I am in such an agitated mood this morning. First, I got yet another solicitation from Google Ads. But Google Ads BANNED ME FOR LIFE a few years ago. I spent a long time composing a reply to the most recent one. I explained the situation, and then asked that if they weren’t going to tell me why I’d been banned, and their form letter was correct that there was no appeal for this lifetime ban, that they at LEAST take me off the mailing list imploring me to join the club I’m not allowed to join.

I worked pretty hard on it to get the right tone and to use the right words and to not make it anything I’d be embarrassed later to have written. Then I noticed it was a no-reply email address.

Then I got an email from Amazon about their latest deal from a business that is not Amazon. I was pretty sure I’d already “managed my subscriptions” to remove messages about deals from their partners, but I thought maybe I hadn’t done it right so I clicked that link again. No: I’d done it right, but this one was categorized as an ELECTRONICS offer, not a PARTNERS offer. Because it was an electronic item offered by a partner, I guess. It’s not like this is RUINING MY LIFE, all I had to do was delete the email, but it’s just kind of IRRITATING on top of an ALREADY-BAD mood.

Then, I’ve been continuing to mull over an article excerpt I read somewhere that said The Help was a bad book because it made it seem as if only bad people owned slaves. I thought that was an extremely good point, and not something I would have noticed, and I was glad to have had it pointed out.

But this morning I started working out why I didn’t think it was right in an all-the-WAY-right way. And why, if it WAS right, I came away from the book feeling horrible and embarrassed and stricken—as opposed to thinking “Whew! At least _I_ wouldn’t have been like THAT,” as you’d expect me to think if the mis-portrayal had been effective.

I find that kind of thinking very agitating and frustrating. I’m a slowwwww thinker, so there’s all this time of me “feeling like something is wrong but not being able to figure out WHAT IT IS, or HOW TO SAY IT,” and that kind of thing leaves me snappish and irritable because I’m working so hard at it but I’m not finding an answer, or I FEEL an answer but can’t ARTICULATE it, or things keep legitimately interrupting my focus to ask for breakfast or to be brought to the bus stop. It riles me up unpleasantly as I sort it out—and especially as I imagine the whole new task of trying to communicate the thoughts to anyone else, and then imagine having to listen to them knock those thoughts down Facebook-fight-style.

But here’s a piece of what I came up with through much wrinkle-browed effort, and will now wrinkle-browedly try to communicate without screwing it up:

I was remembering the book Switch (I reviewed it here, after the part about Rob Lowe), which is a book basically about getting people (including yourself) to do what you want them to do. One sample challenge was a situation in another country, where they wanted old men to stop paying young women for sex: it was spreading disease like crazy. They didn’t think a moral campaign would work, nor a health campaign.

Instead they made a series of ads featuring a sleazy old guy who preyed on young women, and they gave him a name I’ve forgotten but it started with F. So in these ads, F____ would be pursuing a young woman and looking pretty foolish and unattractive doing it, and then someone in the young woman’s life (a friend, a relative, the waitress at the restaurant) would say to the young woman, “Oh, gross, you wouldn’t hang around with an icky old F____, would you?” And this name-starting-with-F became a cultural term, so that old men who pursued younger women were associated with this sleazy character, and younger women felt like it would be gross to go along with that, and their behavior actually changed as a result.

Were these ads fair? Did they accurately represent the older men as ridiculous icky sleaze-bags, and the younger women as creatures to be pitied and rescued from their own dimness? Of course not! The real-life old men and the real-life younger women had multi-layered personalities like everyone else—and they were an assortment of good/bad just like everyone else. Some of them were sleazy, but many (maybe most) of them were perfectly nice people, and probably attractive too.

The idea behind the ads was this: if people think to themselves, “Hey, perfectly nice and attractive people do this,” they feel comfortable doing it themselves. But if it is widely agreed that only a weak person drinks too much, only a heartless jerk has affairs, only a poorly-brought-up person thinks it’s okay to shoplift, and only a bad parent slaps a child, only an ignorant unlikable person would be racist—then it becomes harder to participate in that behavior without compromising my sense of self, and my sense of self MUST include the information that I am a basically good person, and so my inclination is to avoid those behaviors or to feel very uncomfortable if I participate in them.

This is, I think, something that is done in many areas where we as a culture have agreed that something is wrong, but haven’t figured out how to get everyone on board behavior-wise. In television and movies and books, then, we see these behaviors deliberately associated with icky people to make it unappealing—just like in an obvious children’s television show. Wife-abusers are shown as mouth-breathing cavemen in sleeveless t-shirts (despite how many of them are bright and wear nice suits and go to church), in order to try to make people think “Ick. Is THAT how that comes across? I don’t want to be like THAT. I would rather be associated with that pretty girl.” Not this always WORKS, or never BACKFIRES, but that’s the idea.

I’m talking here about the messages we receive from ENTERTAINMENT—the ones where we’re not supposed to NOTICE that our behavior and attitudes are being influenced and that our characters are being worked on. Associating bad behaviors with bad people is a way to get the behavior we want out of people. But certainly in non-entertainment arenas the information that good people owned slaves, and that smart well-dressed men beat women, and that some cultures have made a project out of obliterating other cultures, should be explicitly stated and fully accepted, and everyone who studies the subjects should understand it, and it should be emphasized carefully in schools and discussions.

In fact, I think we should take it further: not only do we need to realize that any of us, if we’d lived in that time, could have been perfectly comfortable owning slaves, we need to realize that any of us, ANY of us, could have been comfortable with it, if we had lived in that particular set of circumstances. ANY of us, no matter what our skin color or nationality, could have gone along with it: not just “us, if we’d been our ancestors, but also “us, if we’d been our ancestors’ persecutors.” That ANY group of us could enslave or kill or discriminate against any other group of people, and that this is why it’s so important that we all learn on many levels and by many methods how terrible such behaviors are.

So, basically, two thoughts:

1. If what we want is to influence behavior, it can help to use fiction to connect a bad guy with a bad behavior.

2. It’s important for us to understand that, born into the right circumstances, most of us have a capacity for the kind of wrongdoing we considering astonishing in historical people. And it isn’t only the descendants of the wrong-doers who need to consider their potential for evil, itt’s every single one of us. History has shown that wrongdoing isn’t based on skin-color or nationality, but on humanness.

Periodically we stop at the animal shelter to browse the cats. This time we came home with one.

Hi.

She’s about four years old, and she has a good Shelter Story: she was found with a wee little sign around her neck that said her name was Madeline/Madeleine/Maddie (all three names were on the sign in various places) and please take good care of her. We’re going to change her name, but we don’t know what it will be yet. I’m campaigning for Sally. (Or Lydia or Silvie or Phoebe or Hillary or Ginny or Linny or Bonnie or Heather or Angela or Ivy. You’d never guess it, but I find names interesting and important.)

She is the sweetheartiest cat I have ever met. The shelter has “interview rooms” where you can spend time with any cat you might be interested in adopting, and most cats (even the really sweet snuggly ones) spend most of their time exploring the room and sniffing all the corners, because that is the cat thing to do. But not this cat. She stayed right on my lap, snuggling in and wanting skritches. She was a cat that WANTED TO GO HOME RIGHT NOW PLEASE.

You don’t understand: I’m not MEANT for shelter life.
I don’t BELONG here.

She doesn’t mind being picked up, even by children. This next picture was taken about 5 minutes after she came to our house, when by all rights she should have been skittish and freaked-out:

Doot-da-dooooo, just dangling my paws

I like to bring kids with me to the shelter, not only because it’s a fun thing to do with kids but also because if I find a cat possibility, the children’s presence is essential. A cat that doesn’t flinch when Henry makes a sudden loud sound, that doesn’t object to being scooped up inexpertly and unexpectedly, is a cat that will likely do well in our household.

She is not, perhaps, the sharpest kibble in the bag. She leapt up onto the windowsill of a closed window, an action that made a sound like this: “Scrabble scrabble scrabble!!! …THUNK.”

That was ONE HUNDRED PERCENT intentional.
(And thank you for opening the window.)

I just finished The Local News, and if I had to give a quick review I’d call it “compelling and squirmy.” It’s about a high school girl whose high school brother vanishes. At first it hits a really good introspective note, with the girl talking interestingly about the weird feelings involved in sustaining that level of anxiety over time, and the different ways the different family members handle it—and about what it’s like when the missing person is kind of a cruel dumb jerk.

The Local News, by Miriam Gershow
(image from Amazon.com)

But then a certain distance in (1/4th of they way? 1/3rd?), I started saying aloud, “Okay, if something doesn’t HAPPEN or CHANGE in the next ten pages, I’m giving up and skipping to the end.” I think a pretty big chunk could have been snipped out of the middle—but on the other hand, I DIDN’T give up and skip to the end, so maybe not. If I were trying to spin it positively, I’d say it gave a good idea of what it would be like to be IN that situation where you had to sustain that kind of anxiety even though nothing was happening.

It’s a book for adults, I think, but it has a young-adult theme. I found I identified way more with the parents, but then I was cringey because I was having to look at what _I_ considered “them doing pretty well, considering,” but from the point of view of someone doing a good job of pointing out how kids don’t really see it that way—or how it doesn’t really matter if the parental behavior is totally justified, it’s still harming the kids.

It also spends plenty of time visiting the stupidness and carelessness and meanness and bumbling mistakes of high school kids.

Another big cringe for me was the way I saw how “supporting a family in crisis” can look from the point of view of someone in that family. Fundraisers, candlelight vigils, kind words, cards from strangers: I saw them all from a point of view I wasn’t comfortable seeing them from. I already second- and third- and fourth-guess so much, adding this kind of material sends me for a bit of a spin. But on the other hand, I felt like it was done in a way that let me appreciate the added perspective without feeling attacked and accused for good intentions.

And this is a huge thing for me: the story line resolved.

So! In short! I don’t know if I recommend it or not. It wasn’t the cheery/entertaining kind of book, it was the thought-provoking kind—but so many of the thoughts it was provoking were kind of downers. But I was glad I read them. So.

There is a Facebook thing (and also an email-forward thing) going around the bugs the crap out of me, and I know I need to be MUCH more specific than that. It’s the one that talks in all-caps about how schools no longer have children say the pledge of allegiance. This is reportedly because schools are SCARED of OFFENDING someone. And you’re supposed to REPOST IF YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT OFFENDING SOMEONE.

LEAVING ASIDE the issue of whether this would be SUCH AN OUTRAGE, or whether the cause could be correctly diagnosed as “fear,” or whether it’s good or bad to care about offending people, there is a problem: at my kids’ schools, they DO still say the pledge of allegiance. They say it every single morning. And on Parents’ Night, they had the parents say it, too—complete with the non-original “under God” part, for those of us worried that the rule about separation of church and state is being enforced.

So I think of this silly repost/forward as being nothing but fear-mongering: let’s drum up an INDIGNANT MOB over something that HASN’T EVEN HAPPENED. So many Facebook things and email forwards ARE like this: they state something HORRIBLE, and no one re-posting/forwarding it checks first to see if it’s, you know, TRUE.

But I DO check. And just because MY kids’ school still says the pledge of allegiance each morning doesn’t mean EVERYONE’S does, or even that MOST schools do. Ours could be a fluke. And so I would like to take a little poll if you wouldn’t mind. Over to the right, if your kids go to public school in the U.S., please tell me if your school system DOES or DOES NOT still say the pledge of allegiance. (It doesn’t have to be daily.) And if your child’s school DOESN’T say it, could you leave a comment about what the deal is (like, is it CARING ABOUT OFFENDING SOMEONE, or is it some other explanation), so that we can figure out the source of this rumor? (And so we make sure they aren’t false-no votes, like when the school is not in the U.S., or when it’s a private anarchist academy.) [Poll closed; see results below.]

It has happened to me twice in the last year that I’ve felt like I finally figured out how to eat less, finally got it straightened out so that NOW I know how to do it—and then found out that I had a hidden infection raging in my head somewhere. Five or six days on antibiotics and I have lost my new-found knowledge. Oh come back to me, brief sweet window of simple easy eating!

I think we could market this. Let’s think how.

(Also, if you know someone who’s like, “You just have to DO IT. You just have to CHOOSE to eat right,” she should probably have a doctor check her ears/throat/sinuses. Ten days of Augmentin should clear that annoying little problem right up.)

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SarahLena linked earlier today to this Steve Burns video you should probably watch when you have a spare 17 minutes. (That’s a daunting length, isn’t it? What I do is I think, “I will watch 30 seconds of it, that’s all.” By then I’m either hooked and it no longer seems daunting, or else I close it feeling like I got a sample of what someone was referring to.)

He mentions that he got a lot of fan mail, like FROM LADIES, and that Nickelodeon filtered most of it for him, but that they let one get through. It became evident that his funny story was going to involve this letter, at which point I started thinking “Please not mine, please not mine, please not mine.”

It’s 17 minutes of my favorite kind of talking: something that wasn’t funny at the time but is funny now, some self-deprecating humor, some stuff he thinks about, some little hints about why he left the show (a twinges-when-it-rains injury for so many of us), some interesting discussion about parts of his job I hadn’t thought about, etc. *Happy sigh.* My favorite line, if you watch it, was “And I thought: ‘Believe it or not, this is the only game you have, man’.”

I have just finished a book I think you should try, and there are problems with the recommendation. I will list them.

1. The title and the design of the book are uninspiring beyond what I can emphasize. The expression “You can’t tell a book by its cover” may or may not be true (I’d say it’s one of those expressions that sounds so true, people generally believe it without evaluating it for trueness), but this book’s cover misleads: the title is dull and unmemorable and non-evocative of the contents (even after reading the book, I can’t call the title to mind without peeking); the cover is pretty but dull and unmemorable; BUT THE BOOK IS NEITHER DULL NOR UNMEMORABLE.

State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett (photo from Amazon.com)

2. There are some distressing scenes of the sort I would feel betrayed by if the book had been unqualifiededly recommended to me. Have you read The Poisonwood Bible? Remember the various jungle horrors? Snakes, vines, endless insects, malaria, hallucinations, contaminated water, determined zealots, dying children? It is not as bad as that. But there is some similar material. Here is the REAL major problem: if I had read it unwarned, I would have felt betrayed when I read it—but if I HAD been warned, I would NOT have read the book. AND I WANT TO HAVE READ THE BOOK.

3. There is a very tense labor/c-section scene. And another. There is a scene where things look dramatically grim for a child. There is an injury to an infant. I want to give you spoilers, because I would myself have wanted spoilers. But I don’t know if YOU would want spoilers. I’ve heard that for some people, spoilers spoil a book, rather than allowing them to read it without dying.

4. If I’d read the inside of the book jacket, I would have had NO INTEREST in the book. NO INTEREST. The second sentence would have made me all but certain I wasn’t interested; the third sentence would have sealed it. I HATE this kind of book. Or so I’d thought. If I tell you what the book is about, you might think, “Bleah, I hate that kind of book.” You might not read it. You might read it but indeed not like the book. WHAT IF YOU DON’T LIKE THE BOOK?? What if you WOULD have liked it, but because of something I say you don’t read it??

This book was a problem for me, because it had already been my turn on the hold list but I’d run out of time to read it and had had to return it unread. I put myself reluctantly back on the hold list, my number came up again, but I couldn’t get to it until only a week of the check-out period remained. I thought, “I will just START it. It looks so dull, I probably won’t like it. Then I’ll be able to return it and let the next person read it.” I got three pages into it and said to Paul, “I have bad news. I think it’s a great book. I will have to finish it.”

Luckily I was able to finish it in three days. When I finished reading it, I burst into tears and I cried for a couple of minutes. I will try to define the type of crying, because this sort of thing seems important: it was crying for a wonderful book, for a wonderful story, for a complete package that worked from beginning to end, and for an author who PULLED IT OFF. It was also crying for what a STUPID title and STUPID cover, which MIGHT HAVE MADE ME MISS IT ENTIRELY. It was great crying, and I wanted to do more of it but Paul finished the dishes and took off his headphones and I didn’t want to be crying in front of him.

Er, not to oversell it. Which brings me to the last problem:

5. One crucial element to my enjoyment of the book was that I went into it not even remembering why I put it on my hold list, not knowing what it was about, and not expecting to enjoy it. I looked at the cover, I looked at the title, I didn’t bother to read the inside of the jacket, and I thought, “Let’s get this over with.” You can’t recreate that experience after I’ve told you about it like this. I have ruined it by recommending it.

This morning I have been brought nearly to tears by the difficulty of peeling hardboiled eggs, and I both DO and DON’T want to ask for ideas. Because you know how it is: the ideas tend to be 70% Things Everyone Already Knows To Try (“Put them in cold water right after they’re done boiling!”), 20% Things That Have Already Been Tried After Googling But Didn’t Work (“Add vinegar / salt / dragon’s tears to the boiling water!” “Crack the shell slightly right after boiling!” “Peel them under running water!”), 9% Things I’m Not Going To Do Even If They DO Work (“Don’t store them in their shells!,” incantations/chanting, that thing where you BLOW the egg out of the shell and I am not kidding), and 1% Ideas Not Yet Known To The Asker But That STILL Don’t Work When Tried.

It seems to me that the way a hardboiled egg peels or doesn’t peel must rely almost exclusively on Element X, because I get the same eggs at the same store every week, and I cook them the same way each time, and some of the boiled eggs peel like dreams, like DREAMS, with the children gathering around to oooh and ahhh as the shell comes off in two large neat pieces, and some of the boiled eggs peel like NIGHTMAAAAAAAAAAAAARES, with little picky bits flaking off and taking chunks of white with them until the egg is a nasty pitted mess and no one wants to eat it. If there was one good solution that worked every time for everyone, that would be the only solution going around.

It reminds me of ice cubes, and the way some of them pop out of their plastic trays beautifully and cleanly and with only a slight twist of the tray, while others require a strong twist and then break into shards. (My brother did a whole study on this phenomenon once. I should see if he’s willing to tackle eggs.)

I have a new mug that I love enough to feel a little surprised by it, because why feel so strongly about a cup? But there it is.

I first saw it at Marshalls, AND it was on clearance, AND the last one left—and then I noticed it had a huge crack down the side. Dang it.

Then my mom and I went to another Marshalls another time, and there it was. On clearance ($3), last one left, but no crack!

I love the appearance of it, of course, and that’s a lot of the explanation for my passion (that shade of green! the pairing of that shade of green with the black-and-white! the shape of the handle! the slight flare-out at top and bottom of the mug!). But I also love the hand-feel (comfy handle with little thumb-rest on top; nice balance) and lip-feel (rim the right thinness and right angle), and those are crucial for long-term mug enjoyment.

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Maybe you saw Title of the Song (here’s the lyrics version) when it was going around before, but when Paul played it this morning I found I had forgotten it and was ready to hear it again:

“Regret over the lateness of my epiphany.” “Naïve expression of love.” “Repetition of the title of the song (can you hear the title?).” “Drop to my knees to elicit crowd response.” I love all of it.

One of the best parts is the comments section. “Pointless comment about how I came here via Metafilter.” “Continued glorification of the video. Realization that in all likelihood someone else has probably made a similar comment. Declaration of how little I care if it is the case! Repetition of my glorification.”

I feel like there is SO MUCH GOING ON, even though a lot of it is over:

1. Elizabeth’s tonsillectomy (over) and the resulting difficulty she’s having with articulation (not over)

2. Paul’s trip to DC, and the change in plans that had to be made because of Hurricane Irene (over)

3. Buying school supplies, and school starting (about three-quarters over)

4. Nephew being born (over as of this past Tuesday, yet ongoing because of wanting to visit and bake stuff and find a good present)

My sister-in-law’s sister took this great picture

5. A visit from my aunt, and my uncle’s death after a very long and painful illness

6. Edward’s anemia, which I assume is mild or else they would have made a bigger deal of it, but I think of it at every meal

7. Our life insurance premium due the day after I write my annual check in memory of the boy who took me on my first date, who died when we were 30

8. My high school boyfriend has left his wife and two children and “wants to talk” (fat.chance.)

[snip]

10. I have a massive, advanced ear infection that I didn’t even know I had. I saw the doctor this morning because my teeth were hurting and my ears were itching, and she says there is to be no Messing Around: if after 24 hours on the antibiotic I feel any worse, I have to go to Urgent Care and not wait for Tuesday to make an appointment

11. My youngest baby starting preschool next week

12. A friend’s marriage is teetery

I’ve kind of jumbled those all up, the serious and the less-serious. They’re all jumbled up in my mind, too: I feel like I have so much to do and think about and remember! I don’t feel STRESSED, really—but I do feel WIRED. I’ve had to cut wayyyyy down on coffee, because I feel like my baseline is at the 2-cup point right now, before I’ve had a single sip.

I’m beginning to feel as if all nutrition information is like the medical information from the days when we still thought illness was caused by evil spirits instead of germs. One old woman tells you that if you have a wart you should put a certain leaf on it, then bury the leaf under a full moon; another old woman tells you that on the contrary, you should put the juice of a certain berry on it, then sleep on the non-wart side for a week. Meanwhile, the old man in a hut in the next village over says that the wart is a manifestation of a resentment you have toward a friend, and his neighbor says it’s that your blood is full of heat and you need to eat cooling foods.

I think to myself, “I will not try to get all COMPLICATED with Specific Eating Restrictions, I will just start with what I KNOW”—and I am lost first thing in the morning at breakfast. Do I eat a good hearty serving of whole grains? Or do I instead avoid grains and eat only protein? and should it be LEAN protein, or doesn’t that matter as long as I’m not eating sugar? Or is it important to eat grains and proteins and fats in particular percentages? Or is what’s REALLY important that it be a WHOLE food, not a processed one? a raw food, not a cooked one? Only foods that conform to an arbitrary limit on number of ingredients? readability of ingredients? (Yay, smart people and people who took Latin aren’t affected by the same things as other people!) Is breakfast the most important meal, or should I “listen to my body” (what does that…MEAN?) and not eat if I’m not hungry? Should I have a piece of fruit packed with fiber and antioxidants, or is fruit full of sugar that will throw off my whole day? Are legumes power foods that do everything but our taxes, are they not intended for human consumption? Does coffee speed up metabolism and also contain important antioxidants, or is it a dangerous dehydrating stimulant that will make me hungrier when I crash?

I like the “Just do the best you can” attitude and the way it avoids the pursuit of unattainable perfection—but it only works when we know what perfection we’re not attempting to fully attain. There can’t be a “best we can” when we don’t even know if fruit and whole grains are EXCELLENT for us or THE VERY THING KILLING US.

Eat whole grains under the full moon! Eat antioxidants between the spring and winter solstices! Eat proteins but only on days when the goddess’s face is visible on the side of the moon, and bury a pear at dusk on the days you eat whole grains! CONTROL THAT BLOOD HEAT. HARNESS THOSE BAD SPIRITS!