Another Sock Yarn Project

Well, it’s been a while, but I haven’t been doing much because the weather has been pretty warm. It snowed yesterday, so I started another project. I have lots and lots of leftover bits of sock yarn, so I’m doing mitered squares. It will probably wind up being a blanket of sorts, but I’m not sure yet if I’m going to join strips diagonally, thus making the miters point upwards, or if I like the look of them being kind of sideways, like some optical illusion.

For this project, I’m using size 4 needles, and casting on 40 stitches. I then slip one stitch for a tighter edge and knit one row plain, then knit to the two stitches before the middle (K18) then K2tog, (insert maker) then sl 1, knit 1, pass slipped stitch over, and knitting the remaining 18 stitches. The next row is sl 1, knit plain (38 sts). On the next row and every OTHER row thereafter, I knit to the last two sts before the marker and miter as noted above. When I’m down to only 4 sts remaining, I k2 tog, sl 1, k 1, psso, then turn and knit the last two sts together. I leave that stitch on the needle and pick up 19 more stitches down one side of the square for 20 stitches, insert a marker and cast on 20 more. Knit one row plain and continue as before. Also, I put a safety pin on what I decide is the right side of the work so I don’t forget.

I’ll keep you posted as this evolves.

Keep ‘em clickin’!

Oddball Word of the Day

ventose (VEN-tohs) adj. windy; given to empty talking

(from the guide to MMMW edited by Laurence Urdang)

How Was My Easter? IN-LAWS! ‘Nuff Said.

Well, probably not, or I wouldn’t be writing a blog entry about it! I should also, for flavor, introduce the cast of characters – my family was there, of course, which included hubs, Spawn, Bunny, Doodle, and me. Hubs has Issues with his siblings. His entire family has problems with clocks – one time they showed up 4 hours late for a housewarming. What makes that particularly relevant is that it was ours. Spawn had to go to work in the afternoon, so we all agreed that we would make sure to leave in time.

My mother-in-law, widowed last year, her husband of almost 60 years having died of CJD, was there, of course. I admire the way she is bouncing back, at 82 years of age, from such a tremendous loss. She’s involved with her remaining friends and has survived with aplomb (or perhaps senility) the passing of a dear friend in the interim. She stays active in her community and is working on learning to fend for herself. She has moved out of the family homestead – a 50 year old tract home in the south suburbs and into a small townhouse which was specifically designed for older people who may be having mobility issues – wheelchair wide doorways, grip bars in strategic locations, easy access all around. She and I had a difficult few years, but since her mild stroke at her 50th anniversary party, and my subsequent bulldozing of pretty much everyone to get her to the hospital, we’ve found a new appreciation and accord for and with one another. She’s pretty deaf and sometimes forgets her hearing aids, and she’s kind of a mumbler.

Then there was my brother-in-law, a confirmed bachelor, aged 50-ish, who is, in my opinion, so completely unable to comfortably relate to others on a one-to-one basis that he invites everyone to everything – every family gathering has to be a party, so that he can plan to be a perfect host rather than learning about other people and letting them learn about him. His late father also described him as being one of those people on a perpetual quest to jam 10 lbs of sand into a 5 lb bag on a regular basis because he plans to do way more than is ever actually possible or sensible. He’s also kind of manipulative, and I generally find him shallow and annoying. I am not alone in those feelings.

Also present were my sister-in-law and her new husband, who happens to be her third husband. I like the new husband – he’s in his early sixties, a medical professional, easy-going, mellow, interesting to talk to, and he has a wide-range of interests. He’s also very wealthy, which explains to a considerable extent why my sister-in-law married him. She’s a 55 year old drama queen, a diva, who has run her own life into the ditch so many times that none of her immediate family will discuss her past because it’s too embarrassing. She has one son, who was not there, who’s in his early thirties, and they have issues that would make Dr. Phil run for his Prozac stash in a big Texas hurry. Just picture growing up in the shadow of your single mother’s perpetual, self-absorbed emotion storm, and I’ll leave your imagination to fill in the blanks there. I try very hard to stay in the moment when I’m in her company. I am sometimes successful. Ahem.

And then there was the only other person my brother-in-law could rope into joining us at the last moment for Easter lunch, my ex-Aunt-in-law-sorta. She used to be married to a distant cousin of my mother-in-law, divorced him 20 years ago, and we haven’t stopped hearing about it since. She’s also a diva, although a more objective one than my sister-in-law, if that’s possible, and she gets notions. Being a stone-cold diva, her most significant notion is that we are all fascinated to pieces over whatever is going on with her. The good part of her diva-hood is that if we are not in favor with her (i.e. we haven’t been slobbering all over ourselves to pay her the attention she feels she deserves), she cold shoulders us and doesn’t waste much of our time blathering ceaselessly into our ears. I actually think she’s kind of funny, and sometimes she means to be. She can be very charming if you have something she wants. She was 45 minutes late, and her entry involved a lot of waving scarves and a deep-throated, “OH, don’t EVEN ASK! Oh!”

Anyway, we headed off to meet at an Olive Garden close to mother-in-law, hubs in an evil mood because he really wasn’t looking forward to being part of the audience for his brother’s party demeanor and the inevitable simultaneous two-diva emote-off. I was busy strategizing.

I realized that over the many years of our marriage, I’ve let his family drive events, partially out of respect for his parents, and partially from wanting to be a people-pleaser to some extent. With Spawn, my own offspring, needing to leave by a very specific time, I also realized I couldn’t allow that to happen this time. Since they are notorious dawdlers with no respect for other people’s time, I was going to have to trust my own generally reliable clock and just take charge of getting things moving along. The first order of business would be making sure we were seated and ordering right on time, regardless of whether the rest of them were there or not.

So, I did. I got us seated, and, wonder of wonders, the rest of them showed up within a few minutes (except for Auntie Diva), and I had already ordered a couple of hors d’oeuvres for the table. I made sure to tell my mother-in-law that we had to leave at a specific time, why we had to leave and to get her agreement that that was perfectly OK. Amazing how well that worked out in the end. When Auntie Diva didn’t show, didn’t answer her cell or home phones, my sister-in-law started her worry routine, and I put a big, deliberately obtuse foot on it to stamp it out and said, “She’s probably on her way, and it’s against the law to talk on a cell phone when you’re driving in this state. We need to order because we need to be gone by 3 o’clock, and I’m sure the staff will make certain to serve Auntie Diva promptly when she does arrive.” Sister-in-law began to pout until mother-in-law said, very pleasantly, “Of course, that makes perfect sense.” Victory!

And, in general, things went pretty swimmingly as long as I stayed on top of making things move right along time-wise. There were a few moments of excessive quirkiness, though. As the restaurant filled up, we had to yell louder and louder at my mother-in-law, and she got mumblier and mumblier. Eventually, this resulted in a lot of people with perfectly good hearing yelling, “WHAT?” at the deaf lady. It’s a good thing I enjoy irony.

Then there was the moment when my sister-in-law’s divahood overcame my pledge to be obliviously swell at all times. We’d been talking about Spawn’s tastefully masculine earrings and how that didn’t bother me, that I just tell the kids no facial piercings or tattoos while they’re living at home, and I’m not paying for any of that anyway. The sis-in-law decided to share one her Great Moments in Parenting with us. (Breathe deeply; you’ll be glad you did.) She regaled us with the time her grown son, who hasn’t lived with her since he was 15 years old, returned from serving in the military during the current war and came to visit her. He was wearing a tank top and had a tattoo of a yin-yang symbol on his upper arm, which caused her to, in her own words, “burst into tears. I was just weeping and weeping.”

My mouth hung open in shock, and I stupidly asked, ”Why?” She replied, “Because he’s my BABY!” That flipped all my social behavior meters into overload, they shorted out, and the next thing out of my mouth was, “Oh my God, it’s not like he’s Jewish and can’t be buried in a Jewish cemetery now!” The look of utter and complete shock on HER face, that I would think she was making a mountain out of a molehill and that I was thinking about HIM rather than her emotions, was probably worth whatever price I’ll wind up having to pay. My mother-in-law chuckled at my wit, my husband snorted into his salad, and my daughter nearly choked on an olive.

My social behavior meters hadn’t charged back up yet, so I made it worse by blurting out, “I wouldn’t care about that, I’d just be glad to see him.” Heads bobbed in agreement, and then I finally realized what I was doing and rammed a truckload of lettuce into my own face to shut myself up. Fortunately, the conversation moved on to dentistry, and sis-in-law could take that opportunity to save up her flusterment at my hands until she gets the chance to trash talk me behind my back.

I’m about half embarrassed and half glad that I said it. She provides a lot of her interpretations of Great Moments in Parenting which make me want to either puke at her self-absorption or just leave the room before I puke, and that winds up with me venting later, which hubs doesn’t need either since he is usually there, too. At least this time, I haven’t needed to vent, having gotten it all out on the spot.

Aside from that, things were OK until it came time to pay the bill. The dithering began. “I want to pay at least part of it,” insisted my mother-in-law. “I think we should all pay for our own groups,” said my husband. My brother-in-law offered, “Why don’t I just see what each person’s...” before he was interrupted by Auntie Diva barking out, “What? Are we paying? I only got here a little while ago!” As they argued, I grabbed the bill folder, shoved my credit card into it, and returned it to the waitress, who scampered off to run it through the machine.

My husband looked at me with his eyebrows raised. “We can just let the others send us checks or whatever,” I said, “it’s 20 minutes before 3, which leaves us just enough time to pay, make a pit stop, and get back on the road.” He nodded and then proceeded to yell that explanation at his mother, who agreed and smiled at me. The rest of them were still dithering, except for my new brother-in-law, who, in a very gentlemanly fashion, quietly got some cash out of his wallet and on his way to the bathroom, slipped it to hubs. He was quite generous, and I think he was glad that for once someone else picked up the tab before his new wife could get theatrically extravagant with his money.

On the trip home, my husband was in a much better mood. He glanced over at me and whispered, “Jewish cemetery?” and grinned. If I could have slammed my head onto the dashboard, I would have. I just said, “Oops” and smiled back. He patted my hand and smiled some more.

So, I suppose all in all, it really worked out much better than our usual gatherings with his clan. They weren’t late and we weren’t either; dithering and dawdling was reduced to a minimum, my mother-in-law and I were in perfect amity about the need to keep on schedule and paying the bill sensibly and quickly, and, of all of them, she’s the only one I really give a hangnail about (except for my kids, and they were VERY happy about not being late and hanging around with loud family beyond their endurance level). It makes me think that maybe joining them for other gatherings might not be so bad from here on out, as long as I stand firm on our needs as a family unit. And I hope sis-in-law will keep her Great Moments in Parenting to herself from now on, too.

Oddball Word of the Day

desultory (DEHS ul-tuh-ree): adj. disconnected; casual; unmethodical

(from the guide to MMMW edited by Laurence Urdang)

Directionally Impaired

I’ve been busy shuffling family members from one place to another, mostly doctors’ offices lately, and this week is shaping up the same way. I can find my way around my own town reasonably well, but I get lost easily when I leave town. I used to make sure and conscientiously get Mapquest directions, then I’d highlight them to make the important turns more obvious, and I’d even trim off excess paper for easier in-car handling. Sometimes I still got lost either from reading something wrong or because the roads had changed since they were charted by Mapquest.

I get lost less often these days, but it has nothing to do with Mapquest. Last Christmas, my husband got me a Garmin GPS Navigator and stuck it to my windshield. Hubs is one of those guys who, even if I give him color choices and catalog numbers, will go shopping for me at Ace Hardware because that’s where he feels comfortable, and it’s got stuff he feels comfortable buying. He has bought me something wonderfully feminine (a purse with beads) exactly once in our marriage – otherwise it’s appliances, electronic doo-dads, or other things that whirr or clank.

Well, the Garmin looked like a pretty good compromise – something I would probably actually use, plus, even though it doesn’t whirr, it does require a power supply, which fits his criteria. He was very excited and drove my car all over town, plugging locations into “My Favorites” for which I don’t need directions, since I already know how to get to all of them. I thanked him nicely and didn’t use it for a month.

One day I got a little curious, so I turned it on and thought, “OK, let’s see if you know how to get to the middle school.” A female voice advised me on how to properly leave my driveway and what to do once I did. I got a slightly eerie feeling creeping up my neck, but I ignored it. I followed Garmin’s directions, which were perfectly accurate, up until I was ½ block away from the middle school. Garmin advised me to “TURN LEFT.” I replied, “I can’t, that would put me in the middle of a baseball field. Damned high tech crap!” Garmin shrieked that I must immediately “TURN LEFT, TURN LEFT!”

I didn’t turn left. Garmin sulked. After I had turned into the parking lot for the middle school, Garmin announced that it was “RECALCULATING,” and I swear I could hear it making noises of disgust and impatience. The now distinctly creepy female voice advised me to drive a half a block back east and TURN RIGHT. I cut off its power supply instead.

I used Garmin another couple of times that same week when I went out of town on errands. Inevitably, the navigator has been dubbed not only female, but shrewish as well. In all fairness, though, she managed to get me to and from my locations with no detours through sports fields or children’s parks. Another month went by before I powered Garmin back up again.

This time, I wanted to see what she’d do if I put a destination in and then ran other errands first. She didn’t like it much at all – she shrieked, “TURN LEFT! TURN RIGHT!” and then repeatedly mumbled and spat about how I was forcing her to begin “RECALCULATING”. I could hear the “DAMMIT” under her digital voice. I was reminded of the Star Trek episode where some bright spark gives the ship’s computer a personality and it then either flirts, pouts or refuses to do as asked. I wondered if I was pushing Garmin to her limits, too. She tried to send me down the right street the wrong way, and I’d have been unable to park from that direction, and she wasn’t happy with me. I felt I’d gotten the upper hand, just a little, on my home turf. It wasn’t much of a victory, but I felt triumphant nonetheless.

So, last week Garmin snoozed while I trundled Doodle to the dentist, Bunny to a friend’s house, myself to the hospital, and ran a thousand ordinary errands. I woke her up on Wednesday and told her that we were going to be taking some very important cargo into Joliet – my Dad had an appointment with his cardiologist. As I poked her buttons, I reminded her that this would not be a good time to play any pranks involving streets under either construction or water, and that I really needed her help this time. I always get lost either coming or going because of the one-way streets. I apologized for muting her voice; I didn’t want it to startle or confuse my Dad, who, with his Alzheimer’s taking a circuitous route through his brain, startles easily at some things and becomes extremely perplexed and eventually upset over other things.

Garmin didn’t let me down. The route in was a little different from my former Mapquest routes, and the route out was a little different, too. I don’t care; I got there and back in good time, confidently, and with Dad in good humor and spirits. I can forgive Garmin for being kind of a stress monkey from time to time, and for being occasionally inaccurately programmed (by yards rather than miles), as long as I can get my Dad and other loved ones where they want or ought to be.

So, if you see me, or some other person, arguing vociferously with an empty car, and you see a little black circle on the windshield, it’s not Rush Limbaugh who’s set us off, it’s probably Garmin. And, we will get where we’re going, especially after all the “RECALCULATING!”

Oddball Word of the Day

napiform (NAY-peh-form): adj. having the shape of a turnip

(from the guide to MMMW, edited by Laurence Urdang)

THE Talk

I’ve now had to have The Talk with my two oldest children. I knew when I became a parent that someday I’d need to have the talk with them. I naively thought The Talk would be about sex and figured that I was pretty much done when we had that one at the onset of puberty for each child.

With my oldest one, and I do pity firstborns because things are usually awkward and untried with them, so they have to cope with experimental parenting as well as their own issues, I tried to be fairly clinical. I managed to avoid using charts or illustrations, and, eventually, I handed off to my husband. Being a man of few words, he raised one finger in the air wisely, opened his mouth, stalled while thinking for a minute or so, and then blurted out, “Let me know if you need any condoms.” Spawn’s brains caught fire and he had to smother the flames by putting a pillow over his head and squeaking a lot. Maybe he was laughing; I know I was. Hubs looked sheepish, shrugged, and left the room, figuring he’d done his fatherly duty. I suppose, if one is of a pithy type, he had.

Anyway, The Talk is not That talk. The Talk goes more like this:

Me: I need to talk with you about your performance in school.

Subject Juvenile (hereinafter SJ): You mean my grades, don’t you?

Me: Yes and no.

SJ: That means ‘yes’.

Me: Don’t distract me. I’m concerned that you are not working at your best level of performance.

SJ: Because I got a B? Geez, you always want me to be perfect.

Me: No, not because you got a B. I don’t care about Bs. What I care about is that I see you doing a lot of self-sabotaging and not turning in your best work, and that concerns me.

SJ: Because you want me to be perfect and have straight A’s and not have a life!

Me: No, those are not my standards, nor are they requirements. Grades are A reflection of performance, but they are not the only gauge of performance. What I’m worried about is that you are not developing academic diligence, and that is going to bite you on the behind in college. I am also concerned that you don’t want to put in your best effort just for the sake of doing so.

SJ: Why should I if I can get A’s from doing papers the night before or even if I don’t study, or if the teachers keep putting the due dates back? Why should I stress out over stuff like that if I can get good grades without working hard?

Me: Because this is not about grades, it’s about the pursuit of excellence for its own sake and for your sake in understanding what you can do when you really put your mind and effort into it, and for you to understand what you need in order to really do your best work. The end result of doing that, at this point in your life, MIGHT be a good grade and probably would be, but you know from past experience with me that if I see you putting in the time and putting in the thought and paying attention to what you are doing, I really don’t care what kind of a grade you get. Excellence has been diligently pursued, and that’s the point. If I think your teacher is being unfair or arbitrary, I’ll talk to them, but if I’m happy with your behavior, I have made a point to say so when that happens, and you know that.

SJ: So, if I work really hard on this term paper, and it “shows” to you, but I still get a B or a C on it, you don’t care.

Me: Mostly, no. If I think your teacher was grading improperly, I’ll say something and you can decide to take it up with the teacher or to have me do so if you wish. If you get a C, my first thought would be that, given you worked to your best ability, something went missing – maybe the teacher thought they specified something and didn’t, or maybe you forgot to do a specific something. But neither one of those things is going to make me think you did a slapdash job or sloughed off.

SJ: And, even if I can get A's without studying, you still think I should study?

Me: Yep. As you progress through school and into college and from there into the working world, you are going to, increasingly, need to develop your OWN standards which are as high or higher than those of your teachers, professors, and bosses. Those standards may be in different areas, with different goals, or they might be the same, but I think you need the practice in a) setting high standards for yourself, b) working diligently towards those standards, and c) understanding what it means to reach them or how to handle not reaching them as well. There will also be times when you may need to set your standards a little lower because you have other things that are more demanding that take precedence. All of that requires practice and awareness.

SJ: So, you’re saying that it’s OK to lower my standards sometimes?

Me: Yes, judiciously. Look, everyone has some point in time where their load is too heavy or too demanding and they really cannot put all their best effort towards everything – there aren’t enough hours in the day, their health is bad, they are having real trouble in some other area and need to put more attention towards fixing that – stuff like that. It’s called “prioritizing”.

SJ: Why should I “prioritize” schoolwork? Maybe I’m “prioritizing” my friendships.

Me: We both know that’s code for “I don’t wanna do it.”

SJ:

Me: Straight out, my experience with you and your work is that you have little experience in pursuing excellence for its own sake or for the sake of learning your own needs in achieving excellent results, you have minimal experience in understanding your time requirements, and you don’t really understand how to maximize your resources to your best advantage to achieve an outstanding result that YOU can be proud of. I’ve watched you put forth minimal to moderate effort in school for years now, and get praise and good grades for working far beneath your abilities. I’ve seen you look smug and disappointed at the same time, and I’ve seen what it’s done and is doing to your character. It is one of the things that has truly angered me about your schooling – that your teachers and peers reward you for putting so little effort into your work.

You are now hitting the wall in terms of not being able to achieve the results you are accustomed to with the same minimal effort, and you are getting angry and resentful and loud and difficult to live with, and that has to stop. And all of that is happening because you know that you are capable of doing better and you are disappointed in yourself for not doing better, right?

SJ: Yeah.

Me: So, rather than standing by, as I have been doing, biting my tongue, I’m stepping in now and telling you that things need to change, that you need to start learning academic rigor, self-discipline, set high standards for yourself, and learn the skills you need to achieve those results; that you need to learn how to pursue excellence so that you can be proud of what you create and achieve instead of resentful that it isn’t as easy as it used to be.

SJ: OK, I get it. … Are you mad at me?

Me: Not really. You haven’t been challenged to be your best outside of this house before this, so you have no experience in dealing with such a challenge. It’s very hard for me to tell someone who’s getting straight A's that they’re not working hard enough because how much harder can you work? Where are the rewards for doing so? I understand that. Things are different this year, and I’ve stood back to see how you’d react and given you time to learn on your own.

I still expect you to learn on your own – I’m just telling you that I see this problem and I expect you to handle it. It’s a tough call for a parent to make – if I speak up, am I interfering or am I doing the right thing. I’m not even sure myself. I just know that I can’t continue to sit by and listen to your anger and let you be hard to live with because you are frustrated – that’s hard on me and the other family members. You need to fix it, and this is my perspective on what’s going on.

SJ: It’s really not about the grades, is it?

Me: Remember “Skills for Adolescence”? Did I ride you like a donkey to excel in that class, or did I agree that it was a waste of your time and set some minimum grade standards?

SJ: Yeah, OK, I remember that.

Me: If you need to ask me for resource material or websites or advice, you can, but I’ve said my piece.

SJ: OK. Thanks. I think I understand better now what you’ve been telling me all these years, I just didn’t get it before because… I guess I didn’t see the reason for it before.

Me: OK. You do know that one way or the other, whether you decide to make changes or not, I love you just the same, right?

SJ: Yeah, I know.



I still don’t know if speaking up is the right choice, and I don’t know if I’ve done it well or really remarkably badly. I am seeing some changes, mostly for the positive now, but that could be short term. I don’t know. I want my kids to be happy in their adult lives; I want them to understand how well they can do when they try, how to prioritize, how to forgive themselves when they don’t do well, and how to keep trying. I want them to be proud of themselves, knowing they’ve done a good job, even if no one else ever acknowledges it, regardless of whether it’s a business plan, a doghouse, or a dinner for four. I want them to believe in themselves, to test themselves, and to learn to succeed to their own standards. And I don’t know if I’ve pushed them forward or under the damned Mommy bus. (sigh)

Meanwhile, it’s time to go tutor and do laundry and reassure the dog that the thunder is not going to come inside the house and eat him up. And if I’ve really screwed things up, maybe I at least managed to teach them to forgive their mom.

Oddball Word of the Day

puissance (PYOU-i-sens): n. great power, might, or influence

(from the guide to MMMW, edited by Laurence Urdang)

Five Places I Get News on the Web

I get syndicated feeds from a bunch of sites. Lots of my interest is in education, what with the whole having kids thing and all (I know people are snorting and hooting and going, “Oh, YA THINK?” behind my back. I’m fine with that. Have a beer.) so my sources are weighted in that direction.

1. Education News : Extremely reliable, mainly national but some international links, digests, and guest columnists. Lots of resources, high quality source of information, mainly for K-12. Really, the majority of the information deals with K-8, but that’s probably more of a reflection on the ratio in original source reportage. Daily feed.

3. Wrightslaw: Not only is there a fascinating personal history for the founder of this website, the wealth of legal information and analysis is unbeatable. Wrightslaw covers news and legal updates for IDEA and 504 issues for kids with disabilities. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Many of the articles are also handy for general-purpose interactions with school districts, or in situations where there is a potential for legal action in the future. Plan to spend several days thoroughly investigating the website if this field applies to you, and sign up. The feed is weekly, I think.

4. Quirky happenings and headlines from This is True: Comes to you weekly and wittily in simple text format. Originator of the Stella awards for dumb lawsuits, a good site for rolling your eyeballs over Zero Tolerance interpretations, and lots of good humored stuff ‘n nonsense.

5. German Stuff at http://www.germanabout.com/: Although I don’t like the preemptory way the “about…” sites try to seize control of my computer, I’ll deal with it for this one. I recommend this site to everyone who wants to learn German, practice German, help others learn or practice German, or who just has an interest in the subject. There is lots of valid and vetted information here; it’s a truly professional quality site for reference and use for beginners and those who are refreshing their skills. Once a week updates on news, specialized vocabularies, word of the day (if you want it), all with advertising, but y’know, advertising happens.

Have a great weekend!

Oddball Word of the Day

rodomontade (ROAD-uh-mahn-TAYDE): n. arrant, arrogant boasting or braggadocio; ranting, blustering talk.

(from the guide to MMMW, edited by Laurence Urdang)

German Idiom for Friday

etwas in den falschen Hals kriegen OR
etwas in die falsche Kehle kriegen: to take something the wrong way

Origin: The picture is of food going down the wrong way, i.e. down the windpipe instead of the gullet.

zB: Meine Bemerkung dass sie eine lustige Frisur haette, hat sie in den falschen Hals gekriegt. Ich habe sie als Kompliment, nicht als Beleidigung gemeint.

auf Englisch: She took my comment about her having an amusing hairstyle the wrong way. I meant it as a compliment, not as an insult.

(from the Guide to German Idioms by JP Lupson)

Knitting Knewbies

At my Chix group we get occasional newbies. I like them. They’re usually mostly clueless, which is why they’re newbies, but they’re so easily impressed it makes me feel like Steve Martin in “The Jerk” when he got so excited about being in the phone book.

Last night we got three newbies, and that was a lot of fun. They were impressed by knitting on circular needles, knitting without watching the needles, knitting on four needles, cabling, and following charts. Some of which I was doing, and some of which the other regulars were doing. It was kind of charming and sweet – we old-timers get so accustomed to knitting mindlessly that we forget what it’s like to be new and worried about every single stitch.

It’s also nice to be of assistance, particularly when the assistance is really simple. One knewbie has some problems getting her circular needle to stop coiling up on her, which a simple twist fixed. She also got confused as to the knit and purl stitches, also an easy fix. Sometimes we get a knewbie who is dogged and therefore creates wonderful things, but at great expenditures of time and effort – she’s working on a children’s sweater for a granddaughter, which incorporates cables, intarsia, textured stitches, and shoulder shaping. I think she’s pulled some parts of it out 8 times, but she just keeps clicking away, coming in for help, and to show us what she’s done.

I also admire these gals. I can be really self-critical and not want to show my own ineptitude in public sometimes. It used to be a leap of faith for me to walk into what could be an artesian well of snooty experts and admit I’m clueless. I found out the bonding and social potential of being in need of help some years ago, and it’s really an eye-opener to realize that asking for help is not only socially acceptable, it’s a good way of opening up a dialogue and being accessible to potential friendships and a wider circle of interaction.

Anyway, as for knitting, I have no pictures at present, but I’m making headway on the Charlotte’s Web shawl and a pair of self-striping socks. Maybe next week I’ll remember to take some pix.

CPAs and IRS Lamaze

Well, hubs and I went to the accountant yesterday to get our taxes done. I had been doing the taxes during the early years of our marriage, what with the experience of growing up with accountants and penny pinchers behind me, but then I had Spawn one December, and I wasn’t up to doing the taxes that year, so we started using this particular accountant.

Our accountant is a special favorite of hubs’ for a couple of reasons. First of all, he used to bill himself, unofficially, as “The Shoebox Accountant,” which meant that if you brought him all your stuff in a shoebox, in no particular order and sometimes frightfully crumpled or spotted or horrible, he’d straighten it all out, fit for an audit or military inspection, and get your impossible taxes done. The second reason hubs likes our accountant is because he’s kind of a “shoebox” personified. His office is not your usual pseudo-banker looking professional office. Instead, it looks like a warehouse full of generally detested stuff in decaying boxes, which are lying at all kinds of angles, books stacked haphazardly around, computers cobbled together with all manner of dirty, used parts, and the boxes and grocery bags of his clients are stowed higgledy-piggledy around the office.

Also, the accountant is a lifelong, diehard Chicago Cubs fan, so he’s almost always wearing a Cubs shirt or cap, and the walls have a junk store appearance with yellowing Cubs posters, CPA plaques given to him by his loving children, or made in school decades ago, and maps. I’m not sure I understand the maps, but maybe they’re covering up holes in the wall or something. I like him because, despite his office’s startlingly jumbled appearance, he knows his stuff like the back of his hand and because his plants are usually dead.

See, his wife collects unique pots and puts interesting plants in them. When their house gets too full of interesting potted plants, some overflow into his office. There are bonsai trees, ferns, little succulent things, and other normally delightful plants. He and his assistant tend them carefully during the majority of the year, but then tax season hits, and they’re so busy they stop watering them and work 20 hour days on taxes, non-stop. So, by the time hubs and I come in, the plants are dead, browned and crispy-looking, the dried remnants of hopeful foliage, slain indirectly by the demands of an inhuman government agency. It’s allegorical. Or maybe just goofy enough to hit my funny bone at the right angle.

Over the years, we’ve sent several people to our accountant, people who are normally very prissy and image conscious, but they’ve usually gotten in over their heads, or they’re running late AND over their heads, and they need a tax rescue. He always does a great job, they love him, and he gets a lot of repeat business from our referrals.

Anyway, tax time is usually stressful for us because hubs’ job is, technically, as a self-employed captive insurance agent. This works out great for his company, since they get to charge him through the snoot for all the services they provide (letting him sell their insurance) and they have next to no accounting to do for him at tax time, and he has to pay all his own expenses, and his own staff, and all the other malarky. This means there is no tax withheld, and we pay Very Large Tax Estimates all through the year, the kind that are so huge that they make me wonder how we can afford groceries, and then we get to pay some more when all the damage is assessed.

Hubs gets more stressed out than I do, although since I’ve taken over the family accounting, his tax-time stress level has lowered. Yesterday, armed with balance sheets, register reports, and 1099’s, we headed off to Quirky Accountant’s office, braved the dead plants, the grocery bags and boxes full of other people’s paperwork, and the slipping piles of enormous tax tomes, and I handed over our neat little screaming orange file pocket of info. QA had the taxes done within an hour, which included a philosophical talk with my husband about a hypothetical situation involving a hypothetical other insurance agent client about funds and insurance law.

The tax bill was distressingly big again, as it always is, but I stepped in before hubs could get to the point where he had two lit cigarettes going at once and was pacing at light speed, and pointed out that over the last year we’d been living close to the vest for just that reason, and that we could pay the whole nut without having to sell even one of the children for medical experiments. I knew I wouldn’t like writing the check, just on principle, but the nice thing is that the check can be written without hesitation. Hubs halted halfway through pulling out his hair and did a double-take at me. The accountant and I glanced at each other because, under all the grocery bags on his side, and the maternal aspect on mine, we have a meeting of the minds at the bottom line. Hubs stood up from his stress monkey crouch, and smiled. We all relaxed. The taxes were done, the bill could be paid, and I promised to buy him beef sandwiches at Arby’s on the way home.

Hubs was more relaxed today, the day after T-Day, than I’ve seen him in years. I smiled benevolently at him over our morning coffee and waved him off to work. Then I did some Lamaze breathing for about 10 minutes and started writing checks. I felt like I was birthing the money, in bigheaded, screaming piles, but I wrote the checks anyway. And, off they go, all swaddled up in IRS forms with 1099 Binkies, inoculated by a CPA.

Sometimes, though, I do dream of sending the taxes off with insufficient postage, just to be annoying, but I’m pretty sure that would come back to bite me somehow. Breathe in, pant out; breathe in, pant out…

Anyway, as my public service for today, for those of you who donate to charity, rules are changing somewhat for your 2007 taxes. If you donate goods (such as knitted items) or cash, there are some new guidelines to follow. Applicable IRS publications are:

IRS Publication 526 on Charitable Contributions


Publication 561 Determining the Value of Donated Property

Oddball Word of the Day

tautology (taw-TAWL-ug-gee): n. unnecessary repetition of an idea in different words

(From the guide to MMMW edited by Laurence Urdang)

Five Assorted Things to Ponder

My computer is finally virus free and working at a reasonable speed again, so…

1. I ‘ll be celebrating an important national holiday today, seeing as it’s National Chip and Dip Day. I don’t normally eat either, but it’s important to make my patriotism obvious and support our troops by stepping up to the plate (chip bowl) and batting (or dipping) away. Also, just for fun, I called up my republican house rep. And urged him to support HR1415, the Restoring the Constitution Act, so’s we can be a free country again, too.

2. My post on the Last Sock has generated a lot of nice comments. The latest one, which mentions using one’s Mensa card as a humor enhancer, reminds me of one of my first experiences with Mensa, or, at least, with another Mensan.

I had joined and not gone to any meetings or said anything to anyone about joining. I did put a little decal on my MomVan window, and it looked a lot like a Batman emblem. A pompous ass of a neighbor, who was always trying to convince anyone who’d listen about the absolute correctness of his point of view, asked why I had a batman sticker on my car. I told him it was a Mensa sticker, and he was much struck, telling me he was a Mensan also. He hadn’t been to any meetings either since joining, so he quit being a pompous ass to me, and I cut him some slack on thinking of him as a pompous ass, and we decided to make a group trip to the next monthly meeting, along with our spouses.

My husband gets carsick if he doesn’t drive (or maybe he’s a control freak, but let’s not go there), so on the night of the meeting, he and PA neighbor dude were sitting in the front seat of the neighbor’s car, the wife and I were in the back, and everyone was yakking up a storm except my husband. He was just sitting there, looking a little cranky. He rolled his eyeballs as the volume increased, and then he started making little motorboat noises – BRMMMMM, BRMMM. The noises got louder. He started miming driving the car, brrrrmmmmm-ing away, bouncing in the driver’s seat, leaning forward over the wheel, and so forth. He finally got everyone’s attention, and PA’s wife said, “HEY! Do you need the keys, maybe?” He put a big stupid smile on his face and nodded enthusiastically, and we all laughed for quite a while over the Mensans forgetting he might need the keys to actually get us to the meeting.

We keep in infrequent touch with our former neighbors, but if hubs or I forget to give the other one something obvious that’s necessary to complete (or begin) a task, a short “brrrm” will usually suffice as a reminder.

3. Der Foehn – in Austria, I could swear I heard it referred to as “die” Foehn, but that probably doesn’t matter to anyone other than me and my calcifying brain cells. Anyway, during the transition between Winter and Spring, there was occasionally a time when the air was warm, there was still snow on the ground, and people would be cranky, short-tempered, a little peculiar, surprisingly romantic or fey, and it was jokingly blamed on der Foehn – a warm Spring wind sweeping over the Alps. The hapless humans dwelling in Switzerland and Austria (and maybe elsewhere) were supposedly emotionally disrupted by it, and it caused a general sense of unease and sometimes inexplicable behavior. There may be more to it than that, but I probably wandered off in a Foehn-induced haze somewhere during the casual discussion of it.

Anyway, der Foehn has been sweeping through my house the last couple of weeks while the snow took its time melting. It seems to be gone, mostly, now, and I’m glad of it. It felt a little like I kept waking up slightly new (to myself) each day, and I had to get reacquainted with me – disorienting, but not necessarily horrible. Other family members were equally affected by it, so things were odd around here.

4. Bravo for coffee! For those of us who truly enjoy our brews, SciAm advises the middle-aged and happily caffeinated amongst us that we might not need to switch to prune juice after all.

5. The new principal at our local HS seems to have spent a quarter and bought a clue. After 15 years of tyrannical domination by an unscrupulous and popular football coach, said coach was retired, pretty forcibly. There was a huge, orchestrated outcry by his supporters, he made a splashy move to another district, and that district wound up, within a year, getting him charged with multiple violations of some state school sports code, and he quit there, made more headlines, and is, quite predictably, suing everyone in sight to supplement his already overly-generous pension receipts. In a very dark corner of my heart, I hope he gets crushed by a bus full of Odyssey of the Mind contestants on their way to do voluntary community service by helping out at the Special Olympics.

Anyway, the new principal, not someone I would previously have crossed the street to spit on, is restoring some academic integrity to the high school. The senior slack-off year, full of courses that did not require books and barely required attendance, has been dealt a deathblow – hurrah! Instead, seniors have to take any core classes they may have missed, with added challenging options of dual credit with the local community college, work-study programs, and a number of other things that get a nod of approval from most of us concerned parents.

I am crossing my fingers and hoping for, over the next several months: a) the death of the block schedule and return of an 8 class day, b) increased rigor being brought back to foreign language classes, social studies, and English, c) further AP classes being offered, d) a big shake up in the teaching staff, removing some destructively dead wood and putting remaining teachers where they will do the most good, and e) the return of a GOOD German language sequence.

Oddball Word of the Day

borax (BOr-aks) n. cheap or shoddy merchandise, esp. furniture

(from the MMMW edited by Laurence Urdang)

German Idiom for Friday

jemandem ein Gesicht schneiden: to make/pull a face at someone

zB: Als Friedl ihre Freundin Astrid sah, schnitt sie ihr ein Gesicht. Sie hatten sich naemlich wegen eines Jungen gestritten.

auf Englisch: When Friedl saw her friend Astrid, she made a face at her. You see, they'd had an argument over a boy.

(from the Guide to German Idioms by JP Lupson)

Whoops, I’m in the USSA!

A little local blog defines itself as follows:

“This blog is about promoting Morris schools, businesses, churches and traditional family values. People are sick and tired of all the negative news reports of scandal, murder, disease, death and War. We cannot read a newspaper or watch a newscast without this kind of negative reporting. Morris is a good Christian community, but gossip and rumor run rampant; this is contrary to our Christian teachings. Let’s turn the corner and put a stop to it by participating in this little community blog.” (note: spelling errors/typos fixed by me)

Now, I could get myself all worked up over violations of the Bill of Rights inherent in this wee speck on the fringes of cyberspace, I really could. I could laugh heartily about the irony of looking for more fluff in an already 90% fluff newspaper, which is what we have here, or even hold forth about the astounding percentage of our community’s children who are serving in this war and how their parents deserve to be able to read about it in the paper.

One thing that strikes me as particularly hilariously oblivious is the remark about traditional family values. I think we all know that’s code for a great many right wing abuses, but I don’t think the blog owner realizes that. He/she also seems to have completely ignored the recent local stats on our 120% divorce rate. Traditional values, indeed.

Nope, I’ve found that I can get along best here in Stepford-on-the-a**-edge-of-oblivion by remembering two things:

1. If I were single and had a trust fund, I would not even be able to find this place on a map, let alone live here. Neither of those things is the case, so I have to make the best of it that I can, which I do by holding true to my own values and teaching my children to think rationally and critically. It’s also extremely useful to remember my favorite quotation, which is thing two:

2. “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.”

In truth, I think no. 2 is one of the best pieces of advice around for defusing temper and outrage. I honestly believe that most people are ignorant of whatever right or standard I might think they’re treading on, and I mean ignorant in the sense of “oblivious, and not by choice”. I’ve found that, especially in working with school districts on rights for the disabled, it puts me in a position of unimpeachable grace, so to speak, if I continually assume that they don’t know what I know.

I can offer information, I can write to their supervising organizations and ask for assistance on behalf of the ignorant; I can write to the feds and ask for them to clarify things for the district in question, and at no point do I ever wind up telling them what to do, nor am I oblivious or demanding, just implacable.

I happily and promptly provide citations, quotations, additional photocopies, and a paper trail a mile wide, all in favor of the point I may be making. If they were honestly ignorant, I have been honorably helpful. If they were feigning ignorance in order to frustrate me, they are the ones who wind up frustrated and shown for the shammers and scammers that they are.

And similarly, I think that the blogger with his militant declaration of Christian positivity is going to wind up shooting himself in the foot without any help from me at all. Irony will out; it’s already starting, so I can just sit back and watch, if I have a couple of minutes to spare, and if I remember. You can, too.

Meanwhile, tune in to:

Fact or Fiction?: A Cockroach Can Live without Its Head
A nuclear war may not trouble them, but does decapitation?
By Charles Choi

For some laugh-out-loud one-liners by charmingly oblivious geeks speaking full-bore “scientist”, and some morbidly interesting data on roaches. Yuk.

Oddball Word of the Day

preprandial (pree-PRAN-dee-uhl) adj. before dinner; before a meal

(from the guide to MMMW, edited by Laurence Urdang)

The Randomizer

Normally, I think of Thursdays as a good time to discuss knitting. I’m in the knitting blahs now, and the only thing I’m knitting is a sock, and I’m doing it half-heartedly – probably because the thought of putting away most of my yarn makes me want to lie face down on the couch, put a pillow over my head, and pretend to not be here.

So, I’ve been trolling the web, or as our not-so-august-decider would say, “the internets”. I’ve also been letting a lot of goofball questions build up, thereby creating an annoying form of intellectual constipation. I’m not sufficiently inspired to search for answers to these questions, or else I’m getting so forgetful that I only remember the questions sporadically, at completely useless times.

For example, this is a very busy time at work for my husband, and they just updated the company computer systems, which, of course, completely screwed up everything he’d spent 2 years getting just right. He has been venting at home, and I’ve been making sympathetic noises. What’s really going through my head, though, is:

“Hey, what’s the brand name of those bath products people get at Bed, Bath & Beyond, and can I get them online, since I hate driving?”

“Why do my kids always drop dish towels on the floor and then get a perfectly clean one to wipe up a spill rather than using a sponge? What did I do wrong?”

“I hate having to tell the kids to go shower. Maybe I could find a way to send them anonymous emails.”

“Damn, I’ve got to make dinner again. I’m so uninspired. Why don’t TV commercials have subliminal menu suggestions of healthful foods instead of nekkid people in ice cubes? I could really go for being enthused about making something with hummus or that spaghetti noodle squash or that I’ll need my melon baller and my pasta machine for…”

Then there’s my tendency to notice completely useless things and then remember them:

My SPAM is so desperate-sounding sometimes – when I alphabetize by sender, I get columns reading ‘Find Love…Find Romance… Find a Friend…Find Someone…’ followed by ‘Get a Christian Loan’.

Why does that last one sound like it might say, in small print, "so you can afford a mail-order bride and solve all those other problems?”

Why is it that English teachers consistently have so many errors in their typed handouts? My high school daughter brought one home that was so riddled with errors that SHE wanted to highlight the mistakes. My youngest son brought one home in which he had noticed that instruction #4 said “Check you work to make sure it has no errors.” He had lightly penciled in “how ironic” next to the sentence. It was, sadly, unintentional on her part.

It’s not cleaning the inside of a toilet that’s disgusting because I can do that with cleanser and a long-handled brush. To clean the outside, though, I have to get way too close to the bowl and seat. Ick.

And websites of some fascination:

The Scientific American Blog website always grabs me and holds me captive for way too long. There’s an article on the science of dread, which is really intriguing, there.

Po Bronson professionally summarizes academically credible research to come up with things I’ve already said, thought, or thought were insightful when I heard them discussed by others. This is both validating and perversely frustrating, but the blog archives remain interesting nonetheless. The writing is certainly engaging, and he and his partner have some good points to make. Thanks to the nice person who pointed me in his direction.

Then there’s the Tempest in a Local Teapot website, called Skeptical Morris, about my little town. Our latest tempest is some right-wing jaw flapping over a shop called “XO Underground”. I’ve been there, and it’s not even close to being a head shop or a cover for prostitution, or anything else that might cause real upset. They have posters with occasional “controversial” language, candles, too much potpourri, and other things you can read about here. I Christmas shop for my kids there. I must be degenerate scum.

This website, Cabin Fever, generally makes me kick myself, thinking, “Dang, I could have designed that!” or “Damn, that’s sharp!”, which leads me to the much more relaxing, Knitting Pattern Central , at which point, I might be missing for days as I search for obscure doilies and the latest incarnation of the elusive perfect knitted teddy bear. And just for laughs, now that the You Knit WHAT website is gone, I like to check in for Updates in Outrage on Stitchymcyarnpants.

Have a jolly day, and if you know the brand name of that soap stuff, let me know!

Oddball Word of the Day

winklehawk (WING-kuhl-hawk) n. an L-shaped tear in cloth

(from the guide to MMMW, edited by Laurence Urdang)

Birdie Bits: Things from the parrot cage last week

<loud wing flapping and clanging of toys> “AAAARGH! I need first aid!”

<grouchy mumbling> “Get your hands off my turtle!”


Spawn: Good morning, birdie!

Hawthorne: Who are you?

Spawn: I’m Spawn, you know me! Who are YOU?

Hawthorne: <smugly> I’m mommy’s little Hawthorne birdie.

Spawn: Well, yes you are!

Hawthorne: Mommy’s CHIRPING birdie. Chirp, chirp. (Note: he says the word “chirp”)

Spawn: I’m a college student.

Hawthorne: <belching noise>

Bunny, from another room: Guess you don’t measure up to a chirping birdie, Spawn! <laughs>

Hawthorne: Wanna waffle?

Spawn: Will it make me a chirping birdie?

Hawthorne: <launches into a 2 or 3 minute spectacular whistling, chirping, singing, clicking aria with great volume and drama>

Spawn: <in awe> Wow, that was good!

Hawthorne: <smugly> CHIRPING birdie!

Spawn: Damn, I suck.

Hawthorne: <laughs hysterically, which causes all of us to laugh until we cry>


And just yesterday, as Spawn, Bunny, Doodle and I were sitting around the dining room table, which is only about 15 feet from Hawthorne’s cage through an open counter area:

Spawn: I really hate my Lit. book; it’s so boring, I mean they tried to set a person on fire, and even that was boring, and <proses on for a while about how boring Jane Eyre is>…

Hawthorne, starting about halfway through Spawn’s twaddle, began saying over and over, in a very bored tone of voice: "Chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp. Chirple, chirp, chirp, chirp, chirple. <belch> Chirpity, chirple, chirp, chirp, chirp…" and so on, all the way to the end of Spawn’s bellyaching. Bunny, Doodle and I started laughing, Spawn started to snort while he was still talking, and finally, we were all laughing like crazy, at which point Spawn quit talking, and Hawthorne quit saying “chirp”.

I wiped my eyes and looked at Spawn. I did a little sea serpent mocking thing with my hand and said, “I think that was the birdie version of ‘blah, blah, blah’!” Which made all of us snort and laugh some more. That brought hubs into the dining room, and by the time we finished explaining it to him, we were all howling with laughter, at which point Hawthorne yelled, “Hey! Quiet down in there!” which made us go off all over again.

Oddball Word of the Day

pontificate (pon-TIF-ih-kate) v. to speak pompously; to act or speak as if infallible

(from the MMMW guide, edited by Laurence Urdang)

The Last Sock In the Nerd Hamper

I’ve put off posting for a while because of a whole crapload of reasons, most of which are boring, even to me. So, I’ll just jump right in…

I think you should know that writing about, or even discussing, being gifted is something I Don’t Do very often. It’s right up there, in my categorization of social skills, with asking an attractive person of the opposite sex, whom you just met an hour ago, to take a look at the fungus on your privates to see if he knows what it might be and how to cure it. It doesn’t fit into my southern upbringing, which prioritizes good humor and humility, and I have found that talking about being gifted often changes the way people treat me. I have to trust that you will take it in stride and continue to be the same person you were to me previously, or that you’ll have the courtesy to ask me whatever questions you want to ask and then move the heck on, which is what I mostly do about it myself.

So, here’s that last socially smelly sock at the bottom of my nerd hamper -- I’m a member of Mensa. I’ve been a member for over 15 years, and I like it. I’m not particularly active, but I still like being a member. And I don’t tell people about it hardly ever, I don’t list it on my resume unless I have good reason to believe that the person reviewing that resume will respond positively, and I simply don’t consider it any different from other groups that I belong to, each of which has a focus of some sort, and which have specialized journals and jargons pertaining to the interests of the group.

There are usually two groups of responses to finding out I’m in Mensa (if you have come to know this outside my “friendship/trust” framework) – a) competitiveness –to prove you are as gifted or more so than I am and that you’re worthy of my respect and appreciation, and consequently elevating both me and Mensa to a position way beyond what we deserve based on name recognition alone, and b) denigration - that you don’t think it means anything, but you’re going to shoot me down anyway, if not directly, then by making a lot of dunning remarks about Mensa. I categorize both reactions as “the 142nd fastest gun in the West” responses, humorous and completely unnecessary.

Because being in Mensa, or being gifted, is like being the 142nd Fastest Gun in the West; it’s not a particularly unique position, from a standpoint of the number of qualifying persons, it is only significant in the great pool of large statistical numbers, and there really is no point in challenging me to either prove my worth or convince me of yours, or to pointlessly jab and slash at anyone who’s gifted. It’s just a state of being; I was not given a choice about being gifted, any more than I was given a choice about being born female, American, or right-handed, and I like all those things about myself, too.

And, Mensa is not what it’s perceived to be. I’m sure that if you look hard enough you’ll find members who want to tell you their IQ and the IQ of everyone else, or at least their estimates thereof, and there are plenty of people in any group, Mensa or otherwise, who have the answers to all the world’s problems, whether anyone wants to listen to them or not. There are also plenty of droners. Mensa does not exist to consult with governments or create life from household chemicals for corporations or just for fun. It’s a social support group for smart people who need a social support group of other smart people. That’s all.

There are great conversations, witty ripostes, truly competitive games and puzzles, varying levels of expertise in a surprisingly dizzying array of people from all walks of life in all kinds of topics, and a group joke about chocolate. And there are “problem children” – people who have too much hair, adipose tissue, religion, arrogance, mental illness, or simple strangeness, or too little of something from more categories than I can mention. All of which has the effect of making it a great cauldron of tolerance, as well as being a social support group.

Public bias has mistakenly confused giftedness with superiority, much as it confuses wealth with happiness. Each is completely independent of and very, very different from the other, regardless of some superficial similarities. Consequently, I hear and read somewhat laughable commentary about how incredibly smart Mensans are, and how arrogant they must be, and what’s it like to have all that brainpower in one place, and what are they up to (as if meetings were concerned with creating new stealth bombs). Some of the commentary is extremely complimentary (and, often, quite off base) and other comments are envious (and also off base). Newspaper articles tend to poke fun at Mensans for not being what the writer wanted them to be (dry, humorless, pontificating physicists with excess eyebrow hair, judging from the articles I’ve read).

I suppose the best analogy for a Mensa meeting that I could make would be:

Suppose you and 20 of your favorite college professors and high school teachers and a couple of other people you think are interesting, all go off for a buffet dinner, free bar, and decide, at 11 p.m. at night, to go out fishing. There you are, full of good cheer, on a boat, trying not to snag each other’s eyelids as you cast your lines, and talking about God only knows what while you wait for something to bite.

You can hear your history professor and your best friend, a hairdresser who reads Proust during slow times in the salon, heatedly debating current politics behind your left shoulder. Your Calculus teacher and your uncle, a janitor at Lockheed, are discussing the merits of Portuguese gourmet cuisine behind your right shoulder. Your English professor is busy trying not to be seasick over the stern and singing dirty ditties in Olde Englische between belches, all by her lonesome.

The Captain, poor slob, is bitching up a storm at some malfunctioning mechanical bits, which, by listening carefully, you realize that you personally can fix. You hand your rod to your son, who is arguing in French with your former Microbiology professor about science fiction authors, and head over to bang wrenches with the Captain. You’re joined by three engineers, none of whom are the slightest bit helpful, and all of whom spend most of the time disagreeing with each other. When someone breaks out the slide rules, you know it’s gotten ugly. Fortunately, the engine runs again, and you do make it back to shore. There are no fish, but everyone had a great time.


So, if you think Mensa is a group ego fest, it’s not. It’s also not the greatest problem-solving organization, and it’s not a gathering place for the great, the somber, the emotionally sober, or even the particularly enviable. It is a social support group for smart people who need somewhere to go and let down their guards and just be themselves, whether it involves being overtly smart or not. Lots of people already have those support groups in their daily lives, and they don’t join Mensa because they have no need to do so. Some of the rest of us do.

Like most groups, Mensa does do spiffy things – scholarships, community service, colloquia of interest, research, etc., and there are publications, smaller sub-groups, and a variety of activities based on interest and willingness to participate. More info at the main website here: http://www.us.mensa.org//AM/Template.cfm?Section=Home


Me, I’m off to do laundry and not think about this topic any more for now. Although I’m pretty sure I’ll need some chocolate to get over it. ; )

Oddball Word of the Day

comity (KOM-ih-tee) n. civility; a courteous manner of behavior

(from the MMMW edited by Laurence Urdang)

Put Down the Barbeque Fork

It’s a good thing the kids all went back to school today because I was getting very close to poking each one of them with a barbeque fork and yelling, “For God’s sake, get out of the house for an hour; you’re sucking up all my AIR!” Between snow days, sick days, and holidays, I haven’t had an instant alone for over a week, and that makes me twitchy.

It’s been hard enough adjusting to having Spawn around at all the wrong times – home in the morning and gone at night, what with his college and work hours – but having the other two wheezing, sneezing, watching lame TV shows, and drinking up all the orange juice has been a little jarring. It’s a lot easier to feel generously loving when they’re regularly gone for a little while – it puts a dab of healing time over the scratch of annoying quirks, probably on both sides.

I know there are lots of people who need to be with other people, even in crowds or public areas where they don’t know anyone, or they feel lonely or uneasy. I’m not that way. I’ve always liked silence and time alone. Loneliness is not an inevitable result of being without company for me, and sufficient time alone is something I’ve missed since I got married.

When I first got married, it seemed like the universe had increased in volume overnight; like there was some strange white noise machine that was suddenly amplified just beyond my tolerance level, and I couldn’t focus or concentrate as well any more. Part of it was simply due to living with another human being who expected attention and had his own personal noises of existence during my previous quiet hours, and part of it was the effect that sharing a life had on my inner ability to cultivate silence and contemplation.

It took a while for me to consciously zero in on what was causing me to feel fractured and what I should do about it, and it took more time for me to get the point across to my husband that I was not being hostile, I just needed some time to be alone. I don’t think that he really gets it now, as he is one of those people who needs constant company, but he seems to accept that I need privacy occasionally.

Babies, toddlers, and small children don’t get it either. I think it has to do with the whole egocentric universe they inhabit -- if they want company, their company is wanted in their minds, and any other choice is aberrant and hurtful and wrong. It was really hard to give up the enormous load of self-disgust and maternal guilt that I larded onto myself for wanting to get away from my children, and it took longer than it should have for me, but I’m glad I did it. I found that doing so was yet another lesson my kids needed to learn and have made good use of.

Teenagers, though, understand it, possibly because they want to be independent of their families and spending their social time with peers, not parents. So, they understand going into a room and closing the door, and they feel fully justified in sounding resentful and annoyed when someone interrupts their private time. They rarely feel guilty for wanting to be apart from family members, a lesson I understand differently from this side of that teenager’s door.

When I have time alone, I can rest emotionally, drift a little, and begin to listen to the sounds of my own existence. I know that we are never really alone, but we can be without the intrusions of others, or the possibility of intrusion by others, and that’s pretty much the same. As I sit here now, pausing between sentences, I can think about what my own life sounds like.

I hear clocks ticking, and that makes me want to watch dust motes traveling on sunbeams. My parrot is thoughtfully picking through his seed dish and clicking his beak, almost the way someone would sigh or hum or tap a finger on a tabletop. I can hear the computer drive giving an occasional rumble, which is eerily like the sounds of digestion, auditory symbolism; there’s a sound of thermal change, contraction or expansion in some metal work near the windows, pinging. My fingernails chime on my coffee cup when I put it down after taking a sip. I can hear the sighing breath of melting snow, half in relief, half in annoyance, as if the phase change is slightly unwelcome but understood to be fated. This is my flotsam time, when I drift on the tide and don’t ask why or where.

I know that in the next moment, I’ll start driving my life again, in stages. Maybe I’ll start by thinking some soothing philosophical thought which is not necessarily deep or profound, but has a possibility of an answer, and that will change to thinking about my family members and myself, and then to time, and then to chores, and the noise and needs of the business of living will reoccupy my thoughts and cancel out the sounds from merely being in the moment.

Which is OK, too, because I’ve just realized I have TWO barbeque forks, just in case.

Oddball Word of the Day

ubiety (yoo-BUY-ih-tea) n. the state of being in a definite place

(from the MMMW, edited by Laurence Urdang)

Five Types of Parents…

…Of Kids I Tutor

I’ve been tutoring off and on over the last 34 years. Since I’m 47, that may seem a little odd, but I was a peer and near peer tutor in school, too. When I went on to college, I tutored for pocket money, and since college, I’ve tutored for pocket money, out of pity, out of a sense of public duty, to further good relations with schools, and sometimes out of boredom. I’ll even admit to a couple of rounds of tutoring due to morbid fascination and/or sheer cussed determination.

There are all kinds of students who need tutoring – some don’t have the hardware, so to speak, to do the work they’re asked to do. The teachers know it, the kid knows it, and sometimes the parent knows it, but the system requires it. Other kids have the hardware, but their software got corrupted somewhere, and other kids have spent so much time sliding by or not caring that it has finally caught up to them and they are seriously in the soup. Sometimes really questionable teaching has derailed them. There are lots of reasons why kids may need an academic helping hand.

More consistent are types of parents. I probably haven’t really listed all of the ones I know here, but it’s time for Friday Fives, and it’s my blog. (snort)

1. Uninvolved and Don’t Care: These are usually the parents of the kids I get referred to me by the school system and teachers. The parents are usually unable to help their child due to circumstances of a pretty wide variety, and they never contact me. The kids never mention that their parents ask about their school day, how the tutoring is going, the parent never enters into the equation unless they have been abusive, which will cause problems for the kid academically, and it shows when I meet with them. These kids tend to confide in me, particularly if I’ve been working with them for a while, and that puts me in a sticky spot. Teachers don’t hear from the parents either.

2. Clueless But Proactive: These parents call me for private tutoring. It’s almost always for math, and the problem is not just that they don’t understand the new curricula or new theories, it’s that they didn’t get the whole concept the first time around when THEY were in school, so they are unable to help their own kids. They are usually earnestly apologetic, very fluttery and worried, and sometimes they will hover around to make sure that I know what I’m doing.

They’re kind of cute sometimes, too – I can spot them eavesdropping, and after the session, they’ll say something like, “Holy cow! If someone had explained it to ME like that, I might not be so dumb in math!” I always offer to have them sit in and learn along with their child, but they never do. I have had some call me on the QT and ask for math lessons for things like getting a real estate license or other certification that requires basic math, but we always do it sort of secretively, so that no one knows they needed help. These are very sweet people, and they’re usually very loving, caring parents.

3. Enablers: Kids will try to get away with just as much laziness as they can, and these parents let them do it. These folks always have some excuse for why Freddy or Sally is having so much trouble – he has too many sports activities, he’s upset over the move, over the divorce, we just stopped home schooling him last year, and it turns out he’s YEARS behind (no surprise there!), he’s afraid of his teacher, he doesn’t like riding the bus so we’re letting him study at home this year, etc., etc., etc.

What it really boils down to is that the kid is has more will power than the parent – the kid whines and wails and rolls in the floor in a great show of helplessness and despair worthy of an Oscar, and Mom (it’s almost always Mom) falls for it. The kid is usually perfectly capable of learning the material, and would do so easily if put back in school and given a suitable environment at home in which to study. That’s where the problem really is – in the home; the homes are invariably chaotic and disorganized, characterized by noise, interruptions, petty questioning, lack of patience, and interference. It’s not the kid who has the problem, it’s the parent. These situations rarely work out – the kid exerts more guilt power, or the parent doesn’t like having the door to the study room shut for an hour and keeps interrupting, and when no magical osmotic learning occurs during their short attention durations, they all give up.

I have no problem taking these people’s money. I have no problem answering the school district’s questions honestly when the parents try to use me as a referral without consulting me, either.

4. Stress Monkey Overachievers: The parent, usually a professional and a father, calls me up, absolutely on the edge of an angry breakdown of some sort. “My kid is in XXX private academy, and he’s never had problems in XXX before, but he’s getting a B in it now! Can you help? He HAS to have an A or he won’t get into (insert Ivy League college name)! He has a test next Tuesday, can you have him up to speed by then?” I usually refuse these jobs unless the kid himself convinces me that HE wants to be tutored, and I’m easy-going enough to tutor the kid who wants to get Dad off his back, too, I just won’t help Dad railroad some perfectly OK kid who missed a decimal point on his last quiz.

It usually takes three sessions – one to put the kid at ease and solve whatever small problem is at issue, one to build the kid’s confidence in asking for help in school from the teacher and other pupils (they’ve usually been so crushed under Dad’s ego needs that they’re afraid asking for help is going to make Dad go into a rage over the kid’s incompetence), and a third one with kid and both parents to calm Dad down and get his approval (in front of the kid) for the sane course of getting help at school. I always leave the door open for them to call me back if there’s another need, and there has only been one callback in all these years.

5. Hostile: The parent calls me because someone else told them they really needed a tutor for their kid. They spend the first call explaining to me why I’m unnecessary, how put upon they are, that the kid just won’t try, that the kid won’t listen to the parent or the kid wouldn’t need tutoring, and what incredible buttinskis grandparents, spouses, neighbors and parents of kid’s friends are. Sometimes the kid has himself, prodded and poked and asked the parent to call for a tutor.

Whatever the case, the parent is hostile towards me and really wants their money’s worth – they want a kid who doesn’t get fractions to be doing differential equations by the end of the second session, or they’ll call it quits in a huge huff of consumer dissatisfaction. Sometimes they call me names. They do that once, and promptly see my large, strudely ass heading out the door. I do not return until we have established some rules of conduct and boundaries, after which we all get along great.

You know that the parent was just hugely embarrassed that they couldn’t help the kid and that the problem got big enough to be noticed, and that they took out their frustration on me. I know it, too, and I know it going in. Sometimes, if the parent is having a humble moment, I can slide a few sympathetic words into our conversation and divert them from getting their knickers in a knot. Sometimes not and it plays out like a cheap novel. I usually spot an LD in about 40% of these cases, recommend a screening, and everyone is a seriously happy camper as a result. The parents then think I walk on water.


I know these parents well, and I’m sympathetic with all of them because I’ve walked in their shoes -- I’ve been too busy to be as involved as I wish, I’ve been clueless, I’ve been guilty of letting a kid slough off when they really should have knuckled down, I’ve even been an occasional stress monkey. And, two of my kids have ADHD, and I was pretty hostile myself until they were diagnosed. I’d be happy to sit down and commiserate with them over coffee and cinnamon buns, but that’s not why they called me.

Mostly, I think about the kids – having a rough time of it, not wanting to be the center of negative attention at home or at school, wanting to succeed or at least get by, hoping to learn a few study and coping strategies in addition to just the material at hand. I get my goodies from seeing them smile, feel more confident, or being excited and proud of themselves and bragging to me about their good test grades.

Anyone can tutor, and public schools are generally thrilled to find someone who will step up to the plate and help out. I hope that anyone reading this, if you have a little time during the day, maybe you’re retired or work a different shift, will call a school and see what you can do – elementary schools have kids who need to be read to and practice reading aloud; lots of schools really just need a “body double”, someone to be present and encouraging and keep a child focused while they do their homework, someone to show them how to use a glossary and index. And, of course, if you can help them with math or other subjects, that’s great, too.

It’s a good use of time for everyone.

Oddball Word of the Day

inchoate (in-KOH-it) adj. just begun; incomplete, imperfect

(from the MMMW edited by Laurence Urdang)

German Idiom for Friday

die Zeit totschlagen: to kill time

zB: Mein Zug faehrt erst in zwei Stunden ab. Um die Zeit totzuschlagen, lese ich mein Buch.

auf Englisch: My train doesn't leave for another two hours. In order to kill time, I'll read my book.

(from the Guide to German Idioms, by JP Lupson)

Yarn Quandary

My sister sent me this yarn for Christmas. You can probably tell she has a real artist’s eye for color (well, she does do that sort of thing for a living), but I don’t. I do OK with managing to not dress myself like an optical illusion, but I have no skill at doing the complex blending of patterns, etc. that always looks so utterly cool.

So, here we have three yarns I would never buy, which is no comment on my sister, she can’t wear or touch animal fibers, and she was going for color. I generally don’t knit with eyelash yarn, or fun fur, and I’ve really been trying to give up buying any more Red Heart for the time being. It looks like it ought to be one of those festive, kicky afghans or throws. I have no clue to as how to arrange it in order to do so. If you have any ideas as to doing that, I’d appreciate it. Diagrams would be nice, too. Even a picture of something similar!

Anyway, 2 skeins of the variegated Red Heart, 5 eyelash in red, and 5 in variegated, er, fake mohair-like acrylic…???

Help!

Oddball Word of the Day

pelagic (pehl-AHJ-ik) adj. relating to the open sea or ocean

(from the MMMW, edited by Laurence Urdang)

Nerdliness Further…

It’s a snowy day, of the type that used to be typical for our area – school’s been called off because we’re expecting several inches of snow, the wind is treacherous, and drifting makes driving extremely hazardous. Temperatures are expected to drop into the sub-zero range tonight. Good thing I knit!

I am, therefore, at home with a full complement of nerd offspring, namely, my own kids. I didn’t set out to make them smart, I didn’t do anything in particular other than love them and read to them and talk to them and play with them and holler at them and drag them to the park. I gave them books of their own and let them read mine, too, and all that other Mom stuff.

But, nevertheless, they turned out smart. Go figure.

I suppose the reason I’m revisiting my own past is because my children are going through similar situations to those in my history. All three of them are having issues from being gifted, some good and some bad. That sends me scouting back through my memory to see what I can dredge up to help, assist, use for advice, find to investigate further to deal with their situations, and so forth.

I know they have it easier on the home front – this is an unabashedly intellectual household. You’ll trip over books, not footballs, in our rooms, and visiting adults have been stunned speechless when one of my kids wanders through with a polysyllabic question on literature or science or mathematics. I didn’t have that kind of a household as a kid – no books, but at least there was no scorn for being bright.

Schools are different. I grew up on the east coast, where intellectualism is tolerated and even celebrated to a greater degree. Possibly the most significant time of my teen years was when I attended the precursor to what is now known as the Thomas Jefferson School for Science and Technology. Back then, in the mid-seventies, it was a school for the gifted within a regular school. We were segregated out with separate teachers; separate gifted only classes, a separate lunch hour, a separate locker area, and so on. We could, if we wanted to, participate in sports, theater, various clubs, and classes which were not on the gifted curriculum.

The director, a fantastic man who “gets it” had rounded up gifted teens from a variety of feeder schools, and, along with the kids who were being bused for racial integration purposes, the gifted kids were being sent to the same school, regardless of home school district. It was a brilliant maneuver, and timed well for public acceptance. It worked out well for me, too.

I remember my interview with him. He sat behind a large, scarred wooden desk, and I slouched unhappily in my chair. I’d just been through a series of years where there was some light for smart kids, which dimmed over time, then thrown back into the soup with other students who were actively hostile towards anyone who showed a glimmer of above-average intelligence. I was told I was in honors classes, and I was bored shitless in them. The teachers couldn’t keep up with my questions and asked me to tone it down again. I got spat on for acing tests, shoved into lockers for getting fed up and shooting verbal insults at bullies, and socially shunned for “making others look bad” by knowing the answers in class or turning in work that I was happy with, which, incidentally turned out to be used as examples by teachers in several classes.

There is no way to tell the above without it sounding like bragging to someone who hasn’t been through it. Let me assure you, it is not bragging. I’m not proud, nor am I pleased, nor do I feel superior to the other kids I went to school with. I just wanted to be myself without my performance being taken as a hostile act towards others. I am who I am because it is what I am and it has nothing to do with anyone else unless they choose to read hostility or aggression into it.

I also, as an aside, have always loathed the implication that I am openly smart in order to shame or humiliate someone else. I am openly smart because it is who I am and there is no reason to hide, mask, or cover it up. I’m not cruising through life looking for people to run over. It is insecure people who waste their time hating gifted folks. I did not become gifted at someone else’s expense.

So, I was cynical. I figured he was going to try to sell me another line of “you’ll be challenged in OUR honors classes” which is always a huge lie. I assumed that at some point one of the school counselors was going to do what they always do, and try to take charge of my gift and tell me what to do with it, and then chide and deride me when I expressed other opinions about what ought to be done with the matter between my ears.

His opening line was predictable, “This is a new program for gifted students here, and it is not going to be like any program you’ve been in before,” he said. What followed was very, very different and got my attention. He told me that I would be challenged, and he said, “possibly for the first time since you started school.” He said that I would no longer have to put up with a day filled with wasted time, bad teachers, abusive fellow students, or stupid assignments. He literally said, “stupid” assignments.

I looked at him and said, “No more ‘What I Did On My Summer Vacation’ essays?” He smiled, a wide, charming grin and said, “No. Not under any circumstances.” And then he won my conditional trust by leaning across the desk, stabbing it emphatically with his finger as he said, “And if one of my teachers does give you a stupid assignment, I want you to come and tell me about it. Don’t be afraid to speak up and tell me. I need to know because I will NOT have it. Will you do that?” I said “OK” and he looked me in the eye and asked me if I was willing to join his gifted program.

I asked again, “No stupid assignments?” “No,” he said, “none. Tell me if you think you’ve been given one. You may still have to do that one until I can come up with an alternative, but I will make sure that there are no more.” I liked that he was realistic and honest. Still not believing what I’d heard, I asked, “No more wasted time?” And he looked at me, with compassion and understanding and stern resolution, as someone who understands what purgatory it is to the heart and soul of a gifted child who has spent 6.3 of every 7 hours in school for 10 straight years, waiting for others to catch up, and he said, “No. I will not waste your time. No one here will waste your time ever again.” I took a deep breath and said, “OK, I’d like to do it.” He smiled and said, “Good. Be ready to work hard on the first day.” And we smiled at each other like co-conspirators.

He did get it. He really, really got it. It was, in fact, a school for gifted teens. Everyone else in my classes was smart as hell, and those who had gotten there on high-achievement or because of pushy parents soon chose to move to a different series of classes. We worked hard, we laughed together, we were our own community, we didn’t care what the rest of the school thought because for the first time in a long time, there were plenty of us, all in one place at one time, with one purpose – to learn what we wanted to learn as fast as we wanted to learn it.

It was a new experience for the teachers, too, having a full day of gifted students and having to develop lesson plans that outstripped several years of teaching mainstream students. We found out that we weren’t each going to continue being the best student in all our classes, and rather than that being cause for upset, it was a huge relief. Finally, there was someone better than each of us at something, someone to ask questions of, a worthy study buddy, a peer to admire and respect for accomplishments that deserved it.

We had some hitches, and I had to make good on my promise to the director. Our English teacher assigned us “My Favorite Holiday” as an essay preparatory to a debate contest. Every other assignment in that class had been deep, serious, clever, interesting, but this one was just not right. I protested in class and several of the other students joined in, a wonderfully unique experience in and of itself, agreeing that they were told they wouldn’t get any of these types of assignments either. The teacher was flustered and told us to do it anyway. We did, and I left a message for the director, who was out of town.

I did mine in protest, choosing the dumbest, most ludicrous holiday I could think of, Groundhog Day. I knew all about Punxsutawney Phil before he hit the big time. I got a B because even I, digging through the library, couldn’t find enough information or create enough verbiage to stretch a Groundhog Day essay to three pages.

The director came back after the assignment had been handed in, graded, and handed back. (In those days, that was the remainder of the week.) I took my paper down to show him. I walked into his office and handed it to him, without saying a word. He asked me if I was upset about the grade. I said that I was not, and I asked him to look at the title. I could see his face change as he read each word – at “My” he sat forward in his chair, at “Favorite” his jaw tightened and he started to grimace, and at “Holiday” he stood up and said, in a very angry voice, “I don’t BELIEVE it!” He was shaking, and either he was a hell of an actor, or he was truly angry. He took a couple of deep breaths, and said, “I’ll take care of this. Thank you for coming and letting me know.” I left, feeling like I had finally found a school official I could trust.

He followed, through, too. The teacher tried to read me the riot act and I stood right in the hallway and gave it back. I told her I didn’t care about the grade, I just didn’t want to waste my time on any more dumb assignments, that I would do whatever work she expected as long it I was learning something of value from it. And I reminded her that I was promised no more stupid work. She was purple with anger, but she said “FINE” and stomped off. Some of my classmates bought me lunch and thanked me. No one blew me any shit.

And we all relaxed and learned to trust again because we were finally home. This was were we could take off the blinders, stretch out our necks and run like we’d always wanted to run because now there were people clearing the track in front of us to make sure we neither stumbled nor crushed anyone inadvertently, nor ran off the track. It was a blissful, rewarding, unique, and wonderful period.

I did have to leave before graduating high school. My home situation became dangerous again, and leaving was possibly the hardest decision of my life. I didn’t want to leave the school that I had waited for all my life; I cried and cried and cried. I had to go though, or there was a significant chance I wouldn’t see graduation day at any school, so I did.

I moved to Chicago, and life has rolled on. But I have gifted children, and I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it is not weird, or wrong, or a hostile act to be gifted. I know that the problems gifted children have socializing tend to evaporate overnight when they are with their intellectual peers, that there is a very large body of crap pop psychology and pabulum that states that “everyone is gifted” and that G & T programs are elitist and that gifted kids are always snobby and arrogant and act superior. I have heard it all, I have lived a serious majority of it, and I can smell the crap of it from a mile away.

The public school system has no collective idea of how to deal with educating gifted children. Individual teachers may, magnet schools may and often do, but by and large, gifted children are still waiting for others to catch up, and dreading that they will spend the rest of their lives waiting, too.

I have never wanted that for my children. I have asked them every year if they want to be home schooled, if they’d like me to seek out a gifted school where they might need to live away from home, if they’d like me to do anything in particular to make their educational experience better. Most of the time, we have worked around the problems, or they have learned to deal with them, or they have chosen to deal with them. I’ve tried to show them the options, and above all, I have let them know that there is nothing wrong with them. I have offered them the hope of college classrooms, which is where most gifted children are finally able to be the rest of themselves without shame or embarrassment or threats.

And, most of all, I have worked to make sure they have a home where is it safe, and where it is normal to be as smart as you want to be, all the time. Gifted children need to be able to come all the way home, too.

Oddball Word of the Day

virosis (vie-ROH-sis) n. any infection caused by a virus

(from the MMMW, edited by Laurence Urdang)