Half Changed World

This week’s book is Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior, by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson.   Grandin is well known for being a high-functioning autistic person who has written and speaks extensively about autism, and who has done groundbreaking work on the treatment of animals in slaughterhouses.

When I picked up the book, I knew that Grandin had said that her autism had helped her understand animals better.  My vague impression was that her claim was, since her autism meant that it took conscious effort for her to see the world from others’ perspective, it didn’t take much more effort for her to see it from animals’ perspective.  In fact, her claim is more radical than that — she argues that in many ways, people with autism see the world in a way that has more in common with how animals see it than with how neuro-typical humans see it — more visual, but also less filtered by generalizations, expectations and assumptions.

Grandin and Johnson write a bit about this video, which shows a group of people passing basketballs.  Go ahead and download it, and then watch it and count how many times the people in white pass the basketball.  Don’t read on until you’ve counted.

The first time I was shown this video (sometime last year, long before I read the book), I totally didn’t see the gorilla.  It’s apparently a well-known phenomenon.  Grandin argues that no animal — and no person with autism — would ever make that mistake.

The book was interesting, although a bit meandering.  I don’t find cows an inherently fascinating topic, but Grandin and Johnson do a good job of tying Grandin’s work on cows to discussions of more popular animals such as dogs, as well as to comparisons with human brains.  (The hard cover I took out from the library has a cover photo of Grandin with a horse; the paperback shows a dog in profile.)

Grandin both believes that animals are intelligent, possibly self-conscious, and is strangely unsentimental about them.  She writes:

"People always wonder how I can work in the meatpacking industry when I love animals so much.  I’ve thought about this a lot.

"After I developed my center-track restraining system, I remember looking out over the cattle yard at the hundreds and hundreds of animals milling around in their corrals.  I was upset that I had just designed a really efficient slaughter plant. Cows are the animals I love best."

"Looking at those animals I realized that none of them would even exist if humans hadn’t bred them into being.  And ever since that moment I’ve believed that we brought these animals here, so we’re responsible for them.  We owe them a decent life and a decent death, and their lives should be as low-stress as possible.  That’s my job."

Greg at Daddy Types wrote last week about the silly NY Times article about parental bragging.  He noted that they cite Unequal Childhoods and was kind enough to point out my book review from last year. 

But the part that made me spit-take was "Her car probably has an "I SO blogged this before you" bumper sticker on it."

It doesn’t, but I think I might need to order one.  Anyone else want one?  It’s probably cheaper if we do a bulk order.

It is true that sometimes I don’t have the energy for real life conversations on topics that I’ve blogged heavily about.  I want to say "look, read these three posts, and then we’ll talk."  I don’t, of course, but it’s tempting.

(By the way, is it supposed to take Technorati four days to find a new link?)

As some of you may recall, last year a Virginia delegate introduced a really stupid bill that would have required women to report all miscarriages to the police within 12 hours.  Largely due to a bunch of really ticked off infertility and parenting bloggers, the sponsor was flooded with outraged emails and calls, and soon withdrew the bill.

Do you think we can do it again?

The new legislative season is about to begin in Virginia, so it’s time for more idiocies.  As Julie reports at a little pregnant, Delegate Bob Marshall has introduced a bill that would ban doctors and nurses (anyone "licensed by a health regulatory board") from performing or assisting an unmarried woman in any form of assisted reproduction "that completely or partially replaces sexual intercourse as the means of conception."

I feel compelled to point out that Marshall is the author of Virginia’s stringent anti-gay marriage law, which prohibits "other arrangement between persons of the same sex purporting to bestow the privileges or obligations of marriage."  So, lesbians are out of luck, unless they can find a man willing to enter into a sham marriage with them, in which case everything is fine and dandy according to Mr. Marshall.

But it’s not just lesbians who are affected, or single women who want to have babies without finding someone to hook up with for a night.  As Maura pointed out at Julie’s site, Marshall has links to the American Life League, which believes that all reproductive assistance is an affront to human dignity.  Fine, he’s entitled to believe that.  Even to do his best to convince others that it’s true.  But he’s not entitled to make it the law of the land.

Via Landismom, I read Trey’s post last week about gay and lesbian families moving away from hostile states, like Virginia.  I certainly can’t blame anyone for making that choice.  But I do believe that those of us who aren’t directly threatened by bills like this (as a married, fertile woman, I’m not) have an obligation to fight against them as hard as we would if we were personally affected.

I’m confident that my delegate will be as opposed to this bill as I am, but I’ll drop him a note anyway.  If you live in Virginia, please contact your delegate.  And all of us can give Mr. Marshall a piece of our mind.

I will admit to feeling gleeful at the fall of Jack Abramoff, and the likelihood that he’s going to take Tom DeLay down with him.  But the extent of the corruption that is being revealed is appalling.  You know things are screwed up when I’m agreeing with Newt Gingrich:

"You can’t have a corrupt lobbyist unless you have a corrupt member (of Congress) or a corrupt staff. This was a team effort."

Maybe I’m naive, but I’m actually surprised by the number of people who had their faces in the trough.  The charges on which DeLay was indicted in Texas were about gaining political power — laundering contributions to influence state elections in order to control the redistricting process — not about lining his individual pockets.  I wouldn’t put anything past this crowd in terms of doing what it takes to stay in power, but I didn’t think they were this blatantly and personally greedy.

And, no, I don’t consider all those sweetheart deals with Halliburton to be evidence of the contrary.  Those are what Plunkitt of Tammany Hall would have called "honest graft" — someone’s going to get the contract, so it might as well be your friends.  Without defending that practice, for me at least, there’s something qualitatively different — and worse — about trading favors for legislation. 

As a federal employee, one of the most frustrating thing about this corruption is that the federal government is deliberately inefficient in order to avoid patronage.  The goal of procurement isn’t just to get a good product at a decent price, but to make sure that everyone has an equal opportunity to be the one to provide it.  Businesses routinely go back to the same contractors again and again, building relationships over time — we have to recompete our contracts and start from scratch every couple of years.  And don’t get me started on the hiring process. 

On December 29th, I was one of the few people at work in my office.  My boss asked me to return a call to someone who had left a message asking about eligibility standards for heating assistance programs.  I wound up listening to her for 20 minutes as she ranted about unresponsive politicians and how do we change these policies.  I pretty much had to say "uh huh" and "I hear you" and "I have some personal opinions on that, Ma’am, but I don’t think it’s my job to share them."

The story of the miners killed in the West Virginia mine accident this week would have been sad in any case, but it’s made macabre by the terrible miscommunication that led the families to believe for several hours that 12 of the 13 miners had been found alive, rather than just the lone surviver.  Every time I walked through the lobby of my office building today, the USA Today headline "Alive" jumped out at me.

As it happens, for several weeks I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Melissa Fay Greene’s Last Man Out: The Story of the Springhill Mine Disaster while I exercise.  I picked it up a while back at a library sale, knowing nothing of the disaster, but willing to give anything Greene wrote a try having read Praying for Sheetrock.  She describes the terrible collapse of an entire mine that happened in Nova Scotia in 1958 and the experiences of two small groups of miners that miraculously survived the "bump."  They were trapped underground without light, food, or water for a week before the miners on the surface were able to dig down to them.

Listening to a book on tape slows it down for me, and makes the images linger.  I know that mines have changed a great deal over the last half century (although maybe not enough), but I can’t help imagining the scene in Tallmansville as much like that described by Greene in Spring Hill.

My thoughts and prayers are with the families.

Last week, I was reading and I must have made a noise, because T said "what?"  I said, "Nothing, I’m just feeling overwhelmed by the book I’m reading."  "Is it as bad as Bastard Out of Carolina?" he asked, that having set the standard years ago by leaving me staring into space and whimpering as I finished it.  "Almost."

The book I was reading was The Glass Castle: A Memoir, by Jeanette Walls and it is both heartbreaking and challenging.  It’s the story of her childhood with parents who simultaneously opened up worlds for their children — worlds of literature and art, of geology, natural history, and astromony — and who failed at the most basic tasks of parenting — keeping their kids fed and safe.  She writes of her first memory — catching on fire at age 3, as she cooked hot dogs for herself — and of her father giving her Venus for Christmas one year.  She writes of living in a leaking house, without heat, indoor plumbing, or electricity, and of stealing discarded lunches from the trashcans at school.  She writes of riding in back of a U-Haul truck, and of her father yelling at her and her siblings when they finally caught his attention and pointed out the that the doors had opened.  And she writes of her father bringing her to see the cheetah at the zoo, and bringing her up to the cage to let it lick the salt from popcorn off her hands:

"I could hear people around us whispering about the crazy drunk man and his dirty little urchin children, but who cared what they thought?  None of them had ever had their hand licked by a cheetah."

Imagine Angela’s Ashes if, instead of doing her best to feed her family in spite of her husband’s drunkeness, Angela had been an artist who thought it was a waste of time to cook, thought it was unfair to expect her to hold a steady job, and hoarded food from the children.

But what makes the book so wrenching isn’t the depths of the poverty to which the Walls family sank, or even the domestic violence, alcoholism, and mental illness that shadowed their lives, but the moments of beauty and wonder that are interspersed with all of the above.  I don’t doubt that the Walls kids should have been in foster care, but Jeanette Walls makes clear that something important would have been lost as well as much gained.  (The one time that a social worker does try to investigate the family, the children cover up for the parents, fearing — probably with cause — that they’d be separated from each other.)

The other book that I was reminded of was The Mosquito Coast.  If you’ve only seen the movie, you won’t understand why, because in the movie, Harrison Ford’s character just seems like a egomaniacal lunatic.  But in the book, the story is filtered through the perspective of his son, who believes in him.  Like Allie Fox, Rex Walls is a man of a million plans.  (The "Glass Castle" of the title is the house that he was constantly designing blueprints for, even as their real house slid down the side of the mountain.)

The Glass Castle has at least somewhat of a happy ending, as the Walls children move away from their parents and at least three of the four grow into basically happy and functional adults.  (The youngest stabs their mother after an argument, is institutionalized for a year, and then moves away and loses contact with the family.)  The parents continue to live by their "ideals" (or their madness) choosing to live as squatters in New York rather than accept assistance from their children or anyone else.  And ultimately, Jeanette is more forgiving of her parents than I could imagine, accepting them for who they are.

An old friend stopped by for a visit last week.  He’s recently moved to the DC area, and a couple of months ago posted a comment here along the lines of "Are you the Elizabeth who…."?  And I was.  We’ve emailed back and forth a few times, and finally managed to connect in the flesh.

When D asked who this friend was, I told him that when I met E, we were closer in age to Daniel’s age now than to our current ages.  We met in Freshman bio, literally more than half a lifetime ago. 

If we were meeting for the first time today, my guess is that we wouldn’t become friends.  Our paths probably would never cross, and if they did, we’d probably get into a political argument within five minutes.  (I certainly don’t have any other friends who are regulars on Little Green Footballs.)  Not that we didn’t have constant political arguments in high school, but somehow it seemed more possible to disagree more or less civilly then.

One of the things that I envy when I read Jo(e)’s blog is the way that she’s embedded in a community.  Her kids go to school with the kids of people she went to high school with.  I grew up in NYC, so I’m not sure that I could have had that sort of experience even if I hadn’t moved away.  Sitting at my table with E is probably as close as I’m ever going to come.

Back in November, Jody posted about a project that Forbes and Yahoo undertook to let you send an email to yourself in the future.  As I wrote in a DotMoms post, it immediately set me calculating how old the boys would be at each of the intervals offered — one, five, ten and twenty years from now.  It didn’t occur to me at the time that this simple calculation contained an awful lot of blythe assumptions.

Last week I attended a funeral.  It was for a twenty-five year old woman, the secretary for my division at work.  She was hit by a bus and killed just a few blocks from our office.  The minister acknowledged everyone’s sorrow and pain and shock.  But then he reminded us "Tomorrow isn’t promised.  Today isn’t promised."  You never know when you could step off a curb and find that it’s your day.

So I’m making my usual New Year’s Resolutions, and plans and goals for the new year.  But I’m also more than usually aware of the possibilities for things to go amiss.

I wish you a happy new year, full of joy and fulfillment.  And may you be able to handle the challenges that life throws at you with grace.

Just before the holidays, I was looking at my referrers, and found this list of tags from del.icio.us, which led me to frugal for life, which led me to a Carnival of Personal Finance, which led me to this post about holiday gift-giving, where the author suggests that you exchange money, and then surprise your "giver" by showing them what you bought with the money. 

Economists hate gift-giving.  Not because they’re cheap, but because they believe that whenever someone buys you a gift that isn’t exactly what you would have purchased with that amount of money, some possible happiness is lost from the system.  (More formally, they say that things are bought for some price that the receiver values at less than the money paid.)  An economist thinks that the perfect gift is cash, followed closely by purchase of the exact item that the recipient has requested.

Miss Manners would be horrified.  As she wrote last week:

"By coming up with the cash gift, the gift certificate and the gift registry, it said, in effect, "Fine, get your own %#$@ presents." All the work of giving was eliminated, leaving only the expense. The possibility of disappointment was eliminated entirely, barring a rebellion on the part of the targeted donors, who so far seem to be meekly complying with demands."

"The perfect system, many believe. Apparently they failed to notice that something else that got eliminated: the entire point of exchanging presents."

I fall closer to Miss Manners in this debate.  The only people I ever give gift certificates to are cousins whose Bar or Bat Mitzvahs I’ve been invited to.  I don’t know them well enough to know what they’d like, and they have sufficiently little discretionary income that a gift card to Amazon can really make a difference in their ability to get the things they want.  By contrast, none of the adults with whom I exchange gifts have such tight budgets that the amount that I’d give to them would make a noticable impact.

At the same time, the single most awkward moment in my relationship with my in-laws was several years ago when they sent me for my birthday present a painting that I really didn’t like.  My usual Miss Manners-approved response to such gifts is to thank the giver and then stuff the item in the back of the closet.   But this was both too big and too expensive to do so.  So I had to tell them, and have it returned.  Ouch.

I went back through the blog tonight looking for my favorite posts of the year, but had trouble deciding among them.  I liked a lot of them, but almost all of them I’d write somewhat differently if I were writing them today.

Instead, I decided to pick a few favorite themes that I returned to again and again. One of the things that I really like about this medium is the ability to develop thoughts more fully and to have true dialogue with commenters and other bloggers. Thus, these collections of posts are better than any one on its own.

Gender and domesticity

• Vacuuming
• Your mommy hates housework and your daddy hates housework
• Division of Labor
• Marriage and compromise
• The domestic glass ceiling
• Cleanliness is next to…

Race and the school decision

• What we learn at school
• The call of the surburbs
• TBR: The Failures of Integration
• Segregation and Self-Reflection
• TBR: Shame of the Nation

Gender differences in children

• Boys and Girls
• TBR: As Nature Made Him
• It’s A Boy!

Class and Privilege

• One month on the Thrifty Food Plan (and related posts)
• Review: Unequal Childhoods
• Entitlement
• Class in America
• Rich?  Who me?
• The privilege of choice