Tomorrow’s TV — today! Or in 6-8 weeks!
Read a really useful article in the Sun today: Mike Himowitz: Act soon to try out your TV’s converter.
Apparently the government is offering up to two $40 coupons toward a digital signal converter box for our perfectly adequate television, with which we use a set of rabbit ears to catch PBS Kids, Martha Stewart’s TV show, and the local news. I did not know that.
Also news to me: that the digital-signal switch, which happens less than a year from now (February 2009), does not force us non-cable-havin’ people to buy a whole new compatible television set (darn!) — just a converter box. Still, Himowitz makes a good point:
Never before has the government, by fiat, declared obsolete a perfectly good, working technology that’s almost universally available and so critical to public safety. And with so little real-world testing of its replacement.
Damn government.
Anyway. I am applying for the coupon today, intent on taking his advice and seeing whether I can get, say, NOVA to come in in high-def. If so: Sweet! If not — well, I’ll take the other part of his advice and let my congressmen know that this idea of theirs was crap. Only time will tell!
Spending my hypothetical “tax rebate”
According to the New York Times, the House approved a quick-fix tax rebate:
As it was presented on Thursday afternoon, the package calls for workers who paid income taxes to receive $300 to $600, and couples to receive up to $1,200 — plus $300 more for each child. The stipend, which some lawmakers were calling a “tax rebate,” would be subject to income limits so that the wealthiest taxpayers would not receive it. Payments would go to individuals with adjusted gross incomes under $75,000 and couples with adjusted gross incomes under $150,000.
I do not think tax rebates are any kind of solution to the general problem of the faltering middle class, and I suppose it isn’t meant to be, anyway. When you’re bleeding from an artery, even a band-aid is better than nothing.
Here’s the problem: the smart thing would be to hang on to that windfall and try to earn a few percent’s worth on it. But that defeats the economic purpose of a rebate, and unfortunately we always have something that $1800 could be put toward, like the $800 in repairs my car is waiting on.
So what do you think: spend it or save it?
Booty, boobies, and mac’n’cheese
Today’s light reading:
The Bunny Vs the Blue Box (Salon):
Annie’s Homegrown Macaroni & Cheese has pretty much achieved world domination — at least if your world is populated by the chronologically challenged. Refueling Gabriel, Rebekka, Isaac and Yazmin after a grueling toddler networking session? The well-stocked mom breaks out the Annie’s. Three-course dinner with (mucho) wine for the grown-ups? A batch of Annie’s keeps the little dears quiet. Rustling up some grub after a round of African drumming and lacrosse practices? Boil water. Grab Annie’s. But while there’s nothing wrong with food that appeals to kids and is easy to prepare, do we parents really have the right to feel so damn smug every time we open the little purple box?
No, no, no, a thousand times no.
Also of interest:
• Bootylicious (Salon): “My kids’ favorite snack smells funkier than poop, has questionable nutritional value and leaves a trail of bright green powder in its wake. Still, I can’t imagine life without it.”
• A Guy’s Guide to Breastfeeding Etiquette (MSNBC): “If we pause for longer than an instant, we risk being accused of voyeurism, even if the sight of mother-baby bonding is simply making us feel warm and fuzzy inside. But if we make a show of NOT looking, we risk being accused of being disapproving. What’s a guy to do?”
Mommy drinks, but not because you cry
So! Owen and I watched the Today Show yesterday morning, on which Melissa Summers was invited to talk about whether “cocktail playdates” are appropriate. Basically, Meredith Vieira was asking, is it ever OK for a mother to drink in the presence of her children? (story)
Unfortunately for mothers everywhere, the piece was quite biased. And the piece said, NO. From the intro footage of Encino moms drinking (zoom in on the wine!) to Meredith’s loaded questions (“but, how would you feel if it was the baby-sitter?”), the general tone was one of incredulous disapproval.
Melissa did a nice job of speaking out for the rational person, but I fear she was slightly overshadowed by every other aspect of the segment. More’s the pity, because this is the kind of thing that gets blown out of proportion and subsequently used to further pressure moms into some sort of Stepford model of behavior.
Look. Moms are people too. They eat. They drink. Sometimes their drinks have alcohol in them. Nobody’s talking about intoxicated parenting, all right? I think we can all agree that that would be dangerous.
But the simple consumption of an adult beverage in the presence of children, including your own — well, hell. Dads have been drinking beers on the couch for … for as long as beer has been invented, and that’s never been criticized.
I don’t drink often, but I’ve never shied away from having a drink in front of Owen. He knows that some drinks are for grownups (anything that comes in an aluminum can, including National Bohemian). And I know that more than a drink and a half is too much, so I imbibe accordingly.
I don’t see the problem. And I think demonizing moms who demonstrate any sort of human behavior (working, drinking, being exasperated) further dehumanizes them and gives the American public fewer reasons to respect and value what they do. And this in turn is why so many mothers today feel suffocated, anxious, on edge — why perhaps they might need a beer, I would venture to say. Because America has been all up their butt all day long.
Oh hey guess what?
I’m pregnant! WOOO!
I’m due May 30. I’m 14 weeks along and am no longer in the shit. We’re pretty excited about Numero Dos here.
Is Owen going to be a kick-ass older brother or what? We did such a good job with him that the second one’s bound to be awesome as well.
The hygiene hypothesis
See, by me not cleaning house I’m actually doing Owen a favor!
Cleaner homes and smaller families, they say, are throwing off our immune systems. In fact, researchers now say we need exposure to healthy doses of bacteria and infectious agents early in life to develop properly.
In fact, he might become too healthy, from the looks of my kitchen.
LAX hair, prepdom, instruction manuals, and my childhood
The City Paper never, ever fails to entertain and enlighten me. Earlier this year it was a piece on those ubiquitous, superlong, XXXL white T-shirts; today it’s the Balti: North Baltimore’s Lacrosse Mullet, and the Next Big Thing In Hair.
The article drew my eye for a few reasons.
1. Last night I found myself yelling at a celebrity cooking show contestant to “Cut yer goddamn hair already!” and now I am interested in developing my new-found curmudgeonliness.
2. My own shaggy mane is driving me crazy and I wish to make it stop.
3. The word “mullet” is a guaranteed attention-grabber.
Not for a long time have I actually laughed out loud — that’s LOL, doodz, and it happens IRL — at a news article. But author Gadi Dechter so deftly captured the vulnerable side of these high-school lacrosse players that I had to titter. It’s hard to imagine these suave yet shaggy preppies, who overrun the Target near Calvert Hall High School, where I shop for off-brand diapers, devoting hours of time in the mirror. Yet they manifestly do, and she proves it with heart-breaking accounts from LAX bulletin boards.
I was also caught by the notion of an insular school environment, where fashion doesn’t change for thirty years and the madras-plaid shorts of 1959 are still de rigeur. I remember that environment well. She mentions in passing The Official Preppy Handbook, a vintage copy of which I ownand rules within which I remember from my own high school experience. In fact, it had not quite sunk in til I read that book that the rest of the world was enjoying grunge while my public-school classmates and I were debating which grosgrain ribbon would best complement our Tretorn tennis shoes and argyle sweaters … in 1995, not 1980 when the tongue-in-cheek “handbook” was published.
The town I grew up in was very white, very comfortably middle class. High school football games [we didn’t have lacrosse] were a town-wide attraction; the rich were popular and vice versa. There was at least one country club on the edge of town — the poorer edge of town, not the McMansion edge of town — and my family lived near this country club. We, of course, with a household of six children, were far too poor to buy a membership or live in the adjacent $300,000 houses (read: $650,000 today in Baltimore), but we were of just the right income bracket to work there. My sister met her life-partner boyfriend while waitressing there; my brother caddied there several summers; and I endured the longest two weeks of my life there, working double shifts in the back office and as a waitress in the various club dining rooms.
(Ask me about my saucy maid’s uniform. I dare you. I was probably the only girl there blushing with embarrasment and trying to let down the hem — I was not looking for an orthodontist-slash-sugar daddy).
I digress. My point is that in this small homogeneous town, where you were either rich, richer, or living in a trailer, a particular small-town, Midwestern brand of preppiness was a way of life. Color-coordinated deck shoes, horses stabled at the riding ranch on River Road.
It wasn’t true Prep, though we did have private parochial schools. It was watered-down East Coast prep; it was Farmer’s Prep. It was as if certain of the town’s population wanted to force their own importance in a rapidly downspiraling Rust Belt economy and cling tight to some semblance of worth in a post-modern America.
Of course, it was utterly repulsive to some of us high-schoolers, particularly those who lived neither in McMansionLand nor the trailers; wanderers in a no-man’s land of fading suburbia. We railed against Preppies, we railed against Jocks; we mocked them but secretly imagined them so much more worthwhile than us.
My greatest dream, in eighth grade, was to be a cheerleader.
Of course it didn’t pan out; undeveloped wall-flowers with two left feet aren’t really what a cheer squad is all about these days. But I consider that the turning point, the month in which rejection became the standard for my life and the month in which I started thinking a little deeper. It was time for rebellion; it was time to put away the grosgrain. I cut my hair short. I started wearing flannel. I determinedly bought a Green Day album.
If this club, with it’s $60 shaggy boy heads and Abercrombie sweaters, didn’t want me, then by God I didn’t want it, either.
And so started a range of identities tried on and discarded by me and a few hundred other small-town suburbanites — pothead, black-turtleneck-wearing intellectual, militant feminist. All of us rebelled against safety and tradition and uniformity, not realizing that the rebellion itself — like these Baltimore Lacrosse players and their identical shaggy haircuts — was uniform.
In the last few years I have grown lazy in my rebellion against the small-town suburban life I professed to hate. I got married. I moved to (what is technically) suburbs. I had a kid. I took my nose piercing out. And now I’m trying to remember what it is we hated so much. The stability? Green lawns? Family vacations? Suspenders?
The high-school anti-Prep rebellion is still alive and well and wearing black eyeliner, hating anything that smacks of tradition, of stability. The rebellion undoubtedly thinks itself as hating the small-mindedness of small towns and the sleeping bigotry of suburbia, as well it should. But it is the definition of small-mindedness not to allow for variations within a population. It is the definition of bigotry to judge on appearance.
I feel for these lacrosse boys, with their faux-bedhead hair. They are trying to rebel and conform at the same time. They are trying to make their hair tell the story of their beliefs, their desires, their self-worth. I do the same thing, so I can empathize, even with a rich white boy with glowing athletic prowess. I, too, am trying to present my whole person, my ideals and my dreams, to the outside world using only my Chuck Taylors and hair gel.
Interesting things I’ve read recently
Wired: Internet’s Gender Gap Narrows. I get the feeling that marketers think we women ought to be hanging out on pink message boards discussing face cream.
43 Folders: Inbox Zero: Delete, Delete, Delete. “Do you have a sloppy relationship with the messages in your life? Be honest. Do you tend to see every new email as a virtual hug that must be reciprocated?” (um, yes.)
In the Sun: Neutral Season. “This season, however, comfort may trump sexy. In fact, even sexiness this season is much classier and more comfortable than in seasons past. Belly baring is out, higher waists are in. Mini skirts are a rarity; skimmers - shorts that hit right at the knee - are all the rage.” So you’re saying my spring uniform — an oxford shirt, cargo shorts and Birks — is not only fashionable, but sexy too? I heart haute couture.
MacWorld: Yes, the iMac does Windows.[Hackers get Windows XP to boot on one a them new Intel Macs]. Dude. “Let me be the first to say how creepy a phenomenon this is.” You said it, brother.
Last is the New York Times: A David Pogue blurb. Yay. Even better, though, is the video he points to: What if Microsoft redesigned the iPod box? And pointed hilarity ensues.
Daaaaaang. That’s some video snark, y’all. OH SNAP.
Nerdworlds collide: The Office and Myspace
How psyched was I to find out, after reading this week’s installment of Schrute Space, that Dwight K. Schrute has a Myspace page? And that the rest of The Office [U.S.] does too? Pam, Angela, B.J. (who plays the temp), Kevin (“I am an accountant. At a paper supply company. It is pretty cool I guess. And like everyone else on MySpace, I am in a Band.”)
My inner nerds (I have several, apparently) flipped their collective shit with fangirl delight.
And there’s a petition to have the season finale supersized. You can sign it here, or read a blog post by Maureen Ryan at the Chicago Tribune about it. Or you could visit a blog called Office Tally which lets you vote on favorite episodes. Or this blog called Northern Attack. Or jeez, all of these links.
Wow. You know what? My nerdiness is alarming even me. I think I should stop here.
I went to the library and all I got were these lousy magazines
Uhh … and some “lad lit.” Sue me. I like fluff.
So I was reading this article in People magazine about Jennifer Aniston — I’m sorry, “Jen” — and I noticed in one of the photos of her at Sundance that her next movie, Friends With Money, is directed by Nicole Holofcener, whom I adore. Ah. Dore. She’s the one did Lovely and Amazing and Walking and Talking, both featuring the stellar Catherine Keener.
So suddenly I’m paying a lot more attention to “Jen“‘s new movie.
Oooh! And Jon Stewart [who I would totally marry if bigamy weren’t such a no-no] had a baby! With his actual wife. Awww.
OK. Now I’m going to go read Scientific American. Did you know they have a blog? I need to offset all this shiny celebrity with … *reading* … new theories on relativity. Spacetime as a liquid? Sweet!
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