bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • The semiannual retrospective, part III: Keeping motivated in the face of okayness.

    MrsDarwin kindly obliged me with a question on my introductory post:

    I really appreciate your maintenance/reminder posts, since I’m kind of at the same stage you are (though with less exercise). I’m at a basically acceptable weight which I maintain without much trouble — I could stand to lose five pounds and tone up, but on the other hand, my clothes fit in a mostly flattering fashion. But I need the constant reminder not to be complacent. You should write about “keeping motivated in the face of okayness.” 

    This is really the crux of maintenance, and it can even be the crux of initial weight loss, too.  Remember the Akron U-Turn?  I think it’s common to use “hey, I’m doing pretty well!” as an excuse to undermine ourselves by going back to undesirable behaviors.

    Some good habits have persisted in the face of my okayness, and some have drifted away.   What’s the difference?  I think a lot of it has to do with having created “bright lines” around some behaviors:  some rule I’ve stated to myself, even gone public with here on the blog or in my family. Something that It’s not okay to eat a whole pizza.  A normal breakfast can contain one egg, but not two.  The right dessert size for me is about as big as two Oreos.  I don’t go through a drive-through to get a snack.    I go to the gym at least twice a week.   

    You have to strike the right balance when it comes to these:

    • they have to be something that you really want to adopt permanently, with few exceptions.
    • They have to be something where it doesn’t matter if you’re doing “okay” — for the rest of your life you want to live with these bright-line boundaries, no matter what your dress size.
    • And you have to know when to define your bright line around a “never” (in my case, “never eat a whole pizza”) and when to define it around a “normal” that can be excepted on special occasions (like the two-egg thing; if I’m starving, I’ll order a big fat omelette at a restaurant, but I think of it as a splurge, a deviation).

    The hard part is creating the bright line in the first place.  I may think I want to stop doing a certain behavior, but often I find that I don’t really want to.  I’ve tried to establish “I never nibble off the kids’ plates after lunch” and it hasn’t worked very well.  On the other hand I might well be able to establish “I make the kids scrape their own plates into the trash after lunch,” now that I think about it.   So maybe part of it is carefully choosing which behavior to enclose in those bright lines.

    Right now the “okayness” I struggle with is in the physical activity.  I’m in pretty good shape compared to the average woman my age; training at a higher level is not feasible right now because of my other responsibilities, so I have no reason to set a stringent goal; even Mark can’t run faster or longer than I can because he’s recovering from an injury, so I haven’t got the motivation to keep up with him.   I still go to the gym twice a week, and try for three times, but I haven’t been pushing myself very hard lately; I’ve told myself “I only have to run for twenty minutes and then I can quit,” and pretty often when I get to the end of the twenty minutes I do quit.  For a while there I was running at a peak speed of 7.2 mph at intervals, and these days I go “meh” and set the treadmill at 6.0 and try not to think about it till I’m done.  Well, I didn’t draw the bright line around a certain number of minutes or a certain speed; I drew it around showing up twice a week.  And I faithfully show up twice a week, but I don’t work very hard right now.

    Why the backsliding?  I think I feel a little bit overwhelmed with things right now — look how badly my blogging has fallen off — and so it’s harder to say “no” to the voice that says, “You’re sick of this treadmill and you could just get off and go take an extra-long, extra hot shower.”   My solution to this has been to run less and swim more, since I hate to run and love to swim.  It works.  At minimum, I want to keep running enough that I don’t hurt myself when I do run, and one run every week or two seems to do that.

    Anyway, I still have to take a good hard look at my habits and clean them up now and again, because where I didn’t draw a bright line they occasionally veer into “old bad habit” territory.  One way I’m doing that right now is by keeping a food diary and counting up the calories — it’s not a permanent habit, it’s a diagnostic tool to find the places where I can improve.  Mostly it reminds me of things I already learned:  I don’t need a snack between breakfast and lunch.  An afternoon snack with a little protein in it is generally a good idea, but it doesn’t have to be big.  Second servings at dinner is something I have to be careful about.  All these things I know, but it’s really easy — when things have been going well — to trick myself into thinking I’m in pretty good shape — I can afford to splurge often enough that the “splurge” creeps back into becoming an everyday thing.

    Anyway, I think the best defense against the “okayness” problem are bright lines — boundaries which are meant to stand no matter how “okay” you feel.  They can be somewhat porous and can have exceptions — but the point is that they define a lifelong norm.  I find that wherever I’ve managed to establish them, they have remained.

    —

    |

    2 comments on The semiannual retrospective, part III: Keeping motivated in the face of okayness.

  • The dark side.

    In the middle of the night my nearly-three-year-old nursling kicked and struggled off the blankets and then burbled, "Mommy milk."

    "Coming up," I murmured and started to roll over.

    At which he sat up and declared loudly, "Mommy?  You're my lifesaver."

    Or perhaps it was "light saber."

    And then he latched on and fell right to sleep.  As did I.

    I'm glad to still be co-sleeping with this little guy.  Two of my other three kids were already going to sleep in another bedroom by this age.  There are definitely pros and cons to getting them out and sleeping on their own — but having done it both ways, I like keeping them with me, especially when they talk in their sleep.

    —

    |

    3 comments on The dark side.

  • Semiannual retrospective, part II. The numbers.

    So I haven’t been doing that “weight control chart” for a long time now. I still weigh myself most mornings, and every few days I write it down because I want to keep a long-term record (and if nothing else, there’s a height and weight check-in on the NFP charts, so I will at least have one data point per month). I stopped doing that thing where I would start following more rules when I had so many data points (weight readings) that were in such-and-such a range, etc. It was worth a try, but it was really too involved to keep up with.

    I have been thinking more and more about the most useful attitude to have toward the numbers: the weight on the scale, the dress size, and even the calorie count (or WW points or carb grams—whatever countable food metric you might be considering).

    Coming into the start of my fifth year of weight control, I am even more strongly convinced of a particular way of thinking about these numbers. I have pointed out before that “the numbers” are not under your direct control. Behavior and habit development are under your direct control; the numbers aren’t. If weight/size control for health is your desire. the numbers are useful — not as goals or targets, because you cannot really aim at them — but as diagnostics to evaluate existing habits and behaviors.

    The sequence goes like this:

    • Check the numbers
    • Decide to develop a particular habit that seems it might be helpful
    • Set goal to “hit” the habit by repeatedly practicing the behavior until habit is established
    • Once habit is established, check the numbers again
    • If the numbers are good (or at least not worse) and the habit is pleasant or tolerable, keep the habit; if the numbers are worse or the habit is intolerable, choose a different habit.

    The important thing here is that if you’re going to freak out and feel like a failure, don’t do it because the numbers are bad. Focus all concern about failure, all motivation to succeed, on the behavior. Not on the numbers. The behavior is what you can control. The numbers are an indirect effect.

     

    One of the things I am even more sure about is that even the number of calories you consume counts as a metric, not a behavior. I know it seems wrong, because theoretically you ought to be able to directly control the number of calories you put in your mouth. But it is so foreign to human relationships with food to calculate calories before eating them, and it is such an intrusion into normal eating behavior to do it, and it is so difficult to keep up long-term (not to mention being pretty inaccurate) that I really think it needs to be considered a metric, something that is indirectly affected by the choices you make throughout the day.

     

    Even if you take the step of counting calories before you eat them, using a calorie counter to make a plan and then trying to stick to it all day, you still need to employ direct behavior strategies, and whether you consume the number of calories you planned or not is an indirect result of all the choices you made that day. One of them was the choice to count up the calories and put together the meal plan, of course. But there were many others: did you measure your food every time? did you take steps to avoid temptations? what did you do when you had to make an unexpected substitution? At the end of the day when you count up all the calories, the number you actually ate is a measure of whether your decisions were useful or not.

     

    In other words: don’t berate yourself for eating 1,972 calories instead of 1,300 calories. Measure it, write it down, work on the habits, and then some day in the future try measuring again and see if, with a similar effort, you manage to get closer to the 1,300.

     

    I find that periodically spending a week or so pre-planning my portions in order to hit a certain calorie range is a good way to remind myself of the portion sizes I actually need, so I do this from time to time. (I am doing it this week; the semi-annual gluttony retrospective is here for a reason, after all). But I try really hard to think of the behavior goal as “I will sit down every evening for a week and pre-plan my portions and foods to the best of my ability to predict them, and at each meal I will measure portions and make corrections to the plan to reflect reality.” I don’t think of it as “I will eat no more than 1700 calories each day.” Because ultimately, unless I moved into a locked laboratory, I can’t just make that happen. I don’t eat calories; I eat food, things like strawberries and cheddar cheese and turkey sandwiches and Twix and margaritas. The calories are an abstraction, and they are not worth getting upset about. I just use them, from time to time, to tell me if my habits are helpful or harmful.

    —

    |

    No comments on Semiannual retrospective, part II. The numbers.

  • Semiannual retrospective, part I.

    First of all, here is my maintenance cred.

    This is me in 2008, near the end of my weight loss…

    6a00d8341c50d953ef01156f82c6d9970c-320wi

    …and this is me a couple of weeks ago, wearing the same clothes and attempting to reproduce the pose (no belt, though):

    2012 weight photo

    I think I weighed about 109 pounds in the 2008 photo.  I probably weighed 114 in the 2012 photo.  Truth is, I like myself better at 114 than at 109.  The giddiness has been replaced by a quieter and more long-lasting satisfaction.

    + + +

    Let's talk first about whether maintenance is getting "easier" as time goes on.

    The challenges change, that's for sure.  My mental health has improved.  When I first changed my way of eating (WOE as they call it on the various boards — not my favorite acronym the Internet has produced), I had done little but exchange one kind of disordered eating and disordered movement for another:  I'd gone from slothful gluttony to hyper-control-freaky rigidity.

     I'm not saying I regret that, because the second set of disorders got me where I wanted to be.  But they took a while to fade.  

    The improvement is here:  When my weight is within limits, well under control, I can just… live.  No counting, no stressing.  Eat when I am hungry, etcetera.  I do normal things like occasionally nibble on the kids' leftovers, but I don't feel compelled to clean their plates for them.  I sometimes have seconds of something tasty, without guilt, but I don't eat six helpings.  I might eat that extra slice of pizza now and then.  Sometimes, when I'm busy, I skip going to the gym and I don't worry that it means I will never go again.

    Nowadays, I only get that panicky must-count-all-my-calories, guilt-over-the-sensation-of-fullness, must-get-to-the-gym-before-all-else, lie-awake-fretting-about-whether-I-can-still-control-myself-sufficiently feeling when my weight goes up to 115 or if I wear a pair of pants that feels tight as I go about my day.

    I am unsure as to whether I should consider its persistence a feature or a bug.

    Probably it causes me to do the right thing, i.e., moderate my eating and maintain my healthy weight, for the wrong reason, i.e. PANIC PANIC PANIC PLEASE DON'T LET ME HAVE TO BUY BIGGER PANTS AND PLEASE DON'T LET ME SEE "TIL that smartypants bearing is fat again" ON THE FRONT PAGE OF REDDIT OR EVEN /r/catholicism PLEASE.

    Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons has always been my specialty.  Never could quite figure out how to make the wrong reasons go away.

    + + +

    Despite how I really feel and behave, I know the attitude I aspire to have.  Even if I pruned away the vanity and the fear of shame that largely keeps me in line, these thoughts — if they remained — might be enough:

    • I want to keep my body strong and healthy as I grow older, in the context of unpredictable twists and turns of life and genetics, so that I can keep doing what needs to be done.  "Living out my state of life, the best I can under the circumstances," you might say.
    • I don't want to be a glutton.

    The longer I keep this up, the more obvious it becomes that my "wrong" reasons for working hard to stay at a low weight actually fight against these better desires.  The more I focus on the number on the scale and the fit of my clothes, the more tempted I am to slide back into bulimia — not conducive to the long-term health I say I value — and to a different sort of gluttony, the kind where I worry constantly about food, get all high-maintenance in restaurants, and snap at children because they ate my special yogurt that I was saving for my 3:30 p.m. snack.

    Because one thing I've learned through the past four years is that there are eating disorders that keep you fat and eating disorders that keep you thin, but they're still disorders.  There are gluttonies that keep you fat and gluttonies that keep you thin, but both are no good way to live.

    + + +

    So it's still hard to keep mentally and spiritually healthy with respect to food.  Still very hard.  I think I have the right target — I know what is right — and maybe it will go on being hard to hit that target, but at least I can see it and I can keep aiming for it every day.  I accept this cross.

    + + +

    I noticed that certain old bad habits are easy to slide back into, and other old bad habits I have still never touched.

    The ones that are easiest are the ones that are common to lots of people, especially the ones that aren't necessarily bad for other people who maintain their healthy weight without difficulty.

    I have the misfortune of being a small person.  I calculate my maintenance calorie target to be something like 1800 calories per day.  This is not a lot.  The average American caloric intake in 2003 was 2,757 calories, according to the USDA.  And I live with a man who needs roughly 2,800 calories per day to maintain his weight, according to the roughest calculator that takes gender, height, weight, and activity level into account (here, scroll down to Method #2).

    If I take my cues from people around me, I'm basically sunk.  And it's really easy to take cues from people around me.  The weight-gaining habits that I find easiest to slip into don't sound like bad behavior, they sound like normal-people behavior.  That's because they are normal-people behavior:

    • Filling up my plate
    • "Hey, can I have a few of your fries?"
    • Pouring a full glass of beer or wine with my dinner
    • Taking a second serving at lunch or dinner 
    • Sharing a bedtime snack with the family
    • Building meals on a foundation of whole grains
    • Letting the number of vegetable/fruit servings per day slip below six

    These are normal things for people to do and I cannot do them regularly without gaining weight.  Because I am a small person and I can only burn 1800 calories a day.  But because they are normal things for people to do, and because my kids and husband do all of them without trouble, it is really easy to slip into the habits.  Heck, it barely even counts as gluttony except that I know better.

    The kinds of things that I don't ever slip into, that I find easy to avoid now, are the things that I firmly think of as gluttonous for the average person.

    • I still don't eat meals between meals.  If I have a snack, I'm good about keeping it small.
    • I still don't go through drive-throughs to get a snack.  I keep almonds and granola bars in my car.  I stick to those, and most days I never touch them, but if I need them they are there.
    • When Mark goes out of town for four days, I still don't order an entire medium pizza and eat it sadly in front of the computer after the kids go to bed. 
    • I still don't eat two or three eggs for breakfast.  (Unless I have just come from the gym and am in a breakfast restaurant on a Saturday morning after 8 AM and they have eggs Benedict and they won't sell me a half order.  I have found that in this circumstance it is useless to resist; better just to compensate with a lighter lunch.)
    •  I still don't devour an entire box of cereal or sleeve of saltine crackers at one sitting. 
    • I still cut small servings of desserts, doughnuts, etcetera.   (Taking seconds is an easy habit to fall into.  Cutting big pieces is not a habit I have a problem with.)
    • I can't remember the last time I have gone on a binge through the pantry.  I may be cured of lonely binge eating.

    There's nobody around me who regularly does any of these things (except that Mark eats big snacks, but I can mostly deal with that one).  I think of a drive-through as a Bad Place To Get A Snack.  I have internalized the idea that eating a whole pizza by yourself is bad.  I believe that desserts are best enjoyed in small portions.   These are hard to slide into without noticing.

    I still eat shredded cheese out of the bag, though.  There's just a lot of shredded cheese around here.

    I'll write more later.

    [Editing note.  Years and years later, I wish I’d done a better job distinguishing gluttony from other problems with food, like clinical eating disorders and other kinds of compulsiveness.  

    I want to emphasize that, whereas I identified some behaviors in myself that probably qualified as self-centered gluttony in the technical sense, I am not and never have been qualified to make that distinction for anyone else.

    I hope to add some commentary to all the posts that have this problem as I find the time to review them.  Here’s a more recent post where I acknowledge some of the problematic material I wrote and set new ground rules for myself going forward.]

    In this post, I think you can see that I’m starting to recognize how some of the ways I’d been thinking weren’t all that mentally healthy.

    —

    |

    No comments on Semiannual retrospective, part I.

  • The semi-annual retrospective.

    Well, it's that time of year again.

    In May and November of every year —

    yeah, I'm a little late this holiday season, but at least I made it to the crucial "between Thanksgiving and Christmas" metric —

    I write a few posts about the maintenance of my 2008 weight loss.  

    I do this for a couple of reasons.

    First, it gives me the opportunity to clean up the links to old posts about gluttony, weight loss, and weight maintenance.  Taken all together, the posts about gluttony and weight loss and such form a lengthy and growing series, and it's one that gets a lot of hits.  I can see from the stats that often someone comes to read through the whole thing.  I like to keep it maintained if I can.  (Right now it's a little ragged.  I'll let you know when I get it all fixed up.)

    Second, it gives me a needed semi-annual accountability fix.  It always seems that right about every six months, I've started to slide a bit, and writing publicly about my lazy bad habits generally shames me into paying attention to them again long enough to do me some good.  This is a long-term project and it needs regular upkeep, even as the frequency of upkeep has dropped quite low.

    Third, time has refined and tested many of my theories and ideas about how to defeat gluttony and, secondarily, how to resist gaining the weight back; also, how to maintain mental health and raise children with healthy attitudes toward bodies, food, and fitness.  As I stumbled along, I got a lot of things wrong or at least not quite right, and as I get older and learn things, I like to go back and see what I used to think and write, and ask myself if I have learned anything new.  I want to find places where I was wrong, and point them out here in this space, maybe go back and update old posts.

    Readers:  

    • what would you like to see here in the next few posts?  
    • any stories from the trenches you'd like to share?
    • recommendations of articles or books?  (A few people have sent me some already that I've saved for this)
    • any questions?

    The combox is yours.

     EDITED TO ADD:   Really, only one comment or question?  Maybe I've finally exhausted the topic!

    —

    |

    6 comments on The semi-annual retrospective.

  • At the movies.

    We took the kids to see a matinee of Wreck-It Ralph yesterday.  
    Images

    (Fun movie — Mark and I liked it a lot — and the short animated film that precedes it, "Paperman," is beautifully animated: classic Disney.)

    The not-quite-three-year-old is not quite sure what he thinks about "big movies."  He sits on my lap, hides his face sometimes, studies the screen and doesn't smile or laugh, nurses a lot.

    This time he watched most of the movie.  He started out squeezed between Mark and me (the theater armrests flip up and out of the way — a benefit to bigger-these-days moviegoers, I guess, but I bet the teenagers appreciate it too).    Not too far into the film he climbed up on my lap and leaned back into me, watching the movie in the studious sort of way he does it, one little leg hanging down on either side.  I wrapped my arms around him and he took hold of the fingers of my hands in front and held them tightly.  I buried my nose in his hair from time to time in the darkness and inhaled the toddler fragrance:  fruit-scented shampoo, a faint whiff of Christmas chocolate.

    Movie theaters give me a strange feeling of nostalgia.  It might simply be because I haven't gone often since we had children, which wasn't long after we were married and so being in one takes me back pretty far.   I remember being little, scared by the Blueberry Girl scene inWilly Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (the one with Gene Wilder) and having to be taken, sobbing, from the theater.  I remember going to see Dirty Dancing with my best friend in seventh grade, one of the first times I was allowed to go to a movie without adults, and the two of us gushing about it being the best movie ever afterwards. My most intense memory is of being deeply frightened and thrilled by Terminator 2 in the summer of 1991 — in a dark theater, I can easily conjure up the sick feeling of watching that nuclear-bomb scene.  I remember going with Mark in 1997 to see the re-release of Episode IV of Star Wars in a brand new theater in Columbus with cushy captains' chairs — I think it was actually on its opening night — and being secretly charmed by the slightly younger geek behind me, who was positively bouncing in his chair with slavering excitement.  

    Images

    My favorite memory:  I had the great good fortune to view Dr. Strangelove:  or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb – for the first time — in a packed movie theater on the Ohio State campus, as part of a Kubrick retrospective.  Comedy is funnier in a theater, you know — and the evening I spent experiencing that gem of a satire in the company of a hundred other young adults, most of whom had never seen the movie before, was an experience I would not trade away for a hundred big-box matinees.

    Yesterday, after the trailers finished and the lights dimmed, the Disney intro started ("when you wish upon a star….") with its swooping vista of the castle and fireworks, and I was taken back again.  It reminded me, briefly, of my late mom, who was one of the world's great appreciators of all movies, and who probably would have enjoyed the modern crop of high-standards animations put out by Disney, Pixar, and Dreamworks.

    I hope I manage to squirrel away the memory of the warm, surprisingly heavy weight of my littlest guy leaning back in my lap, of his wide eyes and of his fingers wrapped around mine.  It won't be too long before he demands his own seat, first (probably) between his dad and me, and later (probably) with those big brothers at the other end of the row.

    —

    |

    1 comment on At the movies.

  • Resignation.

    I think it is about time I admit to myself that I am never going to finish that felt Jesse Tree I started working on twelve years ago.

    —

    |

    7 comments on Resignation.

  • We win.

    Having deja vu about this topic, so stop me if I've told it before.

    Yesterday evening our family went to a show at the Children's Theatre Company (did you know it's the only children's theater to win a Regional Theatre Tony Award?  Yup, pretty awesome) and then, as is our custom, we went out for a late dinner at a restaurant.  It was almost 9 p.m. when we found a place to park the car.

    We try to pick places that tend to be empty on a late Thursday, since it's hard to walk in and get a table for six otherwise.  You'd be surprised how much variation there is in that.  A couple of weeks ago when Mark was out of town for a long business trip, I got a babysitter and went out (also on a Thursday night) to have dinner by myself, and tried a new pub in the next neighborhood — the menu was fine, kid-friendly, and the beer was excellent, but the place was completely packed.  It was a forty-five minute wait for a table.  I didn't mind (I sat at the bar), but I crossed it off my "walk in with the whole family" mental list.

    Lots of places, though, are empty at 9 p.m. on a Thursday.  If you can't scout it out ahead of time, you can make a good stab at it by seeing who has a happy hour that starts around then.  Personally, I think a mostly-empty pub at happy hour is a perfect place to walk in with four hungry kids and two thirsty grownups.   You can actually get a pretty good deal on dinner that way, especially if some of your kids are thrilled to eat the nachos and wings that are on the happy hour menu.  

    It's still a little fun to see the host's eyebrows flinch when we walk in.    I only have 4 children, and I always wonder about what the flinch looks like when it's more than that.

    + + +

    In this particular iteration of toddlerhood, we've been extremely lucky.  Our youngest, who's not quite three, has been a very peaceable restaurant baby from the beginning:  he eats slowly and so stays occupied throughout a dinner, is content to sit in a chair or on a lap, doesn't throw things, and isn't very loud.  (Not all of our toddlers have been like this.  We had an 18-month stretch of never ever going anywhere at one point.)  We go out fairly often — we take a lot of road trips, for example, and then we have the theater-and-late-dinner tradition, and I like to celebrate our anniversary with dinner for the whole family at a Dress Up restaurant.

    Does 

    Along the way somewhere we developed The Game.

    It goes like this:

    If a server, or even better, another diner in the restaurant, comes over to our table and compliments us on our very well-behaved and polite family, we win The Game.

    If nobody says anything to us, we don't win The Game.

    That's it.  We don't give the kids a prize for winning, or a punishment for failing to win.  We just smile and tell the kids (if they didn't happen to hear) "Guess what?  We won The Game."  Or, if nothing happens, the nine-year-old will ask as we are leaving the restaurant, "Did we win The Game, Mom?"  and I will say "Not this time," and the children will sigh and be slightly disappointed.

    + + +

    Some time ago the oldest decided that it was important that there be a way of losing The Game, so it was decreed that if anyone ever makes a point of coming to the table to tell us what horrible children we have, or to ask us to be quiet because we are bothering other diners, then that will be an instance of Losing The Game.  Hasn't happened yet, though.

    + + +

    Last night we won The Game:  the server came over and in an awestruck voice told us that we had very well-behaved children.  (The clear subtext was "You struck fear in my heart when you came in with four children at nine p.m. on a weeknight, but it turned out that my fears were unfounded.")  Everyone was pleased.  It seems that The Game motivates everyone to be excruciatingly careful about pleases and thank yous, and also to be solicitous of the toddler so as to prevent his screeching with dismay.  

    We have runs of bad luck at restaurants from time to time.  (We have particular trouble at Indian restaurants.  For some reason, somebody always knocks over a mango lassi.  Always.  If we ban mango lassis, then they knock over water glasses instead.)  I try not to be intimidated, though.  I have to admit that a lot of the stress of going to restaurants with kids is relieved by a rule-of-thumb that I made long ago, when I had two small children, and used to be anxious about the spills and messes  – 

    Smile and tip generously.

    (The more I think about this, the more I think it's only right.  Children create the same amount of work, or more, for a server than an adult diner does; but they eat less-expensive food and don't drink alcohol, so if you just tip the standard 15 percent, the servers and busboys who work your table are systematically underpaid.)

    I don't know if twenty percent is really enough — I've never run the numbers, I suppose I ought to — but if everyone is pleasant and nothing gets spilled, we tip 20% as a minimum.  I'll tip 25% if we make a big mess or if the server is especially helpful to us for some kid-related reason.

    Because really, I want the server to be thinking when we come in:  Hey, that one family with the four kids is in my section.  I win!


    —

    |

    4 comments on We win.

  • Back from a break.

    All right:  we have stumbled back from a long, lazy Thanksgiving break.  

    Here's to not being beholden to anyone else's schedule.

    Blogging will resume as soon as I think of something to write about.

    —

    |

    No comments on Back from a break.

  • Shielding.

    Thought-provoking opinion piece entitled “How to Live Without Irony:”

    For many Americans born in the 1980s and 1990s — members of Generation Y, or Millennials — particularly middle-class Caucasians, irony is the primary mode with which daily life is dealt. One need only dwell in public space, virtual or concrete, to see how pervasive this phenomenon has become. Advertising, politics, fashion, television: almost every category of contemporary reality exhibits this will to irony.


    Take, for example, an ad that calls itself an ad, makes fun of its own format, and attempts to lure its target market to laugh at and with it. It pre-emptively acknowledges its own failure to accomplish anything meaningful. No attack can be set against it, as it has already conquered itself. The ironic frame functions as a shield against criticism. The same goes for ironic living. Irony is the most self-defensive mode, as it allows a person to dodge responsibility for his or her choices, aesthetic and otherwise. To live ironically is to hide in public. It is flagrantly indirect, a form of subterfuge, which means etymologically to “secretly flee” (subter + fuge). Somehow, directness has become unbearable to us.

    I don’t think this is solely the possession of Gen Y. I am plenty susceptible to this myself, and had in my mind before encountering it in the article: “the ironic frame functions as a shield against criticism.” It is sort of like wearing black all the time so no one can accuse you of trying to look good, or choosing clothes because they promise to hide you, or parts of you, rather than reveal you.

    There are many kinds of such shields, and the ironic frame might be the one that most closely resembles a Zeitgeist at this moment, but the others are all still around. There is also constant self-deprecation; the embrace of victimhood; pre-emptively wounding everyone around you with a mocking, “Don’t you have a sense of humor?”; acquiring a reputation for unpredictable explosive anger. Add them all together and it seems everyone has such a shield.

    Perhaps it is contagious, a kind of arms race of the vulnerable. You cannot be left the only one who lacks protections. Everyone knows they are naked.

    The author of the article identifies some people who don’t seem to carry the shield of irony:

    Nonironic models include very young children, elderly people, deeply religious people, people with severe mental or physical disabilities, people who have suffered, and those from economically or politically challenged places where seriousness is the governing state of mind.

    But many of these people may carry shields, too. I think elderly people — and the not so elderly, maybe starting in their sixties — aren’t infected by irony, not because they don’t put up shields against the world, but because they came of age before public irony had deeply infected the culture. They had other zeitgeists to deal with. And only someone who doesn’t personally know many deeply religious people — someone to whom they are a caricature — would assume that they are also immune from irony. Maybe if you had been raised in a very sheltered family and school, enough out of the mainstream that American popular culture would be a foreign culture. Once you have breathed that air, though, the shielding becomes part of you, and to learn to be real is to transform it. I don’t think it brushes off so easily, because it isn’t something completely superficial. It is more something you must deliver yourself from.

    —

    |

    1 comment on Shielding.

  • Public breastfeeding: back to the 90’s again.

    If only it could be back to the 30’s or so. Jamie’s got a good rant going.

    I’ve been listening to people talk about public breastfeeding since 1996. Things have changed a lot since then. In 1996 there was no state in the US in which a man could marry another man, and the idea didn’t seem likely to gain traction any time soon. In 1996 the Unabomber was still on the loose. In 1996 the impeachment of a President was ancient history. The world has changed a lot since then and yet people are still talking about public breastfeeding as a plot for corrupting the youth.

    She dives into the Historic Photos of Breastfeeding trove, too.

     

    —

    |

    No comments on Public breastfeeding: back to the 90’s again.

  • Jarring, yet intriguing, juxtaposition of the morning.

    Grading papers as foot-washing, courtesy of Jamie (alias Dr. Most-Gladly).

    + + +

    Thought on this one: Why do I always seem to encounter the insights that might have helped me make sense of and/or endure some difficult task, long after I have put that task long behind me, probably for good? I had to do some grading of papers as a TA a few times, and I did it back then with the expectation of a working life spent doing things like grading papers, among other things.

    But I haven’t put grading behind entirely, right, what with the whole homeschooling thing? Still doing it?

    Not even close. Grading your own child’s papers, or the papers of a friend’s child whom you know well, is NOT the same because the intimacy of critiquing lacks the discomfort, that sensation of boundary-crossing. I am supposed to help my child grow up, navigate the requirements of adulthood, which here are communicating like a thinking person in a thinking world, and sending the correct social signals. I am authorized by human sociobiology itself to perform such tasks for my children (and, I believe, for the other children in other family groups close to me). Bathing your own child, however grimy, isn’t even close to foot-washing. Hey, mothers, if you’ve done time in the volunteer nursery — isn’t there a REALLY SIGNIFICANT difference between changing your own child’s diaper and changing someone else’s child’s diaper? Admit it. Your own kid’s poop doesn’t stink quite as badly.

    The essence of foot-washing is that it violates a boundary we would all prefer not to violate. It knocks down an imaginary wall that we put there for our own protection against a number of uncomfortable truths: the sort of truths that are common to human beings. There is something in it that reminds me of the confessional (as it should). There is something in it that reminds me of Snowden’s terrible secret in Catch-22.

    I wonder if Jamie might find some irony in the discomfort of critiquing existing alongside the imposter syndrome — the collection of all such critiquing is the way imposter syndrome is communicated from teacher to student, in a sort of intellectual laying-on-of-hands. (Personally, I would be a little bit concerned for a budding academic who entirely lacked that sense of uncomfortable self-awareness. It’s a useful faculty, if it can be channelled.)

    It might be a little funny to think of such a thing in the banality of grading papers, but I think there is a lot to be said for the comparison. Someone did it for you, and now you’re to turn around and do it for others. It’s thoroughly uncomfortable for everyone involved, but it has to be gotten through and everyone is the better for it, even when nobody’s very well-practiced at the task. It requires the will overcoming the reluctance that persists, for a good natural reason, in our nature. And the will has its own reasons — not wholly natural ones — why it is good and right that it should prevail.

    —

    |

    1 comment on Jarring, yet intriguing, juxtaposition of the morning.

Recent Comments

Recent Posts

Categories

…more to come later