Apt. 11D

Weekend Journal

Another Memorial Day in the burbs. We had been planning a weekend getaway, but soccer matches and a sore throat scrapped our plans. As I sat in my fold out arm chair at the corner of my block, I chatted with the motley crew of neighbors.

The teenagers told me about the Junior Prom. Will their mother let them go to the shore over night and get a belly button tattoo. Um, no. She will not.

End of Week Journal

Yesterday I walked down the hill to the faculty parking lot and dumped the books out of the tote bags and trudged back up the hill for another load. It turned out I had more crap in that office than I realized. It took four or five trips back and forth to clear everything out. Now my trunk is filled with a ton of loose books swimming around back there. Whenever I stop at a red light, I can hear them clunk to one side. I really need to empty the trunk out today.

Spreadin' Love

Have you checked out Ezra Klein's new blog at the Washington Post?

Megan puts the final nails in the coffin for the bankrupt economics reporter. (Any comment on this story must be left at Megan's blog, not here.)

I was rather envious of this family of seven who have made a mint as serial renovators. I want to do that, too. Looks they are going to cash in with a reality show.

Swine Flu Hysteria

Yesterday, I took the kids to the Palisades mall to get their haircut. Haircuts scare the crap out of Ian. He hates to wear the smock and is terrified of the electric razor. For some reason, he tolerates the mall joint, so we made the long shlep over to Master Cuts. While I was in Rockland County, I stopped over at my SIL's for dinner. We fed the kids and chased them around her backyard, until my brother came home from work.

Chris was working on a story for his paper in Orange County about the Swine Flu. Apparently, it's all over the place up there, but the schools are hushing it up and the CDC has stopped testing people. He wrote, "... Minisink Valley Middle School, which reported 153 absent students to the county Health Department on Wednesday. That's almost 14 percent of the student body, based on 2007-08 enrollment figures, and more than triple the number of absences reported at the same time a year ago."

Later this afternoon, I called my friend, Margie, to tell her that people thought that SAHMs like herself were lazy and stupid. She was thrilled and told me to stop reading the freaks on the Internet. Then she told me that her school district on Cold Spring Harbor was infested with swine flu. Her daughter's home sick with the flu, but the doctor refused to test her for that flu. Margie said it wasn't a big deal. Her daughter wasn't all that sick, but the other parents are hysterical. She was getting phone calls from other moms at 7:30am freaking out about sending their kids to school.

American Idol

I watched American Idol on and off all season. I usually watch the auditions, but lose interest after they pick the predictable finalists. This season was slightly more entertaining, because Adam Lambert was unusual with his black eyeliner and screeches. He was too theatrical for me at times, but he was amusing. Tonight it came down to Lambert who treads the line between Siegfried and Roy and Freddy Mercury, and Kris Allen, a Brad Pitt look alike. Well, Brad Pitt won tonight, despite the judges' huge preference for Siegfried. A surprise upset.  Prediction -- the topic of tomorrow will be "Is Adam Lambert too gay for America."

Cue the Misogyny

This week, the blogosphere buzz has been about Edmund Andrews' article in the New York Times magazine. Andrews writes about how he, an economics reporter, got himself so far in debt that the bank will soon foreclose on his house. At first, the story seemed to be about reporters' pay and easy credit. Andrews abdicates responsibility for his debt because the banks gave him money. And they let these people drive cars and vote.

But Megan correctly steered the conversation in another direction. Andrews' problem wasn't that he made too little money. The problem was that he made too little money to support two families.  He couldn't afford to get married again and shouldn't have. Andrews never entertains this notion and, in fact, fails to ever say that child support payments are a good thing and that he had a responsibility to care for his first family.

As I was reading the comments on Megan's blog, I was stunned by the new direction of the discussion in her comment section. Now, it wasn't that Andrews screwed up by getting married again. It was that his wives were bleeding him dry and that his second wife, who was raising the kids, was a leech and idle.  One guy called SAHMs, Yoga and Pilates women. Another commenter thought that the husbands probably liked having sex with the yoga moms. Then they all exchanged the usual crap about how women steal all your money. Lovely.

Bloggy Goodness

Yes, my grades have been submitted, and I'm officially slacking off.

This picture is from Awkward Family Photos.com.

I also recommend The Blog of "Unnecessary" Question Marks.

Ellen's Common Cement Speech

Double X

So, I'm really liking Double X. I do agree with Ann Friedman that these articles shouldn't be in the girl ghetto; they should be on the front page.

I enjoyed Ann Hulbert's review of Bad Mother and Dooce's new book, though I disagreed with most of the review. And Dana Stevens' response was also good.

I also loved Emily Bazelon's article about a new study that examined the variables that predict reading ability in young children. Bazelon explores the surprising findings.

Surprisingly, the amount of shared parent-child reading time did not matter, on average, for the reading skills of either group of kids. What mattered instead, for the kids of average-reader mothers, was [not] how often a child amuses herself with books. What mattered for the kids of the high-reading moms was how orderly the family's home was."

Bad news for my kids, I suppose.

Andrews on the Today Show

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