Returning to old skool blogging with as little fanfare as possible...
The holiday mail malaise meant that I received a copy of The New Yorker, one per day, every day last week.
And one particular Letters Section ("The Mail," December 15, 2025) has me asking, 'Were the interns in charge of choosing these?'
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Dylan M. of Brooklyn notes that yes, it's terrible that Trump has demolished Roosevelt's East Wing...
BUT...
The "original structure was built in part by enslaved people."
SO...
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Karin S-R of Santa Rosa, CA writes as "a feminist, a therapist, and a mother of twin teen-age boys" and notes that yes, there may be a "so-called crisis facing men..."
BUT...
"if feminism does not expand its concern to include the well-being of men..."
"feminism cannot depend on the erasure of male identity." [?]
"if [emphasis mine] WE don't help to articulate new, healthier visions of masculinity..."
[Karin, that sounds like more uncompensated work AND your boys are lucky to have you for a mom.]
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George of San Leandro, CA, notes that "nowadays, commentators frequently introduce Trump by describing him as a 'felon' or a 'convicted criminal.'"
BUT...
"[T]here are about twenty-four million people who have been convicted of felony offenses. Not all of their convictions were the result of fair processes."
[You just KNOW where George is going with this...]
"Words like 'felon' and 'convict' are often used, as in reference to Trump, to signal that someone has inherently low moral worth. This can contribute to the punishing of people who have already been subject to injustices..."
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Could The New Yorker please put its entire letters section at the Thanksgiving table with Leslie Jones?
Junior Dude's Brit Lit teacher is awesome. And she got her high school seniors freewriting today on the topic of "A college (application) essay" -- here's the one my son wrote.
Me? I love to fight for justice. From the British in 1776 to the Soviets in the 1980's and every war in between. I am crafty. I can make a sniper rifle that can kill someone 10 miles away out of nothing but sticks and tape. I can cook. Once the President awarded me the Medal of Honor for cooking him the best steak he's ever had. I am intelligent. I know how to destroy black holes and keep stars from exploding. I am charismatic. Once I convinced a smoking hot woman to bring her friends back to my hotel room. Let's just say that night was wild. I am a winner. Once I won an election with 100% of the vote. And over 80 million votes were cast. I am a sports god. Once I got 6 home runs, 4 touchdowns, 8 slam dunks, and 18 holes in one--all on the same day. I have done everything you can think of. Except go to college.
Podcast up next, but first....You need Girl Scout cookies! Because the right wing has their panties in a real twist about teaching girls to have enough self-esteem to take care of themselves, and be accepting of others regardless of how they might be different. Because teaching intolerance is much more Christian? I'm not going to use the eff word in a post about the Girl Scouts.
Also, I'm not going to mention how many camp counselors were, um, tomboys at my daughter's Girl Scout summer camp last year. It has ALWAYS been that way, yes, even in the fifties. ESPECIALLY in the fifties. Check out Smith College or any other majority-woman institution. They are where the girls are, and that's not predatory, it's just human. Lesbians and the transgendered are not a threat to our daughters, get over it.
Anyhoo, if a Girl Scout Troop is not available to you and you would like to buy some cookies, email me at bluegalsblog AT gmail and I will hook you up with some delicious self-esteem building tolerance cookies. Apparently there are also websites and even an iPhone app for cookie finding. And several of the cookie varieties are vegan, which, I hear, are very popular with you commies.
Which one is most likely to supervise the getting done of the homework tonight?
It's hard to tell from appearances, or is it?
It absolutely amazes me that religious conservatives go so batshit over people who apparently share so many of the same values. I'm pretty sure the woman in the Hijab puts her kids before her tattoos, beer, and 'sluts heart me' Tshirt.
But the headscarf is different, so she can't have a church in town? Because the CHRISTIAN majority is skeered of her?
The rest of the story involved forming and leading an army, exploding helicopters, and something called "Spanish Class," which, I assume, is secret code.
Leave the dishes. Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator and earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor. Leave the black crumbs at the bottom of the toaster. Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup. Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins. Don't even sew in a button. Let the wind have its way, then the earth that invades as dust and then the dead foaming up in gray rolls under the couch. Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome. Don't keep all the pieces of the puzzle or the doll's tiny shoes, don't worry who uses whose toothbrush or if anything matches, at all. Except one word to another. Or a thought. Pursue the authentic. Go after it with all your heart. Your heart, that place you don't even think of cleaning out. That closet stuffed with savage mementos. Don't sort the paperclips from screws from saved baby teeth or worry if we're all eating cereal for dinner again. Don't answer the telephone, ever, or weep over anything that breaks. Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life and talk to the dead who drift in through the screened windows, who collect patiently on tops of food jars and books. Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anything except what destroys the insulation between yourself and your experience.
My guess is Louise Erdrich's children are like mine. They're artists in their own right. And so when I emerge from my writing / film mashing / photoshopping / podcast editing and walk into the living room and there is a garbage bag laid out on the floor (thank you child) with sharpie markers and paper and a bottle of olive oil from the kitchen (yes really) and they've made something too, there is mutual space, mental and physical and temporal, for all of us to do our work.
7yo is sitting next to me right now and so I asked her how do you become an artist. She replied, "I don't know, I was born that way. I was born with ARTISTIC ABILITY." as she swishes her hand across the air. It's in her, it's in me. And there is space amid the mess.
More, including examples of my children's work, at this post from 2008. You can help keep the crayons sharp at our house by donating on this, the last day of my quarterly fundraiser. Thanks.
Because I couldn't avoid that trending Twitter topic any longer. Apparently he's a blonde haircut with autotune, but then my generation had Shaun Cassidy, so yeah, I'll shut up now.
But...you gotta ask yourself, would they love Justin as much if he traded hair with Don King?
ps. 7yo thinks he's quote, "just amazing and he's totally hot and stuff? I wish I could meet him."
Early last month my first grader had a writing assignment to write an actual snail mail letter. She wrote it to me:
Dear Mom,
I WANT a hambster. I want a habster because I never had a Pet and I want to know what it fels like to have a Pet. I will feed it and You will clene the cage.
Love So much
[signed]
Her teacher wrote at the bottom in red pen:
Why do you deserve a pet?
I responded with this:
It's a gerbil, actually, as they are said to be a bit more social and a bit less nocturnal than hamsters.
At last night's salon we talked about what to name her. I want a bloggy name but I was afraid if I named her Jane she might set fire to her own cage, and if I named her Digby she'd just want to write brilliantly all the time and I'd get very very jealous.
Some at the salon suggested Gilly. A heartfelt suggestion, but really, this rodent is small, female, and fair of color. Not a good match.
The kids want to name her "Jessica Awesome." I have no idea where that came from, and it seems a little "Kim Possible"-ish to me, but time will tell.
In the meantime she survived the night, she's eating and chewing the toilet paper roll we gave her, and she hasn't growled once at anyone.
The first grader, to her credit, read aloud to Jessica Awesome for over 45 minutes last night.
I have a little shelf in the dining room where her cage fits, but the kids want her at eye level on the dining room table for now. Will that become her permanent spot? Ya think?
And yes, that is a "Keep your panties on, I'm blogging" nightshirt* she's wearing. I've also found one more reason to be grateful that Tom Tancredo is retiring this year.
Just had one of those mornings with the kids, particularly the youngest, who turns 6 this Friday and has decided that any and all behavior problems I identify as belonging to HER are actually and completely the entire fault of her 11-year-old brother.
BUT JUNIOR SAID! BUT JUNIOR WAS! BUT JUNIOR MADE ME!
Ugh.
So I go and look up behavior charts that I might use with her, since they work so well for her at school.
There are charts for
"I didn't bite anyone today" and
"I slept in my own bed without wetting."
Okay. So I'm doing better than I think,and so is my 6 year old.
So then I think I'm going to have a morning alternating between sulking-due-to-single-parenthood-burnout and housecleaning, and the phone rings.
I had volunteered to drive a large shipment of newborn baby supplies to a local distribution center for transport to Haiti. They were ready for the mom van to take it over.
And I thought of those new mothers. And the conditions they woke up in this morning.
I don't like our generation's habit of thinking "there are people in the world worse off than me." It leads us to accept less than we're worth in relationships, jobs, and governments.
But saying to ourselves "I am going to help someone worse off than I am AND insist on my own worth to the world." is a terrific affirmation, one that I forget.
The distribution center (where I dropped off 191 pounds of toothpaste, soap, diapers, newborn shirts, and washcloths) had a poster on the wall: "You may be one person to the world, but you may be the world to one person."
I hope I made a difference today. I know I made an effort.
Here's what happens if you do: My district started
a magnet elementary school that began enrolling students in August 2001. Open to all students in the district and, at first, operated contractually by a private firm, Edison Schools, Feitshans got off to mixed reviews. More than 600 students signed up to attend the school, which quickly developed a waiting list. Yet, complaints soon developed about discipline and security problems.
District officials later acknowledged other elementary schools had encouraged their students with behavior problems to transfer there. Despite efforts to diversify enrollment, other students began pulling out. Eventually, Edison pulled out, too.
So you decide to throw a magnet school contract to a privately held company. BUT you forget to throw up a gate to keep "troubled" kids out? And the teachers and administrators know this and send the undesirables your way? You get what you deserve, douchebags.
Yet another unforeseen side effect of No Child Left Behind is that teachers and administrators at local schools do whatever they can to eliminate poor-performing kids and hold on to high-performing kids. My middle child just missed the cut-off to transfer to the disrict's "gifted" school by three test points. Not three percentage points, three test points. No one at her school told me this, and I don't blame them. The local school desperately needed my kid to meet minimum standards for average test score results. But with all due respect to the awful job local schools are handed, up yours, because I'm going to do what is best for MY kid, not YOUR school. (I also think it's horrible that my district has segregated gifted kids into their own building rather than provide services within the local schools, but if this is what I'm handed I have to use it, as a parent. We advocated and got middle child transferred.)
Probably preaching to the choir here. This testing bullshit is hurting our country's ability to educate its children. Wonder why we have overwhelming drop out rates in this country? Could it have something to do with schools needing to have high average test scores?
I agree with this commenter at a remembrance of Public Television's Mister Rogers:
My favorite memory of Mr. Rogers is the way he responded to children’s emotional needs during tragedies such as the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11. He advised parents and teachers to focus on showing kids the rescuers and other people who were demonstrating kindness and trying to save others. He wanted kids to understand that although bad things will sometimes happen, there are always people ready to help, ready to make the world right again. In short, he planted faith.
I've also had an opportunity this weekend to talk to my children about Martin Luther King, who was not a perfect person but who made a big difference in the history of our country. People tried to stop him and he was even killed for trying to change things, but he still worked hard to make a difference.
Having kids means you take things to their simple elements, which can be really helpful to all of us as adults, too.
Salon tonight, 9 Eastern at http://tinychat.com/n8kh. It's just typing chat, and it's often very fun. Hope to see you there. First timers are always warmly welcomed!
In order to get my cranky 5 year old to put on her school clothes this morning, I, Blue Gal, noted commie and anti-commercialist, actually played the "Santa Claus is coming to town" gambit. On OCTOBER 22. I know.
After school, she'll get a dose of the Bruce Springsteen version:
Hey, if she better be good for goodness' sake, that'll do.
You know the title of my [unwritten] parenting book, right?
There's a very funny and popular Twitter account called Shitmydadsays. Whether it's a real dad or made up it's very well-written and you WILL laugh your butt off.
I'm thinking I may need to start a 'stuff my kids say' hashtag:
10 yo: "Mom, we have five billion years until the sun burns out. We'd better use those five billion years wisely."
5 yo: "Mom, whatever you do, don't stick your hair in the toilet."
7 yo: "Mom, can we get...[many attempts at pronounciation] mistletoe? I want to kiss somebody."
5 yo, when a guest sat too close to the paper and crayons: "Don't ruin my art!"
10 yo again: "Mom, you have NO IDEA what I put up with from living with those two sisters of mine."
[Welcome to the beautiful people coming here from Crooks and Liars.]
I attended a Community Organizing type meeting sponsored by the school district where as of next year, all three of my children will attend. The meeting was run by the President of the School Board, a man who clearly came from a long line of AME preachers, because "parental involvement in education" was not just the theme of the meeting, it was the God bless-ed gospel, and don't you forget it.
We parents who attended a 90 minute mid-day meeting to discuss parental involvement over cold Subway platters? Yeah. He was preaching to the converted.
The purpose of the meeting was to gather feedback and help to form a plan of action to help more parents in our community involve themselves in their children's education. We brainstormed on reasons why parents in my community might not become involved. Some of the reasons, and I am not making these up, on the paper flipchart (thank you Jesus there was no Powerpoint presentation):
Lack of transportation Holding down multiple jobs Substance abuse Power is turned off at home One or both parents are incarcerated
I mean, we got to "incarceration" within four minutes.
I live in a poor city. Every elementary school in the district is designated Title I, which means extra Federal funds because, duh, the majority of parents in the district are low income. It's called "Improving The Academic Achievement Of The Disadvantaged" but in the world of No Child Left Behind the focus is, of course, far more about standardized test scores than about making sure the child's home has a paid electric bill and at least one parent not in jail.
A few days after this meeting, I met, literally on the schoolyard, an acquaintance, the mother of one of my 6yo's friends. She's under 30, dayglo red hair, tattoos, and a hand-cut cleavage wild child t-shirt.
She's pregnant. Again.
"We found out late. I'm due August 4. I just found out this week."
Dear readers: I do not do math in my head very quickly, but I knew right away for a fact that this woman had gone four cycles pregnant and had just "found out." Granted, as someone who has gone through infertility treatment, I STILL know two years after my tubes were done my exact day of would-be ovulation every single month.
But look, it's one thing to not know anything about what is going on in the world or even your kid's school and not give a shit. It's another to not know what the hell is going on in your own body.
Mr. Gingrich, while I have you on the phone, allow me to say that I am far more worried about the threat to this nation of ignorant parents and their neglected children, as well as a government policy that thinks they can fix these problems with standardized testing, than I am about some invented terrorist boogie man you want to prop up on the Sunday shows. And don't you EVER mention family values while I'm within castrating distance of you.
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Unlike this whole torture-the-terrorists BS brought on by Cheney and Gingrich, there is an actual debate going on in the Republican party over sex: exemplified by Bristol Palin on the 'anti-sex' side and Meghan McCain on the 'pro-sex' side. It recalls a New Yorker article I've linked many times before and will again, Red Sex, Blue Sex:
Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.
So Bristol Palin gets pregnant and doesn't get an abortion, and her choices are understood and even accepted in Red State world. And Meghan McCain is clearly sexually active but doesn't get pregnant, and describes herself as a "progressive Republican."
It's become very clear to me this week after offering, sincerely, to help the "just found out" mom find some hand-me-down baby clothes, that the debate between Bristol and Meghan is not about political party or feminism or even sex itself. It is about economic class. (Yes, my preschooler can tell you that Mommy is a Marxist in the intellectual sense.)
Remember the wonderful old movie Pygmalion, from the Shaw play, with Wendy Hiller and Leslie Howard? Done far better than the My Fair Lady version, mind you. Professor Higgins announces that he will make Eliza Doolittle into a fine lady by teaching her to speak properly:
HIGGINS [carried away] Yes: in six months -- in three if she has a good ear and a quick tongue -- I'll take her anywhere and pass her off as anything. We'll start today: now! this moment! Take her away and clean her, Mrs. Pearce. Is there a good fire in the kitchen?
MRS. PEARCE [protesting]. Yes; but—
HIGGINS [storming on] Take all her clothes off and burn them. Ring up Whitely or somebody for new ones. Wrap her up in brown paper til they come.
LIZA. You're no gentleman, you're not, to talk of such things. I'm a good girl, I am; and I know what the like of you are, I do.
HIGGINS. We want none of your slum prudery here, young woman. You've got to learn to behave like a duchess.
Behaving like a duchess means having no concern over whether society thinks you are a 'good girl' sexually. George Bernard Shaw understood that the cultural battle over sexual morals is not about sex. It's about whether you need to position yourself as morally superior about sex, because that is your economic class's only claim to gentility. (Notice Eliza's slum prudery extends so far as to getting naked for a bath.)
Oh. Did somebody say duchess?
There she is, the daughter of military royalty and brewmaster aristocracy. The word "privileged" comes to mind.
Something Bristol Palin is not.
Bristol Palin recently said "If girls realized the consequences of sex, nobody would be having sex. Trust me. Nobody." Clearly, 'nobody' does not include Meghan McCain, because Meghan has the financial, emotional, and educational resources to protect herself from the unwanted consequences of sexual activity.In a word, she can afford to be pro-sex. Hell, if she gets pregnant, she can afford a crib that costs as much as educating three kids in Catholic school for a year.
Or have Cindy's people call for shipping. The wealthy can afford the crib and the sex and the babies and even the abortions, even if the poor in the red states were to succeed in making that illegal. There's always a trip to Canada, Norway, or a high-priced physician willing to perform an undocumented "procedure." Most importantly, unlike the vast unwashed of Red State Evangelicalism, the rich do not need a pro-life anti-sex political position to be Better Than You.
The rich can also afford to opt out of Title I public education. In doing so, they leave their debt to society completely and utterly unpaid. Not ironically, education leads to a higher 'class' of people, people who don't need slum morals and sexual hypocrisy to prove superior societal status. If we want less influence for the religious right and the Republican Party that takes advantage of their ignorance, we have to start going to public school board meetings and find baby clothes and maybe a clue for the unrefined mother down the street. Paying my debt to society includes her baby, too.
My middle child daughter surprised me the other day:
"We have hardly ANY rules at our house."
She'd been visiting a friend's house, obviously, where they didn't eat in the living room, cut paint and paste on the dining room table, you know, GOOD parenting.
I thought about it for a minute, and realized just how many rules there ARE in my house:
Very little is as important as what you children are interested in.
Mommy will be there whenever she possibly can, which is most of the time.
Don't hurt each other and don't hurt yourself. When mommy says "dangerous"? That's the law.
Making something is much more valuable than buying something. Shopping is not a leisure activity.
Recently I had to sit down with all the children and explain to them that getting to school, church, and yes, BED on time were essential to 'making things work' around here. Getting homework done was also required. That's four things, and even my youngest could handle remembering that (and has to have her own 'homework' as a result, ha).
And last night same middle child asked THAT question: "which of us do you like the most?"
Oh, there's a very big rule about that. Mommies MUST like all their children the same.
"Oh. I saw something...." She thought about it for a second. "But that was just a TV show."
Yep.
***
So, thinking about this some more and I'm kind of shocked that with a few variations, I'm actually using the exact same rules I grew up with. So my question for parents is, are you? Do you do things the opposite of your parents or the same? I don't want anyone to feel they have to dig out and vent the painful aspects of their childhood. Goodness knows I've got mine. But I happily invite you to tell us what a good parent you are, and how rules and parenting fit in the path of doing the best you can.
When I get a note from the teacher "Tuesday is standardized testing day. Please emphasize to your child the importance of yadda yadda ya," it's like being on a computer chat line with customer service. Teacher only has a limited range of responses in her menu, and she doesn't really believe any of them, but can only select one. Just like the multiple choice tests my kid is taking today. And tomorrow. And the next day.
I don't get a customer service survey on whether my kid is well-educated because, well, ensuring my child gets a quality education is my job as a parent. Some days it's rewarding, and some, like the last 24 hours, are exhausting. I'm a failure as a mom and I'm in wonderful, excellent company with every other mom on the planet, so at least there's no peer pressure -- we can all feel the gargantuan guilt together.
I feel for the teachers, especially those who didn't sign up for this tour of No Child Left Behind drill duty, but signed up years ago to simply teach. And yeah, I reminded my child this morning about the test and the importance of yadda yadda ya in solidarity with you.
My ten-year-old son has a NEED greater than pizza. Star Wars novels, comics, compendiums, omnibus compendiums, etc. etc.
It turns out the world he is about to enter is inhabited with young men just like him, ha....
Reading the online reviews by one Star Wars fan cracked me up:
"It's not really that great of a book but you should read it just to be informed."
"If you start the young Jedi Knights series, do not stop (14 part series). They are not a necessity, but they expand and provide much needed light on the Solo children and other academy Jedi."
Wait, some of these books are NOT "necessities"? Don't try telling that to Junior Dude.
Also, whoever designed Gmail spellcheck is one of them. Because if you don't capitalize "Jedi," the spell checker catches it. Just saying.
PS. There's obviously a Higher Power/Force at work here, because I didn't have to photoshop a thing (or even search very long) to find and post this image:
