32 posts tagged “judgments”

When my son was born, the nurses who were working on the umbilical cord and cleanup called one of the doctors over.  "Look at this cord blood," one of them said.  The doctor said, "This baby must have had excellent in utero nutrition."  The other nurse said, "Well, look at his skin, too.  You can see he was already well cared for."

I tried, you know, all throughout my pregnancy.  I tried my best to make sure that the baby had every nutrient that he needed, every day.  I started eating foods in strange combinations to make sure I was getting enough vitamins and minerals in my diet, and it's paid off.  Not only was he born full-term at a healthy weight, he hasn't had any of the problems that plague so many children.  No ear infections, no weird skin afflictions, nothing like that.  He's a bundle of robust good health.  We're very proud of that.

But I'm not just writing this to brag.  I'm writing this because I find the way we talk about these things (or don't) and the way we treat our children in general in this country to be appalling. 

As research into what happens in utero goes on, we're finding out more about how much nutrition in the womb matters.  I think most of us are already aware that a deficiency in folic acid early in pregnancy is linked to neural tube defects, especially spina bifida.  But, when it is recommended by the government that all women who are of childbearing age take a folic acid supplement, it is taken by some people to mean that the government is trying to say that women should always be planning to be pregnant, because maybe that's what women are for.  I find this baffling.  Unplanned pregnancies are most of the pregnancies in this country, and as far as I can tell, most of those unplanned pregnancies are not aborted.  So, a small thing that you could do to prevent lifelong spinal cord dysfunction isn't worth it because of what it says about you, the woman.  Here, as in so many other cases, women's ability to take umbrage and see themselves as victims of a government machine trying to squash their rights and personhood takes precedence over the health and welfare of any unplanned children.  That seems fair, so compassionate. 

Please note that while the FDA does mandate folic-acid enrichment of some cereal products, it does not mandate that any women, pregnant or otherwise, take folic acid supplements.  It just recommends it.  Apparently a recommendation to reduce the odds of spina bifida occurring in children by as much as 70% is fucking oppressive, but probably not as oppressive as spina bifida itself.

And god forbid that you should express sympathy for the goal of getting all pregnant women to pay more attention to their nutrition while they're pregnant.  Apparently it is more important that a woman be able to eat whatever she wants than that the baby be given some chance at good health.  Yes, I believe the majority of mothers do take as much care as they can with this, but it's obvious that too many mothers do not.  One of the reasons we have such a high infant mortality rate is because we have such high rates of preterm births here, and that is sometimes related to in utero care (not always, of course.  It is also related to other factors, but use of alcohol and tobacco during pregnancy are big factors--occasionally, some women smoke during pregnancy because they want smaller babies believing that will make labor easier, which it doesn't.  All it does is set the baby up for lifelong health problems.)

And god forbid you should ever mention the small-but-growing body of research that suggests a link between IVF and some cancers, autism, and other birth defects and complications--not to mention the fact that most such babies are born at low birthweights and often prematurely, putting them already at risk for various health and developmental problems.  Instead, keep following the red herrings and refuse to get your kid vaccinated. 

But what do we care about babies, right?  What we care about is women's rights, and every time the two even remotely, questionably come into conflict, we feel we must choose the woman's right to smoke and drink and not take folic acid during pregnancy.  We get ourselves into that position because of the abortion debate.  It is felt that ceding any concern to the developing fetus is admitting that this thing is a developing person, that what we do to it now can have potentially devastating lifelong consequences for the person it will be.  And admitting that, it is felt, gives up important ground to the pro-life crowd.  Maybe it does, but maybe on this one, the pro-life crowd is right.  I believe that abortion should be safe and legal (and, yes, rare, because I believe that in every case, contraception is preferable) but I am not willing to take away all consideration for the fetus.  And we shouldn't have to.  I believe there is a middle ground where a reasonable case can be made that a potential, developing person is worthy of moral consideration but that there are times when the rights of the woman are more important.  This is an ethical position, please note, not a recommendation for a legal position.

This all disturbs me quite enough, that we care, apparently, so little for giving our children the best chance at a healthy life that we would rather protect abortion rights at any cost than advocate, say, public-health campaigns that would help to educate women about in utero nutrition and its consequences.  But it doesn't really end once the baby is born.  Riddle me this:  If caring about a fetus is not the same as caring about an actual person, then why do our attitudes about fetuses so often carry over even after they're born?

We abuse our children.  We neglect them.  We kill them.  We abandon them, in dumpsters and at hospitals through Safe Haven Laws.  We don't take a lot of time out of our busy lives for them.  We don't take special care to keep fathers, mothers, and children all living in the same household.

In Nebraska, as I'm sure many of you have heard, the Safe Haven Law does not currently have an age expiration.  In the few months since the law passed, some 35 children have been dumped at hospitals, abandoned by their parents.  Most of those children are not infants and are old enough to know they have been abandoned.  Some were in their teens already.  Several of them were driven from out of state by their parents.  One woman drove her son up from Georgia to dump him, then said, "Don't judge me.  I love my son."  Apparently she loved him so much that she could find the wherewithal and money to drive to Nebraska from Georgia to abandon him but not enough to actually take care of him.  Tonight, Campbell Brown asked what's going on that we have so many parents willing to abandon their kids to the state, whether there aren't enough state resources or not enough accesssibility to help parents who feel they can't care for their kids.  I don't think there are enough state resources in the world to prevent this kind of thing.  If parents are bad parents, irresponsible, uncaring, they will still be no matter how much money or aid you provide them.  Good parents take care of their kids even through poverty and hard times.  Any good and loving parent would know the damage they do to their kids by abandoning them.

We do not as a society, though, encourage parents to be responsible and stay with their children and care for them.  We certainly don't encourage men to do so and have gone so far as to tell fathers that they are neither needed nor, in many cases, wanted.  Their money is wanted and required, yes, but not their actual presence.  We don't care, frankly, if putting kids in daycare hurts them in the long run; we don't even want to talk about it because of what it might say about women working. 

And so we get stories like these, girls who have unprotected and sometimes promiscuous sex from young ages (and presumably boys, too, but this survey was focused on girls).  I think it's cute how Dr. Schroeder concludes from these results that what these girls need is sex education.  It's startlingly clear from what the girls said about their sex lives that they know a lot about sex, including how pregnancy happens, what STDs are and how to prevent them.  That isn't the problem.  They're so afraid of losing the "friendship" of boys that they do whatever the boys want.  The problem is they don't know what a relationship with a man that is based on respect rather than sexual demands looks like.  The problem is they don't know what it feels like to be loved by a man--their fathers--for something other than sex.  So, to avoid having these boys think they're uncool or get mad at them, they take the risk of unprotected sex.  That isn't a lack of sex education.  That's a lack of fundamental self-esteem, a self-esteem that your school can't actually give you or teach you because it has to come from your home life, from these basic relationships that are supposed to teach you that you are loved even if you don't want to have sex.  The fact that it isn't--in girls who have not been abused--tells us something pretty fucking awful about our country and how it treats its children.

Add it all up.  We've decided fetuses are not worthy of moral consideration.  We abandon infants, through Safe Haven laws and also illegally in dumpsters and plastic bags.  We abuse and neglect a substantial portion that we don't actually abandon.  Another substantial proportion, we tell them that one or the other of their parents--usually their fathers--are essentially worthless in the cause of raising children.  We expect them to evolve to our desires rather than tailoring our desires to the ways children have been raised for millennia of human history.  We think it's perfectly acceptable to feed our kids any old kind of junk food because we don't "have time" to cook nutritious food--nevermind about the consequences.  We sexualize girls from young ages without ensuring them the benefit of a positive relationship with a man.  While contraception of various kinds is widely available, even when you're poor (Planned Parenthood, for example, has a sliding fee scale--I know from experience) and young, and adoption is also a widely available option, we still have this culture of no blame, no shame for mothers parents who abandon their children or who fail to care for them (to be fair to fathers, I doubt most fathers of abandoned infants even know that they're fathers).  We don't want to talk about anything that would benefit kids but potentially stigmatize or disallow anything any woman wants.  If something does come out, it tends to get buried quickly or shouted at by so-called feminists who support "reproductive choice" for women (but not for men, because this is about equality).  Since we don't want to talk about sex with our kids or take care of our kids, we demand that the government offer programs to do it for us (sex ed in school, self-esteem exercises in school, etc.).  

We, as a society, incentivize irresponsibility, self-centeredness, and to some extent, bad parenting (although we don't only incentivize irresponsibility in parenting and family issues--the bailout so far has been a good example of this, and, gee, look how well AIG is behaving now!).  We don't like to punish people for mistakes that any of us could make, but at the same time, we have to do better at raising kids.  We have to do better by our kids.  We should feel shame at the state of our nation's childrearing. 

I don't frankly know whether it's better or worse in other countries, and I don't care.  If it were found that British parents were even worse than us (and, again, I have no idea--sorry, UK), that wouldn't make our behavior OK.  I don't know what it's going to take anymore--I don't even know how to correct some of the shit we've done.  But we have to because the people who are least deserving of suffering are suffering, even when they don't always know they are.  We are failing to protect the people who most need protection.  And that's wrong.  

When my son was born, the nurses who were working on the umbilical cord and cleanup called one of the doctors over.  "Look at this cord blood," one of them said.  The doctor said, "This baby must have had excellent in utero nutrition."  The other nurse said, "Well, look at his skin, too.  You can see he was already well cared for."

I tried, you know, all throughout my pregnancy.  I tried my best to make sure that the baby had every nutrient that he needed, every day.  I started eating foods in strange combinations to make sure I was getting enough vitamins and minerals in my diet, and it's paid off.  Not only was he born full-term at a healthy weight, he hasn't had any of the problems that plague so many children.  No ear infections, no weird skin afflictions, nothing like that.  He's a bundle of robust good health.  We're very proud of that.

But I'm not just writing this to brag.  I'm writing this because I find the way we talk about these things (or don't) and the way we treat our children in general in this country to be appalling. 

As research into what happens in utero goes on, we're finding out more about how much nutrition in the womb matters.  I think most of us are already aware that a deficiency in folic acid early in pregnancy is linked to neural tube defects, especially spina bifida.  But, when it is recommended by the government that all women who are of childbearing age take a folic acid supplement, it is taken by some people to mean that the government is trying to say that women should always be planning to be pregnant, because maybe that's what women are for.  I find this baffling.  Unplanned pregnancies are most of the pregnancies in this country, and as far as I can tell, most of those unplanned pregnancies are not aborted.  So, a small thing that you could do to prevent lifelong spinal cord dysfunction isn't worth it because of what it says about you, the woman.  Here, as in so many other cases, women's ability to take umbrage and see themselves as victims of a government machine trying to squash their rights and personhood takes precedence over the health and welfare of any unplanned children.  That seems fair, so compassionate. 

Please note that while the FDA does mandate folic-acid enrichment of some cereal products, it does not mandate that any women, pregnant or otherwise, take folic acid supplements.  It just recommends it.  Apparently a recommendation to reduce the odds of spina bifida occurring in children by as much as 70% is fucking oppressive, but probably not as oppressive as spina bifida itself.

And god forbid that you should express sympathy for the goal of getting all pregnant women to pay more attention to their nutrition while they're pregnant.  Apparently it is more important that a woman be able to eat whatever she wants than that the baby be given some chance at good health.  Yes, I believe the majority of mothers do take as much care as they can with this, but it's obvious that too many mothers do not.  One of the reasons we have such a high infant mortality rate is because we have such high rates of preterm births here, and that is sometimes related to in utero care (not always, of course.  It is also related to other factors, but use of alcohol and tobacco during pregnancy are big factors--occasionally, some women smoke during pregnancy because they want smaller babies believing that will make labor easier, which it doesn't.  All it does is set the baby up for lifelong health problems.)

And god forbid you should ever mention the small-but-growing body of research that suggests a link between IVF and some cancers, autism, and other birth defects and complications--not to mention the fact that most such babies are born at low birthweights and often prematurely, putting them already at risk for various health and developmental problems.  Instead, keep following the red herrings and refuse to get your kid vaccinated. 

But what do we care about babies, right?  What we care about is women's rights, and every time the two even remotely, questionably come into conflict, we feel we must choose the woman's right to smoke and drink and not take folic acid during pregnancy.  We get ourselves into that position because of the abortion debate.  It is felt that ceding any concern to the developing fetus is admitting that this thing is a developing person, that what we do to it now can have potentially devastating lifelong consequences for the person it will be.  And admitting that, it is felt, gives up important ground to the pro-life crowd.  Maybe it does, but maybe on this one, the pro-life crowd is right.  I believe that abortion should be safe and legal (and, yes, rare, because I believe that in every case, contraception is preferable) but I am not willing to take away all consideration for the fetus.  And we shouldn't have to.  I believe there is a middle ground where a reasonable case can be made that a potential, developing person is worthy of moral consideration but that there are times when the rights of the woman are more important.  This is an ethical position, please note, not a recommendation for a legal position.

This all disturbs me quite enough, that we care, apparently, so little for giving our children the best chance at a healthy life that we would rather protect abortion rights at any cost than advocate, say, public-health campaigns that would help to educate women about in utero nutrition and its consequences.  But it doesn't really end once the baby is born.  Riddle me this:  If caring about a fetus is not the same as caring about an actual person, then why do our attitudes about fetuses so often carry over even after they're born?

We abuse our children.  We neglect them.  We kill them.  We abandon them, in dumpsters and at hospitals through Safe Haven Laws.  We don't take a lot of time out of our busy lives for them.  We don't take special care to keep fathers, mothers, and children all living in the same household.

In Nebraska, as I'm sure many of you have heard, the Safe Haven Law does not currently have an age expiration.  In the few months since the law passed, some 35 children have been dumped at hospitals, abandoned by their parents.  Most of those children are not infants and are old enough to know they have been abandoned.  Some were in their teens already.  Several of them were driven from out of state by their parents.  One woman drove her son up from Georgia to dump him, then said, "Don't judge me.  I love my son."  Apparently she loved him so much that she could find the wherewithal and money to drive to Nebraska from Georgia to abandon him but not enough to actually take care of him.  Tonight, Campbell Brown asked what's going on that we have so many parents willing to abandon their kids to the state, whether there aren't enough state resources or not enough accesssibility to help parents who feel they can't care for their kids.  I don't think there are enough state resources in the world to prevent this kind of thing.  If parents are bad parents, irresponsible, uncaring, they will still be no matter how much money or aid you provide them.  Good parents take care of their kids even through poverty and hard times.  Any good and loving parent would know the damage they do to their kids by abandoning them.

We do not as a society, though, encourage parents to be responsible and stay with their children and care for them.  We certainly don't encourage men to do so and have gone so far as to tell fathers that they are neither needed nor, in many cases, wanted.  Their money is wanted and required, yes, but not their actual presence.  We don't care, frankly, if putting kids in daycare hurts them in the long run; we don't even want to talk about it because of what it might say about women working. 

And so we get stories like these, girls who have unprotected and sometimes promiscuous sex from young ages (and presumably boys, too, but this survey was focused on girls).  I think it's cute how Dr. Schroeder concludes from these results that what these girls need is sex education.  It's startlingly clear from what the girls said about their sex lives that they know a lot about sex, including how pregnancy happens, what STDs are and how to prevent them.  That isn't the problem.  They're so afraid of losing the "friendship" of boys that they do whatever the boys want.  The problem is they don't know what a relationship with a man that is based on respect rather than sexual demands looks like.  The problem is they don't know what it feels like to be loved by a man--their fathers--for something other than sex.  So, to avoid having these boys think they're uncool or get mad at them, they take the risk of unprotected sex.  That isn't a lack of sex education.  That's a lack of fundamental self-esteem, a self-esteem that your school can't actually give you or teach you because it has to come from your home life, from these basic relationships that are supposed to teach you that you are loved even if you don't want to have sex.  The fact that it isn't--in girls who have not been abused--tells us something pretty fucking awful about our country and how it treats its children.

Add it all up.  We've decided fetuses are not worthy of moral consideration.  We abandon infants, through Safe Haven laws and also illegally in dumpsters and plastic bags.  We abuse and neglect a substantial portion that we don't actually abandon.  Another substantial proportion, we tell them that one or the other of their parents--usually their fathers--are essentially worthless in the cause of raising children.  We expect them to evolve to our desires rather than tailoring our desires to the ways children have been raised for millennia of human history.  We think it's perfectly acceptable to feed our kids any old kind of junk food because we don't "have time" to cook nutritious food--nevermind about the consequences.  We sexualize girls from young ages without ensuring them the benefit of a positive relationship with a man.  While contraception of various kinds is widely available, even when you're poor (Planned Parenthood, for example, has a sliding fee scale--I know from experience) and young, and adoption is also a widely available option, we still have this culture of no blame, no shame for mothers parents who abandon their children or who fail to care for them (to be fair to fathers, I doubt most fathers of abandoned infants even know that they're fathers).  We don't want to talk about anything that would benefit kids but potentially stigmatize or disallow anything any woman wants.  If something does come out, it tends to get buried quickly or shouted at by so-called feminists who support "reproductive choice" for women (but not for men, because this is about equality).  Since we don't want to talk about sex with our kids or take care of our kids, we demand that the government offer programs to do it for us (sex ed in school, self-esteem exercises in school, etc.).  

We, as a society, incentivize irresponsibility, self-centeredness, and to some extent, bad parenting (although we don't only incentivize irresponsibility in parenting and family issues--the bailout so far has been a good example of this, and, gee, look how well AIG is behaving now!).  We don't like to punish people for mistakes that any of us could make, but at the same time, we have to do better at raising kids.  We have to do better by our kids.  We should feel shame at the state of our nation's childrearing. 

I don't frankly know whether it's better or worse in other countries, and I don't care.  If it were found that British parents were even worse than us (and, again, I have no idea--sorry, UK), that wouldn't make our behavior OK.  I don't know what it's going to take anymore--I don't even know how to correct some of the shit we've done.  But we have to because the people who are least deserving of suffering are suffering, even when they don't always know they are.  We are failing to protect the people who most need protection.  And that's wrong.  

OOOOH, Emily Yoffe has brought the noise! 

Yeah, she made the outrageous claim that kids do better in a household with two married parents, preferably their natural ones (but, sure, adopted ones can stand in just fine and so can responsible and caring stepparents--that's my commentary, I guess, since I don't think she really addresses it, but given the fact that her article is so focused on the economic benefits of two-parent households, it would make sense).  I know, I know!  She's so utterly Victorian!  To even suggest that women might oughtn't (Too much time in Arkansas.  Just deal with the double modal.) conceive of children with someone who ain't going to be around come time to buy diapers!  It's so oppressive!

Or, I guess, that's what Broadsheet thinks.  But, meh.  They get a big meh and even a snort of contempt because they (where "they" equals Tracy Clark-Flory) present no actual evidence or data to counter anything Yoffe wrote.  Nothing.

The thing that bothered me most about Yoffe's piece wasn't the thesis of it or her focus on the economic indicators, because those are important.  But I thought she ignored one of the most brutal problems with kids born out of wedlock:  Not only are these kids almost certainly going to grow up poorer and with less parental involvement (duh), they are vastly more likely to be victims of child abuse.  Kids raised by two parents other than their own natural or adoptive parents are at increased risk of being abused, but that number increases higher for kids who have no father figure around at all, except maybe (and possibly worst of all) a string of boyfriends.

There are a lot of possible reasons for this, and you can peruse the Internet at your leisure to find hypotheses galore, although a lot of them have to do with economic stress and are thus related to the poverty argument, but there are other possibilities as well.  It is a fact that most fatal child abuse is perpetrated by the biological mother and most sexual abuse of children is perpetrated by a male who is not the biological father. 

There are a host of other worrisome statistics.  Kids who grow up without their fathers are more likely--in some cases, vastly more likely--to engage in all kinds of risky behavior, end up dropping out of school, end up on drugs, in prison, etc.  Most rapists grew up in fatherless households.

I have seen some research suggesting that two adoptive, committed parents of the same sex (yeah, I'm talking about the gays.  Yesterday I mentioned the Latins.  Today it's the gays.) are equally effective at preventing most of these bad outcomes (I'd say becoming a rapist is a bad outcome, wouldn't you?), leading some to suggest that perhaps it is the mere presence of two loving people who are absolutely committed to the child's best interests.  However, the research is somewhat limited due to a) that type of family being relatively rare and b) the fact that most of the gay couples who adopt/give birth are well educated and of above-average income, confounding comparison with most children born out of wedlock.  That being said, I will continue my support for gay adoptive parents--I don't know, but I have a gut feeling that the more loving and stable adoptive homes that exist for kids, the better off we all are.

It is of grave concern to me that feminism seems to care very little about what is good for kids (or men) because they are so focused on what is "good" for women.  Feminism will continue to ignore the data that kids do much better in a stable home with two parents because it suggests that women should, oh, at least consider how their choices are going to affect others.  And we can't have that.  Or at least Tracy Clark-Flory can't.  The commenters on that piece are a bit more reasonable about it.  No one--not even me or Emily Yoffe--is suggesting that women should marry men who are clearly unable to act responsibly toward both the mother and child and obviously not abusive men or men who have violent rages and make the house feel unsafe and constantly stressful.  Yoffe and I would venture to suggest, though, that perhaps women should GET ON THE FUCKING PILL before they allow themselves to get knocked up by these guys.  But, of course, we shouldn't get all judgey and preachy at women (and men, sure) who are totally fucking their kids over because it's, like, a woman's right to do what she pleases.

Every time some new report comes out that links some behavior in the mother with some outcome in the kid, every damn feminist website screams, "OH MY GOD, THEY ALWAYS BLAME THE MOM."  Well, sometimes, maybe it's the mom's fault, eh?  It's less about blaming the woman, I think, than about finding out what's best for kids, but the constant focus on the woman, the woman, always the woman, means that we can't find out what risk factors there might be for childhood obesity, for example.  Because if it's linked to working mothers, as it has been, the feminists will fucking shriek.  Similarly, there will be a shrill outcry if it is suggested that wymmins are animals and share any qualities with other female animals, including, of course, the dreaded maternal instinct.  We don't have instincts!  We went to college! 

I know, I know.  I'm hopelessly conservative and out of date.  But I warned you:  I care fuck-all about "progress" if progress means throwing kids under the bus.  I also famously hate the type of diseased individualism we have taken to celebrating in this country--hey, man, whatever you want to do as long as it makes you happy.  Feh.  As Kant said, doing your duty first makes you worthy of happiness and 'duty' implies the existence of some type of relationship.

Now, maybe I'm just engaging in pointless handwringing.  God knows, that's what Tracy Clark-Flory would say, right?  Maybe all of those differences between single-parent households and two-parent households can be explained simply by the poverty.  I don't really see how you can ferret out the differences between differences caused solely by poverty and those related to the presence of parents, because in so many cases it is precisely the loss of the one parent that causes the poverty.  So, is the loss of the parent causing the poverty, and then the poverty causes the other problems?  Or is the absence of the parent causing all of it, proximally?  And what are we to make of the fact that biological fathers who live with their children are, compared to single mothers and unrelated men, less likely to abuse their children?  And, by the way, comparisons to Scandi-fuckin-navia don't really hold up; there are so many cultural differences between the US and Sweden that it's way too hard to control for all the variables.  It is certainly possible that with their system that has come close, or so I hear, to eliminating child poverty in their countries also eliminate or nearly eliminate the social difficulties of single-parent households.  Anyway, eliminating child poverty is a worthy goal even if it doesn't, but it's too hard to say. 

Furthermore, comparisons with the animal world are not helpful here since there are no other animals that I can think of who require several years of care before they become independent of their parents.  Also, no other animal young are expected to learn language, to learn to be civilized and ethical, etc.  Human children take much more effort and care and time than any other animal young, so far as I know.  Correct me if I'm wrong--is there some rare bird in the Upper Orinoco that has young who now require 12 years of schooling before they are ready to the leave the nest?

I'm going to go ahead, since it's late and I'm tired, and go way out on a limb here.  I have, as some of you know, a special interest in sociopathy.  Of the sociopaths I have personally known, all of them came from fatherless homes (and some of them from motherless homes, too, i.e., they had been abandoned by both parents).  It makes a certain amount of sense since, while there is probably a biological component for the antisocial personality disorders, it is thought that they can be prevented in early childhood through certain parenting techniques--parenting techniques that are often more doable in a two-parent household.  I would suggest--and some others have, too--that single-parent households are more likely to push kids who already have the biological component to become sociopaths and that two-parent households have a higher likelihood of preventing it.  Incidentally, the rapists mentioned above are more likely to be psychopaths than sociopaths, though they both lie at various places on the antisocial spectrum.

I was just thinking about this the other day, how in this country we put children in their own beds as soon as we can get them to sleep there.  We have a host of experts telling us how to fight the baby's natural instinct to cry like hell when they are left to sleep by themselves; we have to send the message, of course, that in this life, kiddo, you're on your own.  I think attachment parenting gets some stuff wrong, too, but how can we expect kids to grow up feeling part of a deeply loving relationship, feeling that other people's feelings matter, feeling connected to other people when we ignore the kid's needs from infancy.  Not all the kid's needs, yeah, just the need to feel safe with his parents while he sleeps.  I figure that as human emotions and relationships have evolved, sleeping was probably a dangerous time.  A lot of predators are nocturnal, and a baby left alone in a crib all night would have been easy prey.  It seems at least plausible to me that we evolved to prefer sleeping with our loved ones (and this is still how it's done in many places) because it was safer.  (We had our kid sleep in his own bed in our room--our bed when he was very young was too damned fluffy to be safe for an infant--but we got up with him every time he cried.  He now sleeps in his own bed in his own room without any trouble, but if he wakes up in the middle of the night and needs us, we let him sleep with us.  To me it is more important that he know that we are always there with him and for him than to promote a very false independence.  He's 3, man, he is not independent, although he does go potty all by himself.  woot!)  It isn't just the sleeping thing.  I know parents who don't think twice about keeping their baby essentially confined all day long--in cribs, playpens, high chairs, car seats--forcing the baby to conform to the adult's schedule and needs and utterly ignoring the need the baby has to play, move, rest, eat when hungry, etc.  Not to mention that the kid is basically alone most of these times, experiencing the world without the touch, voice, smell of a loved one.  Working parents have come out and admitted in national magazines that they don't enjoy and cannot force themselves to enjoy playing with their kids, so they work instead and hire out the play, as if the kids won't get the message.  But to kids, "love" isn't a word or a feeling--it's an action.  They don't think you love them because you say it, because the word itself doesn't mean much to a 2-year-old.  They learn what it means by associating it with actions and with time spent (the currency of love is time).  A child whose parents are there, making that child their first (not only, but first) time and energy commitment, obviously enjoying the time spent and actively joining the child in their engagement with the world--that child knows it is loved and is lovable, and that child conversely learns to do love to others.  "Do love" is an odd construction, I know, but we adults have come to think of "love" as just a feeling, not an action.  I accepted that without thinking about it until I met T who doesn't like to say "I love you" but is always sure to act in such a way that he doesn't need to; he gives me the time and energy that are love.  We give that to each other, and we give that to our son. 

Love is an action.  The currency of love is time.  Do your duty by your spouse and kids.  Take responsibility--yeah, of course, fathers that goes for you, too, but fathers have less reproductive choice here, having no birth control pill and no say in the abortion question--for the life you create. 

I'm too tired to proofread this now, and tomorrow is my darling son's birthday, not to mention the community Easter egg hunt, and I have a ladybug-shaped cake to frost (coconut cake, and man, it is some fabulous cake--Martha Stewart's recipe, even!) and presents to wrap and gather and blah blah.  Ha.  It's 4:00 a.m.  Awesome.  So, if there are places I should have edited, grant me a modicum of latitude, I beg of you. 

Oh, finally, don't get all up in my face with cohabitation being as good as marriage.  In America, at least, cohabitations are much more likely to break up than marriages are.  In their first 5 years, 20% of marriages will break up, but 40% of cohabitations will; in the next 5 years, the numbers jump to 40% for marriages and 60% for cohabitations.  So, in terms of commitment and stability, they aren't equivalent to marriage. 

Right now, I am not up to the task of turning this into a coherent post.  There are just a variety of related things that have been rattling around in my confused, oxygen-starved brain for a few days, and I need to lay them out here. 

• I've read several articles, in print and online, lately that suggest that "guilt" is something unnecessary and that judging others for their decisions is always (or at least usually) wrong (nevermind the judgment inherent in that).  Guilt is a way that we recognize that we've done something wrong.  There exist people who feel guilty all the time over every single little thing, I know, and those people may need therapy.  But I don't think that is most of us.  If you're feeling guilty, it is possible that your conscience is attempting to communicate to you that you have done something wrong, harmed someone, violated the moral code.  As for being judgmental, why is it wrong to have standards that you expect yourself and others to live up to?  Since when did we decide that any choice is equally OK, as long as that choice does not involve spanking your children, an act which is clearly the worst thing any human could possibly do?  Charles Taylor gives a very good accounting of why all choices are not equally valid or good, at least not in a society that wants to maintain some sense of morality.  Unfortunately, it's not the kind of thing people will generally listen to.  Hmmm, I think there's an essay in this month's Harper's that also touches on this, how we are now meant to respect any idiotic belief, so long as it is sincerely held.  *Note to self:  Reread that essay and also Charles Taylor and make little Invader Zim-like hand gestures of frustration because you are the only person alive who still cares about this.  (I know, that last is an exaggeration.  I know.  I've had pneumonia, and I'm feeling bloody sorry for myself.)
• Stay-at-home dads are kind of awesome.  But what's even more awesome is when people, like Kimura and some hippie dude commenting on this essay, recognize that the supremacy of WORK is fucking bogus.  I've said before that one of my problems with most mainstream types of feminism is that it completely buys into the capitalist hegemony, the superiority of paid work and conspicuous success.  Some of us say fuck all of that, I am SOOOO not giving my life over to some asswipe who gets to decide what my time is worth, I am SOOOOO sick of all the time you people fucking waste in committee meetings that accomplish nothing.  I guess if you like doing all that, well, someone needs to keep the stock markets open, so go for it.  But don't sit around and tell me how much meaningless work I do in a day because I actually change my son's diapers by myself (or used to when he wore them) and wash dishes and such.  You do at least as much meaningless work in a day as I do.  A lot of the work of life is tedious and crappy, whether it's paid work or unpaid work.  Just because you get paid for your time (in units of currency that are gradually decreasing in value, too, you human slave) doesn't mean what you do is inherently more valuable in moral terms than what I do is.  Conclusion:  Fuck the corporate hegemony!  I could totally make a rap song out of this.
• On a related note, I am disturbed by something I have seen on several feminist sites lately--I'm calling them feminist, incidentally, because they call themselves that.  I have no idea if this represents any kind of majority of feminists or not--I hope not.  There is a set of work, mostly that work associated with the house and raising children, that many people find tedious, frustrating, and not important enough to do for themselves.  Their careers are more challenging, interesting, exciting, important, satisfying, etc.  And yet if you suggest, even a little, that middle class, American white women only have the "freedom" to choose the career over the housework because they step on the backs of the colored and the poor, those white women will cry out in rage at you.  The general thrust of their cries will run, "That work isn't inherently demeaning."  Ummmmm...am I the only one who thinks maybe someone is contradicting herself here?  If it's too tedious in comparison to your thrilling career, if you find it mind-numbing and stultifying, do you mean seriously to suggest that it's only that way to you and to no one else?  Do you mean to actually try and tell me that all those impoverished women, some of whom have left their own children and families in their home countries to come here and take care of yours, have done so because nothing thrills and satisfies them more than raising someone else's children?  Are you the most disingenuous bitch ever put on the face of the earth?  The point of noting that white American feminism steps all over the colored and the poor is not to say that white women should all, therefore, go back to being housewives.  The point is--well, there are several.  A)  As in Western Europe, families (including single-parent households, of course) should receive more support in general, including universal health care and all of that, so that all women and men have more choices and better options.  B)  The implication in the economics of these nanny and daycare situations that we currently have is that raising children is not valuable work.  We Americans, as a society, do not value it.  C)  Uh, well, personally, I think it's quite classist and a tad bit racist to say that work that is too tedious and demeaning for you to do is perfectly fine for the underclasses.  Because, um, they don't have the same high-powered mind that you have?  Or...I'm struggling here to find a way to make it better...because you have some kind of rich-white ADD and can't tolerate the mundane tasks of existence that the poor cannot escape, but because the poor are not subject to the rich-white syndrome, they don't get bored the way you do?  WTF?  Grrrrrrrrrrrr. 
• Pneumonia sucks. 
• I really, really hate it when people automatically assume that most people can't "afford" to choose to be stay-at-home parents.  For one thing, the expenses of holding a job if you have children often make the job next to worthless.  Daycare is expensive (and often, let's face it, shitty) and nannies even more so.  Commuting is increasingly expensive.  The extra meals out of the house, the more expensive wardrobe (yes, I am assuming that work clothing generally costs more than at-home clothing--however, unless you wear your work clothes all the time, even cheap work clothes cost more because they entail having a work wardrobe and an at-home wardrobe, in addition to the fancy clothes for dates or whatever--also, work clothing often seems to entail the extra irritating expense of dry cleaning)--all this crap adds up.  After taxes and all this crap, working can be expensive.  I actually can't afford to work outside the home; I can't afford not to work, either, so I work part-time at home, although I resolutely maintain my self-identification as a stay-at-home mom because that's how I mostly think of myself.  Anyway, for another thing, some of us have made the decision that there are any number of expenses we will just forego so that we can afford to stay home and raise our kids.  We don't have satellite TV, for example, which basically means we get only ABC.  Yay, ABC!  We don't have cell phones, iPods, or any other gadgets at all.  We keep our housing costs in check by living in a tiny, old house in the boondocks.  In other words, if staying home with your kids is the most important goal to you (and, it should go without saying, I am NOT talking about single-parent households where there is no choice), you find ways to cut back on what you spend so that you don't need as much income.  In our case, we never realized how much we would have to cut back when we made this decision, because we naively assumed that America's economy was just and sane, but we both agreed that children should be raised by their parents, not by (under)paid help.  And so we make do.  I know I bitch about our poverty mightily on this blog, but most of the time, it's alright.  I bitch here because this is my space to bitch.  In real life, we're OK--at least, thank God, we never ever fight about money.  We made our choices, we take our lumps.  Alls I'm sayin is there are a lot of other people who could easily "afford" to stay home if that was their priority.  That it is not says more about them than they apparently like to think it does.
• That being said, we cannot afford to have another one.  Sad.  That makes me sad.  The last time I was pregnant, I lived in an idyllic land where health care was affordable (pregnancy is oddly not covered by the Japanese national health insurance, but the prenatal visits were still affordable).  I also lived at that time in a land where the assumption is that families will live off of only one income, and most jobs seem to pay accordingly.  Here in America--and this is partially related to the success of '60s feminism and also related to our misguided economic policies more generally--we assume families will need two incomes, and jobs pay accordingly.  This system forces the choice either not to have kids or to come up with ways to manage kids and careers--except for those of us who say "fuck off" to capitalism and consumerism and instead stay home and garden with our kids.

This began life as a comment on mcco12's post about ebooks and books, though I tried to edit it to make it more freestanding.  But you might want to read his post first--it's a good post, anyway.

I had an argument a few years ago with a musician named Danny Barnes about putting more music online.  He made the point that putting it online takes it to a wider, less elite audience by making it more affordable, and I'm not sure that it has.  It can, if you have a computer and a reliable connection and the necessary memory and so on, of course (and especially if you pirate it, but I doubt that's what he had in mind!).  But we tend to forget here, on Vox because we're all online, that there are people who can't afford an iPod, can't afford a computer, can't afford an Internet connection.  I only have a computer and a DSL connection because I use them for work; otherwise, I probably couldn't afford them.  I bought a computer in college with student loans, loans I still haven't paid off, and I used it long enough that it was no longer compatible with anything and then kept using it because I couldn't afford a new one; I certainly couldn't have downloaded music on it with its 10 MB hard drive (yeah, I think it was bigger than 10 MB but not very big.  Floppies, man, it was all on floppies). 

I can, however, afford a dollar or less for a used book or 5 bucks or less for used CDs.  The equipment necessary to use those are cheap and basic (light, in the case of books; a cheapie CD player for the CDs).  If I spend a dollar on a book, it can just sit there peacefully until I'm ready to read it, requiring no further input from me--no upgrading, no extra memory, no check of its battery--and it will keep sitting there as long as I keep it for re-reading for the same dollar.  Not to mention that downloading books is probably going to require a credit card, and I fucking hate credit cards.  I hate the whole culture around credit cards.  Yes, I have one and I am forced to bow the great credit god in the sky to maintain my Blockbuster queue and a few other things, but we're cash people.  We want to use credit as little as possible, and, of course, there are many people for whom using credit cards is either impossible or just undesirable.

Now, I'm not opposed to ebooks--not at all.  I just doubt.  I'm a doubter.  I'm a doubting Thomas.  I doubt they will be less elitist in the end than books are now because they introduce another device that must be bought, maintained, upgraded, etc.  I doubt that most of the unpublished authors will be worth bothering about, particularly because blogs already provide a similar outlet, and I'm underwhelmed by the quality of most blogs.  I doubt that ebooks will ever be as enjoyable to me as book-books.

You're undoubtedly right about the value of portability and searchability.  It also *may* help some authors publish their work, and I think that's worth exploring, even if I'm not interested in their work (with music, I think this has been a pretty mixed bag).  But I can't see that a preference for real books is akin to being against the printing press.  I'm not against bringing the masses more information.  Quite the opposite, actually.  I just do not see that this is going to make books more affordable or accessible in the foreseeable future to people who can't currently access books.  Technology does tend to get cheaper over time, of course, so maybe someday. 

Also, the argument that third space makes in the comments about photos (which I agree with), I would make about books, too.  They do take on meaning and intimacy as physical objects.  They *can* be mere carriers of information, but they don't have to be.  When you're doing research and need the searchability functions, ebooks are perfect, but for some of us, they're just never going to be adequate to replace that intimacy with the book as its own signifier.  For people who don't care about that, fine, use ebooks.  I'll go buy up your used books when you get rid of them.

Gah, I'm sounding like Albert Borgmann.  The object can be just a device for carrying information, and electronic devices do that just as well as paper ones and maybe better.  But there's a loss there, too, of our relationship with the object, the human feeling of paper, the smells of books, the flipping of the pages (that does not give you trigger finger), the appearance of handwritten notes in the margins, the inscriptions from the person who gave it to you or who gave it to whomever sold it to the used bookstore, etc.  Maybe those things aren't important to you or to anyone else but me, I don't know.  But to me, books can tell a lot more stories from their histories than just the information the author consciously put there.  A notebook can, too, in the right context.  I love looking at my old notebooks from college with my sarcastic little notes about classmates and so forth.  The information--the lecture notes--is kind of boring now.  But there's just so much more in there. 

And, yeah, children's books...no, that's just not the same.  Yes, my son rips up his books sometimes and gets sticky syrup on them and so forth.  But I love watching him interact with them, and he loves it too.  The pictures!  The touch-and-feel books!  I don't see how an ebook would serve these purposes at all.

Also, while everything in contemporary society is supposedly towards more convenience, more accessibility, and more choice, life appears to be becoming more stressful, less convenient, more hectic, etc.  Why would the addition of one more "convenient" device be different? 

There is also the concern, that I see now someone else has brought up in comments, about our relationship to texts.  I used to work on texts that had been transcribed from a nonliterate culture for my grad school work, and it was interesting how writing things down made the texts different.  It made people quibble about little details that formerly could change from speaker to speaker, so that each storyteller could make his/her own mark on the text.  It made people quibble about accuracy and lose sight of the larger narrative thread.  I see this happen online already.  People read an article and pick up one tiny fact that is inaccurate and thus dismiss the writer and the article, losing sight of the larger picture of the article as a whole.  It's brought us greater attention to detail and less ability, as far as I can tell, to focus on the argument or history as a whole.  It is possible that the physical properties of the book and the human scale of it draw us into them and give them a human face, which is harder to summarily dismiss than the relatively inhuman presence of type on a screen.  I am not arguing against literacy and for a return to oral storytelling, mind.  I'm just wary of these changes to our interactions with the text and, via the text, with the author.  I similarly have concerns about the value of online, unedited texts.  Srsly, dood, have you seen the grammar and spelling, not to mention the narcissism and lack of logical coherence on a lot of blogs?  srsly.  Yes, yes, I do fear that ebooks are going to sound like the LOLcats.

Hmmm, I think my last paragraph there lacks clarity.  I'll work on it.  But, I'm supposed to be working, like, at a job.

There has been a running theme to my intense irritation and weariness with people lately.  It has come up obliquely in some of my posts (or rants, whatever) about feminism.  It again reared its head covertly in my disgust with that post about racism that I discussed earlier.  Now, it once again comes sneaking round the corner, only this time the proximal issue is religion and atheism. 

The silent beast that so fatigues me is this:  YOU (whoever you are) ARE NOT SUPERIOR TO ANYONE BASED ON THE COLOR OF YOUR SKIN, YOUR GENITALIA, THE COUNTRY YOU LIVE IN/WERE BORN IN, YOUR FAITH OR LACK THEREOF, YOUR SEXUAL ORIENTATION, OR THE LEVEL OF EDUCATION AND/OR WEALTH YOU HAVE OR HAVE NOT ATTAINED.  FULL MOTHERFUCKING STOP. 

Sorry to shout, but this really rankles.

I know a lot of you probably assume, and it's a fair assumption based on my constant ranting, that I think I am superior to a lot of other people.  But I don't.  I am better educated than most people.  I am far better read than the average person.  I am more intelligent than most people--indeed, if the various standardized tests and grades and all that are an indication, I am more intelligent than 99% of Americans.  I have other strengths, and I know them and use them. 

However, I will be the first to admit that I am lacking in other areas.  I am not forgiving.  I am not gentle or kind, and I lack empathy.  I am moody and temperamental.  I can be utterly asinine.  I know this.

The point is, of course, that this means that no matter how smart and well read I know myself to be, I also know that other people have strengths and goodness-es that I lack.  I admire people who are genuinely kind and forgiving.  I admire people with the spatial intelligence that I sorely lack.  I admire people who exhibit more control over their temper.  My husband is one such person, and I admire him greatly.  We are different, but we both see each other as equal.  EQUAL.

On the racism post I ranted about earlier, I was bothered deeply by the fact that she posited that the experience--both historical and contemporaneous--of "POCs" is more important than that of "whites" whom she indiscriminately lumps together.  This struck me as a simple reversal of the old paradigm, i.e., previously "whites" thought their stories mattered and those of POCs didn't, and that was a form of asserting their superiority.  It dehumanizes the other.  That a black woman would sanction such an assertion in reverse, i.e., sanction an attitude that one group deserves dehumanization, wearied me greatly. 

With feminism, it has long bothered me that there is a strain of vocal feminism that takes as its goal (mostly covertly--most of them would not say this outright, but then neither would the racist discussed above) the repositioning of women as superior with respect to men.  Interestingly, Doris Lessing just commented on this and was dissed by Broadsheet as being in line with the views of the rancid reactionary, Ann Coulter.  Doris Lessing as Ann Coulter...just...no. 

Anyway, there is evidence that this repositioning is happening in certain areas.  For one thing, men are being demonized as likely rapists and pederasts.  Police officers advise children to, if lost, find a woman to help them--not a man.  Nevermind that it is actually a tiny fraction of men who abuse children in any way.  Nevermind that child abuse (though not sexual abuse) happens as often at the hands of a woman as a man and that most children who are killed through abuse or neglect are killed by a woman.  No--kids, find a woman!  And fathers are reporting being subjected to questioning from the police for merely taking their daughters out for lunch.  Young boys are being punished for sexual harassment for touching girls in nearly any way--pinching and hugging are apparently sexual now among the kindergarten set, but only if the pincher or hugger is male.  Men who complain about this obviously want to return to a day when they had the legal right to beat and rape women.

Another strain of feminism asserts that working women (mothers or otherwise) are superior to women whose only work is taking care of their households and children.  But you've all heard me gripe about this enough, I think.

And then just yesterday, this came to my attention.  So, some "freethinkers" in Wisconsin gave a talk called "Religion Kills" and put up a billboard that had an anti-religious message.  That leads this Christian (oh, so Christian!) blogger to broadcast her ressentiment thusly: 

This freedom from religion group pompously struts around, asserting that christians all believe blindly and unscientifically, which is laughable, especially if you've ever debated or listened to a christian / athiest debate. They make a point to prey on human pride that drives us to reject conformity, they are full of charming sarcasm and wit and they are like the cool kid at the party - they exude confidence and intelligence, but inside they are just scared little boys (and girls) who desperately do not want anyone to find out that they can't look themselves in the eyes in the mirror.

This is the voice of a person who thinks she is superior to them because of her faith. (If you plow through the comments thread, you will later find her asserting that you cannot have any morality outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition, among other things).  True, there are atheists who feel superior to her because of her faith in Christ, but as with the racists and the feminists, NO GOOD comes of reversing the hierarchy. 

It's so classic, really.  Let's take a little refresher course in ressentiment. 

Ressentiment is a sense of resentment and hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one's frustration, an assignation of blame for one's frustration. The sense of weakness or inferiority and perhaps jealousy in the face of the "cause" generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one's frustration. The ego creates an enemy, to insulate itself from culpability.

I'd say asserting that atheists are by definition immoral (or possibly amoral--she isn't clear) and incapable of looking themselves in the mirror is a very classic case of ressentiment, and it masks a fear and also an inability to admit what the real fear is.  A person who knows herself to be strong has no need of ressentiment or this kind of deep hatred against a group.  It has always amazed me when Christians assert the profound strength and truth of their faith in one breath and then show great delectation in how nonbelievers will be punished in the Last Judgment in the next.  That is a revenge fantasy, and in some of the early American Christian sermons (Cotton Mather and that ilk), the excitement at imagining this revenge is palpable.  If your faith is strong and you honestly believe Christ is your savior, you ought have no special desire or need to hate others or delight in their damnation.

Anyway, the connecting thread here is a consuming need and desire not for equality but for a mere reversal of the traditional paradigm.  Being a person of color becomes superior to (in moral terms) being white.  Being female becomes superior to being male.  Being Christian becomes superior to being "freethinking."  (Actually this last one is exceptional because that already is the dominant paradigm in North American society...so...whence the ressentiment?) To me, that's just a different side of the same oppressive coin. 

In contrast to these positions that I find reprehensible, I am for equality.  Legally, there should be absolute equality, although this is often easier to postulate than to achieve (what does it mean for men and women to have equal reproductive rights, for example?).  In personal terms, I try to see each individual as an individual rather than thinking, "Oh, he's a (member of X group)."  I try to live by the ethical positions elaborated by Heidegger, Buber, Borgmann, and Charles Taylor with a healthy dose of Camus, Aristotle, and Nietzsche thrown in (incidentally, many of them didn't specifically write works of ethics--but I believe that ethical principles are derivable from the ontological frameworks, i.e., knowing our relationships with one another and the world implies an ethics.  Of course, I also believe ethics are implied by such diverse sources as the poetry of Rilke and contemplation of the night sky, so....I could be a little crazey).

But, you say, but!  You, GinBaby, are a known misanthropist!  Yes, this is true.  I dislike nearly all people and think that we probably are, in fact, a virus with shoes.  Mostly I dislike people because I find most of their little weaknesses and insecurities and petty competitiveness to be tiresome.  I don't mean weaknesses of the sort that, say, Gabriel Garcia Marquez characters have, which are charming, or the general sort in which we are not all equally good at all things.  By "weaknesses" here, I mean the incapacity or unwillingness to know oneself completely, to stand strong in the face of opposition, to question received wisdom and authority, to be free for rather than merely free from, to face uncomfortable truths.  These things--jealousy, ressentiment, envy, petty bickering, ego stroking--I just do not have the energy for--or rather I don't have the will to give energy to these things. 

We would be a better society--both nationally and globally--if we all were strong enough to give up our little prejudices and hatreds and insecurities because then we might stop feeling such a pressing need to treat other people like shit.

I apologize for the length of this post. But your brevity does not make you superior.  Wink. 

What modern book do you think will be read in high school by the next generation of kids? 
Submitted by Tom.

This QotD has been under my skin for a few days now, because I keep thinking two things:  1)  Who says the next generation of kids will still read books or be capable of careful, difficult reading?  2)  The more interesting question is really what modern books should they be reading? 

Am I too grumpy?  I think I'm too grumpy. 

I am not one of these apocalyptic types who thinks that books and reading are bound to disappear from our lives.  There will always be bookhounds and bibliophiles around, I suspect, at least well into the foreseeable future, just like some people still enjoy their vinyl records.  Hell, I still have my old Duran Duran and Camper van Beethoven records on vinyl, and I like their scratchy analog-ness. 

But I can't help but think that serious literacy is on the decline (at least in America--I can in no way speak about literacy in other countries, not even Canada).  I don't mean that fewer people are able to read or capable of the kinds of thought that have to go into serious reading, although I think that both of those things are true, as well. 

Reading serious books, though, of the sort that I think one ought to read in school to learn something from requires sustained and focused mental activity.  It takes a kind of concentration and analytical thinking that no television show, video game, or web page is ever going to require. 

Listen--I've heard and read the arguments that shows like The Sopranos and whatnot and some role-playing games require focus and thought to keep storylines and characters straight.  That is likely true, although I would counter that it's not really different from keeping storylines and characters involved in neighborhood gossip straight, because it's more a feat of memory than sustained, focused concentration.  Video games and television and the Internet may be making people better at certain types of intelligence (in my admittedly pessimistic view, though, they are primarily making people smarter in ways that really only pertain to those same media), but that doesn't mean that people are getting all-around smarter or--to get back to the QotD--better at reading.

I taught college-level composition at a university for a while, and I hated it.  College freshman these days (I obviously can't speak about previous generations) are barely literate.  Their vocabularies are very limited, and they are way too lazy to look words up that they do not know--and when presented with an article from, say, The New Yorker, the vocabulary words they have never apparently seen before add up to 25% or more of the total word count.  They have no idea how to figure out what the thesis of an essay is--they have no idea what a thesis is or what the purpose of an essay is.  They are flummoxed by the rigors of complex sentences and baffled by the notion of lexical precision.  They complain loudly and make bitter scenes when they are told that it is not the fault of the author that they don't know what Plato thought or what 'inchoate' means, that finding these things out--that knowing things--is the responsibility of the reader.  They have no way to judge, when doing research, if a source is trustworthy or not, as they possess no critical thinking skills at all (and this skill, of judging the worth of a source, is particularly necessary when using the Internet--any gibbon can publish his opinion on the Internet, but that doesn't mean it's a useful or fact-based opinion and thus able to support your thesis when you're writing a research paper).

This makes assigning reading and writing homework a dicey business.  If it's difficult or serious, they just won't do it, and you will have a class full of students who cannot discuss the assigned reading because they have not read it.  If it's very difficult, though, then they are highly likely to take up the entire hour of your next scheduled class to list reasons why it's "unfair" to expect them to do college-level reading.

No, I'm not bitter--not at all.  Why do you ask?  This is why I fled to ESL teaching.  Foreign students were refreshingly prepared for adulthood and the rigors and unfairness of college life.  My ESL students only complained once, and that was when I had given them a New Yorker article to read, and then they were probably justified--it was a truly difficult article--and they all calmed down after I explained to them that I had not expected them to understand it fully on their own, that we were going to spend extensive class time breaking it down and figuring it out together.  Beautiful people, you Japanese and Malaysians and Finns and Russians.  How I adored you all.

So, what of that experience would make me suspect that the next generation of high school students will even be capable of reading books more difficult than Harry Potter.  I'm not knocking Harry Potter, because heaven knows I love them, too, but they aren't exactly on the same level of difficulty as a Don DeLillo novel or Cormac McCarthy.

I think I will save my defense of literacy and difficult reading for another time--it's a fraught question and persistently dogged by objections from people who think that reading books is just another among hobbies, when it isn't exactly.  Literacy is at the very core of what we usually think of as "being human" in a sense that differentiates us from other animals.  Reading is not just a hobby, although it is that, too; it's both root and sustenance for a complete way of thinking and being.  You think I jest?  I do not. 

Anyway.  Some modern/contemporary books I think high-school students should read, at least the ones who remain capable of doing so?

I guess I also have to assume that their parents and teachers would let them read these, as Americans are really fond of banning books.  It isn't just the Christians, either--Huck Finn, one of the greatest American books ever written, has been banned from time to time because of its use of the word 'nigger' for example.  Americans are very suspicious of books.  I suppose part of it is our Puritanical history--is that also why Americans tend to interpret books so literally, with no imagination?  Probably.  The Puritans had fabulous imaginations for ways to punish the nonbelievers, but not so much in other things.

Oh, right, a list.  Sure, here are some modern books I think are important enough that they should be read by future generations of American students:

White Noise by Don DeLillo.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (not contemporary, perhaps, but modern--and not difficult, perhaps, but very serious).

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.

The Things they Carried by Tim O'Brien.

The Country Between Us by Carolyn Forche (warning:  this is poetry)

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko

The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh

Hmm, well, OK.  I don't know that those are going to be considered appropriate for high-school kids although none of them really deals with any themes or events that are necessarily more shocking, difficult, or adult than those of Hamlet--incest! suicide! murder! indecision! --and Hamlet is often considered appropriate for high schoolers.  It should also be noted that I'm purposely skewing the list to reflect issues that I think are important for contemporary American high schoolers to consider.  Thus, this is heavy American writers (and also regrettably heavy on war novels, but war does seem to be a continual fact of American life). 

Alright, then.  Happy reading, kids.

It occurred to me today, after reading some comments on other people's lists of deal breakers, that I had automatically taken the word "relationship" to mean long-term relationship--not necessarily marriage, but reasons I would break off a long-term love relationship.  That is an unnecessarily limited understanding of the term, though.  Obviously, a person has to pass through many gates before they reach the inner circle of GinBaby, and there are multitudinous deal-breakers all along the way.  I'm a hard, cold rock of a person, disinclined generally to like people.  Friends and loved ones who have persevered find that deep down inside I'm totally a giant pink marshmallow.  But, seriously, there are many perils along the way.

Here are some, but by no means all, of the deal-breakers that will immediately end our relationship, whatever stage it might happen to be in--from having just met to becoming friends or going on a first date:

• Quoting Forrest Gump.  There is no reason to do this--ever.
• Moral zealotry, dogmatism, fundamentalism, nationalism, being overly ideological, evangelical veganism.
• Racism, sexism, homophobia.  This includes comments like, "I'm not a racist, but I think the Indians/blacks/whatever should..." and "I'm not a homophobe--I love Will and Grace."
• If you're a man:  Wearing mock turtlenecks or capri pants.  There is simply no excuse for these things.
• Boasting of your own incompetence, as if incompetence were ever a good thing.  Girls:  You are not cuter because you cannot do math, and you are not more "feminist" just because you can't cook.  These are not things to be proud of.  Guys:  I have experienced this phenomenon less with men, as men seem to have more of a tendency to boast of what they can do, or sometimes what they merely think they can do.  But guys, your inability to cook is also not appealing.  Learn.
• An inability or unwillingness to appreciate the manifest beauty and richness of English vocabulary.  You don't have to use the fancy words all the time, but you should at least learn to appreciate the incredible precision and expressiveness we have available to us as English speakers.  This doesn't necessarily pertain to my non-English speaking friends.
• Touching me without warrant.  Once we are established in a relationship of some sort--good friends, family, dating, what have you--I will gradually relent in this case, and I will signal you in some way that I am now permitting touching.  In general, though, most people touch me long before I'm ready to be touched, and it FREAKS ME THE FUCK OUT.  I don't mean "touching" here in a necessarily sexual or dirty way--I don't want your hand on my arm or a hug or anything until we know each other fairly well.  I am fully aware that I have serious personal space issues that I perhaps should deal with at some point.  Until then, just don't touch me.  I will make some allowances if you are a Southerner, as I know you can't help it.  Anyone else:  I will take you down.
• Inability to write in cohesive paragraphs that are properly punctuated.  Paragraphs, sentences, and clauses are logical units.  If you cannot construct paragraphs of more than one or two sentences and there is no connection between your paragraphs, it is likely that the root problem is your inability to think coherently.  I'm fine with some fragments--heaven knows I do that, too--for stylistic reasons; however, if all your writing is in fragments and little broken pseudoparagraphs, I will have no truck with you.
• Reading self-help books for dummies.  I don't mean the ones about software or something else complicated that you might need a quick and easy reference for.  Oh, no.  I'm talking about things like Dating for Dummies and the previously scoffed at Meditation for Dummies.  Are you for real with that shit?  Because....no.  Look, if you are such a dummy that you need Dating for Dummies, you no longer belong in the reproductive pool.
• Illogic.  An inability and unwillingness to draw conclusions from evidence.  See also moral zealotry, etc.
• Baby hating.  Yeah, I know:  Babies can be loud and irritating in public.  On the other hand, so can adults.  Babies are too young to yet know better; adults are not.  Babies have few ways of communicating other than crying; adults have language.  Babies are asking for food or love or warmth or some other basic need; they are not polluting the airspace with details of their most recent sexual conquest/business deal/airplane meal, none of which do others need to hear about.  Babies make smelly poo-poo; yes, and so do you.  As for the breastfeeding--yeah, you fucking stop eating in public, and then we'll talk.  I'd rather see a baby placidly sucking away at her mama than watch you stuff your gaping maw with French fries--the baby needs the calories and nutrients, see?  You, on the other hand, likely do not. 
• Blaming the patriarchy.
• Insisting that there are no American movies worth watching. 
• Relying too heavily on television shows for your conversation content.  It's not exactly a problem with you, although I find that generally such people are nitwits.  The problem is really that, because I am an infrequent and erratic viewer of television myself, we will likely have difficulty conversing--similarly if the only thing you can discuss are video games.  I have even less of a relationship with video games, and I will be completely unable to follow you.  You may consider this a failing on my part if you wish, but it will kill the relationship.  Zack, Lokii, Kimura:  All of you can converse freely on other subjects, so you're all golden.
• Believing that you understand a foreign country because you went there for, like, two whole weeks.  If you're not American, then America is a foreign country to you, and so this goes for you, too.  Also, if you're foreign, you do not necessarily understand America just because you wear Levi's and watch Tom Cruise movies.  I will get just as tired of your lengthy treatises on American culture as I am now of hearing my grandma (love you, Grams!) tell me all about Chinese culture after she went on a 2-week tour with a bunch of other elderly Americans. 
• False humility.  Intellectual laziness.  Moral cowardice.
• Being religious will not inherently destroy a budding friendship.  However, it may be difficult as I am not religious at all and will not be converted.  I have tried being romantically involved with religious men (Buddhists, all) in the past, too, and it does not work.  There is a fundamental disconnect here.
• A frequent urge to talk to me on the telephone.  I do not care for talking on the telephone, in general.  Sgazzetti, this doesn't apply to you, as it's been far too long since we've seen each other.

Ah, well, you get the idea.  As I said, it's a bumpy road, full of potholes and pitfalls.  Yes, I'm judgmental.  Yes, I'm a misanthrope.  I'm also insensitive, or so I'm told.   I am completely unapologetic for these things. 

Things that will get you in like Flynn:

• Use of arcane vocabulary, particularly if it is in reference to unusual things, such as Scottish headgear or cocktails no one drinks anymore.
• Bibliophilia.
• Loving art, creating art.  Recognizing that fashion is art.  The Balenciaga shoes?  It is irrelevant if they are impractical for daily use and cost $3000.  They are art.  They are art for the feet.  They should be treated as such.  I know I am in awe of them.  Beautiful things should be everywhere--not just shoved off in museums.
• Not just reading, but actually enjoying poetry.  If you can recite Rexroth or Stevens from memory, so much the better.  Extra points for liking of somewhat less famous poets, like Brautigan or Carolyn Forche.  As noted above, beauty matters to me, and poetry is beautiful. 
• Irony.  A robust sense of the absurd.  Much laughter at anything and everything.  Laughter is good.  It is the staff of life.
• Witty banter, snappy comebacks, stylish flirting.  I love a good conversation, even if it is ultimately about nothing important.  I like verbal intercourse and rapidfire wordplay.  Bring it.
• An ability to sit comfortably in silence, even if (especially if!) there are other people present. 

Mmm, there are probably other things, but that's a start.  Not that it matters.  My friends are already my friends, anyway, lists be damned.

I don't usually write about celebrities, and, honestly, I don't really keep up with celebrity gossip and whatnot.  Nearly everything I know about celebrities comes from The Fug Girls, The Superficial (which is written in such a way that you never know if any of it is true), and the occasional piece on Salon.com.  Oh, and I read the headlines of all the tabloids and People and all that while I'm waiting in line at the grocery store.  So, I am by no means an expert on what I'm about to rant about.  Yet, still, I will rant.

Because, see, I've about had it up to here (slapping underside of chin forcefully and repeatedly) with bloggers who write condescendingly about Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and all these other little chickies.  The jokes you make about them are easy jokes to make; the material is all there, laid out for you like a cheese tray.  Making the jokes does not prove your wit or your great intelligence--all it proves is that you will take the easy bait and make the easy joke.  Calling Paris Hilton a slut or any sort of word like that requires no critical thinking skills at all. 

In other words, it's stupid, and you appear stupid when you scrape the bottom of that particular barrel.  You appear no smarter than Paris when you write these kinds of things.

And I will go you one further.  I do not like the music of Britney Spears--indeed, it is repugnant unto me and violates in the most gruesome way every musical ideal that I stand for.  I'm not sure what Paris Hilton even does to like or not like, and I have never seen a Lindsay Lohan movie (I know--miraculous, isn't it?).  In other words, I am not invested in the reputations of these girls. 

I do not, however, find it just and proper that you assault them so.  From what little I have read, all three of them have, like Drew Barrymore and others before them, been pushed, pushed and more pushed by parents eager for fame and money.  They have been sexualized by their parents from extremely young ages--Britney was playing the virgin/whore dynamic long before she could have possibly known what that was (I don't know if she really understands it now).  They have been told--at least implicitly and possibly also explicitly (as in the very creepy case of Jessica Simpson's dad and his explicit appreciation of her boobs)--that the road to money and fame and happiness is their bodies, hypersexualized and shoved in everyone's faces.  These girls have been told from the time they were very young that their job--nay, their very reason for existence--is to shake it, work it, tease, and so forth.  They were made into virgin-whores by their parents, the very people who were supposed to protect them and nurture them. 

Yeah, of course, at some point they might have rejected this.  Actually, Britney did for a while there, during her breakdown.  Getting ugly tattoos, shaving her head--maybe she was doing that to say "fuck you" to all the people who have told her for years and years that she is only as good as her looks, only worth what someone will pay to watch her soft-core videos.  And good for her, or anyway it might have been good for her, except I think maybe she had some serious postpartum depression going on, which isn't so good.  Anyway, now she is apparently going back to her old self, and more's the pity.  I thought maybe we were going to get an Ani DiFranco-ized Britney there for a while, which would have at least been interesting.

Sigh.  My point is that enough people have already told them that they're sluts, whores, vaginas, whatever.  It's enough.  Adding your version of it isn't going to help them or help our besotted and besmirched society.  Of course they represent a throwback notion of femininity (but does any man or woman that you would actually want to befriend/date/screw/whatever actually accept that notion of femininity?  seriously?  because none of the ones I know do).  Of course they play the dumb girl (or perhaps are dumb girls--who would even know? who can now separate the real from the act in the cases of such celebrities?).  Of course they have lurid, publicity attracting affairs.  They have been made this way by unscrupulous parents and a society--that includes you--that wants that love-hate relationship.  You, too, want a whipping post; you, too, want to feel so superior to someone, and especially someone who has so much money and fame.  If you didn't, you would just ignore them.  If you had no need to make yourself look better, then you wouldn't write about them at all.  If you had the self-confidence you claim to, you would have no need to rant and rave about these chippies.  They're not ruining our society.  The people who pay them any mind are.  They're not turning our nation of innocent little girls into harlots, at least not single-handedly.  They are just cogs in a big wheel o' raunch.  If you don't like that Ferris wheel, then fucking jump off of it, but don't blame the people sitting in the other cars--no, not even the hot chick at the top who is squealing in fake fear of being stranded up there.  Just pack your superiority complex into your purse and exit the ride now.

And now for a laugh:

When was the last time you interacted with any sort of wildlife?
Submitted by warpedreality.

I'm undoubtedly being an asshole, but I'm having some difficulty with this question.  What is meant, exactly, by "interact"?  I'm going to get all huffy for a minute here and say that if the wildlife in question is really wild, you shouldn't really interact with it at all, at least not in the way that I usually think of interaction.  I see all these fucking tourists from the cities trying to pet the bison in Yellowstone or feed the mountain goats in Glacier or try to get just a little closer, just a little closer to take the picture of the moose.  You shouldn't be doing that, you fucking urban hillbilly.  They're wild.  Not only could they kill you without straining a muscle--yes, even the mountain goat--they are meant to be wild.  They live, see, in the wild.  If you keep giving them your little bits of hot dog and Dorito, not only are you setting them up for the same ill health you enjoy, you're teaching them to hang around the humans and eat human food, which does them no good at all, since they continue living out there in the wild even when you and your fat cracker kids are no longer car-camping nearby.  Also, harassing animals by getting so close to them to take their picture or try to pet them is just that:  Harassment.  Leave them alone.  They want nothing to do with you.  Do you see how they're trying to, oh, eat their lunch there?  Would you want a bunch of clumsy assholes trying to take your picture while you were eating lunch?  See how it runs away from you?  Yeah, that means it doesn't want to be near you.  Take a hint, fucker.

Ah, got that off my chest.  Damn people. 

Otherwise, I see/watch/photograph from afar wildlife on a pretty regular basis, I guess.  I kind of live in the middle of nowhere and have most of my life, and I hike a lot and all that and have had the great good luck to gawk at and enjoy all manner of wild animal.  I don't think I've really got close to any since I lived in Alaska last summer, though, where there were moose living right in town, and they would just sort of pop out and scare you once in a while.  Moose are awesome.  Oh, and the bald eagles.  And the salmon flopping themselves up on to the beach.  There are few things more awesome than having a king salmon flop himself nearly right into your hungry little hands.

My parents have two llamas that are pretty ferocious; does that count?  I'm just kidding.  They're very cool animals, and we interact with them all the time.  My last interaction with them involved my toddler running after the one called Red Wolf, squealing happily, and chasing the poor llama into the ground.  Then we fed them.  They needed it after the terror.

And of course my two puppies (a 5-month-old and a 10-month-old, both half-Lab mixes) are pretty fucking feral.  My last interaction with them was just this morning and involved catching them at destroying the greenhouse and scattering impatiens seedlings far and wide, and narrowly preventing myself from killing both of them.  Actually, I didn't want to kill them, but I don't think I have ever quite wanted to kick a dog so much as I did...and, yet, I did not kick them.  Fear not, judgmental intarweb inhabitants.