Half Changed World

It is 10:43.  I have a pile of clean clothes to put away, a load of laundry in the washer, and one in the dryer, and a sink full of pantyhose soaking.  I have a pot of beef stew and a pot of red lentil-chickpea soup simmering on the stove.  I have played "runaway dinner" with N and read to D about opals, amber and pearls (from Ranger Rick), and then showed both boys my jewelry collection.  And I posted pictures of our kitchen on the house blog.

(And before you ask why T isn’t doing some of this, so far this week he’s painted the living and dining rooms, repaired the dryer, and visited a kitchen design center.  In addition to the usual chasing after the boys, driving them around, stopping them from killing each other, etc.)

I was a little concerned that the boys would be disappointed in their Halloween haul, as the houses are far more spread out in our new neighborhood than our old one.  They did hit fewer houses, but lots of people were giving out full-size candy bars, so I don’t think they feel deprived.

T gets all the credit for the costumes.Bonus points if you know who D is dressed as — he was quite annoyed that very few of the adults knew the answer.

The past week just kicked my *ss.  Busy at work, terrible traffic due to the rain, lost power 5 minutes after I got home one evening, had to put the cat to sleep.  And it really doesn’t help me when it’s totally dark out when I’m getting up.

I like the idea of trick-or-treating before it’s totally dark out, but otherwise, I think this extended daylight savings hours idea stinks.  My boys keep asking me, with quizzical expressions, whether it’s really morning as I shake them awake.  The streetlights are still on as the high school bus rolls down the street.

And does anyone really think that it saves power? 

Last summer, I wrote about two social lending sites, one for money and one for stuff.  Borrowme seems to have gone under, without ever building up any steam.  But Prosper seems to still be functioning well, and hasn’t been totally swamped by the mortgage meltdown.

When I wrote about it, I hadn’t put any of my money into Prosper, but I did so in the fall.  I’ve now made 36 loans over the course of the past year, all of them for $50.  Two of them have already been repaid (ahead of schedule) and two of them are 3+ months late, and barring a miracle, likely to go into default.  Netting out the defaults, I’ve made a little more interest than I’d have gotten from the bank, but the difference is probably under $40.  So, not a particularly good return on the time spent reading through loan requests.  Although there’s a certain fascination with reading people’s stories…  I still think the real potential is for loans among people with 2nd and 3rd degree real life connections, but I see little evidence that’s what’s happening.

I’m slowly moving almost all of my real banking into the online world.  My main checking account is now at Ebank, which I love because I can take out money from any ATM without a fee.  I’m trying to figure out whether I think it’s unethical to keep our savings at Countrywide, which is offering awesome savings rates, presumably because they’re desperate for deposits to keep from sinking under all their bad loans.  (Yes, it’s FDIC insured.)  But they’ve got a reputation for being particularly unhelpful to borrowers in trouble.

D has been saying that he wants to save his money for a Nintendo DS.  I’m not thrilled at the idea of a handheld game system, but if he has the willpower to save that kind of money on a $1 a week allowance, we’re going to allow it.  I’m trying to convince him to open an account at a nearby bank that offers generous rates on kids’ accounts, but he likes having the piles of coins to play with and count.   We need to figure out if they offer safe deposit boxes — if so, we’re going to say goodbye and good riddance to SunTrust.

I was at a conference last week on accounts, assets and access.  It was a real eye-opener for me.  Call me naive, but I hadn’t realized how much money banks were making off of poor people on overdraft and late fees.  Now that  it’s been pointed out, it seems obvious — the dollar amounts that low-income people borrow are typically so low that even high interest rates don’t amount to much in dollar terms.  The killers are the fees.

Here’s an example of a card advertised as available to people with bad credit.  Not bad interest — only 9.9% APR.  But check out the fees — $29 set up fee, $95 one-time fee, $48 annual fee, $7 monthly fee.  And if you’re in this situation, you probably don’t have this cash on hand, so all of these fees are charged to the card when you get it.  So if you get the minimum possible credit limit of $250, your card will come to you with a balance of $179 and available credit of $71.  Oh, and they charge $11 for each autodraft (which actually costs them less to process than a check) and $25 each time they raise your credit limit.

Compared to that, a payday loan with a 100% interest rate doesn’t sound like such a bad deal.

In writing yesterday’s post, I realized something funny. Somewhere along the way, after giving up on being "normal," it happened anyway…

At least from the outside, I look pretty darn normal: I’m in a monogamous heterosexual marriage, in a house in the suburbs with a mortgage, two kids and a minivan….  Needing glasses made me stick out in third grade, but are pretty common now.  I still read too much and don’t wear enough makeup, but in grown up life, that doesn’t seem to matter a whole lot. 

In the movie Pump Up The Volume, the Christian Slater character has a line where he says "At some point, I realized I was never going to be normal. And I said, f— it, so be it."  I saw this movie with a friend from high school, at a theater somewhere in the middle of Queens, and I laughed so hard at this line that I literally fell off my chair and the few other people in the theater all turned around to stare at me.

I was reminded of this line by Laura at 11d’s comment this weekend that "I think it helps that I have never placed a whole lot of stock in normality."  It made me realize that while I’ve long ago made my peace with being weird, I’m not quite there yet with respect to my kids.  I want them to be happy.  D’s already come home saying that kids have teased him, and I know that’s part of life, but I still want to strangle them.

D says they call him short. And you know what?  D is short, and he’s probably always going to be short.  Physically, he seems to take after me, and I’m short. Plus he’s on inhaled steroids for his asthma.  So what can he do?  He can ignore it, or try to turn it into a joke.  He can tell them they hurt his feelings, or find other kids to hang out with.  He can try to fight the kids who tease him, or tell a teacher.  Mostly I think he needs to get a little thicker skinned, but I don’t think that’s something you can learn by being told — you need to figure it out yourself.

He’s also said that kids laughed at him because he was licking the sweat off of himself after they were running.  I had to work hard not to laugh myself when he said that.  D can’t control that he’s short, but I don’t think it’s crazy to think that he could choose to save licking his own sweat for when he’s in private. I wouldn’t suggest that someone pretend not to be smart, or hide her sexual orientation in order to fit in, but this doesn’t seem like such a fundamental thing.

When we were talking about Madeline L’Engle after her death, one of my friends who does a lot of work with gifted kids commented that Meg clearly thinks it makes sense to pretend not to be as smart as she really is; she only gets in trouble because Charles Wallace is totally incapable of doing so, and Meg gets in fights defending him.  The problem with pretending is it’s hard work, and you miss out on friendships with the people who might actually like you the way you are, and if you’re good enough at pretending you sometimes forget who you really are.

The best fiction I’ve ever read about these issues is a comic called Zot! by Scott McCloud. Zot is a teenage superhero from a parallel dimension, but in the last 8 or 9 episodes that McCloud wrote, he gets stuck on our Earth and hangs out with his not-quite-girlfriend Jenny and her group of weirdo high school friends.  They’ve never been published as a trade paperback, because the press that put out the earlier volumes of Zot! went under.  I just found out that HarperCollins is going to publish all of the black and white Zot! episodes next year, as a single volume.  I’m really pleased.  (The Zot! book is now available for pre-order.)

Posts like this one, at Corporate Mommy, intimidate the heck out of me.   Geez, they did that all themselves?  I can paint a room and replace the flappy part of a toilet, and that’s about the limit of my home improvement skills.  Come on, I grew up in an NYC apartment — when something broke, you called the super.  So I liked the article in this Sunday’s Washington Post magazine about a woman who bit the bullet and learned to do some electrical work around her house.

T’s a bit more skilled than I am, but not as much as I sometimes think he should be.  Not because he has a Y chromosome, but because his father is pretty handy.  But he had bad experiences "helping" his father as a teenager.  That said, he’s become a fair hand with a solder iron since we bought the house.  His father showed him how to do one and the first one he did took him about 3 hours, but since the house had essentially no grounded plugs or GFCIs when we got it, there were lots of opportunities to practice.

Fundamentally, those are the two elements that you need to learn most hands-on skills — someone to show you how to do it, and the opportunity to practice.   In general, we don’t have either for home improvements, which is why we’ve spent the last two months sending emails back and forth with the guy we’re trying to get to do our bathroom.  (One of the lighting fixtures fell out of the ceiling tonight, so I’m hoping that we can expedite this process a bit.)  I didn’t learn how to do crafts as a child, either, and have mostly
self-taught those, but the difference is that I don’t really mind having a
sloppy quilt where none of the corners quite line up stuffed into a closet.  I don’t want to live with a kitchen where the cabinets don’t line up for the next 20 years.

See also: The Simple Dollar on The Do It Yourself Dilemna

The Washington Post today had a front-page story on a recent poll that found that 60 percent of working mothers said that part-time work would be the ideal situation for them.  This is an increase of 12 percent since 1997.

It’s hard to know what to make of this finding since, as the newspaper article points out, only about 1/4 of working mothers work part-time, and that hasn’t increased in the past decade. The question asked was "considering everything, what would be the ideal situation for you, working full-time, working-part time, or not working at all outside the home?"  It’s hard to know how people interpreted that — if people thought about a hypothetical part-time job that paid as much (per hour) as a full-time job, with benefits and interesting work, or if they thought the part-time jobs that are actually out there.  Who wouldn’t want the "have your cake and eat it too" version of part-time work?*

I know I’ve said that at some point I’d like to cut back to part-time (probably 3/5 or 4/5 time) work.  I’d like to spend more time with the boys, and I’d like to have more time to do all the other things (reading, blogging, cooking, hanging out on the lake) that I never have enough time to do.  And I could even do it at my job without it being a major career-limiting move — Rachel Schumacher, who is quoted in the article about her part-time job, works for my organization.

So why don’t I?  Money is the most obvious reason.  I took a paycut when I took this job, and while we’re doing ok, it would be hard to cut our budget by another 20 percent.  T could presumably get a job that would fill the gap, but it would be tricky to align our hours.  This will likely be more manageable when the boys are both in school, and I suspect that we’re headed in that direction (although it will in part depend on how much the market value of T’s professional skills have degraded with his time out of the workforce).

But I also suspect that I’m driven enough that I’d have trouble cutting back on my work commitments.  Take next week for an example.  T has someplace else he needs to be for 2 days– we’ve known about this for months, and I’ve planned to take them off from work to hang out with the boys.  But Monday I learned about a meeting on an issue area that I’ve been trying to get into for the past year. And of course it’s scheduled for one of the days that I’m supposed to be off.  My boss literally didn’t say a word, but I knew I should be there.  So I scrambled, and have lined up some childcare for that morning.  I have a feeling that I’d wind up working at least some of the time as often as not on my days off.

* Well, fathers apparently.  Only 12 percent of fathers said that part-time work would be the ideal situation for them.  But, interestingly, 16 percent said that not working outside the home at all would be the ideal situation for them.  That’s lower than the figure for mothers (29 percent), but I think it’s fascinating that fathers were more likely to chose "not working" than "part-time work" and mothers were more likely to choose "part-time work" than "not working."  Does that mean that there’s more interest among men in "reverse traditional families" than in "equally shared parenting"?  Or that more dads still think that staying home is a permanent vacation?

N is at a stage where he desperately wants to be a big boy, or even an adult.  There are so many things that he’s old enough to understand that they’d be fun, but just isn’t big enough to do (cross the street by himself, swim to the deep end, pour himself a glass of milk).  And it’s made worse by having an older brother who can do many of these things.  And who doesn’t hesitate to point out that he’ll always be older. "And when you’re MY age, I’ll be NINE!!"  N has decided that he’s not little any more, he’s "medium."  And maybe next week he’ll be big.

I found myself humming Circle Game last night — "Words like, when you’re older, must appease him/ And promises of someday make his dreams."  Because I know it seems to him like it’s taking forever for him to grow up, but to me it seems like he was a baby in my arms just yesterday.

The song reminded me that we should try capturing fireflies in a jar to make a lantern.  I found a jar and punched holes in the lids.  I explained to the boys that we had to be very gentle with the fireflies, and that when it was bedtime we’d let them go.  (We’re not as brutal as Christopher, but we’re not as tenderhearted as Lyra.)   And I put some ivy in the jar so they’d have something to sit on.

And then we waited.  And waited.  And eventually the fireflies came out, and we caught some and popped them in the jar.  But the darn things wouldn’t light up.  We tried shaking the jar, and we tried leaving it alone, and we tried bringing them into the dark.  And they wouldn’t light up, except for the one that escaped from the jar and flew around D’s room.  Finally, we gave up and let them go, and then they lit up.  I have no idea what we were doing wrong. 

My mother in-law is getting a new car, and she very kindly offered to give us her old one.  It’s 4 years newer than our second car, and was a much nicer car in the first place.  The catch is that it’s a stick shift, and I haven’t driven one in approximately 11 years.  Ok, everyone promises it will come back to me.  I spent some time practicing in an empty parking lot, and then last week I started using it to drive to the metro station.

Overall, it’s gone pretty well.  Yes, I’ve stalled out at stop lights a few times, but overall the drivers around me have been remarkably gracious about waiting for me to get the car moving again.  After a week and a half, I’m doing a lot better, and am no longer terrified.

Or at least my conscious mind is no longer terrified.  My body seems to have a different opinion.  Every day last week, I needed to use the bathroom pretty much nonstop from when I woke up until I left for work, and by Friday, I felt sick pretty much all day.  I was fine over the weekend (when I drove our automatic transmission minivan) and then my gut acted up again Monday morning.  Not fun.

So, I spent some time on Monday googling, and wound up downloading two MP3s from this hypnosis site, one on stopping irritable bowel syndrome,* and one on overcoming fear of driving.  Since the problem was clearly originating in the mind-body
link, it seemed logical that was a good place to start trying to fix
it.  And telling myself that I was being ridiculous didn’t seem to be
helping.  I’m pretty sure that hypnosis can’t hurt, and the downloads are cheap enough that it was worth a try.  I listened to them on both Monday and Tuesday, and yesterday my gut was better and today was better yet.

I told T, and he said he was glad it was helping, even if it was the placebo effect.  My response was "what exactly do you think is the difference between hypnosis and the placebo effect?"  As far as I can tell, hypnosis is essentially a way of harnessing the power of mind over body that makes the placebo effect work.  I suppose you could test whether hypnosis directed at a specific goal was more effective than just putting someone in a trance and not making specific suggestions, but that would only work if you were able to get people into enough of a trance that they didn’t know what you had said.  (I  personally have no idea what’s on either MP3 I listened to between the introductory section and the ending, but I’ve had that happen in meetings too.)

* The MP3 begins with a disclaimer that only a doctor can diagnose IBS and that you should seek medical treatment, etc. etc.