we should try to rationally consider things—but it was hard to get past the way he made it seem like he was someone who seriously couldn’t tell the difference between two very different kinds of intervention to two very different kinds of people. A better example would have been to tease someone for carrying a gun but not learning the Heimlich Maneuver.

One final objection: he interviews a stalker and asks him what the stalked person should have done differently, in order to avoid being stalked. But all the other anecdotes illustrated that it doesn’t matter what the stalked person does: whatever they do, the stalker incorporates it into their excuse for stalking: “She was cold to me! She’s a monster who must be destroyed!” “She seemed to be encouraging me! She’s a tease who must be destroyed!” “She’s perfectly nice! She’s an impostor who must be destroyed!” It’s Scriptwriting again: it doesn’t matter what the stalked person does, the stalker goes on with their script.

Let’s see, is that everything? Overall: GREAT book, and I want to go work for this guy, and I kind of love him, and I think he made very good points, and I feel like he taught me some very doable and easy methods for evaluating for actual danger. I think I’ll be temporarily extra-jumpy, and only time will tell if the ideas WORK—but already I feel LESS fear rather than MORE fear. I think I’d like to own a copy of the book so that I can refer to it as needed. But I mention all my objections because I hate to think of you reading the book and thinking “She didn’t object to this kind of arrogant attitude?” “Wait, does she think the parents are to blame??” “Did she not notice how he seems to think it’s reasonable that a child who was one time shoved into a heater (perhaps by accident; it isn’t clear) would grow up to shoot his parents in the head?”

I was folding laundry and mulling someone who recently mentioned his gifted childhood, when actually he didn’t seem real bright to me. Kind of dim, in fact. And this is something that has happened fairly regularly over the years: someone works into the conversation that they were in a gifted program in school, and I think, “…Huh.”

I have come up with a theory, and it is this: that there is Gifted and that there is Ahead, and that schools and tests have trouble telling them apart (and/or that maybe it’s not possible to tell them apart early on). Which leads to many, many people being categorized as Gifted (not only in academics but in music and dance and sports and so forth), and then later suffering the unpleasant feeling of things not having panned out.

(I think there are other issues involved, too, such as Potential vs. Application, and Aptitude vs. Motivation, and Abilities vs. Interests, but here I’m only talking about the Gifted vs. Ahead thing.)

When I worked in the infant room of a daycare, we sometimes had a baby who would walk at, say, 9 months. This would make the other babies’ parents feel a little funny: their babies were not measuring up; their babies were not getting a fuss made over how advanced they were.

But was the early-walking baby GIFTED? No, just temporarily ahead of the other babies. That baby was not going to maintain that gap between her physical abilities and the physical abilities of the other babies; it’s just that she got there first, and then all the other babies caught up. Perhaps there will be a few star athletes among the early walkers and then we will say “Ah! The ability was evident even early on!” But the majority of the early walkers will later be only regular walkers, indistinguishable from the average and late walkers, and there will also be star athletes from the late walkers and we just won’t remark on it because it won’t seem significant then.

I think it can be the same with academics: sometimes the school system calls a child “gifted” when that child is just ahead of the other children at that point. A child who is reading at a 12th-grade level at age six is not likely to maintain that 11-year gap all her life: it’s more likely she is AHEAD, and soon the others will catch up. It IS likely she (like all the others at her reading level) will still be a better/faster reader than many of her adult peers, but it will not be as startling a gap, nor will it be likely to have as big an impact on her adult life as it did on her elementary school life.

The problem, I think, is that a child who is told she’s eleven grades ahead at age 6 gets the feeling that she is eleven grades ahead FOR LIFE. But soon there isn’t “eleven grades ahead” to BE: we don’t say that a 24-year-old is reading at a 35-year-old level. And this leads the adult version of the gifted child to feel a certain dissatisfaction with life: wasn’t she…GIFTED? So why has the gap for the most part vanished? Where did the all the fuss and all the discussions of potential disappear to? It’s because all she was was temporarily ahead.

Or it’s because there was a misunderstanding about what gifted means. A child growing up with bright parents might think that gifted means EVEN BRIGHTER, or in a class of their own—when actually it means being part of a large group that is brighter than the average of the general population, an average they may have assumed is higher than it is. It’s still good news, but what it means is that they get to have the kind of college-educated job they were already assuming they’d get, rather than a job that requires few mental skills. What they might have been thinking of as an ordinary and non-gifted life IS the gifted life: being able to communicate in both spoken and written word; valuing knowledge and education; being able to think things through; being able to read well and enjoy reading; being able to analyze and critique; being able to take a stab at helping the children with their homework (although I am grateful for Wikipedia, because I am more than a little fuzzy on 7th grade history) (and rules of grammar) (and what IS that lattice-math thing they’re doing??).

I have a couple of things I want to buy as gifts for other people, but it’s things I have no expertise in. I keep going to the store, looking despondently at the choices, and thinking, “I don’t even KNOW what to choose! If only I knew someone who was an expert at this!”

…Or as Paul often says: “If only we had access to some sort of global information network.”

Here’s what I was thinking: I will tell you the things I’m looking for (I’m sure there are lots, but I can only think of two of them off the top of my head), and if you know something about those things, perhaps you can advise me. If you instead have your OWN things you want to buy as gifts for other people but don’t know which one to choose, you can leave that in the comments section, and then another commenter might be able to advise YOU!

I don’t know if this will work, now that I think about it a little more. But I suggest we go with the spontaneity and then if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, and that would be fine too.

SO. I will go first. Here are the two things I want to buy as gifts, but I don’t know what would be good.

1. Paul wants measuring cups, and his only requirement is that they “not suck.” He’s sick of the pretty ones I buy, which he claims are sucky because the handles keep breaking off. Well, whatever, if he’s going to be PICKY about it. I’d like to get him some strong, unbreakable, MANLY measuring cups, but I don’t know which those would be. The metal ones? A particular brand of plastic? So that’s what I want from you, if you know something about it: Which strong, not-suck measuring cups should I buy Paul?

2. Rob wants a book that will teach him how to draw manga/anime, and he wants sketching pencils and colored pencils. I want to find him a book that emphasizes how to draw the non-porny manga/anime, and I want pencils that are more artist-quality than Crayola, but not the kind that cost $30 for six of them: we are at this stage of the game talking about a 12-year-old boy drawing cartoons in his math notebook.

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Leave your suggestions in the comments, or leave a comment about your own shopping decisions and maybe someone else here will know ALL ABOUT that kind of item and can point you to just the right thing! And maybe THEY will in turn be looking for input on something YOU know all about! Oh, this could be so exciting!

I am on a tear today. A TEAR. I just went antiquing with my mom, and I don’t think my mouth stopped running the ENTIRE TIME. And furthermore, look at the cheery topics I introduced during our pleasant relaxing outing:

1. One child is being a persistent jerk, and he’s not stopping even when I Use My Words with him.

2. One child is a being a basketcase each morning before school, and it’s now reaching into the evening when she starts dreading the next morning.

3. One child told us 10 minutes before his bedtime last night that he was supposed to have worked on a project over Thanksgiving break, and this is with us working to help him cope with his flakiness but apparently it’s not WORKING. And then after I let/made him stay up until 10:00 to work on it, he LEFT IT ON THE COUNTER.

4. One child has anemia and it will probably be fine, but now that I’m WORRYING about it he looks all peaky to me, and also I feel like when I said to the doctor “we changed his diet, and as you can see there was no impact, so let’s look for something else,” he said “well, it’s probably his diet, so let’s work on that.” I’m anxious to get to the next blood test, which isn’t until January.

5. I’m reading The Gift of Fear, and I’m ALREADY SO GLAD I’m reading it and it has already given me some ideas that make me feel more ready to deal with situations—but it is a HIGHLY STIMULATING book and I had to tell my mom AT LENGTH about a scary/upsetting illustrating anecdote, and I kept CHOKING UP as I was telling it. Plus, I was VIGOROUS in my explanation of how the book was SO REMARKABLE, and that kind of thing is always tiring to listen to.

Plus-plus, as I was talking I was drinking a large coffee, and I was so distracted I drank it all, when my intention had been to drink half and save the other half for this afternoon. So imagine my voice increasing in both speed and volume as the blood-caffeine level increased.

Neither of us bought any antiques. I think we might have somehow gradually come to feel as if there was NO POINT IN ANYTHING BEAUTIFUL OR FUN.

William’s best friend is Clarissa. William and Clarissa are in the fifth grade—so, they are in the 10-11 age range. This past weekend they asked if they could have a sleepover. Hm. How about NO.

Or…maybe we should say yes. What can we give them as a reason for saying no, considering that if William’s best friend were a boy we wouldn’t have had the same reaction? What IS the reason for the different reaction? I’m remembering how indignant and outraged and self-righteous and “Who is it exactly we think is going to barge into our house and see me in my room with a boy and jump to the conclusion of EVIL, and what do we care about what other people think if they’re DIRTY-MINDED AND WRONG?”-ish I felt about my parents’ “avoid the appearance of evil” reason when I was in that age range and wasn’t allowed to have boys in my room, so I’d like to think of another way to explain it so that I don’t have to have that conversation with someone like I was.

Or considering we don’t even know yet if either kid is attracted to the opposite sex anyway, perhaps we have to re-think the whole part about separating boys and girls. Plus, I had many guy friends in high school who, even though I was attracted to boys, I wasn’t attracted to AT ALL. Not even a little. Would have been repulsed at the thought of being attracted to them.

It’s also worth taking into account that even if William’s best friend were a boy I’d be looking for an excuse to say no, because hosting a sleepover sounds…unpleasant. But it’s good we’re thinking about this, because we are FLYING into the age range where this WHOLE TOPIC needs to be considered—not just for sleepovers but for all situations when the kids’ friends are over here. I wasn’t allowed to have boys in my room, but I was allowed to have girls in my room; I don’t know what rules to have for my own kids. A difference to consider: I had my own room, and so does Elizabeth, but the boys share rooms.

What if we said yes, but they could have the sleepover in the living room? And then maybe when they were ready to go to sleep, Clarissa could go to Elizabeth’s room? But again, if Clarissa were a boy, we might have them in the living room (because William shares a room with Henry, and because sleepovers require a parent to keep going in and asking for the noise to be kept down and suggesting it’s time to go to sleep) but we wouldn’t split them up at sleeping time—but if we knew William was gay, we would. Maybe we should set a rule now that for ALL sleepovers the kids get split up at sleeping time, to make it an easier standard to apply. That kind of kills the concept of a sleepover, though, and we don’t have a spare bedroom, and I’m pretty sure people can walk from one room to another when everyone else is asleep, if that’s what they have in mind.

Maybe we shouldn’t allow sleepovers; our lives were easier before we started thinking about this. But sleepovers are a cool kid-stage-of-life experience, and maybe we don’t actually want to say no to that. Plus, our kids might get invited to other people’s sleepovers, where we have significantly less say in how things go…and also there are Bad Stories about sleepovers and the adults and/or older children in other households. Hey, look, I found something else to worry about!

Probably Clarissa’s mom would say no to the sleepover idea anyway—or maybe she’d think we were puritanical and weird for thinking we should say no. Maybe she’d think we were Implying Things about her daughter, and/or about her daughter’s relationship with our son. Maybe she’ll say yes, and then William will be invited to their house for a sleepover, and we’ll have to either say yes or think of a reason that doesn’t sound like we’re assuming Bad Things Happen if boys and girls don’t stay a pew’s width apart and keep both feet on the floor.

I’m trying to remember how _I_ felt about boys in the fifth grade. I’d definitely had crushes, but they weren’t yet obsessing my mind. Sixth grade was when that got started, but still not in full swing. Seventh grade was when boys became a more serious consideration. So in fifth grade I could have had a sleepover with a boy (but it’s hard to imagine it because I would have found that idea appalling: in my PAJAMAS near a BOY??). But I went to a small private middle school: there were only three boys in my class in fifth grade and two of them were fourth graders i.e. BABIES. Things might have been different if there had been a larger selection. And I’m remembering my friend who lost her virginity at age 12 after a long string of related leading-up-to-it experiences, and the sister of a friend who did the same. These things do happen.

It boils down to this: We don’t know if there should be different rules for boy-girl friendships or how to enforce them, but it’s the time to think rapidly and get some policies in place before we’re arguing with teenagers. It’s an interesting topic for me to think about, but also stressful.

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Review blog stuff: Home Depot (about small ways to do good environmental stuff), and Hellmann’s (with a turkey-dinner-leftovers recipe and a sweepstakes to win a $100 Cooking.com gift card).

Milk and Cookies: Toy gift ideas I’ve already played with (alternate title: “My mom and aunt went toy shopping and I used all their successful ideas as my own”).

The instructions for the frozen pizza I made last night included: “Due to the unique ingredients, toppings may have shifted.” The unique ingredients: pepperoni, cheese, sauce, crust. Well! I can see how those UNIQUE INGREDIENTS result in SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCES! Normal pizza toppings don’t have to take physics into account! OUR pizza toppings DO!

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Henry and I went to the library yesterday. A little girl came into the children’s room and said to me, “Hi, I’m Paige, I’m four!” I said, “Really? So’s he!” She said to him, “You’re FOUR, like ME!!??”—totally astonished. And Henry said accusingly, “If you’re FOUR, how come I didn’t see you at PRESCHOOL today?” It was very cute, and they had a great time playing together (they had a tea party!), and I had a great time reading the paper instead of having to drink pretend lemonade.

Then she said to me, “I have head lice!”

Inner Swistle: “NOOOOOOOooooooooooooo!!!!!! AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!! *brushing off everyone’s head!!* *grabbing Henry’s hand and running away!!* *dousing our heads in rubbing alcohol!!*

Outer Swistle: “Really? Does it itch?”

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I was complaining to Paul that ONCE AGAIN I have managed to acquire cats who DROOL when petted/happy, and HOW do I manage to keep doing that? If I’d wanted DOGS, I would have CHOSEN dogs. And Paul said our cats DIDN’T drool. That they drool ON ME, but do not otherwise drool. Is this…something that could be possible? Could the cats be drooling ONLY ON ME? (Note: Benchley also drools on Rob. But could there be something about a particular person that inspires a cat to drool?)

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Assorted links:

It’s a little odd to link to a guest post, but I’m going to anyway: Things I’ve Learned From Reading Women’s Blogs.

Did you know that Temerity Jane is having a get-together at her house? I am partway through my usual “fret and agitate about maybe going—and then, if past experience is to be relied on, NOT go” right now.

Paul told me about Written Kitten, and at first I misunderstood and thought you’d get a REAL kitten for every 100 words you wrote—which seemed like a difficult and not entirely practical idea. But it’s better than I thought: you get a PICTURE of a kitten with every 100 words you write. It seems perfect for doing NaNoWriMo, though I thought my friend Firegirl might prefer a puppy version.

On Milk and Cookies, one of the many gift-idea posts I’ll be writing at this time of year: Gifts for 11-year-olds. (There’s also a girlier list for a similar age range: Gift ideas for a 10-year-old girl.)

Review blog: new post about small ways to save energy.

Previous posts in this series:
See’s Chocolate Adventure: A First-Round Report
See’s Chocolate Report Continued: The Weird Intriguing Ones
See’s Chocolate Report Concluded: The More Ordinary Flavors
See’s Chocolate Report: REVISITED!
See’s Chocolate Report: Continuing the Revisitation!

P-Nut Crunch was a very happy surprise. It’s KIND OF like chocolate-covered peanut brittle, but the brittle isn’t very brittle: it’s somewhere between a brittle and a cookie. Like a Butterfinger (with the nice saltiness of a a Butterfinger, too), but looser, and with less sticking to the teeth. I really liked it, and would order one next time. Maybe two. Maybe three. (SEND ME A WHOLE BOX PLEASE AND THANK YOU.)

P-Nut Crunch
(photo from Sees.com)

Dark Buttercream is one of the ones that showed me that even though I can have a stack of dark chocolate bars in the house and not even be tempted, sometimes I DO prefer dark to milk. Usually when combined with something very sweet, such as vanilla buttercream filling. Top tier for me.

Because of my success with dark chocolate + sweet fillings, I thought I’d try the Dark California Brittle. I really like the California Brittle, which is coated in milk chocolate. It turns out I vastly, vastly prefer it to the Dark California Brittle. There is something magic for me about the combination of the toffee flavor with MILK chocolate. Dark chocolate gives me a startled/clash feeling with toffee. I wouldn’t order these again, I’d just increase my percentage of the regular California Brittle (I got more of them in this box so I made sure I was comparing only the coating, and that also served to remind me how much I love them).

After my unexpectedly positive response to the Apple Pie Truffle, I thought the Pumpkin Pie Truffle might be a hit. But I didn’t even finish it. I ate half and then thought “Why am I continuing to take little bite after little bite of something I don’t like?” I gave it a fair shot, but I didn’t like the pumpkin-pie-spice flavor combined with chocolate, and the filling seemed like Too Much: too spicy, too rich, too dense.

The Apricot Delight, though, was another unexpectedly positive experience. It has apricots, which I think of as not having much flavor but these were really tart and yummy, and coconut, and white chocolate, and a sweet filling. The white chocolate wasn’t a strong flavor (mostly to hold things together), but everything else pitched in with good enthusiasm. I wouldn’t want a bunch of them, but I’d want ONE.

The California Crunch has the same hybrid of peanut butter cookie and Butterfinger bar as in the P-Nut Crunch, but then coated in white chocolate (not much contribution to the taste) and crushed walnuts. It was yummy, and kind of messy, and I think I’d rather have the P-Nut Crunch because that peanut-buttery stuff was so good with the milk chocolate.

One last note: in my last order, I was surprised and pleased by both the Blueberry Truffle and the Pineapple Truffle. This time, I was sort of ho-hum about both. Neither seemed as tart and flavorful as I’d remembered. This could be that conditions changed: last time, I expected both to be losers so I was pleasantly surprised, but this time I expected both to be yummy so I was less wowed. Or it could be that batches vary a little. Or perhaps I’m getting a cold. I still liked the Pineapple Truffle enough that I think I’d order one piece in my next custom order, but I don’t think I’d order the Blueberry Truffle again.

I’m feeling embarrassed and upset over something MINOR that was nevertheless embarrassing and upsetting.

Edward’s lunch has been a problem since the first day of school. His lunchbox comes back with one bite taken out of his sandwich, and he says it just doesn’t TASTE right. About a month ago I came up with what I thought was a clever plan: a bunch of little nutritious snacks instead of A Sandwich. It worked well: his lunchbox started coming home with evidence of him having eaten something in the 7.5 hours he’d been away.

But yesterday at lunchtime, the school secretary called, saying Edward’s teacher had asked her to call to find out “what they should do for Edward’s lunch,” because “all he had was peanuts, pretzels, and raisins.”

I get how when you say it like that it kind of sounds like…snack mix, or something, or somehow “not a real lunch.” Especially if you put the words “all he had was” in front of it. But keeping in mind that a peanut butter and jam sandwich would have been a no-explanation-or-phone-call-needed lunch, I think peanuts are a nutritional step up from peanut butter, and I think raisins are a nutritional step up from jam, and I think pretzels are sitting on the step right next to bread.

Luckily, luckily, LUCKILY, I did not do my usual thing where I don’t feel like I can defend myself because I’m so worried it will sound like I’m lying. And in fact I just said pretty much exactly what I would have later come up with while lying awake in bed: that Edward had been coming home with only one bite of his sandwich eaten, so I was experimenting to find foods he WOULD eat at school; that I’d thought he could have peanuts for protein and fat, raisins for fruit, and pretzels for carbohydrates. And the secretary sounded perfectly fine with that and said she’d let the teacher know.

So it went PERFECTLY, didn’t it? It really did go perfectly. But I’m still fretful because they looked at his lunch and felt it warranted a call to a parent. It doesn’t seem like I should have needed to explain that lunch.

The fact that two people DID think so makes me feel upset: they thought I’d made a mistake when I don’t think it even LOOKED LIKE I’d made a mistake. I don’t like that kind of being at-odds with someone else: I like it when the actions I think are right also LOOK clearly right to other people, without being so uninterpretable that I’d need to explain why it was right.

So even though this actual incident is minor, and went surprisingly well and ended fine, I still sent a sandwich with Edward today. He won’t eat it, so I also sent peanuts, raisins, and mini-wheats. But then I’m here feeling unsettled because I sent a STUNT SANDWICH to reassure school teachers/secretaries, and because I still feel unhappy that I had to explain that other lunch.

Previous posts in this series:
See’s Chocolate Adventure: A First-Round Report
See’s Chocolate Report Continued: The Weird Intriguing Ones
See’s Chocolate Report Concluded: The More Ordinary Flavors
See’s Chocolate Report: REVISITED!

By the way, I suggest taking a screen shot (or writing it down, pfff, whatever) of your custom-mix order before you place it: the boxes arrive labeled, but with a small handwritten label that only mentions a couple of varieties in the box, not all of them. Oh…I wonder if it was printed on the packing slip as well? I forgot to notice.

But if you forget to write it down (or if you remember but still can’t tell some of the pieces apart), the custom-mix ordering form doubles as a chocolate-identification cheat sheet. I appreciate the way they make them all look different, so I don’t have to bite into what I think is a vanilla cream only to find a chocolate cream. Because that is true suffering.

Also, if you’re ordering more than one pound of custom-mix, customize each pound separately. You can choose up to ten different kinds of candies per custom box—but if you select “3 pounds,” it considers that “a 3-pound custom box” and you can choose ten different candies total for it. Whereas if you say “1 pound” and you do it three times, you can choose ten different candies for each pound—or up to thirty different kinds of candies total. Is this clear? No? Here’s the “Don’t try to figure it out, just obey me” version: add each custom pound to your cart separately if you want to try more than ten kinds.

One more note: the smallest amount you can choose for a variety is 5%. There are ABOUT 20-24 pieces per pound-box, but of course this varies depending on piece-size. Still, it’s a good rule of thumb. So 5% is about 1 piece, and 10% is about 2 pieces and might be 3, and 15% might be 3 pieces or might be 4 pieces. I think of it as “one piece per 5%, but round up.” I ordered 10% Polar Bear Paws and I got 3 of them.

Now back to the flavor-trying:

Milk Cocoanut is the first OMG reaction of this order. I like coconut fine, and I’ll eat a miniature Almond Joy out of the Halloween bag after I’ve eaten all my favorites, but I often share the Russell Stover coconut ones with Paul because they’re his favorites and I’m just so-so with them. But this! This is not just all-coconut like I’m used to: it’s like a dense buttercream filling combined with coconut flakes. YUM YUM YUM. It’s very sweet, especially with the thick milk chocolate coating, so I can imagine it being too sweet for some people—but it’s upper tier for me, and I would definitely order more next time. I’m sad that I only ordered one piece this time.

The Raspberry Truffle was also delicious. Nice raspberry flavor, with LOTS of dark chocolate flavor: the inside of the truffle and the nicely-thin coating. Upper tier for me; I’d want several in a box.

I wouldn’t have thought to put lemon and chocolate together, but it works! I like these more than the Key Lime Truffles, less than the Raspberry Truffles. I’d want one in a box.

I’m not sure I would have bothered to try a Polar Bear Paw, but SOMEONE sent me a Crappy Day Present that included some and I loved them. It’s salty peanuts and some caramel (but just a little caramel, not a huge chewy amount), covered in white chocolate. So good. Upper middle or lower upper tier for me, and I love them mixed in with the more chocolate-dominated flavors.

I think of marzipan as yucky, without ever having had any. Did I have a children’s book that described it as gross and dry and disappointing? That’s the sort of opinion-forming memory I have of it. But in fact it turns out to be yummy if you like almond flavor, which I do. My mother-in-law had a pastry recipe that called for an almond-paste-based filling very similar to what’s in these chocolates, and although I didn’t bow down before that pastry as she said everyone in her town did (only because she repeatedly told them they were expected to do so, is my guess), I thought it was quite nice. In the Marzipan chocolate, there’s too much of it for me, and I’m not crazy about the texture: it’s probably the same texture that makes me think “Little bits of apple peel and pie crust!” for the Apple Pie Truffle, but I liked it less in the Marzipan. I finished the piece and was glad to have tried it, but I wouldn’t order it again and I’d probably give it to someone else if I encountered one in a mixed assortment.

Chelsea is one of the varieties I ordered so I’d be sure I’d have a nice number I already knew I liked. It’s like a piece of chocolate walnut fudge, coated in milk chocolate. Except that description sounds way too heavy and sweet, and it isn’t. It IS one of the sweeter ones, though, like the Milk Cocoanut.

Strawberry Cream is another I already know I like. Nice strawberry flavor, and I like the milk chocolate with it.

Ditto the Vanilla Nut Cream: already a favorite. Some vanilla cream, a nice number of walnuts (i.e., not just a fragment here and there, but a lot), and a nice amount of milk chocolate coating.

There are still more to go!

Hello! Have you noticed that lots of blogs in your Google Reader have cute little icons next to them, but yours has a stupid orange B? Have you just about lost your mind trying to figure out how to change that? Never fear, Swistle is here!

I combed through every option in the entire Blogger panel thingie, working on the assumption that it HAD TO BE SOMEWHERE, and eventually I found it! And I have a blogging philosophy that if I lost tooth enamel over an issue, I’ll post about it when I figure it out.

Go to the Design tab, where normally you can add things to your sidebar or change the order of the things in your sidebar or whatever. See at the top of the “Add and Arrange Page Elements” section? That little orange B and then the word “Favicon” and then the word “Edit”? CLICK EDIT. Then upload your own image. Whew.

It should also show up on browser tabs, but you might need to clear your cache and restart your browser first. (And once I did that, I still don’t see my icon when I’m in writing/editing mode. Only when the tab is of the actual blog itself.)

(P.S. I’m still not seeing it changed in Google Reader, however. Is patience required, or is this Enamel Loss Part 2?)

(P.P.S. Now I’m seeing it in Google Reader for Swistle Baby Names, but not for Swistle or Swistle Reviews. Paul says: “PATIENCE.”)