About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
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June 5, 2012
Andrea at So Over Debt spent $4 on packing materials to get back $460 by selling back textbooks using Amazon’s trade-in store.
I used to sell back my books to the bookstore right after the final, literally in some cases, but there were texts that I held onto out of sheer, stupid sentimentality. And then some books were classics, so I held on to those, but eventually realized I’d not picked them up in years so I went through a variety of textbook buy back sites to sell to the highest bidder – always with prepaid shipping. Those paid cash back, not store credit, so that was always a boon to my checking account.
Katherine at Feather Factor interviewed Patrick Rothfuss.
I’ve actually known more about him as a person/ality than as an author (though, as a personality, it was probably as an authorial personality because how do you distinguish?) because I hadn’t had a chance to pick up his books. I did recently and devoured the Kingkiller Chronicles. And am sulking around waiting for the third installment because I have no patience whatsoever.
I particularly love that he threw in the bit about having 1 pair of pants and the subsequent lack of reaction to it. Or was my favorite the part about his moment of self-actualization, such as it was? Whatever, please, have a read of the interview, I <3 Patrick Rothfuss.
I also need to hit up that reading list again and keep myself busy while I wait. But I am loathe to spend more money on ebooks so I might go the library route while there’s no need for me to be highly portable.
Eemusings is asking what’s more motivating: paying down debt or saving up sums?
Same same for me. Can’t hoard if I have a hole in the ground, though, must fill it first, then pave it over, then build a house atop the hole.
Bella at One Sister’s Rant shares one possible reason not having Facebook is probably healthier.
I should keep on staying off Facebook. I’m too evil to be stalkerating.
May 31, 2012
My favorite thing to do while sitting at the airport is observe people over my book or while chitchatting on Twitter. Idly guess who is going to be on which flight and who might be on a layover or whether it’ll be a full flight and other mundane things like that.
On our outbound to Hawaii, though, there wasn’t much to see. Everyone in our area was destined for Hawaii and we all looked a little bored.
A woman behind me snapped her phone shut and said tersely, “Well, that’s it. There’s nothing else I can do.”
I heard an older male voice ask, “What? What’s wrong?”
She snapped, “He didn’t register for his AP tests in time. He can’t take them next month so now he can’t start school as a sophomore, he won’t get priority registration, and I’m going to have to pay $20,000 more for college.
I stifled a laugh and settled in.
The man turned away and asked, in a softer voice, “What happened?”
A teenage boy, voice clearly adolescent, sullen and resigned, “I just forgot.”
A flurry of wretchedness from Mom: “I can’t believe you! This is so typical, and I’ve had to run round making calls to all the administrators and the teachers for weeks to see if there was anything we could do and they can’t get him in so now I’m going to have to pay all this money because you won’t get those classes waived because those were class credits for every exam you passed and you won’t get priority registration because you’ll be starting school as a freshman, not a sophomore like your brother, and you’ll be fighting for classes just like every other kid.”
Kid attempts to defend: “My school doesn’t work like that!” Dad: “You’re missing the point!” Mom, again: “I have to do everything in this family and you guys just sit there and let everything happen to you.”
I had a few immediate reaction points:
* Kid, what do you mean your school doesn’t work like that? High school or college? Does your college not accept more than a few units from AP classes or does your high school do something weird? If the former you really might want to say something more clearly on that point because I know that happens (mine used to only accept 3 classes’ worth of AP units). If the latter, you might be mistaken. Either way, speak up with your actual words. Not with that slump-shouldered, vaguely formed defense that doesn’t really say much to anyone about your mental competence or your follow-through.
* Mom, quit being such a martyr.
* Dad, actual involvement might have been helpful, not that weird mediation thing you were doing.
* Kid might not have been missing the point at all.
* Sister, which planet are you wishing you were on right now? Poor kid.
Soon after, our flight started boarding, and this family was in the first group to board. We were the last so I had a few minutes to share the drama and quick chortle with PiC over the flight that kid was destined to have.
But seriously, after we came back, I thought: Wow, that was all kinds of dysfunctional.
To expand:
Mom – helicopter parenting much? If you “do everything” in the family, especially when things go wrong, no wonder your kids “do nothing” (if that’s even accurate) if they’re in the least bit inclined to be extrinsically motivated or are easily steamrollered. Just because one kid managed to get it “right” doesn’t mean all the others will, or do it the same way and I can’t imagine that doing it for them does anything but teach them that when they fail, you will fix it. And pitch a fit about it while trying to fix it. They won’t learn how to deal with failure and mistakes.
And then rewarding him with a trip to Hawaii when you had this situation brewing? Clearly from her comments, she’d been running around trying to fix this for weeks. It’s been years since I had to deal with this but I know AP registration had to be months before March. So, really? I don’t know about anyone else but no 17 year old kid of mine would be getting a lovely trip to a tropical island after being irresponsible enough to make mistake that big, not if I cared that much about it, family vacation or not. It clearly displays a misalignment in priorities: you can screw up that big but I will still give you these luxuries. Therefore, it doesn’t matter.
If that situation presented itself to me, my kiddo would be responsible for finding a way to late register and to earn the money for the community college he/she may be attending for a year instead, if not for the extra year in tuition and expenses now expected. And I would try to find a responsible adult for him or her to stay with under restriction, for the duration of our vacation, he or she would not be going on vacation. Because a teenager should be learning at that point I am not obliged to pay for your mistakes.
Nothing is terribly simple in parenting, I know, but basic attitudes wherein all the parents’ mistakes are their mistakes and all the kids’ mistakes are also the parents’ responsibility without ever bothering to teach kids culpability and agency seems to be a terrible thing.
***
I was made aware from a very early age that we didn’t have much money and even though my parents expected to pay for college, I needed to defray the costs. My parents had no clue AP tests existed; my brother was a poor academic so he didn’t take them but I found out about them as soon as I started high school and I assumed I would take them. I also sought and applied for low income grants to help lower test fees because we didn’t have the money for that either.
They didn’t have the knowledge, nor the time or inclination, to pick up after my mistakes. And I would have paid the price for them in the end when I had to pay for college. As it turned out, I saved myself a number of classes via taking AP exams. I wasn’t the highest scorer nor the most prolific. The most classes one could take and test was around fourteen by graduation, I think. But I did manage to eliminate a few basic classes that I would otherwise have wasted time and money taking.
***
The attitude reflected in that family dynamic is one I see repeated in the five or ten percent of the young people I deal with professionally. They expect to be prioritized and taken care of and anything that isn’t done for them within their timeframe is simply outrageous.
One staff sniped at me for not answering or then returning her call within twenty minutes because she wanted to get on the road, never you mind I was in back to back meetings. And the reason she needed to reach me so urgently was the result of not making the appropriate arrangements in the first place.
The same population also demonstrate they can’t conduct their own professional affairs, make their own decisions like whether and how to apply for promotions they’re not qualified for or mature enough for, yet are proactive enough to create rumors about not landing them because of one or another imagined slight, and heap all possible responsibility on others. These limited visionaries are gems.
The other ninety percent are, due to careful selection, pretty great and even care about protecting their jobs but we have to spend an inordinate amount of time to find those candidates. And even then, we have to teach basic sense.
It’s very much the opposite of these kids I could be proud of all day long. Look! Past performance IS an indicator of future performance!
Ed Note: This observational anecdote was simply a superficial people watching. My comment about the dysfunctionality, above, was in reference to the specific interactions that I observed and the effects I know to stem from that in my personal experience, no more, no less. Of course I know I don’t know these people outside of those interactions. I don’t presume to, nor am I suggesting that I understand any or everything about their lives beyond what they loudly paraded in front of me and everyone else. But I was interested by a slice of the extremely detailed life that was relevant to my personal and professional interests and commented on that.
If I were inclined to pass actual judgement on a family, I’d do that based on a longitudinal, anthropological study much like that of the members of my own family who have earned the nod of disapproval for a lifetime of poor behavior. But having lived with abuse, manipulation, and severe dysfunction, the circumstances of which have been discussed, dissected and understood from every possible means, I don’t judge easily or lightly.
May 30, 2012
I had forgotten what a difference a tailor makes.
Poking around an Ann Taylor sale, there was a blazer with great bones that seemed like it could fill out a hole in my professional wardrobe really nicely so I added it to my order, mostly to try on and hit the free shipping quota.
It was boxy and bulky. I was a bit shocked that, even sized as far down as possible, it still made me look completely frumpy, like a beanpole wrapping herself in a sackcloth.
My eye for fit and fashion remains unhoned, but it was such a terrible fit that I had to go back and check whether I had imagined how well a jacket should fit. Comparing the difference between the $100 tailoring on the jacket I wear now and this off the rack jacket is night and day.
I’m still mulling over whether this jacket is worth spending the money on at all, or whether I should keep looking for better base material. Either way, I am reminded once again of the value of a great tailor on things like this.
The rest of the box was a bit of a disappointment.
A much needed pair of black pants: 2 inches too long, saggy around the waist and probably too long in the crotch.
Decision: On the fence but I’ve been grumpy about alteration experiences with pants of late. Or perhaps mainly with the fact that I can’t get into my altered pants which has less to do with them than me.
A medium-interesting poly blouse: too wide, the armholes too large. Not sure that can be remedied.
Decision: It’ll go back, it’s not worth $40 plus alterations.
Bright green cardigan:
Surprise and a half, the cardigan actually fit well; that never happens. I’ve already worn it a few times. It went with me, experimentally, on a work trip, and cheered up my (as it turned out unnecessarily) wintry gear quite well. My only concern is that it might not be a long-wearing material.
Decision: Probably a keeper.
While the additional 50% off made most of the order seem nearly reasonable, the total still makes me pale and I’m pretty sure I’d feel better returning at least half.
This reluctance to spend is why I struggle with having a variety of good clothes but I’m also striving not to hoard too much Stuff either – I get closet claustrophobia. The claustrophobia isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it limits careless spending and mindless accumulation. But it is a bit of a toughie getting dressed of a morning as clothes wear thin. Seems like they just don’t make things to last anymore.
May 28, 2012
This year, two of my baby relatives are heading off to medical school and I couldn’t be prouder.
Growing up in an equally poor household, their family stayed that way. They didn’t try to live above their means, live above their means or throw money away on big purchases. They had one parent stay home with the kids and tend to their needs physically and educationally: carting them around to school, a few limited activities, cooking, extra tutoring when they were younger or taking them to study groups and accelerated classes when they were older while the other parent worked.
Perhaps they got a wee bit spoiled in that they don’t cook or clean for themselves at all at home, but their mommy looooves to do those things for them. Instead they studied their tuchuses off and earned full scholarships to universities, and then took care of themselves after that. And now, medical school.
It finally feels like they’re becoming adults as much as I’ve been in denial about it even though they’ve been growing up right at my heels. It’s a cognitive dissonance that may never fade to realize my wee rellies aren’t so wee. I remember cradling them as infants, while just a child myself. I remember dandling babies off knees hardly far enough off the ground to fall and scrape it. The distance between us is half a decade and more, yet it seems like they represent the next generation, and perhaps even redeem mine own.
At times, I look at our socio-political landscape and I weep for our present. Others, I look at my cousins and I think, we may have something yet.
They might well indeed be the ones to mend up my broken heart over my sibling. They have potential still, they have futures to fulfill and prospects ahead of them. I can’t wait to see what life has in store for them and what they’ll do with it all.
They have “the promise of a generation.” (CJ Cregg, The West Wing)
May 21, 2012
Recent discussions about money, higher-earners and expectations, external and internal to the relevant family members, has conveniently coincided with the point in time where we start talking about trajectories for the future.
I was fascinated, and disturbed to see, value judgments still being passed on choices like whether dads should stay at home with the kids. I completely understand having a strong personal preference one way or the other, but I’m not a fan of declaring one way right or wrong when harm isn’t being done in the pursuit of building and rearing a family.
I wandered into a parenting forum that disgusted and outraged me on the subject. One woman was stomping all over the thread (population: single dads/stay at home dads/dads being the primary caretakers for other reasons) telling all the posters that they were second class citizens, the second but worst choice, that they were harming their children by choosing to be home with them instead of leaving them with the women in their lives, because “women are naturally better at caring for children”. Her claim was that at childbirth, women are gifted with the skills and a level of cognition that men can never achieve, so men are bumbling incompetents apt to do more harm than good interfering with the women’s right to raise the children.
In this day and age, that was difficult to see.
When people are constantly decrying the deadbeat dad, the detached dad, the long-gone dad, how on earth does someone have the gall to decry those men who are choosing their children over their career or choosing to make their career work with their children as the first priority? And what about those situations where the mothers/females are not in the children’s lives because they simply cannot be or choose not to be?
I can tell you this much: giving birth to a child means you are capable of giving birth. I have never in my anecdotal experience of seeing dozens of cousins, first, second and third degree, and coworkers, have children, seen it confer any level of parenting expertise that outmatched anyone else’s if that person didn’t have a brain to begin with and resources to coach them. I say this from having learnt how to care for three children alone, a toddler and two infants, while their idiot mother swanned off for several hours to hang out. Because she figured a seven year old was appropriate childcare for her 3 kids under the age of three. And from watching more than one coworker smoke and drink her way through pregnancy and then wonder why her kid was on a respirator at birth.
So what makes the “choice” more or less “ok”? If it’s not a choice and one has to be forced into the situation due to unemployment, disability, or other circumstances beyond one’s control?
That was the situation my relatives found themselves in: the husband was becoming obsolete in his field due to rapid technology changes and the cost of staying up to date was beyond their means. With the kids, it made sense for the dad to stay home with them. Yes, they were poor but they weren’t latchkey kids. And for all I know, that could have been the choice that saved our family from eventual meltdown.
Good friends of ours consciously made that choice. Dad could have kept a horrible commute to make more money but his wife made good enough money for their household and it was better for their peace of mind to always have Dad with the young ones rather than babysitting with family (which meant no rules!) when mom wasn’t home so that’s what they did.
Let this pessimist declare that judgment system flawed.
I’d much rather try to make as conscious a choice as possible and plan ahead. I know what it’s like to be raised with not much in the till or on the table, and I saw how much my parents struggled with not having anything at the end of their lives. In the middle here, I’d like to attempt some informed choices that include all possibilities.
I like to think I’d choose to be a mother who stays in the workplace because I don’t think I’d be stellar at caretaking while I know I’m awesome at professional work. I know this because I’ve spent over 20 years caring for family and children, related or not. I love them dearly but it’s exhausting and I simply didn’t have the instinctive biological yearning that my mother did to want to continue to care for children. I’m not bad at it, in fact, I am a great sitter in a pinch, but I’m no Child Whisperer. In contrast, love or hate my job at the time, I’ve always been good at it. And even if I’m in pain, I can do my job. And when it’s really bad, I can work from home or take a sick day. You cannot take a sick day from your kid!
PiC, on the other hand, may not have 20+ years under his belt but he is goooood with kids. They love him. They love uncle to distraction. At any age, at any time of day or night, Uncle is awesome. And he has so much more energy than I do. And to him, a job is a job is a job. It’s there to make a living, he’d rather be (fill in the blank). He understands how to live life – which is what grounds me when I’m willing to be grounded away from work.
He’s never loved his work to the degree that I do. My theory is that he would be way better at home with kids than I would. I have no real idea if he’d survive nap times and setting structure but he’s so good at ignoring a clingy Doggle that I’m certain he’d set boundaries after a while. Men parent differently and I know he’d make it work.
Financially, it could be a little tricky. Frankly, at the moment, he has far superior benefits. Mine are mediocre. If we had a family, I’d want his coverage. I make more now but I need to make way more if we were to lose his salary. In part, because we’re still covering my dad. But things could definitely change. I could find a better gig with better benefits, or at least different benefits, and then it could work.
At the end of all this, this is only the Right Now.
My health hasn’t improved appreciably over the last ten years and has in some ways, declined. This is a reminder that we cannot take our health and capabilities for granted.
There are so many unknowns:
What’s my actual health and earning life span? (No idea.)
What if he takes a break and has to go back to work? How does that work? (we could sort of plan for that)
What if I have to be the one to take a break?
How does that affect earnings and savings?
And what about cultivating alternative income?
And honestly, we could just change our minds and want something totally different from what we thought we wanted. I not only want, I need and expect that to be ok. That’s why any of this: choice.
May 16, 2012
One of the mistakes I’ve been making lately is getting on a plane without a good book. I never used to be caught anywhere without reading material at the ready, so being stranded on a plane was like the Spanish Inquisition. I didn’t bear it very well.
My past two weeks have been spectacularly rough, 10-18 hour days, and getting worse, now staring down the barrel of a full week of two business trips in a row, but feeling at death’s door has focused my mind wonderfully on the important things: Do Not Leave Without a Good Book.
Having had no leisure time, though, I had no idea what on earth is out there right now. I turned to Twitter and asked for help. Maybe fantasy or sci fi but it wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t, and it had to be around 700 or more pages because so help me, being stuck at 10,000 feet just having finished a book and needing another one for the next five hours is the sort of brain death I’ll trade someone’s toes for.
Twitter delivered and I share with you the bounty.
From @cthulhuchick: you might like The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. Kind of slow, very long, but very good. Historian/Dracula stuff.
From @scoughtfree: the name of the wind and the wise man’s fear by Patrick rothfuss. Though you want only 1, you will want the second soon.
And I’m digging 1Q84. That’s almost a thousand pages.
From @moneymaus: unbroken by laura hillenbrand!
From @csdaley: The Dragon’s Path by Daniel Abraham. Only 600 pages but if you buy the Kindle version it comes packaged with Leviathan Wakes.
And The Reality Dysfunction by Peter Hamilton.
And Perdido Street Station by China Mieville. Short on pages (640) but my favorite novel of the last decade.
And Otherland: City of Golden Shadow by @tadwilliams
From @clareyt: I recommend Shantaram!
May 7, 2012
With my promotion came a healthy bump in salary to a number that I’d been aiming at for some time. It’s not the “magic” six-figure number but it’s a necessary and great goalpost to reach.
I’ve insisted on making specific progress on salary for several reasons:
1. Regain lost ground. If I had stayed in a different niche of my field, I had the opportunity to make that salary earlier, with more robust and affordable benefits. I consciously chose change because it was time to temporarily give up the money for wider experience and a different environment was the wiser and healthier life option. But I wanted to get back on top.
2. Aim highly, and fail at negotiating. And win as well. Negotiating is highly uncomfortable. Not as in, I won’t do it, but as in, I hate how bad I feel at it. So I have to keep aiming at a higher number that I know I’m worth and negotiating, failing or succeeding, to get better at it. My work will back it up but until I master the art of simply negotiating, I’d always wonder how much I left something on the table.
3. Winning. I like winning. Obviously. And I treasure a win that scores a point for women that much more. I’ve always played against the boys when I competed: in sports, in academia, in grit. I wanted to be faster, tougher, smarter, meaner, and better in every possible way. Call it a family legacy or a survival instinct, I was practically born knowing that the patriarchy* was my enemy and I was going to crush its influence as far as I could.
There might have been a pivotal moment in my life, when I might have gone down the path of becoming a traditional docile woman. Then my dad said no, I couldn’t do something “because you’re a little girl.” He was actually concerned about my weighing all of 28 lbs with a bookbag, rather than being female, but at age five I heard sexist discrimination which got my dander up and it stayed up ever since.
I’m joking a little but really, if I heard sexism when I was five, I was probably long lost to docility. Sorry, Nurture.
This made me an insufferable little sister growing up, of course, until we figured out that it made me a perfectly decent little brother. As an adult, I don’t need to “think Iike a man” or a woman to get ahead. I think like me: I am rational, reasonable, seek compromise to create solutions but equitably because I’ll stand my ground until the cows come home. No one is going to play me, my team or my department. No one makes the mistake of thinking I’m soft in the workplace twice. And going over my head only gets the finger pointed right back to me.
So if women are chronically underpaid against men dollar for dollar? You better believe I’m going to do something about that.
4. Family. As much as my quest for breaking barriers and seeking equality for women in my small way, I always always sort of expected I might have kids. Practically speaking, I still have no idea how I’d manage but financially, the safest plan seemed to be: make as much as possible, secure a hefty savings, allow one of us to stay home.
Just think: If I earn at least six figures, or more, can you imagine what our savings would look like?! I regularly dream about that. And I will admit to trying to game the system of “creating choice”, to become the primary breadwinner, so that it would “only seem logical” that PiC stay home with the kid(s). I’d feel guilty secretly confessing here except he already knows I’m up to no good (TBD). 😉
*Patriarchy doesn’t equal men. The patriarchy I fought was the assumption that “little girls” can’t do the same things that men or boys can do, nor should they try, simply because they’re girls which automatically makes them weaker, dumber, illogical, morally weak or any number of demeaning assumptions that come with “don’t worry your little head about that.” Patriarchy is the assumption that men are superior in any and every way to women and deserve more (money, prestige, property, rights) simply because they are men and we are women.
I get along just fine with males as long as they accord me the respect I’ve earned, as I will for them. I spent many of my younger years competing and associating with males. Incidentally, that made it quite easy to very quickly disabuse several male bullies of the notion that I was any kind of a target, much less an easy one.
Many young males of my acquaintance bonded through competition, bragging, and chest beating; social order and hierarchy were established by these means though sometimes folded into somewhat more civilized behaviors (video games, academics), and since I was right in the middle of it, I learned to understand them quite early on. And they became pretty great friends.
