Half Changed World

I saw this meme at Kaethe’s blog.  She decided not to play, but I was intrigued enough to pick it up (especially since I’m beat from N’s birthday celebrations).  It’s a little more complicated than your basic meme, but not as much work as writing a real post.

The Pharyngula Mutating Genre Meme 

A blogging and scientific experiment.

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is …".

Copy
the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a
limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

• You can leave them exactly as is.
• You can delete any one question.
• You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one
  question. For instance, you could change "The best time travel novel in
  SF/Fantasy is…" to "The best time travel novel in Westerns is…", or
  "The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is…:, or "The best romance
  novel in SF/Fantasy is…".
• You can add a completely new
  question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still
  in the form "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”.

You
must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct,
and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.  Then
answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link
back to the "parent" blog you got them from to
simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember,
though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured
by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of
both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of
successful attempts at reproducing them.

My great-great-grandparent is Pharyngula.
My great-grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My grandparent is The Flying Trilobite.
My parent is Pro-Science (by adoption).

The best time travel short story in SF/Fantasy is:
The Lincoln Train, by Maureen McHugh
 
The best feminist movie in scientific dystopias is:
 Aliens

The best sad song in rock is:
Hallelujah (as sung by Rufus Wainwright in the Shrek soundtrack)
 
The best cult novel in Canadian fiction is:
Not Wanted On the Voyage, by Timothy Findley
 
I’m not going to tag anyone, but anyone who wants to play is invited to do so.  Comment or trackback here if you do.

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.)

A month or so ago, I got an email from FlavorX, asking if I’d be interested in a sample of FlavorIT, their new home kit for adding flavorings to medicine.  I responded with an enthusiastic yes.

I’d heard of FlavorX a couple of years ago, but at the time, they only had products for use by pharmacies.  Pharmacies add the flavorings either free or for a nominal charge, but generally only for prescriptions that they fill — it’s a way to stand out from other companies, in what is basically a saturated market.  But because we have a HMO, we have to get our prescriptions filled at the HMO’s pharmacy — and they don’t do flavorings.  So after much calling around, we finally found a kindhearted pharmacist (at Alexandria Medical Arts, for anyone in the area) who was willing to do it.  (We had our cat’s prescriptions filled there, so they did make some money off of us.)

So, I was thrilled to hear that these flavorings were now available for home use.  But, I didn’t want to post about it until we had actually tried it, and D has been relatively healthy of late.  But the other day, he complained of a stomach ache until we broke out the Zantac, and gave it a try.  The kit comes with a bottle of sweetener and four different flavorings.  I think we did a drop of the sweetener and one of the bubblegum.  He still grimaced at the taste — but he drank it. 

So, if you have a kid who resists taking medicine, I’d definitely give this a try.  The one thing that I wish they did differently is provide a medicine syringe for mixing the flavorings in, rather than a spoon.  The syringe wastes less medicine, and is good for shooting the medicine into the back of the mouth, so there’s less opportunity to taste it.

Leslie Bennetts has been very harsh about people who criticize her book, The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much?, without having read it.  So I’m here to report that I slogged through the whole thing, and now I feel perfectly entitled to criticize it.  Here are my major complaints:

1)  Bennetts says repeatedly that she’s not making a moral judgment about the value of stay-at-home parenting, only pointing out the economic risks of dependency.  But I just don’t believe her.  She refers to stay at home parents as "parasites," to singularly focused lives as "sterile and stultifying," and suggests that the children of such parents will be overly dependent.  As far as I can tell, she believes that devoting your full energies to parenting is waste of brains as much as Linda Hirshman does, but doesn’t have the courage to stand up and say so.

2) Bennetts is unbearably condescending towards Gen X (and Gen Y) women.  She’s fallen hook line and sinker for the story that Gen X women are looking at Boomer Women and rejecting their attempts to "have it all."  So she thinks that Gen Xers are lazy/wimps/expect to have perfection handed to them.  But there’s no evidence that’s true — mothers’ labor force participation has declined slightly from its peak, but is still higher than it was in the 1980s or earlier.

3) She doesn’t take the issues of lower-paid mothers seriously.  In the section on child care, she blithely writes that "the horror stories about negligent or malignant baby-sitters do not reflect the reality of quality child care as those with reasonable means typically experience it."  That’s probably true, if you define reasonable means as earning $60,000 or more a year.  But that’s not most families.  And she rhapsodizes on about the importance of having meaningful intellectually stimulating work, with hardly a nod to the possibility that not everyone has that kind of work.

4) The issue of economic vulnerability is a real one.  While I’ve said here before that I think Bennetts overstates the risk of divorce, she’s totally dead on about the long-term financial consequences of breaks in labor force participation.  But where Ann Crittenden talks about these same issues and asks why should a 5 year interruption in work reduce your earnings for the next 40 years, Bennetts just scolds women for making bad choices, even as she quotes people like Pamela Stone as saying that these were constrained choices.

Towards the end of the book, Bennetts quotes a working mother who reports on what her pediatrician said: "I have taken care of thousands of children from all kinds of backgrounds, and the one consistent thing in raising well-adjusted children was parents who were happy with their choices."   Pity that Bennetts didn’t seem to hear what she was saying.

Some interesting conversation going on at 11d, Asymmetrical Information, and Raising WEG about the ethics of hiring people to clean your house.  Long time readers may remember that I’ve written quite a bit about housework before.

I don’t think there’s anything inherent to housecleaning that makes it less moral to hire someone to vacuum your floors or scrub your toilets than to hire someone to mow your lawn or cook dinner.  And while Jody’s points about the lousy pay that most housecleaners get are totally on target, there’s a huge swath of the economy that is just as underpaid, but not as visible.  And most of us eat at restaurants without interrogating them as to what the busboys are making.

We don’t use a housecleaning service these days (we got a roomba!), but I didn’t feel guilty when we did.  My personal moral line is that I won’t use one of the big services (e.g. Merry Maids, that sort of thing), because too little of the money that you pay goes to the people doing the dirty work.  (And Barbara Ehrenreich also convinced me that they don’t get the house particularly clean.)  I know a few people who have worked as housecleaners, and while it’s hard work for not a whole lot of money, the fact that they have multiple employers gives them a degree of independence that lots of low-wage workers don’t have. (I do think the DC area is probably atypical, in that the Zoe Baird
history has created a real market for housecleaners and nannies who are
legally allowed to work and are reporting their income for taxes.)

The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism has a really good action packet you can download with information about ethical treatment of domestic workers.  It talks about things you can do, from treating any workers that you hire justly, to advocating for expansions of various labor standards to include domestic workers.  It also includes a link to this article from Lilith magazine that offers a Jewish feminist perspective on hiring a housecleaner.

The holidays are still 2+ months away, and we’re already drowning in catalogs.  It’s clutter that we don’t need, and it’s bad for the environment.

I went to the Direct Marketing Association website and asked to be taken off their lists.  (They charge you $1 for the privilege, which ticks me off.)  That helps with the random catalogs from companies I’ve never heard of, but doesn’t stop catalogs that you’ve bought from in the past.  The problem is that I do like ordering from companies like LL Bean and Oriental Trading Company, but I do so from their website, and I don’t need (or want) to get a monthly catalog from them.  So I’ve been calling one or two companies a day and asking them to take me off their lists.

In general, the process has been pretty painless.  But Lilian Vernon was sufficiently annoying that it makes me far less likely to order from them in the future.  You call, and get an electronic voice that asks you what you want to do.  Then it asks you to read it your customer number off the catalog.  Then it asks you to confirm that your address is… (whatever they have in the system.)  Only then does it connect you to a live operator… who proceeds to ask for your customer number again, and for you to repeat your address to her.

Update: Via Aggregating the Fascinating, I found Catalog Choice, a free online site to submit requests to be removed from a catalog.

The other morning I asked D to get dressed, and when I went into his room 10 minutes later to check on him, I found him sitting in his underwear reading.  I just had to laugh, because I can’t tell you the number of times my mom found me with one sock on, reading or just staring into space.  While it can be annoying to have to repeat myself 3 times before it registers on him that I’ve even said anything, I’m just pleased as punch that he’s becoming a real reader.

On the other hand, I’m sort of selfishly bummed by his choice of reading material, which is almost exclusively manga.  He’s read all the Naruto that the library carries, and is now working his way through the Yu-Gi-Oh books.  It’s not that I think that comics aren’t "real" reading –but it’s not the stories that I dreamed about sharing with my children.  D still wants to be read to, but he’s less and less willing to let me pick the stories, and has almost no patience for chapter books of any sort.

Added to clarify: I’m thrilled that he’s reading, regardless of the content.  But there are so many books that I was personally looking forward to reading with him that he’s not interested in….  He won’t watch baseball with me either.

The good news is that the House passed the SCHIP reauthorization bill.  The bad news is that the 265-159 vote margin is not going to be enough to override a veto.  Congress will presumably include SCHIP in the continuing resolution that it will need to pass by September 1, and it will continue at current levels until at least sometime next year, probably until 2009.  That’s going to mean real cuts in some states.

Here’s the roll call.  What immediately jumped out at me is that my representative, Tom Davis, is one of the Republicans who voted against the original House bill but for the compromise bill.  I had been wondering about that after getting his response to my email plea for SCHIP last week, which said, in part:

"H.R.
3162 was not SCHIP.  It was an excessive expansion of a good program, an expansion that could undermine
the program’s effectiveness and a backdoor effort to move toward government run health care….   

Given
the wide range of problems with this legislation I voted against it when it came before me in the House.
It passed, however, by a vote of 225-204.  The Senate passed a narrower expansion of the SCHIP program.
I am hopeful that as we proceed to a conference we will return to the core principles established in
the original SCHIP."

I assume that Davis is going to run for the Senate seat that John Warner is vacating.  I think this vote will hurt him in the Republican primary, but help him in the general election if he gets nominated.  Or maybe I’m being too cynical — many Republican voters support health care for kids too.

Added: I heard this afternoon that there’s been another recall of Thomas trains for lead-based paint.  Unlike the first go-around, we do have some of the affected pieces, and will send them in for an exchange.  But I still wish that the American public was half as outraged about SCHIP as it is about lead in toys.  Nick Anderson got it right a month ago.

This week’s book is A Class Apart: Prodigies, Pressure, and Passion Inside One of America’s Best High Schools, by Alec Klein.  Klein, a Washington Post journalist, spent a year at Stuyvesant High School, one of New York’s competitive math and science high schools.  He tells the stories of a handful of students and teachers as the school year progresses, occasionally cutting back for a bigger-picture look at the questions such as the value of gifted and talented education and the huge under-representation of black and Hispanic students.

In topic and approach, A Class Apart bears a striking resemblance to another recent book, The Overachievers, in which Alexandra Robbins reports on three semesters she spent with students at Walt Whitman High School in Montgomery County.  (Both authors attended the schools they wrote about.)  But I whipped through A Class Apart in a couple of days, while I gave up on The Overachievers after finishing less than 100 pages in the three weeks the library allowed me.  So what’s the difference?

• I also went to Stuy, so I had more of a personal interest in the book.  It was interesting to see what things had changed (more racial divisions in the student body, far more organized prepping for the entrance exams) and what hadn’t (Sing!, Ms. Lorenzo, the existence of an assistant principal who would approve schedule changes for the desperate).
• Klein included teachers’ experiences which made for a greater variety of stories.
• Klein clearly felt a great deal of affection for the students, the teachers, and for the school as an institution.  I didn’t get that from Robbins.
• I think Klein is just a better writer than Robbins.

Klein’s book doesn’t really have a thesis — it’s just descriptive.  To the extent that it has an argument, it’s a plea that there ought to be more schools like Stuyvesant.  By that he means schools that push bright kids to excel, but he also means schools where parents are involved (sometimes to a fault) and schools where students feel a sense of ownership (again, sometimes to a fault) and teachers and administrators are willing to bend the rules in the interest of learning.