I’ve been so wan. More like “wa,” because I’m too wan to say wan. In fact, more like sitting in a chair not saying wa either.

Part of it, I think, was trying to read The Flame Alphabet, which had a premise I could really identify with: the sound of children’s voices becomes toxic for adults. But the book itself was so grey and heavy and nauseating and confusing, I didn’t even get halfway through it. (Lionel Shriver’s review is pretty much exactly the way I felt about it.)

Furthermore, in the book there are many conversations with the contemptuous, argumentative early-teens daughter of the household, and let’s just say I can FULLY identify with that but don’t feel like seeking out more exposure to it. I’m leaning heavily these days on Empty Nest Feather’s post Desk Cleaning, which is only partly about desk-cleaning and has given me a new private nickname for Rob (“Mr. Eye-Rolling Contempt”). I’m also leaning on her post The Last of the Teens, which gives me some hope that I won’t be this miserable for the next fifteen years.

This morning William was apparently doing the verbal equivalent of “I’m not touching you, I’m not touching you,” and Rob suddenly EXPLODED with rage. The reaction was understandable but not allowed, and I told him so, and told him he needed to take a break from his computer turn. Then, because I sympathized with his position, I lectured William at length within earshot of Rob, discussing pointedly how much I sympathized with Rob.

Rob sulked ostentatiously for twenty minutes or so. As I helped get another child ready for school, he asked why William was allowed to “just get away with it.” I explained what should already have been clear, which is that William ALSO got punished: William’s punishment was the lecture, while Rob’s was a break from the computer—and also that although William’s behavior was indeed obnoxious, it wasn’t against the rules in the same way “screaming out in rage” was. I reiterated my empathy, and also reiterated that he could not react that way even if it felt justified. He claimed justification = appropriate. I remained calm (and to my tremendous credit, did NOT later use this as an opportunity to ask if in that case it was appropriate for me to smack him in the mouth), and said that part of my job was to civilize him: that he could not yell out like that in school or in his future workplace, and so he needed to learn not to do it.

He claimed that at school it would never happen, because teachers “have the time” to make sure it doesn’t; they don’t have to “choose their battles,” they can deal with ALL of them. What a nice little dig, putting in references to recent calm responses I’ve made to his snotty interrogations, and using verbal air-quotes. That’s when I became no longer calm. I had been deliberately and repeatedly sympathetic/empathetic; I had doled out a very light and understanding punishment; I had calmly explained the ideas behind the rules. And now Mr. IRRITATING McASININE was saying that it was MY FAULT that he had yelled. And this AFTER he has REPEATEDLY told me that the teachers are NOT consistent and DO choose their battles and DON’T always enforce the rules for everyone, with me offering REPEATED sympathy, discussion, and soothing explanations that defended the teachers without failing to legitimize his precious adolescent FEELINGS!

It is very, very unpleasant, after deliberately avoiding choosing a spouse who would force me to live my life with this kind of crap, to end up living with it anyway.

Recent events have reminded me to tell you about my very pleasing and successful concept of Spite Charity. The idea is this: when someone (or a group of someones) pisses you off on the subject of a cause you care about, donate money to the side of the cause you prefer. Did your grandma spend the entire holiday grousing about how in her day no one did any of this ridiculous recycling, and she for one was going to continue stuffing her milk cartons into the non-see-through trash bags? Did you have to listen to your nutcase uncle talk about how a certain ethnic group is none too bright but they ARE good-looking, he’ll give them that much? Did a Facebook friend post a completely untrue and unfair political remark about a candidate you support? There’s a non-profit organization for that—and it can be a real thrill, writing that check.

Furthermore, it can lead to increased peace of mind: instead of feeling like you’re flailing futilely/weakly against a relentless tide of unpleasant and unshakable opinions, you can feel like you are funding the armies of goodness and righteousness. It’s like sneaking a box of guns across enemy lines, behind the back of the person talking to you, while appearing attentive and respectful to what they’re saying.

Now, it is possible that you have so many friends and Facebook friends and relatives and acquaintances and co-workers and Twitter friends who are, shall we say, outspoken about things, that right now you are thinking you really like this idea except that it will bankrupt you. In that case, I recommend the tally-mark system. Put up a piece of paper up in a convenient place (or tuck it in a drawer or keep it in your purse if seeing it all the time will rile you, or if other people will make things awkward for you by asking about it), and divide it into sections, one section for each topic that makes repeated appearances. Choose a corresponding charity to represent each topic. Each time you clench your teeth over a remark, add a little tally mark to the appropriate category.

Each mark can be worth whatever fits your budget; for example, perhaps each mark can be worth a dollar, and when you hit twenty marks you send a check for $20 to that category’s charity. Or each mark can be worth 25 cents, or five dollars, or whatever comes out right for how many remarks you hear and how much money you’d like to give. You could also copy the swear-jar system, and mark up a group of jars. Each time a remark bugs you, put a quarter in the corresponding jar.

Not only will either of these systems keep track of your spite charity donations for you, you will have refreshed appreciation for how much crap you maturely listen to without clawing at anyone’s face.

Yesterday I wrote about yet another “Enjoy every moment!”, and I am still incredulous whenever I hear people saying that, when it seems so widely known that people go home and weep in despair after hearing it.

I will say, however, that at least it’s a comment that’s kindly meant. The person saying it might not be aware of how such a thing sounds from the point of view of someone in the trenches (HOW COULD THEY NOT? Did no one ever say it to THEM?), but they are TRYING to communicate good will and happy wishes. I think, if we reached, we could even spin it as a sort of blessing, rather than as an instruction: like, I WISH for you that you’d be able to enjoy every moment. Even though that’s an unreasonable wish and can make a mother feel like she is failing in even more ways that she’d realized, it’s still meant WELL. It’s not meant to hurt feelings, or to cause the mother to feel like a failure, or to sound idiotic—even if it does all three of those things.

There is a lot to be said for meaning well, and in fact I think things should be said about it more often. Each situation needs to be evaluated individually, of course, but in general if the person talking to you has shining eyes and a happy face, or sad eyes and a caring face, or if it’s a person who cares about you and doesn’t generally try to hurt you, then they are most likely choosing what they think is a PLEASING thing to say, and that is a social inclination I’d rather encourage than repress. It would also be nice to encourage the inclination to assume positive things about what is meant, rather than leaping to the worst possible thing the person’s words could be twisted to mean, so that a person who is trying hard to say the right thing now feels that there is nothing at all safe from horrible assumptions of bad intent, and that everyone is just waiting to LEAP on a misstep and punish it relentlessly.

Which is not to say people shouldn’t try to improve their niceness-intended to niceness-received ratio. “But I was trying to be NICE!” is no justification for “You’d be so pretty, if you lost some weight” or “You’re too thin!” Keeping our ears open (and using the “How would I feel if it were me?” centers of our brains) is how we learn not to say such things; for many things (especially those outside our own experience) it makes sense we’d need to have it explained, but we shouldn’t need it explained twice: once we know that the received message is not what we’re trying to send, of course we wouldn’t want to keep sending it.

I heard an older lady (for age reference, she said her grandchildren were now “big kids”) seriously, no-kidding, no-paraphrasing tell a woman with little kids to “Enjoy every moment!” She used those actual words, verbatim.

My question is: Aren’t the people who keep saying this READING BLOGS? Two and a half years ago it was ALREADY a beaten-to-death topic.

My second question is: Does this mean OUR generation WON’T do this, when OUR grandchildren are big kids, because we’ll have read so many hundreds of times that people feel like leaping off cliffs when they hear it?

My third question is: In which case, what will OUR well-meant, make-other-women-feel-like-jumping-off-cliffs-but-we-just-won’t-stop-saying-it expression be?

1. Presumed Innocent, by Scott Turow, if you like courtroom drama books. My mother recommended it to me, saying it was one of the few books she and my dad had both liked. She added, “Now, there will be some scenes that you will not like to think of your mother as reading…” OH INDEED, INDEED THERE WERE. But I still liked the book. I’m watching the movie now, and I’m glad I read the book first or I would have had trouble figuring out what was going on and who was who. [Edited to add: The movie cuts out about 9/10ths of the book, and Harrison Ford makes one single facial expression through the entire thing. I think I’d only recommend the book.]

2. Sita Sings the Blues. This is one of the oddest movies I have ever seen (funny/accurate summary from the Wikipedia article: “It intersperses events from the Ramayana, illustrated conversation between Indian shadow puppets, musical interludes voiced with tracks by Annette Hanshaw and scenes from the artist’s own life”), and it’s free. That is, you can have it for free. You can also buy it, if you want to support the artist, and Paul and I liked the movie so much we HAVE bought it for people. It’s like nothing else I’ve seen, a weird mix of 1920s/30s music and four kinds of animation and…I don’t even know what to tell you except to try it and see if it’s to your tastes as well. Maybe watch some of the samples on YouTube. (My favorite is the song “Rama’s Great.” Very catchy.)

3. Everything Matters! by Ron Currie Jr. I read this long enough ago that it’s now bargain-priced, and all I remember is that it kind of blew my mind and I wanted to remember to recommend it to you. It’s about this guy who gets alien/omniscient advice, starting in THE WOMB, and I was kind of envious.

4. I don’t necessary RECOMMEND Friday Night Lights (Netflix link) per se, but I want everyone else to watch it because I’M watching it and I want to refer to it and be understood. It has been highly recommended to me from a variety of sources and it’s very soapy (it reminds me a lot of One Tree Hill)—but it’s QUALITY soapy and I’m near the end of season 1 and I’m still watching (I credit Connie Britton and the guy who plays Landry), so at this point I want to have company watching it so we can talk about it.

5. This song seems a little WRONG in some hard-to-put-a-finger-on way, but Paul and I both get it stuck in our heads ALL THE TIME, and the kids love it:

6. The Diniwilks post Compromise was for me a highly interesting and entertaining look at how negotiations/decisions go in someone else’s marriage. I strongly identified; it’s similar in our household.

7. The book Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones. (I hadn’t realized this was the same author as two of my childhood favorite books, Witch Week and Charmed Life.) We’ve watched the movie (Netflix link) a few times and we all like it, but the children watch it with the acceptance they give to all things they don’t yet understand about life, while their father and I watch it thinking “What the?” The book makes much more sense, and is very different in many ways. I’m giving it to Rob and William to read, too.

8. Paul reads to the kids each night in three age-divided batches, and The Penderwicks was the book he just finished reading to the oldest group. He said he didn’t expect them to like an old-fashionedy book about four girls, but they were RAPT. So then I read it too, and I liked it a lot. It reminded me of the kind of books I liked as a child, like Little Women and The Five Little Peppers.

9. Paul assures me that everyone has already heard of the game Age of War, but _I_ hadn’t heard of it, so there. Henry and I have continued to play Sonny pretty much every day, and Age of War is NOT a turn-taking game so we were a little freaked out at first (the transcript would show me saying “AAAAAAAA they’re coming at us!! AAAAAA what am I supposed to do?? AAAAAAAAAAA they keep shooting!! AAAAAAAAAA pause it pause it pause it!! AAAAAAAAAAAAA!!). I recommend playing it with a 13-year-old sitting next to you and patiently bossing you, because I don’t think I would ever have figured out how to play it otherwise.

I re-watched part of The Incredibles yesterday, which was a mistake since I needed to look over a dental plan option today. In The Incredibles, the dad of the family works for an insurance company, and legitimate claims are being denied left and right, and the boss keeps saying he doesn’t care if it’s a legitimate claim, DENY IT!! Make it IMPOSSIBLE for the clients to figure out how to get what they paid for!! Or else you’re FIRED!! (The Incredibles dad eventually loses it and throws the boss through several walls, which is satisfying.)

Anyway, the forms. I can’t tell if it’s worth it. FIRST, the dental plan collects $1,700 per year from us. (There’s no employer contribution, though it’s “through” the employer.) THEN, if I understand the simple, easy-to-read charts correctly, they cover what they feel like covering, at the percentage they feel like covering it, up to a maximum of $1,000/year per family member. And next year, we’ll get a letter from HR saying that the rates have doubled. Is that a good deal, or not?

We might have economies of scale going for us, here, since the amount per year is “per family.” So, for a family of four, maybe they don’t use more than $1,700 in coverage (plus the co-pays and deductibles) most years; but for a family of seven, we can use that in annual check-ups alone. BUT: although the cost is per family, the limit is still per person.

AND: it doesn’t cover our dentist. Or any dentist I’ve ever heard of. So we’d have to switch from the dentist we like to an unknown dentist, and then we add to our lives the SHEER RAGE of finding out after every check-up that we weren’t covered for what we thought we were covered for. Not to mention that I don’t see how I can get two check-ups/cleanings/x-rays and maybe a filling per year and still have much left of my personal $1,000 maximum to pay for, say, a crown.

Also, if we have insurance, the dentist will switch their view of us from Poor Unfortunate Uninsured mode to Milk-Cow mode. Currently, our dentist looks at our file and says “…Oh. No insurance. Well, if you like, we can wait on those x-rays until next time.” Or if I don’t want a certain procedure considered essential for EVERYONE living in a country that has already greatly shifted the definition of “basic care,” I can say regretfully, “No dental insurance,” and they back right off: I mean, you either have that kind of money or you don’t. But as soon as I have insurance, it doesn’t matter if it costs $1,700/year before I get any benefit at all, and it doesn’t matter that a procedure isn’t covered or is only covered once every four years at 50%, suddenly we “have dental insurance!” Which sounds like “Everything’s free!” to us, and like “Switch to Luxury Level dental care because everything’s paid for!” to the dentist.

And it’s hard to collect information from other people about whether coverage is worth it or not, because hardly anyone (including me) sits down and figures out the math. So if I asked you right now if it was worth it, you might say “OH, yes, TOTALLY!”–and yet you could be WRONG WRONG WRONG. Say for example you’ve for years been spending $1,700/year on coverage for $1,000/year of benefits (in other words, losing $700 a year on the deal), but then one year you needed a $4,000 procedure and 80% of it was covered so you only had to pay $800, WHEW. You no longer even notice the monthly payment taken out of your check, but you DID notice the huge relief of not having to pay the $4,000—so you might feel as if the insurance was totally worth it. And yet you wouldn’t even have broken even: your costs would still have exceeded your benefits. (And now you’re not eligible for that $4,000 procedure for another 6 years.)

(And also, even THIS happy story wouldn’t apply to the plan I’m looking at this morning, since benefits cut off at $1,000/year/person, so that $4,000 procedure would be covered at $1,000 minus the dental care covered that year—or, about $700, say, at absolute most, with the other $3,300 due to my dentally-insured self.) (This really isn’t sounding like it’s worth it, as I type it out.)

It’s also complicated because with health and life insurance, you may have heard the expression “a gamble you WANT to lose”: that is, we don’t mind if we put in more money than we get out, because the only way for the insurance to be a good deal is if we have a serious problem—and we’d rather lose money on the deal than get cancer and/or die in order to come out ahead. This is NOT the case with dental insurance: especially with a $1,000/year maximum per person (i.e., when we can’t think of it as “But in a big dental crisis, we’d get a huge benefit out of it”), we DO need to come out ahead for it to be worth it.

I am going to see if I can do this math.

$1,700/year for $7,000/year maximum coverage
but the $7,000 is misleading because it’s $1,000/person
and most of us won’t get anywhere near $1,000 in a regular year
and remember we sometimes have to pay a percentage of a procedure
but we get our xrays/cleanings 100% covered
(as long as we don’t get them done too often)
and if we needed fillings, we’d get more benefit
but sealants are already done for $20 through the school system
and we’d have to switch dentists, which I don’t want to do
but soon Paul and I will be needing more serious work
but it’s still only $1,000/year coverage for each of us

No wonder nobody does the math. It’s not math, it’s a LEAP OF FAITH. A leap of faith into the arms of companies we know make a huge profit. And that profit is COMING FROM SOMEWHERE, which is an equation I CAN do.

Describing a run-of-the-mill illness is like describing a dream. “I was too sick to take a shower.” “It was so weird, it was LIKE our house, but it was ALSO our old apartment.” “I sat in my recliner, but that turned out to be too active for me, so I had to lie on the couch.” “You were you? but it was weird, you were also NOT you, you know?” “The barfing was bad, but it was the whole-body soreness that really got to me.” “We were walking through, like, a park? I guess? And, like, you were telling me about your cat, but then suddenly Allison was there, and…” “I was TOO SICK TO CHECK TWITTER.”

Illnesses and dreams feel so consuming, but they don’t transfer well to the storytelling realm. Suffice it to say, I had a stomach virus (or perhaps food poisoning; it’s hard to tell the difference) that completely felled me. And please note: the use of the term “stomach virus” is deliberate, to avoid spreading the highly misleading term “stomach flu.” If we are vigilant over our entire lifetimes, if we spread the “stomach flu IS NOT FLU” message every chance we get, one day we may reach a utopia where no one will ever say again, “We were barfing all weekend! Stupid useless flu shot!!”

Who STARTED calling it stomach flu, anyway? Did they realize what they were doing? YES, some people barf when they have influenza; that doesn’t mean that barfing = influenza. Influenza can also involve coughing and sneezing, but that doesn’t mean that if your cold involves coughing and sneezing you have the cold flu; influenza can involve a sore throat, but that doesn’t mean if you have a sore throat from strep you have the strep flu. A stomach virus might be CALLED stomach flu in a casual way, and that is FINE and I DO IT MYSELF, but it is only REALLY fine as long as all the speakers and all the listeners understand that it is NOT FLU. The flu shot does nothing to prevent it, BECAUSE IT IS NOT FLU. Why is it called flu if it’s not flu? I don’t know, why is a cold called a cold even though it’s not about feeling cold? Why don’t we have a singular pronoun instead of having to say “his or her” and “he or she” all the time? LANGUAGE IS WEIRD LIKE DREAMS.

Are we all clear? Because I could go on. Except I’m kind of too tired and sore still to go on, so just re-read the post kthanx.

Let’s discuss: What makes this a “Moms'” storage pack?

I dreamed last night that we were snowed in and stranded, so I nursed a friend’s baby. Which reminded me of something I hadn’t thought of in a long time, which is the time I DID nurse a friend’s baby.

We were out shopping with our babies, far from home; she’d forgotten her diaper bag; we were considering whether she wanted to buy a pack of bottles and a can of formula and then try to wash the new items and mix a bottle in the bathroom; and while we were talking over the options we went to the baby section and found the store was out of the kind of formula she needed. My friend remarked how convenient breastfeeding must be for me at times like this: there’s no way to forget the bottles, no way to be out of the formula, no need to ask a restaurant employee for some warm water. We discussed if we needed to just abandon the outing and go home, or if we should load the babies back into the car and drive to another store to get the formula.

I think I was the one who raised the idea. I said something like “Too bad I can’t just nurse her!” And there was a little pause as I waited for my friend to be grossed out and she waited for me to be grossed out, and neither of us was grossed out so we thought we would just go ahead and try it: maybe the baby wouldn’t be willing, and then we’d abandon our plans for the day and drive to another store that had her formula, or stay here and get a different kind of formula, or WHATEVER, but in any case we’d call those Plans B and C and D, and now we had a Plan A.

I’d often mulled the idea of nursing someone else’s baby, and of course until very recent times such things used to be commonplace. Whenever I was nursing a baby of my own I’d wish it were possible to offer “Breastfeeding Daycare,” where I’d take care of someone else’s baby and also nurse the baby during the day. That would work great, if weekends wouldn’t then be kind of a problem—and if it were legal, which considering the extremely strict regulations for childcare services I’m guessing it isn’t. (And can you imagine calling around to find out?)

With my fifth baby, I’d become pretty immune to The Alleged Magic and Wonder of Breastfeeding. Hum de hum, shirt up, latch the baby on, sit there and read a book while ordinary biology does its ordinary thing, done and done. But nursing someone else’s child brought the stun factor back into it: I am FEEDING THIS BABY. We are MAMMALS. MAMMALS!

I have had an insight. Please await it.

It started when Rob and I were having that unpleasant conversation in which he wanted to know why Everyone Couldn’t Just Get Along, and I wasn’t really sure.

It continued to simmer during the whole War on Christmas thing that comes up every year, when I think it was Caitlin who remarked so insightfully that it seemed like it was actually a War on Happy Holidays.

And then, in the shower this morning, between applying the conditioner and rinsing it out, is when I figured out Where Religion Went Wrong. This is RICH STUFF, people. (It was Tresemmé Advanced Technology Salon Performance.) And as with all insights, I can confidently assume that many, many people have already ALSO had this insight—but “having it first” and “being the only one to have had it” are not required for something to be categorized as an insight, so THAT’S okay.

Braced for salon-quality brilliance? Okay! Here it is: it went wrong when it turned outward instead of inward. Religion works beautifully, I assume, if each participant uses it as a guideline for working earnestly on their own behavior, and for improving their own relationship with the god or gods of that particular religion. This holy book says our deity doesn’t want us to get tattoos, so I will not. This holy book says our deity doesn’t want us to eat pork, so I will not. This holy book says our deity doesn’t want us to have sex during a woman’s period, so I will not. This holy book says our deity wants us to take care of the poor, so I will. This holy book says our deity wants to give over 10% of all my money to our church, so I will. Lovely for everyone.

The trouble started when people INSTEAD said: This holy book says not to get tattoos, so I will picket outside tattoo parlors, even though the holy book doesn’t say anything about wanting me to picket. This holy book says not to eat pork, so I will tell other people they must not do it either, even if they don’t belong to my religion and the holy book isn’t trying to give rules for people who don’t belong to my religion. This holy book says not to have sex during a woman’s period, so I will make sure that our national laws list it as a prosecutable perversion for everyone, whether they belong to the same religion or not. And worst of all: I don’t choose to follow the rule about giving 10% of my income, and that rule about not getting tattoos isn’t relevant to our times, and I don’t think the rule about taking care of the poor applies to THESE poor people or to anything _I_ should be doing—but I will put tremendous time and energy into making sure other people follow that rule about not having sex during a woman’s period.

The only holy book I’m familiar with is the Christian Bible, but it’s weird that it even COVERS this with “Take the 2×4 out of your own eye before you try to get the speck of sawdust out of someone else’s” and “You can throw stones as soon as you’re perfect in every way”—the obvious message in both cases being that no one will EVER be available to work on someone else’s issues. And yet that’s not the way it goes down a lot of the time.

I don’t see why people CAN’T get along, as long as religion (and, as long as we’re at it, various self-improvement programs) stay inward-focused. If one person is working on herself, and another person is working on HERself, they can be friends even at a restaurant where one orders a ham sandwich and the other drinks wine. It’s when one person decides to start working on SOMEONE ELSE’S flaws that we run into problems. Nobody LIKES that, is the issue I think.

Er, which is why I’m DEFINITELY NOT working on other people’s flaws with this post. Certainly not. I am merely recommending my conditioner, in case you decide for yourself that it’s right for you.