The Ice Cream Index

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Earlier today I learned of these numbers today from Mature Landscaping:

Salary of retired US Presidents ……………$180,000 FOR LIFE
Salary of House/Senate ……………………..$174,00​0 FOR LIFE
Salary of Speaker of the House …………….$223,500 FOR LIFE
Salary of Majority/Minority Leaders …… $193,400 FOR LIFE
Average Salary of a teacher ……………….. $40,065
Average Salary of Soldier DEPLOYED IN AFGHANISTAN $38,000

 

I had been feeling unsettled by a gnawing sense of guilt and shame ever since. That’s probably why when we caught a glimpse of the evening news, I suddenly blurted out,

Did you know how much a soldier that is currently fighting in the war is paid? A year? $38,000. That’s how much!

The boys immediately were feeling just as outraged. “That’s not a lot of money right?” The Teenager got a bit emotional. “And they are risking their lives over there!”

8-year-old Mr. Monk got up on the coffee table and pontificated as he’s wont to.

You know what? What we need is for the economy to get better!

I swear I have no idea where he got this (or any others). We seldom watch TV, let alone news. I wonder whether this has anything to do with his endless viewing of The Simpsons. In fact, he watches The Simpsons so much he’s able to quote some of the episodes the way The Husband is able to quote The Princess Bride.

You know how you can tell the economy is getting lower?

(He is, after all, only 8 years old…)

The free ice cream at ______ Burgers is now so small that you only get the bottom part. It used to be as big as the Dairy Queen’s!

Hold the thought while I contact The Economist about the Ice Cream Index idea.

Shoot

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A couple of weeks ago, I was in downtown Chicago with my family. We do that from time to time: using the hotel points we racked up from business trips for a weekend in downtown Chicago. A Staycation. (Sorry for using the stupid buzz word) After a most satisfying lunch at Berghoff where I was surprised by one two of the best Tom Collins I’ve ever had.

Berghoff is billed as a historic restaurant in Chicago. A classic. A landmark. A local gem. You know what that means. That (usually) means it is a tourist trap and therefore I was not expecting much. Following the theme of Lowered Expectations, I was absolutely blown away when I took a sip of the Tim Collins. I have been looking for a good, old, solid Tom Collins for a while now, and I have been to quite a few places where the bar tenders actually asked me, “What is a Tom Collin?”  Not making this up. Little did I know that I would have found The Perfect Tom Collins that one afternoon when we sort of gave up and walked into Berghoff because it was still open for lunch at 3 pm and was not crowded.

After lunch, The Husband announced that he needed a nap. (Don’t say anything. I know. Ugh)  I looked at the boys, “Well, mommy is going shopping. Whom do you want to go with?” “Dad!”

*Cue evil genius laughter on my part*

That’s how I got two hours of Alone Time wandering around the Chicago loop area by myself.

The streets were mostly empty.  I took my time, walking slowly, deliberately, yet aimlessly.  Occasionally I would stop, whip out my phone to take a picture of something that struck my fancy. Lamp post. Intricate carvings on a building. Wrought iron works. Brass decor on top of an elevator door. Of course, my idea of me being a great street photographer trumps my actual photographic skills and that is why none of those photos are featured here. Believe me when I say that the images are whimsical and beautiful and fascinating when I have them framed like this with my mind:

Click. Click. Click.

Of course, while I was taking my leisurely stroll, I had no idea that the pictures were coughcoughcough so I was walking around with the aura and euphoria of a street photographer exploring the beauties around me.

At one point when I stopped to take pictures of a wall scone outside one of those gorgeous Chicago buildings, a guy doubled back to ask me whether I would like a picture with the wall scone. I laughed and explained that I was simply taking random pictures of random objects. “Because I am crazy like this.”

Oh, yeah. I do say things like that to random strangers. I am indeed crazy like this.

“If you like Chicago architectural details, you really should go into this building over there,” he pointed at a building not far from the crosswalk where we both stopped at the light. “It has an amazing lobby with all the original details intact.”

Alas. (See above).

But all was not lost because when I came out from the building, I spotted a bride and a groom being led by a real photographer towards a deserted intersection. I ran. I was shameless. By god I was going to get that shot of the photographer taking a picture of this couple standing in the middle of a Chicago intersection.

I had just watched the trailer to the documentary Bill Cunningham New York and I might have been mistakenly inspired…

How ironic would that photo be. How awesome!

But when I got to within the optimal (photo) shooting range, I could not raise my phone. I was shy. It felt awkward even though there were others taking pictures of them.

I couldn’t help but smile because it was a lovely sight and walked across the street away from the trio, trying to look as if I meant to cross the street all along. As soon as I turned my back toward then, the little voice piped up,

“God damn it! You need to get over this! Chicken!” I thought to myself. “They won’t mind. People gawk and take pictures of brides all the time.”

“FINE!” I turned around to snap a picture and then quickly walked away, as if I had done something wrong.

 

The Lesser of Two Evils

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Yet another interesting conversation with my 8-year-old that makes me worry…

[In the car]

Mr. Monk: Mom?

Me [Distracted by This American Life on NPR]: Huh?

Mr. Monk: What’s the drug that starts with an M?

Me [Paying attention now]: Eh… You mean Methamphetamine? [Crap! How did he know about Meth?!]

Mr. Monk: You know what I think? [He IS the King of Non Sequitur] I think that the best way to get rid of an addiction is to have another one.

Me [Trying hard not to freak out. Deep breath]: Eh… Where did you hear that? Who told you that?

Mr. Monk: Nobody. I came up with this theory on my own. Let’s say you want to quit smoking, won’t the best way to quit smoking is to become addicted to some other drugs?

Me: Ok. It does not work that way, honey. Addictions don’t work like that. You are going to end up addicted to BOTH cigarettes and whatever drugs, and that would be really really really bad.

Mr. Monk: Oh. But wouldn’t it be better if you are addicted to cigarettes if you have to choose?

Me: Ok. Let’s say some crazy god comes down from heaven and says to you, “Thou shall choose an addiction!” Then yes, hypothetically speaking, you should choose cigarettes. Or if someone sticks a gun to your head and make you choose. Then yes, go for the cigarettes.

Mr. Monk: Yeah. Because cigarettes will cut your life short but drugs will ruin your life completely.

Me [Kind of relieved]: Well, I sure hope you never get yourself into a crazy situation where you are forced to choose! Ha ha.

Mr. Monk: Then why do they have Marijuana added gum at Walgreens for helping people quit smoking?

Me [So this is where the FIRST question came from. M is for marijuana. I should feel better about this. But… WILL THIS NEVER END?! And what was the last time we were at Walgreens? Wasn’t it a week ago?!]: What? WHAT?! Oh I am pretty sure you saw it wrong. First of all, it is illegal to sell marijuana. [Yes yes, I omitted the whole exception for medicinal use. But I think I deserved a pass here since I was trying hard not to crash the car!] I don’t think Walgreens would sell some gum with marijuana  in it. You must have read the label wrong.

Mr. Monk: Yeah, you are probably right.

[Silence]

Mr. Monk: Mom?

Me [Holding my breath]: Y–E–S?

Mr. Monk: What does CVS stand for?

 

My son. Champion Player of Free Association.

 

If I could tell you one thing about parenting

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My 8-year-old, known as Mr. Monk here, is singing a song that he improvises right now. In the middle of the Kaleidoscopic of lyrics, I heard,

 

Thank you for being our mother.

 

I chuckled. “I honestly do not know how to take that.”

“Well, don’t take it as an insult. I am not being sarcastic.”

“Well, thank you.” I said while remembering what I did to deserve this: Did not get home until 8:30 because I was trapped on the train due to a wind advisory while the kids stayed home by themselves; Fed him leftover chicken from the rotisserie chicken I bought on Sunday but forgot to take it out from the fridge; Gave him half-melted ice cream which I did not remember until an hour after I got home from the grocery store.

This goes to show that whatever you do, keeping the expectations low is going to make parenting a lot easier.

 

A Reason as Good as Any

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Conversations that happened yesterday…

(Proving that thank goodness I work fulltime so I don’t spend too much time talking to my kids…)

 

[On the way to lunch]

13-year-old: My friend is jealous. He thinks we have the coolest license plate ever! [Be rest assured: It is dorky.]

8-year-old: Oh, mom, we should keep this car forever so we can keep our license plate.

13-year-old: Dummy. We can keep our license plate even when we have a new car.

Me: Actually they have made the rule so that people can pass down their license plates to their kids.

8-year-old: You mean when you die, we can have the license plate?! Cool!

Me (failing to be concerned by his excitement):  Actually you two will probably fight over it. We need to get another cool license plate.

[A lengthy discussion ensued regarding what other cool (and equally dorky) license plate we could get]

[At the restaurant]

Me: Ugh. I forgot my ring… Speaking of my ring. I need to update my will. Now that I have lost both my engagement ring and my wedding ring, I no longer have anything to pass down to you.

13-year-old: Nice job, mom!

8-year-old: You mean you have written down what we are getting when you die? When you die, do we get everything?

Me: Technically, no. When a person dies, and if they’re married, their spouse would get everything. That’s how most people set up their wills. Oh, remember that Mr. Monk episode? (Yeah, we are polite to fictional TV characters) Remember the guy had to pretend that his father died after his stepmother? They both already had kids when they got married. The husband left his son everything; the wife left his daughters everything. The man actually died before his wife, so the son would have lost everything. That’s why he went through the trouble to make sure that people think his stepmother died after before his dad.

[Pause while the boys digested the twisted plot line]

8-year-old: Can you do me a favor? Can you and dad never get a divorce so this thing won’t get so complicated?

 

Porn for Women

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You can say that I have given up on attracting more male readers… Since I am of the Drastic Measure type of bitches: It is All or Nothing to me, I have decided to actively repel men*, esp. the straight kind. Let’s go all the way, baby!

 

This is a real book.

The Cambridge Women’s Pornography Cooperative asked women, young, old, rich, and poor, “What really, really gets you hot?” Armed with their findings, they worked day and night to create Porn for Women.

(Granted, the book should have been more accurately titled “Porn for Straight Women”… And some of the things attributed to the men/actors are plainly condescending, if not insulting, to women IMO, such as “Ooh Look! The NFL Playoffs are today. I bet we’ll have no trouble parking at the craft’s fair.”…  At any rate, I hope you all get the chuckle or drool out of these…)

 

Some choice pornographic photos from the book:

 

I found the following on Flickr:

(This one, to me, is more about fairness: Yup. If you make the mess, you clean up the mess. IMO, most men that claim they love to cook do not have to clean up the pots and pans afterwards. If they had to clean up afterwards, they would not have used three pots to cook one dish!)

 

 

 

As Liz Lemon would say:

I want to go to there.

 

 

* I understand that this is an affectatious** statement: by claiming that I am actively repelling men, I am implying that otherwise they would have visited this blog in drones. It’s like I prefer to think to myself that people dislike me because 1) they are racists, 2) they hate my gut. The truth is, I am deeply aware of this, they probably simply dislike me because they dislike me.

** The use of the word “affectatious” is itself ironically affectatious.***

*** The fact that I pointed the above out is an act of affectation.

**** And so on, and so forth.

***** I don’t really worry about the fact that I have few male readers. In order to prove myself to you, I will talk about menstrual cycles next.

****** Why is “MEN” in the word “MENstrual”?

******* Come to think of it, I think Elly has beat me to it [i.e. talking about menstrual cycles] with this video she posted on her blog called “Her First Period”.

******** I really should turn my footnotes into a separate blog post. And I am writing my footnotes before I write the post proper, and am having more fun doing this.

******** Do people even read these footnotes?

Just sit down and relax, honey.

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I heard this study that was published this May on the radio today. The headline is:

Men relax best when wives are doing housework chores!

 

My first question was: How is it possible that I did not hear about this until now?! Is the Universe conspiring to keep this earth-shattering news from me?

You are probably thinking: “I need a study to tell me this?” I know. But it is always nice to have your suspicion confirmed by rigorous scientific research.

For starters, the researchers “measured stress hormones and daily activities”, specifically, they “sampled saliva repeatedly to measure cortisol, which increases in stressful situations”, a most objective measurement: so there is no arguing that women only feel more stressed because they bitch about everything and they CARE MORE about whether the dishes are done, the laundry is folded, and the floor is not covered with random objects.

The study was done with researchers observing “30 dual-earner couples in Los Angeles, each with at least one child ages 8-10. Most had two or three children. The average marriage was 13 years and the average age was 41… Over four days, two weekend days and two weekdays, researchers tracked activities at 10-minute intervals.”

And here are the highlights of their findings:

  • For women, healthier cortisol levels resulted when their husbands spent more time pitching in on housework
  • For husbands, more leisure time was linked with healthier cortisol when their wives spent more time doing house-related work and less time in leisure.
  • Men, when they come back home, tend to be alone in a room.
  • Women, when get back home, tend to be with one or more children doing childcare.
  • When women are alone, they tend to be doing housework; When men are alone, they tend to be relaxing.

(Note that none of these families have YOUNG CHILDREN. I can only imagine the discrepancy to be even more skewed between men and women were babies and toddlers present in these households studied)

 

You know what? All my feminist sisters could throw banana peels at me. I am not outraged by the research findings at all. Nope.  Au contraire!

I. AM. ELATED.

Why?

Because I am going to remember this research next time I hear about some other woman talking about how her husband pitches in, 50-50, and then I will not secretly hide in the bathroom and cry.

Because I am normal. I am NOT alone. I am part of the statistics. Part of the cogs that make up normalcy. Like the common stock photos showing a man reading newspaper while his wife vacuums and him lifting his legs up for the vacuum out of consideration.

Kapow! Woohoo! I am doing a happy dance while I survey the disaster zone that is our house and also my weekend project. (If you call housework a PROJECT, you feel more accomplished and less housewifery…)

 

It is truly a relief to know I am simply part of the normalcy.

 

WTF Wednesday: I will stab anyone who says “Boys will always be boys”

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I wrote a post titled  I will stab anyone who says “Boys will always be boys”  in October 2010 at the height of teen (and preteen) suicides. With the nation coming together in the movement It Gets Better, I felt relieved.

“People get it now.” I thought. “They are reaching out to our young people. People are taking bullying at school seriously.” I told myself. “There is hope that things will change.”

What the fuck was I thinking?

 

Almost a year from when the movement It Gets Better was first started in September 2010, Mother Jones this week brought to our attention that NINE teenagers have committed suicide in ONE school district in the past two years. (Never mind your first reaction: Why weren’t these cases reported by the news outlet? Now that we have the celeb-endorsed It Gets Better, teen suicides are no longer news-worthy or something?!)  That district, Anoka-Hennepin school district, is the largest in the state of Minnesota with 40,000 students. The situation is so alarming that the area where the school district is located has been identified as a “suicide contagion”, according to the school district website, “because of higher than normal numbers of suicides and suicide attempts.”

Nobody can really pin point precisely why these young people decided to take their own lives. Most of them were either self-identified as gay or were thought and taunted as gay. Wouldn’t you know that the Anoka-Hennepin school district apparently has one of the most homophobic official school policies?

Anoka-Hennepin has a policy on the books known colloquially as “no homo promo,” which dates in back to the mid-1990s. Back then, after several emotional school board meetings, the district essentially wiped gay people out of the school health curriculum. There could be no discussion of homosexuality, even with regard to HIV and AIDS, and the school board adopted a formal policy that stated school employees could not teach that homosexuality was a “normal, valid lifestyle.”

Later the policy was changed to require school staff to remain neutral on issues of homosexuality if they should come up in class, a change that critics said fostered confusion among teachers and contributed to their inability to address bullying and harassment, or to even ask reasonable questions about some of the issues the kids were struggling with, like sexual orientation.  Source: Mother Jones

 

After so many young people have lost to us, people started paying attention and asking questions. The Anoka-Hennepin school district is currently under Federal investigation.  The Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Center for Lesbian Rights have also filed a law suit against the district. (SPLC explains why they are suing Anoka-Hennepin here)

The Anoka-Hennepin school district has been the subject of an investigation since the fall of 2010, after several students and community members came forward to report both verbal and physical bullying and harassment . During the ten month investigation, SPLC heard from students and teachers about concerns regarding the “neutrality” policy and implications of a gag policy in the classroom.

According to Sam Wolfe, lead attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, students have reported being called vicious anti-gay slurs and subjected to being physically assaulted pushed into school lockers and trash cans due to their actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity. One student even was reportedly attacked by a pencil and stabbed in the back of the neck. Source: WashingtonBlade

 

Maybe it is pure coincidence, but Anoka-Hennepin school district happens to be in Minnesota’s 6th congressional district whose representative is none other than Michele Bachmann.

Michele Bachmann who just recently signed a Christian right conservative family value yada yada group’s pledge which also stated that children born into slavery were somehow better off than children born into modern African American families.

Michele Bachmann who has from the beginning of her political career opposed any education and policy promoting tolerances towards the LGBT communities, who sees a “homosexual agenda” where gay youth would lure and indoctrinate the otherwise non-gay youth into a life of sin.

 

Yes, Michele Bachmann, there IS indeed a "Gay Agenda"...

 

Michele Bachmann who is the favorite of the Tea Party, and is leading the one woman (+ one ambiguously “pray the gay away” gay therapist husband) charge against gay marriages in defense of marriages, vowing to ban gay marriages (AND pornography, because you know, straight people do NOT watch porn. Ever). “Marriage is something worth fighting for!” she yelled. Cough cough. Michele, on this point, I think we all agree with you: Why do you think the gay community fights so hard for their right to marry?!

(I am waiting for her to say something in support of Hitler and deny Holocaust. Just you wait. It’s like she is playing a “Really? Really?! Are you fucking kidding me?!” Bingo game…)

 

According to a blog post on The Dump Michele Bachmann Blog from 2006 (way before she became a household name), “Most of the time Bachmann avoids committee hearings like the plague. However, she did deign to attend a hearing about a bill to address bullying in schools.” At this hearing in 2006 (which has been unearthed and discussed in these past few days), Bachmann questioned a proposed “zero tolerance” anti-bullying bill:

 “For all us, our experience in public schools is there have always been bullies, always have been, always will be. I just don’t know how we’re ever going to get to point of zero tolerance and what does it mean? … What will be our definition of bullying? Will it get to the point where we are completely stifling free speech and expression? Will it mean that what form of behavior will there be – will we be expecting boys to be girls?” – Michele Bachmann, 2006

 

She went on and on to say that there are differences between boys and girls, that children are like barbarians and we as parents are trying to civilize them, yada yada yada. Why? So we as parents simply expect boys to be barbarians? To bully each other? To pick on the weak who cannot defend themselves? Lord of the Flies? 

I have been seeing red ever since I read this line of hers this afternoon. I am so upset that I cannot really talk about it intelligently. I have said all that I wanted to say wrt. this subject in October 2010  I will stab anyone who says “Boys will always be boys”. I did not expect the day when I need to repeat myself, and it seems more urgent than ever because Bachmann is running for President and I honestly do not want to live in a country ruled by her and her narrow-minded friend. Heck, I don’t even want to live in a country where such an outcome is POSSIBLE.

I need to go stab a pillow or something.

Oh, one more thing.

Can we bring Sarah Palin back please?

Happy Monday. Or not.

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In case you are wondering what the hack is happening to this blog. “I did not sign up for a PHOTOBLOG! (not that anything is wrong with it…)” My dear readers, my most sincere apologies. (And if you are actually happy about not having to read my ramblings, you are absolutely welcome!)

Just got back from our one week vacation from the Outer Banks in NC, and right back into Monday blues. I am still feeling quite disoriented. (Probably more because I have not had any coffee yet…)

Temporary cure for Monday Blues? Take two rainbows with a glass of ocean. (Side effect may include: wanting to repeatedly hit your head on your desk when the euphoria wears off)