I have another tip from Pelvic Floor Therapy, for those of you who have the issue of Suddenly! Needing To Pee Really Badly! So That You Almost (or Actually) Wet Your Pants a Little Bit! (Frequently happens as you’re unlocking your own front door, or as you enter a bathroom and are struggling with the button/tie of your pants.)

It’s another of the tips I found unlikely when I heard it, and then it actually worked. At the time the pelvic floor therapist told me about it, I was not yet able to do a noticeable pelvic floor contraction (these are sometimes called Kegels, but the therapist said we are not naming any more woman things after men), but she said do one ANYWAY, and in fact do three in quick succession (they call this “flicking,” which I find icky but memorable). She said, do what you THINK or IMAGINE is a pelvic floor contraction (or Kegel), three times in a row really fast, and it can stop the urge temporarily, and ideally can stop you from peeing your pants a little. And I thought, how is this going to work, when I cannot yet do a pelvic floor contraction that I can feel? But I did three imaginary (imaginary from my point of view in terms of success, but actually trying to do them) quick Kegels, and it worked. It doesn’t work for LONG. Like, if you’re nowhere near a bathroom, you are out of luck with this maneuver. But it works for the time it takes to get from the front door to the bathroom.

Which, by the way, the SECOND level of this is to NOT hurry from the front door to the bathroom, but to instead force yourself to do something else for a few minutes, such as putting away a bag of groceries. This is when you’ve gotten good at doing the three quick flicks, so then the next step is to untrain your bladder to want to go to the bathroom the minute you walk in your door. This is when we use Gentle Reassurances, like you would for a sweet little dog who is going to get to go outside very very soon but not yet. “Yes, yes,” you say to your bladder, “I know you want to pee, and we WILL pee VERY SOON, but not QUITE YET. It is fine! We can wait! We don’t even need to go all that badly!” (This method does NOT apply when you REALLY DO need to pee. Like, you have been running errands and drinking a giant iced coffee, and you have been driving 7 miles over the limit all the way home because you honestly need to pee. It is ONLY for the kind of peeing where your bladder hears you coming home and thinks “PEE TIME RIGHT NOW!!!,” when a minute earlier you didn’t even need to.)

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A number of years ago, I consulted with you about buying a mattress in a box for a kid going to live in an unfurnished college apartment. (I don’t remember why, but we weren’t going to have space for a mattress on the way THERE, but thought we WOULD have room on the way BACK.) (Oh, I remember why: it’s because of the difference in passenger space needed. An extra kid was coming along for drop-off but wouldn’t be going along for pick-up at the end of the year.) I cannot find this post now, but it doesn’t matter, because it would have been, let’s see, when Rob was a college sophomore, and eight years is a long time for mattress developments. The mattress we bought him at the time (a Tuft & Needle), after sifting through the advice, was $350, and now that same mattress is $850, and that seems…incorrect, for a mattress that lasted three school years (Rob used it for two years, Edward for one) before collapsing internally and being thrown away. (Looking at the mattress online, I see it had a 10-year warranty, so we should have looked into that—but the collapse was discovered when Paul was picking up Edward at college, and so he pitched it into a dumpster with relief at not having to find room for it in the car. And probably there would have been some reason the warranty didn’t apply.)

I wondered if anyone has recent experience buying a mattress in a box, or knows what the word on the street is. I’m kind of inclined this time to go to a physical mattress store and buy normal mattresses not in boxes. With TWO students in college apartments this year, we’re renting a lil trailer, so we don’t really need the space the boxed mattress saved. (And that space-savings disappears anyway when you go pick the kid up again and the mattress is no longer crammed into a box.)

In the morning before I leave for work, I like to leave a note on the counter telling various kids what I would like them to accomplish while I’m gone—just small, reasonable tasks, nothing particularly onerous. Sometimes those things are left silently unaccomplished, which is maddening. I think they’re trying to surf on plausible deniability: hey, maybe they didn’t see the note! maybe they haven’t even been downstairs yet today! Who can say?

This morning I tried something new. I left the note to two children. I said would the second of those two children to see the note please empty the dishwasher. Then I put “first person to see the note:,” with a line for them to write their name. You see. This way, the motivation is TO HAVE SEEN THE NOTE. When I got home, the dishwasher was empty and the note was gone. I suspect they’ve taken it back to their lair for research/strategizing. How to defeat this new parental ploy?

I had such a successful day of errands yesterday, and I hear how dull that sounds. But you know that good feeling when you just get a whole bunch of little things checked off a list? I had some checks to deal with (the college sent some little refunds, with no explanation, and made them out in the kids’ names); I needed to stop by the hardware store and see if they had tower fans and/or pretty duct tape; I needed to pick up a prescription and see if that drug store had the potassium supplement I was looking for; I needed to drop a Litter Box Sample off at the vet; I needed to mail a package. I also needed a haircut, and that did not get done, but that can wait.

And this sounds even duller, but I had such a good experience at the hardware store! You know I have been trying to shop LESS at Amazon (not eliminate it, just REDUCE it), and I am mad at Target so I am trying not to shop there at all right now, but this means finding new sources for the things we need. Pretty duct tape, for example. I use it when packaging up boxes, especially care packages or gifts. Did I dare go to our very manly hardware store and try to find it, knowing that a nice older gentleman would be asking if I needed help within 30 seconds, and I would have to reinforce a stereotype? Well, I went, and happily found a female clerk, and she said “Wellllll, not really, but I’ll show you what we do have…” and brought me to a large display with half a dozen different patterned duct tapes (rainbow, checkers, camo, etc.) plus bright solids such as yellow, orange, purple, hot pink. I had to use restraint. (I got rainbow, yellow, and purple. If I do Halloween/fall care packages for Henry and his friends, I will permit the addition of orange. Nearer Christmas I will allow the purchase of red and green.)

Each time I go to one of these new stores I’m adding to my repertoire, I try to browse just a little through PART of the store, so I gradually learn what else they have, but without it getting overwhelming. So I browsed a little in the hardware store, and found Sharpie markers, which were also on my list! And a 5-cup coffee maker, which is on my list for Henry for college! And an indoor/outdoor thermometer/hygrometer, which I wanted now that we’ve put away our Amazon listening devices and can’t ask Alexa! And then the tower fan, which I’d been pretty sure I’d find, but they only had two left, and so that was nice. And I saw they have, for example, KITCHEN UTENSILS, and Mrs. Meyer’s soaps, and envelopes, and a bunch of other things I didn’t expect a hardware store to have.

When I picked up my prescription I browsed the drug store a little, but it wearies me to see their much-higher prices and realize I’ll need to get used to using their sales/rewards/coupons just to bring the prices down to the non-sale prices I’m used to paying. It’s worth it to me, but it’s going to take longer to get used to, and it’s less fun than the hardware store surprises (the duct tape, Sharpies, and coffee maker were the same prices as Target, and the tower fan was $5 less).

If you want to join our Summer Classics Reading Club, and why would you, we are currently reading The Three Musketeers, a book I expected to suffer through, but to my surprise I like it very much. You can probably get a copy at almost any library or Goodwill or used book store, or you can order a copy on Amazon for $4 and have it tomorrow without having to leave the a/c, which is the sort of thing that makes Amazon so hard to get away from.

I like sending mail, and I have several friends who like sending/receiving mail. Last night as I was writing a card for a friend, I noticed that the card had cost more than the copy of The Three Musketeers I’d impulsively sent her. Henry and I talked for a few minutes about the possibility of using inexpensive books AS cards. Like, what if you spent $4 on a copy of The Three Musketeers, or Pride and Prejudice, and wrote in it the same thing you were going to write in a birthday card, and sent it to a friend for their birthday? Would that be weird? It’s about the same price as the card, but for the most part we throw away a card after appreciating it for awhile, whereas the book they could get more use out of, if they wanted to, and then could keep it or donate it or otherwise get rid of it just like they do a card. But does it SEEM LIKE A CARD? This is the sticking point. You can send a card to someone without it being in any way “a gift,” but if you use a book as a card, it might indeed be perceived as a gift, and now you’ve set an unintended gift-exchanging precedent. It’s silly, because the card cost more, but this is the kind of thing that can happen.

And of course there’s the matter of shipping. When I impulsively sent a copy of The Three Musketeers to a friend, I didn’t have to pay shipping because I had it sent directly; the card I’m sending her will cost me a 73-cent stamp, so the book is cheaper again. But if I’d had the book sent to myself so I could write in it and use it as a card, it would cost over $4 to send it to her even at the media-mail rate, so then we’re talking DOUBLE the price of a card.

Back to The Three Musketeers. I’d expected a lot of swashbuckling, and I’d also expected it to be hard to read, because it is old and because it is a classic. But Henry said one reason he chose it is that the writing style is supposed to be curiously accessible/modern, and I have found that to be the case—after the usual getting-used-to-it delay of starting any older book. Like, the first few pages were a real struggle, until I got into the swing, or rather the swash, of things. But after that, it hasn’t been hard to read, and I see how it got a reputation for being curiously accessible/modern. There is for example some breaking of the fourth wall, where the author says to the reader, don’t worry, even if this character forgets about this other character and forgets to worry about where he is, WE will not forget, and WE know where he is. And the characters say “Thanks” to each other, which feels oddly modern, and the writing style is arch and confiding and dryly funny in a way that reminds me of Jane Austen. Henry reports that the audiobook is even more accessible, the way Shakespeare can be easier to process when you hear it spoken aloud by people who understand what they’re saying and know what the tone/emphasis should be.

For quite a big chunk of the book, there were NO women, and I was feeling kind of aggressive about that, but then suddenly there were some women, named and voiced and important to the plot. It’s still a very Guy book with lots of Guy stuff about sword-fighting and doing favors for ladies and dying for your monarch and so forth. But instead of finding that boring and annoying as I’d expected, I am, as I think I may have already said twice, enjoying it. It’s silly in a good way—like it’s SUPPOSED to be silly. It’s sword-fighting for people who don’t really like reading about violence and are more interested in the relationships between the characters. Or for people who DO like to read some violence but ALSO like to read about relationships between characters.

We have had A Little Incident, which is that someone left the standalone garage freezer slightly open on one of the hottest days of the year, and the freezer tried valiantly to preserve its coldness, and perished in the futile attempt. A lesson for us all.

We discovered the situation relatively soon and did not lose TOO much. I moved all the more expensive things (meats, vegetarian faux meats) to the other freezer. A fair number of things could be transferred to the refrigerator (butter, cheese, homemade pizza sauce) or to normal air (bread, rolls, frozen bagged cocktails). Some things should have been thrown out anyway (ravioli that were best by January 2024, leftover appetizers from New Year’s that nobody liked), so this was a good opportunity to do some tidying. We did lose all the frozen vegetables, which were stored in the freezer door and were squashy and soggy by the time we discovered the problem, but those are not expensive. All in all, it was about the best outcome we could have hoped for, if “closing the goddamned door” was not one of the outcomes available to us.

A patron who comes to our library regularly, always with her hair covered, has suddenly stopped covering her hair. I was startled by this, until I wondered if it might be because immigration officials are now grabbing people who “look like they’re from other countries (we don’t mean Sweden or The Netherlands)” and sending them to prisons in other countries (we don’t mean Sweden or The Netherlands) without any chance to first prove their citizenship status. Then it seemed less baffling. Though I did also think of an Augusten Burroughs essay where he talks about the mistake of letting your imagination run with the most dramatic/upsetting option: another possible option is that this patron was covering her hair because her husband wanted her to, but now they’re divorcing. Cheerier! Or it could be, given that this is an area I know almost literally nothing about, that she was covering it for some particular TEMPORARY reason (mourning, postpartum, preparation for something, a season of something), and that that time has ended. Or perhaps she was trying it out as a fashion, and has decided it’s not appropriate. Who knows!

Paul thinks he is getting sick, so…think of me tonight when you kneel to say your prayers.

Henry, who will be a college freshman in two months and I assume we’re all just going to let that happen, is running a book club this summer, as part of his “Do I want to be an underpaid English teacher or don’t I?” journey. The book club membership consists of four of Henry’s friends, plus it originally included four members of Henry’s household. But now Elizabeth has unexpectedly gone away for the summer to be a camp counselor (it is a Christian camp, and she knows this worries me, so she is sending texts such as: “I love my supervisor. Not to alarm anyone, but if she handed me Kool-Aid that would bring me to Heaven’s gate, I would drink it”), and she is on-duty 23 hours out of 24 (though not paid accordingly: the Lord’s work does not even APPROXIMATE fair wages, since presumably the Lord’s followers can readily subsist on manna collected each day from the morning’s dew), so now the book club contains only three of Henry’s household: William, Edward, and me. And actually Edward is participating in what Henry calls “remedial book club,” because Edward wants to read SOME books but not as many as Henry thinks we ought to read. My own opinion is that Edward is right and that Henry’s syllabus is far, FAR too ambitious, but this is how English majors learn what is reasonable before they turn into English teachers.

Anyway, we started with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which I thought I had read in my youth but it soon became clear I had not. Goodness. And I never DID become inured to the casual use of the n-word, nor to the absolute PREPONDERANCE of male characters. But then we got to the part where Huck dresses up like a girl, and an older woman figures him right out because he catches a tossed ball of yarn by closing his knees instead of opening them, and I remembered that vividly! …Though I’d remembered it came from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or possibly from a Laura Ingalls Wilder book. So my guess is that either there was a suspiciously similar scene in Tom Sawyer / Laura Ingalls Wilder, or else that scene was in one of those English-class collections that includes poems, essays, and excerpts from novels, and I read it there.

Our second book is Pride & Prejudice, which, well! I have read it multiple times, I own the annotated version which I highly recommend and am using for this re-read, and I have many evolving opinions on the strengths and weaknesses of the various TV/movie adaptations. It is HUGELY enjoyable for me to re-read it for a group project, and to hear the kids using “Mrs. Bennett” as an insult.

An aside: I told Henry that I would like to provide copies of the book for the book club, on a book-by-book basis: that is, let’s start with one round and make no promises and see how it goes. My working philosophy was that I would not buy from Amazon, and instead I would buy from Goodwill/eBay, where we can liberate used copies from the landfill!!!! Except I ordered eight matching “like-new” copies of the same edition (we want to be able to reference page numbers), and I received the most amazing hodge-podge of absolutely-in-NO-way-“like-new” books, which included highlighting, rips, entirely different editions, crumpled covers, water damage, a large patch of sticky residue, teachers’/schools’/libraries’ stamps/stickers, etc. Contacting the sellers resulted in a shrug: return them, if you want. But it was too late to do so before the book club began, so we breathed carefully and tried to use the situation as an opportunity to practice using perspective.

For Pride & Prejudice, we ordered from Amazon. I didn’t like it, but Henry’s overambitious reading schedule is tight, and we could get brand-new copies delivered the next day for less than the price of battered/unknown copies on eBay that would arrive a week and a half after we were supposed to start reading. For the next book (The Three Musketeers) we tried again to be responsible consumers, but once again we were too late: even thinking relatively far ahead, eBay copies wouldn’t get here for ten days or more, AND those battered used copies would cost more than brand-new, so we ordered again from Amazon. But the NEXT book after THAT is Jane Eyre, and we have some time because we are thinking SO SO far ahead, so we have ordered “very good” (i.e., undoubtedly stickered/stained/highlighted/underlined/ex-library/torn/water-damaged beyond reason) copies from eBay that will take two weeks to get here.

Let’s say that, when someone you know (or the loved one of someone you know) dies, you like to send a donation to the charity mentioned in their obituary. What do you do if the charity they mention is one you actively don’t want to support?

I am in this situation right this minute. Paul’s elderly uncle-by-marriage has died, and Paul’s elderly aunt (special to me) survives. The uncle and aunt were residents of a nursing home which has stripped them of all their assets, not necessarily by fault of the nursing home, but by fault of the system which is set up to squeeze all assets from old people. The obituary says that memorial donations can be made to the nursing home. Our understanding is that “posting the obituary” is a service the nursing home provides, and that it’s the nursing home that has listed themselves as the preferred recipient of donations. We don’t know this for sure; we are not going to ask the grieving elderly aunt if this is the case; we don’t want to give more money to this particular system; please take these as the boundaries of this particular puzzle.

Because it could just as easily have happened that the obituary would suggest that donations could be made to a church with views we actively don’t want to support. Or could have suggested we make a donation to a consignment-sales organization whose anti-LGBTQ mission we don’t want to support. Or could have suggested we make a donation to ANY particular organization we are not willing to give money to. What THEN, is what I am wondering. How do you send a symbolic sympathy gift THEN?

One option is that we could do what people do when the obituary doesn’t suggest a charity, and we could make a donation to WHATEVER organization we think is a good one, among those organizations we think the deceased/survivors would also support. That is what started the obituary-charity-suggestion thing, I’m guessing: someone would die, and people would make a lot of donations in that person’s name to various charities, and after awhile it occurred to relatives that it would be a good idea to DIRECT those donations to a PARTICULAR charity. I do worry a little about Guessing Wrong, but there are so many relatively unobjectionable charities—animal shelters and world hunger organizations and so forth.

Another option is that we could just donate to the charity mentioned anyway, even if we don’t support it. I’m not a fan of this option, but I want us all to know I am aware of it, so that no one feels the need to suggest it. Perhaps we could all think for a moment about an organization we are opposed to, and then imagine “just” donating to it “anyway.” Nah, right? Nah.

A third option is that we could skip the donation, and send flowers. [A few comments make a good point about not sending flowers if the obituary says “in lieu of flowers…,” which I agree with, and in those cases I wouldn’t be considering sending flowers; this obituary did not say “in lieu of flowers.”] I feel like this is a perfectly acceptable option, but a waste of potentially-charitably-useful money in a situation where the bereaved will be receiving a lot of flowers they will have no place for. But it’s not a terrible option. I’m okay with sentimental/symbolic/decorative wastefulness. And I feel like I could make it work a little better by sending the flowers, say, on the one-month anniversary of the death. This seems like a particularly good option for the particular case I am currently considering, where emotional/still-thinking-of-you-and-here’s-something-decorative-to-show-it support might be more valuable.

A fourth option is that we could do a Caring Gift—we’re distant in this particular case, but if the recipient were local this would be like bringing over a casserole, or a bag of yogurt/juice/muffins, or a cake, or whatever. For a distant recipient, it could be sending food or…I don’t actually know what the options would be for someone in a nursing home. But the gist is that we could send something not related to what the obituary suggests, but also not flowers. Honestly in this particular case I can think of nothing, but in the past I have sent batches of cookies/brownies, or have had companies send food.

I am wondering what YOU do in this kind of situation, or what you think you WOULD do (if you haven’t had to deal with this before).

I am having a very busy time of life right now: four kids at home; kid graduating high school; kid dealing with college decisions and orientation and needing to acquire supplies; kid finally going for their driver’s license; kid getting job at a summer camp and needing to acquire supplies; three kid birthdays in less than two weeks. All GOOD things, and yet I am not coping particularly well, I notice: lots of the BAD stress feelings.

I suspect it’s that the baseline stress right now with what’s going on in the country is SO BAD, that any busyness or excitement added INTO that stress just exhibits as More Negative Stress. I also think there’s a tipping point: everything can be WONDERFUL, but we can still handle only so many happy tasks in a day before we start to feel batty-eyed.

Additionally, things are not going well at my job right now. We’ve all been clinging on for dear life the last year or two, waiting for a new person in the top position, while an unqualified and inexperienced temporary replacement steers us wildly into one storm after another. The new person was found; the new person seems GREAT—and the new person is continuing to allow the temporary replacement to run everything. The new person’s philosophy is admirable: don’t show up and start changing things without first assessing the situation and getting a clear picture of how things are and how they should change. But it’s been almost six months, and the new person spends all their time in meetings off-site or behind a closed office door, so I don’t see how the new person is getting any sort of feel for how things are on the active floor—and, as I say, so far the new person is allowing the unqualified person to continue to steer us poorly/wildly. This too is keeping baseline stress levels higher and making it difficult for the HAPPY kind of busyness to feel happy.

Normally you know I love almost nothing more than shopping for college, shopping for a birthday, shopping for a new baby (there is a new baby in our extended family)—and instead it all feels like more urgent tasks to be checked off a list. Choosing wee footie sleepers, which is a rare treat and should be enjoyed for as long as possible, had to be RUSHED. And it doesn’t help that I am trying to avoid shopping at Target, trying to avoid Amazon. I will say that this past week (shopping for the twins’ birthdays after an unsuccessful experience shopping small for Henry’s birthday; shopping for a kid who suddenly got a summer-camp job that starts this weekend; shopping for a new baby) I have just gone ahead and used Amazon: sure, it’s run by an evil oligarch who supports our current terrible administration, but they have what I need and they will get it to me quickly. I know small businesses can’t compete with that, so I will not ask them to. (Target may be a lesser evil, but I care more about them feeling my timely wrath.)

This weekend is a busy one for many of us. I hope you all stay safe.

A few weeks ago I flew in an airplane (my brother and I went to see our parents) and the airplane did not crash, which was a fresh relief in light of the recent scary stories about the gutting of the FAA. I know it’s safer to fly than drive, blah blah blah, but what gave me actual comfort was the stories of airports briefly closing because the people there felt it was not safe to direct air traffic. It made it seem as if the people in charge might not just be shrugging and saying “What can we do? We don’t have the necessary staff but we have to keep flying planes anyway or we’ll lose money!”

We flew Delta, and they pissed me off yet again, by changing the flight schedule literally the day after we booked the flights, to something I would not have booked if it had been that way to begin with. It was fine, it was fine, but it added roughly four hours of waiting-in-airports time, and two of those hours were because my last flight landed 15 minutes before the bus for home departed (instead of landing, perfectly, 45 minutes before the bus departed, as originally scheduled), and I had to wait two hours for the next bus because now we were on the Evening Schedule with buses spaced further apart. That was frustrating, to be so close to home and yet still be sitting in an airport. But it was fine. I played my little phone games.

For Henry’s birthday, I tried to avoid shopping at Amazon or Target. I shopped two weeks in advance, because I know I have gotten accustomed to 2-day and 3-day shipping and that smaller places can’t do that. I braced myself for things to cost more, and they did indeed cost more. I ordered things that were scheduled to arrive in time for the birthday. None of them are in fact arriving in time for the birthday. I am finding this very frustrating. I shopped small! I supported the little guy! I spent more time and money! Shouldn’t I have earned Good Shopping Karma for this? Why am I instead being punished.

Elizabeth and I had Her Big College Talk. The gist is that she feels that Illustration is not the right major for her. It’s difficult, because she is not only good at it but better at it than many of her peers, and it would be worth a shot at being one of the few who ends up working in the field. But she has picked up from her professors and peers that the life of someone successfully working in illustration is a life of hustle and self-promotion and self-bossing. Her fellow art students are excited about this: being their own boss! working on their own terms! But it fills Elizabeth with dread. She wants to work regular hours, and have a boss and health benefits. She had thought Illustration would put her in the position to be doing art the way she wants to do art, which is filling someone else’s request; she had not realized she would not be able to do that work in an office with a regular paycheck.

Possibly you are about to tell us about digital/graphic artists, or people who work in marketing. This has also been addressed and discussed: she doesn’t like to do digital/graphic art, and she doesn’t want to work a career that is about selling a product or making money for the sake of making money. This narrows her artistic options significantly.

I was all set to encourage her to keep going with art: it’s what she likes to do, and she’s good at it, and she can’t think of anything else she wants to do. Her wavering reminded me of people who write to the baby name blog during postpartum, worried they’ve chosen the wrong name for their baby—but they don’t have another name in mind, or any particular reason to jettison the name they’ve chosen. There is a type of uncertainty that is just uncertainty, and doesn’t mean anything needs to change, and I’d thought that was what Elizabeth and I were going to be discussing. But it sounds to me like she has a more legitimate reason to consider a change: she does not feel she is suited for the type of working she would be doing—and, whether or not she’d be suited to it, she doesn’t want to do it. So then what.

One possibility is teaching. Regular hours, in some sense (I am the daughter of a teacher, so I already know about the after-hours grading/etc., but so does Elizabeth, and this falls within her definition of regular hours). Health benefits. Going IN to work, not working from home. Working for something that feels meaningful/important/community, as opposed to something designed to create money. People say things like “Oh, but teaching is so different now! / the administration! / the parents! / the lack of respect! / etc.!”—but one of my coworkers who worked in a school for years says that in her experience, newer teachers don’t struggle with this the way older teachers do, because newer teachers come into it as it is, rather than comparing it to how it used to be.

People also say it is hard to find art-teacher jobs, and that they don’t pay well, and that art is one of the departments a lot of schools are cutting—but this starts to make me wonder what ANYONE is supposed to major in, if it has to be something that results in a high-paying, easily-findable job we will always need. I was a business major, and I know about supply and demand, and that is not how it works: if there even EXISTS a job that is high-paying and easy to get, it will not stay that way. I suppose “low-paying and hard to get” is not ideal, either, but teaching falls within my own understanding of a reasonable wage. It’s not what doctors and lawyers and engineers earn, but you can make a life with it. And currently most schools DO have an art teacher, and those art teachers are mortal. And if someone wants a job with meaning/importance/community elements, rather than a job that generates money, that job is going to come with a lower income.

But, after saying all that: I am not sure Elizabeth is actually interested in teaching. And also: we are having a surprising amount of trouble figuring out how it WORKS to get a teaching degree. When I was in school, both elementary ed (grades K-6) and secondary ed (grades 5-12) were 4-year bachelor’s degrees, but when I look online at various schools, I’m seeing confusing offerings of some 4-year and some 5-year degrees, some bachelor’s and some master’s, and I’m surprised at how difficult it is to figure out what is what. Also, one school mentioned that all their teaching degrees are nationally accredited, and claimed that only 30% of the teaching degrees at U.S. colleges are nationally accredited—so maybe the degrees at my college were inferior in some way, and that’s why they were only 4-year bachelor’s degrees (…though, my classmates went on to get teaching jobs). I’m also puzzled by the way a particular school will offer, for example, secondary ed degrees in history, math, music, and English, but not in science or French/Spanish or art. Elizabeth and I spent an hour or two on our computers, both working on the question “HOW DO I GET A TEACHING DEGREE IN ART?,” and we were not able to get an answer to that question before giving up in frustration.

Anyway, we are not sure what her next step will be. She might continue in Illustration for now—though, she’s at the halfway point, so she is reluctant to continue with a path that feels Wrong. She might take a semester or a year off—though she finds she strongly dislikes this idea. She might take a class or two in education and see what she thinks. It’s very hard to know what is the right thing to do. Her main summer project is Trying To Figure This Out. We have been trying out aptitude/career tests online, and mine say I should be a library assistant or a pharmacy technician, but that’s because I gravitate to what I already know I can do; Elizabeth’s results lean toward engineering/science/analyst jobs, because that’s what she wishes she wanted to do.

Elizabeth’s birthday is coming up, and she has asked for “Assorted pretty little hair clippies. I’ve been using bobby pins in my hair and I want something a little cuter. My vague idea is, ‘you know, like in the 90s!’ But not like bright pink and yellow butterfly clips 90s, more like dark and sparkly and mostly-neutral lil’ guys 90s.”

I was a Young Person in the ’90s, and I remember there were two basic fashion paths for girls: one path involved short skirts, baby-doll shirts, choker necklaces, and hair clippies; the other path involved jeans, flannel shirts unbuttoned over t-shirts, and work boots. Your Swistle admired both paths, but was personally Path #2. And I have a high forehead, and wore/wear glasses and multiple pairs of earrings, and so on me hair clippies always felt like, in the words of Mitch Hedberg, “a lot of cranium accessories.”

Elizabeth is growing her hair out from a velour-like cut, and it is now getting long enough to get into her eyes, almost but not quite long enough to tuck behind her ears. Thus the request—which I feel ill-equipped to address. I suspect she wants whatever clippies were worn by the girls who went Path #1 PLUS wore Docs and that dark merlot lipstick. Or maybe she is thinking of something else?? My hope is that some of you remember well what little hair accessories were used back then, and/or that you have kids who are in on this same retro/throwback trend and you know JUST where I need to shop. This feels like such a tall order, but you have surprised me again and again with this sort of thing, and it emboldens me to keep asking.

Speaking of the twins, we have Edward’s second-year grades. I would say they are a little depressing (to me). However, the academic probation has been lifted, and the scholarships have not been taken away for next year, as far as we can tell. It’s possible there will be an unpleasant surprise when the bill comes in August—but Edward researched it pretty carefully, and read aloud the pertinent sections, and it SOUNDS as if everything will be okay, financially.

That still leaves the question of whether it is okay to keep going to school and getting such iffy (to me) grades; I don’t know how to make that decision—and I guess I’m not really looking for advice, exactly, though would actively welcome commiseration and thought processes from other parents going through the same thing. The grades are passing grades, so it makes me think of that joke about what do you call the student who graduates medical school with the lowest GPA? (“Doctor.”) Edward says the school still feels like the right fit and so does the major, despite the outcomes saying otherwise (to me). We talked a little about why the grades are iffy, and Edward said some (good, promising, concrete) things about figuring out a studying style and also about figuring out how to keep track of things that are due. I asked about using the student services department that provides help/support for those very things, and Edward will look into it in the fall. I also remarked hand-wringingly that it seems like if, for example, a student is getting a 70% in a class, they may be missing 30% of the education they’re paying for, and Edward said amicably, “Yes, Mother.”

Have you watched Severance? We watched the first two seasons, and then the twins came home from college and they’d both watched only the first season, so we’re re-watching the second season now with them. I’m finding it riveting and distracting: lots to think about when not watching it.

Oh! And I just finished a book and I wonder if you might like it. It’s The Wedding People, by Alison Espach (Amazon link, Target link). I would say it was fun without being lightweight.

(image from Target.com)

I built the links/image the way I usually do, but this is the first time I’ve done that since finding out various bad things about Target: first, that they absolutely tripped over their own feet rushing to pre-comply with the new U.S. president’s executive suggestion about eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion; second, that they donated a million dollars to that same president’s “inauguration fund,” and that it was the first time they’d made that sort of donation.

This leaves me in a bit of a pickle, as Target is where I do a LOT of my shopping—and I USED to feel good about shopping there instead of at Walmart or on Amazon. Now I am not sure what to do. I am reevaluating my other shopping options. For example, our grocery store sells toilet paper and shampoo and toothpaste, so I can get those there, and I am willing to pay a little more (and have a more limited selection) to feel on firmer ethical ground. And I look for used books on eBay; sometimes the sale even claims to benefit a charity.

But there are some things that are MUCH more expensive to buy at places that are not Amazon/Target/Walmart, without the place itself seeming like an obviously better choice, and I don’t know what to do about those. I can pay $11 instead of $6 at a chain drugstore; is that an ethical improvement? One of the kids got a little lofty about it, saying “we” “had to” be willing to pay “a little more,” and I was like, child, there is only so much money to work with here, and only a limited selection of sellers. We can fuss at each other about Ethical Stands, and hurt our own budgets over Possibly Slightly More Ethical Shopping Choices, without a single CEO feeling a single mild scolding, let alone a significant economic impact.

But that doesn’t change the fact that shopping at Target makes me feel bad now, so I’m continuing to explore.