RAM, housefrauwery, and miscellaneous obscenity

Got a gig of RAM put in my laptop yesterday and enjoying my superfast, non-kernal-panicky computer. (I tried feeding it some Klonopin at first, but it just gunked up the keyboard. Which leads me to the obvious question: where can I get some new RAM?)

In other RAM news, Max bought himself a gig for his mobile phone. "Why do you need a gig of RAM for your freakin' mobile phone?" asks Amy, whose brain usually refuses to even register the fact that her phone is ringing ("What's that noise?" asked my mom the other day. "Oh, I guess it must be my phone," said I. And no, vibrate doesn't help much either. To get me to pay attention to my phone, I told Max, you will probably have to shove it up my ass. And then I am unlikely to extract it in time to actually answer a call. And, since I don't check voicemail, you may as well not bother. And even if I do pick up the phone in time, the chances are slim that I've remembered to charge it, so it'll probably cut out before you've told me what you called for. ). Back to Max's RAM, though. Turns out he needs it to keep photos and tinny-sounding music on the phone. "It was only fifteen bucks," he said defensively.

On to hausfrauwery:

This morning Salon's Broadsheet directed me to www.cleaninghunk.com, which is an extended ad for some fake-piney kitchen and bathroom cleaner. You choose your hot guy, his music, and his outfit, and he cleans a kitchen or a bathroom while you watch. It's clever and addictive, and if I were inclined to buy fake-piney cleaners, I'd certainly end up buying that one. Though the fact that I'm amused by such a thing makes me feel disturbingly housewifey; next thing you know, I'll be reading Erma Bombeck and laughing hysterically "Ohmigod, that's so true!"

Actually, I've already fallen into the dark heart of modern housewifery with an email subscription to flylady. Flylady is the dominatrix of domestic chores. She floods my inbox with exhortations to shine my sink, do the laundry, check my calendar, and floss my teeth. Kelly, her sidekick, tells me things like "Today it's time to vacuum the lint out of your dryer's exhaust pipe." Any second now I will get an email from Flylady asking where the hell my shoes are, because if I'm not wearing shoes, I'm not getting my housework done. "Screw you, flylady," I think, as I am not currently wearing my shoes. Yet even when I'm feeling rebellious, the truth is that I crave being dominated by Flylady and Kelly. I do think my teeth need flossing, my laundry needs doing, and my dryer vent needs cleaning. I like offloading the thinking about what housework I ought to do, and when, to someone else. It also makes it easy to offload chores to Max too. "Flylady said we needed to vacuum under the bed today." Max does the vacuuming in the house. Okay, says Max, and vacuums under the bed.

So actually I have my own cleaning hunk. Except somehow, when Max is cleaning, there's a four-year-old grabbing onto him, I'm nursing a baby and trying to put the laundry in the dryer, and the phone is ringing. So it's not like I usually have the time or inclination to get lascivious about him, shirtless, vacuuming with Django playing in the background. The house the online cleaning hunk cleans seems suspiciously childless. I suppose that's some of its appeal. On the not-appealing side, it also looks suspiciously like a McMansion. Wouldn't McMansion owners just have a member of the Brazilian cleaning cartel do the scrubbing?

Right, my brain is all over the place, just like a frazzled hausfrau's brain should be. Flylady also sends me obnoxious testimonials about how awesome she is, many of which thank God for her existence. Every time I read one of these (and yes, Internets, I do read them. Like I said, Internets, I'm just one step away from a subscription to Family Circle.) I consider sending my own "your program works even for Godless Atheists like myself" testimonial, to see if it gets sent around. Wait, am I an atheist, or just an agnostic? Or am I having some temporal lobe malfunction and believing in God this month? Who can keep track? Flylady tells me I can do anything for just 15 minutes at a time, and that I should stop wasting all my time at the computer reading testimonials about how great her feather dusters are. Maybe Flylady is God.

Apparently everyone else already knew about flylady, as at least 2 friends of mine have said "oh yeah, flylady" when I mentioned, with shame, that it turns out that I like being dominated over housework. Both these friends are already over their flylady phase. Where have I been the last few years, Internets? I only saw Britney's crotch shots a couple of days ago, when I was searching for a picture of her shaved head. (Unsurprisingly, the top links on a Google search of "Britney shaved head photo" are not photos of Britney's shaved head.)

Oops, I feel some buzzing in my ass. Is that my phone, or did the cleaning hunk bring some extra tools with him? Either way, guess I better sign off, Internets. TTFN, suckas.

Scrotum

Wow. It turns out that some school librarians consider 'scrotum' to be a dirty word, one that a 10-year-old should not be exposed to.

Ms. Nilsson, reached at Sunnyside Elementary School in Durango, Colo., said she had heard from dozens of librarians who agreed with her stance. “I don’t want to start an issue about censorship,” she said. “But you won’t find men’s genitalia in quality literature.”

“At least not for children,” she added.

How can scrotum be a dirty word? It's not 'cunt,' for chrissakes. Do about 50% of all ten-year-olds have scrota? Yes, Virginia, they do. Is scrotum pejorative? No, it is not. It's not even slangy. It's just a plain old word.

People are insane.

Nutritionists

My midwife group sends all its patients to their nutritionist early in their pregnancies. In principle I approve of this; it's part of their whole-person approach to babymaking (which, by the way, I PLAN NEVER TO HAVE DO AGAIN IN MY LIFE!). In practice, I find it ridiculous. Their nutritionist was nice enough, but I think the whole activity of telling a nutritionist what I eat is bogus, even setting aside the rubber sample portion sizes she waves in the air during the questioning. And then the whole activity of the nutritionist telling me what I SHOULD eat is equally bogus. The whole thing makes you think about food in hideously wrong ways, and if you try to organize your eating patterns according to nutritionists' rules, you will soon go insane.

Anyway, so I've been meaning to write a post about food for oh, six months now, and I haven't gotten around to it. In the post I planned to write, I would explain how the rules that I use for deciding what to eat are simpler than the nutritionists' rules, but, I think, give me perfectly good health results while directing my focus to what's really important about food: the ecological, ethical, social, and gastronomic aspects, rather than the poorly-understood nutritional aspects.

But of course I was sick, and then sick some more, and then I had a baby, so I never got around to writing the post. Luckily, Michael Pollan has now done it for me. [paywall, sorry!] (The virtues of procrastination!) He's made the rules even simpler than mine would have been: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." If we do that, he says, we'll be generally healthy, and can stop worrying about properly balancing each meal and making sure we get enough protein, calcium, iron, and folic acid every day.

The whole thing is worth reading, but if you can't get behind the paywall, the summary will do.

Marxism and Lawyers

There's an interesting post up at Balkinization about how "large law firms might be one of the handful of venues in which volume 1 of Capital applies in almost pure form."

It isn't particularly relevant to my life, I have no insightful comments about it, and there's no action to be taken. But I did enjoy reading it, and immediately after I read it, I realized I meant to try to post more. So all the more relevant, important posts I might have made tonight have been displaced by this one. It's like what someone said about Bush: he agrees with whatever person talked to him last.

Babysitters and Discipline

We are in the middle of interviewing replacements for one of our current fabulous babysitters, C., who is returning to France in a couple of weeks. Yesterday we interviewed a woman who is a full-time nanny with a few spare hours to babysit. I am pretty sure we flunked the interview. At some point she pulled out a notebook and pen poised, asked us all about our approach to discipline, what time we had meals and snacks, when nap time/quiet time was and what did it consist of, and further questions for which we had absolutely no answers. We stared blankly at each other. How to describe our approach to discipline? Wait, we didn't prepare for that question. We can't answer "So, tell me about yourself..." either. Or "Tell me about a challenge you've had in your parenting and how you overcame it, or what you would do differently next time." Not that she asked us those questions. We were also unprepared to ask relevant questions of her, outside of "So, how much are you an hour?" and "What days did you say you were available?" We go almost entirely by gut when hiring sitters. Of course we check references, but we also find that Ari is an excellent judge of character. So we pick people he adores on first sight. G., for example, another one of our fabulous babysitters, who, upon meeting, he began showering with presents. After she left the interview, he said "She was very beautiful." And he has loved her ever since.

Anyway, we're not sure what our approach to discipline is, our schedule is pretty fluid (though we are starting to get into a bit of a routine for some things, just because, with two now, we have to be somewhat more organized), and Ari eats when he's hungry, and woe unto the adult who tries to get him to do something different.

Actually, I guess, about discipline, it would be more appropriate to say that we're not sure we believe in 'discipline' at all. Which doesn't mean that we 'let' Ari do whatever he wants. It does mean, I think, that we are constantly re-evaluating whether something we want him to do, or not to do, is reasonable or necessary. It turns out that a lot of the stuff we, as parents, want our kids to comply with has very little to do with "raising our children properly" and a lot to do with "what I, parent, want right now, or think is okay, or finds gross or annoying or just weird." As in "No, Ari, you can't make a clementine burrito, that's gross." Or "don't use your baby sister's crib as a trampoline." Both items we initially said no to and then "gave in" about.

We "give in" about a lot of things not because we don't know how to discipline our kid, but because on second or third or fourth thought, many of our requests or demands are not very important. It would be nice, perhaps, if we remembered not to make unimportant requests or demands in the first place, but that's unrealistic, and perhaps also not healthy. If I ask Max to stop doing something that's annoying me, he'll usually do it, if it's easy for him to comply. If not, he'll explain why it's important to him to do the thing. Even if it's something I don't think is important, I will try to respect that he thinks it is. Or else I will argue that the reason I want him to stop is more important than his reason for wanting to continue. It's a negotiation. I don't just order him to stop this instant or I'll send him to his room.

So why should I treat Ari any differently, except in the obvious cases where he is doing something stupidly dangerous or hurtful? (And if Max were doing something stupidly dangerous or hurtful, no doubt I would tell him to stop this instant too. In fact, I do. For example, when he's needlessly rushing while driving somewhere.) Most of the stuff Ari does that I tell him to stop doing, however, is not dangerous or hurtful, but just weird and incomprehensible to me. It also often gets in the way of what I am doing. Still, why should I assume that what I am doing is so much more important than what he is doing? Why should my lack of understanding why it is so important for Ari to attach a helium balloon to his golf clubs caddy and string a kind of archway through the front hall with it prevent him from doing just that? No doubt the things I do seem just as strange and incomprehensible to him. Why is it important that this stack of papers on mom's desk remain exactly where it is, precariously perched on the edge?

No doubt we appear to be awfully wishy-washy. Perhaps even ruled by our child. I have to go by how we feel as a family, though, and how Ari gets along with other kids and other grownups. Are we a happy, healthy, and safe family? Yes. Do other people like Ari? Yes. Does anyone in the household feel resentful and out-of-control? No. So we must be doing fine, discipline or no.

Interview Questions

This morning we interviewed a potential new French-speaking babysitter for Ari. "Do you have any questions you want to ask her?" I asked Ari.

He thought for a moment, and then said "What is your plan to hug Scooby Doo?"