Half Changed World

The Julie/Julia Project was the first blog I ever read, back when I didn’t really know what a blog was.  I think someone posted a link to it on one of my email lists, several months into the project, and I read a few posts and was hooked.  In it, Julie Powell documented her attempt to cook every single recipe in Volume 1 of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the course of a year.  She wrote about the dishes that turned out great and the dishes that she tortured her friends with, the days when she was interviewed on television and the days when she didn’t get home from work until 8 pm and had to start cooking a dish that takes at least 3 hours to cook.

So, I really wanted to like Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen.  But I didn’t.  It wasn’t as funny as the blog, didn’t have the detailed information about the food and, of course, didn’t have the element of uncertainty that was in the blog.  By the very fact that I was holding the book in my hand, I knew that Julie finished the project, got a nice book contract, and was even able to quit her crappy government job.

Maybe the book would be more compelling to someone who hadn’t read the blog and so hadn’t heard many of the most interesting stories already.  But I’m not sure.  One of the recurring themes in both the blog and the book is the crappy little kitchen that Julie had to work in.  In the blog, she mentioned several times that it’s so small that she had to perch her food processor on top of the trash can.  That’s a wonderful image, bringing the scene to life.  She never uses it in the book.  What happened?

Last week, Julie was quoted in the NY Times as saying that she no longer searches for herself on blogs.  I hope that’s true, because I feel mean for saying negative things about the book when I got so much pleasure from the blog.

I’m afraid we’ve managed to totally confuse D with this whole Hanukah and Christmas deal.  The boys opened their presents from their paternal grandparents (who celebrate Christmas) this morning, and within 15 minutes D was shrieking "no, it’s mine!" at N.  I asked him to sit with me and asked "Do you know what the spirit of Christmas is about?"  He answered immediately "Judah Maccabee!"   We clearly need to find the light-up elephant that Baraita was talking about.

In all seriousness, we had a lovely day.  T’s parents scored some real hits with both the Bucket Blast Game, which had us running all over the place throwing beanbags at each other, and the Peanut Butter and Jelly Game, which is one of the few kids games I’ve played that doesn’t make the adults cheat in the kids’ favor in a desperate attempt to get the thing over with.  It’s nice to spread the presents out, because everything gets played with much more than if everything comes at once.  It was a rainy dreary day outside, so we hung out, played lots of games, ate left over chinese food, baked chocolate chip cookies, and watched the Muppet Christmas Carol.

In thinking about my attitudes towards Christmas, I’ve figured out that there are at least three different holidays that are cojoined under the name of Christmas these days:

• The religious holiday, with the babe in the manger and so forth.  I have deep respect for this holiday, and find parts of the story very moving, but I feel no need or desire to celebrate it myself.
• The Charles Dickens / Irving Berlin version of the holiday, which is essentially secular.  (When Scrooge wakes up Christmas morning and wants to change his life, it’s not church that he rushes off to.) This version is about winter wonderlands, crackling fires, lots of cookies, and good times spent with family and friends. 
• The buy-buy-buy Sunday circular version of the holiday, which is all about spending money.  Tom Lehrer caught it perfectly in his tribute to "the true spirit of Christmas as we celebrate it in the United States, that is to say the commercial spirit."

Thinking of it this way really helped me understand my ambivalence about Christmas.  (Last year, I wrote that I didn’t really have a good answer for why I was less than totally thrilled about having another holiday to celebrate).  As a non-Christian, in some ways it’s easy for me to enjoy the second version of Christmas — especially since I’m not trying to live up to an idealized image of what Christmas is supposed to be.  I can bake gingerbread men with my boys, without feeling like I’m a failure for not making 10 different kinds of cookies.  But, without the counterbalance of the religious components of Christmas, I’m afraid that if we celebrate it as a secular holiday, the materialistic component will become overwhelming.    Does that make sense?

It also helped me figure out why I’m so scornful of the supposed "War on Christmas."  Because saying "Happy Holidays" isn’t a threat to any of the three kinds of Christmas.   (And as many people have pointed out, it has spread largely because it’s bad business sense to offend any potential customers.)  It’s only a threat to those who are nostalgic for surface conformity, who are fine with there being Jews and Moslems and atheists in the US as long as we’re willing to be second-class citizens.

I’m sure everyone in New York is relieved that the transit strike has been settled.  The buses and trains should be running by tomorrow morning.

The blogs that I read have generally been supportive of the striking transit workers, strongly so in the case of landismom and Lindsay Beyerstein, moderately so for Laura at 11d.  By contrast, my family in NYC had very little sympathy for the strike, even though they’re generally liberal and pro-union.  They argued (and I agree) that it was the working class  — who don’t have the option of telecommuting, who don’t get paid if they can’t make it to work, and for whom the cost of a taxi is a significant portion of a day’s wages — who bore the brunt of the shutdown. 

In weighing whether the TWU demands are reasonable, a key issue is whether you’re comparing them to an abstract ideal of what workers should received or to the wages and benefits that other workers actually receive.  Because I don’t think anyone is disputing that their retirement and health package is more generous than most workers receive today, especially when compared to other jobs that don’t require college degrees.   And, just as low-income workers often get hostile when welfare recipients get benefits they don’t, lots of people are angry at the transit workers for asking to be able to retire at 50.

Retirement benefits are a particularly tricky issue, because it’s becoming increasingly clear that both the private and public sector vastly underestimated the real costs of the pension promises that they made during the last 30 or so years.  Negotiators saw pensions as a cheap concession to make, because they didn’t have immediate cost impacts.  Now that the law requires companies — and is about to require governments as well — to calculate the real costs of their future obligations, they’re in trouble.  A lot of companies are dealing with it by ducking out of their promises — either converting to defined payment plans instead of defined benefit plans, or just dumping the whole mess in the government’s lap. 

Governments — and quasi-governmental entities like the MTA — tend not to weasel out completely, but they’re in a fix too.  While I’m not a fan of two-tier benefit systems that treat workers differently depending on when they’re hired, I’m not sure what the alternative is if we don’t want to change the rules on current workers in midstream, but also don’t want to be tied forever to unwise decisions that we made 30 years ago.

Today was not a good day.

The Senate passed the budget reconciliation bill.  It was so close they had to fly Cheney back from Pakistan to cast the tie-breaking vote, but it passed.  And the Dems have been able to delay it by a parliamentary maneuver that forces the House to vote on it again, but I’m not holding my breath waiting for the miracle that stops it from being enacted.

The bill has some pretty lousy welfare provisions — a few of them better than what Congress has been talking about, but some of them worse.  And, from my selfish point of view, it’s incredibly frustrating to have Congress throw out everything that we’ve painstakingly tried to improve over the past four years, and stick in some language that no one has ever seen before.  It really feels like the main thing I’ve spent my time at work on over the past several years has just been a total waste.

We got a panicked call this afternoon from a Senate staffer because the lobbying office from her state was calling furious about the TANF section and she wanted talking points.  All of our reaction (which we didn’t say out loud) was "And you didn’t realize that this was going to piss the states off?"

And then I got home and opened up a rejection letter from a job that I had pinned high hopes on.

Today is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.  For our ancestors, who didn’t have electric lights, it was a terrible time, "the dark midwinter." But it’s also a season of hope, because the days are finally going to start getting longer.  You can understand why almost every northern hemisphere culture has a festival that involves lots of lights

But today, I’m thinking of Frontier House, and the huge pile of wood that the families chopped preparing for the winter.  And the expert took one look at it, and said "it might last until January."  I know there are seasons and cycles to everything, and that the darkness won’t last forever.  But I’m feeling like I don’t have enough wood stocked to make it through until spring.

Ok, that’s way too dramatic.  I have a terrific family.  I don’t have any health issues more serious than a runny nose.  I have a job that doesn’t eat my life, that pays well enough for T. to stay home, with great colleagues who appreciate me.  I have a wonderful group of readers of this blog.  (According to Typepad’s stats, I got my 100,000th hit today.  Statcounter’s numbers are higher — I’m not sure which to believe.)  But I’m feeling pretty darn down.

A few months ago, when I wrote about how much (or how little) effect parents have on how their children turn out, Jen recommended a book called The Stardust Lounge: Stories from A Boy’s Adolescence, by Deborah Digges.  It’s Digges’ memoir of how her younger son got into trouble — car theft, running with gangs — how helpless she felt — there’s a great passage where she describes following him through the night streets as he heads out to do graffiti with his friends — and how they eventually made their way through the rough waters of his teenage years.

Digges recounts the conversation with Steve’s therapist that seems to have been a turning point.  Ed, the therapist, says:

"Kids like Steve have come to understand themselves as capable, independent thinkers by the time they reach their teens.  Despite their problems with impulse control, even problems with conventional learning, they believe in their abilities to solve their own problems because — Steve’s an example — they’ve been allowed to.  Or because — like his street friends — they’ve had to."

"After a childhood of being allowed to make his own decisions — after your encouraging him to explore his passions and play them out, even when they were a bit dangerous, even when they involved risk — now you’re telling him no.  That’s all over.  Now he’s got to do what you say, what his teachers say, what the cops say, no questions asked."

"But the stakes are so much higher! He got himself into gangs and guns.  And he’s still just a kid.  He’s failing school…"

Ultimately, Digges decides to back off and let go, to let Stephen make his own decisions — and to let him deal with the consequences imposed by schools and legal systems when he makes bad ones.  Part of the charm of the book is that Digges never suggests that this is the only right approach.  In fact, she never is sure that it’s the right approach, even for her and Stephen.  Even at the end, when he’s going to college for a fine arts degree, she doesn’t suggest that this means the story has a happy ending, only that he’s on an easier path for now.  But she accepts that she’s not cut out out to be a controlling parent, and that Steven can tell she’s faking it when she tries.

Social services programs for youth talk a lot these days about building on adolescents’ strengths, not just seeing them as a bundle of trouble waiting to happen.  Although Digges doesn’t use this language, this is precisely what she does — encouraging his music and his photography even when he’s at his most rebellious, expecting him to act responsibly in caring for their chronically ill dog. 

Perhaps the bravest — or craziest — thing that Digges does is take in one of Stephen’s friends, Trevor, when his own family turns him away.  It would have been easy for her to say, sorry, I have enough on my plate dealing with my own kid and my job and my falling apart house and the tax authorities.  No one would have faulted her for saying, no, Stephen’s peace is fragile enough, I can’t take in a ghetto kid with a whole set of his own problems.  But she didn’t. Perhaps because of Stephen’s difficulties, Digges didn’t have the expectation of being able to control how everything would turn out, and so was open to letting even more chaos — several high-needs pets, a troubled teen — into her life.

I hope I don’t experience the challenges that Digges did, but if I do, I hope I can face them with as much grace as she did.

Photo by Subhankar Banerjee from his Arctic Refuge Series.

I’m too tired and frustrated to write much about the end of year craziness in Congress (six hours after the reconciliation bill passed the House, we were still trying to figure out what exactly was in it), but I will encourage you to email or call your Senators asking them to oppose adding the ANWR drilling provision to the Defense bill.  This is a pure political move — its supporters know the bill couldn’t pass on its own, so are trying to attach it to a must-pass bill.

Here’s some background from the Sierra Club, and the link to an action alert from the Religious Action Center and one from the National Wildlife Federation.

I keep thinking that I’ve achieved a level of cynicism such that I won’t be shocked by anything our government can do, but then I discover that I’m wrong.   We’re just supposed to trust the President when he says that the illegal wiretaps were so time sensitive that they couldn’t be brought before the secret court that could have approved them.  I’m not all that surprised to learn that the President was sleeping through 10th grade American Government when they covered checks and balances, but I can’t believe that no one in the Administration seems to have noticed (or had the guts to point this out to him). 

Meanwhile I’ve been spending much of the weekend hitting refresh on my computer, checking CQ.com and the Congressional websites, trying to figure out what exactly is in the budget reconciliation bill that Congress is about to pass.  It appears that some version of welfare reauthorization is in there, but the details are extremely murky.  And, as the Center on Budget and Policy Prioirities points out, even the members of Congress themselves are likely to get the actual bill text — hundreds of pages of it — only shortly before they’re asked to vote on it.

So what do you think is in those pokes?

In case you were wondering, yes, some of my recent posts did disappear and then come back.  Typepad was down today, and for a while they were showing an old backup of all the blogs.  (If you have a Typepad blog and the new posts haven’t returned, republish your blog.)

Via Brad Plumer, I ran across this interview with Bob Moffit.  Moffit is a labor economist who does a lot of work on welfare and low-income populations, and generally has interesting things to say. 

In response to a question about why welfare reform passed in the 1990s, Moffit answers:

"As for the source of the increased conservatism on the part of voters, I think that the increased labor force participation of middle-class women was part of the cause. That transformation really changed the attitude of voters. Once a large percentage of middle-class women were working and putting their children into day care, the public began to question why we shouldn’t expect the same thing from poor women. There was no longer the support for paying women to stay at home with their children, which was the goal of the original legislation in 1935."

I think this is dead-on, in the sense that a lot of low to middle-income married parents thought "I’d love to [have my wife] stay home with our kids full-time, but no one’s handing me [or her] a check to do so. Why should I pay more taxes so these single moms can stay home?"

But I want to distinguish this claim from the similar-sounding one that Caitlin Flanagan made in her screed against female professionals:

"…women like herself [Chira], who have chosen to separate themselves from their children for long hours of the day, and who feel a clawing, ceaseless anxiety about this. Conflating the hardships of the working-poor mother with the insecurities of the professional-class mother ennobles the richer woman’s struggles (entirely self-inflicted). Describing how even poor mothers are "working and thriving," and extolling the benefits of passing a child around among family members while her mother is gone for hour after hour, makes the richer woman’s choices look not like what they are—a series of decisions often based entirely on providing herself with maximum happiness—but, rather, like the empirically proven superior way to raise children."

Today’s book is Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female In The US Army, by Kayla Williams.  This insta-memoir is Williams’ account of her year serving in Iraq as an Arabic-speaking military intelligence soldier. 

I first heard of the book through a fairly negative review from Debra Dickerson on Salon.  Their site pass system is broken tonight, so I can’t look it up to quote it, but Dickerson basically says that Williams is whiny and compares the book unfavorably with Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead.  Yes, Jarhead is a better written book, brutal, elegant and hallucinatory by turns.  Swofford has serious literary ambitions — he attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop — and has the advantage of writing 10 years after his military service.  Twenty years from now, I’ll guess that people will still be reading Jarhead, while they’ll have long forgotten Love My Rifle.

But that doesn’t mean that Love My Rifle More Than You isn’t worth reading.  Williams’ prose isn’t memorable, but it’s servicable, and she shares experiences that are worth hearing about.  She writes about the constant sexual harrassment and a near-rape by one of her fellow soldiers, about the ambiguity of the Army’s relationship with the Iraqi people, about her quest for vegetarian MREs, and about how some female soldiers use their gender to get out of unpleasant tasks.  She writes about her brief involvement with interrogation of prisoners.   There’s material in the book to discomfit both supporters and opponents of using women in combat roles, and both should read the book.

Yes, the book is whiny at times.  Williams sounds surprised that her armpits and groin chafe in the desert heat, that her commanding officers sometimes give her stupid orders that risk her life.  She doesn’t seem to have read Catch-22, let alone Jarhead.  (By contrast, Swofford never is surprised by any degree of official stupidity.)  But ultimately the book reads like Williams is sitting down and telling you what it was like.  And I was happy to spend a few hours in her company.