The Perils of Facebook

I've been thinking about Facebook over the past few days. In particular, I've been thinking about how facebook-- and the internet more generally-- limits or complicates our ability to evolve and grow as people.

My niece got a Facebook when she was 11. Although I was glad to have the chance to see her grow-- she lives very far away and I hardly ever see her-- it struck me that what she was posting then is not what she will be posting in a few years once she's in high school. Right now, she's just posting pictures of her cat. But in a year or two, she will probably start commenting. She will post status updates and maybe even articles.

Many status updates are opinions. I am all for young people expressing those opinions. I feel lucky to have grown up in a family where my opinions were listened to and valued. They were also challenged, so that I learned to stand up for my beliefs. And, as those opinions were challenged, sometimes I realized that they were flawed. Sometimes, my opinions changed.

The difference between a Facebook status and an opinion expressed by a child with their family is that the internet is forever. Even if you delete a post or change your privacy settings, you never know who has taken a screenshot of what you said. So, when you are 23, someone can bring up something you said when you were 13. The development of your opinions and your beliefs is documented. And because seeing what a person said three years ago is as simple as scrolling down, it's easy to make judgments on a person in the now based on who they were back then.


Then there's college.

When you go to college, you meet all kinds of new people and make all sorts of new friends. Your world opens as you encounter people you would never have interacted with in your high school town. Rich people meet poor people, American students meet international students, city mice meet country mice. My parents' generation could compartmentalize. When interacting with people back home, they didn't necessarily let on that they were now protesting against the Vietnam War or getting involved with civil rights groups or going to wild parties. But now, everyone sees everything. Social movements invite people to action through Facebook events. After a party, all the photos go up on facebook and everyone gets tagged. Facebook allows some flexibility with the privacy settings, but it's easy to get mixed up and let something slip through. All this makes it really hard for a kid trying to figure out who they are in the world.

I hope my niece's generation will be able to deal with this. I understand why my parents feel overwhelmed. Things have changed so much in the past decade. Change isn't inherently good or bad, but it creates new challenges for people to confront.

The Library - Part I

Few things have brought me more joy over the course of my life than my local library.

I have certainly had instances of great happiness completely unrelated to the library, but it has been a constant presence since before I even learned to read. As a small child, I would pull a picture book off the shelf and "read" to the stone owl that sat in the children's room. I didn't yet understand how the letters on the page formed words, so I looked at the illustrations and created my own stories. I would beg my mom to take out dozens of picture books, most of which she never had the time to read to me. That didn't matter. I took in the pictures.

Even after learning to read, I loved Dr. Seuss, Serendipity books, and Bill Peet for their colorful and imaginative illustrations. But I also enjoyed Chris Van Allsburg, best known for Jumanji. His stories, like his illustrations, were darker. Things less whimsical than downright strange occurred in the eerie worlds he created. The Wretched Stone in particular sent chills down my spine. While I love fantasy of all kinds, I am sure Allsburg is partially responsible for my interest in magical realism.

I didn't read all the books at my library. That would have been impossible; I was fortunate to have an enormous collection at my disposition. But I did read a great number of books growing up. In the summer, I would check out 30 or even 40 at a time. I rarely read them all, but I read several a day, sitting in a fort I'd built or in the shade of a tree. My library kept my mind busy. With all those books at my beck and call, I was rarely bored.

Box of Chocolates

This Valentine's day, my friend's boyfriend handed her a wrapped present.

She unwrapped it. It contained a beautiful box and, inside, some cheap chocolates.

Her boyfriend took the box from her, dumped the chocolates in her lap, and put the box in his bag. "Sorry," he said, "it's my mom's. I promised I'd give it back."

The Elements of Style

Family tradition dictates that all young women receive a copy of Pride and Prejudice for their sixteenth birthday. I remember receiving my own copy: a thick, illustrated, hardcover edition. I still have it on the bookshelf in my old room, although when I revisit it I prefer the paperback version. I've never been able to read from hardcovers. I'm too concerned about the binding to really crack it open.

Some distant ancestor (or not so distant-- I'm pretty sure my great-grandmother started the trend) decided that Pride and Prejudice was a life-changing book and an important gift for 16-year-old girls.

I loved Pride and Prejudice and it was life-changing. My encounters with Jane Austen mark my shift from pure fantasy to capital-l Literature. I still love a good fantasy novel, don't get my wrong, but Austen's works convinced me to branch out a bit.

Pride and Prejudice is not the only book to have changed my life. Another book, one without the popular appeal of an Austen novel, had an equally strong influence on me: The Elements of Style.

When I first read The Elements of Style, I had a rare spiritual moment. I could hear the angels singing down on me as I followed Mr. White on his grammatical and stylistic journey.

"But, P," you might rightfully ask, "you don't follow all the style rules outlined in the book!" Yeah, okay, get off my back. I love the book, but I don't consult it before every single post! Here's the thing, though: this slim volume can really teach you how to write. If you follow its instructions, your writing will improve. And given its contents, it's surprisingly easy to read.

If I have children, I'll give them a copy of Pride and Prejudice for their sixteenth birthday. But I'll give them The Elements of Style as soon as they enter high school.

Love letters

While doing some research for a personal project, I stumbled across the story of Emma Hauck, a woman with Schizophrenia who lived in Heidelberg, Germany at the beginning of the 20th century.

Letters of Note writes that she began writing letters to her husband, supplicating him to visit her. The letters contain pages and pages of "Sweetheart come" and just "come." I found these letters tremendously sad. I imagine her being so lonely and scared, with those letters as her only hope, and yet as Letters of Note says, they were never sent. How scary it must have been to find herself losing control of her senses, far from the people she loved.

Making friends

I'm in Europe right now, and my dad's cousin called me the other day to inform me that, while in town, she had run into a group of young Canadian men.

She told me more about it when we met up for drinks later that day.

"I heard them talking in English, and they mentioned Canada, so I went up to them and told them about how my American cousin was visiting. You should meet up with them! They were so friendly, and they were absolutely thrilled when I mentioned you. They really want to meet you. They're very excited to talk to you." She dug around in her purse. "They wrote their numbers down on a piece of paper-- here it is." She pulled out a flier and handed it to me. At the bottom, someone had scrawled a name and phone number.

It was a Mormon recruitment flier. I think I know now why those gentlemen were so eager to meet me...

Note: I do not mean any disrespect to Mormons. I only find it amusing that my cousin thought that these random guys she met were driven by a sincere interest in meeting me.

Got Milk?

Anyone who knows me realizes I'm a bit of a dairy nut. My lactose intolerant friend and I joke about how between her lactose intolerance and my vegetarianism and dairy fanaticism, we'll never find a place we can both go out to eat. Another friend of mine posted on facebook this Valentine's Day suggesting that, instead of flowers, people buy a wheel of cheese for that special someone. That's a proposition I can get behind! I promptly showed the post to my significant other.

But dairy is a pleasure that should be enjoyed in small quantities. On days when I have a glass of milk in the morning, I will forgo cheese-based meals for lunch. And on days when I break out the mac 'n' cheese, I'll pass on yogurt for dessert. I was led to believe that this was the way to go. Now, though, I've learned that perhaps I can indulge my dairy habits a little more. NPR has an article on the possibility that whole milk may actually keep people thinner.

A few caveats before guzzling a gallon of whole milk:
-The first study only observed the habits of men. Women may not be in the clear.
-We don't yet have an explanation for the results. Drinking whole milk may not directly cause weight loss/weight retention.
-As the author points out, there are other reasons than weight gain to avoid high-fat dairy products, such as cholesterol.

So, in honor of this discovery, what are your favorite dairy-based recipes?

Book Review: November - Georges Simenon

In this moody novel, Laure, a young woman living at home with her parents, her brother, and their maid Manuela, spends her time observing the people around her. She alone of all her family members holds all the pieces of the puzzle: her mother’s alcoholism, her brother’s relationship with Manuela, and her father’s lust for his son’s lover. Laure, meanwhile, has her own secrets. Although she might have settled down by marrying a man closer to her own age, she decided instead to pursue a hopeless relationship with an older man, one of the doctors she works with at the local hospital. When Manuela disappears, Laure becomes obsessed with learning what happened. In doing so, she begins to envision her life’s trajectory.

More than the characters, it is the setting that sticks with you. Laure's house is large and its inhabitants isolated-- but there is no real sense of privacy. Laure, from her room, can hear every movement, and she knows her mother can do the same. Most of the family's stilted interactions occur at the dining room table. Lies pervade every word, from the collective denial of Laure's mother's alcoholism to Laure's own deception about her affair. Only Manuela brings a respite from the family's bizarre inter-alienation. Laure describes her singing and her constantly cheerful temperament. It is little wonder, Simenon suggests, that Laure's brother and father both gravitate toward her. But Laure vacillates between distaste and sympathy. The ending feels at once hopeless and hopeful.

 I doubt whether, years from now, I will remember the details of the scattered plot. But I will remember the rain pouring down. I will remember the big, empty house. I will remember November.

The Skin I'm In

When I was a sophomore in college, my roommate came down with scabies.

What, you may ask, are scabies? Are you ever in for a treat!

(Squeamish people may want to avoid reading on.)

Scabies are tiny mites that crawl around under the surface of your skin, chewing their way through your body. This itches tremendously.

Not an accurate scientific representation. Drawing not to scale.

My roommate had been scratching for quite some time before he realized that something more than anxiety was going on. He scratched until he bled, leaving smears of blood all over the mattress, which was always sheetless. It was only after his romantic partners started coming down with the same symptoms that he went to see the college’s health center. That was when we all learned a little something about these friendly critters.

I felt tremendously bad for my roommate, who had been suffering from these parasites for almost a year at this point and who must have been in significant discomfort. But I was also concerned for myself. I contacted the health center and asked a nurse how I could reduce the risk. Scabies, she assured me, are transmitted almost exclusively through skin-to-skin contact. She gave me a bottle of hand sanitizer and sent me on my way. The Internet, however, informed me that I could also contract scabies through the clothing of an infected person.

Although my sophomore roommate had many redeeming qualities, cleanliness and organization were not among them.* His clothing littered the floor, and since his bed was closer to the door, I had to walk through large piles of dirty clothes to leave the room.

The scabies minefield.

With each step I took, I imagined thousands of tiny mites lunging from the dark recesses of a dirty sock to latch onto my skin. I started to see mites everywhere I looked. And whenever I thought about scabies, I started to itch. Every pimple, every scab became a source of fear. Was it an infection site? Some nights, I would toss and turn, incapable of sleep, certain that a tiny mite would burrow into me as soon as I let my guard down.

Two weeks later, my roommate’s treatment was over, and I had not come down with any symptoms. But now, whenever I get an itch, I wonder...

*To be fair, I, too, am a slob. This was part of what made us such compatible roommates.

Next Update: Wednesday - "Book Review: November - Georges Simenon"

Susan Patton's "straight talk" is far too rigid

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article by Susan Patton in which she encourages women to find their future husbands in college.

The article is pretty unoriginal and advocates a traditional attitude towards marriage and relationships, so I won't comment too much on that. But what I found most disturbing was her attitude towards men who aren't classically educated:

Could you marry a man who isn't your intellectual or professional equal? Sure. But the likelihood is that it will be frustrating to be with someone who just can't keep up with you or your friends. When the conversation turns to Jean Cocteau or Henrik Ibsen, the Bayeux Tapestry or Noam Chomsky, you won't find that glazed look that comes over his face at all appealing. And if you start to earn more than he does? Forget about it. Very few men have egos that can endure what they will see as a form of emasculation.

Full disclosure: my long-term boyfriend has several degrees, but they are technical degrees; he has never been to college. He can fix wildly complicated machines, but no, Patton, he has no clue who Cocteau or Chomsky are. I, meanwhile, have studied both a social science and a humanities field at the graduate level-- but put me in front of a broken-down car and I am useless.

Entering graduate school really is entering an ivory tower. You get lost in complicated debates that, often, don't have much of a real-world application. I believe in the power of education and the humanities (I will post about this belief later). The humanities enrich our understanding of art and improve our enjoyment of life. But it's important not to get so lost in these reflections that we lose sight of the concrete.

There's an old union song, "Bread and Roses." The song emphasizes that, as much as workers need bread to live off of, they need art, too-- roses. "Hearts starve as well as bodies," says the song. "Give us bread, but give us roses." Just as it is easy for those focused on the bread to forget about the roses, it's easy for academically-minded rose admirers to forget about all those people out there with the basic need for bread. And, beyond the bread, all those things that help make the roses accessible to everyone. The gardeners, the people who lay down all the dirt and fertilizer and mulch that make it possible for those roses to share their beauty with the world.

Without people working in technological and mechanical fields, art and entertainment would only be accessible to people living in big cities. Traveling would take days and days and would be feasible only for those with a great deal of free time. But with all these mechanical and technical geniuses, we have cars, trains, and the Internet. People can turn on their TV and learn about myriad subjects, and it's not people in academia or the business world who are out there fixing TVs.

The problem with Patton's approach is that she expects women to find partners who understand their careers perfectly. But life can be made rich with contrast. I have plenty of friends with whom I can discuss what I'm studying-- just as I have friends who, like my boyfriend, find themselves a little lost. What makes my relationship fulfilling is not that he understands my studies perfectly. It's that he understands me. I can't talk to my boyfriend about literary theory. But that isn't a bad thing. He is someone on the outside who keeps my feet on the ground and my mind open.

Ultimately, though, what works for me works for me. I wouldn't tell other women, "Go out and date a guy who can fix an airplane." I would tell them, "Find someone who makes you happy." And, maybe, "Keep an open mind about what kind of person that might be."


*I do, however, suggest that you work on finding happiness in many different places, rather than hinging it all on one thing. Love is wonderful! So is a career you enjoy, a volunteer project that lets you make a difference, and a hobby you're really good at. Happiness in several facets of your life will lead to higher satisfaction with your life overall. But if love is The Most Important Thing, be your bad self and go after it.

Real-world superheros

It is so easy to get discouraged about the future when the present is so grim. The economy is in terrible shape. Every day, more young people are sent off to war. Turn on the news and all you'll see is suffering. And through it all, we as individuals often feel helpless.

Then there are superheroes. These individuals with special powers who can change the world with an individual act. They don't have to think, they don't have to theorize. The instant they decide to do something, they can do it.

Superheroes aren't real... and yet...

The other day, I read this article about a woman who distributed 35 blankets and $5 McDonald's gift cards to homeless people in Boston. She saw a problem and acted. Her actions might not change the world, and they might be putting a band-aid on the problem, but for the individual people she helped, in the moment that she helped them, she made a difference. She even has a cool, superhero look about her.

 

Happy Valentine's Day.

Next Update: Monday - "The Skin I'm In"

Alternatives to dating a girl who reads

By now, we've all learned why we should date an illiterate girl, why we should date a girl who reads, and why we shouldn't date a girl who travels... These posts are multiplying like scabies*, so I thought I'd throw some ideas out there for other people to spend time on.

1. Date a girl who breathes. Everyone should have standards!
2. Date a girl who's just like my girlfriend, but not actually my girlfriend because that would be weird.
3. Date a girl who reads The Onion and takes it seriously.
4. Don't date a girl who writes whimsical blog posts.
5. Date a woman. You're an adult; time to grow up.

*More on this on Monday!

Edit: Looks like "Date a girl who breathes" already exists, and it's great, so check it out.

L'esprit de l'escalier

Someone says something to you, something insulting or aggravating. You know there's a good comeback out there, but, put on the spot, your mind goes blank. Maybe you mumble some attempt at a retort, or maybe you stay silent and brood over your negative feelings.

Then, hours later, it comes to you: the perfect response.

This is l'esprit de l'escalier, staircase wit. It even has its own wikipedia article.

Welcome to my life. Welcome to my blog.