Smart Phones and Dumb People

Ok, kids, change of pace.

 

A friend of mine posted this story about smart technology on Facebook a couple weeks ago. 

 

It's interesting reading, and I think the author makes a good distinction between technologies that enable you to overcome problems/be informed vs. those that try to force you to behave a certain way or share all your information with others. One size fits all, doesn't. Anything that tries to conform people to the same mold and limit individual liberty--including the liberty to make mistakes and do stupid things--worries me. We don't really have a paradigm for dealing with these types of problems yet and deciding how far is too far. 

 

However, from the headline of the piece ("Are Smart Gadgets Making Us Dumb?"), I thought the article was going to be about something somewhat different, as did my friend, so we ended up discussing what we thought the article was about rather than what it actually discussed.

My friend said, "I think there are 'smart' things that are making us dumb, or less able to think on our own, but the article doesn't cover that much. Math teachers having been arguing for years that calculators are encouraging students to never learn basic math."

 

Yes, yes they have. But that leads me to one of my pet rants. I thought I would post it here and see what you guys think. ^_^

 

Smart gadgets are not necessarily making us less smart so much as changing our intelligence. 

 

The same thing happened when we switched from being an oral culture to a literate one. Smart stopped meaning memorizing lots of things and started meaning knowing how to read well. We no longer memorize and recite The Odyssey, we read it in a book.

 

Now being smart means knowing how to use machines to help you get answers that were once found in books, and which before that had to be memorized.

So it's not necessarily less smart, but differently smart. In all cases it matters not so much what you know or know how to do, it's what you do with that knowledge. 

Lots of people can remember things in an oral culture, but only a few create that which is worth remembering. Lots of people read in a literate culture, but only a a few write what's worth reading or read what others have written about discoveries and use it to make new discoveries. Lots of people use calculators and smart phones and computers, but only some use them to expand mathematics or create art or cure diseases.

So, yes, relying on a calculator makes you less able to do basic math in your head, but that only matters if you think doing math in your head is of some intrinsic importance and that being able to do it makes you smart. Because a calculator also makes it possible for you to perform longer and more complicated equations. Remember in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, one of the characters in the nineteenth-century timeline discovered some important mathematical concept, but it couldn't be proved until computers were invented. The character filled page after page with hand calculations, but an entire lifetime was not long enough to make all the calculations necessary, calculations that a computer could do in a few minutes.

Many great mathematicians and scientists are terrible at doing basic math in their heads, but that doesn't make them stupid. In a way it's intelligent to not allocate brain space to remembering basics if it means you then have brain space available for advanced thought.

Machines are, or historically have been, tools. You still have to know how to use them. The problem is, we're starting to enter territory where we no longer have to know even that, because the tools tell you how to use them and what to do. 

This loops back to the actual topic of the article and the importance of being allowed space to make mistakes. It's one thing to ask a calculator to calculate twenty divided by five for you and learn it's four, and another for the calculator to tell you that the number you want is four because that's the number all your friends wanted you to know.

I don't necessarily disagree that technology often atrophies brain functions that I, at least, consider important. But I don't think the changes it makes to our brains are always and only a bad thing any more than they are always and only a good thing.

 

After all, you can use smart phones to say "omg c u l8r" and watch Jersey Shore, and you can use them to read The Wall Street Journal and discuss the impact of technological changes on human intelligence (I tapped out the entirety of my side of this conversation on my smart phone while nursing T-Rex). The phone you use doesn't make you more or less smart. It's a tool you can use to exercise your brain as well as one that can let your brain be lazy.

My friend then pointed out, "I just see kids learning ways to 'cheat' and not understand what division is by relying on their calculator so much, instead of just using it as a tool to not have memorized all the division tables.

"Most common example is the need for parenthesis in using the calculator where they were 'understood' when written on paper. For the students who never understood exactly what was written, they were using their machine incorrectly for the problem and getting the wrong answer. It frustrated me to explain it over and over when they just wanted a quick fix 'so just tell me when I need them, ok mrs friend's name?'"

I agree that you still need to learn those basics in your head when you're young. That's part of understanding how to use the machines for other purposes once you're older. So I'm actually in favor of forbidding calculators until maybe high school or late middle school math classes (my younger self would NOT have agreed; I'm terrible at math! Also, it's only now that I'm older that I understand why my dad (who's a physicist) would check my math homework with a calculator but wouldn't let me use one to do it in the first place).

Then, there's also the fact that a lot of technologies change and affect our brains in ways we don't yet understand. Staring at screens has been shown to make itharder for you to sleep because the artificial lights stimulate the brain, and I do think the screens have given us rather shorter attention spans, which is a problem. So I mean. I'm pretty ambivalent about a lot of it, personally. But I suppose change always comes with costs as well as benefits, and we need to learn how to manage those costs, not stop the changes.

I'm definitely addicted to my smartphone, and am making a conscious effort to distance myself from it a bit. I can tell it's shortening my attention span, and I'm trying to negate that effect by making sure to read non-fiction in book form. But I don't think I would argue it's making me or anyone else less smart. 

What do you think? Are smart gadgets making us dumber, smarter, neither, both? 

What do you think about the actual topic of the article?

More importantly, what are you supposed to do with kids in this gadget-saturated world?

I am having a Dragon baby.

One of my coworkers is Chinese. As in, came-from-a-Beijing-suburb-to-Tulsa-for-grad-school, is-applying-for-her-permanent-visa-while-working-with-us Chinese.

Before her, we had a different Chinese student working for us. I've learned a lot of interesting things from them, such as:

1. You don't have outgoing mailboxes at home in China. If you want to mail something, you have to take it to the post office. The old worker wanted to know what the flags on mailboxes were for and was fascinated that you could just drop something in there and the postman would take it away for you.
2. If you are an only child, and your husband is an only child, then you can apply to the government for permission to have two children. But you have to submit all kinds of paperwork to prove that each of you has no siblings and it's a long, complicated process.
3. KFC is more popular than McDonald's in China because they have more successfully adapted their menu to Chinese tastes.
4. Pizza Hut is a fancy restaurant in China--the sort of place you would take a girl for a nice date.

Completely unrelated picture. Though it makes me think I
should ask about nurseries and Chinese baby sleeping
arrangements.

I've really been enjoying our conversations about pregnancy, babies, and child-rearing. We both like seeing how our cultures do things differently.

Yesterday we talked about the foods you should eat during pregnancy. My coworker says that her mom ate lots of apples while she was pregnant, and that's why my friend has such white skin. I don't know about white skin, but eating lots of apples sounds like a good idea--fiber, you know. ;-)

She also said it was interesting because in China, you're supposed to eat lots of fish while pregnant because it's good for baby brains, but here, they tell you to avoid fish because of mercury and other contaminants. I bet fish really is a good food for pregnancy, and it's unfortunate we have to worry about the contaminants now.

Both the Chinese and Americans say you should eat nuts to develop baby brains, but in China it's pecans and America it's walnuts.

Beyond food, she told me that she and her husband would really like to have a dog because they both love dogs, but they're not allowed to because you can't have a dog and a baby in the house at the same time, and of course their parents would like them to have babies (the plural is one reason she wants to stay in the States) sometime in the near future. In China you only get a dog after the child is seven or eight. She's jealous that we have not one but two dogs and wanted to know what our mothers thought about that. When I told her that our parents all had dogs when we were babies, so they certainly don't care, and in fact a lot of people think it's good to have dogs because they help watch and protect the babies (obviously, lots of Westerners take the Chinese line on this topic, but think Nana in Peter Pan), she thought that was pretty much the coolest. I sense a rebellion fomenting. ^_^

And here is an interesting cultural take on the breastfeeding vs. formula debate: Here, of course, it's quite the debate, but even formula companies pretend to be breastfeeding advocates, because there's an assumption that "breast is best." Certainly the online community I frequent loudly advocates breastfeeding. Well. My friend has some friends in China with a baby, and for the past several months, my friend has been going to Target, buying American baby formula, boxing it up, and shipping it to China. Her friends want to give their baby the absolute best, and the absolute best, to them, is American baby formula. It's thought to be much superior to formula sold in China, and her friends are willing to pay American prices PLUS shipping to feed it to their baby. I haven't yet asked her what the Chinese think about breastfeeding; I'm hoping it will come up in the next few months.

She did point out that of course, if you're only having one baby, you are willing to spend a lot to make sure it has the best. You don't have to worry about spreading your money out over two or three or four kids.

My friend is also super excited that T-Rex will be a Dragon baby (which I will admit I think is cool too ^_^). Apparently Chinese couples plan to, as much as possible, have a baby in a lucky year like Dragon or Pig. She was reading on a Chinese website that the big hospital in Beijing has already had more births this year than in all of last year, and since they usually see more births in the last half of the year anyway, they expect this year's birthrate to be more than twice the normal. Her...aunt, maybe?...is a Kindergarten-equivalent teacher, and she told my friend that this year, instead of about twenty children entering Kindergarten at their school, there are forty-four--because all those lucky Pig babies born in 2008 are starting school this year. Correspondingly, many fewer kids are born in less lucky years, like Sheep.

Sometimes I get so wrapped up in the one perspective (or two violently dueling perspectives) I get on all this baby stuff, that I forget just how myopic this view is. I vaguely remember noting differences between the German and American approaches to children when I lived there, but it was all very distant and theoretical at the time. Now I'm learning about things the Chinese do (or at least things that the upper middle class, suburban Chinese do) right when I'm making those same decisions for T-Rex.

I love hearing about the things my friend takes for granted, because it helps me see the things that I take for granted, too. And even if I'm not going to be giving up my dogs or importing formula, it's good to know that others do those things--and why.

What things cause you to question your own assumptions about different topics?

Do you have any other fun cross-cultural baby trivia for me?

I am opening a can of worms.

The internets have gotten me thinking.

So if you're having a lazy layabout weekend, I thought I'd get you thinking, too.

First, read this. It discusses a study by a couple of psychologists researching a psychological phenomenon they term the "stereotype threat."

It's an NPR fluff piece with an angle, not the actual scientific study itself. NPR's angle is that this stereotype threat is one of (perhaps the major) factor behind the dearth of women in mathematics/science careers.

I know several women in precisely those fields (including one working in the National Security Administration's cybercrimes division), but they're roughly my age, so I can't exactly speak to whether or not they'll stick it out in those careers. That's one of the article's points--women start out in those fields, doing well, with lots of academic credentials, but end up quitting sooner and advancing less than their male colleagues.

Keep in mind, too, that one of those women specifically credits attending an all-girl high school for her own success in mathematics, reinforcing the stereotype threat theory.

So in other words, for stereotypes to stop being true, we need to stop talking about them all the time. If you never know there's a stereotype that girls are bad at math, you'll never unconsciously self-fulfill that prophecy. Maybe?

Something to think about, since current feminist methods promote pointing out every little disparity all the time until you can't even enjoy a movie without worrying if it passes the Bechdel test or read a book without worrying about its conflicting feminist messages.

Yet complaining about these stereotypes may in some way perpetuate them, exactly the opposite of what we're trying to accomplish (not that I think we should sit down and shut up like good little housewives, either; it's just that the situation is a lot more complex and multi-faceted--and harder to fix--than we'd like to think).

Got all that?

Ok then. Now read this thoughtful post by Anne at Modern Mrs. Darcy.

What do you think?

I think that the stereotype threat is the most compelling theory I've heard for discrepancies of that kind. But. It's certainly not the whole story (it never is, is it?).

Women (and men) of a certain generation worked very hard to ensure that the women of our generation had the opportunity to work in scientific fields (and business ones, and political ones, etc. etc.).

And it must be excruciatingly frustrating to see women of my generation (and the one between, to which Anne belongs) not fulfilling their dreams of total parity (in terms of numbers, prestige, pay, usw.) in the workplace.

So they look for an outside explanation. If laboratories and Senate floors are not fifty/fifty men/women, there must be some outside force preventing women from holding those positions. After all, in their day, an outside force was to blame. That's what the women of that generation know how to fight--entrenched societal norms and stereotypes. Nothing but those sorts of outside forces could keep them from fulfilling their own dreams, and they assume that younger women have the same dreams and thus the same impediments to those dreams.

That's not necessarily the case. I'm not saying a certain amount of stereotyping and pressure don't exist. Like I said, I think it's likely that the stereotype threat, as a psychological phenomenon, is real.

But. I also think that women of my and Anne's generation have different dreams, on the whole (see, there I am stereotyping, of course), than did the women of the previous generation. It's not that outside forces are keeping us from jobs as scientists or politicians or whatever. It's that we don't necessarily dream of being scientists and politicians, or we dream of being them differently than did our predecessors.

Because, as I pointed out in my comment to Anne's post, this is not just a women's issue. It's a generational one. The men of our generations don't really want to be scientists and politicians in the old mold, either. Both men and women want more flexibility, more freedom. They're more concerned with happiness and personal fulfillment than getting ahead. They want to be successful in their careers, but on their own terms, in ways that mean that their successful careers don't define them.

The DDH doesn't just want to be an awesome lawyer, or to claw his way to a partnership at a prestigious firm. He wants to be a good husband and a good father and a man who pursues other interests, from video games to church leadership. And he's willing to work at a less prestigious (and, sadly for me, a less financially renumerative) lawyering job in order to have the time to be those other things.

Which is what Anne is doing.

Which is what my friend at the NSA plans to do, to stay home with her children once she and her husband have them, at least for a time, and pursue other interests (and her husband also works for the NSA, so it's going to look, on paper, exactly as if a man and a woman, same age, began working at the same workplace in roughly positions, and the woman "couldn't stick it out" and quit while the man keeps going).

Which is what I want to do.

Which is what thousands of other women and men in their twenties and thirties are doing because it's what they want to do.

It's not what every woman wants, of our generations or any other, and it's very important that women have the opportunity to be just as successful as men in any career they choose.

But when we choose not to stick with a career or to take a slower route to the top, it's not necessarily because of the insidious pressure of entrenched societal stereotypes. It's not a problem that can be rectified with more shows like Bones or movies like Brave, though I think we could use more of those, too.

Because it's not necessarily a problem at all.

So what do you think? Am I crazy?

What is your experience with and relationship to these issues?

I am reading: Spirit-Led Parenting

Spirit-Led Parenting: From Fear to Freedom in Baby's First Year
By Megan Tietz and Laura Oyer

I don't really know anything about child rearing.

I'm only four-and-a-half years older than my youngest sibling, not exactly old enough to remember much about her infancy.

My mom tells us stories about when we were younger, but these mostly revolve around funny things we did (like how a couple weeks after Sister was born, Misha and I went to Mom and told her that she should probably take Sister back to the hospital, because her real mommy would be missing her and she obviously didn't belong with us) rather than the day-to-day details of How To Rear A Child.

I don't have any close friends or cousins with children.

As of yet, no one has bothered to foist his or her sage advice on me, in spoken or book form. (Or if they did, I wasn't paying attention. I once tried to explain to my mother that it wasn't that I didn't listen to her, it's that I evaluated what she had to say and came to my own conclusions, and proceeded to act on those conclusions rather than her instructions. This doesn't go over well when you conclude you don't need to do your chores, but it's a great skill to have once you're out in real life making your own decisions.)

So I am not quite the target audience for this book. The real target audience is the mother who has been inundated with advice about The Way To Rear a Child, advice that doesn't resonate with what her own instincts tell her. Specifically, the mother who is surrounded by baby-training, anti-spoiling advice (such as advocated by Gary Ezzo in his book Becoming Babywise) but who feels led to practice more Attachment Parenting-style practices.

For that mother, yes. You will find comfort and reassurances in the pages of this book, in the stories of Megan and Laura and many others who have fought the guilt imposed by others and found peace with particular parenting practices.

But if your instincts don't really point you in that direction, or you're in a community that primarily practices Attachment Parenting, or one that really doesn't care what you do (or at least you don't care whether or not they care)...you may find it all a bit much.

The core message of the book--that parents should follow their instincts, common sense, and the leading of the Holy Spirit in this joyful-but-difficult time of life--is one that absolutely every mother and father needs to hear (skip the Holy Spirit bit if you're not Christian, obviously, but the instinct-and-common-sense thing holds true).

Just some of us could use some counter-examples as to how this looks, exactly, in non-AP homes.

That would be my one criticism of the book except, as I said, it is targeted at readers who need exactly this, who are already overwhelmed and guilt-ridden by far too many examples of the successful use of other parenting rule sets. So I'm not sure it's a weakness so much as--I'm just not a member of that target audience. INTJs don't have a lot of time to waste on guilt.

Still, Megan and Laura have much to say to any new or soon-to-be parent (and even old parents could stand to be reminded of some of these lessons), and I do highly recommend anyone in that broader category read this book.

Here is some of my favorite advice from Spirit-Led Parenting:

Parenting as Servanthood.

When the intangible God chose to make Himself tangible to the world, He chose the form of a servant. Think on that for a moment. He could have come in any incarnation that pleased the Father, and the incarnation that He knew would prove to be most powerful, most influential, and most extraordinary was that of servant. Surely, that must speak volumes to us as believers as to how we are to approach each relationship with each person (no matter how small) the Lord places in our lives. (p. 47).

This does not mean that parents should become slaves to l'enfant terrible, catering to their young child's every wish and whim.

Instead, it means accepting that, especially in the infant season, the child's needs come before the parent's wants (and to a certain degree, things we think are needs, like sleep). It means the parent should approach the child, not from the vantage point of a ruler determined to make her subject submit to her expectations, but as a servant, seeking how best to meet the baby's needs and thus the needs of the family, even if that way doesn't exactly look like we expected it to look.

For some, that will mean surrendering a full night's sleep for longer than we hoped; for others, it will mean helping a child to learn how to sleep longer sooner because to not do so is too detrimental to the family as a whole. It might mean breastfeeding or bottle-feeding or co-sleeping or crib-sleeping. It means being open to the way God has designed your child (and you!) to function, and serving him or her joyfully, or as joyfully as you can at three a.m.

The Idolatry of Success

If baby is thriving and mom and dad are happy, isn't that an ideal situation? Well, yes. Most of the time. As we've said before, scheduling works wonderfully for some families from early on and most little ones eventually fall into some sort of routine as they grow. This is where it is important to watch that the success of the schedule does not become another sort of idol. (p. 200).

My dad was in the Navy when we were young and would be out to sea for months at a time. Because Mom was not only sort of doing the single parent thing, but also tended to find herself in new cities with no friend or family support system in place, she developed a very strict structure for our lives.

When Dad came home from a tour, he wreaked havoc on our schedule. Having not seen his babies in months (and months is a long time for kids under five), he of course wanted to soak up all the time with us he could get. There would be a whirlwind of events to attend and people to visit and lots of staying up past bedtime just because.

Which meant that there were lots of super-cranky, out-of-sorts babies and one highly irritated Mama. Because while, once the two weeks' leave was up, Dad could go back to his regimented on-board existence, Mom was left to clean up the mess of suddenly disagreeable and off-kilter kiddos. What should have been a time of joy and togetherness often become a time of stress and disagreement.

Mom set a strict schedule for good reasons. It was what our family needed to get through its days in that season of life. Dad broke the schedule for equally good reasons. Obviously, the story has a happy ending: my parents are still happily married, and none of us kids turned out to be crazed social deviants. But it's important to remember that, when things are going well and the schedules and techniques we use are working, we must still remember to be flexible, to be open-minded, and to accept the upsets to our routines as a healthy part of life.

Relinquishing Control and Relying on God

This passage, written by Laura, could easily have been written by me:

Here is something else I know: if scheduling Maya's days had "worked better" for us, I would have missed out on an area of spiritual growth for which I am now profoundly thankful. My need for control is an aspect of life in which I fiercely resist dying to self. An organzied, steady schedule to sail tidily through the early months of parenthood would have become a grievous idol for me, allowing me to take credit for the "success" of my orderly days, stand in judgment of those who parented differently, and find seeking God's plan for our family to be almost unnecessary. 

Let me give you an example of the specific kind of control-freaks the DDH and I are. Thursday, his mom called and asked if we'd like to meet her and her husband at a free outdoor concert that evening. I thought it sounded like fun, and the DDH agreed, so we said yes, gathered up a blanket, and headed out.

As we were preparing to leave, though, I noticed the DDH seemed particularly grumpy. "What's wrong?" I asked. "Do you not want to go to the concert? We don't have to go."

"No," he said. "I want to go. I just hate having my plans changed at the last moment."

Yes. It was something he wanted to do, but because it came up at the last minute, he was discombobulated and grumpy about doing it. I am the exact same way sometimes.

I have very carefully avoided giving myself any rules for parenting. I'm not going into it with much of a plan or an expectation. Because I know when my plans get messed up, I get grumpy. And if there is one thing babies are good at, it's messing up plans. My INTJ Mastermind personality says that I must be in control, but I know that a) that's impossible in this situation and b) I need to learn to rely on God and listen to His plans rather than clinging to my own.

***

I have no idea where this parenting journey is going to take me once T-Rex gets here. Like I said, so far my only plan has been to have no plan at all. But I will likely re-read Spirit-Led Parenting in the months ahead, finding comfort and reassurance in the voices of so many parents who have been there, done that already, and to remind me where my focus should be: on the Spirit who brings us peace in the midst of life's messiest and most sleep-deprived seasons.

Be sure to check out Megan and Laura at their online homes, too, SortaCrunchy and In The Backyard--they are both wonderful and entertaining bloggesses as well as Real Book Authors.

I am looking back and forward (and have pictures of puppies).

I caught Jayne trying to dig a hole right next to the one we filled with the bag of cement sand yesterday. That said, they haven't successfully escaped in about a week now (knock on wood).

Also yesterday, Kaylee had another seizure. She'll go for months without one and I sort of forget she gets them, and then bam. Poor thing.

Also our neighbors got a new puppy.

So the dogs are keeping me busy.

***

There was a dog show in town over Memorial Day weekend, and this year's Tibetan Spaniel specialty was held here as well (a specialty is a show just for one breed of dog. For popular breeds, it can be a real prestige event; for less popular breeds like Tibbies, it's a great way to pick up majors toward a dog's championship).

Trail of Tibbies.

We primarily showed Rhodesian Ridgebacks in our dog-showing days, but my sister wanted a little fluffy dog and we ended up getting and showing a Tibbie. As with many things ostensibly purchased for my sister (such as the fish tank), I think Howard the Fluffrat* was really my mom's dog. He has since passed on, and she has replaced him with two girl fluffrats, Ruffles* and Apple*.

*Not their real names. I took an adolescent dislike to the small dogs, being a big-dog kind of gal and loyal to my Ridgies, and renamed Ch. Royal D's Kokopelli "Howard." Though they've grown on me, I insist on carrying on the tradition. Ruffles I think is really Ch. Royal D's Diamond in the Ruff and Apple is something something Queen Mab (different breeder, so not Royal D, and she's a pet so was never shown and is not "finished," so no Champion). There's a peculiar logic as to how I got Apple out of that (Ruffles is obvious and Howard just looked like a Howard), but I won't bother you with it here.

I think her name is Bailey.

ANYWAY, all this to say that Howard's breeder was in town for the specialty with Apple's littermate Bo and some bitch (above) that I'm sure is related to Howard or Ruffles in some way but I don't really know. Anyway, we stopped by to watch Sunday's Tibbie classes and say hi to Ruth and the Tiblets. The bitch is a pretty one (see above; adorable, right?) but didn't win anything that day; however she did pick up a major on Friday, which was the last one she needs for her Grand Champion title. She only needs one more point now to finish that and anyway this dog show talk is probably boring.

The point is: cute fluffies and a chat with a friend of the family.

***

This upcoming weekend we have a surprise sixtieth birthday party for a friend at church (when I was younger, I thought sixty was ancient. And it still sounds old, but it doesn't look old. I never guess that my friends who are sixtyish are that old, because in my mind sixty is still a doddering old lady) and my step-sister-in-law's wedding. Party party.

The story of my life at this moment is celebrations: birthdays, weddings, wins.

Or perhaps the better term is connections. The connections that bind me to the DDH's family and his step-father's family to his and my step-sister-in-law to her almost-husband's family. Ties that bind.

The connections we're finally forging at church, making friends as slowly as only a pair of shy introverts can.

The connections between my mom and her friend who is my old dog's breeder and between all the dogs and all the people that own and breed and love on the dogs.

The connections that are forming order out of chaos as I organize the craft room and clean and purge the rest of the house--connections made and connections severed.

The connections broken and reformed when the dogs leave and return. (And a seizure is a kind of leaving, as she becomes completely unaware of her surroundings during it, supposedly.)

Celebrating the connections. That's what I'm up to these days.

***

Some weekend reading for you:

Anne at Modern Mrs. Darcy recommended this post last week, and I'm still pondering it: Legos, Spaceships, Breasts by Kate Bachus. My thoughts might eventually be worthy of their own post, but in the meantime, I leave it for your consideration. Where are you on the boy/girl toy divide?

Speaking of marketing to children, Kathleen Quiring's post today on Children as Consumers and the Invention of the Toddler is interesting reading, as well.

And to go along with the marketing theme, the foodies among you might be interested in this book excerpt posted at The Atlantic, How Vegetable Oils Replaced Animal Fats in the American Diet, by Drew Ramsey and Tyler Graham.

***

What are your weekend plans? What connections are you celebrating right now?

Have you ever been to a dog show?

I am a reader: The Book That Changed My Life Carnival

Happy to be linking up to The Book That Changed My Life Carnival at Modern Mrs. Darcy.
Head over to Anne's site to read about more people's life-changing books!

I don't remember when I first read Watership Down.

I know I borrowed it from the library, that first time and many times after. So many books I remember only vaguely, by the stamp of some emotion they left on my soul long after title and author were erased by the endless succession of library books devoured and returned.

But Watership Down I remembered. Watership Down I checked out and read over and over, until finally, in high school, I used a birthday gift card to Borders to buy my very own copy.

For those of you not familiar with this classic, Watership Down follows a group of rabbits as they escape the destruction of their warren and travel across the English countryside to make a new home.

As with the best animal books, the rabbits talk and have some human characteristics but still retain their essential rabbitness. They are not merely miniature humans in fur suits but very definitely Other.

The story of Fiver, Bigwig, and their companions teaches many lessons about bravery, friendship, perseverance, brains-over-brawn, faithfulness...the usual suspects.

From it, however, I also learned a sad lesson--a necessary one, perhaps, but a truth parents wish their children never had to learn:

Nice people aren't always nice. Evil doesn't always wear a black hat.

(Spoilers beneath the bunny.)

Perhaps the greatest lasting impact of the book:
My succession of pet rabbits.

In a pivotal scene in the book, our rabbit heroes stumble upon a warren filled with fat, sleek, friendly rabbits. After weeks of wandering a hostile landscape, escaping death by predator and weather alike, and worrying about how they will start a new warren without any female rabbits, this place and its co-ed inhabitants seem like heaven to our hero rabbits.

They are given a warm welcome, and several of the group argue that the journey should end here, that they should assimilate into this warren and cease the search for a new home.

There's only one problem: it turns out the nice, friendly fat rabbits are trying to kill them.

There's more to it than that, but the point is this was, if not the first book, than the first book I remember reading that presented evil in such a nuanced light.

Most children's books follow the simple moral duality of old westerns. White hat/black hat, good witch/bad witch, Superman/Lex Luthor. The main story arc of Watership Down follows the same formula--later the rabbits steal female rabbits away from an evil, openly oppressive warren and an epic bunny battle ensues.

Life for a little kid is like that, too. Everyone you know is nice to you. If you have a teacher you think is mean, that teacher becomes the Mean Evil Teacher and you see no redeeming quality in her at all. Life is as black and white as the Wicked Witch of the West versus Glinda the Good Witch.

But slowly you come to see the gray in life. The Mean Teacher turns out to be the best one you've ever had. Your best friend betrays you. The worst criminals are the ones who can masquerade as normal and friendly. Normal people are capable of committing terrible acts in the name of "the greater good."

This last is what those fat sleek rabbits were really guilty of. They grew fat and sleek because a farmer spreads food for them in a nearby field--but in exchange, he periodically places snares there and kills them. The rabbits hope that our heroes, unaware of the danger, will not be cautious and will be snared and killed, sparing their own number for a little longer. They have traded freedom for convenience and try to kill fellow rabbits so that they can maintain their lifestyle.

The lessons are chilling and many. But as with the best books, I never consciously defined these lessons until re-reading the story many years later, with waaaay too many hours of critical reading classes under my belt.

It is, at its heart, a good Story. And that lesson, too, is important: that power of Story to captivate the heart as well as the mind, to cross the barriers of time, space, culture (and even species!) and speak to us all.

Perhaps it was in Watership Down that I first learned how seamlessly Story and Teaching could be woven together.

I am doing pregnancy wrong.

As soon as you see that positive result on a pregnancy test, everyone and their mother (and your own mother, and your husband's mother) wants to tell you what to do. They want to lay out The Rules.

Well, here are some of the ones I'm breaking:

• I'll be twelve weeks on Monday and so far I've lost five pounds. I'll admit some of this is probably due to muscle mass turning into fat. Most of it is due to the effects of a diet comprised mostly of Saltine crackers. I know eventually I'll be complaining about how much weight I'm gaining, but not yet!
• I still drink the communion wine. Apparently there are some women who flip their lids demanding grape juice instead. Ladies, it's a thimbleful of crappy wine once a week. Alternatively, the blood of Jesus can't hurt your baby.
• I still eat Sam's Club hot dogs that have been sitting in the warmer. Mostly because Sam's Club hot dogs are made by angels in heaven and sent winging earthward on potato bun wings and therefore could not possibly give me food poisoning.
• I participated in a comic medication back-and-forth with the doctor's office. "Stop taking that medicine!" "No that medicine's okay; stop this one." "Never mind, just keep doing what you were doing. Just don't do this." Sigh. Depending on who is actually correct, I possibly have caused or am continuing to cause irreparable harm to Critter.
• I didn't feel all that excited when we first saw Critter on its ultrasound. It was cool and all, but I'm just not that emotional a person. I wasn't too terribly stoked about my wedding, either.
• I don't have any cravings, at least so far. And I don't have aversions to specific foods, just to eating in general.
• I'm not freaking out about every twinge or rushing constantly to the doctor to demand extra tests and ultrasounds. I'm very que sera, sera about the whole thing. Apparently this is unusual.

The thing is, I always have and always will do everything wrong, according to someone.

For instance, my doctor told me to keep exercising but just make sure to keep my heartrate under 120. My mom told me I shouldn't raise my body temperature by working out too hard or taking hot baths. A friend said her doctor said all of that was old wives' tales and she could do whatever she wanted, which she proceeded to do, and her healthy son is now two.

When different authorities give you contradicting advice, you just can't please them all.

And it's just going to get worse once Critter is born. No matter what I do--crying, no crying, spanking, no spanking, infant baptism and feeding and diapering and sleepovers and extracurriculars--someone will tell me I'm doing it wrong.

You know what else? They'll be right. I will be doing it wrong--for them. What I choose to do during this pregnancy and in rearing Critter and its eventual theoretical siblings could be the completely wrong things for other people to do.

But barring gross negligence and inevitable learning experiences (aka mistakes), what I do is and will be the right thing for me. And the DDH and Critter and theoretical future siblings, etc., who get a certain amount of say in the situation.

Because one size fits all, doesn't.

Just live.

What are you doing wrong in your life that's actually completely right?

The men that God made mad.

"The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad.

For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad."
- G.K. Chesterton

I read Thomas Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilization last month as a pre-St. Patrick's Day holiday read.

I will confess I delighted in the book, which is blatantly biased, unrepentantly pedantic, and just generally exactly the sort of book you would expect to be written by a genial old professor thoroughly immersed in and excited by his studies.

Cahill begins by outlining and theorizing about the fall of the Roman Empire, examining the parallel lives of a now-obscure but then-famous Roman courtier-poet and the great figure of Augustine of Carthage. Cahill then traces out a coherent account of the life of St. Patrick (no mean feat considering the dearth of information on this barely-historical legend), whose proselytizing he credits, essentially, with saving all the texts of Greek and Roman civilization that survive today.

Through it all, we are treated to extensive quotations from various original sources, often in the original language--Cahill speaks (or at least writes) Latin, Greek, Old English, and who knows what else, and lets you know it. This sounds pretentious, but somehow isn't. Usually. Perhaps because he freely admits he knows no Gaelic.

I would not in any way approach this book as an unbiased historical account. This is not to say that I think Cahill is lying, but he takes scant source material (I mean, we're talking about the third to eighth centuries, roughly, here, and a people who for much of that time were illiterate) and extrapolates freely to reach his (not entirely unreasonable) conclusions.

I was not expecting it to be as biased as it was; Cahill managed to be academic without being...is reputable the word I want? At first, this bothered me a little. I hate to read nonfiction books that are compromised in ways I can't exactly define--that is, I don't know enough about this time period to have any idea what Cahill might have stretched or left out--though at least I could recognize that it was biased in this case. The book was apparently extremely controversial (in academic circles anyway) at the time it was released, and I hate to accidentally embroil myself in controversy. ;-)

As we approach St. Patrick's Day, however, I've been contemplating the book and Cahill's passionate advocacy for his Irish ancestors in the light of more contemporary Irish history.

How the Irish Saved Civilization was published in 1996. This was two years before the Belfast Good Friday Agreement of 1998--perhaps not the height of The Troubles, the Irish-Anglo, well, war that lasted from the late 1960s to (officially) the Good Friday Agreement in 1998--though violence continues even today on a smaller scale.

Let's get something straight. The Irish Republican Army (as well as its unionist counterpart, the Ulster Volunteer Force) were terrorists. There is nothing romantic or glamorous about blowing up hotels and London financial districts (this and the Manchester bombing both occurred in 1996, the year Cahill's book was published).

Have you ever listened to the lyrics of U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday?" "Broken bottles under children's feet/Bodies strewn across the dead-end street." They're singing about a real massacre that happened in 1972 in which thirteen people died. The Cranberries' song "Zombie" (you know the song, trust me, the lady wailing "Zo-om-BEH, zo-om-BEH") is a also protest song about The Troubles, specifically the 1993 Warrington bombing in which two children died.

Chesterton was right; the Irish sing many a sad song. 

We may forget, here in this country and on this holiday celebrating a cartoonish leprechaun-and-whiskey version of the Irish, that discrimination against the Irish, especially the Catholic Irish, has a long history both in England and America. Ireland has a long history of being a shithole plagued by disease, violence, oppression, famine, and poverty. From the Irish Potato Famine at the turn of the last century that sent my own grandparents across the Atlantic to the violence at turn of this century, back and back about as long as there's been people in England and people in Ireland.

One can hardly begrudge an Irish Catholic the writing of a book that so passionately defends the ancient Irish and the country's first Catholics.

Moreover, Cahill demands respect for these ancestors of his (and, by extension, their descendents). He describes them as great warriors and partiers, yes, but also as learned, civilized men and women who loved books as much as beer. Between the IRA, the UVF, and the benign but wild stereotype of the Irish characterized by our St. Patrick's Day celebrations (and less benign, think of movies such as Boondock Saints), the world doesn't exactly have much respect for this particular ethno-religious group.

Cahill assigns perhaps rather more importance to the achievements of the ancient Irish monks than they deserve, but they did achieve much. The Irish, as Cahill shows, are more than America's two-dimensional image of them and they are more than the depressing, desperate violence and poverty that has defined the country since the Middle Ages.

Enjoy your Guinness and Jameson today; I certainly plan to. Wear green and play Pandora's Irish Pub Rock station (which is awesome but, um, not censored). Celebrate the life of a dedicated saint and a country finally enjoying some measure of peace and prosperity for the first time since the triple-digit centuries. Remember that terrible things happen in places we don't expect--and that everyone has something to teach us.

Reality Bites at Reality Chef

I know it's an internet phenomenon, to complain about how un-real our internet personas are.

I hear people complaining about it--how they get depressed because everyone's life seems better than theirs when seen through glowing status updates. I myself am prone to shameful raging fits of envy when I see other people's beautifully decorated houses (and then those people complain about them, ugh!), their seamlessly organized and totally fulfilling lives.

Exhibit A: This used to be the view from my bedroom window.
When I lived in Freiburg, Germany.

It seems to be all the blogosphere rage to insist you and your blog will "keep it real," that you're "all real," but all the while we post a carefully edited presentation of our lives. Even our troubles can be giftwrapped and prettied up to seem artfully tragic.

I hate that.

I mean, I am the Number One Fan of the curated personality presentation. I don't mind people presenting me the Best Bits version of their lives--that's more or less what I'm presenting you. I like a juicy secret and I like to know that your lives really aren't perfect, but people go to the internet for the same reason they go to the movies or watch television or read books: for entertainment.*

And mundanity is anything but entertaining.

That's why no one loves the friend who tweets every day's tiniest event: Woke up, had coffee. Heading off to work, blah. Think I'll get Chipotle for lunch. Stuck in traffic and found some spinach in my teeth.

Yawn.

Somewhere, though, there's a balance. There's a balance between the kind of real that tells you what time I brush my teeth every day (right before bed. Yeah, just once a day, don't tell my dentist) and the kind of editing that makes you think I eat nothing but free-range meat and homegrown produce cooked in my four-star kitchen (I wish) to exacting standards for my Hollister-model husband and my 2.5 kids.

Somewhere in there is the version of life that's entertaining without making you (too terribly) jealous. A version of life that's relateable. A version of life--of self--that is a friend.

I've got a series in mind for this little blog, but I'm starting with Reality Chef, because I named the damn thing with this whole concept in mind yet lately have been only posting recipes and meals that make me look good like a skinny-bitch Paula Deen with a smitten kitchen chaser.

Every day from now until Easter (so basically for Lent), I'm going to post what I had for dinner. Sometimes, and in keeping with my New Year's goals hopefully at least three times a week, this will be a recipe that you might want to try. But maybe more often than I'd like, it's going to be leftovers or fast food or whatever reality meal Americans eat these days.

I won't be posting all of these here, because that could be totally boring. I'll just link to the recipe ones the way I've been doing. But if you're curious, keep an eye on the food blog for a taste of reality. Hopefully, it will encourage you and show you that real food lifestyles are doable, without overwhelming you with the impossibility of living them perfectly.

'Cause heaven knows that I'm not perfect, and Day 1's dinner proves it.

*Ok, so that's drastically oversimplified. REALLY mostly people go to the internet to Google stuff on Wikipedia. Also for porn. And to nurture human relationships or buy stuff on Amazon or whatever. But entertainment is certainly a primary purpose. No, I'm not linking to porn with that link, geez, but to the Avenue Q song.

11 Things at 11:11 on the 11th.

By the time I hit "Publish" it won't be, but I would like to point out that RIGHT NOW it is 11:11 a.m. on the 11th. ^____^ (By the time I hit "Publish," it's not even the 11th anymore...oh well.)

I think the entirety of my online existence in middle school (and, honestly, most of high school) consisted of chain survey emails passed around between my girlfriends and me.

At some point I realized that other people didn't enjoy them as much as I did...and my innate shyness means that I cannot do anything that might possibly irritate, offend, or cause someone to think less of me. So I stopped sending them.

But I love love love them. I am endlessly curious about other people's lives, and perhaps because I'm so shy and spend the entirety of my life crafting a persona I think others want to see in me, I spend a lot of time navel-gazing myself.

SO. Megan at SortaCrunchy tagged me in this little meme and I'm going to do it. SO THERE.

RULES

1. Post these rules.
2. You must post 11 random things about yourself.
3. Answer the questions set for you in the post of the person who tagged you.
4. Create 11 new questions for the people you tag to answer.
5. Go to the blogs of the people you've tagged and tell them that you’ve tagged them.
6. No stuff in the tagging section about you are tagged if you are reading this. You legitimately have to tag 11 people.

11 RANDOM THINGS

1. I own or have owned a variety of dogs, rabbits, fish, and rats, but I have always wanted and never owned a guinea pig.
2. I showed dogs for five years or so when I was younger (elementary and middle school).
3. Monkeys creep me out to the point of terrifying me. Ugh.
4. I have lived in five states and two countries. Technically, I'm a Yankee by birth, but I'm a Southwestern girl at heart.
5. I only shower about three times a week.
6. I am the oldest child of two oldest children.
7. I hate Jon Stewart. He's a pompous, unfunny jerkface and I have no idea why he's so popular. (I also don't get The Office. Obviously my sense of humor is broken.)
8. One of my husband's and my old college friends is currently living in one of our spare bedrooms.
9. I don't like olives, bell peppers, or pepperoni.
10. I eat hamburgers and other sandwiches in circles around the outside edge. The middle bite, where there's a bit of everything (meat, veggies, sauce) is the tastiest and I save it for last. 
11. I have an insatiable sweet tooth and the summer I spent nannying, I went through a 96 oz. bag of M&M's from Sam's Club every two weeks. By myself. I didn't gain any weight because I was spending ten hours a day literally running (and biking) around after two little boys, but amazingly once I stopped this habit, I lost thirty pounds.

QUESTIONS

 

1. Which season is your favorite and why? Fall. Harvest season! The weather is beautiful, there's an abundance of fresh produce, and I like coziness and pumpkin spice. I'm a fan of summer, too, though, and spring when it's finally warm after winter. Honestly, more than the season, I just love a clear sunny day, no matter the temperature. Rain and mud depress me.

2. What is the best deal you've ever gotten on anything? Hmm. When I was in middle school, my Destination Imagination team went thrifting for supplies for our skit. At one of the thrift stores, I found and for some reason fell in love with a stuffed armadillo. I don't remember what he cost; maybe a dollar? Little enough that my limited-income middle school self could snatch him up. Armee has accompanied me everywhere since: to dog shows, on road trips, to college, to Germany. He lives in the bottom drawer of my bedside table and even now if I'm feeling gloomy I pull him out and hug him and think of a sunshiny Albuquerque day and an adventure with friends and all the places we've been together.

3. What is your favorite dessert? Ice cream. Anything involving ice cream and/or chocolate.


4. When was the last time you went to the dentist? Just a few weeks ago, actually. No cavities!

5. Do you prefer older homes or new construction? Older homes (though updated plumbing and electricity would be nice). They just seem more solid, somehow. Built to last. And I love love love hardwood over carpet or tile any time. Our house has hardwood that some idiot covered in hideous Berber carpet, and it is one of our fondest dreams to rip it up and refinish the floors beneath. But bringing the electrical system up to code and replacing the disintegrating cardboard sewage pipes should probably come first....

6. What is your favorite social media platform and why? (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, etc) Facebook 'cause my mommy's on it. Ha. No, Facebook seems the most suited for actual personal interaction with family and friends that I don't see every day (or ever), as well as for just sharing those interesting tidbits I find on the web. Though I just started on Pinterest yesterday and it's proving useful so far.


7. Photography: do it yourself or go to a professional? I haven't had a professional portrait taken since my senior pictures for high school. I guess except my wedding pics, which aren't very good. I am a prolific but mediocre picture-taker and would really like some nice, artsy photos of me, the DDH, and perhaps the pets. But, you know, money.


8. What is the last thing you made? Yesterday I made two tortilla pies, beef stew, and some granola bars. Today I made guacamole. I make a lot of food. What was the last non-food thing I made, though? I'm not even sure.

9. Thrifting: love it or hate it? I want to love thrifting. That is, I want to have all these cute vintage clothes for very little money. But I have not found a good place to go in Tulsa and/or I'm just not very good at it. I have difficulty seeing the possibilities of a garment and I never seem to find any treasures (except Armee the Armadillo, of course).

10. Sunrise or sunset? Fiddler on the Roof. ^_^ Sunrise. There's something special about being up and outside at that time of day.


11. What is your guilty pleasure? Long, hot showers, since I am a water Grinch in the rest of my life (desert girl, you know). Also, trashy novels.

I'm not tagging anyone because the only people I know who read me are Megan (who tagged me), Anne (whom Megan tagged), and Sarah, who has an itty bitty baby and negative amounts of spare time. I guess technically I'm tagging you, Sarah, but you can just answer Megan's questions. And, contrary to the rules, anyone else is welcome to play, too.

Yay weekends and middle school flashbacks!

I am cooking up a storm: Bacon and Egg Tarts

The DDH revolted against my healthy dinner plan on Tuesday, and we ended up with these.

Bacon and Egg Tarts

I mention this briefly in the recipe post, but I'll note at a bit more length here: This is, for all its seeming unhealthiness and whatever sort of vibe you get from something consisting entirely of bread, eggs, and bacon, a very local meal.

I made the bread myself, with wheat from a local farm and butter from a local dairy. The eggs came from one of the DDH's coworkers. The milk and bacon came from a dairy and farm in the area.

Only the cheese (and the other ingredients in the bread: sugar, salt, yeast) came from a store. Something has to give in our food budget, and we eat far too much cheese at this point in our life (nachos being our standby I-don't-feel-like-cooking meal), and the local cheese selections are so limited, that we still get Sam's Club cheese.

Given that Oklahoma is such an agricultural state, sometimes I'm surprised at how limited our local food opitons can be. We don't have a year-round farmer's market, for instance.

But the options are there.

We have an every-other-week online order food pickup in the winter, from which we get all that dairy and the eggs (usually; this is the first time we've had coworker-eggs) and bacon.

We have a local butcher/rancher from whom we get most of our meat.

And during the growing season we have several different markets from which I get all of our produce that I don't grow myself.

A lot of this food is more expensive than conventional supermarket versions (in-season produce often being the exception), though not necessarily more expensive than all-natural or organic supermarket versions. We eat less meat than when I bought it all at Sam's Club, and as I said, we still get our main cheese there because it's so expensive otherwise.

And while I firmly believe in the principles of supporting local businesses and responsible farming and ranching practices, I totally understand not being able to afford those things. I've been there. Trust me.

But there's usually something you can do, if those values are important to you.

Growing your own produce is cheap and possible even for most apartment dwellers.

Maybe you pick one item that matters the most--eggs, or milk, or meat--and make an effort to buy that one item locally.

It makes a difference.

And when you're able to make an entire meal and think, not only did I make this for my family with my own two hands, but I have met, personally, all of the people involved in producing this food--well, that's a wonderful feeling.

I know this comes across as a self-righteous or look-how-awesome-I-am feeling, but that's not what I mean. It's just a feeling of belonging to a community, of being an active participant in a system rather than a passive one, of taking charge of what is an integral part of all our lives: food.

We all have to eat. Let's make what we eat good, in as many senses of the word as we can.