Ten days ago, as you may recall, Amicus had a large birthmark removed from his scalp. Yesterday we went to have the stitches out, and although on the day of the actual surgery we were in and out of the office within twenty minutes, this time we had to wait and wait and wait.
I had plenty of time to read several glossy magazines which I would otherwise never pick up, and to observe the goings-on of the cosmetic-surgeon's office. Here are some things I noticed:
1. The average age of the population in the waiting room was roughly eighty, and most of them seemed to be somewhere in the process of having skin cancers removed from their faces.
2. The average age of the staff behind the reception desk was roughly twenty-two, though actually, on reflection, I don't know how I could tell for sure. They do the Botox thing, and the eyelash-enhancement thing, and the subtle-little-facelifty thing, and the eyebrow-shapery, and goodness knows what else in this office, as well as your basic skin-cancer removal and nevus-sebaceous-ectomy, and the longer I looked at the pert young receptionists, the more I began to wonder whether there was some kind of employee-discount business going on. They were all awfully sculpturally pretty.
3. There was a poster, with flyers, advertising a "Mommy Makeover" informational fair at which Doctor Perfect Hair was to speak on the subject of, um, things augmentational and reductionary, to help all us Mommies erase from our bodies any archeological-type evidence of our having gone through anything physical on the path to motherhood. The idea, I guess, is to emerge from these augmentational and reductionary procedures looking as if we got be Mommies simply by thinking of babies. Or as if the angels really did visit us and surprise us -- out of the blue! -- with little gurgling bundles.
Goodness! I think we're supposed to appear to have exclaimed, all wide-eyed like Barbie. Where did this come from?
It occurs to me now that this represents a perfectly logical full-circle conclusion to the separation of sex from babies: the separation of your body from any acknowledgment that it played a role in the generation of a person of, presumably, some significance to you.
Goodness! Having babies is hard!
Or maybe I'm just completely grouchy because I turn forty-five this week, and I feel sure that if Doctor Perfect Hair had gotten five minutes alone with me, he would have suggested, in the nicest way possible, that somebody as pretty as me was doing herself an injustice by not trying to be even prettier. You know, we all need to admit that sometimes we need help. That kind of thing. The imperative of the possible. The longer I sat in that doctor's office, the more I thought about it, and the more it made my skin crawl: my highly-imperfect, saggy and stretch-marked forty-four-years-three hundred-fifty-nine-days-old skin, with which I was happy to escape.
PS: Amicus is great. He managed to burst one stitch scratching his head, but the whole thing healed up fine. And Dr. Perfect Hair, bless his heart, did say that the birthmark was indeed a nevus sebaceous of Janysson's (or something like that -- see the link in the post I linked to at the top of this one for correct spelling and info), which absolutely needed to come out. So we're all very thankful that it's gone, and that the whole thing went as smoothly as it did.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Old News Photoessay: Last Month's Eucharistic Procession
I must have given Epiphany back the camera at the end; the ponytailed person in the blue rain slicker to the left of the baby's head struck me as awfully familiar somehow, even from the back. Then I realized it was me.
The Drama of Hallowmas
I'm On the Square today, discussing the three-day cycle of Halloween, All Saints, and All Souls as the enactment of a mystery play. Come join me there.
And many thanks to Sarah for first reminding me of the medieval feel of Halloween.
PLUS! The Anchoress reflects, and includes some nifty costume pics, too.
One commenter over at First Things takes me to task for saying that on Halloween, "the day of the saints hasn't come." Her point, that it is the Vigil of All Saints, is a valid one. After sundown the night before, the feast has arrived. Still, in terms of imaginative iconography, I think that the move from darkness to light is a powerful thing. The Great Vigil of Easter is a vigil feast: technically, it's Easter, particularly in parishes which celebrate the Vigil in the pre-dawn hours. Yet, for all that the darkness is over, metaphorically speaking, we begin in a dark church, as in the tomb. Our sense of Easter is not belittled, but heightened, by the drama of light out of darkness.
She mentions, too, wishing to avoid neighbors with live snakes, and also registered sex offenders. To this I'd respond that you can look up sex offenders on the internet and avoid their houses on Halloween. Of course, for all you know, the stranger sitting next to you at Mass may be a registered sex offender, too. I don't let my children, even my teenager, trick-or-treat without an adult -- that just seems common sense. What doesn't seem sensible is to be more afraid of other people on Halloween than you would normally be.
One of the things I do appreciate about Halloween, which there wasn't room to mention in the article, is that at its best it's a neighborhood and community holiday which, despite what I believe is its very real part in a Christian narrative, cuts across sectarian lines. The businesses on our town square stay open late for trick-or-treating on Halloween -- the used-bookstore owner doesn't give out candy at home, he told me last year, because the ringing doorbell upsets his elderly mother -- and the City Lunch diner holds a carnival, from which my children came home dripping with cheapo treasures. It's also one night when we actually see lots of our neighbors.
I can appreciate the antipathy to the neighbor wreathed in live snakes, especially if he's really trying to be scary, and not just showing off his interesting pets for the sake of good herpetological PR. In our old neighborhood, there was one guy who used to dress up in some kind of monster costume and sit on his front porch, slouched in a chair as if he were a stuffed decoration. When children came up his front steps, he would explode terrifyingly to life. I think he thought he was just having some fun -- he didn't strike me as a malicious person at all. But my youngest child was very afraid of him. Solution: avoid that house next time.
And many thanks to Sarah for first reminding me of the medieval feel of Halloween.
PLUS! The Anchoress reflects, and includes some nifty costume pics, too.
One commenter over at First Things takes me to task for saying that on Halloween, "the day of the saints hasn't come." Her point, that it is the Vigil of All Saints, is a valid one. After sundown the night before, the feast has arrived. Still, in terms of imaginative iconography, I think that the move from darkness to light is a powerful thing. The Great Vigil of Easter is a vigil feast: technically, it's Easter, particularly in parishes which celebrate the Vigil in the pre-dawn hours. Yet, for all that the darkness is over, metaphorically speaking, we begin in a dark church, as in the tomb. Our sense of Easter is not belittled, but heightened, by the drama of light out of darkness.
She mentions, too, wishing to avoid neighbors with live snakes, and also registered sex offenders. To this I'd respond that you can look up sex offenders on the internet and avoid their houses on Halloween. Of course, for all you know, the stranger sitting next to you at Mass may be a registered sex offender, too. I don't let my children, even my teenager, trick-or-treat without an adult -- that just seems common sense. What doesn't seem sensible is to be more afraid of other people on Halloween than you would normally be.
One of the things I do appreciate about Halloween, which there wasn't room to mention in the article, is that at its best it's a neighborhood and community holiday which, despite what I believe is its very real part in a Christian narrative, cuts across sectarian lines. The businesses on our town square stay open late for trick-or-treating on Halloween -- the used-bookstore owner doesn't give out candy at home, he told me last year, because the ringing doorbell upsets his elderly mother -- and the City Lunch diner holds a carnival, from which my children came home dripping with cheapo treasures. It's also one night when we actually see lots of our neighbors.
I can appreciate the antipathy to the neighbor wreathed in live snakes, especially if he's really trying to be scary, and not just showing off his interesting pets for the sake of good herpetological PR. In our old neighborhood, there was one guy who used to dress up in some kind of monster costume and sit on his front porch, slouched in a chair as if he were a stuffed decoration. When children came up his front steps, he would explode terrifyingly to life. I think he thought he was just having some fun -- he didn't strike me as a malicious person at all. But my youngest child was very afraid of him. Solution: avoid that house next time.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Dear FCC
I thought you ought to know that nobody paid me to feature all those books on my blog today. Nobody sent me a free book. They are all books I either already owned or borrowed from the library. I do not know Tomie de Paola or Brian Wildsmith personally in any way, shape or form, and I believe Marigold Hunt has gone to be with the Lord. Ditto Origen, Madame Guyon, and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. They paid me nothing to plug their exigeses of the Song of Songs.
If, however, someone happened to buy a book via a link on this site, I would earn something like thirty-seven cents. To give you an idea of how much wealth a person can generate putting sponsored links on a blog like this, Amazon direct-deposited a whopping two dollars and seventy-three cents to my bank account today, representing roughly seven months' total earnings. Not that I've been trying all that hard.
Anyway, dear FCC, I thought that maybe a high-stakes blog like this one would raise red flags. Just wanted to let you know we're on the up and up.
If, however, someone happened to buy a book via a link on this site, I would earn something like thirty-seven cents. To give you an idea of how much wealth a person can generate putting sponsored links on a blog like this, Amazon direct-deposited a whopping two dollars and seventy-three cents to my bank account today, representing roughly seven months' total earnings. Not that I've been trying all that hard.
Anyway, dear FCC, I thought that maybe a high-stakes blog like this one would raise red flags. Just wanted to let you know we're on the up and up.
Blogger Madness
For some reason, Helier and Crispina's "highly, highly recommended" read didn't show up in the last post, and every time I tried to edit it, the whole post disappeared from the "compose" page. Ain't got time for that!
Anyway, here, again, I hope, is one of our favorite saint-/ Early-Church-themed reads of all time:
So there.
Anyway, here, again, I hope, is one of our favorite saint-/ Early-Church-themed reads of all time:
So there.
Good Reading In a Saintly Season
I'm currently reading
Not every mystic represented here is a saint -- you have Madame Guyon and Teilhard de Chardin rubbing elbows with Gregory of Nyssa and Bernard of Clairvaux -- but Gregory's meditation on the burning bush, for example, as well as writings on the Song of Songs from Origen and Bernard, among others, inspire the soul, as Augustine says, to be "poured out above itself."
Epiphany and Amicus have been reading
Helier and Crispina have been reading
Highly, highly recommended!
We also love
and
and
and
and
It occurs to me that you could do worse than to build your library around the liturgical year.
Other people's saintly favorites welcome.
Not every mystic represented here is a saint -- you have Madame Guyon and Teilhard de Chardin rubbing elbows with Gregory of Nyssa and Bernard of Clairvaux -- but Gregory's meditation on the burning bush, for example, as well as writings on the Song of Songs from Origen and Bernard, among others, inspire the soul, as Augustine says, to be "poured out above itself."
Epiphany and Amicus have been reading
Helier and Crispina have been reading
Highly, highly recommended!
We also love
and
and
and
and
It occurs to me that you could do worse than to build your library around the liturgical year.
Other people's saintly favorites welcome.
Hallowmas
The season of costume and hyperglycemia, death and hope, is upon us again. I've just finished a little article on the subject which will run On the Square at First Things tomorrow or the next day, so be sure to drop by there.
Meanwhile, here are a few more items, from the informative to the goofy, to whet your appetite for the candy corn, the Laffy Taffy, and the Beatific Vision:
Halloween's Ancient Origins
"Redeeming" Halloween
"Redeeming" Bakery Disasters
Feast of All Saints: Receive Saint of the Day via Email
Celebrating All Saints Day in Spain: I'd Like to "Take a Bridge"
More All Saints Traditions
Pontifical Requiem Mass for All Souls
Polish Observance of All Saints and All Souls
Dia de los Muertos: Altars, Crafts, Food
Finally, some scenes from our parish All Saints party last year.
Meanwhile, here are a few more items, from the informative to the goofy, to whet your appetite for the candy corn, the Laffy Taffy, and the Beatific Vision:
Halloween's Ancient Origins
"Redeeming" Halloween
"Redeeming" Bakery Disasters
Feast of All Saints: Receive Saint of the Day via Email
Celebrating All Saints Day in Spain: I'd Like to "Take a Bridge"
More All Saints Traditions
Pontifical Requiem Mass for All Souls
Polish Observance of All Saints and All Souls
Dia de los Muertos: Altars, Crafts, Food
Finally, some scenes from our parish All Saints party last year.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
What a Girl Wants
As I said, I don't take girls under the age of 15 shoe shopping if I can possibly help it. But, dang. Are Epiphany and I good, or are we good? Do we know, or do we know?
The girl in question would sleep in these shoes if she could. Warning to Christmas-shopping aunties who also know what this girl wants: she already has these. Fortunately, the world is so full of a number of things, and so many of them are pink . . .
Even her brother likes them. On her.
You Are Making Bad Choices: Shouting As the New Spanking? (Cum Addenda)
From the New York Times last week:
Read the rest.
Well, I'll say right now that if I spent my waking hours uttering phrases like, "You are making bad choices," I'd probably snap by bedtime, too. In fact, I am almost positive that I would find myself making some very bad choices.
Seriously, articles like this always intrigue me. Why, for example, when we're talking about family interactions, do we always wind up drawing comparisons with the workplace, and what we would or wouldn't mind relative strangers saying to us over the top of the office cubicle?
Hello? My children are not my co-workers. Well, actually they are. We run a household together, which I guess could be construed as a business endeavor of sorts. But nobody gets to go home at the end of the day, because we're already there. I would wager that if people spent not only their working hours but all their off-hours, including 3 a.m., together, the veneer of pleasant professional distance would start to wear off, and they would find themselves saying things like, "You've already told me that story about your Aunt Jean four hundred times. Go away."
I'm not at all convinced that it's a bad thing for children to see that they're getting on your nerves; the question is, is it what they're doing that bothers you, or that they're just there, being who they are in the wrong place at the wrong time? One of the hardest realities of parenthood, I think, is that at a given stage, everything about a given person drives you crazy. Maybe it's where they are at the time, developmentally; maybe it's where you are, developmentally. But it's awfully easy to get into a rut with a child in which all your interactions hinge on a behavior or set of behaviors which increasingly push your buttons.
I am a stage right now, for instance, where my tolerance for whining of any kind is gone. Gone. No patience left. The tube is empty. Unfortunately, even five-year-old girls who are otherwise delightful in every way are prone to whining as a default mode. Whining is not an intrinsic part of a person's being, and it does eventually kind of go away on its own, but it's also a bad habit that doesn't have to be passively tolerated. At my best moments, I can say calmly, "You're whining. It needs to stop now, and when it does, and you ask for X in a pleasant tone of voice, you may have it." If the whining persists, the whiner gets sent to her room so that other people don't have to hear it.
These responses in themselves aren't so bad, I don't think. It is my job, after all, to teach good behavior, and that includes making it clear that bad behavior is unpleasant and results in being out of good relationship with the people around the bad-behaver. But I'm also aware that sometimes we have whole days during which I think I hear every utterance on the child's part as a whine, whether it really is or not, and also days when, because I'm working or otherwise preoccupied, I set that child up to whine, because I didn't hear her the first five times she said something to me.
But that's perhaps tangential. In terms of the "problem" framed by this article, I really don't see that there's anything wrong with saying, if a child refuses to go to bed, that I've been doing things for him all day. Why would it be damaging to him to realize that I have a life, too, every minute of which is not necessarily devoted to his gratification?
ADDENDUM: Why would it be a problem for me to say that his persisting in disobeying me, when I'd told him to go to bed, was in fact becoming ridiculous? It is ridiculous to have to keep telling a child, especially a 7- or a 9-year-old, over and over to do something which he should have done with no fuss the first time you said it. I mean, I'm not an authority freak, but I am the authority figure in my house, as it happens. Someone's got to be, and better me than a 7-year-old. So to my mind, the "yelling" for which this mother is beating herself up seems like a reasonable assessment of an annoying situation. Which, I also can't help thinking, doesn't happen so much if you're really authoritative the first time, and levy penalties for non-compliance. Being the meanie is no fun, but it does save your vocal cords in the long run, not to mention the peace of your household.
In reality, I'd be much more likely to say that I've been doing things with him all day, which is more true: I don't spend all day being my kids' slave and chauffer, and it occurs to me that maybe that's part of what's at the root of this other mother's snapping. I spend a lot of time trying to teach my kids to do things for themselves, which is also exhausting, but doesn't leave me with so much resentment at the end of the day. I will say, honestly, to a kid who's still bouncing off the walls, "We've been together, and I love you, but you're tired and I'm tired, and it is time for you to go to sleep, and I'm not talking to you any more. Good night."
I find that being able to say that, straightforwardly, makes me not want to yell at the bouncing child. This is true even if, as is often the case, I'm saying it through clenched teeth, or maybe just a tiny bit more loudly than is really necessary. I just say it, and by the end of the utterance I've calmed down a lot. Then I close the bedroom door and walk away, and eventually the child lies down and goes to sleep, but I'm not involved any more. He wakes up happy the next morning; I wake up happy the next morning. And we start over with a nice clean slate, and -- at least on my part -- a resolve to be kinder, gentler, and also more firm on the front end, to keep opportunities for unkindness from arising.
On the other hand, I also notice that at the top of my list in Confession, pretty much every time I go, is some version of "lack of charity," and it almost always involves my children.
You?
PS: It seems far better to me to speak sharply in response to a behavior: for instance, just a minute ago, one son grabbed the other by the arms, and the other son, by way of reply, was emitting a shrieking noise kind of like what the soundtrack of Psycho does when Janet Leigh is in the shower. I don't mind saying that I get totally fed up with both these behaviors, especially when they happen in my immediate vicinity. So I said, not bothering to drum up a whole lot of maternal warmth and gentleness, "Cut that out right now. Stop making that noise. I'm tired of it."
Now, if I thought I had to say, instead, something like, "Are you making good choices? Are you being kind? I don't think that's a good idea, etc," by the end of the day I'd be ready to eviscerate the next person who spoke to me. (I'm sure I would, because the behaviors wouldn't stop. The kids would say, "Yeah, actually this does seem like a pretty good idea . . . I would choose to do it again, and again, and again . . . "). I'd have gone from, I think, a reasonable irritation with an objectively irritating set of behaviors (which are knee-jerk, instinctive reactions of my boys one to the other, sort of like the whining thing with girls), to a kind of free-floating resentment of all things children. I'd have an anger looking for a reason to happen, and it would happen, believe me. I'd wind up yelling at someone for some tiny infraction, and dragging their character into it, in the spirit of You children always drive me crazy, and while the experience might be cathartic for me, it wouldn't be good for the recipient, and it wouldn't solve any of the day's problems.
Better to react, I think, cleanly and sharply and in the spirit of cauterizing a specific thing, than to pretend, on the one hand, to be Mrs. Happydale, and on the other to fester in resentment, and blow up at people just because they're there and you suddenly can't take them any more.
Meanwhile, there are certainly places I just don't go, in terms of addressing my children. I still wince when I think of things I've overheard in stores. Just the other week, I was browsing the shoe section of the Really Big Store That Sells Everything -- without my children, because I am not stupid. I take a shoe that they're currently wearing, and I buy one or two sizes up, and if it turns out not to fit, I take it back and get another size. I do not present certain of my offspring with choices of shoes because, as I say, I am not stupid. Or a masochist, either.
Anyway, so I'm looking at the boys' Sunday-type shoes, and on the other side of the rack, I hear a woman addressing her daughter, who is maybe three and can't get a shoe on her foot. The mother is standing over her, screaming at her -- I'm not exaggerating -- to put the f-ing shoe on her foot, she's sick of this s-t, and so on. The child, to her immense credit, I guess, wasn't crying. She just couldn't get the heel of the shoe over her heel.
I was a weenie, or a deer caught in the headlights, or something. I can never think of what I'd say to somebody, assuming I actually had the courage to go up to them and say something about the way they're treating their child. And this was one of those instances where whatever you presumed about the person's parenting was probably pretty much what you saw; it was an incidence in a completely different league from the tantruming-child/oh-that-mother-must-be-doing-something-wrong scenario. So the memory, the whole of it, her behavior and mine, makes me cringe no end.
Of course, I didn't notice anyone else walking up to confront this woman, either. What I did notice was that several other mothers with children in tow were speaking to them with exaggerated kindness, and in louder voices than was absolutely necessary. "ARE YOU HAVING TROUBLE WITH THAT SHOE, SWEETHEART? I SAID, SWEETHEART! CAN MOMMY HELP YOU PUT ON THE SHOE, HONEY BABY?" Whether they were trying, indirectly, to educate the other mother, or just drown her out so that their own children didn't have to listen to profanity while trying on the Dora sneakers, was not entirely clear.
JACKIE KLEIN is a devoted mother of two little boys in the suburbs of Portland, Ore. She spends hours ferrying them to soccer and Cub Scouts. She reads child-development books. She can emulate one of those pitch-perfect calm maternal tones to warn, “You’re making bad choices” when, say, someone doesn’t want to brush his teeth.
That is 90 percent of the time. Then there is the other 10 percent, when, she admits, “I have become totally frustrated and lost control of myself.”
It can happen during weeks and weeks and weeks of no camp in the summer, or at the end of a long day at home — just as adult peace is within her grasp — when the 7- or 9-year-old won’t go to sleep.
And then she yells.
“This is ridiculous! I’ve been doing things all day for you!”
Read the rest.
Well, I'll say right now that if I spent my waking hours uttering phrases like, "You are making bad choices," I'd probably snap by bedtime, too. In fact, I am almost positive that I would find myself making some very bad choices.
Seriously, articles like this always intrigue me. Why, for example, when we're talking about family interactions, do we always wind up drawing comparisons with the workplace, and what we would or wouldn't mind relative strangers saying to us over the top of the office cubicle?
Hello? My children are not my co-workers. Well, actually they are. We run a household together, which I guess could be construed as a business endeavor of sorts. But nobody gets to go home at the end of the day, because we're already there. I would wager that if people spent not only their working hours but all their off-hours, including 3 a.m., together, the veneer of pleasant professional distance would start to wear off, and they would find themselves saying things like, "You've already told me that story about your Aunt Jean four hundred times. Go away."
I'm not at all convinced that it's a bad thing for children to see that they're getting on your nerves; the question is, is it what they're doing that bothers you, or that they're just there, being who they are in the wrong place at the wrong time? One of the hardest realities of parenthood, I think, is that at a given stage, everything about a given person drives you crazy. Maybe it's where they are at the time, developmentally; maybe it's where you are, developmentally. But it's awfully easy to get into a rut with a child in which all your interactions hinge on a behavior or set of behaviors which increasingly push your buttons.
I am a stage right now, for instance, where my tolerance for whining of any kind is gone. Gone. No patience left. The tube is empty. Unfortunately, even five-year-old girls who are otherwise delightful in every way are prone to whining as a default mode. Whining is not an intrinsic part of a person's being, and it does eventually kind of go away on its own, but it's also a bad habit that doesn't have to be passively tolerated. At my best moments, I can say calmly, "You're whining. It needs to stop now, and when it does, and you ask for X in a pleasant tone of voice, you may have it." If the whining persists, the whiner gets sent to her room so that other people don't have to hear it.
These responses in themselves aren't so bad, I don't think. It is my job, after all, to teach good behavior, and that includes making it clear that bad behavior is unpleasant and results in being out of good relationship with the people around the bad-behaver. But I'm also aware that sometimes we have whole days during which I think I hear every utterance on the child's part as a whine, whether it really is or not, and also days when, because I'm working or otherwise preoccupied, I set that child up to whine, because I didn't hear her the first five times she said something to me.
But that's perhaps tangential. In terms of the "problem" framed by this article, I really don't see that there's anything wrong with saying, if a child refuses to go to bed, that I've been doing things for him all day. Why would it be damaging to him to realize that I have a life, too, every minute of which is not necessarily devoted to his gratification?
ADDENDUM: Why would it be a problem for me to say that his persisting in disobeying me, when I'd told him to go to bed, was in fact becoming ridiculous? It is ridiculous to have to keep telling a child, especially a 7- or a 9-year-old, over and over to do something which he should have done with no fuss the first time you said it. I mean, I'm not an authority freak, but I am the authority figure in my house, as it happens. Someone's got to be, and better me than a 7-year-old. So to my mind, the "yelling" for which this mother is beating herself up seems like a reasonable assessment of an annoying situation. Which, I also can't help thinking, doesn't happen so much if you're really authoritative the first time, and levy penalties for non-compliance. Being the meanie is no fun, but it does save your vocal cords in the long run, not to mention the peace of your household.
In reality, I'd be much more likely to say that I've been doing things with him all day, which is more true: I don't spend all day being my kids' slave and chauffer, and it occurs to me that maybe that's part of what's at the root of this other mother's snapping. I spend a lot of time trying to teach my kids to do things for themselves, which is also exhausting, but doesn't leave me with so much resentment at the end of the day. I will say, honestly, to a kid who's still bouncing off the walls, "We've been together, and I love you, but you're tired and I'm tired, and it is time for you to go to sleep, and I'm not talking to you any more. Good night."
I find that being able to say that, straightforwardly, makes me not want to yell at the bouncing child. This is true even if, as is often the case, I'm saying it through clenched teeth, or maybe just a tiny bit more loudly than is really necessary. I just say it, and by the end of the utterance I've calmed down a lot. Then I close the bedroom door and walk away, and eventually the child lies down and goes to sleep, but I'm not involved any more. He wakes up happy the next morning; I wake up happy the next morning. And we start over with a nice clean slate, and -- at least on my part -- a resolve to be kinder, gentler, and also more firm on the front end, to keep opportunities for unkindness from arising.
On the other hand, I also notice that at the top of my list in Confession, pretty much every time I go, is some version of "lack of charity," and it almost always involves my children.
You?
PS: It seems far better to me to speak sharply in response to a behavior: for instance, just a minute ago, one son grabbed the other by the arms, and the other son, by way of reply, was emitting a shrieking noise kind of like what the soundtrack of Psycho does when Janet Leigh is in the shower. I don't mind saying that I get totally fed up with both these behaviors, especially when they happen in my immediate vicinity. So I said, not bothering to drum up a whole lot of maternal warmth and gentleness, "Cut that out right now. Stop making that noise. I'm tired of it."
Now, if I thought I had to say, instead, something like, "Are you making good choices? Are you being kind? I don't think that's a good idea, etc," by the end of the day I'd be ready to eviscerate the next person who spoke to me. (I'm sure I would, because the behaviors wouldn't stop. The kids would say, "Yeah, actually this does seem like a pretty good idea . . . I would choose to do it again, and again, and again . . . "). I'd have gone from, I think, a reasonable irritation with an objectively irritating set of behaviors (which are knee-jerk, instinctive reactions of my boys one to the other, sort of like the whining thing with girls), to a kind of free-floating resentment of all things children. I'd have an anger looking for a reason to happen, and it would happen, believe me. I'd wind up yelling at someone for some tiny infraction, and dragging their character into it, in the spirit of You children always drive me crazy, and while the experience might be cathartic for me, it wouldn't be good for the recipient, and it wouldn't solve any of the day's problems.
Better to react, I think, cleanly and sharply and in the spirit of cauterizing a specific thing, than to pretend, on the one hand, to be Mrs. Happydale, and on the other to fester in resentment, and blow up at people just because they're there and you suddenly can't take them any more.
Meanwhile, there are certainly places I just don't go, in terms of addressing my children. I still wince when I think of things I've overheard in stores. Just the other week, I was browsing the shoe section of the Really Big Store That Sells Everything -- without my children, because I am not stupid. I take a shoe that they're currently wearing, and I buy one or two sizes up, and if it turns out not to fit, I take it back and get another size. I do not present certain of my offspring with choices of shoes because, as I say, I am not stupid. Or a masochist, either.
Anyway, so I'm looking at the boys' Sunday-type shoes, and on the other side of the rack, I hear a woman addressing her daughter, who is maybe three and can't get a shoe on her foot. The mother is standing over her, screaming at her -- I'm not exaggerating -- to put the f-ing shoe on her foot, she's sick of this s-t, and so on. The child, to her immense credit, I guess, wasn't crying. She just couldn't get the heel of the shoe over her heel.
I was a weenie, or a deer caught in the headlights, or something. I can never think of what I'd say to somebody, assuming I actually had the courage to go up to them and say something about the way they're treating their child. And this was one of those instances where whatever you presumed about the person's parenting was probably pretty much what you saw; it was an incidence in a completely different league from the tantruming-child/oh-that-mother-must-be-doing-something-wrong scenario. So the memory, the whole of it, her behavior and mine, makes me cringe no end.
Of course, I didn't notice anyone else walking up to confront this woman, either. What I did notice was that several other mothers with children in tow were speaking to them with exaggerated kindness, and in louder voices than was absolutely necessary. "ARE YOU HAVING TROUBLE WITH THAT SHOE, SWEETHEART? I SAID, SWEETHEART! CAN MOMMY HELP YOU PUT ON THE SHOE, HONEY BABY?" Whether they were trying, indirectly, to educate the other mother, or just drown her out so that their own children didn't have to listen to profanity while trying on the Dora sneakers, was not entirely clear.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Working on Deadline Today
I have a print project due by the end of working hours today, plus some other online things I need to . . . well, start. And then finish.
Back soon.
Back soon.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
God Is Outside Time, and So Are Some Other Things
The plastic Saint George breastplate which Helier plans to wear to next Sunday's All Saints party at church is stamped with this chronologically-challenged caution:
It didn't? Dang. But what about this one, next week?
THE SIMULATED PROTECTIVE DEVICE WAS NOT SAFETY DEVICE AND OFFERED NO PROTECTION.
It didn't? Dang. But what about this one, next week?
Anthony Esolen on The Last Green Thing in the World
At lunch the other day, a young adjunct in my department, whom I was meeting for the first time, said a few things that showed a remarkable insight into the loneliness of modern life. He reminded me that C. S. Lewis had noted that in the late Middle Ages, after the climate had gone bad, people fantasized about food -- almost, you might say, pornographically. Certainly in a bawdy poem like The Land of Cockaygne there's more voluptuous fascination expended upon roast geese flying through the air, and things like that, than upon nuns and monks ready to go at it. But it is hard to find, in all of medieval literature, a reference to someone's being lonely. . .Read the rest.
Thanks, Macbeth.
Sunday Afternoon
It's a quiet, overcast, cool-ish day here, soft and faintly sad, lit here and there with changing trees. On the way to church we passed a front yard dominated by a maple caught, as we glanced at it, in the act of combusting. Though the leaves remained mostly still green, the outer tips of the branches had begun to smoulder with gold, like rolls of paper lit with a match which don't burst into open flame, but are eaten by subdued red fire which travels down the paper, leaving curls of crumbling carbon in its wake. The tree seemed to pulse with undecided color; I didn't notice it again on the way home, but I wonder whether, if I walked over there now, I'd find it already consumed.
My First Communion class has been dealing with original sin and baptism. Today we did not, in fact, baptize a baby doll which I swiped from Crispina's room this morning before she was awake, but we did walk through the motions, all jostling around the font in the church foyer, everyone taking a very proprietorial godparentish interest in the future of our shocked-looking infant. It was one of those plastic-headed dolls that come with a pacifier, and have a perpetually rounded-O mouth in which to insert it. O! it seemed to say, as it reclined in Laura Martinez's cradling arms. Get this original sin away from me!
I'd begun the lesson by showing the class a white t-shirt. Unfortunately, or maybe not so unfortunately, I didn't think to bring a a second one dredged in the mud -- they had to imagine that part. We all admired the cleanliness of the shirt, bleached white as the day I bought it -- from Goodwill, as it happens -- and then I asked them to imagine that I'd somehow bought a filthy-dirty shirt instead of a clean one.
"Take it back!" they said. "Get your money back! Don't buy it!" What kind of moron buys a dirty shirt? What kind of store sells a dirty shirt? I know the answer's going to wind up being Jesus . . .
So, anyway, the odds are that you've been to Faith Formation class, too, and you know where this is going. Alas, I didn't have a doll-sized white t-shirt; the doll, who had begun more or less naked, though I always tell children that the rag body is a jumpsuit, got a white handkerchief as its baptismal garment. We went over the matter of the sacrament: a bottle of holy water, an oil stock, and a little candle which we did not light, because there are twenty-five of them, and I'm not quite that stupid. We've also been jawing away about the Trinity -- that is, I have been jawing away about the Trinity -- and when we got to the form of the sacrament, and I asked them how many times the priest pours water on the baby's head, their eyes lit up. That three business . . . we've heard that somewhere before.
Second grade is a nice age. You don't have to work to make conversation with second-graders. Instead, they come up to you and start talking, generally on fairly obvious themes: that they saw you last night at the folk dance, for example, which you know already because you saw them, too, and said hello to them. Or else they show you, without preamble, the gaps in their mouth where they've lost six teeth since last Sunday. They don't want to argue with you much, which makes them restful people to be with, even when they're rattling around you, all wanting at once to hold the oil stock you've brought to show them, or yelling out words like Soul! and God! and Trinity! before your question has fully emerged from your lips, because they have an innate sense of probability, and they know that at least a third of the time, one of those words is going to be what you're looking for.
I've also been reading them, a little at a time, Marigold Hunt's Saint Patrick's Summer: A Children's Adventure Catechism.
At home, I'm reading it with Helier and Crispina as well, and after reading about it for years, I can now recommend it as a catechetical resource. The premise of the book is that two English children, Michael and Cecelia, who are preparing to make their First Communion and befuddled by concepts like the Holy Trinity, are visited by Saint Patrick, Eve, Saint Cecelia, and other personages from the Bible and Church history, who bring the information contained in the catechism vividly to life. Marigold Hunt's writing is always warm and engaging in that mid-century English way we're familiar with from C.S. Lewis. I was surprised that the class today remembered details of the little bit we had time to read last week, but they did, and they were content to work silently in their activity books for a good fifteen minutes while I read aloud.
Now we're back from church and nodding after pancakes and sausage. Even coffee on Sunday afternoons makes me sleepy rather than otherwise. I'm tempted to go and lie down, though if I did I'd sleep until nightfall and be all disoriented and then insomniac, which would make me tired tomorrow. The sun's come out a little, meanwhile, and the redbud by the back gate is shedding its leaves like big yellow valentine hearts, and the thought of going out to scuff through them has its appeal: down the driveway, around the road that loops the wooded park, walking in the quiet beneath the changing trees.
My First Communion class has been dealing with original sin and baptism. Today we did not, in fact, baptize a baby doll which I swiped from Crispina's room this morning before she was awake, but we did walk through the motions, all jostling around the font in the church foyer, everyone taking a very proprietorial godparentish interest in the future of our shocked-looking infant. It was one of those plastic-headed dolls that come with a pacifier, and have a perpetually rounded-O mouth in which to insert it. O! it seemed to say, as it reclined in Laura Martinez's cradling arms. Get this original sin away from me!
I'd begun the lesson by showing the class a white t-shirt. Unfortunately, or maybe not so unfortunately, I didn't think to bring a a second one dredged in the mud -- they had to imagine that part. We all admired the cleanliness of the shirt, bleached white as the day I bought it -- from Goodwill, as it happens -- and then I asked them to imagine that I'd somehow bought a filthy-dirty shirt instead of a clean one.
"Take it back!" they said. "Get your money back! Don't buy it!" What kind of moron buys a dirty shirt? What kind of store sells a dirty shirt? I know the answer's going to wind up being Jesus . . .
So, anyway, the odds are that you've been to Faith Formation class, too, and you know where this is going. Alas, I didn't have a doll-sized white t-shirt; the doll, who had begun more or less naked, though I always tell children that the rag body is a jumpsuit, got a white handkerchief as its baptismal garment. We went over the matter of the sacrament: a bottle of holy water, an oil stock, and a little candle which we did not light, because there are twenty-five of them, and I'm not quite that stupid. We've also been jawing away about the Trinity -- that is, I have been jawing away about the Trinity -- and when we got to the form of the sacrament, and I asked them how many times the priest pours water on the baby's head, their eyes lit up. That three business . . . we've heard that somewhere before.
Second grade is a nice age. You don't have to work to make conversation with second-graders. Instead, they come up to you and start talking, generally on fairly obvious themes: that they saw you last night at the folk dance, for example, which you know already because you saw them, too, and said hello to them. Or else they show you, without preamble, the gaps in their mouth where they've lost six teeth since last Sunday. They don't want to argue with you much, which makes them restful people to be with, even when they're rattling around you, all wanting at once to hold the oil stock you've brought to show them, or yelling out words like Soul! and God! and Trinity! before your question has fully emerged from your lips, because they have an innate sense of probability, and they know that at least a third of the time, one of those words is going to be what you're looking for.
I've also been reading them, a little at a time, Marigold Hunt's Saint Patrick's Summer: A Children's Adventure Catechism.
At home, I'm reading it with Helier and Crispina as well, and after reading about it for years, I can now recommend it as a catechetical resource. The premise of the book is that two English children, Michael and Cecelia, who are preparing to make their First Communion and befuddled by concepts like the Holy Trinity, are visited by Saint Patrick, Eve, Saint Cecelia, and other personages from the Bible and Church history, who bring the information contained in the catechism vividly to life. Marigold Hunt's writing is always warm and engaging in that mid-century English way we're familiar with from C.S. Lewis. I was surprised that the class today remembered details of the little bit we had time to read last week, but they did, and they were content to work silently in their activity books for a good fifteen minutes while I read aloud.
Now we're back from church and nodding after pancakes and sausage. Even coffee on Sunday afternoons makes me sleepy rather than otherwise. I'm tempted to go and lie down, though if I did I'd sleep until nightfall and be all disoriented and then insomniac, which would make me tired tomorrow. The sun's come out a little, meanwhile, and the redbud by the back gate is shedding its leaves like big yellow valentine hearts, and the thought of going out to scuff through them has its appeal: down the driveway, around the road that loops the wooded park, walking in the quiet beneath the changing trees.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
More Book News
Patrico on Duffy on Mary Tudor
I agree wholeheartedly with Ryan Patrico's conclusion; on the other hand, this seems rather too many, too, though it was over the course of nearly two centuries, and not the work of one brief reign.
via First Thoughts
I agree wholeheartedly with Ryan Patrico's conclusion; on the other hand, this seems rather too many, too, though it was over the course of nearly two centuries, and not the work of one brief reign.
via First Thoughts
Swine Flu News
Here's an item I received in my email today, from a friend passing along the commentary of two physician acquaintances, describing what they're seeing in hospitals (these two doctors are in Idaho, apparently), and weighing in on benefits-vs-risks of the H1N1 vaccine. What they write is making the rounds anonymously, and I'm taking the liberty of reproducing it in full. The first doctor writes:
The second physician adds:
Just FYI.
H1N1 is hitting people in their 40s around here. Our ICU is full of patients on ventilators due to respiratory distress syndrome (this is identical to hyaline membrane disease in newborns when they are born too early) associated with the flu and many of these patients are being infected with staph pneumonia as well. If you are over the age of 50 you are at lower risk, since (theoretically) many of these people have had previous exposure during an outbreak in the 70's, or have sufficiently "tuned" immune systems to avoid the hyperimmune reaction that leads to respiratory distress. The risk of getting seriously ill from the H1N1 flu is much higher than the risk of having some vaccination related complication. (Vaccine complication risk is somthing like 1:100,000 while the mortality rate from the flu is somewhere around 2% (seems high to me). Pregnant patients are at increased risk for severe flu illness as are neurodevelopmentally disabled patients. The injected vaccine is dead virus while the nasal spray (pediatric) is live attenuated virus. The vaccine is prepared in the same way as the seasonal flu virus vaccine, so the complications related to H1N1 vaccine can be expected to be similar to the seasonal flu vaccine. There is the usual hysteria out there about government plots for mind control or mass bioterrorism thru the vaccine program or whatever etc, but I have not seen any compelling evidence for any of that. Many cases of the flu are relatively mild and self limited, so most of you who will get the flu will be ok... I got the vaccine because I am in a health care setting and considered at higher risk...so in a nutshell, the following are considered at higher risk and are recommended to be vaccinated:
1) pregnant patients
2) Health care workers
3) younger patients
4) Anyone caring for an infant up to 6 months of age
The second physician adds:
I completely agree. In addition, the vaccine is made from chick embryo cells, not human fetal cells. I think the risk of a reaction is way less than the risk of the disease. Our county is projected to get about 67000 cases of swine flu, but it has barely started and our ICU is full of 20-50 year old patients on ventilators with no prior medical problems. One would probably have died last weekend but lived because he was on a heart-lung bypass machine for a whole week.
This is a nasty bug. I am not sure if it will not overwhelm all the iCUs in the country, at the rate we are going. We may end up having to select who goes on the respirators and who doesn't, if this is declared a major health emergency.
Just FYI.
Of Interest
Mark Memmott on Hilary Mantel on the Tudors
Postcards from Britain: The Postal Strike Updated
Saving Imelda's Shoes
Child Holding Breath, Turning Blue, Passing Out, Is Scary; No Duh, Say Parents
Bill Cosby Wins Mark Twain Humor Prize; Producers Worry Tribute Show Won't Be Funny
NPR: Are Monkeys Funny? (Geo. W. Bush Says Chimpanzees Funny; Barak Obama Too Smart to Laugh At Chimpanzees)
Norwegian Wins at Monopoly, Gets Real Money
All righty, there's a child standing here beside me who wants me to let him mop the floor with me in Uno. It's a way to start the day . . .
Postcards from Britain: The Postal Strike Updated
Saving Imelda's Shoes
Child Holding Breath, Turning Blue, Passing Out, Is Scary; No Duh, Say Parents
Bill Cosby Wins Mark Twain Humor Prize; Producers Worry Tribute Show Won't Be Funny
NPR: Are Monkeys Funny? (Geo. W. Bush Says Chimpanzees Funny; Barak Obama Too Smart to Laugh At Chimpanzees)
Norwegian Wins at Monopoly, Gets Real Money
All righty, there's a child standing here beside me who wants me to let him mop the floor with me in Uno. It's a way to start the day . . .
News of the Gross
Raleigh Sewer Blob is Tubifex Worm Colony
and more fun stuff from Science News Blog!
Posted using ShareThis
and more fun stuff from Science News Blog!
Posted using ShareThis
Friday, October 23, 2009
Frugal Hacks: A Cookbook and an Interview
Read it here.
Here's how I would answer these questions (not that anyone was asking, necessarily):
1. How much time do you spend in the kitchen daily?
A lot, because that's where we do school. In terms of time spent cooking . . . hm. For breakfast and lunch, as little as possible. My idea of the perfect breakfast is the hard-boiled egg: you put a clutch of them on to boil, set the timer, and forget about them till they're done. Compost the shells, and otherwise cleanup is minimal. Lunch is sandwiches or leftovers.
I typically spend an hour on dinner, though only rarely am I standing over a hot stove for that whole amount of time. Last night was an exception: I made what I like to call "fauxsotto," ie regular old rice cooked as you'd cook arborio rice for risotto. That you do have to stand over, stirring continually, but the results are worth it. Out of one cup of cheapie white rice, from a 20-lb bag I bought about six months ago and store in a file box under my cabinets, some leftover scraps of meat from a chicken I'd cooked the day before, water, herbs, and grated Parmesan, I made a rich and filling main course. Normally I prefer to make casseroles and things which I can put in the oven and forget about (see "hardboiled eggs," above), but the barer the cupboard, the more energy I put into the meal, in both conception and execution.
My kids also do the dishes.
2. What are your favorite frugal meals?
Well, "fauxsotto," obviously. Rice is even cheaper than pasta, generally, and as with pasta, I can use whatever's on hand: leftover meat scraps, tomatoes, peppers, or kale from the garden, etc.
Scones for breakfast
Recycled Pancakes for Breakfast or Dessert
3. How do you deal with picky kids?
I don't. We have an unwritten zero-tolerance rule when it comes to pickiness, though we're nice about it, mostly. What's for dinner is what's for dinner, and everyone in my house knows that there's no point in complaining. On the other hand, I don't go out of my way to make things people are likely to hate, and I don't make a big deal out of forcing people to try things, though generally I do require at least a taste of an unfamiliar food. If someone refuses to eat, well, that person will be very hungry later, and I don't keep snack food around.
4. How much time do you spend shopping and planning each week?
Here is where I'm most likely to fall down. I'm a poor planner. When I'm really on my game, I do two big shopping trips a month, generally to Aldi, where the prices are low, though the selection is somewhat limited. At my worst, somebody goes to the store daily, and money runs through our fingers like water.
I've never been good at planning actual meals far in advance. What I do is keep a rotation of popular basic meals in my head -- pasta-, rice-, potato-, or roast-meat-based, for example; or soups -- and a mental list of basic ingredients I need to make variations on these meals.
5. Are there ingredients you never buy? Always buy, no matter what the price?
I never buy mixes (pancake, waffle, gravy, etc) or prepared pasta sauce.
We always buy good coffee. It's our one consistent luxury. That, and fresh parmesan. I won't spend an arm and a leg on the latter, but it's worth it to me to buy a pre-grated tub of real Parmesan for four bucks, versus the off-the-shelf off-brand Parmesan-flavored powder, though the latter is far cheaper. We often do without meat, but I often cook with cheese, and using decent cheese seems a worthwhile and even cost-efficient habit by comparison.
6. Is it possible to eat affordably AND healthfully? What about fresh fruits/veggies?
What the lady says. I don't splurge on expensive exotics, but we almost always have bananas, apples, and/or oranges in the house, if nothing else. We also have a (limited) garden, which right now is still yielding banana peppers, kale, cucumbers, and a few last tomatoes.
I also keep lots of frozen veggies on hand, especially in the winter. Aldi has peas, corn, and okra (!) for 99 cents a bag, which is a decent deal for something you can pull out and cook, or put into soup, which hasn't gone through the canning process or had loads of salt added to it.
They carry packs of frozen fresh green beans -- not your French-cut or short-cut/might-as-well-be-canned variety, but really nice skinny gourmet-ish ones -- for something like $1.69. I can't remember the volume you get for that price. I pan-sear them in some olive oil, so that at least some of them are a little crispy, and my family eat them like french fries. I can generally get at least two meals out of one pack of beans, and even at the higher price, the fact that everyone loves and asks for them makes them worth it.
7. Have you ever had people say you are too frugal? How do you respond?
No. And I wish.
8. Is it possible to feed a family affordably in areas where food costs are high?
I'm not the expert, but food costs here in my part of North Carolina seem to run about a dollar higher per item than I remember paying in Memphis, particularly for milk and dairy items, and for meat. Last year, not long after we moved here, we took a hard look at our financial picture and our budget, and we determined that to get by, we really needed to halve our food budget. At least, we knew that we needed to cut costs fairly drastically someplace, and I proposed to my husband that we halve the food budget. He didn't think it could be done, but I amazed him. I haven't stayed on the wagon consistently, but that's due to my poor organizational skills. When I have it together, we can spend far less to feed our family here than we were spending in a less-expensive area two years ago.
9. What kind of wisdom would you give your younger self? Would she listen?
What Mary Ostyn says about the car note. I'd also make my younger self not consider eating out as a viable option: we did that far too often for far too long, as a default setting when I just didn't feel like cooking. Now I still sometimes don't feel like cooking, but I feel even less like having more month than money. Not that I'd have listened to that bit of wisdom, necessarily; my younger self also had a pretty hefty case of entitlement, grievance, and undiagnosed general sloth, and felt that she deserved all kinds of goodies just for existing.
I think I'd also have made her overcome her fear of financial commitment and buy a house early on, rather than renting. My younger self and her equally-younger husband lived very foot-loosely during a major real-estate bubble in the early 1990s, in a city where property values were doubling yearly. This would have been a good time to invest, instead of giving money away to a landlord, and we didn't do it. Instead, we waited, and bought just as the market was on the brink of collapse, and our first house, instead of being an investment, became an albatross.
In general, I think I'd tell my younger self to bother to pay attention to the economy and to the details of personal finance, rather than thinking that to think about money at all is to serve Mammon. Somehow I think you wind up serving Mammon more when you're sloppy and inattentive than when you're on the alert.
Here's how I would answer these questions (not that anyone was asking, necessarily):
1. How much time do you spend in the kitchen daily?
A lot, because that's where we do school. In terms of time spent cooking . . . hm. For breakfast and lunch, as little as possible. My idea of the perfect breakfast is the hard-boiled egg: you put a clutch of them on to boil, set the timer, and forget about them till they're done. Compost the shells, and otherwise cleanup is minimal. Lunch is sandwiches or leftovers.
I typically spend an hour on dinner, though only rarely am I standing over a hot stove for that whole amount of time. Last night was an exception: I made what I like to call "fauxsotto," ie regular old rice cooked as you'd cook arborio rice for risotto. That you do have to stand over, stirring continually, but the results are worth it. Out of one cup of cheapie white rice, from a 20-lb bag I bought about six months ago and store in a file box under my cabinets, some leftover scraps of meat from a chicken I'd cooked the day before, water, herbs, and grated Parmesan, I made a rich and filling main course. Normally I prefer to make casseroles and things which I can put in the oven and forget about (see "hardboiled eggs," above), but the barer the cupboard, the more energy I put into the meal, in both conception and execution.
My kids also do the dishes.
2. What are your favorite frugal meals?
Well, "fauxsotto," obviously. Rice is even cheaper than pasta, generally, and as with pasta, I can use whatever's on hand: leftover meat scraps, tomatoes, peppers, or kale from the garden, etc.
Scones for breakfast
Recycled Pancakes for Breakfast or Dessert
3. How do you deal with picky kids?
I don't. We have an unwritten zero-tolerance rule when it comes to pickiness, though we're nice about it, mostly. What's for dinner is what's for dinner, and everyone in my house knows that there's no point in complaining. On the other hand, I don't go out of my way to make things people are likely to hate, and I don't make a big deal out of forcing people to try things, though generally I do require at least a taste of an unfamiliar food. If someone refuses to eat, well, that person will be very hungry later, and I don't keep snack food around.
4. How much time do you spend shopping and planning each week?
Here is where I'm most likely to fall down. I'm a poor planner. When I'm really on my game, I do two big shopping trips a month, generally to Aldi, where the prices are low, though the selection is somewhat limited. At my worst, somebody goes to the store daily, and money runs through our fingers like water.
I've never been good at planning actual meals far in advance. What I do is keep a rotation of popular basic meals in my head -- pasta-, rice-, potato-, or roast-meat-based, for example; or soups -- and a mental list of basic ingredients I need to make variations on these meals.
5. Are there ingredients you never buy? Always buy, no matter what the price?
I never buy mixes (pancake, waffle, gravy, etc) or prepared pasta sauce.
We always buy good coffee. It's our one consistent luxury. That, and fresh parmesan. I won't spend an arm and a leg on the latter, but it's worth it to me to buy a pre-grated tub of real Parmesan for four bucks, versus the off-the-shelf off-brand Parmesan-flavored powder, though the latter is far cheaper. We often do without meat, but I often cook with cheese, and using decent cheese seems a worthwhile and even cost-efficient habit by comparison.
6. Is it possible to eat affordably AND healthfully? What about fresh fruits/veggies?
What the lady says. I don't splurge on expensive exotics, but we almost always have bananas, apples, and/or oranges in the house, if nothing else. We also have a (limited) garden, which right now is still yielding banana peppers, kale, cucumbers, and a few last tomatoes.
I also keep lots of frozen veggies on hand, especially in the winter. Aldi has peas, corn, and okra (!) for 99 cents a bag, which is a decent deal for something you can pull out and cook, or put into soup, which hasn't gone through the canning process or had loads of salt added to it.
They carry packs of frozen fresh green beans -- not your French-cut or short-cut/might-as-well-be-canned variety, but really nice skinny gourmet-ish ones -- for something like $1.69. I can't remember the volume you get for that price. I pan-sear them in some olive oil, so that at least some of them are a little crispy, and my family eat them like french fries. I can generally get at least two meals out of one pack of beans, and even at the higher price, the fact that everyone loves and asks for them makes them worth it.
7. Have you ever had people say you are too frugal? How do you respond?
No. And I wish.
8. Is it possible to feed a family affordably in areas where food costs are high?
I'm not the expert, but food costs here in my part of North Carolina seem to run about a dollar higher per item than I remember paying in Memphis, particularly for milk and dairy items, and for meat. Last year, not long after we moved here, we took a hard look at our financial picture and our budget, and we determined that to get by, we really needed to halve our food budget. At least, we knew that we needed to cut costs fairly drastically someplace, and I proposed to my husband that we halve the food budget. He didn't think it could be done, but I amazed him. I haven't stayed on the wagon consistently, but that's due to my poor organizational skills. When I have it together, we can spend far less to feed our family here than we were spending in a less-expensive area two years ago.
9. What kind of wisdom would you give your younger self? Would she listen?
What Mary Ostyn says about the car note. I'd also make my younger self not consider eating out as a viable option: we did that far too often for far too long, as a default setting when I just didn't feel like cooking. Now I still sometimes don't feel like cooking, but I feel even less like having more month than money. Not that I'd have listened to that bit of wisdom, necessarily; my younger self also had a pretty hefty case of entitlement, grievance, and undiagnosed general sloth, and felt that she deserved all kinds of goodies just for existing.
I think I'd also have made her overcome her fear of financial commitment and buy a house early on, rather than renting. My younger self and her equally-younger husband lived very foot-loosely during a major real-estate bubble in the early 1990s, in a city where property values were doubling yearly. This would have been a good time to invest, instead of giving money away to a landlord, and we didn't do it. Instead, we waited, and bought just as the market was on the brink of collapse, and our first house, instead of being an investment, became an albatross.
In general, I think I'd tell my younger self to bother to pay attention to the economy and to the details of personal finance, rather than thinking that to think about money at all is to serve Mammon. Somehow I think you wind up serving Mammon more when you're sloppy and inattentive than when you're on the alert.
Well, Gromit, How About a Nice, Hot Cup of
Scandium?
Here's what Mary Daly's Chemistry 001: Introducing the Periodic Kingdom to Its Heirs has to say about scandium, which Helier and Crispina and I studied today for science:
And then we drank some scandium, though only a teeny-tiny amount, maybe, in our blue-and-white cups, to help us not to forget it.
More from Mary Daly:
Notice the Universe, the most interesting weather blog you're likely to run across.
PLUS
An intelligent woman's faith explained
Here's what Mary Daly's Chemistry 001: Introducing the Periodic Kingdom to Its Heirs has to say about scandium, which Helier and Crispina and I studied today for science:
When the metallic element scandium was found in Scandinavia, it was thought that it wouldn't be found anywhere else in teh world, and it made sense to name it after its place of origin. [Here we got down the globe to find Scandinavia, and to discuss the fact that the Vikings had come from that part of the world] In fact, however, it is common in many places.
Scandium seems to be the source of the blue color in the beryl called "aquamarine."[Here we looked back at beryllium on the Periodic Table, and at the aquamarines in my engagement ring]
There's not much scandium in our fruits and vegetables, but scandium in the soil does help many things to germinate -- corn, peas, etc. And ordinary tea seems to collect a little scandium, though only about 140 parts per billion.
And then we drank some scandium, though only a teeny-tiny amount, maybe, in our blue-and-white cups, to help us not to forget it.
More from Mary Daly:
Notice the Universe, the most interesting weather blog you're likely to run across.
PLUS
An intelligent woman's faith explained
Thursday, October 22, 2009
We Are Not Alone
CDC Report: In Record-Breaking October, 1 in 5 US Children Had Flu-Like Symptoms, Parents Involved in Car Accidents, and Blue Teeth
OK, only part of that is true.
Related: "Major Non-Compliance" at Cancer Research Hospital; or, If You Can't Trust the Person Ordering Your Chemo Cocktail, Whom Can You Trust Not To Kill You?
And related to that: "Holy Grail" of Cancer Treatment
(via Instapundit)
Don't know why I'm on about cancer tonight; all we've had is the flu. Both are in the news, however.
Also via Instapundit: Way to Feel Better About Driving a 12-Passenger Van; or, Honey, Don't Ask What's For Dinner
Schadenfreude Proves Unruly: Essential Plot Twists for Writers
(via BoingBoing)
OK, only part of that is true.
Related: "Major Non-Compliance" at Cancer Research Hospital; or, If You Can't Trust the Person Ordering Your Chemo Cocktail, Whom Can You Trust Not To Kill You?
And related to that: "Holy Grail" of Cancer Treatment
(via Instapundit)
Don't know why I'm on about cancer tonight; all we've had is the flu. Both are in the news, however.
Also via Instapundit: Way to Feel Better About Driving a 12-Passenger Van; or, Honey, Don't Ask What's For Dinner
Schadenfreude Proves Unruly: Essential Plot Twists for Writers
(via BoingBoing)
That Anglican-Catholic Thang: UPDATES
I'm still trying to get my head around the Vatican's announcement of the other day. Like Maclin, who years ahead of me followed the Methodist-to-Anglican-to-Catholic trajectory, I view these developments on the one hand with something of a shrug: three years ago the prospect of not walking away from the Book of Common Prayer and the beauty of Anglican liturgy would, frankly, have meant much more to me than it does now. Aesthete that I am, I didn't die of bad Catholic liturgy; in the meantime, I've come to love, if not outright prefer to all other prayers, the Roman Canon of the Mass, especially as I've seen it done well.
On the other hand, though, I really can't shrug. How many people will ultimately be affected by the proposed initiatives is anyone's guess right now, as is the practical substance of the initiatives themselves. Will there be "hundreds of thousands" of Anglicans flocking to Rome, now that the doors are open wider and the way made smoother? I have no idea. How many new "Anglican Use" parishes will be created as a result? No idea. Will it really be easier for an entire parish to convert as a body, and how often is this truly likely to occur? Again, I don't know.
Still, I can envision ways in which a settled procedure for dealing with Anglican converts would make life easier for everyone. Anglicans, particularly from the Anglo-Catholic end of the spectrum, tend as we did to bring with them a lot of Catholicism-learned-in-Anglicanism: Marian devotion, belief in the Real Presence, devotion to saints, and other Catholic practices which often pose stumbling blocks to Protestants exploring Catholicism. They are, by and large, familiar with the forms of the Mass, possibly more so than many cradle Catholics. Much of the catechetical content of the typical RCIA program is ground which Anglicans have been covering all their lives, and a reception process which recognizes that experience would be a welcome development.
Too, the prospect of an Anglican-Use ordinariate promises to ease the transition of former Anglican clergy into Roman orders. Currently, of course, the 1980-vintage "Pastoral Provision" provides a means -- though what that means means, on a practical level, varies from bishop to bishop -- for a former Anglican priest to be ordained a Catholic priest, an opportunity not without difficulties for married men, especially. Under the current system, a former Anglican who becomes a Catholic priest is incardinated in a diocese like any other diocesan priest and offered, generally, in the absence of an Anglican Use parish, some kind of assistant-level pastorate. A man with a family to support almost inevitably has to do some other kind of work alongside his priestly ministry; incardination under a diocesan bishop severely limits his possibilities of moving elsewhere to find work, should the need arise, in whatever his non-priestly field happens to be. A sort of "floating" ordinariate would, presumably, allow for greater mobility.
(ADDENDUM: Also, as Fr. Longenecker points out, diocesan bishops at best really don't know what to do with convert clergy once they have them, and frustration tends to run high on both sides.)
More:
Fr. Longenecker on the fork in the road, and on the implications of the PO
Fr. Finigan Explains Further
Fr. Hunwicke Unburns Cranmer
Fr. Rutler Is Astringent
Thoughts From the Canon-Law Perspective
Fr. Z Annotates the Joint Statement
Discussion at Mere Comments
And at New Liturgical Movement
Some Continuing Anglicans Just Say No
All This And More From The Anchoress
As I said before, I'm still trying to get my head around it all. Watching and waiting with interest . . .
UPDATE:
What don't these developments mean?
1. They don't mean that Anglicans/Episcopalians are automatically in communion with Rome.
2. They don't mean, as some Anglicans appear to believe, that Rome is bargaining for the privilege of having Anglicans in full communion, or willing to make concessions to accommodate Things Anglicans Like, chiefly the Prayer Book form (or forms) for Eucharistic consecration. Some Anglicans object to the Book of Divine Worship, the adaptation of the Prayer Book used in Anglican-Use Catholic parishes, precisely because the Anglican form has been replaced by the Roman Canon. The shift in language aside -- and I can appreciate how jarring it is to the Anglican ear -- the adaptation is absolutely necessary. The confection of the elements of the Eucharist into the Body and Blood of Christ -- Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity -- is the heart of the Catholic Mass. A Catholic must believe this, and the action at the altar must re-enact, unambiguously, what's often rather infelicitously referred to as the "unbloody Sacrifice."
I learned my Catholicism, including my belief in the Real Presence, in Anglicanism; the sole reason why I am no longer Anglican but Catholic is that I realized that not only did I believe this doctrine, but I believed it to be absolutely non-negotiable. Presumably that's what the Pope believes, too -- well, there's no "presumably" about it -- and he's not likely to admit as Catholic a liturgy which fudges this central truth, however lovely the prose.
Also, a brief history of the current American BCP.
3. They don't mean recognition of Anglicanism, as it currently stands, as a legitimate branch of Catholicism. At least, I don't think they do, though clearly one can draw parallels with the Eastern Catholics, who are Catholic though not Latin/Roman. It seems to me, though, that Anglicanism's claims for its Catholicity are far more problematic, as the history of Prayer-Book revisions suggests. Certainly the Oxford Movement's aim was to revive, or refound, the Church of England on its medieval Catholic foundation, and I thank God for that, as this was our path to Rome, in Cardinal Newman's footsteps.
But whether it's actually true is up for grabs. Some years ago, I would have said that it was. Now I'm not so sure: for one thing, the absence of clear and seriously authoritative authority is deeply problematic, too often enabling a split between meticulous Catholic practice on the one hand, and a breathtaking absence of formative, normative theology on the other.
Do you partake of personal Confession or not, for example? Rome says, "Absolutely." And I hated Rome for that for a long time, and dragged my heels about going to Confession, even when I was otherwise ready to be Catholic, yea unto the last minute before my reception into the Church. Now I know Confession for a source of grace and go at least twice a month, if not weekly, which habit I would never in a million years have cultivated had it been optional. It's the "optional" setting at the core of the Anglican sacramental ethos, not issues of clerical celibacy, divorce and remarriage, or even contraception, which defines Anglicanism as something other than Catholic. At least, this is my sense of things -- the man sitting at the dining-room table grading liturgics exams is far more qualified to comment on these matters than I am, but alas, I'm the one who writes the blog, not he, so you're stuck with me.
Incidentally, I realize that many Anglicans do not take advantage of the "optional" setting, and do partake regularly and faithfully of Confession, and otherwise adhere to Catholic practice. It's one thing, though, to say, "I do these things because I believe in them," and quite another to say, "I believe these things because the Church teaches that they are true, and I trust her to be the repository of truth." You may begin, as an Anglican, at Point A, but to be a Catholic you must end at Point B.
ADDENDUM: These observations aren't meant in the spirit of "dissing" Anglicanism. Many of my dearest friends, &c., not to mention that I owe my hunger for Catholicism to my experience as an Anglican. I'm merely trying to fumble my way through arguments being raised and, I think, misperceptions being trotted out with regard to Rome's intentions in this matter. People seem to object to these new initiatives on the grounds that the Pope seems to expect the people taking advantage of them actually to become Catholic, not just Anglicans who can go to Communion at St. Peter's. And, well, yes, I think that is the deal, though of course nobody's forced to take His Holiness up on it.
MORE: Useful commentary from Taylor Marshall here, here, and here.
Mantilla Splains It All For You
As does Tertium Quid. See also this.
Not to mention the Bovina Bloviator: here, here, and here.
And Argent By the Tiber.
Creative Minority Report Tells It Like . . . Uh . . . What It Must Look Like To Some People.
MORE: Argent by the Tiber on Repatriating Anglican Music
Argent represents my feelings exactly: I'm too much a Latin-Rite Catholic at this point to want to be anywhere else. The move from Anglicanism to Catholicism is a conversion, not a lateral kind of ecclesial relocation, and I have no desire to go back.
A number of Continuing Anglicans cite Rome's need for "more reforms" as an impediment to their consideration of such a -- well, from the conversation, I gather that they regard the move to Rome as precisely the sort of lateral move that I think it isn't. This position has its basis, of course, in the belief that they're already Catholic, the evidence for which is that they practice what the Church has practiced for 2,000 years. Though I'm not myself a theologian -- I'll have to consult the member of my household who is -- my instinct is not to find this convincing.
On the one hand, it's what everyone claims to do. It is the claim of that kind of "Mere Christianity" which a Presbyterian practices. On the other hand, while they themselves may adhere strictly to Catholic practice, the Anglican tradition has not done so consistently, across the board. It has maintained Apostolic Succession (though there are Catholics who would argue with that), but its history has been as full of Mr. Collinses as of Cardinal Newmans. And tellingly, the Cardinal Newmans swam the Tiber.
But about those reforms. They are in motion already: witness the release of the Motu Proprio regarding the use of the Tridentine Mass, and the Holy Father's keen interest in good liturgy.
Visit New Liturgical Movement.
Related Post: On Conversion, and On the Validity, Or Not, of Anglican Orders
On the other hand, though, I really can't shrug. How many people will ultimately be affected by the proposed initiatives is anyone's guess right now, as is the practical substance of the initiatives themselves. Will there be "hundreds of thousands" of Anglicans flocking to Rome, now that the doors are open wider and the way made smoother? I have no idea. How many new "Anglican Use" parishes will be created as a result? No idea. Will it really be easier for an entire parish to convert as a body, and how often is this truly likely to occur? Again, I don't know.
Still, I can envision ways in which a settled procedure for dealing with Anglican converts would make life easier for everyone. Anglicans, particularly from the Anglo-Catholic end of the spectrum, tend as we did to bring with them a lot of Catholicism-learned-in-Anglicanism: Marian devotion, belief in the Real Presence, devotion to saints, and other Catholic practices which often pose stumbling blocks to Protestants exploring Catholicism. They are, by and large, familiar with the forms of the Mass, possibly more so than many cradle Catholics. Much of the catechetical content of the typical RCIA program is ground which Anglicans have been covering all their lives, and a reception process which recognizes that experience would be a welcome development.
Too, the prospect of an Anglican-Use ordinariate promises to ease the transition of former Anglican clergy into Roman orders. Currently, of course, the 1980-vintage "Pastoral Provision" provides a means -- though what that means means, on a practical level, varies from bishop to bishop -- for a former Anglican priest to be ordained a Catholic priest, an opportunity not without difficulties for married men, especially. Under the current system, a former Anglican who becomes a Catholic priest is incardinated in a diocese like any other diocesan priest and offered, generally, in the absence of an Anglican Use parish, some kind of assistant-level pastorate. A man with a family to support almost inevitably has to do some other kind of work alongside his priestly ministry; incardination under a diocesan bishop severely limits his possibilities of moving elsewhere to find work, should the need arise, in whatever his non-priestly field happens to be. A sort of "floating" ordinariate would, presumably, allow for greater mobility.
(ADDENDUM: Also, as Fr. Longenecker points out, diocesan bishops at best really don't know what to do with convert clergy once they have them, and frustration tends to run high on both sides.)
More:
Fr. Longenecker on the fork in the road, and on the implications of the PO
Fr. Finigan Explains Further
Fr. Hunwicke Unburns Cranmer
Fr. Rutler Is Astringent
Thoughts From the Canon-Law Perspective
Fr. Z Annotates the Joint Statement
Discussion at Mere Comments
And at New Liturgical Movement
Some Continuing Anglicans Just Say No
All This And More From The Anchoress
As I said before, I'm still trying to get my head around it all. Watching and waiting with interest . . .
UPDATE:
What don't these developments mean?
1. They don't mean that Anglicans/Episcopalians are automatically in communion with Rome.
2. They don't mean, as some Anglicans appear to believe, that Rome is bargaining for the privilege of having Anglicans in full communion, or willing to make concessions to accommodate Things Anglicans Like, chiefly the Prayer Book form (or forms) for Eucharistic consecration. Some Anglicans object to the Book of Divine Worship, the adaptation of the Prayer Book used in Anglican-Use Catholic parishes, precisely because the Anglican form has been replaced by the Roman Canon. The shift in language aside -- and I can appreciate how jarring it is to the Anglican ear -- the adaptation is absolutely necessary. The confection of the elements of the Eucharist into the Body and Blood of Christ -- Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity -- is the heart of the Catholic Mass. A Catholic must believe this, and the action at the altar must re-enact, unambiguously, what's often rather infelicitously referred to as the "unbloody Sacrifice."
I learned my Catholicism, including my belief in the Real Presence, in Anglicanism; the sole reason why I am no longer Anglican but Catholic is that I realized that not only did I believe this doctrine, but I believed it to be absolutely non-negotiable. Presumably that's what the Pope believes, too -- well, there's no "presumably" about it -- and he's not likely to admit as Catholic a liturgy which fudges this central truth, however lovely the prose.
Also, a brief history of the current American BCP.
3. They don't mean recognition of Anglicanism, as it currently stands, as a legitimate branch of Catholicism. At least, I don't think they do, though clearly one can draw parallels with the Eastern Catholics, who are Catholic though not Latin/Roman. It seems to me, though, that Anglicanism's claims for its Catholicity are far more problematic, as the history of Prayer-Book revisions suggests. Certainly the Oxford Movement's aim was to revive, or refound, the Church of England on its medieval Catholic foundation, and I thank God for that, as this was our path to Rome, in Cardinal Newman's footsteps.
But whether it's actually true is up for grabs. Some years ago, I would have said that it was. Now I'm not so sure: for one thing, the absence of clear and seriously authoritative authority is deeply problematic, too often enabling a split between meticulous Catholic practice on the one hand, and a breathtaking absence of formative, normative theology on the other.
Do you partake of personal Confession or not, for example? Rome says, "Absolutely." And I hated Rome for that for a long time, and dragged my heels about going to Confession, even when I was otherwise ready to be Catholic, yea unto the last minute before my reception into the Church. Now I know Confession for a source of grace and go at least twice a month, if not weekly, which habit I would never in a million years have cultivated had it been optional. It's the "optional" setting at the core of the Anglican sacramental ethos, not issues of clerical celibacy, divorce and remarriage, or even contraception, which defines Anglicanism as something other than Catholic. At least, this is my sense of things -- the man sitting at the dining-room table grading liturgics exams is far more qualified to comment on these matters than I am, but alas, I'm the one who writes the blog, not he, so you're stuck with me.
Incidentally, I realize that many Anglicans do not take advantage of the "optional" setting, and do partake regularly and faithfully of Confession, and otherwise adhere to Catholic practice. It's one thing, though, to say, "I do these things because I believe in them," and quite another to say, "I believe these things because the Church teaches that they are true, and I trust her to be the repository of truth." You may begin, as an Anglican, at Point A, but to be a Catholic you must end at Point B.
ADDENDUM: These observations aren't meant in the spirit of "dissing" Anglicanism. Many of my dearest friends, &c., not to mention that I owe my hunger for Catholicism to my experience as an Anglican. I'm merely trying to fumble my way through arguments being raised and, I think, misperceptions being trotted out with regard to Rome's intentions in this matter. People seem to object to these new initiatives on the grounds that the Pope seems to expect the people taking advantage of them actually to become Catholic, not just Anglicans who can go to Communion at St. Peter's. And, well, yes, I think that is the deal, though of course nobody's forced to take His Holiness up on it.
MORE: Useful commentary from Taylor Marshall here, here, and here.
Mantilla Splains It All For You
As does Tertium Quid. See also this.
Not to mention the Bovina Bloviator: here, here, and here.
And Argent By the Tiber.
Creative Minority Report Tells It Like . . . Uh . . . What It Must Look Like To Some People.
MORE: Argent by the Tiber on Repatriating Anglican Music
Argent represents my feelings exactly: I'm too much a Latin-Rite Catholic at this point to want to be anywhere else. The move from Anglicanism to Catholicism is a conversion, not a lateral kind of ecclesial relocation, and I have no desire to go back.
A number of Continuing Anglicans cite Rome's need for "more reforms" as an impediment to their consideration of such a -- well, from the conversation, I gather that they regard the move to Rome as precisely the sort of lateral move that I think it isn't. This position has its basis, of course, in the belief that they're already Catholic, the evidence for which is that they practice what the Church has practiced for 2,000 years. Though I'm not myself a theologian -- I'll have to consult the member of my household who is -- my instinct is not to find this convincing.
On the one hand, it's what everyone claims to do. It is the claim of that kind of "Mere Christianity" which a Presbyterian practices. On the other hand, while they themselves may adhere strictly to Catholic practice, the Anglican tradition has not done so consistently, across the board. It has maintained Apostolic Succession (though there are Catholics who would argue with that), but its history has been as full of Mr. Collinses as of Cardinal Newmans. And tellingly, the Cardinal Newmans swam the Tiber.
But about those reforms. They are in motion already: witness the release of the Motu Proprio regarding the use of the Tridentine Mass, and the Holy Father's keen interest in good liturgy.
Visit New Liturgical Movement.
Related Post: On Conversion, and On the Validity, Or Not, of Anglican Orders
Help! I've Fallen
And now my safety-alert necklace is choking me!
What do we want? Peace of mind!
When can we buy it? Never, apparently.
What do we want? Peace of mind!
When can we buy it? Never, apparently.
Ebaywatch: It's Still October
Still time to find some beautiful rosaries --
Like this one.
Pricey by my standards, but beautiful!
I've never seen a rosary ring this pretty before.
If anybody out there's still got a turntable . . .
A rather sweet little vintage mother-of-pearl rosary with case, for a buck.
And another, for more than a buck.
An unusually lovely old rosary box.
An even more gorgeous set
Who were they? What did they do when this sitting was over, and they stood up? Where did they go?
("The chewdren of Stone'enge! 'oo were they? Wot did they . . . do?" Can't help channeling that voice a little . . . )
Like this one.
Pricey by my standards, but beautiful!
I've never seen a rosary ring this pretty before.
If anybody out there's still got a turntable . . .
A rather sweet little vintage mother-of-pearl rosary with case, for a buck.
And another, for more than a buck.
An unusually lovely old rosary box.
An even more gorgeous set
Who were they? What did they do when this sitting was over, and they stood up? Where did they go?
("The chewdren of Stone'enge! 'oo were they? Wot did they . . . do?" Can't help channeling that voice a little . . . )
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
News of the Pointy-Toed
Will Barbie Ever Look Like Real Human Being? Latest Attempts Founder
I can't decide which mystifies me more: that after fifty years, there are still people who expect a Barbie doll to look like an actual flesh-and-blood human female, or that after fifty years, Mattel still can't manage to pull it off.
I can't decide which mystifies me more: that after fifty years, there are still people who expect a Barbie doll to look like an actual flesh-and-blood human female, or that after fifty years, Mattel still can't manage to pull it off.
Homeschooling Salon Style
Hipsters Get With Program, Exercise School Choice, Experience Felicitous Results.
I'd say who'da thunk it, except that I've known people like this for years: essentially secular folks doing what we were doing, except that the deities interacting with Odysseus in their children's minds were Hindu ones (or earth goddesses) instead of Jesus.
Like us, these Salon parents have pulled together a curriculum around an amalgamated center: their children's personalities and interests, tempered by their own parental vision of what constitutes an education. And -- news flash -- it works.
via my friend David Mills
P.S. If I'm leaving this hanging a bit, it's because Aelred's standing here beside me being interviewed over the phone by Radio Free Europe, on the subject of the new canonical arrangements whereby Anglicans may be received into full communion with Rome. It's hard not to eavesdrop. No idea when the spot will air; at any rate, that's one way to start a day.
I'd say who'da thunk it, except that I've known people like this for years: essentially secular folks doing what we were doing, except that the deities interacting with Odysseus in their children's minds were Hindu ones (or earth goddesses) instead of Jesus.
Like us, these Salon parents have pulled together a curriculum around an amalgamated center: their children's personalities and interests, tempered by their own parental vision of what constitutes an education. And -- news flash -- it works.
via my friend David Mills
P.S. If I'm leaving this hanging a bit, it's because Aelred's standing here beside me being interviewed over the phone by Radio Free Europe, on the subject of the new canonical arrangements whereby Anglicans may be received into full communion with Rome. It's hard not to eavesdrop. No idea when the spot will air; at any rate, that's one way to start a day.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
The Post of What's Happening Now
This morning I took Amicus to have his birthmark removed. It was a nevus sebaceous, a grainy cluster of cells on his scalp, yellowish-pink in color and, in recent years, beginning to show signs of continental drift as he grew. It had always vaguely bothered him, especially when his hair was cut too short; people tended to ask him what he'd done to get that big scab on the side of his head. We'd known from the time he was several months old that one day, preferably before the onset of puberty, he'd have to have it taken off, and today was the day. Ten minutes in the chair with Dr. Perfect Hair and the nurses and the big needle, and now instead of the nevus sebaceous he has a tidy scar like the seam on a baseball. It itches, but he seems to consider it an improvement.
On the way home I asked him whether, having had the nevus so long, he had been at all sorry to say goodbye to that part of himself.
"Uh, no."
He said unambivalently.
Icons and Curiosities closed up shop today rather abruptly. That is, I knew it was coming, but I didn't know that this was the day, and would have loved to have figured that out BEFORE spending the entire afternoon writing one last Ebay-shopping post and not after. At any rate, the blog is still there for the time being, though the link is off the navigation bar at the site, and I won't be posting any more there. Now to think of something to say that isn't about Ebay . . .
What other news, what other news? We have recovered from a household-wide bout of flu, Epiphany has been studying for her Latin midterm -- "LATIN WANTS YOUR BRAIN!" declares an anonymous message on our kitchen whiteboard -- and Aelred, after two decades, at least, of perfect driving, last week rear-ended a truck with a trailer hitch.
He didn't hit the other guy hard, just enough to punch the trailer hitch through his own front bumper and into his radiator, effecting damage of some magnitude. His car, for anyone not already familiar with us and our vehicular situation, is a 1995 Mazda MPV minivan, bought with our last three thousand dollars on our return from England in 2003. It had 120,000 miles on it when we bought it; last week or the week before, it turned over 200,000. As the family researcher, I had settled on an MPV as our car of choice long before we ever saw this one, because 1) Mazda makes as good a car as Honda or Toyota, but 2) people don't seem generally to realize this, with the result that Mazda vehicles, as used cars, are worth virtually nothing. I could have bought a Honda Odyssey of the same vintage as the MPV for roughly twice what the MPV cost us. And the MPV, good as any big-name-brand car, ran and ran and ran and ran and ran, burning a little oil, maybe, but never failing to start in the morning, until now.
These things happen. Bizarrely, the things which have happened in the wake of this big thing which has happened are the kinds of things which do happen to us, which is not a little unsettling.
First of all, Father rang up at the end of last week to see whether we'd all died of the flu yet, and whether, if by some chance we were still living, we needed groceries. We had a jolly old forty-five minute conversation, I in my kitchen and he in his car in the Bi-Lo parking lot, the upshot of which was that while we didn't need groceries, we had had this thing with the car.
"Oh," he said without hesitation, "you know you can use my car."
Now, this was pretty generous, even if he does have the car of a brother priest who's in Rome this year gathering dust under the carport beside his own. The car is gathering dust, that is, not the other Father. Every time I've seen him he has looked distinctly, even impeccably, un-dusty. And whatever it is he's gone to Rome to do, gathering dust probably isn't part of it.
Anyway, raise your hand if your pastor has ever offered to buy you groceries personally. Raise your hand if your pastor has ever lent you his personal car for, like, five days.
Anyone? Anyone?
So there's that. Meanwhile, on Saturday, Aelred rang up our local mechanic to see if he could bring the big van in for an oil change. "Oh," said the mechanic, "I was just thinking about you."
Raise your hand if your mechanic ever says he's been thinking about you.
The reason our mechanic had been thinking about Aelred was that the mangled MPV had had to go to the body shop, but it had first made a stop at this mechanic's, and he had beheld the damage. A trained mechanic could take one look at that car and predict that the cost of repairs was going to be greater than the current blue-book value of the car. Actually, a trained monkey could probably have taken one look at that car and come to the same conclusion, but we didn't happen to have a trained monkey on hand, which is too bad, because maybe a monkey could be convinced to fix a car for free. This is not normally the case with a mechanic.
But our mechanic, as I say, had been thinking about us. And what he had been thinking was this: his mother-in-law has a van for sale, a 1995 Mazda MPV, for $400. It doesn't run right now, because it needs a fuel pump and some new tires, but what he was thinking, when he was thinking about us, was that if we had our mangled van towed over to his place, he could take the practically-new fuel pump out of our old van and put it on the $400 one. Ditto the practically-new tires and the rear bench seat, which the $400 van is also missing. He would, he was thinking, do all that for free. Get outta town, trained monkey. And then we would have a van that runs, plus a van for parts to keep the other van running, and his mother-in-law would have $400 to buy her medicine this month.
We haven't done it yet, but I think it's what we're going to do. And, as I say, this is the kind of thing which generally does happen to us at the brink of whatever kind of disaster we happen to be standing at the brink of on any given day. It is very strange how these things happen, and I am slowly learning not to panic.
Finally, for dinner tonight I made a dish of diced kielbasa, potatoes, and sweet onions; black-eyed peas; and stewed apples and cranberries in my cast-iron skillet. Some part of this meal has turned all our teeth blue.
On the way home I asked him whether, having had the nevus so long, he had been at all sorry to say goodbye to that part of himself.
"Uh, no."
He said unambivalently.
Icons and Curiosities closed up shop today rather abruptly. That is, I knew it was coming, but I didn't know that this was the day, and would have loved to have figured that out BEFORE spending the entire afternoon writing one last Ebay-shopping post and not after. At any rate, the blog is still there for the time being, though the link is off the navigation bar at the site, and I won't be posting any more there. Now to think of something to say that isn't about Ebay . . .
What other news, what other news? We have recovered from a household-wide bout of flu, Epiphany has been studying for her Latin midterm -- "LATIN WANTS YOUR BRAIN!" declares an anonymous message on our kitchen whiteboard -- and Aelred, after two decades, at least, of perfect driving, last week rear-ended a truck with a trailer hitch.
He didn't hit the other guy hard, just enough to punch the trailer hitch through his own front bumper and into his radiator, effecting damage of some magnitude. His car, for anyone not already familiar with us and our vehicular situation, is a 1995 Mazda MPV minivan, bought with our last three thousand dollars on our return from England in 2003. It had 120,000 miles on it when we bought it; last week or the week before, it turned over 200,000. As the family researcher, I had settled on an MPV as our car of choice long before we ever saw this one, because 1) Mazda makes as good a car as Honda or Toyota, but 2) people don't seem generally to realize this, with the result that Mazda vehicles, as used cars, are worth virtually nothing. I could have bought a Honda Odyssey of the same vintage as the MPV for roughly twice what the MPV cost us. And the MPV, good as any big-name-brand car, ran and ran and ran and ran and ran, burning a little oil, maybe, but never failing to start in the morning, until now.
These things happen. Bizarrely, the things which have happened in the wake of this big thing which has happened are the kinds of things which do happen to us, which is not a little unsettling.
First of all, Father rang up at the end of last week to see whether we'd all died of the flu yet, and whether, if by some chance we were still living, we needed groceries. We had a jolly old forty-five minute conversation, I in my kitchen and he in his car in the Bi-Lo parking lot, the upshot of which was that while we didn't need groceries, we had had this thing with the car.
"Oh," he said without hesitation, "you know you can use my car."
Now, this was pretty generous, even if he does have the car of a brother priest who's in Rome this year gathering dust under the carport beside his own. The car is gathering dust, that is, not the other Father. Every time I've seen him he has looked distinctly, even impeccably, un-dusty. And whatever it is he's gone to Rome to do, gathering dust probably isn't part of it.
Anyway, raise your hand if your pastor has ever offered to buy you groceries personally. Raise your hand if your pastor has ever lent you his personal car for, like, five days.
Anyone? Anyone?
So there's that. Meanwhile, on Saturday, Aelred rang up our local mechanic to see if he could bring the big van in for an oil change. "Oh," said the mechanic, "I was just thinking about you."
Raise your hand if your mechanic ever says he's been thinking about you.
The reason our mechanic had been thinking about Aelred was that the mangled MPV had had to go to the body shop, but it had first made a stop at this mechanic's, and he had beheld the damage. A trained mechanic could take one look at that car and predict that the cost of repairs was going to be greater than the current blue-book value of the car. Actually, a trained monkey could probably have taken one look at that car and come to the same conclusion, but we didn't happen to have a trained monkey on hand, which is too bad, because maybe a monkey could be convinced to fix a car for free. This is not normally the case with a mechanic.
But our mechanic, as I say, had been thinking about us. And what he had been thinking was this: his mother-in-law has a van for sale, a 1995 Mazda MPV, for $400. It doesn't run right now, because it needs a fuel pump and some new tires, but what he was thinking, when he was thinking about us, was that if we had our mangled van towed over to his place, he could take the practically-new fuel pump out of our old van and put it on the $400 one. Ditto the practically-new tires and the rear bench seat, which the $400 van is also missing. He would, he was thinking, do all that for free. Get outta town, trained monkey. And then we would have a van that runs, plus a van for parts to keep the other van running, and his mother-in-law would have $400 to buy her medicine this month.
We haven't done it yet, but I think it's what we're going to do. And, as I say, this is the kind of thing which generally does happen to us at the brink of whatever kind of disaster we happen to be standing at the brink of on any given day. It is very strange how these things happen, and I am slowly learning not to panic.
Finally, for dinner tonight I made a dish of diced kielbasa, potatoes, and sweet onions; black-eyed peas; and stewed apples and cranberries in my cast-iron skillet. Some part of this meal has turned all our teeth blue.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Friday, October 16, 2009
Writing on Air: A Case Against Blogging? UPDATES
From Stefan McDaniel, who writes,
Read the rest.
I'm tempted to agree with this argument, at least in part. As McDaniel notes, what drives a "good" blog is not necessarily good writing, but a principle of constant motion. To drive up traffic stats, you have to keep things moving, moving, moving. You have to pound pound pound out those posts, put the stuff out there at the speed of channel-surfing, day in and day out. Some people seem to excel at this; some of my favorite bloggers manage, by some miracle, to follow widely divergent strands of news and other interests closely enough to report on them seemingly hourly, and still to have something like a personal life, which we know because they write about that, too. And they do it well, and quirkily, which is why I bother with them at all.
I don't know how they do it, though. And I don't really have any burning desire to learn. My experience of doing a very public, if not really high-profile, blog is that I seem to spend hours every day not listening to what my children are saying to me, hours of saying, "Just a minute, be right with you," and still not even remotely approaching the level of action which the successful blog demands. And even after scrounging around for something to write about, a topic-of-the day, what I too often end up with when I hit the "Publish" button is not really adequately reflected-upon, and this bothers me. It's uncomfortably easy to be a public idiot.
Years ago, during an early round of graduate school, I was talking to a mentor of mine about writing on a computer. This wasn't even online writing we were talking about, just word-processing. When I admitted to this elder writer that I did, sometimes, compose poems at the keyboard, she responded, "Yeah, but isn't that just like writing on air?"
Well, yes, it was, and is. For that matter, writing on paper is also like writing on air. The soul lives forever; the written word does not. Even words graven on stone wear away eventually, as the crop of blind headstones in the Lutheran churchyard around the corner from here bears witness. The Greeks knew how to write, and then, in an era of chaos, they forgot. It does not seem incredible to me some days that this culture might be heading in the same direction.
Whether blogging is a cause or a symptom -- well, versions of that conversation lie in slagpiles all around us. In the meantime, the blogs I like best and visit most frequently have little to do with what people generally think of when they think blogsphere. They aren't news blogs or current-event blogs, though they often reference news and current events. They aren't humor blogs, though they're often funny. They aren't strictly religion blogs, though the people who write them are people of faith. They don't exist for the sake of hits or page views, and nobody as far as I know is making money off them.
The blogs I like best exist for conversation, and though the doors are open, as internet doors almost inevitably are, they have attracted and maintained a relatively small core of loyal readers: not the kind of audience advertisers want, maybe, but to my mind the better context for anything like serious and mannerly discussion beyond the level of hammer-and-tongs/what-you-say-is-a-load-of-crap discourse, which has become common currency among strangers on the net. A blog like Light on Dark Water, for example, functions more as a web of epistolary friendships, among people who like to think and talk about religion, books, music, marriage, fog, kudzu, canned chili, and I think zombies, though that part of the conversation took place before I happened along, than as a kind of 24-hour infotainment-a-thon.
Is all of this good or bad for the written word? It's hard to say. It seems that much in our culture mitigates against the written word as a thing of value, including many things which are themselves manifestations of the written word. The only cure, it seems to me, is to keep trying to write well, though it means writing less often. And if blogging offers some incentive to do that, then good. Most of us write with a reader in mind -- or perhaps it's more accurate to say that the conversation in our heads is a dialogue. For me the blog medium is a motivator, to move the dialogue out of my mind and into writing. This at least is something ventured, though it amounts to air in the end.
UPDATES:
Singing is air, too, now that I think about it. Here's another reason I'm grateful for blogging.
And if I tend to link to the same five blogs all the time, well, there's a reason. Sometimes it's not that worth my time to go farther afield.
Interesting counterargument and discussion from Joe Carter and First Thoughts commenters here.
Someone recently encouraged me to write more, because “words aren’t lifeblood. Words are cheap.” Words are certainly held cheap, and the blogosphere has drastically lowered the going rate.
This is a development entirely in conformity with the spirit of the age, which, as Wendell Berry observed, does not ask a man what he can do well but “what he can do fast and cheap.” Berry and I are not alone in thinking that this is a bad state of affairs. It’s no small problem that our society is trying to do very important business with increasingly debased currency.
Read the rest.
I'm tempted to agree with this argument, at least in part. As McDaniel notes, what drives a "good" blog is not necessarily good writing, but a principle of constant motion. To drive up traffic stats, you have to keep things moving, moving, moving. You have to pound pound pound out those posts, put the stuff out there at the speed of channel-surfing, day in and day out. Some people seem to excel at this; some of my favorite bloggers manage, by some miracle, to follow widely divergent strands of news and other interests closely enough to report on them seemingly hourly, and still to have something like a personal life, which we know because they write about that, too. And they do it well, and quirkily, which is why I bother with them at all.
I don't know how they do it, though. And I don't really have any burning desire to learn. My experience of doing a very public, if not really high-profile, blog is that I seem to spend hours every day not listening to what my children are saying to me, hours of saying, "Just a minute, be right with you," and still not even remotely approaching the level of action which the successful blog demands. And even after scrounging around for something to write about, a topic-of-the day, what I too often end up with when I hit the "Publish" button is not really adequately reflected-upon, and this bothers me. It's uncomfortably easy to be a public idiot.
Years ago, during an early round of graduate school, I was talking to a mentor of mine about writing on a computer. This wasn't even online writing we were talking about, just word-processing. When I admitted to this elder writer that I did, sometimes, compose poems at the keyboard, she responded, "Yeah, but isn't that just like writing on air?"
Well, yes, it was, and is. For that matter, writing on paper is also like writing on air. The soul lives forever; the written word does not. Even words graven on stone wear away eventually, as the crop of blind headstones in the Lutheran churchyard around the corner from here bears witness. The Greeks knew how to write, and then, in an era of chaos, they forgot. It does not seem incredible to me some days that this culture might be heading in the same direction.
Whether blogging is a cause or a symptom -- well, versions of that conversation lie in slagpiles all around us. In the meantime, the blogs I like best and visit most frequently have little to do with what people generally think of when they think blogsphere. They aren't news blogs or current-event blogs, though they often reference news and current events. They aren't humor blogs, though they're often funny. They aren't strictly religion blogs, though the people who write them are people of faith. They don't exist for the sake of hits or page views, and nobody as far as I know is making money off them.
The blogs I like best exist for conversation, and though the doors are open, as internet doors almost inevitably are, they have attracted and maintained a relatively small core of loyal readers: not the kind of audience advertisers want, maybe, but to my mind the better context for anything like serious and mannerly discussion beyond the level of hammer-and-tongs/what-you-say-is-a-load-of-crap discourse, which has become common currency among strangers on the net. A blog like Light on Dark Water, for example, functions more as a web of epistolary friendships, among people who like to think and talk about religion, books, music, marriage, fog, kudzu, canned chili, and I think zombies, though that part of the conversation took place before I happened along, than as a kind of 24-hour infotainment-a-thon.
Is all of this good or bad for the written word? It's hard to say. It seems that much in our culture mitigates against the written word as a thing of value, including many things which are themselves manifestations of the written word. The only cure, it seems to me, is to keep trying to write well, though it means writing less often. And if blogging offers some incentive to do that, then good. Most of us write with a reader in mind -- or perhaps it's more accurate to say that the conversation in our heads is a dialogue. For me the blog medium is a motivator, to move the dialogue out of my mind and into writing. This at least is something ventured, though it amounts to air in the end.
UPDATES:
Singing is air, too, now that I think about it. Here's another reason I'm grateful for blogging.
And if I tend to link to the same five blogs all the time, well, there's a reason. Sometimes it's not that worth my time to go farther afield.
Interesting counterargument and discussion from Joe Carter and First Thoughts commenters here.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
From My Reading List
Pentimento on Elizabeth Goudge
Love, Sex, Marriage, Feminism, and Can A Family Live on One Income?
Betty Duffy on Pragmatism and the Past
Frugal Wedding Bells Are Chiming at The Common Room
The Anchoress Reminds Us to Breathe and Be Humble
Not Dead Yet (Though His Vital Signs Are Pretty Darn Faint)
People in Utero
Those Not-At-All-Filthy and Not-Very-English K-niggits of Malta
What Mama Says About the Food-Stamp Challenge
Chanting the Divine Office
Literature, Place and Self at Front Porch Republic
Book-Blogging and Full Disclosure
On Moral Imagination and Being an Oddball
But Don't Your Children Ever Want to Talk to Other People?
Beauty at House Art Journal
Now Here's a Leatherworking Merit Badge Project . . .
Visible Prayers
Okay, really, I'm going to have to unbolt all the bedroom doors and let the children out of pris -- uh, "quiet time."
Meanwhile, you just sit back and enjoy.
Love, Sex, Marriage, Feminism, and Can A Family Live on One Income?
Betty Duffy on Pragmatism and the Past
Frugal Wedding Bells Are Chiming at The Common Room
The Anchoress Reminds Us to Breathe and Be Humble
Not Dead Yet (Though His Vital Signs Are Pretty Darn Faint)
People in Utero
Those Not-At-All-Filthy and Not-Very-English K-niggits of Malta
What Mama Says About the Food-Stamp Challenge
Chanting the Divine Office
Literature, Place and Self at Front Porch Republic
Book-Blogging and Full Disclosure
On Moral Imagination and Being an Oddball
But Don't Your Children Ever Want to Talk to Other People?
Beauty at House Art Journal
Now Here's a Leatherworking Merit Badge Project . . .
Visible Prayers
Okay, really, I'm going to have to unbolt all the bedroom doors and let the children out of pris -- uh, "quiet time."
Meanwhile, you just sit back and enjoy.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Saturday, October 10, 2009
In Which We Sort of Kind of Plan to Return
The leaves around here haven't changed yet, but the still-green trees have a faded look, as if they'd been left out in the sun too long. The house is chilly when we get up in the mornings. Early in the summer, the squirrels pulled all my tomato vines off the halfhearted stakes I'd put up to support them -- note to self: next year do go to the trouble of making string trellises -- and they're still sprawled and twined and snaking all over the ground like something not quite entirely vegetable; they look a little disturbing, but fortunately it's going to get cold before they can take over the world.
Most people I know prefer the transitional seasons, and I'm no exception. I like the going a lot more than I like the getting there, generally. Process, people say, it's all about process. And, yeah, it kind of is. It's all about slogging towards holiness, which means that as much as you'd like to carpe that diem and be present in that moment, you really can't stick around. Miles to go, &c.
All that to say, we're back, sort of. I've spent the last five months in a blogging experiment that hasn't taken off, at least enough to pay for itself; that will be closing up shop in the near future, and although I'll be writing several days a week for a related blog, there are things I like to write about which don't fit there.
Although I've been told that blogging isn't my talent, I like doing it. That is, I like doing it the way I do it: occasionally, and for the sake of writing rather than breaking news. I admire those who do have metabolisms which enable them to live and breathe the internet, but I'm not made like that. This isn't something, frankly, that I can hope to parlay into a career kind of thing, with money and book deals. All the same, I'm not sure it isn't worth doing. "Hobby" isn't quite the word for it, and "vocation" seems a little much -- think of it as a gift, maybe. Not "gift" as in, "Let me tell you how gifted I am," but "gift" as in, "Well, here. I made this. Hope you like it."
Posting here will be not daily but steady, I hope. Subject matter will be, as always, whatever, though as I've discovered I kind of like writing about religious goods on Ebay, and about strange religious news, you can expect more of that.
Anyway, here we are. Welcome back.
Most people I know prefer the transitional seasons, and I'm no exception. I like the going a lot more than I like the getting there, generally. Process, people say, it's all about process. And, yeah, it kind of is. It's all about slogging towards holiness, which means that as much as you'd like to carpe that diem and be present in that moment, you really can't stick around. Miles to go, &c.
All that to say, we're back, sort of. I've spent the last five months in a blogging experiment that hasn't taken off, at least enough to pay for itself; that will be closing up shop in the near future, and although I'll be writing several days a week for a related blog, there are things I like to write about which don't fit there.
Although I've been told that blogging isn't my talent, I like doing it. That is, I like doing it the way I do it: occasionally, and for the sake of writing rather than breaking news. I admire those who do have metabolisms which enable them to live and breathe the internet, but I'm not made like that. This isn't something, frankly, that I can hope to parlay into a career kind of thing, with money and book deals. All the same, I'm not sure it isn't worth doing. "Hobby" isn't quite the word for it, and "vocation" seems a little much -- think of it as a gift, maybe. Not "gift" as in, "Let me tell you how gifted I am," but "gift" as in, "Well, here. I made this. Hope you like it."
Posting here will be not daily but steady, I hope. Subject matter will be, as always, whatever, though as I've discovered I kind of like writing about religious goods on Ebay, and about strange religious news, you can expect more of that.
Anyway, here we are. Welcome back.
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