The Lost Art of Self-Preservation (for Women)

The Brock Turner Rape Case

noreply@blogger.com (grerp) — Sat, 11 Jun 2016 05:10:00 +0000

The outrage this week over the sentencing of Brock Turner for the three counts of sexual assault he was convicted of in the recent Stanford rape case highlights the disconnect between what the public views as appropriate punishment for various crimes and how the legal system sentences. I will admit to sharing that outrage.

I don’t enjoy an online lynching, but I don’t feel sorry for this kid. At all. No matter what hook-up culture exists on college campuses today, no matter how much alcohol flows at parties or how sex is viewed by young people these days, choosing to rape an unconscious women behind a dumpster is the action of a predator. Brock Turner saw someone vulnerable and instead of choosing to help or even just pass on by, like the proverbial priest and Levite, he stripped her, took photographs of her breasts and texted them to his friends, then sexually assaulted her until he was stopped by two Swedish men who happened upon them.

I’ve previously written about the importance of girls staying safe and sober in order to avoid sexual assault. I stand by that opinion. Some people are dangerous. It’s a sad fact, but it’s true. No one else will be responsible for your safety, girls, so you have to be. It’s fine to have a designated driver or a responsible friend, but the only person who will prioritize your safety in these situations is yourself or people who genuinely care about your welfare like your family.

This isn’t, by the way, advice solely directed at women. I would also tell my son not to get blackout drunk at parties or put himself in close proximity to people who might hurt him. People do stupid things when they’re drunk that get them into trouble. They gamble large sums of money, they drive and have accidents, and they get into fights. Rape is not the only negative outcome of binge drinking. There are any number of them, and they can seriously derail your life.

In this case, I went further and I talked to my son about predatory behavior. I wanted to use Brock Turner as an example of someone I do not want him to ever emulate - not because Brock’s life has taken a sharp turn for the worse, not because he was caught and found guilty and will go to jail, but because it’s his responsibility, no matter how drunk, how sexually frustrated he is, or what is going on around him, to be a decent human being.

It’s harder these days, I know. We’ve got a real Lord of the Flies society thing going on. It’s not impossible, though. Brock is not an isolated case. He’s not representative of all or even the majority of people, men, or college students, but he’s not a token. He’s one of many predators who will hurt people when they get a chance and will fight being held accountable for it until the people who care about him go bankrupt. In other words, he’s a waste of oxygen. The world is not a better place because he exists.

I didn’t change all of those diapers and cook all of those meals so that my son can do the same. I expect him to earn his oxygen and not do stupid, selfish things when he’s a man, just as I would any daughter of mine.

Neal Gabler on America's Declining Standard of Living

noreply@blogger.com (grerp) — Fri, 20 May 2016 03:17:00 +0000

For the May issue of the Atlantic Neal Gabler, a writer, university lecturer, and erstwhile movie reviewer, wrote The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans, a piece about how he has struggled with his finances in silence due both to his family’s personal choices and the declining standard of living for middle-class Americans. This is an interesting piece, more for what it says about the author than the people with whom he’s trying to equate himself.

Gabler’s tale is another reiteration of Aesop’s fable, The Ant and the Grasshopper, padded with statistics for more effect. The problem with this piece is that Gabler wrote it, and he’s hardly the spokesperson for the down and out in America. Even if he’s shedding light on a real trend, his motivation is to gain sympathy for himself while placing himself over the unwashed in the social hierarchy.

The fact is, it is hard out there for many, many Americans these days. The statistics Gabler cites are true. The standard of living for lower income, working class and middle class Americans has definitely gone down in the past decades. While the cost of items we’ve grown to think of as non-negotiable - like housing, education, and healthcare - has sharply risen. Many more people are living on the edge of bankruptcy. As the article points out, 47 percent of respondents to one survey said that they would have to borrow or sell something to come up with $400 to pay for an emergency expense or would not be able to come up with it at all.

$400 is not that much money. There are so many things that cost at least $400 to repair or replace. This winter my refrigerator died, my washing machine died, and my laptop more or less collapsed. Each of these problems cost at least $400 to resolve. A car repair, an unexpected tax bill, or a medical emergency will easily run up into that kind of money as well, and most of us are vulnerable to those kinds of issues since we drive, pay taxes, and have bodies that break down.

The bump in prosperity the United States experienced in the middle of the twentieth century got people out of the habit of behaving in the kinds of pragmatic, cooperative, and self-denying ways that our ancestors had to live in order to survive, as well. And, unlike previous generations, the Boomers haven’t saved much and are looking winter straight in the face at this point. It’s coming.

Gabler, however, seems to have managed to either purchase or achieve most of his life goals. As a writer, he works a job of his choice in a financially unpredictable field, getting paid sporadically rather than steadily. He lived in New York City, a very expensive part of the country. His wife quit her job and stayed home with their two daughters when they were younger. They purchased a house in the Hamptons before they sold off their co-op apartment in NYC. They sent their daughters to private school and then chose to use savings and an inheritance to send them to Stanford, Harvard Medical School, Emory, and the University of Texas. (The UT degree was a master’s in social work, so the ROI on that investment will be calculated in negative numbers.) They also paid for one daughter’s wedding.

Essentially Gabler had caviar taste on a tuna budget. He wanted certain things for himself and his family - a career as a writer/professor, posh schools, owning property in a high status zip code - and he got them. He mentions them all in this article so that we know that, while he doesn’t have any money, he is still not among the great unwashed and uneducated. He chose to invest in the finer things because he has taste and refinement. This money wasn’t blown on a drug habit, cruises to the Bahamas, or an unhealthy obsession with cars.

The problem is, he still couldn’t afford these things and have a retirement that’s something other than a lead slug. And it’s retirement time.

Historically, Americans didn’t make these types of choices because they didn’t have the option. Easy credit wasn’t available, so people could spend only until they ran out of money. As a result they didn’t get all new carpeting in their condo. Instead they made their own rag rugs and called it good enough. People didn’t have designer weddings. They got married by a minister in the living room of their parents’ home, and they sat down to a homemade dinner afterward. My great-grandmother insisted that all of her children go to college because it was the only way she could see them not following in her own path of subsistence farming/seasonal work in the pickle factory. All of them did a year at County Normal and then went off to work. It was an entry level option into a better paid field instead of status signalling to everyone she knew how smart they - and, by extension, she - were.

It’s okay to be proud of the intelligence and accomplishments of your kids. It’s fine to invest your money in them. There’s nothing wrong in wanting to live in a safe area with good schools or to work a job that’s better suited for your temperament than sales, accounting, or customer service. The problem is, you can’t make those decisions when you don’t have the money to pay for them and then lump yourself in with Americans who sell their plasma to pay bills because they can’t find any work that pays over $12 an hour. There are quite a lot of those people living in America today, and they don’t feel solidarity with guys who send their daughter to Harvard Med.

Neither do I.

Chrissie Hynde's "recklessness"

noreply@blogger.com (grerp) — Wed, 07 Oct 2015 18:49:00 +0000

The other day when I was on my way to my son's school I caught part of Chrissie Hynde's NPR interview with David Greene in which Greene decided to focus on the chapter in Hynde's new book, Reckless: My Life as a Pretender, in which she discusses how her drug use resulted in her getting sexually assaulted.

The upshot of the interview, or at least what I heard, is that Hynde viewed this experience as something she walked into by doing drugs and getting high with dangerous people. She didn't want to label it rape, and she resisted other people telling her how she should think of it, and, as a result, she's gotten all sorts of garbage on social media for it. Essentially, she's making the argument that what women do, where they go, and what they have on make a difference to their safety, and no one wants to hear that. No one.

I found it interesting and even sort of funny that, when pressured by Greene to frame her experience differently she told him (and the audience): "Just don't buy the fucking book, then, if I've offended someone. Don't listen to my records." She also compared the social media response to a lynch mob. It's funny because Hynde apparently lived a pretty raucous life, and the audience isn't offended by any of the mistakes she made and acknowledges, but rather by her old-fashioned view that people are entitled to tell their own stories according to their own values and be left alone if they refuse to go along with what the current narrative says about things.

Sadly, that's not the way things work anymore. You have to say what they want you to say, or at the very least they'll take you apart online. They'll probably come for your livelihood as well.

It's been over five years now since I said something along the lines of what Hynde said in the online community I was in. I commented on a blog piece about frat parties and women's safety and wrote:

"I am SO tired of women thinking that since the Sexual Revolution, sex is now roped off and controlled, bureaucratized, no longer subject to natural law or the lusts of man (and woman).

"Men do not go to frat parties or bars during meat market rush to talk Plato and sample the culinary repast. They go to 1) get drunk and 2) get laid. Do women not know that? Come on, they have to know that. If you go to these venues scantily dressed, intend to flirt a lot, get all kinds of validating male attention, and go home on an ego high, you are a tease. You get something, they get nothing. Again, they don’t care what your thoughts on Plato are. Men accept the possibility of failure, but still it’s a set-up. They provide the booze and atmosphere, and hopefully you provide the ____.

"If you walked into a bordello and got drunk, would you expect to wake up with your panties still on? No. Why are you getting drunk if you’re inserting yourself into an unstable situation?"

I've had a lot of time to reflect on this incident, and, you know what I think? It was ridiculous. I was quoted and reviled on numerous blogs, Twitter, and even in newspapers. I received threats - physical threats - I was psychoanalyzed to death, and ultimately I quit the position I was in within that community. It wasn't because they fired me. It was because I felt that after 10 years of reading, commenting, and volunteering within that community, if this was the response I got when I said something people didn't agree with, I didn't want to interact with those people ever again. At the time I was volunteering like 20 hours a week of my time and generating a great deal of free content. I thought that people would care more about me as a person instead of words I wrote on one blog piece. I was wrong.

And, you know what? I could have been a lot less angry in that post. I could have skipped the sarcasm, and I didn't have to double down after. I suppose I could have apologized and gotten "educated," and I probably could have stayed in that community. That's not what I wanted. It's quite possible this was my way out of a commitment I'd grown tired of. Considering how little drama I create in real life and online, that seems as decent an explanation as anything else.

Why did I write it then? I wrote it because I really did not want to see any more girls get assaulted. That's it. I didn't write it to corral women and pen them back up. I didn't write it so that rape victims would feel worse about themselves. I didn't have a political agenda, and nothing I did or wrote made any difference at all except that it served as a rallying cry to circle the wagons and reaffirm what the right stand on women and sexual assault was within that community.

Twenty-one years ago I went and lived abroad. I've talked about this before, but within the last year, I've been examining my behavior more and trying to figure out some of my own thoughts and responses. The place I lived in, post-Soviet Russia, was not a safe place. It wasn't the most dangerous place in the world either, but things were destabilizing quickly at the time, and the experiences I had while living there and traveling through the area have had long-term effects.

I have night terrors practically every night. I wake up two or three nights a week - sometimes more, sometimes less - screaming. Sometimes I wake up everyone in the house. I find myself pawing through my purse in the middle of the night looking for my documents, checking to see if I still have them.

I don't feel safe traveling. I don't feel safe anywhere near anyone in a government issue uniform. I have an almost unbearable time flying, not because of the flying itself, but because people take your things, and pat you down, even strip search you. If I have to fly anywhere it takes me a long, long time after to feel safe again. I know what it's like to be in a place where you have no rights, protections, or legal recourse and to feel grateful when you come home alive.

None of this really has anything to do with rape at fraternity houses or drunkenness, but it does have to do with vulnerability and naivete. When I went to Russia, I assumed it would be okay. It wasn't. From a safety standpoint this was a dumb choice for me to make. I'm old enough now with enough experience to see and admit that. And I'd like to spare other people from decades of nightmares and fear.

I still don't understand why the shaming frenzy is necessary when people talk about the dangers out there for women and how to avoid them. Is it pride at work? Does it strike a personal chord in so many people? Why does everything have to be shouted down? Why can't we say women are vulnerable to predation; please avoid doing these things for your own safety?

I took some souvenirs home with me from my experiences abroad, but it's not the matrioshka dolls or the now historical currency that I examine the most, it's why two decades later I still wake up screaming all the time. It seems like we're doing nothing practical or worthwhile about stopping that from happening to more girls and women, and we can't even talk about our options anymore. How is this better?

Obergefell and the creeping federal overreach

noreply@blogger.com (grerp) — Fri, 10 Jul 2015 02:10:00 +0000

So I haven't commented too much on the whole gay marriage thing. For the record, I don't have a problem with civil unions. I have gay friends, and I think anyone should be able to control issues like inheritance, shared finances, medical or durable power of attorney assignment, insurance beneficiaries or covered dependents, etc. I also think marriage as a whole was long ago downgraded to civil union status in the West since, with the advent of no-fault divorce, it's now an unenforceable contract. The whole point of marriage is that people need structure in order to make sure that the vulnerable or defenseless are protected and the most effective, loyalty-inspiring arrangements seem to be familial. But if there's no bite to the contract, the strong will leave and the weak will go under. This is what we're experiencing now - a whole lot of people slowly going under.

What cheeses me off about the whole gleeful celebration of the past several weeks is that loads of people don't see what coming just around the river bend for religious people whose values are in conflict with the equality cult religion now in power. It's been in the works for quite some time already.

If the government can fine you into oblivion for refusing to bake a cake for an occasion that goes against your religious beliefs and then place a gag order on you after the fact, we no longer have free speech or freedom of religion. For that matter, we don't even have equality, since some citizens are protected upon pain of fine or jail and others are jailed or fined.

So I got into a Twitter discussion. Yes, I did. I know, I know. But when people say this Supreme Court decision won't change anything about my life since I don't want to marry another woman, I have to shake my head. Where have these people been living for the past 60-70 years or longer? Haven't they seen kids forced to travel by bus clear across a city to an unknown school so the equality flag can fly higher? Haven't they seen federal tax dollars funneled for Planned Parenthood and abortion initiatives? Have they not seen public schools stripped of any Christian cultural expression? Haven't they noticed how hostile college campuses are to the religious or people of conservative values? Haven't they watched as villages and hamlets get sued into submission for their Santa displays or Christmas tree decorations? The Boy Scouts - the Boy Scouts - have been successfully rebranded as bigotry purveyors.

If Christians want to have Christmas programs at community schools at Christmastime, they're out of line and selfish, but people can dance naked and simulate sex in public parades and religious people are told, "Don't go, then." Media has become unbelievably offensive. The solution? "Don't watch/listen/read/view/participate, then." Don't watch the media? Any media? The media is everywhere. Good luck with that.

If anyone thinks that this most recent Supreme Court decision is the end of this, they have not been paying attention. We are about to witness lawsuit after lawsuit against the religious, and not just about cakes and wedding photo shoots. Every Christian college is about to be forced to lose their ability to regulate sexual mores on campus or lose their ability to offer their students federal financial aid. Churches that refuse to marry gay people or have gay people in relationships hold office will lose their tax exempt status. These people will not stop until religious groups speak, think, and act by their rules within their own walls. Full stop.

Put out a rosary in your own cubicle and expect a complaint to rise. If you're not willing to nod and smile about your coworker's sex transitioning plastic surgery, expect HR to call and mandate a reprogramming class. Or lose your job. A lot of this road has already been traveled.

So when people say it's paranoia to think this decision was anything but a victory for love, I'm not at all convinced. Because the people we are dealing with do not negotiate in good faith. They take, and they sue, and they bulldoze, and they expect you to say thank you that you can still put up a cross and "believe what you want" in your own home.

Well, no thank you.

Grerp elsewhere

noreply@blogger.com (grerp) — Mon, 06 Jul 2015 15:26:00 +0000

I thought I'd put up a notice of things I'd participated in elsewhere.

28 Sherman posted my review of Sexy Baby and Hot Girls Wanted this morning. I didn't mention this in my piece, but the hands-off parents in Sexy Baby named their daughters Winnifred, Gogo, and Myrtle, and, as far as I'm concerned, that's all that needs to be said about them. Except that she's a heavily tattooed NYC lawyer who actually competed on the dance floor with her tarted up daughter at the girl's bat mitzvah and he sought out feminist picture books to read to his girls when they were little. Mark my words, this will not end well.

A few months back I also did an interview for Ascending the Tower on femininity and gender roles. If you missed it, check it out. This was a fun conversation, and I was very pleased to be asked to participate. Thank you to Surviving Babel and Nick B. Steves.

"Create Your Own Religion"

noreply@blogger.com (grerp) — Sat, 03 Jan 2015 20:00:00 +0000

Quit Playing Prophet by Mark Yuray is certainly worth a read.

I've been following a few atheist and humanist sites over the past year or so. I always find it interesting to try out the head space of people who view the world much differently than I do. I find it fascinating that suddenly, arriving seemingly concurrently with post-apocalyptic visions of the world in pop culture, young people are obsessed with science and rationality - religiously obsessed, as if all of life must be put through these twin lenses or be counted inauthentic. And these are the same people who spend loads of money on steampunk costumes and paraphernalia so they can go to comic book conventions and interact with other people who are also pretending to be fictional characters.

What?

I also have found it amusing to read ranting comments about the harmfulness of religion and how it "poisons minds and hearts" and amounts to child abuse while watching the twin trends of lessening religious observance and increasing rates of suicide, mental illness, obesity, illness, depression, illegitimacy, family breakdown, crime, arrests, imprisonment, and poverty. Not that these two are in any way connected. Of course not.

Full disclosure: While I am a practicing and observant Catholic, I've experienced my own periods of religious doubt, some lasting for years. From what I've read few people come out of the experience of infertility and miscarriage with the same view of the world and how it works. I was no exception. It took its toll.

I've read the whole Bible, had read it by the time I was 15 (I was raised in an evangelical tradition). There are a lot of things, particularly in the Old Testament - which, I confess, I prefer - that do not rest easily in my mind with my ideas of right and wrong and how to handle conflict.

I've never observed a miracle, have never seen anything that I would classify as even being close to miraculous. I am naturally religious; I'm not at all spiritual. When people - and this happens frequently - tell me that everything happens for a reason, I cringe.

I have come to believe, however, that my personal ideas and beliefs, questions and doubts are unimportant, that focusing on what I need my religion to provide for me is, in fact, hubris and completely inappropriate. Religion was never meant to provide individual satisfaction or happiness, although it does do this frequently enough. I've known so many people who have survived horrible trials only because of their religious faith and the support their religious community gave them.

Religion is the way culture maintains and reproduces itself. It's the way values are transmitted between generations, the way worldviews are shaped, and destructive behavior within a community is minimized. Religion gives us multisensory ways of experiencing the passage of time and heightened spiritual experience. Religious belief inspires; it's creative. Religion ties people to their communities and brings them together to celebrate and mourn everyday happiness and sadness.

While it's true that people could theoretically come up with purely social methods for transmitting culture and bonding themselves together, most people would not feel compelled to participate without some higher meaning or guilt attached, and you need significant buy-in for the prophylactic effects of religion to work. A small percentage of people are capable of creating community and policing their own behavior adequately without this framework. Most people are not.

Human beings are endlessly innovative, and it's quite possible that someone could come up with a successful religious framework that would accomplish the above goals in the West better than Christianity has for the past two millenia. Certainly Christianity has not done a great job of standing up to the kindergartenish ideals of "fairness," "equality," or "tolerance" over the past century. But I have absolutely no interest in a religion created out of whole cloth for practical reasons for the same reasons I wouldn't bother to learn to "speak" Dothraki or an Elven tongue, even though I love languages. The countless iterations of Christian observance tell us nearly everything we know about our ancestors and what they believed, lived, and valued. The rituals they made up to celebrate life and time satisfy me very likely because they satisfied them and we are genetically connected.

The pastor's chair that once sat in the front of my grandfather's church sits in my bedroom today. It's not the most valuable piece of furniture in my house, but it reminds me that my grandfather helped build his church with his own back and his own money and these things were important to him. I still sing his favorite hymn, and it helps me to remember the person he was. I have my grandmother's stained glass nativity set, and I think of her and how we are alike and different every year when I set it up.

I am neither a philosopher nor a theologian, but I am a mother, and I have chosen to raise my child in a religious community with religious values. He feels he is a part of something and surrounded by like people who care about him. We talk about the saints who came before us, we sing the Agnus Dei as people did for centuries. Religion meets different needs in different people, but I'm not confident I could manufacture anything out of whole cloth that would be as relevant or inspirational as what Christian tradition offers. And it would not be a connection to my ancestors or their lives.

From what I've seen over the past 43 years, attempts to bypass the negatives of "organized religion" while still maintaining its "spiritual" benefits have failed, and the Boomers had the benefit of being raised in a functional society with actual rules and obligations. I'm not foolish enough to think I could do better on my own.

21st Century 'ships: Cartoons, not gay gay couples, and Kimye

noreply@blogger.com (grerp) — Fri, 05 Dec 2014 18:24:00 +0000

Yesterday, EOnline wrote up a piece about the 20 most 'shipped couples on Tumblr in 2014. For those who aren't familiar with "'shipping" - and I'm not really either - it's:

Ship: (noun) Short for "relationship," an imagined romantic pairing of two people, fictional or otherwise.

Basically, from what I can tell because I don't read or write fan fiction or slash fiction, it's readers and viewers writing, video editing, gif making, and talking about real, fictional, or imagined couples from popular media. It seems to have exploded with the internet and particularly on sites like Tumblr which allow for the fast spread of any idea someone can come up with and make a .jpg or .gif file about.

I know I'm dating myself here, but we didn't do this sort of thing when I was young. Popular media was still somewhat universal, and there was little way for fans of esoteric fiction, written or filmed, to come together to obsess about their fandom. There were media events - like when Dave and Maddie hooked up on Moonlighting (epic writing/plotting mistake) - but we just watched them and then talked about them with our friends. Or we watched with our friends. We didn't buy Moonlighting-inspired Shakespearean costumes off of Etsy and go to conventions dressed as Katarina and take 1000 selfies with people dressed as werepuppets or some other absurdity.

Seriously, I don't get this trend. None of it. It's all too bizarre to me. What is going on with kids these days?

It's not just that I don't get fan fiction, although I don't. I've written fiction. I have no interest in writing other people's characters doing things I'd prefer them doing. That feels intrusive to me. I certainly would not want to write their characters doing or being something other than what the original writer wrote them doing. For instance, being gay or hooking up with villains.

I first became aware of slash fiction when people started writing Lord of the Rings characters Merry and Pippin as gay lovers instead of semi-intrepid hobbit friends in a war zone. I remember thinking, "Why would anyone ever want to read or write that? Why is this kind of character shift intriguing to them? What are they getting out of this?" Particularly because the people I knew who were doing this sort of thing - then on Livejournal - were young, heterosexual women. What was it about these women that made them want to see hobbits get it on?

I still don't get it, but as this trend exploded, I find it more and more distressing because fast forward 15 or so years and now out of the Top 20 Couples of 2014, only five of them are heterosexual. Five. And one of those five is Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. The rest of them are anime character couples, Youtube video makers, a couple of actually gay couples, and pairings made up of heterosexual characters who people think would be hotter if they were gay.

What?

Look, Harry Potter isn't supposed to be with Malfoy. Romantic couples are supposed to be inspirational, aren't they? When girls read or watch Pride and Prejudice, they're supposed to want to be Elizabeth Bennet, right? When Colin Firth stares at Jennifer Ehle in P&P, a normal reaction is not to wonder what it would be like if Darcy and Bingley hooked up. Right? Right??? I just looked it up. There actually is Darcy/Bingley fiction out there. What? What a bizarro world we are living in.

Babies, people. Babies. It used to be, you wanted your characters to get together so that they would be all romantic and everything and then the natural would occur and they would have about twelve babies and be happy forever. Because gorgeous people - perfect couples - should reproduce themselves and populate the (imaginary) world with smarter, more athletic, better looking, more inspiring people with perfect teeth.

When even women's fantasies don't involve family formation and reproduction - or even the involvement of female people - that's some kind of mass-induced insanity right there. What is going on here?

Feminine nurturing as a social building block

noreply@blogger.com (grerp) — Fri, 28 Nov 2014 16:06:00 +0000

I was thinking aloud on Twitter tonight and thought it would be good to write some things down.

The crazy, Marxist push back on Thanksgiving always bemuses me. I mean, who hates Thanksgiving? I love Thanksgiving. It's a warm, relatively low key, family-and-comfort-food-oriented holiday thoughtfully placed on the calendar in the bleakest part of autumn. It's true that it can be a lot of cooking and baking, but there's no requirement to serve a 20-pound turkey and seven sides.

Besides the usual attempts to torpedo Thanksgiving with absurd white guilt, there's the bitching about how cooking enslaves women (please). And this year some SJWs tried to conflate holiday family interaction with oppression and killing of the Black race.

I've made peace with the fact that SJWs are mentally ill, but I still do not understand the loathing they have for white men. In the history of humanity, women have never had it better in terms of freedom and social mobility than white women do, particularly white women married to white men. Does that mean all white men are good? No. As in every population, there are any number of violent, unstable, and difficult men. But in my experience, those men are in the minority. Most of the white men I know and have known have been very good to me, and frequently kind and solicitous. (I won't comment on other ethnic groups. I interact largely with middle and working-class white men.)

Haven't these SJWs seen a group of middle-aged men show up on a Saturday morning to move all of a parishioner's household goods to a new apartment? I have. Haven't they seen guys bring chain saws and axes to clear roads after a big storm? I have. I've also had men walk me home, fix my car, drop off yards of free mulch for my yard, and offer me work when I needed it. My sister's father-in-law once drove to the state capital to get a document apostilled for me when I needed it in a hurry and couldn't get it done myself. (That man can get anything done.) All of these services were done without a hint of payback, by the way, either sexual or otherwise.

What I think has changed - and perhaps this makes the SJWs experience very different from mine - is that women no longer interact with men in the traditional ways that set up a more positive dynamic between them. It used to be that older women of some station or qualities had rather a significant amount of influence over men, which, given their lack of sexual allure, seems inconceivable today. Now women have all of the power they will ever have when they are young and at their sexual peak. And, generally, they squander this power or deliberately abuse it instead of focusing it on loyalty building through nurturing and relationship building. When they are older, then, because they have not cultivated those important ties, they wind up like Liz Jones complaining about being lonely, poor, and ready to die.

It's all so bizarre. Women are natural nurturers; they've evolved to be this way. Check out Tumblr if you think the desire isn't there. It showcases thousands of girl blogs full of pictures of puppies, kittens, and baby hedgehogs propped in baby-like poses. Or browse Pinterest for the plethora of homemaking adventures and craft projects pinned there. But instead of embracing these female yearnings in the traditional vocations of wife and mother, girls online are writing thousand-word essays on the lack of bad-ass role models on TV and writing gay slash fiction about apparently heterosexual Harry Potter characters.

It's a little stated fact that this female nurturing, while requiring considerable effort and self-sacrifice, it sets up more positive interactions with men (and, for that matter, people). Feminine behavior like cooking, baking, tending, touching, listening, smiling, laughing, and singing, brings out the protective nature of men and sets up a natural, positive give-and-take between them. Whereas a bitchy, kick-ass persona actively repels most men. It's very counterproductive.

Women can't compete physically with men. Period. And the vast majority of them don't even seem to want to compete in traditionally masculine high-stress endeavors. Given this, women would be far better off building affection, respect, and loyalty by developing their natural caring abilities. And I don't mean to say that in some kind of stick-to-your-knitting, condescending way. I don't think women are only good for a handful of uses or that they cannot make contributions in any number of ways. You can have a career and still interact with people in ways that makes everyone's experience more positive. However, I don't support women who only want to bitch about how there aren't enough women in STEM careers or in CEO positions or making boatloads of money writing simulation software or having their games developed into the next big thing.

As far as I am concerned women have a choice there. They can either excel at the things men excel at, expending their own time and energy, or they can develop more cooperative strategies. Complaining endlessly about "male privilege" and attempting to shame successful people may seem like an easier path, but it's going to go nowhere given the relationship between the sexes right now.

What goes around comes around

noreply@blogger.com (grerp) — Sat, 25 Oct 2014 05:32:00 +0000

Q: How satisfying is it to watch Gawker squeal a bit after pressure from gamers on their sponsors?

A: So soooooo satisfying.

Gawker has now lost at least potential ad revenue from at least three major sponsors: Adobe, BMW, and Mercedes. Since, unlike other passions, evil gossip, personal speculation, privacy violation, and bullying people out of jobs cannot, apparently, be done on one's own time and must be hired, this Gamergate offensive seems to be working. Even Amanda Marcotte seems alarmed.

There you go. What goes around comes around.

Lest we forget how very deserving the demise of Gawker's carefully engineered empire of poison words would be, let's recap. Twitter in the past year or more has turned into a bloodbath, and wherever there's a pile on, wherever someone's life or livelihood gets ruined, someone from Gawker has been there, holding a torch or a pitchfork and smiling, smiling, smiling.

Justine Sacco, Pax Dickinson, Brendan Eich - all lost their jobs because of the actions of a mob ginned up by Internet activists. After Sandy Hook, Gawker listed the names of all of the gun owners in New York City. These people are gleeful about causing trouble for anyone who does not subscribe to the worldview they are advocating for, or for anyone who deviates from the PC script any time, anywhere.

People who are active online should know that it's not a safe place, and it's not only unsafe in the sense that there are pedophiles waiting to talk to kids in chatrooms. It's unsafe in the sense that everything is archived and can be called up to use as a weapon in any future conflict. And there are apparently thousands of mean or mentally unstable people waiting impatiently for the right opportunity to do just that.

What is Twitter? If you consider the hundreds of millions of people every day who tweet things via this medium - most of it is nothing but air. It's the equivalent of bar conversations, only every conversation is public, not in the sense that it's being "heard" in real time, but that it's recorded, and can be played back, minus any context at any future date.

Have you ever been obnoxious in a bar? Have you ever made a joke that your audience would appreciate, but your mother - or your girlfriend - or your boss - would not? This is a normal part of discourse. Obviously the things we say are not always appropriate for any audience. Unfortunately, people like Sam Biddle are out there combing Twitter and other online media for ammunition to ruin people's lives. Really, how awful is that?
It's just so petty and malicious. So middle school girl clique-y.

Well now, after Sam Biddle made a callous "joke" about the necessity of bullying nerds, he's being moved around the Gawker empire from editor of Valleywag to some senior writing position at Gawker itself, after a short forced sabbatical. How does it feel, Sam, the fire of public opprobrium? Not so great, huh?
Unfortunately, that awful Nitasha Tiku who is just as nasty is taking over for Biddle, and no doubt things will be business as usual.

Perhaps Gamergate can do something about her too? Go, gamers! Keep it up! Maybe if enough of these horrible people have to suffer at least some consequences, they will think twice about being so casually cruel to others online.

Piece of Advice #116: Don't rely on the government to protect you

noreply@blogger.com (grerp) — Wed, 15 Oct 2014 21:01:00 +0000

It should now be clear to even the least engaged American that, when it comes to our government, the adults are not in charge. In fact, from Ferguson to the Ukraine to Iraq, whatever our current U.S. Government has touched has turned to blood. They've been busily destabilizing sovereign nations and stirring up race hatred in the heartland, all the while ignoring their role in scandal after scandal, and responsibility for their decision making processes in failed projects of their own choosing, like the healthcare rollout.

However, the average American, not really known for his awareness of what is happening within his ever expanding, ever more complex and corrupt government, can't really be blamed for his ignorance of large scams like Pigford. First, because it doesn't affect him directly and probably doesn't affect anyone he knows directly. Second, because the media has been running cover for the Obama Administration for over six years, framing their actions and covering their misdeeds in a decidedly Soviet fashion. And, third, because, under the New Normal that followed the economic freefall of 2008, we're all pretty busy trying to do more with less. At the end of the day, if there are only bread and circuses, we'll we'll take a second helping of both, please, and maybe a beer?

But here's the deal: while the bad faith misdoings of the IRS, the DHS, the FBI, the ATF, the HHS and the Justice Department are certainly bad news for all of us, and the military purges and our porous border will absolutely affect the security of the U.S. longterm, in the shorter term, most of this stuff, again, doesn't affect us directly in ways we can point to and accuse. Yes, the new jobs aren't anywhere near as good as our old jobs, and the average taxpayer will be on the hook for the needs and demands of an unending stream of immigrants, but it's still a fairly indirect assault. You have to be paying attention to pinpoint the source of your troubles.

But now we have Ebola on our soil, and there's nothing like a disease that makes people's inner organs hemorrhage and their eyeballs liquify to shake things up a bit.

So far the CDC is doing about as good a job as you might expect from a federal department under this administration. Ebola has been ripping through Africa for months now, a horrible disease that has no cure. The mortality rate is currently about 70%. 70%! Still, the media has attempted to run cover for the inadequacies of organization and planning which lead to it cropping up in Texas, instead bringing up gun deaths and Republican budget cuts, and reminding us that the flu kills 36,000 people in the U.S. every year (a statistic that even the Huffington Post blatantly calls out as a lie). Obama personally told us that it was "unlikely" that Ebola would surface in the U.S. CDC officials told us it was unlikely that Ebola would spread in the U.S. And now we have pockets of Ebola in several states and at least two homegrown cases in healthcare workers who treated Thomas Duncan, the Liberian man who knowingly brought it here. The last case even flew about the U.S. after her coworker was diagnosed with Ebola. Wow, the government is really on it. Relax, peeps, cheeel. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we...play golf. Yeah, that's right. Absolutely nothing to worry about.

Seriously, people. My brother-in-law's border collie mix could do a better job of herding people and keeping mischief from happening.

I think it's time we realized that our leaders have a different agenda here, and it's not keeping average Americans safe or healthy. Obama can give Frieden the ax to try and save face, but until we stop flights from West Africa, seal our borders, and quarantine anyone - anyone - who's had exposure to the virus, we are all at risk.

Most of these scares will prove to be false alarms, and it looks like the people who did not treat Duncan medically have not come down with the virus. But officials have begun rethinking that 21-day quarantine period as sufficient, and, frankly, we don't know enough about this disease and how it's spread yet to make any more mistakes. But it's hard to imagine, after such an auspicious beginning, that there will be no more mistakes. The paperwork from the medical liability lawsuits will decimate forests.

So, we're on our own here. The CDC isn't going to save you, so take care of your own. Beef up your health as best you can, stock up on Sambucol, and start a hand washing ritual. We may have to self-quarantine as well - which would require stocking up on essentials and will have a significant impact on our economy. Be aware of the risks of being in public places or in germ incubators like public transit. Prepare for possible financial disruption. And make sure your employer has some policy on how to handle outbreaks of sickness in the workplace to minimize exposure to everyone else.

Good luck, and God bless.

Piece of Advice #115: Teach your girls not to rape

noreply@blogger.com (grerp) — Thu, 18 Sep 2014 04:15:00 +0000

Originally, I was going to talk about hitting and physical violence among women since new evidence has shown that frequently, in roughly 40% of cases, men are the target of domestic violence. We are so programmed by our duplicitous media to regard women as victims, that younger generations cannot imagine such a high rate of abuse victims are men - except for young people who grew up in the households of abusive women. They can imagine all too well.

I've known a number of men personally who were perhaps not physically beaten by their wives or partners, but were subjected to endless psychological abuse, crazy, jealous, or controlling behavior. At least three of these men's wives took a blowtorch to their lives, and they barely survived. They were normal men whose lives were ruined when vicious women used the system against them for fun and profit.

Teach your girls not to be like that.

Start with the idea that they need to keep their hands them themselves. That just because they're cute and small, they don't get a free pass on hitting. It's not okay to hit a boy just because he's bigger or male. Then move up to the idea that "Want, take, have" is a philosophy suited to psychopaths not women, and certainly not ladies.

It's distressing to read all of the recent stories about adult women who have taken sexual advantage of the boys entrusted to them socially or professionally, like local teacher Jamila Williams who sexually molested two of her students. This is not an isolated incident. Women pedophiles are becoming more common. I'll forgive you if you haven't read more of the hundreds of these cases (h/t SOBL1). The media doesn't seem to think they are as interesting as priest pedophile cases. We are still getting thorough coverage of archived Catholic scandals in the national press, although female pedophile cases are much more of a trend now. Where there is little oversight, predators will roam, and schools apparently are great hunting grounds these days.

Some may say boys who are sexually molested by women must consent or sex cannot occur, but the fact remains that these boys are still minors. Their brains have not fully formed, and they cannot conceptualize the legal responsibilities they will have for their predators' children should these women become pregnant or what life with herpes (or antibiotic-resistant Gonorrhea) will be like. We shelter them from the responsibilities of voting and drinking because our society thinks they are unready. If it's wrong for a 30-year-old man to have consensual sex with a 15-year-old girl because one is adult and has adult understanding and the other is a child with inadequate experience, it's wrong for women to have sex with boys as well. Personally, I don't think we have the punishments right for these "consensual" sex cases, but I do agree that this isn't trivial stuff. I'm not raising my son to believe sex is like a handshake and matters just as little.

Then there are the truly crazy cases, like the one in Chicago where the nurse had sex with a medicated patient without his consent. It's fair to say that if on college campuses consensual sex must contractual, having sex with your drugged up patient is rape. You can't broker any kind of business if you can't count to 10.

For those confused about how women (and girls) should respect men's boundaries physically, psychologically, emotionally, sexually, and legally, remember: What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

Piece of Advice #114: Stay together for the children

noreply@blogger.com (grerp) — Fri, 05 Sep 2014 01:03:00 +0000

This piece of advice basically goes against all of the "wisdom" of the last 45 years, since the second wave feminist movement and the Sexual Revolution. Since I was a child myself I've heard adults rationalizing that if they're not happy in their marriages, the kids suffer, so it's just better to make a clean break and create a new happier environment for them to thrive in.

This sounds really great; the problem is, it's just sheer crap. I think by now we all know it because the people who are of childbearing age now have seen so much of the insecurity, sadness, loneliness, anger, violence and abuse that are the results of broken families.

It's hard to even type that phrase, "broken families," because I've had so much negative reinforcement and reeducation of the "every family type is unique and valuable" kind. "No family is broken, we're all just making different choices, etc., etc."

So last week I found out that a woman I know, have known for several decades, who comes from a good intact family of loving but strict and religious parents, who was homeschooled as a girl and has been homeschooling her many children, has decided to Eat Pray Love and dump her, by all accounts, kind, decent looking, good provider, good dad husband so she can find herself. Or whatever. I should have known this was going down by the large increase in Facebook preening selfies (a number of them on horseback) being posted on her timeline, but I guess I wasn't paying enough attention. I really didn't pick up on the fact that she was getting divorced until she changed her last name back to her maiden name and her status to divorced.

She has many children. And, yes, she's held together well. She's still really attractive, and she's fun and creative and energetic, but what a nightmare. At least one of her daughters is taking being separated from her daddy really hard. And looking even a short distance into the future, her economic prospects are fairly grim. She's not particularly educated, and her job training isn't in a lucrative field. I don't know what she's thinking. There is no way that she's ever going to do better than her now ex-husband.

She says her children are doing really well, but "well" is a pretty relative term.

My son spent a lot of time this summer playing with a friend whose parents got divorced two years ago. It was an "amicable" split up, and they were both very discreet on the reasons for it. Their son had anger issues then, and I remember thinking, "This isn't going to make him less angry." He spent this last summer terrorizing his family, including both sets of grandparents who were helping to take care of him. Apparently the only time he was easy to be around was when he had friends over, so out of pity, I let my son play there more than I was comfortable with because I know his grandmother, have known her for years, and I was dismayed to hear her say in astonishment how good he was when my son was over.

The last week of the summer his mother locked herself in the bathroom with her daughter because he was so out of control. Her father had to come over and get this boy talked down. Another total nightmare.

While I think this boy could seriously benefit from the establishment of some strict parental boundaries, the longer the summer wore on, the more I realized he was punishing everyone because he was angry and because he couldn't do anything about the divorce two years ago, but he sure could now. So he did. He made everyone in his family as miserable as he could.

In the last six year since my son went to school we've seen numerous families split up, and a number of my son's classmates have really floundered. They've been angry. They've hit kids on the playground, they've gotten thin and ghostlike, and their grades have seriously suffered in school. I've had to inform my son's school of abuse, and I've testified in court. And this is a private, middle class Catholic school, not the inner city.

Their parents have suffered too. They don't know how to handle escalating misbehavior. They don't have time to do enough intervention. They don't have any money. They've married and divorced again, or not married and just had serial relationships. Or posted a lot on Facebook about how strong and independent they are when it was obvious that they were just hanging on by a thread.

I don't know what was going on behind closed doors in most of these situations, but divorce didn't make any of these people better parents or happier. Yes, it's still the short term, but there has been so much collateral damage.

Marriage is hard. It's not always happy. Sometimes there are long spells of sadness, disappointment, health problems, money problems, or incompatibility that must be weathered. Children add complications and stress. Individual wants or even needs often must be put off. But the sheer act of keeping on keeping on in the face of difficulties is an education for kids, and the long term benefits of growing up in a house with both biological (or adoptive) parents are of immeasurable. An inheritance richer than pearls or diamonds.

If that's a gift you can give your children, why wouldn't you do everything you can to provide it?

Suffer the children...

noreply@blogger.com (grerp) — Tue, 26 Aug 2014 22:32:00 +0000

Recently in Grand Rapids we had a rather shocking murder: Jamarion Lawhorn, a 12-year-old boy, took a knife to a playground of a private trailer park and fatally stabbed a 9-year-old boy and then asked a nearby adult to borrow his cellphone so he could turn himself in to the police. "Hi. I just stabbed somebody. I want to die. I'm tired of living in this world. Please pick me up," he said.

Besides the extreme youth of Lawhorn and his victim, Connor Verkerke, the case was troubling in a number of ways. The two boys didn't know each other. There had been no contact between them. The act was premeditated, committed in a place Lawhorn didn't play, and done in broad daylight. Also, Lawhorn was black and Verkerke was white.

If you haven't heard about this case, it's not surprising. The larger media doesn't cover stuff like this; it's too busy trying to inflame a race war in Ferguson. And although by all accounts Connor Verkerke was a very nice boy, well behaved and very loved, he tragically was the wrong color for clickbait. Just another unfortunate incident. Nothing to see here.

The story gets grimmer, though. Lawhorn, when examined after the crime, was found to be covered in bruises. CPS substantiated child abuse allegations against his mother and stepfather last year, but apparently the parenting classes they were required to attend didn't "take." So Jamarion and his two younger siblings continued to live in a house with little food, no sheets or blankets on the beds, drug paraphernalia in the bathroom, and turn-off utilities. Oh, and two abusive. drugging adults. Of course, now that Jamarion's done something even CPS can't sweep under the rug or try to repair with therapy or classes, the other children have been pulled from the home, and the state has filed to terminate Anita Lawhorn and Bernard Harrold's parental rights.

Jamarion will spend his life locked away somewhere. He's still being held in jail until they can figure out what charging a 12-year-old as an adult really means. No judge will ever assign bail and shouldn't. He probably has a metric ton's worth of rage shoved down not so deep inside. Who wouldn't? No mention has been made of whether his mother and stepfather will be charged. Anita already surrendered her rights to two other children back in the 1990s because of abuse.

This kind of thing absolutely guts me. Stuff with kids always does. And it's not because CPS didn't do its job. CPS can't do its job - we place parental rights to abuse and neglect children above the rights of children to have functional families, just like we place the rights of people to "express themselves" sexually, socially, emotionally, politically, criminally, etc., before the rights of children (and all people) to live in safe, prosperous, and orderly cities and towns. It's important that we mouth the right sentences, not that we protect the vulnerable. Ideas over people.

Anita Lawhorn is a bad mother and very likely a very nasty piece of work. But she's feral because she's been allowed to become feral and to continue to be feral. And at the individual level, there's very little we can do about any of it. Agencies will encourage people to become foster parents, and many well meaning and very ill-prepared people will sign up to try and put the pieces of the puzzles of the Anita Lawhorns out there back together - and then the state will give those kids right back to their abusers. And innocent people, black and white and every other race, will get mugged, robbed, stabbed, shot, raped, and murdered because children who live in hell grow up to have, to be demons.

And that is not even remotely surprising, just horrible and terribly sad.

Piece of Advice #113: Stock up

noreply@blogger.com (grerp) — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 21:34:00 +0000

One of the things that I was grateful I had done when we found out my husband was being laid off was to have fully stocked my pantry. Between that and the freezer we could have eaten for a couple of months, at least, although thankfully it didn't come to that. It was still a huge load off my mind when I was calculating expenses that we would have enough food to eat, no matter how long unemployment took to kick in. And it took a long time. I don't know how families without any savings do it.

Yesterday I also restocked my freezer with meat and fish from the coop, enough to make it through at least several months. I've purchased a half a pig as well from my local farmer who puts them out in his fields to fatten them up for fall. I'm splitting it with a friend since we both have smaller families. Last December we got a quarter hog's worth of meat, and it filled my freezer up. Meat is so expensive right now that buying it in bulk, even free range as I prefer, often costs less than what's in the grocery store. You do have to be organized in how you use it, though, because more than six months in the freezer is bad for most meats.

Many staples last in storage indefinitely, though. Beans, rice, split peas, lentils, wheat berries (if you own a grinder) all can last for years without spoilage. My pantry also has sugar, honey, and agave nectar, condiments, spaghetti and other noodles, canned fruits and vegetables, an embarrassing amount of tea leaves, as well as oils and spices and medicinal herbs. I have perhaps 40 gallons of water in storage as well. I put 3 drops of bleach in each container to keep it from molding. I've never had to use much of it, but the bleach will quickly evaporate once uncapped and then it will be safe to drink.

Other things I keep about in case of emergency: batteries, flashlights, extra blankets, a battery operated shortwave radio, a crank radio/lantern, camping gear, and a complete medical kit (with surgical tools and a number of spare bandages). I also have ibuprofen, Tylenol, and aspirin, elderberry elixir, as well as an additional stock of any medicines we regularly use.

The medical supplies could easily come in handy during an extended electrical blackout, blizzard situation, or epidemic. This has been on my mind be cause of the uncontrolled Ebola outbreak in West Africa. While I don't believe the disease would spread nearly as fast in a first world country with a complete infrastructure and advanced medical care available, I do think we will see cases in the U.S. before long, given the entirely insufficient attempts to limit travel to and from West Africa or quarantine asymptomatic people who have recently been there.

Fortunately Ebola is not an airborne disease, but influenzas are and all we'd need to bring the world basically to an at least temporary stop is one virulent and highly infections avian or swine flu. No matter how prepared cities and hospitals feel they are for an epidemic, the fact remains that as a society we don't know how to deal with mass illness or large amounts of infectious medical waste. Even professional cleaners used to disinfecting don't know enough about the sterilization required in such an emergency, and although medical supplies are generally not in shortage, that could change rapidly if there is enough sudden demand.

You can't always control your circumstances, but long term planning for a number of eventualities can make challenges easier to manage when they do arise. Stock up now.

Piece of Advice #112: Pray

noreply@blogger.com (grerp) — Fri, 08 Aug 2014 22:58:00 +0000

As the world spirals into chaos, with Russian separatists bombing airliners full of HIV researchers out of the sky, and ISIS beheading toddlers, and militant Muslims destroying millenia-old Christian communities and committing genocide, while Israel decides now is the time to show the Palestinians who's got bigger guns, Ebola rips through Africa and missionaries put self-preservation ahead of the safety of the whole North American continent, the U.S. Government deliberately floods our southern border with tens of thousands of homeless children with a variety of contagious medical conditions, and the majority of people in post-economic-recovery America can't scrape together $400 for an emergency expense, the future seems bleaker by the hour. Add in extreme cold and extended drought, wars and rumors of wars, famine, livestock disease, oil spills, poisonous solvent exposure, groundwater contamination, and nuclear waste, and it feels downright biblical.

Of course, none of this is new. Horrors have happened before, on a grander scale, and some survived to tell of the carnage and degradation. Drought and dust storms have happened before and been addressed, albeit with tremendous environmental damage and human suffering. Christians and Jews, Russians and Chinese, as well as any number of other religious and ethnic groups have been targeted for genocide, not even that long ago.

It's frightening, though, when stories like this one hit your local news: a twelve-year-old boy walks up to a nine-year-old on a playground and stabs him repeatedly with a knife, killing him, then turns himself into the police, saying, "I don't want to be on this earth anymore." It makes you doubt your own advice and think twice about ever letting your kid out of your sight again. You get to wondering if these parts can be cleaned, if the puzzle can be put together again, or if this time things are too messy to put back in order again.

It's during these times that I've taken up prayer again, albeit in a different way than when I was a child. For one, I no longer really expect miracles or direct intervention in my (or others') problems. I pray for perseverance. I pray that I will be able to be generous with others instead of hoarding and counting what savings we have. I pray that people will build community and that they will be grateful for what they do have instead of resentful over what they do not. I pray that I will build community and that I will be grateful. I pray that my husband will figure out how to make the hours he's put into his business pay off.

Over a year ago we found out my husband was going to be losing his job, and I decided to say my rosary daily so he would find something else. Our income was drastically reduced, and I've had to step up my hours writing to keep the family economically afloat, and during the long, horrific winter, I got fairly discouraged. But I kept praying. During Lent I asked if anyone needed prayer, and slowly my prayer list has gotten longer and longer. I didn't realize before how many people in my social circle were struggling with health issues, family problems, unemployment, grief and sorrow. Praying for them made me realize how common my problems were, how this was just another thing people, even people who plan and prepare, go through and endure and try to stiffen their spine through. It's been humbling and eye-opening.

There really isn't anything I can do right now for Christians being murdered in the Middle East, except pray for them. But I can pray for them. And the act of prayer connects me to them and to all the other people who pray and have prayed. Some people say that prayer is worthless, that time and money is more important to give. But I've found that, by praying, I am more aware and concerned about the people around me. I check in on them more and am moved to be more personally generous. If I pray for the Israelis and Palestinians, I conceptualize them as people with needs. I know that when people tell me they are praying for me, I feel loved and cared about. And if that is the main gift I can afford to give now, that's the one I'll give.

Piece of Advice #111: Bypass Craigslist Casual Encounters

noreply@blogger.com (grerp) — Fri, 25 Jul 2014 04:43:00 +0000

The big news in my neck of the woods this last week has been the triple homicide that resulted from a Craigslist Casual Encounters sex meetup gone wrong.

Police are being somewhat mum still, but only hours after Brady Oestrike fled a police chase, slammed his car into a highway barrier, and shot himself, and the police recovered the body of 18-year-old Brooke Slocum and her unborn baby from his trunk, people online were already making connections between Slocum and several Craigslist postings from June and July.

Apparently, Slocum, 8 months pregnant with her boyfriend Charles Oppeneer's baby, arranged to meet Oestrike with Oppeneer at a park for sex. Oppeneer's headless body was found on Wednesday, July, 16, and a search for Slocum was carried out and ended with the aforementioned chase, crash, and suicide.

I've covered stranger danger here at TLAoS-PfW and have argued against Craigslist as a good place to look for love or sex, even. As I've explained to my 10-year-old son, repeatedly, you do not know who is on the other end of an internet chat, and it's imprudent to meet anyone you don't know in anywhere other than a very public place (and never without adult supervision). From interviews with Slocum's family members, it seems this was not a first encounter for Brooke Slocum. She'd been augmenting her income through Craigslist for awhile - until she met the wrong guy and was murdered.

This story is depressing on so many levels. You have Slocum and Oppeneer strange relationship (Oppeneer had two children from a previous failed relationship) and plans to co-parent, with or without the third party Slocum was seeking out for true love (?). So there's three children with precarious futures because clearly these two weren't going to make it as a couple. And then there's Slocum's apparent attempt to hold on to her boyfriend by including him in other sexual adventures. She's an attractive enough young woman with her whole life ahead of herself and this is the best arrangement she can create for herself?

Additionally, you have Slocum's family who could not control her behavior. Her father was quick to say in interviews that Brooke "wanted love" and to justify his daughter's behavior as a desperate attempt to "keep her new family together." Based on Brooke Slocum's online profile's, it's obvious that her home life had taken a few beatings long before she signed up on Craigslist. She was writing letters to her unborn baby, Audi, explaining why she met men on Craigslist for sex.

Who does that? Not anyone who's had healthy parent-child relationships patterned for her.

And then there's the killer Oestrike who is more of a cipher at this time. It appears he had used Craigslist before for role playing stuff (that he paid for). He seems strange, lonely and obsessed with weaponry, particularly guns, but not a poster child for triple homicide. And where did he put Oppeneer's head? Police have taken apart Oestrike's car part by part, and gone through his house, ripping apart furniture and walls. I suppose we will have to wait some time to get a reason for why Oestrike took it in his head to murder Oppeneer and Slocum.

It's not surprising that in a country when we have government subsidized Planned Parenthood employees educating 15-year-old girls about rough sex and bondage, you eventually get young women comfortable enough with prostitution to turn to it for money. It's also not surprising that, given the divorce rate, many young people are insufficiently supervised and get into trouble. But how sad and unnecessary this all is.

I hope that any young readers of this blog will think twice about their safety before they go anywhere with people they don't know and will skip Craigslist Encounters altogether.

Piece of Advice #110: Don't wrap your kids up in cotton wool.

noreply@blogger.com (grerp) — Wed, 23 Oct 2013 03:04:00 +0000

Did you have a Big Wheel? I had one, the ugly orange original, not some fancy, rigged up glitter princess one. Remember how loud they were, that plastic grinding against the dirty blacktop? What a great memory.

Gosh, and remember when kids wore shorts that short in a completely non-sexual way? I spent much of the 70s (by 1980, being 9 years old, I wouldn't have been caught dead on a Big Wheel) hanging out in hideously ugly green/yellow/orange androgynous polyester two piece pants sets. And my hair was like that boy's. Ugh, what a horrible decade for fashion. But, man, as kids we were still allowed to do stuff.

One summer my sister and I built forts out of wooden pallets left behind by the developers who carved out my suburb and stopped more or less with our house. They dumped a whole box of nails and all kinds of 2x4s and pressed wood a big ravine they dug out behind our house (Hill #1), and we dragged all of it up the hill and got out our dad's hammers and went to work. We made this rag tag shack fort and we were so proud of it. The boys from a street away came and tore it down in the night, and we vowed we'd build it again. And we did. Again and again. Stepping on rusty nails did not stop us! Ripping open our scalps on broken wood from low door "frames" didn't stop us. We had the best time getting sunburned and scabbed and poked and cut and showing those boys we would not be defeated.

We walked and biked all around our neighborhood, all day long in the summer. I don't even know if my mom even knew where we were. We were just supposed to be home by dinner and not watch TV. We'd ride over to the park and swing on the rusty swings and fling each other off the paint chipped merry-go-round. I distinctly remember riding the steep hill down Packer Dr. with my feet on the handlebars and my hands up in the air and, of course, no bike helmet. No one wore a bike helmet. No one. I didn't tell my mom about the feet on the handle bars thing, though. No, I did not.

Elbow and knee pads too!

There were creepy adults in the 1970s and 80s, but we didn't look at adults as creepy. Now as parents we read all the time about sex offenders and kidnappers and closed head injuries and we want to protect our kids against all of that. Of course we do. But we're getting pretty paranoid. There's no real reason toddlers need to wear helmets on their scooters. They're not going very fast and they aren't going to be out of the supervision of adults. But I've seen all kinds of moms apologize for their tiny kids being "in danger" from not wearing a helmet.

My son rides a bike and a scooter and roller blades and I've never been able to get him to wear one. I also can't get him to put a coat on for half the winter, let alone mittens or gloves. I do not let him wander about the neighborhood because we live in the city, only a couple of blocks away from a middle school in which my cousin's wife remembers seeing one girl shiv another with nail file in the hall. The houses across the street from the school have had any number of break ins too. He plays in the park and walks the neighborhood, but I wouldn't be comfortable saying, "Be back by dinner." I just don't know my neighbors like we knew the neighbors growing up - and I have tried. Three different neighbors moved out this year, ones I'd gotten to know some.

Still, I let my son climb trees and slide down icy hills in winter. I don't make a big deal out of it if he get a boo boo. Cuts and bruises and scabs and scars are a part of growing up. Life is full of pains, large and small, and if he doesn't learn to deal with them now, he'll be too weak to deal with larger problems later. And I'd prefer that he not turn into a huge whiner who thinks it's other people's responsibility to shelter him from any and all adversity in life. If you let life be the teacher and hand out consequences for homework, they'll learn some important lessons earlier on and probably be more pleasant to be around in the here and now.

#FatShamingWeek

noreply@blogger.com (grerp) — Fri, 11 Oct 2013 03:00:00 +0000

Sorry, I can't get behind this blog/Twitter trend. And it's not because I'm not consistently appalled by the amount of weight Americans have gained over the last 20 years. I am. I remember driving home from work sometime in the late 1990s and hearing on the radio that two-thirds of Americans were overweight and feeling shocked. After that I started spot checking each roomful of people to confirm this and realized that, clearly, we have a problem. It's not confirmed that obesity causes higher morbidity, but it's certainly correlated with a swath of horrible diseases - diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and strokes, and it exacerbates other conditions like joint problems and arthritis. That only makes sense; if you load up a person with mobility issues with, say, 10 bags of flour, they're going to find it more difficult and painful to get around. Added to the fact that people who are obese tend to have become obese by eating incredibly unhealthy foods, and we have a severely health compromised citizenry (and right when we're looking to socialize medical costs too!). I fully support any sort of research that could provide solutions to turn this trend around. It's particularly troubling to see children and young people get fat because their obesity will directly impact their overall quality of life and the array of choices they will get to make.

But fat shaming is like slut shaming - obesity and promiscuity are established practices in the western world, and we've reached and passed critical mass for turning it around by social shunning. When 7 out of 10 people in a room are fat, your trenchant commentary on their expanded waistlines is going to have little effect - except for arousing anger and hard feelings. Sure, feel free to reject the lunacy of the "Heathy at Any Size" propaganda. You don't have to believe things just because people really, REALLY want to you to believe them. But we're going to have to come up with better solutions than tossing epithets like "fatty" and "land whale." Or snapping pics on our cellphones and uploading them to Twitter. Seriously, that's just self-righteous cruelty.

You can give people information, but until they're ready to hear it, or until we install a better system of incentives/disincentives, you can't control people's weight.

I've heard the argument that social shunning turned cigarette smoking from cool to prole, but while there is currently a lowered status assigned to smoking, it was government intrusion and eventually very, very expensive lawsuits that turned things around for our collective lungs. It was only after Big Tobacco's back was broken that we all fell in line and denied ever EVAR smoking those cancer sticks. We then shunted the addicted to roped off ghettos and eventually out into the cold, cold night. Only people who ride very large motorcycles or work in black fingernail jobs like auto repair management can smoke with impunity now. The government could probably do the same with fast food (or alcohol!), but it's in bed with Big Ag and Big Sugar - so no dice. Unhealthy people with unhealthy debilitating addictions are easier to push around too, so perhaps it's not in our government's best interests to encourage it at this time.

Obesity affects everyone - outside of the weight loss/bariatric surgery/dialysis industries - negatively, but this is not an effective answer to the problem.

Splintering

noreply@blogger.com (grerp) — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 15:34:00 +0000

Western culture is clearly coming to a breaking point between the two competing ideologies of Liberalism, which has its "religious" expression in Humanism - with or without the atheism - and Christianity, which is considerably weaker than it's ever been in the West, outplayed and outshone by its competitor's easy breezy narcissistic hedonism.

The two have coexisted uneasily for this last half century, but cannot much longer now that Liberalism has decided to directly and unambiguously target religion and the religious as Evil, and has decided that nodding and smiling is not enough of a response to affirmations of its core tenets of democracy, diversity, unfettered sexual exploration, and redistributionism. So, here we go.

The Pax Dickinson skirmish of last week, was one of many recent examples of people being fired for saying something - instead of say, doing something - the other side considered going against the narrative and outside the realm of acceptable thought. My response to it was rather personal as it happened to me, on a much smaller, less public scale a few years ago. I had done volunteer work for a reader's website for about 10 years and had gotten along just fine with the site's administration and readers all that time, until I strayed from the party line on frats, alcohol and rape, and then people made a lot of noise, called me a lot of names, attempted to psychoanalyze me online, and called for my dismissal. I decided to resign rather than apologize and (maybe) be forgiven. Doing thousands - literally thousands - of hours of volunteer html coding behind the scenes no longer seemed so appealing. The hardest thing for me to swallow was the accusation that my son was obviously in an abusive situation with me as his mother, if I thought the way I think.

I saw the same sentiment echoed in Anil Dash's words about Dickinson: "So, to be clear: I have no interest in playing an agent of Pax Dickinson's redemption. I do not want him anywhere near kids of any sort, let alone teaching anyone."

Words now = pedophilia or child abuse.

I was also extremely put off by how the people who criticized me seemed to revel in my newly cast off status, how they gleefully proclaimed, "Google is forever," as if my never getting a job again was suitable punishment for saying women shouldn't go to frat parties and get completely hammered because it wasn't safe. Justice served! Maybe someday she and her (abused kid) can starve! We can always hope!

To be clear, I believe (among other things):

Order > Chaos
Self control > Hedonism
Community > Individual expression

None of those values would have even been questioned by the majority of Americans fifty years ago.

It's interesting, though, to see how the other side reacts when someone of their values wanders past the ideological fence and gets taken down. The outrage, the cries of unfairness, the accusations of injustice, bigotry, McCarthyism; it's all the same. In this case, a lesbian Catholic school teacher was fired for coming out and stating she was in a lesbian relationship. She wanted to express her values, and since this is not in accordance with the Catholic Church's "branding," she was fired. An entirely predictable outcome.

Note that children are once again involved. It's really starting to heat up over children and who gets access to their minds. This is because we're splintering as a society into groups - not even cohesive groups - but everyone knows that children are the future, and if people can choose how and where and why to educate their children, they may not choose as directed. Should be interesting.

Twitter and humanity

noreply@blogger.com (grerp) — Wed, 11 Sep 2013 02:31:00 +0000

It was reported today that Business Insider today fired Pax Dickinson for his history of "offensive tweets" on Twitter. Business Insider characterized it thus:

A Business Insider executive has made some comments on Twitter that do not reflect our values and have no place at our company. The executive has left the company, effective immediately.

A bit coy, but whatever. I guess Henry Blodgett doesn't have to tell us whether Dickinson will be eligible for unemployment or not. He's busy bending over to please a bunch of implacable harpies. Apparently this whole thing was sparked by someone named Nitasha Tiku who noticed that Dickinson has little love for feminism and became all OFFENDED. Commence Twitter firestorm, and emails fired off to Blodgett calling for him to axe Dickinson, and a day later he is no longer working for Business Insider and his reputation is in the dumpster.

You ever get the feeling that the adults are not running the show anymore? That we are now living some large landlocked Lord of the Flies experiment with the angry, hysterical kids getting all the pork? I mean, honestly, who cares what a segment of people on Twitter think? Do none of these company heads have the basic fortitude to simply reply, "Thank you for your concern," and hit delete? And what is with all of the asinine snark? Is douche one of those words that you can just add any noun to in order to enhance its basic quality. Douchecanoe? Are we in 7th grade? Don't people get that the brogrammer tweet was supposed to be self parody? And why is it kosher to mock his name?

Again, are we in middle school? I feel like we're in middle school, and the teachers are long, LONG dead.

I don't always agree with Pax's tweets, but I've found a lot of them funny. I felt the same way when I was an expat in Russia and would get together with other Americans. There's nothing funny about the fact that Russians use a spoon to eat their cake instead of a fork. Unless you and everyone else in the room have had the experience of picking up a fork and being laughed at for it. Then it is hilarious. Just hilarious.

Here's my serious question to all the people who ganged up to deprive Dickinson of a job, are rejoicing that he's unemployed now, or are happily making comments threatening his physical safety: what are you supposed to do if you actually, truly don't believe all the humanist, progressive propaganda the news media/educational system/corporations shovel at you day in and day out? Think but never talk? Talk only in whispers amongst your family and hope a neighbor doesn't hear and report you to the Party? Because it gets old, really really old absorbing it all day long and never venting. Do you enjoy mouthing a creed you don't believe in? Somehow, I think not.

I mean, what if you don't believe white people are the source of everything that's wrong in the world? What if you think traditional gender roles worked just fine? What if you think the overall impact of religion was - gasp - positive for humanity? You can't say these things at work any more. Or in college. Or high school. Or in news articles about cops being shot during traffic stops. Not without being downgraded for it. Or suffering endless anti-religious trolling. Or being fired. And apparently you can't say them on unrelated social media either. Teachers have been fired for status updates, and kids get sent to jail for making sarcastic comments on Facebook.

Does this seem a little controlling to anyone else? I thought in this brave new post-modern, post-Christian world we were all supposed to live and let live, to accept diversity, to coexist. To tolerate each other. Who goes around gunning for the jobs of people they haven't even met and feels all righteous doing it?

Ironically, it's the behavior of these people spouting off their humanist values that make me sigh for humanity today. We are so tribal, and ever ready violently vanquish anyone from an "enemy" tribe and whoop it up at the post blooding celebration.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Piece of Advice #109: Don't deliberately sabotage your looks

noreply@blogger.com (grerp) — Sat, 24 Aug 2013 19:28:00 +0000

At the risk of being accused of pulling a "Kids today..." curmudgeonly rant, it does seem like many young people are deliberately making themselves unattractive, and I do not understand for what purpose.

And I'm not talking about the tattooing/piercing/branding trends, although I find myself horrified by those as well. I get that those are a fad, fed by our narcissistic cultural urge to be unique while still being conformist. I'm talking about people who seem to want to make themselves look as ugly as possible.

This week my family and I were standing in line at a store and two young women came in. They both had shaved their heads in some sort of hideous long Mohawk, but the second one was also grossly overweight, had two sets of spacers in her earlobes (in orange and green), and was wearing an incredibly sour expression. Everything about her was off-putting. I tried imagining what she would have looked like circa 1985 (or, heck, circa 2000), and while she would never have been stunning, under different circumstances, she could have been attractive. But everything she had done to herself made her look more tribal, more sullen, more hostile, and it had to have been deliberate.

Was she motivated by some sort of self-loathing, I wondered - did she choose to repel people rather than wait for them to reject her? Or was this some sort of political or sociological statement she was trying to make? Was I supposed to notice her or was I supposed to avert my gaze?

A week or so ago the local shelter put up pictures of new dog and cat adoptive families, and one couple was strikingly unattractive. Both the man and the woman were heavy and dressed like itinerants, but the woman had dyed her spiked hair a fluorescent pink, and had an illustration from The Giving Tree tattooed all over her shoulder and arm. Why, why, WHY?

Neither of these women were physically ugly in their basics, but they had made themselves so with their clothing/ornamentation/lifestyle choices. I'm not talking about people who have let themselves go or people who, for instance, have inherited unfortunate dental problems but can't afford to get braces. I understand laziness and poverty. But I don't understand self-sabotage.

The fact is that even if you are not in the dating market, your appearance does affect how people perceive and, therefore, treat you. Your choices about what you wear and choose to look like affect the choices people make in how to treat you. We all may secretly dream of being treated according to our inner selves, but people judge you on what they see, and if you look scary, hostile, threatening, sullen, unapproachable, outlandish, or just plain ugly, they will treat you worse than if you were beautiful, attractive, or even plain. Most of us aren't beautiful, but we can at least strive for clean, pleasant, and unremarkable. You may think, "I'm not interested in meeting anybody," or "I'm not looking for a job," but the way you present yourself now affect the way people will feel about you and talk about you when recommending (or not) you for anything in the future.

So don't wreck your looks on purpose.

Piece of Advice #108: Be prepared

noreply@blogger.com (grerp) — Fri, 16 Aug 2013 03:41:00 +0000

In general, my philosophy is "Have less stuff." But for the stuff I do have, I try to buy quality, hold onto it, and take good care of it.

Actually, I'm not really a very good minimalist. I've spent the last decade or so stocking up on old lady detritus picked up dirt cheap at rummage and garage sales. Sometimes I think if I died and they held an estate sale, people would wonder how old I was? 75. 80?

Except the decor's not right.

I have a sewing machine and a fabric stash I got mostly second hand. I've got all kinds of canning equipment. I have flannel sheets and enamel pails, old guy tools, jars of herbs, and a set of World Book Encyclopedias from 1954. I have wooden train tracks and camping equipment and garden tools and walls and walls of books. Children's books, history books, books about politics and geography, economics and science. I've got books on raising rabbits and books on herbal remedies, I've got books in Russian, dictionaries in 7 different languages and a small collection of old hymnals. No, I'm really not the poster child for minimalism.

But in my defense, I got nearly all of this stuff second hand, most of it is sturdy and exceedingly practical and has been used (by me, even), and I've carefully organized it so that it's at hand when I need it. If my son needs a costume for school, I can make it. If he grows out of his size 10 pants, I've got the next four sizes in boxes, by size, for him to look through. If my kitchen faucet develops a pinhole leak that, hypothetically say, sprays you in the face when you turn the water on, I've got a reasonably comprehensive set of tools, or, failing that, a decent selection of duct tape. My pantry's stocked and my freezer's full.

A long time ago, I read about The Pantry Principle in Amy Daczyczyn's The Tightwad Gazette. She talked about it in reference to cooking. She said that she never cooked by recipes, in the sense that she had to assemble all ingredients in order to cook a meal from a magazine page. Instead, she stocked her pantry over time so that she always had the basics and cook a decent meal from them, making substitutions if necessary. Like Amy, I don't cook from recipes. I take a trip down to the freezer in the morning and pull out a roast (or some brats, or a whitefish fillet) and while I'm down there I look to see if I've got any frozen green beans left or if the potatoes in the pantry look like they might need to be eaten sooner rather than later. Later, when I'm making mashed potatoes, I'll think about what's in my herb garden that could be used and I'll grab a handful of parsley or dill and throw it in there. I'll buy butter, olive oil, or honey in bulk and mentally keep track of how much is left. I am continually in the process of stocking up. And I never run out. I mean, really, almost never. Before a storm I don't have to go to the store because I know there's plenty of toilet paper and batteries and blankets and water in the house already. My challenge is using up the stuff I have, turning the pantry over so nothing goes past date or completely stale. Not that you can't use stale. There are a hundred good uses for stale, if you can think out of the box.

I've extended The Pantry Principle to most everything, and it does save time, money, and peace of mind. About the only thing I can't do this with is our cars, except for adding oil and antifreeze - I just don't know enough about auto repair. So when my car leaks coolant like it is right now, I'm at the mechanic's mercy, more or less, because I'm not good with cars and I haven't stocked up. I keep thinking I should do something about that.

Opting in, opting out

noreply@blogger.com (grerp) — Thu, 08 Aug 2013 21:16:00 +0000

The New York Times Magazine has a story this week entitled, "The Opt Out Generation Wants Back In." It's about the high profile, highly educated women of Generation X who, after working in high powered jobs, made the specific choice to stay home with their children - and are now regretting it. Or not. Or something. I'm not sure what the point of it is other than to express, again, that women aren't happy, even when they have choices or have had full agency to make choices because they can't have it all.

Well, duh.

Life is hard. Life isn't fair. Life doesn't come with a guarantee. We make choices. No one ever promised you a rose garden. Pick your cliché, they're all true.

The first woman they profile, Sheilah O'Donnel got divorced after about a decade at home - in the custom home her husband had built for them. She decided being a stay-at-home mother was disempowering and disenfranchising and skewed the balance in her marriage and caused all kinds of problems in her relationship with her husband:

At her peak, O’Donnel was earning $500,000 a year. But after her first two children were born, O’Donnel’s travel for work became more difficult. She gave up a quarter of her earnings in exchange for working three days a week, but felt marginalized, her best accounts given to others, meetings often scheduled on her days out of the office. “I felt like a second-class citizen,” she said. Even with the reduced schedule, the stresses of life in a two-career household put an overwhelming strain on her marriage. There were ugly fights with her husband about laundry and over who would step in when the nanny was out sick.

So O'Donnel - a la Mary Chapin Carpenter - got the heck out of Dodge and now has a small apartment and a midlevel sales job. And no husband. Whee!

The Times profiles two other women, whose stories I was more sympathetic to because they didn't actually break up their families for seemingly frivolous reasons. The tone of the article seems to be, "You'd better work, honey, because men are unreliable. It's just safer to support yourself." Which harkens back to that 2nd Wave feminist idea that women should - must! - all work outside the home because then we are all equal, equal workers, indistinguishable.

I'm not saying that women shouldn't work or that girls shouldn't be trained for a vocation or learn valuable skills. I went back to work last year, and it turned out to be a very good thing because my husband is getting laid off in a few weeks, and we will have at least some income to live on until he finds another job. And, of course, life does sometimes intervene. Accidents happen, work peters out, people die or become incapacitated, spouses sometimes leave. Skills are good to have.

My point is, Sheilah's husband wasn't the one who stopped being cooperative, who stopped supporting his family. But somehow, the Times puts Sheilah in the victim role here. It also really bothers me that feminists frame the working/staying home dilemma entirely in terms of how it affects women. What about the children? Sheilah was home for over a decade; did her children not benefit from the time they spent with their mother? Did Sheilah not benefit from spending time with her kids? That, to me, is far more important than what the pillows in her new apartment are like.

I stayed home with my son because I wanted to be with him. I wanted to know him. I wanted to be the one from whom he learned his numbers, his letters, his morals, his values. Not everyone can or even wants to stay home, but I went through a huge effort to have him in my life, and I wanted to be with him. Now, it's true, he won't remember those years. Already he doesn't remember how things were when he was a baby. But I remember, and it's a blessing to me. Yeah, I had to sacrifice my career as a librarian, such as it was, and, yeah, I had to become financially dependent on my husband and it did change the dynamic between us somewhat and sometimes I felt, I suppose, lesser, being a non-working person in a society that values everything in monetary terms. But I had time with my son. I invested my energy in him. Will it pay off? I hope so. There are no guarantees in life. He's happy, he's secure. I gave him that, and I feel proud of it.

When I read stories like Sheilah's, I can't help thinking of my grandmother, a teacher and farmer's wife, who kept on keeping on when her husband was struck by lightning and rendered bedbound for the better part of a year. She kept making dinner, running the farm, raising her boys. She went back to work to keep money coming in, and you know who never complained that she wasn't fulfilled? My grandmother. She went and read to her mother-in-law who had had a stroke and needed the company. She taught Sunday School. She was grateful to have enough to eat and a warm place to sleep and a family who loved her. Great woman, my grandmother. God rest you, Amy Coleson Pettigrove. He cracked the mold the day you were born.

Everything runs right on time, years of practice and design
Spit and polish till it shines. He thinks he'll keep her
Everything is so benign, safest place you'll ever find
God forbid you change your mind. He thinks he'll keep her

For fifteen years she had a job and not one raise in pay
Now she's in the typing pool at minimum wage

Today is my 15th anniversary. I've kept the house clean, made healthy meals, repaired things that broke, shuffled my kid to school and basketball and scouts. I've taken the dogs to the vet and taught myself to cook and garden and make medicines, prayed for my husband when he was away and traveling unsafe roads, and listened to him when he was tired and discouraged and scared.

And all I have to show for it is: a clean house, a healthy family, rambunctious dogs, a happy and secure kid, a pretty little garden, shelves full of canned goods and herbs, and a loving and appreciative husband. Poor me.

Piece of Advice #107: People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones

noreply@blogger.com (grerp) — Thu, 01 Aug 2013 20:03:00 +0000

So, Hugo Schwyzer is gone, with a flouncy, narcissistic, self-pitying flounce. I can't say I didn't see that one coming. If there was ever an unstable, self important, attention seeking sociopath, Huge is The Man. I would say more, but it was so wonderfully expressed here:

I honestly cannot think of a single individual I am less surprised to hear turned out to be a creepy, adulterous pervert. As a general rule, the more a man publicly lectures others about the importance of not being creepy, and the more "feminist" he proclaims himself to be, the more likely it is that he is a creepy pervert who is barely managing to keep his urges under control. It's exactly like the way ex-smokers preach the anti-smoking gospel and alcoholics lecture everyone on teetotalism.

This is the guy who used his college classroom as a pick up joint, who tried to take a girlfriend along while attempting suicide, who acknowledges he may have fathered a child and passed it off as another man's, and who advocated pegging as a way of making men more "feminist." [I actually did not know what pegging was and do not feel better for having learned. If you don't know, just consider it outside what your grandparents would have considered normal human sexual behavior.]

This guy is a REAL piece of work. Now, we know by his repeated admission that he's an ex-drunk and druggie, a serial cheater, and has a slew of mental problems, and normally I would feel sorry for someone this messed up. People can't always keep their crazy under wraps. If your brain doesn't work right, it doesn't work right. But, honestly, anyone with this much of a history of predatory and violent behavior, of sexual excess, of trampling on the rights of others, should have taken himself out of the game a long time ago. You don't keep sending petroleum down corrosive pipeline without expecting a disaster. And if for whatever reason that wasn't an option, he should have at the very least not spent years lecturing men on the proper way to view and treat women. If ever there was a man who should not have cast stones, it was Hugo. What a hypocrite.

I don't believe he's really gone. This is a man who craves, who demands, attention, good or bad. He can't survive without it. And the fact that he frames the pushback of others as obsessive persecution instead of attempts to point out and correct his abuse, proves that he's learned nothing. He will go off, lick his wounds, straighten out his meds, separate from his - what, fourth? - wife and eventually stage a comeback. But perhaps we'll all have a little break from him for now.

Piece of Advice #106: Don't let your kids get fat

noreply@blogger.com (grerp) — Tue, 30 Jul 2013 04:31:00 +0000

Friday night my husband and I watched Stand by Me, and Saturday we went to a work party at one of those kiddie casinos with laser tag and video games and go carts...and there were a LOT of fat kids there. A lot. Not even chunky, or pudgy, actually obese kids. It occurred to me that by today's standards, the "fat" kid, Vern, in Stand by Me wouldn't even be considered husky.

The CDC reports that in the United States about 18% of kids were obese in 2010, up from 5-7%(depending on age) in 1980. That's nearly one out of five kids. And that kid is obese, not pudgy. If you include the overweight kids, you're looking at one in three.

The astounding rate at which we've gained weight in this county often seems surreal to me. One in three, two in three... It's as if we all blinked in tandem and then opened our eyes again and everyone's fat now. I don't mean to rag on fat people. I ate all my hard feelings last year and am now working on getting those calories off. It happens. I know lots of nice overweight people and appreciate them as fellow travelers. But kids! Kids should not be fat. Kids are active and hyper and have fast metabolisms, the best metabolisms they will ever have. And no one, outside of those with genuine and serious medical problems, should be obese. That there are so many obese children is like a red flashing light/glaring siren warning. Something is deeply wrong with our society.

When I was a kid, a little more than one generation ago, hardly anyone I knew was fat. And I know this is not simple nostalgia on my part because I went back and checked the yearbooks. The kids in Stand by Me are twelve years old. I was twelve in 1983, and in that sixth grade yearbook there are approximately 250 kids, 10 of which are chubby. I did not see one obese kid. None. Just row after row of skinny little kids with horrible haircuts. We have not evolved to be fatter by changes in our genetic structure. We are fatter because our lifestyles are terribly unhealthy.

The premise of Stand by Me is that a group of kids walk twenty miles to find a dead body of a kid who's gone missing. Vern overhears his brother talking about this body he found and is unwilling to let anyone know about because he found it after he boosted a car and doesn't want the attention of the police to fall on him. So Vern and his friends decide to satisfy their curiosity and be heroes all at once and find this body. And they walk all day and part of another to do it.

It's a little shocking to think of the kind of freedom kids had once to wander about at will, twenty miles away from home with no one aware of what they are doing, but outside of that, I can't think of a kid I know who'd sign up for that kind of walking. I walk my son the 1.25 miles between our house and his school every day; he gets some exercise, but when he takes friends home after school with him, they are always surprised at how far he has to walk. "You do this every day?" they ask. Kids are terribly sedentary, entertained by television, video games, and every other kind of hypnotic media. Even when they are outside, they ride around on their battery powered mini-jeeps or motorized scooters. No one had that kind of stuff when I was a kid. Mom kicked you out the door when she got tired of you, and you made your own fun out of Lord knows what. One summer my sister and I built a fort out of pallets and bits of scrap wood left by a construction crew. The boys from a street over came and tore it down on a regular basis, and we built it back up again. It was great.

And then there's the tremendous lot of junk food and soda kids now consume. When I was a kid, you ate at home what you were served in a timely fashion. Mom made it, you ate it, end of story. You ate around the table together. We hardly ever went out to eat - only for special occasions, really. We certainly did not know what was on the McMenu of half of the fast food places in town. We also drank soda very rarely. Mostly we had water and milk (ours was from powder - gross). In the summer we sometimes drank unsweetened sun tea. Once in a while we had juice with breakfast. That was it. Soda really is the devil's drink - it has no nutritional value and tons and tons of sugar. It's terribly addicting as well. Kids should have very little access to it because they won't regulate their consumption. But you can't go anywhere now without seeing kids with soda or "power" drinks.

As a parent, I know it's a huge drag to have to fight the culture so hard on behalf of your kids, but it has to be done. Fat kids = fat adults, and fat adults have so many more health and social problems. That's not what you want for your children. Make them exercise, make them work a bit, limit their access to crap food and soda. Try and cook for them or, ideally, with them. Food they make (or grow!) themselves, kids will want to try. I know this all takes time and patience, but our parents did it for us, and everyone just thought it was normal. We can do it too with a little discipline and effort.