Half Changed World

Did anyone else try the cold-brewed ice coffee recipe from the Times?  I thought it was incredibly weak, even when I diluted it less than the 1:1 that they suggested.  Bleah.

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.

Quick reviews of two quick reads:

• What the Dead Know, by Laura Lippman.  A woman claims to be one of a pair of sisters who disappeared more than 20 years ago.  She knows things that no one else could know, but seems to be hiding something.  I’ve enjoyed Lippman’s Tess Monaghan mysteries, so picked this up even though the premise seemed a little too Oprah-ish for my taste.  I read the whole thing in about 24 hours. 
• A Map of the World, by Jane Hamilton.  This one really was an Oprah book club pick.  I picked it up a couple of years ago, and read the heartbreaking opening section, and decided that I couldn’t bear to read a story about the death of a child.  It was on the trade-a-book shelf at work, though, so I gave it another shot on a recent business trip.  It’s good, although nothing in the rest of the book matches the crystalline painful brilliance of the first chapters.

So, what’s on your reading list?  What should I be looking for at the library?

At D’s end of the kindergarten year ceremony, the kids performed a little song about all the things they had learned during the year, and were each called upon to say what they want to be when they grow up.

D wants to be a scientist who builds rovers.  He explained that a rover is a kind of robot that goes to other planets and if anything bad happens to the rover, it means you can’t send people.  (Yes, the Mars imax movie did make an impression on him, why do you ask?)

Of the other kids in the class who didn’t totally mumble their answers, the choices were:

• a soldier who drives a truck (said with truck driving action)
• a football player
• air force (said with plane flying action, which looks a lot like truck driving action)
• nurse (said with a simpering "Doctor, here are your instruments")
• ballerina (said with a pirouette)
• a cheerleader (said with a jump)
• a cheerleader (also said with a jump).

I found this intensely depressing.  Yes, I know they’re 6 years old, and "when I grow up" is further away than "once upon a time."  But it felt like they’re pulling from an awfully limited deck.  I don’t know; maybe I wouldn’t have felt so strongly about the exact same answers coming from a middle-class group of kids.

I think my dad still has hanging in his office the drawing I did when I was about that age of the different tools that a doctor uses, labeled in an adult hand, but clearly to my dictation (it says things like "this is the pointy part that shoots out.")  And no, I’m not a doctor.  But it was within the realm of what I could imagine.

Laura at Geeky Mom has a series of posts up about why she’s not a scientist.  There’s a lot of good evidence that girls tend not to take the prerequisite courses math and science in high school, shutting off options before they’ve really considered them.   That wasn’t me. 

In high school, I took calculus, Honors Bio, AP Chemistry (you had to dissect a cat in AP Bio, and that really wasn’t something I wanted to do.)  And then I went to college, and took the minimum 3 classes in hard math and science needed to graduate.  I was still interested in the topics, but where in HS I could take math and history and English and French and a science and economics and still have room for pottery, in college, you couldn’t take more than 4 or 5 classes a term.  And the introductory level science classes were notorious for being both boring and difficult.  And up a hill a 15 minute walk from the rest of campus.  By then I was pretty sure I didn’t want to be a doctor.  So I signed up for the "great books" set of humanities classes and never looked back. 

A few weeks ago, I went looking online for a table to put in my home office to give me some additional workspace.  One click led to another, and eventually I found this craft table at Target.  But the shipping charges seemed awfully steep, so I decided to google and see if I could find it for less.  I soon found it for quite a bit less on eBay, so placed the order.  When it arrived a few days later, I was somewhat taken aback to find that it had been shipped directly from Walmart.

Lots of eBay sellers use drop shippers (which means that they never touch the product), but this was my first experience buying from someone re-listing something from a mainstream retailer.  For a few minutes of her time, and the cost of the eBay listing, the seller had leveraged the difference between what Walmart charged and what I was willing to pay for a quick $20 or so profit.   She’s received slightly over 1200 feedbacks in the past year; if my transaction was typical, that means she’s made at least $24,000.  My guess is it’s more, since many buyers don’t bother with feedback. 

Is this outrageous?  Some people seem to think so — a few people gave her negative feedback when they got the shipment that shows a lower retail price than they paid.  I gave her positive feedback, since the item was delivered as described, in good shape.  And how is this fundamentally different from what mainstream companies do every day?

James Fallows has a fascinating article in this month’s Atlantic, on the Chinese manufacturing plants where most brand-name electronics are made.  One of his points is how little of the money spent by consumers goes to the manufacturers, whether the owners of the factories or the assembly line workers. 

The Times today had a blog post about Sarah Jessica Parker’s new line of very inexpensive clothes, and some of the commenters wondered about where/how they were made, given the low prices.  There’s a Frances Perkins quote that I love, about how "the red silk bargain dress in the shop window is danger signal."  But, as we’ve learned, expensive prices are no guarantee of safety or good working conditions. 

The freegans think that they’ve solved this dilemma by not spending money to buy things, but that only works for them because the rest of us are so wasteful.  (And I include myself in that, even if I make myself feel better by giving things away on Freecycle instead of putting them in the trash.)  And we’re wasteful because things are so darn cheap.

I fell in love with the world that Michael Chabon created in the Yiddish Policeman’s Union on the first page, when the main character, a Yiddish policeman of course, referred to his gun, his piece, as a "sholem"  (which is both Yiddish and Hebrew for peace).  I’m a sucker for puns, and when you make them multi-lingual and integral to the world view, I’m hooked.  Twenty or so pages in, Chabon hit me in the kishkes with a passing reference to the two million who died in the Holocaust.  (Just typing that gives me the shivers again.)

A few years ago, Chabon wrote an essay about a book he encountered, "Say it in Yiddish" and imagined it as a guidebook to an alternative world, one where you might have to ask about a bus schedule or buy a dress in Yiddish, in other words, one in which Yiddish was a living spoken language.  This book is set in that alternative world, one where the Jews were given chunk of Alaska as a (temporary) homeland.  It’s one where Hebrew is a dying language, spoken only by those with nostalgic memories of the long-past Zionist experiment, where the Chassids who wear the fur coats and black hats of their Polish ancestors are perfectly well dressed for the Alaskan winter.

Oh, and it’s also a murder mystery, and a hard-boiled detective story.   It’s a wildly ambitious book, and even though it doesn’t quite succeed at everything it reaches for (the last few chapters spiral out of control, and I didn’t know what to make of the ending), that still puts it ahead of most of what I’ve read lately.

I’ve got a backlog of solicited reviews, so here’s a bunch of bullets about various things that I’ve been sent recently:

• The good folks at PBS Kids sent me a DVD of their new educational show, coming this fall, Word World.  The learning gimmick is that key words are spelled out, and then the letters transform into the thing itself.  The site says it’s aimed at 3-5 year olds; I think my 3 1/2 year old has already mastered the idea that letters make words that represent things.  But both N and D watched it eagerly, and thought it was very funny.  I asked them whether they liked it more or less than Between the Lions (which is aimed at 4-7 year olds), and they said they liked it more.  N said "it wasn’t scary."
• Yamaha sent me the Konga drum from their new "real rhythm" line.  I rolled my eyes a little at the literature they sent me about how important drumming is to brain development, but it’s a nice drum.  (I do think music is important to kids, but they can make it with a jar full of beans as well as with a fancy drum.) I know my parents spent quite a while looking for a solid kid’s drum when D was a toddler (without a stick, so he couldn’t put anyone’s eye out) and this one is nicer than anything that was available at the time.  And it’s got a shoulder strap, so you can march around the house with it.
• I got a CD of a new release — Lullaby Appetite, by Alexa Wilkinson.  If you’re wondering what the title means, so did I.  And having listened to the title track a couple of times, I still don’t know.  So, I’ll send the disk to the reader with the best (as judged by me) explanation.  Overall, I found the lyrics on this album evocative but not quite meaningful.  But the music is catchy and Wilkinson’s voice is fine.
• Usually publishers email me and ask if I want a review copy, but Friends and Mothers, by Louise Limerick, just showed up on my doorstep.  It’s mommy-lit, Australian style.  I read the first few chapters, and thought they were ok, but put it down in the middle and felt no compulsion to pick it up again.  But Flea read it, and she’s pretty positive about it, so I might give it another try.

I’ve heard some interesting stories lately about the complications that are arising because same-sex marriages are recognized in Canada and Massachusetts, but not the rest of the US. 

• Yankee T is frustrated because she can’t enjoy any of the benefits of marriage, but has to report her partner’s income for financial aid purposes.
• Shannon wonders what to say when asked if she’s married.  By a hostile insurance company.
• And Dana reports a surprisingly inclusive response from USAA, of all organizations.

My dad got a letter to the editor published in the NY Times last week, in which he makes the argument that government should get out of the marriage business entirely.  As I wrote when Shannon made a similar argument last year, I think it’s an elegant solution in theory, but think that there are circumstances where government does need to treat two people who have made a family together differently from roommates.  So whether you call it marriage or not, the problem still exists.

But there is a power to the word "marriage" and to the legal piece of paper.  My friend Kristie put her wedding on YouTube.  The video is about a minute long, and makes me cry.

Freedom to Marry has an ad campaign out celebrating the 40th anniversary of Loving v. Virginia.  40 years from now, will the current mishmash of laws seem as bizarre as Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage does now?

All of my parenting email lists and many blogs are abuzz with news of the recall of a bunch of Thomas trains for lead in the paint.  I think it’s drawing a lot of attention for several reasons:

• These trains are awfully popular.  Pretty much every kid I know has some.
• They’re expensive, and they’re made of wood, so they have an old-fashioned aura.  People aren’t surprised that the cheap plastic crap from the dollar store is made in China or Mexico, but they don’t expect the stuff that’s $15 for a little train to come off the same assembly line.
• It’s coming right after there’s been a lot of attention to the impossibility of protecting the food supply from contaminants.

Realistically, I don’t think there’s a need to panic, unless your kid has been walking around sucking on James all day.  While it’s clearly a bad thing, all of us who grew up when leaded gasoline was in common use got exposed to much higher levels of lead.   

(Don’t worry, I will check our train bins to see if we have any that are affected — I think all of ours are older than 2005, though.)

But it does highlight how interconnected — and how vulnerable — we all are in this global economy.  There’s really no way to avoid it.  The part of that NPR story on the food supply that struck me the most is that China produces 80 percent of the world’s Vitamin C.  Unless you’re going to go try to play Robinson Crusoe somewhere, you can’t avoid it.

This week I’m reviewing Writing Motherhood, by Lisa Garrigues as part of the MotherTalk blog tour.  It’s a how-to book, aimed mostly at the beginning writer who is feeling intimidated by a blank page.  Garrigues is a friendly, encouraging voice, telling the reader that yes, she does have a story to tell and that she just has to jump in and start writing. 

If you’ve read Julia Cameron, Anne Lamott, or Natalie Goldberg‘s books about writing, much of the specific advice — to carry a notebook, to write daily, to take some time to play, to free write first drafts without editing — will seem familiar.  But just because Garrigues didn’t invent these techniques out of thin air doesn’t mean that they’re not good advice.  And the book contains literally hundreds of suggestions for topics to write about, from birth stories to bandaids.  While I can’t imagine anyone finding them all equally inspiring, I can’t imagine reading through the book and not itching to pick up a pen or open up a file over one of them.  I think my favorite idea was to write down all the questions your child asks you in the course of a day.

Like Dani, I’m a little skeptical about the inherent virtues of longhand writing.  Garrigues is quite adamant that, whatever the virtues of a blog as a way to share writing with a larger audience, it’s no substitute for a Mother’s Notebook.  I agree that the public nature of a blog means that I’m not quite as uninhibited as I would be in a private notebook — there are some topics that I’m just not willing to share.  And I know that the nature of the medium discourages revision, and that my writing is better when I revise.  But knowing that there’s an audience out there reading keeps me writing far more regularly on my blog than I have in my journal in years.  Ultimately, I think there’s a role for both.  Garrigues loves her journal because it’s the one place she can be truly alone; I love my blog because it’s where I can always find company.

This week, I’ve also been reading some of The Elephant in the Playroom, which is a collection of essays by parents of children with special needs.   It’s very much a mixed bag.  My favorite piece in it is by Flea from One Good Thing, a version of her post about putting Alex on Ritalin.  What makes that essay stand out is that she’s not trying to summarize her entire life as Alex’s mom.  Rather, she describes, in exquisite (and hysterical) detail, a few specific moments in that life.  Some of the other writers also understand the importance of the moment and describe the phone call they received to find out that their child got into the school of their choice, a walk they took after a night when they didn’t get enough sleep.  Others tell, rather than showing. 

I know I’ve complained before that too many anthologies about the parenting experience draw too heavily on professional writers.  There’s an obvious reason for this — they tend to be good at writing — but it limits the perspectives that we get to hear from.  Garrigues believes that every mother has a story worth telling — and gives them the tools they can use to make it a story worth listening to as well.