I was going to write about my current obsessive hobby of beading, but then Seven Brides for Seven Brothers was on TV. And I was appalled all over that I let my impressionable… Read more Raising Feminists, the Movie Edition →
A billion years ago (actually 24) I worked as a ghost-writer for a psychiatrist whose specialties were 1) working with women with serious psychiatric disorders (schizophrenia, bipolar depression, etc.) who were the mothers of infants, and 2) infant depression (you will be unsurprised to know that they are frequently linked). About the time my older daughter was six months old, I quit–having my nose that deep into psychiatric dysfunction in infancy meant that every time my daughter hiccuped I was afraid she might be going into a decline. But during that time I learned a… Read more Planned Obsolescence →
This is apparently true: a Long Island elementary school cancelled the annual-year end kindergarten show because it would distract the kindergarteners from preparing for college. I’m not as surprised by this as… Read more Education =/= Panic →
When you’re a kid, and later, if and when you’re a parent, you sometimes hear the term “bad attention.” As in, “We know you like attention, Lochinvar, but setting Mary Lou’s braids on fire will only get you bad attention.” Bad attention: the sort of attention that goes down in your permanent record, that possibly keeps you out of a job or the college of your choice, the sort of attention that maybe comes with media attention and perhaps a lengthy jail sentence. There are those, I know, who believe that… Read more Bad Attention →
There was a day, a few years ago, when I was walking Emily, the household dog, across the overpass that spans the highway near our house. We were on the far side, starting down the ramp to the sidewalk, when I observed a middle-aged woman on the street below us. She was walking her dogs, two affable looking German shepherds. When one of them stopped to do what a dog stops to do, the woman picked up the leavings in a plastic bag, as one does. And then she did… Read more The World is Full of Small Weird Miracles →
Once Upon a Time, I worked with a man who did not believe in fiction. He admitted its existence, he just didn’t get it. In every other particular, Justin was a lovely man: charming and funny, sharp as a tack, and very successful. He was visually handicapped but a huge consumer of the written word. But what he liked to read were how-to books, essays, commentaries on real estate law, history–things factual. “Fiction is a lie,” he said. “Why do you want to read things about people who don’t exist?”… Read more How Story Saves Our Lives* →
I have been derelict, for which I apologize. And I really ought to write a post for SarahTolerance.com first, but I’m mulling something over there, after several posts about Regency sewing (!) and here I can talk about less, um, historical things. Like cats. And old boyfriends. I no longer have cats because we’re all allergic to them. While it was just me, and I was acclimated to my late cat Alexis, this didn’t matter. Then I got married and had a kid and, sixteen months into the kid’s life,… Read more Cats and Boyfriends →
I missed last week’s post (I really am trying to post weekly) because I was in Massachusetts for my father’s memorial party. Yes, I said party. My father was a big believer in parties, and he left very specific instructions about this one: the Dixieland band that was to play us down to the river where his ashes were to be scattered (by plane) and then triumphantly back again afterward, a real New Orleans funeral; the specific locale; and no “memorial service” or religious overtones whatsoever. Oh, and the party… Read more Obscenity →