Tag Archives: neurosis

On the Empty Seat: musings about how we all sit together, or not, on the train

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Like on any public transportation, an empty space on the seat next to where you are sitting is highly coveted – this has been proven with money (after all it talks) when airlines started offering “an empty seat next to you as long as it is not a full flight” as one of the benefits for being a super premier member, the elite amongst all the elites (e.g. United Airlines’ 1K members).

I take the commuter train to and fro work every day and have been intrigued by the phenomenon surrounding the “The Empty Seat” (“TES” henceforth) Syndrome; in my perverted easily-amused mind, this is an anthropological subject waiting to happen: talk about cultural and social boundaries and unwritten rules being played out here, much like what one can observe inside an elevator. Only, on the train, I have an entire hour to watch the dance between two strangers forced to sit side by side for an extended period of time, sometimes, egads, with arms and/or legs touching!

It is curious even though there is no rule on this, it does seem that people always sit by the window if they are the first to occupy a seat. This is after all good civil etiquette. However, immediately following Rule #1, Rule #2 commands, “Unless there is NO MORE empty seat on this train cart, do NOT come sit by me! Consider TES next to me only as a last resort!” Whoever breaks Rule #2 is immediately looked upon with suspicion and even alarm.

TES is subtly guarded with vehemence – just look at the purse, the briefcase, the newspaper, the magazine, the book, the shopping bag, and the McDonald’s paper bag placed on where there another person could have been sitting. This gesture murmurs loudly, “Yes, you are of course welcome to sit here, but I’d prefer if you don’t!” Some people seem to have taken TES as their god-given right: instead of the subtle act of leaving object on TES, they simply plot themselves down PAST the invisible dividing line on the two-person seat. Men tend to do this a lot, and oftentimes I am tempted to ask whether they are ready to have the conductor punch two holes on their tickets. (And I am more than ready to punch two holes on somewhere else other than their tickets… I am passionate about things that don’t matter like this…)

The most intriguing is the act of “choosing a seat” on a train that no longer has any TES left. Every single chair is occupied, with someone sitting by the window. And here you can tell roughly what kind of person each one of us is:

Health warning: Since we are NOT in B-school and I don’t work for any of the management consulting firms, the following attempt at metaphorically grouping passengers on MY train is by no means MECE. Anybody that complains, “But it’s not MECE!” will die a horrible death…

The forever conscientious: these people, mostly women (and not young), move their belongings onto their lap as soon as they see new passengers coming. But very seldom do I see people ready to 1. move their bag all the way to the floor, 2. move themselves closer to the window so as to make more space. “Please, please, please. I want to do the right thing but please don’t pick me…”

The “I have done my share so what do you want from me”: these people will continue to do whatever they are doing. They have kept their belongs relatively close to themselves so there is still reasonable space for a relatively normal-sized person to sit in TES. Maybe they really are so engrossed in the book or the scenery outside. They will simply ignore you, and not budge while you sit down.

The “Yeah I see you but I am not happy about moving my stuff”: maybe they are simply pretending that they don’t see you coming. You need to actually ask these people, “eh, excuse me…” The nicer ones would quickly move their stuff, some even apologetically. The not so nice ones will furrow their brows as if you are asking them to give you their first born. When you sit down, you are made to feel ashamed for encroaching on their carefully constructed personal space.

The “I am sitting here and you’d better not try and squeeze in beside me”: These are the aforementioned (mostly male) passengers. Their body takes up so much space, mind you, not because they are overweight, but because they do not make the attempt to “be one with the window”. They leave so little space that only a waif could possible sit by them – perhaps that is the intention… I am not sure. Though I often, as I mentioned above, wanted to confront them, I have never actually tried to sit down, afraid that they may turn out to be truly jerk-offs – They may NOT budge an inch, and I will have to suffer either the shame of getting up from a seat and moving to another seat (a questionable act on the train unless you have an excuse that EVERYBODY else could see and could easily understand…) or the agony of being squeezed into a space fit only for a waif, for an entire hour!

Tomorrow, I will blog about the agonizing thought process of when I choose a seat on the train back: So many choices, so little time…

Rising to the Challenge: trying to explain why I don’t watch Lost

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Dear Mr. Gleeson,

I know this sounds like a cop out to you, but here is a short, incompletely researched response to your question to which I have not responded to. But I have other duties to tend to, such as packing for our long trip to Asia which commences tomorrow, (Here is a picture as proof), finishing my work (unfortunately, I am one of those women that are “uppity” and need to prove themselves), and taking care of my children (hence the second part in my Twitter ID “Submom”). Anyway, enough with the violin in the background…

Though I am never an avid fan of any TV shows… On second thought, I do recall not being able to sleep when the BBC TV series, “Jane Eyre”, was on many years ago. Kind of silly, I know, since everybody knows the plot already. But Timothy Dalton was quite dreamy as Mr. Rochester. By the way, what happened to the guy? Anyway, I digress…

Where was I? Oh, yes, I can understand your demand for a proof for my accusation that the writers of Lost have been known to change the plot when one of the mysteries was “figured out” and became public consensus through the many fan sites. I swear that I have come across an article talking about this, quite a few years ago, otherwise I would not have formulated such an impression since I do not watch the show. None at all. For those who simply came upon this blog post of mine without knowing the back story of why I am writing this post, please curb your anger. Yes, I know I should not be talking about a show I have not even seen. It’s a long story. Suffice to say that on Twitter, I made such a bold confession: that I Hate Lost. The claim was made partly in jest as one of the random cyber vents I send out via Twitter: “You Know What I Hate?” If you are familiar with Mad TV, you know the bit I modeled this on. The audience is supposed to say, “WHAT?” with much glee and anticipation.

And it all went downhill from there.

I didn’t mean to do this to garner attention, you know, the way how some people yell out obscenity for attention. Some other Twitterers responded and asked me Why? I then responded, because I was brought up with good manners. All in the name of trying to explain why me, personally, do not, and will not, spend my time watching Lost.

Yes, I get the irony of me spending time Twittering and writing this blog. But you have your guilty pleasure, and I have mine. Live and let live, they say.

Perhaps I was flattered that someone even cared about why I do not like Lost, won’t even give it a try, No Sirree. I now feel compelled to give them a good reason. I am by no means a good writer. Please bear with me here.

So I cannot present you with the article tonight because Google failed me. When I typed in the keywords, “Lost Writers Changed Plot Fans Speculation”, BOOM! the search engine came back with articles after articles, blogs after blogs, posts after posts, analyses, interviews, on Lost and its writers. It was like I opened Pandora’s Box! And I promise you that I will continue trying. I am a researcher at heart, and I am as of now obsessed with finding it.

What’s really interesting is that I came across quite a few articles that talked about how the Lost writers made up the plot(s) and mysteries as they went along, twist after twist (i.e. what I call “upper hand” over the audience which got your goat) especially in the previous seasons. So that pointed to the same direction as my said “grievance”, to a certain degree. What I also found interesting is that even the writers themselves are finally realizing the entire alternative universe that they have created has taken on a life of its own. A new ecosystem separate from its creators. The collective force of the fans is larger than the writers themselves: through the Interweb, the fans have conjured up ,multiple universes more immense than what the writers have envisioned in the writers’ room. I am especially fascinated by these two articles: one about continuity of the “mythology” and the other one about “time-space continuum“.

(For Mr. Nation’s dilemma for keeping all threads accounted for and untangled, I would like to suggest a relational database. Not a joke. In fact, the George Lucas empire does just that for the Star Wars ecosystem: with its own “Continuity department“)

All brainy stuff. Great for debates and discussions, preferably after a pint or two.

In fact, if I were still in school, the analysis of the universe within Lost the Show and the meta-universe of Lost the Fandom as a way to understand how the Internet has changed how popular culture is shaped would be the subject of my dissertation.

Seeing how I have left school a long time ago, I will not spend my time on the show. Sorry. It requires too much investment on the part of the audience, perhaps that is where you and I differ fundamentally as TV watchers. I am the “brain-dead” type. I do not want to get sucked into a fictional world that is striving to be as complicated as the real world (albeit in very different ways) that I have to constantly worry about what is going to happen now and agonize over the fact that I cannot figure the mysteries out.

I worry too much as is. As for puzzles, I have my Sudoku and Crossword puzzles. Or my pre-teen boy.

And I stand by the point that it is hypocritical that men (yes, mostly men) laugh at women for treating soap opera characters as if they were real live people, while they discuss incessantly about what is going to happen to which group on the show Lost. I just have to laugh. Not passing judgement here. Just sayin’ that if you think one scenario is ridiculous, then you have to take a good look at the other scenario.

Sincerely,

Not a Lost Fan

Towards the discussion of race with a 6 year-old…

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Every day is a trial and error in my effort to bring my kids up the “right” way…

Here is an incident happened last month which I have been chewing over and over:

My 6 year-old came home excited one day to tell me all about what he had learned at school about MLK, about Rosa Parks, about the civil rights movement, and about what it was like before for people of color. (Except, of course, he did not use the ultra PC term, “People of Color”…)

“Do you know that the white people had their own sinks, and they wouldn’t even let the colored people use them? And do you know that the white people get to sit in the front of the bus, and the colored people have to go sit in the back. And guess who gets to sit down if there are no seats left? The white people!”

On one hand, I was glad that he learned so much and seemed to be grasping the concept/idea. On the other hand, I winced every time he used the term “colored people”. I sat him down and gently asked him where he’d learned that term, he said from
a book he read at school. My guess was that the book describes the situations in the past, esp. in the South, and there were signs on which “Colored people only” and “Whites only” were shown. But as a Kindergartner, my son did not understand that the term is no longer in use. Political correctness is not factored into his choice of vocabulary yet.

Although he is probably too young to understand the concept of Political Correctness, I did try. I explained to him that we no longer use that term to refer to people with tanned skin, and that now we use the term “people of color”. For example, mommy is a woman of color. He looked at me, puzzled. I am not sure how much he understood.

I wrote the teacher a long letter and here is her response:

“We read the book last week. The book we read showed the signs for ‘Colored Only’ above water fountains and bathroom doors, as well as referring to those terms in the story. There was quite a discussion about unfair laws. We talked about everyone having color in their skin. People are not white or black – there are different tones of color. The phrase you used, ‘people of color’ was introduced. We also used, ‘African-Americans’ as a term as well.

I try to keep the concepts simple and easy to understand because the terms are so abstract. The main goal is to teach how we are all alike and all different as well as respect.”

By god this whole thing is complicated since NAACP has “Colored People” in its full name: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It is confusing sometimes even for adults, let alone Kindergartners.

I was caught off guard again when my boys heard on NPR the term “Black women”, when a lot of discussions happened around Michelle Obama’s role as the first Black First Lady, and what it means for Black women, and also, especially, young Black women that are just forming a sense of themselves. My 6 yo asked, “What do they mean by Black?” Probably the first time he heard the term so loud and clear, and it registered in his head that it means more than just a color but something else.

So we started a discussion on “African American” = “Black”, but you want to be careful when you use the term Black because you need to use it appropriately otherwise people may be offended or hurt. And the most appropriate term is probably “African American”.

“Why do they call themselves Blacks? Their skin is not black, just tanned. Like your skin is tanned, just different. But Auntie R’s dad (who is Asian Indian) is not Black even though he has dark skin too?”

(I mused, inside my head, about the usage of the term “Blacks” to refer to any non-white people, including the large population of Asian Indians and their UK-born descendants in the U.K. That would have made my duty as a parent a lot easier! But I refrained myself… Maybe some other time…)

From there, we got into a discussion on why President Obama is African American and NOT African even though his father was from Kenya. And the conversation quickly turned (or deteriorated) into who is American and who is not… And the question inevitably came up: “So Samantha next door is Korean and not American?” “No, no, no! She is American just like you guys. It is just that her grandparents came from Korea and that they still honor some Korean customs and traditions… If you want to label her, she would be Korean American. But you know, it does not matter what kind of American you are, and you shouldn’t label people anyway. It does not matter: you are all Americans!”

So, yeah, I was mentally kicking myself for singing to the tune of “We are the World”… and secretly praying, “Gosh. Please please don’t ask me what being an American mean… Not on this car ride… I need to write a thesis just to answer that question!”

I declare: Nintendo Thumb = Text thumb = Twitter Thumb. At least in my case…

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No more texting for me!

Finally after living with the pain in my left thumb for three weeks, I could not ignore it any more. Luckily a colleague whose wife is an excellent hand surgeon volunteered his wife’s time and I was able to bypass the long wait time typical at orthopedic surgeons’ offices around the country. The verdict: Yup. I’ve got it: Tendinitis of the thumb, (or Thumb tendinitis), commonly known in the 1990s as Nintendo Thumb. Now, it is mostly caused by texting.

Dr. M, who by the way is the kind of intelligent, accomplished, generous and beautiful individual that I would wish my daughter to grow up to be like if I had a daughter, put my hand on a splint and delivered the grim news: take 2 Aleves twice a day, and if the condition does not improve in a week, I will have to take a cortisone shot right in my palm. The best way to cure any malaise caused by tendinitis.

I am keeping my fingers crossed (the ones that still can).

I have given birth twice. Somehow, however, I am not too keen on receiving a big giant needle on my palm.

It is kind of embarrassing for me to be getting myself into this predicament. What am I? A high school girl? I don’t even text that much, and now I need to swear off texting. Perhaps it is now a good time for me to reconsider a service such as Jott which enables voice to text (text messages that is).

(Too bad Jott was once free during Beta but not any more… )

Here is another realization:

You don’t appreciate how good we have it for having the opposable thumbs until you no longer have them! I want my opposable left thumb back!

Metablogging: Maybe we are all egomaniacs…

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and if we were, or, if I were, I would not be sitting here at 6 am worried about my being an egomaniac and what all this blogging and twittering and facebooking says about me as an individual.

Is it not enough to live an anonymous life? Or, Why is it not enough to live an anonymous life?

I asked myself guiltily.

What does this say about me? Does this mean I am so ill content in my own personal, real, life that I need to create a separate persona for myself in the cyber space? What kind of wuss am I that I cannot do something about my “real” life?

Doesn’t “We Are All Egomaniacs” have a nice ring to it? Nice name for an alt. rock band?

Here is what the venerable (or at least expensive) Forrester Research has to say about Microblogs, i.e. Twitter and its like:

“The current darlings of media attention, microblogs appeal to both the egocentrism and the voyeurism of Web 2.0 aficionados.”

From Oliver Young’s research article on Enterprise Web 2.0 (published in November 2008)

Mr. Young is a fine researcher with a good head on his shoulder, let me preface by saying this. The irony of his comment on microblogging is that, and I suspect that he himself has sensed the irony, he is on Twitter (with 337 followers and not all of them are friends or FOAF).

Today is the day: Inaugration of President Obama, yet, I am not feeling the fever. What’s wrong with me?

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I am a liberal alright and a staunch Obama supporter. In fact, I am proud of the fact that I “called it” in 2004 before Obama gave that fateful speech at the Democratic Convention that launched him into the national spotlight. (And what’s more, he wrote it himself!) I called it even before that: I saw him on TV being interviewed for something, and I told my husband, this guy could run for the president one day and I would vote for him. After the 2004 Dem Convention speech, I was utterly convinced that he has what it takes to be the POTUS and I anxiously waited for someone, someone that mattered to make this official.

I still tell my husband, “I called it before anybody else did!” from time to time, and it annoys him to no end since, of course, it cannot be true that I was the very first one to see this coming…

I was guessing 2012, but it came 4 years earlier to my excitement. At the same time, I was worried that the timing was off, and the country might not be ready for someone so young, and this might ruin his chance forever. (Not ready NOT because he’s black but because he is young, relatively “inexperience” – I already predicted that the country would be ready for an African American man to lead them before a woman… but that’s for an entire different post later)

During the election, I constantly had panic attacks that we were going to lose again, and be under the GOP thumb for another 4 years. I joked, “kidding on the square”, with my husband that we should consider moving to Canada, as we did 4 years ago when Bush won again. On November 4, 2008, I was so happy that my worry was unfounded. He won. WE won!

I admire Obama very much and would like nothing more than the opportunity of speaking to him in person, or even just shaking his hand, like the rest of the nation, judging by the blogs, Facebook updates, Twitter followings, even the news media that lavish praise after praise upon him. He has made so many speeches that brought tears to my eyes. He is able to get in touch with many on a very personal level. I have posted tribute to him myself as well.

I admire Michelle Obama as well, on so many different levels, esp. her being an intelligent person, and a working mother to boot. Like her husband, many have responded to her on a very personal level as well. They are truly an inspiration to the “regular” Americans since as far as I can tell, they have absolutely no ties to any big political names, not the nephew or niece of so-and-so. And for African American women, her being the First Lady has begun to carry so many symbolic meanings, and many of them have been materialized in the new book Go Tell Michelle.

Oh, I have felt the fever alright. During the election.

But I woke up early this morning, at 2:46 am to be exact, feeling a panic attack, because I am not feeling the excitement that the news media has shown us, the screaming fans and all. Don’t get me wrong, I am happy. But it feels like, all of a sudden, at a party where everybody is screaming and laughing and drunk with youthful abandon, and well, partying, I am standing in the midst of all this, sober.

I can understand the significance of this event for many people, a significance much much deeper than the face value of a Presidential Inauguration – He IS the first African American to be elected the President of the United States. I cannot begin to imagine the significance of this event on the psyche of African Americans. This is truly a watershed moment that can potentially change the lives of so many, not just in the US, but around the world. The policies he will make, the changes he will carry out (or at least try his darnedest), the wrongs that he will correct (starting with banning waterboarding outright!), the people that he, as the first Black U.S. President, and Michelle, as the first Black First Lady, will inspire, again, not just in this country but all around the world.

But I am not feeling the screaming fan blind adoration bestowed on him as if he were a rock star or a movie star chosen as Sexist Man Alive. Maybe that’s my problem. This man has a wife, and two young daughters. And he is going to be OUR President for the next four years. To be honest, I am not cool with screaming female fans treating him like some sort of sex symbol. (Call me a prude… I am never one to fall for a celebrity so maybe that’s why I am such a party pooper at this moment). Calling him Obama-daddy trivialized the election of an intelligent capable man who just wants to do the right thing and inspire others to do the same. Selling thongs with his image on it and words “Sleep with Obama” is disrespectful to his wife, not to mention anything else.

Yes, I do have a sense of humor. I found the Obama Girl funny, during the election. But now we have reached our goal and elected the man, hmmm, don’t you think it is time to let it go? Last time I checked, this here is the United States, not France….

There lies my problem: I am not seeing him as a celebrity, commanding my unquestioned adoration.

This man is human. He is not Superman.

It is 4:30 am, on the day of the historical Presidential Inauguration of Barack Obama who I voted for and wanted for president since before 2004, I am completely sober, much to my liberal chagrin, in the midst of youthful obsession that turns anyone into a Hollywood-style “celebrity”.

My cure? Psyching myself up by shopping for the commemorative items on the official PIC2009 website. Get them before they are gone! If I am not feeling the party, at least I can fake it!

To Tweet or Not to Tweet…

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Upon learning my having joined the latest phenom which is Twitter, my male co-workers asked me point blank, But, WHY?

Why not just use emails if you want to talk to people you know? Why not use TXT? You can email to an entire group of people if that’s your reasoning for using Twitter (“one to many” instant communication)

Or, is your intention of letting strangers know what you are doing at any given minute? Waiting in line in the grocery store? Watching TRM at airport lounge?

Why? What is the rational excuse for this? Or even, the psychological needs behind this?

Excuses I use for being on Facebook, despite not having lots of “friends” (or Peeps) nor being a teenager, nor leading an active interesting life, cannot even be applied to Twitter: I can share pictures with people that I know on Facebook, only when they want to know; I am not shoving my cute kids’ pictures down anybody’s throat. And my friends may not want to know that I have been up to on a daily basis (for some, perhaps once-a-year Christmas cards have been adequate?) , but if they check my Facbook status, again, only when they want to, they can see that I have been traveling a lot more for business and that my husband is traveling around the world for his own consulting gig.

No. The same rational does not apply to Twitter. So why indeed?

I happened to read an article in Spectrum, the less-techy (and more Wired-like version of IEEE’s publication), in the current issue: “To Twitter or Not to Twitter” by Robert Lucky (I wonder whether he gets teased for his last name a lot…)

(Right off the bat, the author showed his Newbie status by not using the correct verb “Tweet”… But it’s the type of endearing mistakes that anybody over 30 in this day and age could relate to…)

He mentioned his puzzlement over a young speaker’s Tweeting about “waking up in the morning now”. Any sensible (perhaps older person) would ask, “Why would anybody want to know?” And if they want to know, can’t you call them? TXT them?

This new need experienced by the Internet-generation to be connected to the World all the time is intriguing to me, and I doubt that our children ever even stop and ponder at the wonder of this. To them this is part of existence, “I TXT, therefore I am.” The real grown-ups say this now often as a gentle tease, but there is truth in this saying. “I am Connected on the Web, therefore I am.” A life that is not documented is not worth living.

Excerpt from Mr. Lucky’s article:

“Twitter, the social-networking Web site that allows users to broadcast short text messages to a group of friends, has burst into popularity with millions of subscribers. I’m a confirmed e-mail user, but that’s so 20th century. I feel a certain pressure to get with it. So, to Twitter or not to Twitter? I view it as a question for the ages—the ages of the users, that is.

It was my generation of engineers that created the Internet, but it is largely today’s youth who are molding the social connectedness that is coming to characterize cyberspace. These are the so-called digital natives, who grew up with the Internet already a part of everyday life. They’re always online, inhabiting multiple identities, living a culture of sharing and peer collaboration. For them, multitasking is just the way it is. We older engineers built cyberspace, but our kids live in it, and for many of them the technology is transparent and almost irrelevant.

So as a digital immigrant, already an adult as the new culture was forming, I am amazed at what I see. At a recent meeting a young speaker casually mentioned that every morning he Twitters that he has just woken up. Alarm bells went off in my head. I thought about the fact that several scores of people are going to read a message that this guy has awakened. Isn’t this is an incredible waste of time for everyone involved? But a more unpleasant thought also formed in the back of my head—the worry that no one would care that I myself had just arisen. There must be some social consequence that I’m missing. An older acquaintance told me that he had been using Twitter and that after a week he had begun to feel a sense of connectedness.”

Mr. Lucky referenced two cartoons published by The New Yorker 12 years apart to illustrate how things have changed through the years, and how things have not really: these priceless (and thought-provoking) cartoons can be found here:

“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” (A dog, sitting at a computer terminal, talking to another dog.)  Published in The New Yorker 5 July 1993 by Peter Steiner.

“I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking.” (One dog talking to another.) by Alex Gergory, The New Yorker, 12 September 2005.

“I wish Mary Poppins is my mom…”

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The other day when my 6-year-old was very frustrated with me for saying NO to most of his requests, he sighed and said with longing, “I wish Mary Poppings is my mom.”
Startled but not offended, laughingly I said, “Yeah, I wish she were your mom too.”
He in turn was shocked by my non-reactive reaction.
Then today, after pointing out to me that I didn’t feed him a “proper” dinner (Note to self: Bagel with cream cheese does not count as a “proper dinner”), he said, in mock-earnestness, “I am going to ask Santa for a better mom.”  “Oh, I am just kidding.”
Ah, a great sense of humor is the sure sign of intelligence, I always say.
Being self-reflective to a compulsive degree, I often picture my kids sitting in a shrink’s office, discussing their childhood with their unstable mother and her effect on their great novels of the decade.  Perhaps all the tribulations in our repressingly liberal suburban household will become cannon fodder for their artistic endeavors one day.  One can only hope.
Coda: Turned out that hot dog on a piece of white bread (since I don’t buy buns because they always go bad before we can finish them) is an acceptable entree for dinner.  Thank goodness.
p.s. I am well aware of this:
self-reflection + lack of action to correct any un-motherly behavior = rampant self-indulgence in the guise of mock self-pity

My pet peeves (Part 1 of a long series I am sure…)

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  • People who say “How are you?” or “What’s up?” and then give you that look when you actually try to answer the question other than “Fine”
  • People (ok, men) who do not look at you when they are talking to a group of people and you are the only woman in the room — scan, scan, skip. Repeat.
  • People with bad manners in general
  • People who check their BB constantly when you are talking
  • People who do that hand motion to signal you to hurry up and finish what you have to say – what are you? The time-keeper at a debate?
  • People who say “Fine” instead of “Yes, please.” when you ask them whether you could bring them something (to eat)
  • People who do not hold the door open behind them until your hand is on the door
  • Drivers who do not put on their frigging turn signals – your car has one, use it!
  • People with really nice cool powerful cars and then drive slowly like a Florida retiree – You have a nice car. Drive it!
  • People who are rude to “foreigners” because they do not speak English (well enough) – hey, you know what? Their English is better than your “insert the language spoken by the said ‘foreigner'”

That’s it for today. What are yours?

Questions I ask myself every day (No.1)

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Just because I am aware of my inadequacy as a mother, I am able to make fun of myself and I give myself the title “Bad Mommy of the Year”, does it absolve me for doing a bad job bringing up my children?

If I call myself out as a criminal, does it make my crime less appalling?

By calling myself a Bad Mommy, does it make me superior to women who are unaware of what a bad job they are doing or frankly don’t care?

By calling myself names, does it necessarily mean that I care? Or is my need to call myself names a desperate attempt to prove to myself and the others that I actually do care even though it may seem that I don’t?

And I want to make it clear: when I call myself “Bad Mommy” or “Worst Mother of the Year” it is definitely not a “Backdoor Brag” like the “Worst Mother of the Year” in this essay. (This mom certainly reads like a dream mom to me, and I am sure that she knows it and is proud of it even: “I am such a great mother with strong convictions that I do not succumb to my children’s whining and blackmailing!”) I really really mean it and I live with regret and fear every day…