There is nothing my toddler does that is so annoying that yelling at him can’t make it worse.
The speed with which my toddler moves, and his ability to listen to me, vary in inverse relation to how loud the baby is screaming.
My ability to feel like a competent parent is directly related to the amount of sleep I’ve had, and to how nice the weather is.
I spent today and one day last week in an uncharacteristic manner: driving around. I was in and out of the car with both boys all morning, and in the car for a long time. Drake did very well, and Guppy slept the whole time, but it isn’t an experience I want to increase in frequency.
We only have one car that G. Grod and I share. He can take the bus to work or drive. One of the reasons we like where we live is that we’re within walking distance of several parks, a coffee shop, restaurant, two libraries, our grocery co op, and more. I enjoy walking to these places. I get exercise, and my sons get fresh air and a scenic stroller ride.
Running back and forth in the car felt only like it was a means to an end. I know lots of people for whom driving is an everyday event. They live in suburbs and have to drive to everything. I also know people who live near me and drive their kids around to museums, gyms, and other kid venues. I know those has value, but for me and mine, so does avoiding time in the car. The park down the block may be smaller than one I can drive to, but I don’t think Drake enjoys it any less, and I know we’re both better off not having to negotiate getting in and out, and in and out, of the car to go someplace further away.
#27 in my movie challenge for the year was The Constant Gardener. I enjoyed this movie a lot. It was not told in in a linear fashion, which I sometimes have difficulty with, and on top of that I’m sleep deprived, and Guppy was on-and-off fussy while we watched so we had to spread it over two nights, but I nonetheless was able to follow both the mystery and the romance. I thought both were well done. Fiennes was good as the everyman who is pressed by circumstances into becoming a spy/detective, and Weisz deserved that Oscar. She was completely believable as the complex character she portrayed.
BTW, Guppy seems less inclines to hang out peacefully (awake or not) while we watch TV and movies at night, so I think my viewing extravaganza may be coming to a close for now.
Alison Wolf makes an interesting argument: career equality between the sexes has negative repercussions for society. In this article, (link via Arts and Letters Daily) she claims there are three results:
-the death of sisterhood, or an end to the millennia during which women of all classes shared the same major life experiences to a far greater degree than did their men.
-the erosion of “female altruism,” the service ethos that has been profoundly important to modern industrial societies, particularly in the education of their young and the care of their old and sick.
-the impact of employment change on childbearing. We are familiar with the prospect of demographic decline, yet we ignore – sometimes wilfully – the extent to which educated women face disincentives to bear children.
I’m not sure where to begin on how messed up this article is, but I’ll try. (Also, the last sentences of three of the four final paragraphs are strange in tone and seem like mistakes.)
First, her assumption of some prior “sisterhood” in which women shared experiences re-visits one of the key mistakes of early, 70’s era feminism, where “women” really meant “rich, white women” and did not accurately or fairly represent the multiplicity of women’s lives.
Second, she decries the decline in volunteer social services, but only implies a conclusion, and one that’s disturbing at that: that educated women should leave the workforce to resume the unpaid social services of the past.
The final concerning implication in Wolf’s article is that the financial disincentives for career women to have children mean that more poorer, less-educated women are having children. I took Wolf’s concern to mean she thought the “wrong” women were having children.
At base, Wolf’s point is a good one. Society does suffer because women are penalized rather than supported in having children. But penalties exist for all women, not just wealthy, highly educated ones. Wolf doesn’t put the onus where I think it should be–on public policy. By implication, then, (so much of what’s troubling about the article is what’s implied, because hard data and solutions aren’t supplied) the onus falls where it usually does–on women themselves. What Wolf has done is blame the victim.
According to this New York Magazine article (link via Arts and Letters Daily) I’m a Grup. I wear tattered high tops and unconventional eyeglasses, I carry a messenger bag instead of a diaper bag. The bands they mention are either in my collection or in my queue at the library and on my radio station. My kid likes to listen to DJ Shadow.
The author defines Grups as
40-year-old men and women who look, talk, act, and dress like people who are 22 years old. It’s not about a fad but about a phenomenon that looks to be permanent.
The article is an extended analysis of the current state of Gen-Xers. Apparently, we’re destroying the generation gap because we like a wide range of music. What was embarrassing about the article was the mirror it held up–so many of the people mentioned in the article are so like each other, and so like me. So much for individuality. What was refreshing, though, was the idea that we’re trying to synthesize childlike (NB: not childish) passion with adult responsibilities.
Being a Grup isn’t, as it turns out, all about holding on to some misguided, well-marketed idea of youth–or, at least, isn’t just about that. It’s also about rejecting a hand-me-down model of adulthood that asks, or even necessitates, that you let go of everything you ever felt passionate about. It’s about reimagining adulthood as a period defined by promise, rather than compromise. And who can’t relate to that?
Of course, that’s not a real ending–even the Grups don’t know how this will end. They know they’re making up adulthood as they go.
I’ve waited years for this.
We’ve been chosen as a Nielsen Family for a one week TV survey.
At last, my opinion will matter. Veronica Mars and Battlestar Galactica will get the recognition they deserve. For years I’ve watched good shows get cancelled, like My So-Called Life and EZ Streets. Perhaps I can finally make a difference.
#16 in my book challege for the year is Dillard’s tiny but powerful Holy the Firm. I finally read the copy I purchased so long ago that the friend who recommended it is no longer in my life. The book is more of a keeper than the friend was. More poetic than prosaic, it’s beautifully written, sometimes painfully so. A wandering, but not meandering, meditation on faith, it plumbs some of the same territory as Anne Lamott’s Travelling Mercies, though in a very different way.
There is no one but us…., a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead–as if innocence had ever been–and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved. But there is no one but us. There never has been. There have been generations which remembered, and generations which forgot; there has never been a generation of whole men and women who lived well for even one day. Yet some have imagined well, with honesty and art, the detail of such a life, and have described it with such grace, that we mistake vision for history, dream for description, and fancy that life has devolved. So. You learn this studying any history at all, especially the lives of artists and visionaries; you learn it from Emerson, who noticed that the meanness of our days is itself worth our thought; and you learn it, fitful in your pew, at church.
#15 in my book challenge for the year, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell took me over three weeks to read. I didn’t resent the time, in fact, I was sorry to be done. I thoroughly enjoyed the story and its characters and I admired the book for its craft. Both the characters and the story are complex and well drawn. The prose is appealingly Austen-ish, and I was glad to read JS&MN so soon after Pride and Prejudice. Clarke’s homages of prose, humor,and character were easy to see when read in proximity. This book was one I owned, but for a long time I doubted I would read it at all. To a person, everyone I knew who read the book, my husband G. Grod included, merely liked it. No one owned to loving it, and I thought one should love a book that’s so long. But when my friend Becca said she had just finished it, I decided to give it a try, since it’s one I already own.
(Aside: I thought I already noted that this year’s book challenge would be less about the number of books, and more about reading books I already own. Yet I can’t find that in an entry. Perhaps I imagined that I wrote it. But I mean it.)
I am curious why I liked JS&MN so much better than others did. The reviews are so good it’s almost ridiculous. Did the others have high expectations based on reviews, while I had lowered ones based on the non-glowing feedback of friends? G. Grod will offer only that he thought Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle books are so much better that JS&MN suffers in comparison. I haven’t yet read the Baroque Cycle, so I don’t have that potentially unflattering contrast. I entreat any readers who have read JS&MN to comment.
#14 in my book challenge for the year was V for Vendetta. The mixed reviews of the movie prompted me to re-read this. It was one of my “gateway” comics–one that someone else gave me to introduce me to the medium. It worked, where Watchmen and Dark Knight hadn’t. For that alone, it will always have a place on my shelf. V is both dated and less polished than some of Moore’s other, later works. But the creators’ obvious passion for their tale drives the story through the early, more clumsy chapters to its dark, complex middle and conclusion. It’s still a compelling read, and one I enjoyed enough that I’m not going to tamper with by going to see the movie.
#13 in my book challenge for the year is Dylan Horrocks’s excellent graphic novel Hicksville; it’s a self-referential tale, a history of comics, a romance, a mystery, and more. It’s been almost five years between issues of Atlas, Horrocks’s related follow-up project. I hope the wait for Atlas #3 is somewhat less long.
#12 in my book challenge for the year, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is such a polished novel that it almost sparkles. I want to revisit this book more often. The prose and the characters are a joy to spend time with.
#11 in my book challenge for the year, Truth and Consequences by Alison Lurie felt like a novel in shorthand. It was a quick read that I enjoyed, but the story of two couples–or is it four individuals?–never engaged me at the deep level that Lurie’s Foreign Affairs did.
#10 in my book challenge for the year is Salvation Run by Mary Gardner, about bikers and Lutherans in northern Minnesota. Mary Gardner is such a good writing instructor that I took the same class from her twice. Disproving the adage “those who can’t do, teach”, Salvation Run is exquisitely crafted. In simple prose, tales of flawed people who struggle with themselves and others interweave, but never confuse. Several characters linger long after the book is done.
Did you think I was just watching movies? I’ve been reading, too. It takes a lot more effort than it used to, and I’m having to give up a lot more things to do it (showers, housecleaning, email replies, phone calls) but I am reading. Further, I’m appreciating the reading, because I have to work so hard to do it. I think it’s tougher than watching a movie; it requires more mental energy, and more physical energy, too. Maybe you don’t think holding a book and turning pages is tough, but try doing it on little sleep and while nursing a baby–no small feat.
#9 in my book challenge for the year, Goodnight Nobody by Jennifer Weiner was the first novel I read, post-Guppy. The pink, chick-lit-y cover doesn’t match the novel at all; shame on the publisher for foisting it on the author. The mystery is interestingly plotted, and clips along at a good pace, but doesn’t linger in the mind. The meditations on marriage and motherhood, though, are complex and engaging. Weiner writes about ambivalence with humor and empathy. Her main character is easy to relate to, even as she questions her marriage and flirts with an old flame. The end of the book tidily ties up the mystery, but not the complex relationships. Some reviewers at Amazon have a problem with this, but I thought it elevated the book above its chick lit counterparts, and made me wish that Weiner focuses more on the messy relationship stuff for her next book.
Taking care of two kids and trying to get stuff done feels rather like my head and to-do list are at 45, but my life is playing at 33 and 1/3.
Speaking of, I’m woefully behind on my email and comment replies. Please don’t take it personally if you haven’t heard back. Thanks to everyone for writing; I do read and appreciate and will try to get back on track.
My spam lately is links for va1ium. Coincidence? Are they reading my mind? Ooh, the spam is talking to me.
I was sorely tempted to put ellipsis after that last sentence, but I think they’re so overused that they’re probably not able to be used at all anymore.
During the last big snow storm, I put Guppy in the Baby Bjorn, got Drake in his snowsuit and boots, shovelled our walks, then pulled Drake around the park in his sled. I will try to remember that day anytime I’m feeling useless and unaccomplished.
#26 in my movie challenge for the year was Millions, a quirky little film. I can see watching this with Drake when he’s a few years older; this is a good family film. I enjoyed the characters a great deal. While Damian, the main character, is endearing, I also liked the older brother and the father. The film is clever in its portrayal of how Damian sees saints, and whether or not they’re real. Roger Ebert called it one of the best films of 2005. The ending is overdone, but the film overall is quite charming.
#25 in my movie challenge was a date with my husband to see Lawrence of Arabia. We got a babysitter, I spent three nights expressing enough milk for two bottles for Guppy–enough to cover a four-hour absence–and we indulged in popcorn, candy, and soda at a local theater showing a pristine print in 70mm. I had seen it before over ten years ago, but remembered almost nothing. It was beautiful to look at, and engaging even at almost four hours. Roger Ebert says seeing this film in 70 mm “is on the short list of things that must be done during the lifetime of every lover of film.” I’m glad we did.
#24 for the year, Lord of War was the second of a bizarre double feature; it arrived in my library queue at the same time as In Her Shoes. Jared Leto is gently compelling as the little brother of Cage’s arms dealer. Reviews were mixed, but I found the film’s depressing message never outweighed the story, and was handled with deft, dark humor.