1) If I had a visiting teacher, I would ask for this. I'd just go get my own, but I've got a vicious flu, and the merits (and road safety) of going out are dubious. Sadly, I disposed of my most recent one some months ago by pointing out that being called as my vt didn't give her the right to call me "baby" and "hon"--not after pretending I didn't exist through two years of classes together and a year of sharing a bus stop. No exploiting the system for me. Quel domage.
2) This, in the words of William J. Doherty's The Intentional Family, is the problem with being an atheist:
"For American families across all income strata and ethnic groups, religion provides a primary source of rituals of community. The great majority of American families belong to a religious organization of some sort, and on a typical weekend 41 percent of all families with children attend a religious service. In addition, families who are members of religious institutions are also more active in nonreligious community groups and organizations than are people who do not affiliate with a religious institution. In other words, religiously active families tend to be involved in all sorts of rituals of community."
Although, take note, "tend to be" does not mean "are," as I can attest to from my own intensely religious, but community starved and ritual hungry, upbringing. Doherty goes on to describe how his young family had benefited from the experienced multi-generational church community.
"What were the odds of us having someone like Judy and the other families be part of our community if we were not involved in a religious organization? Not very great. We could have tried to create a three-generational community around ourselves, but this would have been a full time job for a struggling young couple who were new to the area. A neighborhood community would also have been a possibility, but generally there are not weekly rituals of connection in most neighborhoods during with you can interact with dozens of people at different phases of the life cycle. The reality is that the most widely available source of family rituals of community is a church, synagogue, or mosque."
Friday, January 28, 2011
Sunday, January 23, 2011
we'll strip-mine the other planets later
I was puttering around at sociological images and saw this:
which really got me thinking. I consider trash disposal the least of our problems--but how huge it is, even this one thing. How horrifying. So I took inventory--what can I do? And what will I do? Because now that I consider my own life of value, not just my survival, the resources these efforts take compete not only with what I should do but with what I want to do.
Regarding possible changes, I'm struck by the role of community in determining how much it will cost me to make them. I'm lucky to have the housemates I do; they're fun, interesting, and smart, and I'm safer for living with them. But we have different priorities. Like usual for adults living together at our age, we're much more a mismatched boarding house than a unified household.
Maybe if I lived with crazy hippies we could sometimes eat together, and share in cooking and gardening, which would reduce need for convenience foods. We could get rid of the air conditioner and clothes dryer, make a group commitment to buying second-hand, share our cars and bicycles. There is nothing about these economies that inherently binds them to families and older adults. It's only preference, and a lack of infrastructure to put together relatively stable households with young people of similar values.
Lack of community damages us ecologically on a lot of levels. I use unnecessary resources most when I'm sad. Considering that young adults have high suicide rates as a group, I suspect I'm not alone in using material resources to manage depression when a stronger social network would do it better. People (even people who identify as anti-social) are happiest on average around other people.
It also creates the helplessness we face when considering environmental issues. Solar panels for your house are an attempt to replace unsustainable infrastructure you've already paid for once as "clean coal" plants and the attending medical bills. Using public transport and a bicycle means paying twice for transport--first through hefty tax-funded subsidies to the gas-guzzler system, then in the time and money it actually costs to ride your bike and take the bus.
There's a certain amount that every individual can and should do for the environment. Eating as sustainably as possible, conserving water and energy, not buying more stuff than we absolutely need, and carefully choosing what we do buy and use are measures we all ought to get used to. These are cultural standards we need to create.
But ultimately--in a country where car is a better predictor of employability than a high school diploma--the decisions that break us are made at a policy level. Personal and even cultural change are necessary but not sufficient. Political action using real power is the only way to necessary systemic change.
which really got me thinking. I consider trash disposal the least of our problems--but how huge it is, even this one thing. How horrifying. So I took inventory--what can I do? And what will I do? Because now that I consider my own life of value, not just my survival, the resources these efforts take compete not only with what I should do but with what I want to do.
Regarding possible changes, I'm struck by the role of community in determining how much it will cost me to make them. I'm lucky to have the housemates I do; they're fun, interesting, and smart, and I'm safer for living with them. But we have different priorities. Like usual for adults living together at our age, we're much more a mismatched boarding house than a unified household.
Maybe if I lived with crazy hippies we could sometimes eat together, and share in cooking and gardening, which would reduce need for convenience foods. We could get rid of the air conditioner and clothes dryer, make a group commitment to buying second-hand, share our cars and bicycles. There is nothing about these economies that inherently binds them to families and older adults. It's only preference, and a lack of infrastructure to put together relatively stable households with young people of similar values.
Lack of community damages us ecologically on a lot of levels. I use unnecessary resources most when I'm sad. Considering that young adults have high suicide rates as a group, I suspect I'm not alone in using material resources to manage depression when a stronger social network would do it better. People (even people who identify as anti-social) are happiest on average around other people.
It also creates the helplessness we face when considering environmental issues. Solar panels for your house are an attempt to replace unsustainable infrastructure you've already paid for once as "clean coal" plants and the attending medical bills. Using public transport and a bicycle means paying twice for transport--first through hefty tax-funded subsidies to the gas-guzzler system, then in the time and money it actually costs to ride your bike and take the bus.
There's a certain amount that every individual can and should do for the environment. Eating as sustainably as possible, conserving water and energy, not buying more stuff than we absolutely need, and carefully choosing what we do buy and use are measures we all ought to get used to. These are cultural standards we need to create.
But ultimately--in a country where car is a better predictor of employability than a high school diploma--the decisions that break us are made at a policy level. Personal and even cultural change are necessary but not sufficient. Political action using real power is the only way to necessary systemic change.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
obvious but so important
for dating:
1) have a healthy social life
2) be able to look after your own emotions
3) still want to date a given person under these circumstances
You want a different kind of partner for comfort, or for a crutch, than you would if trying to build something amazing. Even if the person might be the same, the relationship would be different.
1) have a healthy social life
2) be able to look after your own emotions
3) still want to date a given person under these circumstances
You want a different kind of partner for comfort, or for a crutch, than you would if trying to build something amazing. Even if the person might be the same, the relationship would be different.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
dress
Years after giving it away, I found the remnants of my baptism dress. It was on the floor at my sister's house, threadbare and faded from yet another life as a hand-me-down, cracker crumbs embedded in the hem and old banana ground into one sleeve. I picked it up, and when she said it was headed to DI anyway, carried it home, where it's now been sitting unwashed on the corner of the unused desk in my living room for months.
The thought that I might want to pass this down to my own daughter someday didn't survive my high school minimalism, but seeing the dress return like a ghost has given it weird significance. Not just an object, it represents a mental place, and an event for which I was supposed to be innocent and pure and old enough to make my own decisions. I keep it now because it records the size of my body when I was eight. I wanted it to say I was small and helpless, but it doesn't; it agrees with my medical records, 90th to 98th percentile hight and weight all though elementary.
The breakthrough would be: to believe it doesn't matter that I was big and strong for an eight year old. To believe it doesn't matter that I had already learned way-too-much (but not enough) about sex, or that I had a terrible, violent temper. To believe that regardless of all this, keeping me safe and teaching me how to deal with those parts of myself was someone else's job and not just a massive problem for me to fight alone.
The thought that I might want to pass this down to my own daughter someday didn't survive my high school minimalism, but seeing the dress return like a ghost has given it weird significance. Not just an object, it represents a mental place, and an event for which I was supposed to be innocent and pure and old enough to make my own decisions. I keep it now because it records the size of my body when I was eight. I wanted it to say I was small and helpless, but it doesn't; it agrees with my medical records, 90th to 98th percentile hight and weight all though elementary.
The breakthrough would be: to believe it doesn't matter that I was big and strong for an eight year old. To believe it doesn't matter that I had already learned way-too-much (but not enough) about sex, or that I had a terrible, violent temper. To believe that regardless of all this, keeping me safe and teaching me how to deal with those parts of myself was someone else's job and not just a massive problem for me to fight alone.
Sunday, January 09, 2011
inventions
"Did you ever spend time in other places that had a different. . . vibe? Maybe a friend's house?"
I snort. Of course there were places that were different from home; a montage of memories presents itself. First grade teacher at my school, too much eye contact, voice anxious and tense: "I saw you walking to school this morning--you seemed. . . upset. Didn't seem to know which way to go. And I saw your father and your sister in the car, following behind."
My best friend Ashley's house when I was six, where everything was magical and spotless and clean; she had a collector's edition ice-skater Barbie that she wasn't even allowed to touch, except on special occasions. I was allowed to touch it too on those rare days, until she stopped talking to me.
"Of course," I said. "but that didn't mean I belonged there."
"So you never felt like you belonged."
Reflective listening at its finest. "No. I mean, occasionally there would be something--"
"But not very often. Those were pretty few and far between."
"Yes."
"And you've never really gotten to a point where you felt like you belonged."
This is a forgone conclusion. We are covering unrecoverable ground; it's a battle I've given up long since, and it's time to stop and work on something that might imaginably change. Even strangers say it, "You're really one of a kind, aren't you!," clasping one hand around my back and applauding some half-accidental feat. At these moments all I can do is smile awkwardly and nod, hoping the gesture reeks more of sarcasm than desperation. They have no idea at all why I've done what I've done, but they can tell I'm not like anybody else.
"I want you to think about this: what if that isn't true? What if it's just a lie your parents told you?"
I want to argue. At a certain point, if it was my parents telling me that lie, then the lie has to be true. It becomes true, a triumph of developmental psychology; if you never learn how to belong, you never will belong.
"But belonging is a social construct," I say. I don't think I've been making this up, and if she makes me abandon it that means I'll have to go out among other people without my cultivated and entirely false indifference.
"Just think about it."
I have a picture, recently obtained, of me as red riding hood and the wolf. She's blond ringlets and pale red lips, a cunning and aggressive seductress of four, perhaps five or six, no more than ten. Always looking older than her age, never old enough. Supernaturally strong and fast, not immortal but still delicate. An expert at social manipulation with no conscience, sharp miniature canines, and thousands of terrifying hungers. Like the wolf, she is perfectly turned out, finest clothes, perfect manners. She's restrained by practicality and a certain civilized manner that saves her from detection till it's too late, but there's something wild and insensibly vicious beneath. At odd moments, innocence and brutality shine through the corners of her eyes. She loves to run and to hunt; she is at best temporarily contained.
When we were sixteen, she singled out a loner and seduced him away from the herd until he fell in love. Then she invited him into the woods and ran him down patiently, like a wounded deer, before ripping his heart out with her teeth.
Much of my life since I was four or five or six has been devoted to containing this. . . keeping wolf in check, or with no likelihood of success, seeking bare redemption for her sins. And at every cost, trying not to let myself become her. How much is she even real, and how much a lie told by adults for whom reality was inconvenient?
I snort. Of course there were places that were different from home; a montage of memories presents itself. First grade teacher at my school, too much eye contact, voice anxious and tense: "I saw you walking to school this morning--you seemed. . . upset. Didn't seem to know which way to go. And I saw your father and your sister in the car, following behind."
My best friend Ashley's house when I was six, where everything was magical and spotless and clean; she had a collector's edition ice-skater Barbie that she wasn't even allowed to touch, except on special occasions. I was allowed to touch it too on those rare days, until she stopped talking to me.
"Of course," I said. "but that didn't mean I belonged there."
"So you never felt like you belonged."
Reflective listening at its finest. "No. I mean, occasionally there would be something--"
"But not very often. Those were pretty few and far between."
"Yes."
"And you've never really gotten to a point where you felt like you belonged."
This is a forgone conclusion. We are covering unrecoverable ground; it's a battle I've given up long since, and it's time to stop and work on something that might imaginably change. Even strangers say it, "You're really one of a kind, aren't you!," clasping one hand around my back and applauding some half-accidental feat. At these moments all I can do is smile awkwardly and nod, hoping the gesture reeks more of sarcasm than desperation. They have no idea at all why I've done what I've done, but they can tell I'm not like anybody else.
"I want you to think about this: what if that isn't true? What if it's just a lie your parents told you?"
I want to argue. At a certain point, if it was my parents telling me that lie, then the lie has to be true. It becomes true, a triumph of developmental psychology; if you never learn how to belong, you never will belong.
"But belonging is a social construct," I say. I don't think I've been making this up, and if she makes me abandon it that means I'll have to go out among other people without my cultivated and entirely false indifference.
"Just think about it."
I have a picture, recently obtained, of me as red riding hood and the wolf. She's blond ringlets and pale red lips, a cunning and aggressive seductress of four, perhaps five or six, no more than ten. Always looking older than her age, never old enough. Supernaturally strong and fast, not immortal but still delicate. An expert at social manipulation with no conscience, sharp miniature canines, and thousands of terrifying hungers. Like the wolf, she is perfectly turned out, finest clothes, perfect manners. She's restrained by practicality and a certain civilized manner that saves her from detection till it's too late, but there's something wild and insensibly vicious beneath. At odd moments, innocence and brutality shine through the corners of her eyes. She loves to run and to hunt; she is at best temporarily contained.
When we were sixteen, she singled out a loner and seduced him away from the herd until he fell in love. Then she invited him into the woods and ran him down patiently, like a wounded deer, before ripping his heart out with her teeth.
Much of my life since I was four or five or six has been devoted to containing this. . . keeping wolf in check, or with no likelihood of success, seeking bare redemption for her sins. And at every cost, trying not to let myself become her. How much is she even real, and how much a lie told by adults for whom reality was inconvenient?
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