Time Travel to the Island of Lost Toys

From the annals of classic 1970s ads, here's a reminder of what's gone lost in the world of play since my childhood.

I'm not arguing for a pink-and-blue-tinged nostalgia. I remember how clearly trucks were considered a boy toy. My little brother adored his Tonka trucks while I stuck to my stuffed animals. I was no gender outlaw in the sandbox. He got a doctor kit for Christmas; I got a nurse kit. All we really cared about was the bottle of candy pills. Still, the message hit its mark.

But by 1972, marketers couldn't just ignore the burgeoning social ferment. In the first of these ads, check out how many dads are involved with their kids - sons and daughters alike. Note the nod toward racial inclusivity. In all honesty, toy marketing is no more racist or sexist in those ads than it is today; maybe less so.

And man, were these ads prescient for 1972! Thirty-seven years later, we're surrounded by plastic crap that breaks on contact. We're deluged by gadgetry meant to entertain rather than engage. I love the line:

You see, we've learned that when a toy doesn't need a kid, in a very short time, the kid doesn't need the toy.

But enough seriousness. If you're old enough to remember 1972, by now you're recalling the classic Tonka elephant commercial and wondering where it went. It's here in this clip, too; ain't YouTube grand? Unlike platform shoes and Richard Nixon, the Tonka elephant hasn't gone terminally uncool. (Well, okay, so Nixon was never cool.) Enjoy!

My Pro-Life Reflections on the 36th Anniversary of Roe

Today is Blog for Choice Day, marking the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. The official topic is what action we'd most like to see the Obama Administration take on reproductive justice. My official response is brief because I think the first steps are pretty straightforward:

• Repeal the Mexico City policy aka the Global Gag Rule.
• Reverse the HHS "conscience clause" that allows health care providers to capriciously deny any service, including birth control (see the recent case of a nurse who removed an IUD against the patient's will although the new rule is not yet even in effect!).
• Require age-appropriate comprehensive sex education in every school in America.

How's that for a start?

But I'm not in an especially policy-wonky mood today, and to be honest, I'm not much worried about Obama dropping the ball on women's health. He's more likely to be too timid on the economy or Iraq.

Instead, I'd like to tell a story. It's a morality tale with a somewhat unlikely lesson: that the decision to terminate a pregnancy can be profoundly pro-life. While I promise it'll loop back to reproductive rights, the story begins with one man's health crisis.

In August 2004, a family of four was vacationing in Berlin, Germany. One evening, the man complained of severe pain in his limbs. The pain rapidly grew worse. Within a few hours, the agony was so overwhelming that he could hardly speak, hardly walk. The woman woke the downstairs neighbor, asked him to guard the children, and rushed to the ER, where her husband was admitted.

Several days passed, and the husband was losing his ability to walk. His left hand was paralyzed and most of his right arm. He was in excruciating pain, 11 on a 10-point scale, no matter how much morphine he got. The doctors had no explanation, no name for what was happening. An Austrian neurologist was sanguine that he'd recover fully, but he gave no diagnosis and the paralysis continued to progress. Besides, the doctors' attention was monopolized by a suspicious "Raumfordering," whatever that was. (The doctors did rounds at 7 a.m. and wouldn't answer phone inquiries, while the husband was too drugged to be a very reliable reporter, so the wife felt very much in the dark.)

The wife spent her nights googling various symptoms, wondering if it was Guillain-Barre (it wasn't) or any number of other nerve disorders. (A few years later, a neurologist in Columbus gave the most plausible explanation: MADSAM, a disorder in which the the myelin of peripheral nerves is attacked and destroyed.) All that googling revealed just one thing: a Raumforderung is a mass. Her husband had a chest mass. A day or two later, the cancer diagnosis was confirmed.

About a week into this adventure, she realized her period was several days late.

She knew that if she were pregnant, she couldn't go through with it. Her husband was lying in the hospital with cancer and paralysis. The hospital called her daily demanding an immediate cash payment of 10,000 euros (roughly $12,000) because they had no contracts with the family's American insurer. She had two very young children, aged four and 14 months. Her mother was in California, an ocean and a continent away. Her best girlfriend in Berlin was helping with the kids but had to return to work again. She was drowning already; how could she stay afloat with the heavy fatigue and the 24/7 nausea that she vividly recalled from her two pregnancies?

Any abortion under those circumstances would have been a pro-life abortion. It would have been to protect the lives of her family - including her own - in a situation where time, energy, and money were already unbearably strained. (In fact, she had to appeal to her dad for money, and bless him, he wired what was needed.)

--------------

As you've probably surmised, that woman was me. As it turned out, I wasn't pregnant. I hadn't eaten, I hadn't slept, and I'd lost close to ten pounds in just over a week. Anyone in a calm state of mind probably would've done the math and realized that the stress had made me late. I wasn't calm, I was overwrought, and so nothing computed.

As sure as I felt about the decision I would have made, I also knew that ending a pregnancy would've been wrenchingly hard. Having already carried two babies, I knew how your heart expands along with your belly. However. From experience, too, I knew that time, energy and money aren't so stretchy. They're finite. And I was already beyond my limits.

Every woman who has a pregnancy scare has her own story to tell. I got lucky. My decision stayed in the realm of the hypothetical. For others, the scare will reveal an actual pregnancy, and they'll have to choose. For some, the decision will be easy and obvious; for others, it will be agonizing. Most who choose abortion will see it as the lesser evil.

Women's reasons for deciding to bear a child - or not - may not be evident to an outsider. Most of them won't have a mate in the throes of a life-and-death health crisis. But many will have young children and feel utterly unable to cope with more. Many will have serious money worries. Some will have good reason to fear a parent or spouse. Each story is different.

And unless we know every constraint on a woman and every wish and fear in her heart, we pass judgment at her - and our - peril. Because sometimes, the most pro-life decision she can make will be to end an unplanned pregnancy and nurture those lives that already depend on her. Including her own.

Queering Masculinity, '70s Style

A few days ago, while I was having coffee with a colleague and friend of mine, we somehow got onto the subject of "Match Game." I spent hundreds of hours watching that show during those long, lazy summers when I was in late grade school and junior high, circa 1975. The fact that everyone's parents disapproved of the show's sexual innuendo, which was as wall-to-wall as our shag carpets, only added to the allure.

My friend said, "Well, there's a theory that Charles Nelson Reilly queered the game show!" Not her original thesis - I think it may come from Elana Levine's Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television- but looking back, I knew immediately what she meant. Back then, however, I had no clue that Charles Nelson Reilly was gay; I just thought he was funny. (Judging from this comment thread on Pam Spaulding's obit for him from 1997, I wasn't the only kid who didn't get it.)

Not that anyone used the term queer back then in the mid-1970s. It was still an insult, years away from being reappropriated. At least in North Dakota, all things homosexual were still very hush-hush, which helps explain my cluelessness.

But there was so much change in the media around that time. While people weren't yet regularly labeled as "gay," depictions of non-straight people were beginning to proliferate, even if Ellen DeGeneres was still unimaginable in my corner of the Upper Midwest. I grew up listening to Elton John and David Bowie. I just didn't have a handy label for what made them different from, say, Billy Joel.

In some ways, though, the more remarkable thing was the portrayals of "straight" masculinity that really don't look quite so straight nowadays. I mean, the hero of Saturday Night Fever was a dancer. The soundtrack was provided by the oh-so-fey Bee Gees. Luke Skywalker looks downright girly by today's standards. So do all the teen heartthrobs of the time: David Cassidy, Shaun Cassidy, Leif Garrett, Parker Stevenson. (Of course, that layered-look, blow-dried haircut can't help but be anti-macho. You have to wonder if they all had the same stylist as Farrah Fawcett.)

And then there was this commercial, which I hadn't thought about for thirty years until I stumbled upon it a few hours after my game-show nostalgia session: "I'm a Pepper, you're a Pepper ..." Imagine, if you can, a soda commercial today featuring a man singing and dancing like a leprechaun. (The head Pepper was, as it turns out, David Naughton, he of "American Werewolf in London.")

I'm not saying that those singing and dancing Peppers were gay. But man oh man, did they queer masculinity!

Grey Kitty, in Memoriam

Seven years ago today I lost Grey Kitty, patron cat of this blog. She was 15 3/4 years old and had been sick with apparent lymphoma for several months. One unfortunate thing about adopting a stray is that her birthdate remains a secret (best guess: somewhere in early April 1985) and so the only solid date for commemoration is the day of her death. It makes me sad to think of those last weeks, so instead I'll just post a picture of her taken in her prime, circa 1997.

Grey Kitty was sweet, bitchy, affectionate, neurotic, snuggly, funny, clumsy, and very very prone to hairballs. In other words - a truly excellent cat.

Sadistic Coaching and Parenting

Before it goes stale along with my Christmas cookies, I just have to vent about this expose of Santa and his head reindeer, Donner, via Christy Hardin Smith at Firedoglake (caution: not suitable for kids):



It's about time! Even as a kid, I hated Donner's overbearing, unsympathetic attitude. Until now, though, I didn't notice how relentlessly Santa had his back.

Didn't you have a coach or gym teacher just like Donner, too? For me, the worst was Mr. Rosen in junior high. His favorite trick was to make his classes run "gut drills." I think they're called by different names in different parts of the country, but the upshot was that - starting at one end of the basketball court - you had to sprint to the first freethrow line, touch it, pivot and sprint back to the starting line, then do the same with the center line, the other freethrow line, and the out-of-bounds line at the court's far end.

If you didn't finish the gut drill in 30 seconds, you had to run another. Then another. And another. You were done if you made it in under 30, or when Mr. Rosen could see you were about ready to puke. Woe to you if his basketball team had lost the night before.

I almost never finished in less than 30 seconds. All through those long North Dakotan basketball winters, I'd make myself sick with nauseated worry on days when I had gym. Since P.E. was always late in the afternoon, I lost entire days of my life to that dread.

Mr. Rosen was a sadist. I suspect my sons' gym teacher has a similar, though much milder, streak. As a parent recently said on an email list I lurk on: "P.E. is institutionalized bullying." I'm think it's changed somewhat since 1975, but I don't see it as wholly transformed.

The truly appalling thing about the Donner character, though, isn't that he's a coach. It's that his parenting reflects the same sadistic approach. Even more sadly, I don't think he's wholly fictionalized.

This fall, watching the Tiger's kindergarten soccer team, I overheard a dad yell at his child: "Come on, pull yourself together out there!" He then stalked away in disgust. Dude! These are five year olds!! Ironically (but irrelevantly) this man's daughter was actually paying attention to the ball. My Tiger, meanwhile, was running in the wrong direction and chatting with a little girl who'd befriended him.

Sometimes I think my boys need to be a little tougher - not because they're boys but because they can both be cloyingly thin-skinned. They tend to cry over every little bump. They tattle on each other at each opportunity. I'll readily admit that my understanding and frustration spring from the same source: I was just like them as a kid.

But you know, the world is full of Donners, and my sons will encounter plenty of them. They're leading P.E. classes. They're on the playground. They're clawing their way up the corporate ladder. (Who hasn't had a Donner as a boss?)

What my kids need from their mama is not a Donnerette. They need love and understanding. They need sympathetic encouragement to distinguish the minor scrapes of life from the big bruises. They do need me to discourage the tattling, too - but that'd be another post for another day.

Of Housecats and Cat-houses

No, not that kind of cat-house. I mean home design that's properly feline-accessible.

Back in Grey Kitty's prime, when I first moved in with my boyfriend in Berlin (the same guy who's now my husband), we slept in a loft bed in a one-room apartment. Well, two out of three of us did. GK was initially banned from the bed. But one day, in a blur of spinning, clutching paws, she scrambled gracelessly up the ladder and glared down at us defiantly. GK specialized in glaring. She did it very, very well.

My mate followed her up the ladder and pitched her kindly but firmly out of bed.

GK climbed up again. And again. And again. Until finally she wore down the humans and occupied her rightful place between the two pillows.

In the long run, this was probably incredibly stupid, because my partner developed a serious cat allergy and we are now catless. It's possible that he could have avoided the allergy - or at least the resultant asthma - had she slept elsewhere. Be that as it may, for as long as we lived in that little studio, she stayed ensconced in that bed.

We all stayed in that apartment so long, in fact, that GK started to grow old. She still clambered up the ladder as clumsily and gamely as ever. But she never did learn how to climb down again. She was always climbing-impaired from kittenhood onward, though that's a whole 'nother story. Her egress was to leap - plunk! - onto the backrest of a couch. As her catty knees grew sensitive, it obviously hurt her to make the four-foot jump.

My husband (who by then was sniffling and wheezing like crazy) responded by building her a ramp from the bed onto the couch.

GK had it good, all right. And yet, if she'd seen this, she'd have felt entirely neglected.

From I Can Has Cheezburger? The original source for the photo is The Cat's House.

Six Random Things about Me(me)

A little while back, Henry of Henry's Travels tagged me (or was that just a whisker rub?) for a "six random things about me" meme. I don't know if I can match the feline brain for sheer randomness, but here goes anyway:

1. I once played organ for a Christian Science congregation, though I'm neither an organist nor a Christian scientist. The congregation consisted of about a dozen people, average age 67, and only two who sang loudly. Unfortunately the two lusty singers tended to be about a half-beat behind the organ. It was a strictly mercenary gig; they were willing to pay $10 per Wednesday evening service and $15 for a Sunday morning. I was only 17 and those were 1981 dollars, so I felt rich indeed. It was the most I've ever earned making music.

2. I have a master's degree in engineering, which I'm guessing is true for less than one percent of women's studies professors. My field was industrial engineering - aka "imaginary" engineering, which fit me just fine. I've never worked as a "real" engineer, yet I've used that part of my education in a whole slew of ways. It taught me to pick apart statistical studies. It demystified science for me. It gave me basic knowledge that was super useful in translating technical material from German to English.

3. I was on the field at the 15-yard line for arguably the most famous and definitely the strangest play in the history of college football:



And yes, I do know the trombone player who got tackled in the end zone. He's a friend of mine. His trombone survived the tackle pretty much unscathed.

4. I'm an incorrigible slacker and underachiever. College classmates of mine (one degree of separation from me) include a Nobel Laureate in physics, a journalist who was kidnapped and executed by Al Qaida, and a cable news anchor who once dated Rush Limbaugh. All things considered, I think I'll stick with underachieving.

5. Although I'm not a very girly girl, my favorite color is purple. This started in third grade, when I had a purple dress with a pink and purple striped turtleneck collar and matching long sleeves. I also convinced my parents to paint my room lavender that year. As a result it took me a long time to understand the point of the Jenny Joseph's poem "Warning," which begins, "When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple ..."

6. I never learned to swim. Growing up landlocked and snowbound in North Dakota, I lived 30 miles from the nearest pool. One summer we were bussed there, to the little town of Gackle, and plunged into the icy water - to no avail. I only learned to dog paddle a few years later while visiting my cousins in California. I've gone white water rafting, water skiing, and snorkeling anyway. Life vests are a fabulous invention.

Contrary to the rules of this meme, I'm not gonna tag anyone else. I was always a total loser when I played tag as a kid; the only thing worse was Red Rover. (Hmm, I guess that amounts to a seventh random thing ...) If anyone decides to play along anyway, leave a comment and I'll gladly link to you in an update.

Greenlighting the Best Sex Ever

Ampelmännchen photographed in Berlin by Flickr user lsphotos, used under a Creative Commons license.

I've got a big backlog of things I'd like to say about about politics, but I'm coming down with yet another cold and the global economy is crumbling. So I'm reduced to my reptilian brain, and all it wants to write about is sex. Via Biscuit and figleaf, I've been mulling over a deceptively simple thought experiment at Manic Monday:

Which would you prefer and why? To have every stoplight turn green upon your arrival for the rest of your life or to have one week of the best sex any person ever had?

Now, for me the initial answer is screamingly obvious: I live in a small town. I spend most of my time on my bike, not in the car. Anyway, I tend to interpret traffic lights rather liberally while on my bike. Maybe if I still lived in California I'd go for the green lights and reclaim years of my life.

But I live in Ohio, so I'll take the sex.

The questions figleaf and Biscuit raise in their responses are actually more interesting than the original. Biscuit worries that every sexual experience would pale after such a peak. That's a reasonable concern.

When I think back to other sorts of pinnacles, though, I can't say that's been at all true for me. Take dancing, for instance. Back in college, I once very briefly dated a guy who'd danced on American Bandstand. I didn't know that until we were at a party and he picked me up and twirled me around 360 degrees. Without warning. Vertically. It lasted two seconds at most. By many orders of magnitude, it was the most intense experience I've ever had dancing.

Did that take the luster off of subsequent dances for me? Nah. It happened once. It was perfect. It inhabits its own space in my imagination and memory. It didn't impinge on late nights in Berlin clubs, or endless sunny California afternoons at Grateful Dead shows, or the ballroom lessons I took (clumsily but happily) with my husband back when we were planning our wedding.

Or take music. I typically hit a few sour notes (or a lot). Somestimes the phrasing doesn't come out as I imagined. And yet, I have memories of performances that - while still imperfect - far outshone my actual abilities. Fiddler on the Roof, opening night, me on French horn, and I just nailed all the high notes in the wedding dance. A high school friend who was such a phenomenal marimba player, he made my humble piano accompaniment sound brilliant. A ridiculously simple piano duet with me and my eight-year-old Baerchen ridiculously well attuned to each other. A vocal trio with my mom and sister in church that was virtually one voice singing three parts.

Sex is different than that? Well, yeah. I haven't often played music naked. (Though maybe I should try it?) I've never had sex in church. But if these other memories still make me want to dance or toot my horn, why would a memory of near-perfect sex be any less inspiring?

Which brings us 'round to the set of issues figleaf raised for me: What the heck do we mean by "mind-blowing sex," anyway? After saying he'd pick the green lights (figleaf???!!!) he wrote:

Regular sex is already pretty nice, and in my experience "mind blowing" sex, while also nice, is sort of overrated. I mean who in his or her right mind says "oh darn it, that last orgasm sucked because it wasn't the best ever" and/or "my partner's last orgasm sucked because it wasn't her/his best ever?"

For one thing, it's precisely because "regular" sex is lovely that I don't think I'd lose anything by experiencing "the best sex ever." I totally agree with him that we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. But that doesn't mean I'd turn down a one-time experience of "perfection," or some reasonable fascimile thereof.

For another, my idea of "mind blowing" would be pretty multidimensional. I wouldn't sneeze at an orgasm that went longer and took me deeper than ever before, but (as figleaf might well say himself, if he weren't still zipping through those green lights) there's way more to marvelous sex than just shuddering orgasms. There's imagination. There's anticipation. There's the give-and-take, following and leading, of dancing horizontally with a partner. There's the duet of shifting tempos and crescendoes, whether in sweet harmony or giddy dissonance. There's the lure of trying something new, for the first time, and gently pushing each other's boundaries. There's playfulness and a readiness to laugh when something doesn't work quite perfectly after all.

And then there's the shivery thrill of imagining a week spent having sex. A whole week! Speaking as a fuddy-duddy old mother of two, even the prospect of a week devoted to mediocre sex leaves me giddy. (But really: if I had a whole week, it would not be mediocre.)

On a more philosophical level, if I'm given a choice between efficiency or a new and intense experience, I'll never view it as a choice at all. My bias is always to assume that experience is how we grow. So that week might just be deeply pleasurable. It might be transformative. Either way, "mind blowing" is a pretty clichéd term - but even if that single week of perfect sex were never repeated (and the original question didn't say it would be your last great sex, ever) I can't imagine regretting it. The aftershocks would echo, whether with my partner or alone. Because of that, I'd never be precisely the same.

And I'd have a plethora of ways to occupy my imagination while I sat idling at all those red lights.

Palin, the Object of Our Obsession

I know it's time to move on from Sarah Palin. Somehow, we have to shift everyone's focus off of her and back to Obama's promise of - well, not salvation, maybe not even transformation, but at least starting to remedy the fuck-ups of this country that I love.

So why am I having trouble shifting focus, myself? Yeah, I'm scared because she's a wingnut who could too easily become President. But I'm not normally this obsessed about any individual 'winger. Huckabee alarmed me, too, but you didn't see me blogging about him for ten days straight.

I think I've finally figured it out after reading this post by Jessica at Jezebel:

When Palin spoke on Wednesday night, my head almost exploded from the incandescent anger boiling in my skull. ...

And the question now is why? Why does this particular pitbull in lipstick infuriate — and scare us — so viscerally? Why does her very existence make us feel — and act — so ugly? New York Times columnist Judith Warner calls Palin's nomination a "thoroughgoing humiliation for America’s women," because "Palin’s not intimidating, and makes it clear that she’s subordinate to a great man." ...

I think what Ms. Warner is dancing around, but not saying outright, is that for a certain kind of feminist, Palin is a symbol for everything we hoped was not true in the world anymore. We hoped that we didn't have to hide our ambition or pretend that our goals were effortlessly achieved ("I never really set out to be in public affairs, much less to run for this office," the Governor has said.) We hoped that we could be mothers without having our motherhood be our defining characteristic, as it seems to be for Palin. We hoped that we did not have to be perfect beauty queens to get to where we wanted to be in life, that our looks, good or bad, wouldn't matter. ...

I think the correct high school stereotype is of the homecoming queen. For many of us looking back at high school, we can now feel a smug superiority towards the homecoming queen. Sure, she was pretty and popular in high school, catering to the whims of boys and cheering on their hockey games, but what happened to her after high school? Often, she popped out some kids and ended up toiling in some not particularly impressive job. We can look back and say, we might have been ambitious nerds in high school, but it ultimately paid off. What's infuriating, and perhaps rage-inducing, about Palin, is that she has always embodied that perfectly pleasing female archetype, playing by the boys' game with her big guns and moose-murdering, and that she keeps being rewarded for it. Our schadenfreude for the homecoming queen's mediocrity has turned into white hot anger at her continued dominance.

(I've excerpted a lot of it but the whole post is worth reading.)

You know, I don't have any real issues with Palin's beauty queen past. I'm not a great beauty, myself, but I'm also not hideous. I don't know what it's like to have men drool en masse over me, but I've always been attractive enough for nearly all of the men who interested me. So I don't have jealousy issues about beauty. Nor do I discount the intelligence of women who happen to be conventionally beautiful. In high school, I even got along just fine with the homecoming queen, who was the band's drum major.

(In fact, in an odd chapter of my past life - which I'd forgotten until very recently - my band friends nominated me for "basketball homecoming queen" my senior year of high school, a very obscure honor indeed. It was mostly of a joke, and I was sort of an anti-candidate. I so didn't fit the type and I was never "popular" but I did have plenty of friends. I vaguely recall coming in second.)

But the cheerleaders! A few of them had this slightly simpering, dumbed-down way of dealing with boys. They weren't dumb, they just played the part. They hung out with the girls who were "popular," which - as in most high schools - was not at all the same as being well-liked. They acted just slightly frosty to the rest of us, enough to register with the girls but pass under the boys' radar. (Just to be clear, I have a couple of friends who were cheerleaders in high school. I'm not casting aspersions on all cheerleaders, just a select few from my high school.)

To this day, I have a real allergy to that sort of woman. Sarah Palin strikes me as one of them - as a woman who will fake and flirt and cajole and act stupid to please the menz - and then turn around and stab women in the back, individually and collectively.

Patriarchal systems have always required women like these. Every era has had its Anita Bryants and Phyllis Schaflys. Madame Bitch at Open Salon suggests that far from being the target of sexism, Palin is the very apogee of playing by the patriarchal rules:

What are the ways in which Palin embodies these sexist rules?

• She's number 2, not the top of the ticket.
• Her very appointment is a testament to the paucity of women leaders in the GOP -- had there been more choices, perhaps McCain would have chosen someone with fewer drawbacks.
• She's a mother of 5 children, so her "woman" credentials cannot be challenged.
• She constantly downplays her ambition and her accomplishments, even though the ambition is oozing out of her ears.
• She dumbs herself down.
• She embraces the frantic mommy role, both literally, and figuratively for her leadership roles.

To me, Palin seems not like a trailblazing, hard-charging battering ram, but a gray fascimile of that ideal, and one that is neatly confined into the small allowed space for her to exist, completely controlled for the comfort of the men who created those rules.

(Read the rest here.)

Palin is quite literally being controlled by the men, at least for now. She's being groomed and prepped and the press is not being allowed access to her - although word came out today that she'll grant an interview to Charlie Gibson later in the week. It reminds me a little of Old Testament descriptions of girls being prepared for entrance to the king's harem. The Book of Esther recounts how they spent a full year being beautified with oils and perfumes and makeup before they ever had a private audience with the king.

Palin has her beauty routine down pat, but the patriarchal grooming is no less intense for being focused on the names of foreign leaders and the pros and cons of privatizing Social Security. (I'm not suggesting that these are in any way "patriarchal" subjects. It's only the GOP take on them that's steeped in patriarchal assumptions.) My hunch is she's a quick study, judging from her convention performance. She seems to be smart and very, very tough. If Palin were transported back to the Old Testament, she wouldn't be a girl in the harem. She would be the woman who runs it. (For those of you who've read The Handmaid's Tale: Palin would be Aunt Lydia.)

Palin's experience in beauty pageants is not irrelevant; pageants teach and reward poise, self-possession, and smooth performances. So does cheerleading. I say this sincerely, not snarkily. These are good life skills for anyone. They're invaluable if you're a politician.

I'd like to think we're all beyond knee-jerk high-school emotions, despite the results of the past two elections. But I can't help thinking of another memory, this one from the back of the school bus, where my friend Kate and I were using our halting French skills to disparage the cheerleaders in what we assumed was our secret language. Eventually, one of them - a platinum-blonde named Mary - turned around and glared at us. We'd forgotten that Mary was in third-year French. Oops.

We underestimate the cheerleaders at our peril.

Infinite Loops

Recursive blanket flower by Flickr user gadl, whose work totally rocks. (I used another gadl image in an earlier post.) Used under a Creative Commons license.

Warning to actual computer experts: The following is a mix of muddled memories that both oversimplify and distort the way programming works just so I can make a silly metaphorical point about my children at the end. Don't say you weren't warned.

So, back in the early to mid-1980s, when I was going to college in the Silicon Valley, pretty much everyone took a class in computer programming no matter how talented or clueless we were about computers. It was just what you did. The language we learned was Pascal, and though I've hardly ever heard about it since then, it's still considered a good starter language for picking up the basics of programming (or so says Wikipedia).

Being exceptionally clueless about my future, I took not one but two programming classes. About all that stuck is an ability to create nifty "if" statements in Excel spreadsheets that automatically convert a numerical grade into a letter grade and vice versa.

Conceptually, two ideas are still with me: recursion and infinite loops. They somehow got hard-wired through marathon late-night programming sessions, which were inescapable because time on the mainframe was strictly limited except between 2 and 6 a.m. (The mainframe! It took up a room the size of my house.)

Recursion is just a mindblowingly crazy weird idea: stuff nested inside of other stuff, like a programming version of Russian matryoshka dolls. There are more formal - and no doubt better - definitions of recursion, but the cat below will give you the basic idea. (Unless, of course, you're an actual computer person, in which case you're probably scoffing at me, as you should. But hey, you were warned back in the first paragraph.)

Recursive cat by Flickr user raincrystal, used under a Creative Commons license.

Recursion is one of those things that makes a lot more sense right after a Grateful Dead show. As it happens, when my recursive program was due in the winter of 1985, I spent the evening at a show in Oakland (it must have been part of the Chinese New Year festivities) and then came home and started the program around midnight. It was done before the sun came up and worked perfectly on the first try.

The other concept that's endured for me is the infinite loop. Programs use loops to perform an action repeatedly. They normally stop obediently when the specified task is finished or a desired condition is achieved. For instance, if you search Google for Kittywampus, it searches until it's got the results and no longer. (I have no clue what sort of algorithm Google uses or if you can even call it a loop, but the point is, the search is finite.)

An infinite loop is one run amok. It doesn't stop tidily but keeps on going, usually because the programmer screwed up somehow. It doesn't know when it's time to stop. (One way it differs from recursion is that a recursive program or function knows when enough is enough.) I created at least one of these, too, although that was (obviously!) not part of any assignment.

These days, I have one big infinite loop in my life, and I'm mostly at a loss about how to stop it. That loop is a never-ending squabble function.

My two boys - who can be so sweet, smart, and empathetic - spent the winter squabbling ferociously. It starts predictably in the morning with the Tiger deliberately making annoying noises at the breakfast table (aka the "breskit table") and the Bear using his bossiest voice to order him to stop. It ends only after they've argued over whose turn it is for a piggyback ride from their dad up the stairs at bedtime.

The quarreling escalates massively whenever they have friends over, particularly when the Bear has a playdate and the Tiger wants to join in. The Bear wants to play big kid stuff; the Tiger wants to be part of it, even if it's only by crashing the party and trying to plant sloppy kisses on all the other kids. I understand that they both have legitimate desires and needs, but so far compromise only leaves both pissed off.

I'm actually not beating myself up about this too much. I think both his dad and I try to be fair; we try not to intervene constantly, but we also try to teach them that compromise is the only alternative to misery. (Of course, I'm grateful for any words of wisdom from anyone who's handled this more successfully!)

The proof that this is an infinite loop came a couple months ago when I told the Bear to pick up some underwear he'd left lying on the floor. He balked. The Tiger said, "I want to pick up the underwayer!" The Bear said, "No, I will!" and a tug-of-war ensued - over underwear and who would get to pick it up!

For an infinite loop, the only thing I know to do is reboot. But with kids, it's not at all clear where the on/off switch is located. I'd RTFM, if only I had one.

What's working right now: spring! Now that the kids can be outdoors without suffering frostbite, I'm mercilessly kicking them out into the yard. Yep, the Tiger tried launching a kissing attack outdoors, too, but on the whole they've been a lot kinder to each other. And that makes me even happier than the flowers bursting out.

Recursive stained glass by Flickr user gadl, just because I love it. Used under a Creative Commons license.

The Day the Music Burned

I realize there are worse tragedies happening in the world. No one got killed in this one. I'm still really sad about it.

Photo by Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters; I swiped it and hope no one will mind.

Today the Berlin Philharmonic hall suffered a severe fire, which apparently started while welding work was being performed. The International Herald Tribune reported:

Musicians described a frantic evacuation. Sarah Willis, the 2nd horn player, said she had been in the warm-up room when she "smelled something like lunch was burning."

"A few minutes later, someone burst in and said we have to get out now," she said, speaking on her cellphone as she watched smoke billowing from the building. "Double basses were on stage and many valuable violins and cellos were in lockers. The stagehands were allowed to take them out." ...

"It's really sad," she said. "It's the best acoustic in the world. We just don't know what it's going to look like."

She's not exaggerating. I was lucky enough to hear probably a few dozen concerts in this hall when I lived in Berlin. The acoustics are astonishing. Even the "standing room" seats behind the orchestra are fantastic.

For me, this is also personal. The Philharmonie has been almost a character in my life. I met my husband at the Schauspielhaus in East Berlin in 1991, when the Berlin Philharmonic had to relocate during asbestos removal from the Philharmonie. A concert at the Philharmonie was our favorite thing to do on a date, and we almost always scored inexpensive last-minute tickets. I went there with dear friends and relatives when they made the trek from California to visit me in Berlin. I heard Mahler's 7th at the Philharmonie while I was hugely pregnant with the Bear and thought I was going into labor early. Apparently he was signaling enthusiasm or exasperation at all the Sturm und Drang. (He likes Mahler now, for what it's worth.)

I hope the roof can be repaired in a way that preserves the acoustics. I hope it can happen even though the city of Berlin is in the direst of financial straits. And I hope that, while the repairs are being made and the orchestra is again displaced, some other young couple will find each other while waiting for the music to begin.

Regrets Only?

So I'm still reading The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta. The protagonist I mentioned a few days ago – Ruth, the sex ed teacher – gets sent to a remedial class on abstinence because she's failed to toe the district's hard line on demonizing sex. She and her three fellow miscreants are given the assignment of writing a short in-class essay entitled "A Sexual Encounter I Regret."

At first I was afraid Perrotta was going to let Ruth subject herself to slut-shaming:

It wasn't that she was stumped for something to write about. Like anyone else her age, Ruth had committed her share of youthful and not-so-youthful indiscretions. There were a couple of tipsy one-nighters in college she would have taken back if she could, as well as an ill-considered fling with a married, much older grad-school professor that had fizzled after a lackluster session on his office couch.

While Ruth is still trying to decide what to say, her classmates begin reading their essays aloud. The lesbian names heterosexual sex on her prom night as truly regrettable because she said yes only in hopes of proving herself "normal." Another woman describes seducing her best friend's fiancé. The only man in the group, a gym teacher slouching toward retirement, starts to rhapsodize about "fourteen-year-olds who look like they're twenty" but is cut off by their teacher, a thirtyish professional virgin who favors a seductive Barbie-doll look.

When it's finally Ruth's turn, she doesn't recount any of her ancient "mistakes," nor does she divulge that her biggest regret is the sex she had with her ex-husband. Instead she calls out the instructor for trying to shame her students:

"It would be all too easy to pick one of these errors and tell you what I should have done differently, and how much better my life would be if I'd been mature and responsible enough not to have made it. But I'm not sure I believe that. I think it would be more accurate to say that we are our mistakes, or at least that they're an essential part of our identities. When we disavow our mistakes, aren't we also disavowing ourselves, saying that we wish we were someone else?

"I'm halfway through my life, and as far as I can tell, the real lesson of the past isn't that I made some mistakes, it's that I didn't make nearly enough of them."

This resonated with me because I've never felt any real regrets about my occasionally checkered past. (Then again, I never slept with any of my grad school professors.) I've sometimes thought I might be a little bit shallow on this count. It's not as if I never hurt anyone, or never got hurt myself. But it always seemed like my misadventures in mating made me slightly wiser each time; at least I didn't repeat the same mistakes over and over and over. I've tried to reflect on them and learn from them. I didn't set out to deliberately hurt my partners. Like Ruth, I think all of my experiences have made me who I am today. And also like her, the few real regrets I have about past love affairs are all about words unspoken, chances not taken.

Ruth set me wondering, though, what would I consider my biggest sexual mistake, even if I'd stop short of calling it regrettable. (TMI alert! Stop reading now if you don't want to hear a PG-13 story about me that includes one unsavory medical detail. Hmm, I bet I just ensured that you'll read this post in its entirety. Well, you've been warned.)

I'd have to say it was a guy I briefly dated my senior year of college while my boyfriend was studying abroad and we'd agreed to see other people. I met this man while we were both playing French horn in an orchestra for a formal ball. We were mostly performing Strauss waltzes, so musically it was pretty dull for the horn players, leaving plenty of time for minds and bodies to wander off topic. In between sets, he asked me to dance to the jazz band that was switching off with the orchestra. He wasn't a bad dancer, and what with the heady music, a couple glasses of wine, and the elegant atmosphere, I gladly said yes when he offered to walk me home.

I tend to think that a man who can dance will have some satisfying moves in other realms, as well. (The reverse is by no means true – a great mercy, considering how many men are lousy or reluctant dancers.) This guy turned out to be the exception that proved the rule. The sex was just plain awful. Awkward, clumsy, no chemistry. This in itself was not the mistake. Young though I was, I knew better than to expect instant ecstasy with a new partner. Which may be one reason that I said yes to the next date, and to the one after, hoping we might click after all. Also, I was mildly dazzled by the fact that he was several years older than I and very, very smart, a Ph.D. student in particle physics. (I'd just gotten my one and only C – in first-quarter college physics – so this impressed me unduly.)

No, the mistake came when I saw him a couple more times even after I'd visited the student health center with some painful blisters. I didn't have an STI, which was just dumb luck because like most young heterosexuals in the mid-1980s, I was in full denial of the new risks that were emerging. What I had, the doctor said, was friction blisters. This gives you some idea exactly how clueless this guy was in bed. But I bore some responsibility, too, because I let it happen without speaking up, even though in the heat of the moment it was evident to me that there wasn't, well, quite enough heat. Despite all the friction. Or maybe because of it.

Soon thereafter, I slammed on the brakes when he called me on the phone and accused me of snubbing him. He claimed he'd said hi to me while I was playing Frisbee near the student union, but I'd ignored him. I retorted that I didn't play Frisbee, which is true to this very day; I'm way too much of a klutz. Besides, I'd been in class. He insisted loudly that it had to have been me, that this mythical woman even walked like me. I concluded he was just as clueless outside of bed, not to mention borderline mentally unbalanced, and so I bade him adieu.

But that wasn't quite the end. Three years later I left for grad school on the other coast – and guess who I promptly run into, now working on a post-doc. I guess I should've screened out history grad programs at colleges with particle accelerators. Anyway, I was floored when he called to ask me out. What part of "no" had he not understood? He was starting to strike me as slightly stalker-ish, or at least what my students fondly call a creeper. I was uncharacteristically blunt in turning him down. He didn't call more than twice, but I had an uneasy feeling for weeks.

In retrospect, I don't think he posed any danger to me. I think he was just deeply self-absorbed. It's not just that he was utterly insensitive in bed; worse, he seemed to have an idealized image of me that only tangentially and coincidentally overlapped with the actual me. So if I hurt him – and I know I did – it was inevitable. I could never have been everything that he projected onto me. Stringing him along would've been cowardly and cruel.

Why no regrets? Well, at a minimum I learned to speak up for myself, to be as assertive in sex as I already was in the rest of my life. I learned to protect my boundaries and not stay in a situation that felt unsafe. And I'm happy to say that the only blisters I've had since 1985 were on my hands – the result of digging in the garden.

What about you? How would you respond to the assignment Ruth was given? And do you think people are ethically impaired if they reach mid-life and still sing "je ne regret rien"?

Photo by Flickr user jeco, used under a Creative Commons agreement.