So I'm trying this thing

I like Shapely Prose. A lot. The three people who were writing there when I first started reading (Kate, Sweet Machine and Fillyjonk) had a big influence in my "your problem with me is *your* problem" version of self-esteem. The essays they wrote said what they meant, they drew out connections between past and present, society and self, and they said, so clearly that it may as well have been on the banner at the top of the page, "there is nothing wrong with you." I hear a lot of societal messages about the necessity of fixing what's wrong with you, making yourself better, and the terrible vanity of being happy as you are. Vain, and don't forget selfish! Don't you know people can see you? And you look like that? When you take these messages as truth, they're motivations to keep playing the game, looking for approval that you're never going to find.

It reminds me of Sarah Vowell's take on Puritans in The Wordy Shipmates, that their sincere belief that you could never tell if you were on God's good side kept them all looking over their shoulders, never able to relax, miserable in the knowledge that they were probably damned. There's no rest for people in search of external approval, especially from the incorporeal.

I've wandered a bit from where I started out meaning to go in this post, which is this: Shapely Prose has added and lost writers over the past few years, and right now Kate is the only one writing there (in addition to writing here and here), and I've developed a bad habit. I check for new articles all the time. Even though I'm pretty sure essays like this take time and revision, even though it's apparently taken me two months to write this bit of fanmail. So not only am I an inconsistent blogger, I'm a hypocrite too! Enjoy the irony here: what makes sense to me as a response is self-improvement on two fronts. I'll try to write something here when I'm mentally complaining that there isn't something new over there.

Complaint, interrupted

This morning, I was all ready to write a complaint as a post here. I've been kind of bothered about this issue for a while, and have never found the right platform for talking about it (plus, Chris is tired of hearing about it). The problem? The (sometimes) terrible music in a knitting podcast I listen to regularly. Sometimes it's great (Jonathan Coulton), and sometimes it's all obvious lyrics and overdone vocals. The injustice! I listened to the two most recent episodes this morning, and had the angry wind knocked right out of me: the music wasn't bad. It wasn't the best thing ever (and one of the bands, though apparently comprised entirely of women, was called "Girly Man", which...no.), but it was a nice mix of fun and poignant and bouncy. Darn you, podcast author with musical tastes that differ from mine, and also impeccable timing!

This doesn't get you out of a complaint, though. The podcast has rubbed me the wrong way before - the theme of the episodes for a while was "alchemy", which is fine as a metaphor, but (and I'll keep saying this through gritted teeth until the rest of you give up and go along with me) magical thinking is not science. People who made themselves crazy with mercury fumes while trying to transform lead into gold are not a model for informed inquiry or the scientific method.

I...get a little defensive about this. Needless to say, I never wrote this to the podcast author (no constructive point), but it bothered me every episode until she switched the theme to "Make Do and Mend", which was lovely and thoughtful. I liked that a lot.

Basically a placeholder

I was listening today to the episode "This American Life" recently devoted to health-care reform, and I got totally hung up on one thing in the last story. It is generally about the negotiations between insurance companies and hospitals, and the reporter and the economists he speaks to assert multiple times that the real problem with the current healthcare system in the US is that patients don't care what procedures cost; that we're all wasting insurance companies' money on unnecessary tests and treatments. Apparently, if we had to pay some fraction of the cost for every procedure, we wouldn't go frivolously having biopsies and taking maintenance medications.

What?

I really don't have time to get into this tonight, but I am writing up some thoughts (including every Professional Scientist's favorite complaint, that a test that returns a negative result is not a waste of time, it is still valid data) and will say more another day. This is an area where I have a hard time staying removed from the issue: it feels so personal and immediate, what if I was in that situation?

Updates

I wrote about Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals the other day, and lo: the excerpt I wrote about, that I thought hadn't gotten enough attention in the reviews, is in a Writer's Block podcast I just downloaded. It's really moving to hear him read such personal stories in his own voice.

Yesterday's festivities were a lot of fun: the kids had all made paper lanterns, and were so excited to have the teachers put little tea lights inside. We went around the neighborhood and stopped every few blocks to sing a song. We didn't have an audience per se, but Liam has been learning the songs for weeks and singing them at home, and he had a great time. C and I talked to one of the teachers, who was surprised to hear that we don't do Martinstag in the US (though he seemed happy that we do caroling at Christmas).

Food and memory

Some (not totally connected) thoughts about food as personal history:

• I have yogurt for breakfast every morning (except some weekend mornings, if C makes pancakes or eggs). We all do - Liam likes pretty much any kind (two kinds together if possible), with frozen raspberries and musli, C likes a lot of musli and apricot yogurt, and I like vanilla with a little musli. When I was a kid, vanilla yogurt with sliced banana was my mom's territory, something she didn't have all the time, but would have if she got the chance. I feel a connection to her in staking out the vanilla yogurt as "mine".
  
• Shrimp casserole was also a rarity, and a big favorite of mine (all that cheese!), so I made a version of it last night: switch the rice for pasta, the cheddar for an emmental/gouda mix, the soup for heavy cream steeped with garlic and sauteed onions. Just like when I was a kid - but totally different. It turns out that Liam is a huge fan of shrimp; we may have to move closer to the ocean.
  
• I've read reviews of Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals, and they all bill it as stark anti-factory farming, conscience-shocking reporting. Truth, in other words, and high moral principle, and would that we all had the time and resources to live by our principles all the time. The excerpt I've read from the book was hardly mentioned in the reviews: Foer's hesitation and guilt at moving away from family food traditions in pursuit of vegetarianism. He tells this story by writing about his grandmother, who fled the Holocaust, who lived miserably but escaped in the end, who spent his childhood feeding him as much as possible, sweeping him off his feet in hugs so she'd know he was gaining enough weight. This is no cliched "what will I bring to Thanksgiving?" whine, and his conclusion is hopeful, forward-looking and old-fashioned: in his family, he will do his best to do the right thing. Food memories and bonds formed depend less on what's for dinner, and more on the time spent and care taken.
  

Compelled

C and I started watching 6 Feet Under a while ago, and we raced through the first two seasons. What did that mean? What will she do? Why don't the people in this show ever just talk to each other? There isn't a clear narrator or protagonist among the characters; they're all partly understandable and partly awful, obviously still growing and still lost in some aspects. The characters seem like real people, albeit real people you don't want to be. (Aside: apparently this device works well on me. I like reading Margaret Atwood, but I can't think of a character in any of her books I've read that I'd want to be.) There were four seasons of the show on itunes, so we figured that the end of season 4, which is dark and unresolved and uncomfortable, though perfectly executed, was the end of the show.

But it wasn't! The last season is for whatever reason not available on itunes, but I got a copy while on a work trip to the States, and it is depressing. Grindingly hopeless. I feel reluctant to watch more episodes because the characters all feel so doomed. If the show turned around at this point and headed for a happy ending, it would feel dishonest, but I am so disappointed that characters who started out on such hopeful trajectories have gone into these short-sighted self-absorbed spirals. The characters who have made progress from their neurotic beginnings feel like they're in a holding pattern right now, too - one, being stuck with a big, rash, decision she made, is resentfully right back where she started, and the other, though he is immeasurably more honest and happy than ever before, is still under a cloud of tension and uncertainty. Effective storytelling, because these aren't real people, but I feel so invested in their fictional lives.

What do I read?

My online reading habits drift, partly as I find new sites I like, and partly because I'm one of those people who gets overwhelmed by bad news. I used to read some of the big-name feminist blogs (Feministe, Feministing, Pandagon) all the time, but stopped when it started to get me down that they were all reporting the same frustrating, sad stories. I'm at about that place with Shakesville, which is a real shame because the community there is very tightly knit, but the focus of the site is maybe too honest for me. A frank look at the world, from the perspective that people deserve to be treated fairly, gets to be too much when society refuses to play by the rules. I have picked up good habits from reading there, and at Shapely Prose - I can't even read the body-snarking comments at Project Rungay or the "I'm so fat" contests in some of the Jezebel threads, because they're so obviously wrong after just a little time in body-shame-free environments.

I can be a real news junkie at times - I was completely addicted to 538 in the month before the last presidential election, and the level of detail in FireDogLake's coverage of congressional hearings and debates is a great antidote for me to the hopeless superficiality of TV news. Lately, though, I'm getting that feeling again, where opening up a lefty news aggregator like Crooks & Liars creates this heavy feeling in my chest, where I wonder what's gone wrong since the last time I checked the US news.

Fortunately, news isn't the only thing on the internet: although I do research in physical science, I like to read about literature, history and philosophy. Maybe I'm making up for the time I didn't spend learning those things in college? Edge of the American West and Crooked Timber discuss a lot of subjects I don't know a lot about, usually with a good amount of backstory and nuance, and while I don't know what Michael Berube is talking about in his "Theory Thursday" posts, the thread about the Golden Compass series gave me a sci-fi/religious philosophy reading list that would take months to get through. I also used to read Language Log regularly, but quit when the "grumpy old man who doesn't allow comments on his posts" contributor started getting more airtime than the computational linguists.

I also read very little about my field, or those related to it, online. I don't think the blog environment works well for real science education: there isn't the time, or the possibility of real-time interaction, that make science education work. The surface-skimming of popular science reporting grates on me a bit, too: when I write for and read journals, it is with great care and precision, and blog-format writing doesn't have the time for all that. For me, the details are the interesting bits. There is also a little professional jealousy in action here, I should admit, because my subfield is only a little bit cool, and doesn't get the kind of attention or money that follow the sexier specialties.