Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 70
April 19, 2012
Writing and Mothering
1. When my kids were babies, I never put them down. Seriously, almost never. I sometimes put them in those little papooses of various kinds, but I often carried them in my arms. Cooking, cleaning, at church or in the grocery store, those babies were like monkeys hanging onto mama. I would sometimes read a book while pushing a child in a swing. I would go do workouts in the morning before they woke up. But I was there almost every moment and I believe strongly in the need for children to be with mama, not in a baby jail or in a bouncer or a car seat. It drives me crazy that I see so many parents trying to keep babies happy in a car seat. Pick that baby up, I want to say.
2. And yet--I also taught classes at the local university for four years while my oldest children were small. I had to deal with all of the problems of child care. I once ended up hearing that the husband of the woman I sent my kids to for a couple of hours a week had been arrested for abusing his wife physically. Imagine how great that made me feel. I did child care swaps with a friend. I asked my 70 year old mother to watch my kids while I taught school. I finally volunteered for all 8 am classes so my husband could stay with the kids until I rushed home at 9 and he could go off to work. I did this in part because I wanted to, because it was what I was trained for and I was proud of my education and my ability to work. I also did it because we were dirt poor and on WIC. I don't know what I would have done if I hadn't had to work, but I felt I did.
3. When I finally quit my job with the university and turned to writing, I had 5 kids. I used to have to squeeze in writing time during naps. I would make sure that the kids all went to sleep at the same time (by waking them up early, if necessary). When kids were too old for naps, I gave them rules for quiet time. I bought lots of videos for the kids to watch. Yup, the TV was the babysitter while I was in the next room. Call me a terrible Mom. I'll measure the success of my two oldest (now both graduating from high school and going off to college) against any Tiger Mom. I did home school with the kids in the summer and drilled them on math and corrected their grammar and drove them everywhere they needed to go.
4. With 5 kids all in school now, life has changed a lot. But some things haven't changed. I still work. There are still times when I can't go to family events because I'm committed to an evening signing or some other writerly event. There are times when I am on deadline and dinner is Campbell's soup and some bread that Dad brings home from work. There are people who act as if I have no work to do, and that annoys me. I can't volunteer for things at school because if I did that, I would have no time for my writing. And yet, am I looking down my nose at people who do have time for that? I don't know.
In the end, I fall back on something I find more and more true. We must listen to people when they tell us what they want with their lives. We must trust them that they will do what is right for them, and that what is right for us isn't right for them. We must accept that other people have different realities than our own. We must validate others for the work they do, even if it isn't work we choose to do.
I don't vacuum much. I don't dust often. I have dishes sitting on top of the dishwasher every moment of my life. I sometimes wish that I didn't, but I know that it's my choice. And it's all right for me to make that choice.
April 18, 2012
Writing Wednesday: What We Measure
I do the same thing sometimes with my workouts. If I start measuring my heart rate, I can become obsessive about it. If I count up the number of minutes per day, I tend to do more minutes that I should, purely to get the count up for the week, even if I'm actually doing a race that week. It's actually quite difficult to work around my tendency to get goal happy. For writing, I have decided that to set goals based on time spent. It's not perfect because I sometimes fiddle around, but perhaps fiddling around is actually getting me closer to the proper goal than anything else.
I am thinking about this a lot in part because of the pressure we put on our children and the school system to measure such amorphous things as progress and learning. What happens is that instead of actually learning and actually having progress, we have made the school system be about measuring those things, which means that the attention of everyone is on the tests. Yes, our kids do better on the tests. But what does that mean?
As a student myself, I was the worst sort of gaming the tests kind of person you'll ever meet. I think I took the ACT about 14 times to get the best possible score. There was no penalty for doing this. The highest score was the one reported, and of course the capitalist system (and don't get me wrong--I like capitalism overall) we live in encourages corporations to increase this behavior, since it adds to their bottom line. I haven't seen a lot of change in this area in the 20 years since then. If anything, the testing has become more powerful. And frankly, I encouraged my kids to test a lot, too. And to read the test booklets and game the system, if they can. It's to their advantage. But it's not to everyone else's, necessarily.
What if we measured something else? I don't have a good idea, frankly. If we measured how many books were read (which the AR system already does), that is just as bad. If we measure how much a teacher is loved by the students or parents, that can be horrible. So what to do? Stop measuring, maybe. Or measure a lot less, anyway. It's making us crazy as a country. I have started to think that all humans have a strong element of OCD in their behavior, trying to find repetition to comfort us, and that's what measuring is. We like to look at numbers because they give us comfort. They mean--something, right?
One other note to those who think that America is falling behind internationally. I went to a high school in Germany for a year. Yes, they taught things there that I didn't learn in the US. They were doing Physics, Chemistry and Biology all at the same time, in 8th grade. On the other hand, the math class was quite a ways behind my US math class (which was advanced). My literature class wasn't ahead of us by any means. There was French and Latin as well as English, but in Europe, it makes a lot more sense ot have multiple languages taught. I'm not saying languages shouldn't be taught here, but Spanish is the one that makes the most sense. (I say sadly, since I wish my kids learned German.)
But the most important thing I learned there was, as House would say, Everyone Cheats. Everyone. I never met a single German student who thought there was anything wrong with cheating on a moral level. They all cheated whenever they could get away with it. They were astonished and then annoyed that I wouldn't cheat nor help them cheat (when I could). We had many MANY conversations about this. They told me that the teachers assumed they would all cheat and that the test scores were based on the assumption of cheating. If they didn't cheat, they were at a serious disadvantage compared to all the other students. One teacher bravely walked out during a test, telling everyone in the class he trusted them to be honest and do their own work. As soon as he was out the door, the cheating began in earnest.
So, when people tell me that German students are doing better on tests than Americans, well, I'm not terribly impressed by the statistics. Lots of Americans cheat, but my guess is that at least half think it's wrong. More in some areas.
When teachers tell my children that they must maintain a 4.0 to get into a good college, I want to scream. Sometimes I do scream. Then I explain that having a 4.0 to many schools simply means that you are a grade grubber and that you only take classes you know you can get an A in. Far more important is how many AP or Honors classes you take, how smart you are about finding other opportunities to learn in at local colleges or anything else. Your essays tell a lot about you as a person and how you see the world. I'm not saying hire someone to write your essays to get into a good college. I'm saying actually do the work to become an interesting person and then write about that. Standardized tests are important, but they aren't everything.
In writing, it isn't having the largest word count per year of any writer that is going to get you published. Believe me, I know. If that were a contest, I would win. It's writing the right words, giving yourself and your story time, finding the right people to give you feedback, finding the right editor and publishing house. Things that can't be measured easily and can't be rushed. I say this to myself as much as to anyone else. I do triathlon because there you really can measure everything and I get to channel my need to measure into that.
April 17, 2012
Does Mr. Darcy suffer from Asperger's?
1. Impaired non-verbal communication not caused by development delay or lowered IQ
Darcy seems completely unable to tell that Elizabeth hates him. She gives him tons of nonverbal clues about her feelings, but he is so oblivious that when she rebuffs his proposal, he has to ask for an explanation of what she dislikes about him. She ends up shouting at him that he is the last man he would ever marry in order to convince him.
2. Inadequate friendships
Mr. Darcy's friendship with Mr. Bingley is surely one of the strangest male friendships in literature. I suppose most female readers simply think that we don't get it because they are men and what makes men friends confuses us. But what do they have in common? The main thing that seems to make them friends is that Bingley needs a friend and so does Darcy. Darcy's way of "managing" Bingley's romance. Bingley is, if happier, as socially clueless as Darcy seems to be, since he has no idea that Jane likes him. Is he also aspie or simply modest like Jane is? Hard to tell.
3. Deficits in emotional reciprocity--failure to have back and forth conversations
Think about the dance where Mr. Darcy gets up the courage to ask Elizabeth, but then has no idea how to have a conversation with her on the dance floor. She tries to give him a few clues about what topics are allowed and how the conversation moves back and forth lightly. Mr. Darcy seems to think silence would be preferable. Those who know aspie people, how many times have you had conversations like this, trying to explain what seem to you the most basic rules of social interaction?
4. Routines/rituals
Not sure if this fits Mr. Darcy or not. Perhaps his letter writing to Georgiana might fit under this category. The book doesn't get into Darcy's life much, but I must say I would not be surprised to learn that Darcy has to have his clothing just so, to be comfortable, that he insists on certain music, lighting, and so on. He hates the country living of Elizabeth's family and says that he finds them beneath him. But maybe he just doesn't like unfamiliar things?
5. Strong resistance to change
When Darcy proposes to Elizabeth, he admits that he is going against his own judgment in falling in love with her. She is not part of his set and this will ruin all his imagined plans for the future. It makes him very uncomfortable and makes him appear really unpleasant and prickly. But that isn't his character at all, as Elizabeth later learns. He does not seem like a man who is happy in London and tends to stay on his own estate as much as he possibly can.
6. Often picky eating
We don't see Darcy eating much, but he seems to like his aunt's style of dining and perhaps this is because she is as picky as he is. His cousin is sicky and seems to not eat much. My experience has been that aspies are often thinner than neurotypical people and just don't seem to enjoy eating as much.
7. All-consuming interests
Darcy doesn't seem to bore anyone about his latest video games or whatever the contemporary interests might have been for gentlemen of his age. The movies fill in a little more for us. Colin Firth's Darcy seems obsessed with fencing and swimming? Also, he seems to spend a lot of time reading and thinking about his sister's music. Also, what a properly educated woman is like.
8. Sensitivity to certain stimuli
Darcy clearly hates loud music, dancing, and crowds of people who are unfamiliar to him. As someone who leans towards aspie herself, I can say this is definitely true of me. I can spend a few minutes in these situations, but I quickly become rather unpleasant to be around unless I can get away at frequent intervals and spend time alone.
9. Odd speech (sometimes very precise)
You can imagine Darcy practicing his proposal speech to Elizabeth over and over again, can't you? He is so precise in everything he does and has little sympathy for those whose speech is not as precise as his. The letter he writes to Elizabeth to put her straight about Mr. Wickham seems exactly the sort of thing an aspie would do, needing the truth above all things. And his refusal to lie and flatter Elizabeth in his proposal seems equally aspie. I hate lying and this seems to be one of those things that makes me lean toward diagnosing myself officially.
10. Poor physical coordination
Remember when Darcy says that he hates dancing? Maybe this is because he is actually not physically coordinated enough to do it well. The movies rarely show him as clumsy because they want him to be sexy, but Matthew McFadyen's Darcy is a bit more that way on the dance floor than others. Poor Mr. Collins was probably a great dancer, really. He is so careful about those sorts of things.
At the happy ending, it seems clear that Mr. Darcy has not really changed at all. It's just that Elizabeth has come to interpret his actions differently. He has always had a good heart, but has been unable to show it. With Elizabeth's tutoring and with his own desire to prove to her that he's not a snob, only that he doesn't express himself well in many social situations, she changes her mind and agrees to marry him. But no one else thinks that Mr. Darcy has changed. The Bennet parents think he is as disagreeable as ever, and even Jane thinks so. An aspie hero doesn't need to convince the whole world that he is sociall adept, however. He only needs to find a handful of people to interact with happily and successfully to lead a good life.
April 16, 2012
Monday Book Recs--Black Heart by Holly Black
I don't know what to say to those of you who haven't found Holly Black's noir/fantasy series that begins with White Cat. It crosses so many genre boundaries it's hard to even begin describing it. Imagine a world where the mob is magic, and the whole government is about circumventing that magical system. Or imagine a world where kids don't know what magic they have and can never be entirely sure of the explanations that adults give them. In other words, imagine our world, just tilted slightly to the side.
I just finished Black Heart, the final book in the series, and all I can think of is the quote from Oliver, “Please, sir, can I have some more?” It isn't just the brilliant plot twists and turns that make this series great, although those alone would make it worth reading—and reading again. It isn't just the finely drawn characters who are worth reading—although I would love to sit in a room with any of them and pick their brains and hearts. It isn't just the core-deep sense of world building that is going on in this book that seems to seep past the pages like a painting that has no frame. It's the language that makes me tip my hat to Holly and say—you are not only a writer, ma'am, you are a poet.
I marked a few of my favorite quotes, and I hope that someday I write little snips as good as these that will in future centuries be read and passed from reader to reader as a kind of passcode to the world of cool geeks:
“Girls like her, my grandfather once warned me, girls like her turn into women with eyes like bullet holes and mouths made of knives. They are always restless. They are always hungry. They are bad news. They will drink you down like a shot of whisky. Falling in love with them is like falling down a flight of stairs.
What no one told me, with all those warnings, is that even after you've fallen, even after you know how painful it is, you'd still get in line to do it again.”
“In all relationships, there's a balance of power. Some relationships are a constant fight for the upper hand. In others one person is in charge—although not always the person who thinks they are. Then, I guess there are relationships so equal that no one has to think about it. I don't know anything about those. What I do know is that power can shift in a moment. Way back at the beginning of the relationship, Sam was always deferring to Daneca. But once he got mad, he couldn't seem to stop being angry. By the time he was ready to hear her apology, she no longer wanted to give it.”
“At the end of a criminal's life, it's always the small mistake, the coincidence, the lark. The time we got too comfortable, the time we slipped up, the time someone aimed a little to the left . . . Birth to grave, we know it'll be us someday. Our tragedy is that we forget it might be someone else first.”
“A girl like that, Grandad says, perfumes herself with ozone and metal filings. She wears trouble like a crown. If she ever falls in love, she'll fall like a comet, burning the sky as she goes.”
“This is never going to be over . . Someone will always be after me. There's always consequences. Well, BRING IT. I am done with being afraid, and I am done with you.”
April 13, 2012
Friday Tri: Bricks
Bricks are the triathlon term for workouts that are back-to-back in different disciplines. Most typically, triathletes will do a swim-bike brick or a bike-run brick, because those are the two that will be done in a race. Sometimes, a reverse triathlon will require a run-bike brick or a bike-swim brick, just to confuse you. I have found that I do almost all of my workouts as bricks of one kind or another. Usually, I do a bike-run brick, because I find it comfortable to warm up on the bike and then move to a challenging run. Or it could be that I am just easily bored and don't want to spend too much time on any one sport. That's why I'm a triathlete, right?
There are other kinds of bricks that can be useful to any kind of athlete, however. Ideally, you should train your body that it can handle anything you throw at it. You also want to train yourself to realize what works and what doesn’t work for you. Mud races which are becoming more popular, where you do obstacles courses, or Xterra with trail biking and running or even winter triathlon are great for shaking things up. Or you can simulate the effect for yourself at the gym.
For example, twice a week I meet a friend at the gym. We start out on ellipiticals, because that’s her preference, but if one of the ellipticals is being used, I let her take the other one and I will get on a bike. We do that for 30-45 minutes, and then move on to weight lifting. Then when she is ready to head home, I go in and get some swimming in. I do this because the swimming pool has certain hours that don’t make it convenient for me to swim before my friend arrives. Sometimes I swim at a different time and then do weight training after the swimming. Not only do you get in a double workout, cardio and weights this way, it can also be extra challenging to make yourself do cardio after weights, as well. You are going to feel more tired and that will force you to pay more attention to what you are doing.
A beginning triathlete will want to practice whatever transitions are particular to the race ahead, because you want to get your body used to being able to go from swimming horizontally to running and biking. Believe me, if you have never done a triathlon, the first time you do one you will be surprised when you get out of the water and try to run toward your bike to discover that suddenly you can't stand upright and you have a tendency to fall over as if drunk. This is partly because your body isn't used to what's going on, and partly because you're working at a higher intensity in a race than you would in a normal workout and you're more tired.
When you're finished with a bike and have to click out of your pedals, get into running shoes, and start out of the transition area, you will have another nasty surprise. Your legs feel like lead. They are so tired, it feels like you are dragging them along with you. You've been looking forward to getting off the bike for so long, but now it doesn't feel as good as you had hoped. Tri bikes, which have a slightly different angle set are supposed to make it easier to run off the bike. I can't say I believe that much. I used an old Quintana Roo, which is a Tri-bike, for about 4 years and now I ride a Time Trial (TT) Cervelo bike that is pretty standard road issue for elite bikers. I haven't noticed much difference getting off the bike at all.
Practicing transitions in a brick is the second-best way to make sure your race goes well. The best way? Doing lots of raced. Because there's nothing that's more like a race than, well, a race. If you really want to do a lot of transitions, you can try a continual brick. I do these periodically, when I am feeling especially masochistic. I will bike for ten minutes, then hop off the bike and run a mile, then back on the bike again, over and over again. You can make these intervals longer, 30 minutes on the bike, 2 or 3 miles of running. This is easy for me since I’m indoors on my own equipment. But it’s also great for when the kids want to work out with me. They can use either the bike or the treadmill that I’m not using, and they can still be with me and talk to me.
April 12, 2012
Writing Wednesday: Back to Basics
If you are a writer, this applies because I think a lot of writers make the mistake of trying to tell a story that doesn't lend itself to a simple structure or to an easy point of view. Yes, there are writers who can do this with their debut books, but not many of them. If you are writing a first novel, don't try to do stuff that you aren't confident about. Don't use techniques that you aren't rock solid on. My daughter says that if you can't make it sound effortless, like you can hit a half octave above that note, then you shouldn't try it in an audition, where you're likely to be nervous. Don't do it in writing either. If you are worried a story is going to require skills you don't know, it may teach you a lot to write that story, but it may also take you years to do it. It may never work. Most writers have more than one idea, and you might start with a simple one. There is nothing wrong with telling a simple story beautifully. And that's what singers need to do, not do the hardest song out there, but sing a song, even if it is "Happy Birthday" so well that you leave people wanting more.
April 10, 2012
TV Tuesday: Women in Labor
I cheered:
1. Bones' arguments against giving birth in a hospital. These are arguments that I believed in for a long time. I don't necessarily trumpet them anymore, but Americans have an obsession with medicalizing everything and intervening in things that don't need any help. We want everything to be painless and we don't think about the cost. For me, I am willing to deal with a certain amount of pain for the pleasure of being able to walk immediately after birth, for example. I also hate the idea that your baby will be taken away from you after birth. I hate hospital personnel coming in to poke at you while you are trying to sleep. I am much MUCH more comfortable at home either during or after delivery and that decreases the pain.
2. Bones' refusal to plan everything in her life around her due date. Women often work right up until a few hours before delivery, and there's no real problem with this. Women are healthier if they continue to exercise through pregnancy, unlike the insane advice of the Victorian era that women should be "confined" to their beds for their health and society's stupidity. The more I live, the more I think that advice about not exercising too much is just silliness, for children and for women. Of course, you don't want to make yourself bleed to death when you are postpartum, but the more studies that have been done, the more women who have had Cesaerean sections are told to get up and start walking immediately after suturing. Exercise is good for us.
3. Bones' reaction to Booth telling everyone to wash their hands before they touch the baby. This is the following episode, but really, Americans are so SO stupid about antibacterial cleansers. If you want clean hands, use soap. Those antibacterial cleansers are just creating dry hands and super-germs. Also, probably children who get auto-immune diseases because human bodies have evolved in combination with parasites, bacterias, and viruses and actually do not work as well without any of them. (Unless you are immuno-compromised for some reason, obviously.)
I went insane:
1. When Bones is about to deliver within minutes of her water breaking. I suppose this happens occasionally, but it seems pretty rare to me. Granted, I am someone who was in labor almost twenty hours with my first baby and at least that much with subsequent babies, so I could have driven to a different state to give birth, but seriously? I'm sure this was partly for comic effect, but it just seems so silly and stereotypical. I wanted more from Bones, more calm, more sense that this is perfectly normal, not pathological in any way, and could be handled easily.
2. Booth apparently delivers the baby alone, and I'm sure Bones was giving him advice, but did he never think to take a class on this or look it up, after Bones mentioned she wanted to deliver at home? Also, you can't make a decision like this a week before delivery. Why did she not find a midwife who was certified to deliver at home? Yeah, they had Daisy make a joke about being a doula, but why was it a joke?
3. Why is Bones looking at hospitals a week before delivery to decide which one? This should have been decided a long time ago, with her physician. She has one, doesn't she? Why not talk options with him? Yes, I know that Bones and Booth have problems agreeing and talking about things, but I just shook my head over this.
4. The car ride while the woman is in labor seems to be de rigeur for Hollywood, complete with bumps and women screaming in pain. OK, I have been in a car ride while at 10 centimeters dilated, going to the hospital after fifteen hours of labor and my son would not turn for delivery. The midwife made a wrong turn, we followed her, and we had to turn around and head back in the right direction to the hospital. This was in some sense an emergency, but let me tell you, bumps in the car were not one of my primary concerns at the time.
5. Screaming during labor? I don't know about other women, but I get quiet when in a lot of pain. This is another Hollywood cliche. Could we have some women who have some other reaction to labor? I have the same complaint about grief. Everyone who is told on a TV show or in a movie that a loved one is dead weeps. But in real life, there are tons of weird emotional reactions that don't mean the people are murderers or mentally unstable.
6. Bones and Booth bring the baby home and no one asks if they went to a hospital afterward to be checked out. In most states, home birth is actually illegal. In New Jersey, where I gave birth to my oldest, I delivered in a free standing clinic but had to promise to take the baby to a physician within 48 hours. This is a huge inconvenience to a newly delivered mother, who should probably be at home in bed, and the baby would be safer there, too. Where do babies get sick? Hospitals and doctor's offices, where there are a lot of sick people.
Monday Book Recs--Fair Coin
Fair Coin by EC Myers is about a young man who comes home to discover his mother has attempted suicide because she believes he is dead. Whoever it was in the hospital morgue looks a lot like him, has a library card identical to his—and a coin. And in addition, at school the next day he finds a message that tells him to make a wish and flip the coin. He does this, and his wishes begin to come true. Except that this isn't your ordinary fantasy. It twists into something rather different, and I must say, I was truly impressed at how tight this plot was and how the threads were all tied up at the end. When you change history, you've really got to work hard to make me believe it works, and this book faces a similar problem. I read quickly, eager to find out what happened next. The prose flows easily and the characters are well-drawn. If I had any quibble at all, it is that the author stole the idea from an old manuscript of mine from years ago. But then did it better.
April 6, 2012
Friday Tri: Supplements
I don’t believe in supplements. I don’t take vitamins. After several years of continuing improvement as an athlete, I feel like I can say confidently for myself that I don't need any and that claims about their efficacy are vastly overstated and mostly just to get people to spend money. I know there are a lot of athletes out there who disagree with me, but I see so many supplements being hyped by athletes who, as far as I can tell, do it because they need the sponsorship money. I feel bad, but it also makes me a little angry. I see people who believe the advertisement and think that spending money on a supplement will make them go faster. It won't, much.
Mostly, if you want to go faster, you should train harder and eat better. Proper scientific studies don’t show benefits to sports supplements except for the basics like Gatorade and possibly (as new evidence comes in) a combination of carbs and protein while working out in a form similar to chocolate milk. I do not see any proof that Electroylytes are needed, either, even in extreme circumstances like 50 mile races, which I have done. I used to use them, but don't bother anymore. I'm not convinced Gatorade needs salt in it, either. It's just convenient for me and I don't see any harm in salt (which is a whole nother rant about Americans being told they eat too much salt--some Americans are sensitive to it in blood pressure, many are not, and then there are those of us with low blood pressure who need MORE salt.)
I do drink Gatorade if I'm going to be working out for more than an hour or so. (I think the idea of G2 or whatever is just plain silly. Either you need extra calories while working out or you should just have water, but if you like the taste, go ahead. I suppose it won't hurt, though I personally think artificial sweeteners are the devil.) The scientific studies I have seen seem to bear out the idea that if you want to perform well (like in a race, or to get a PR), a sweet drink in your mouth will increase your brain's ability to force you to go faster. Strangely enough, this is not true with an artificially sweetened drink. Your brain is smart enough to tell the difference. In the study I read, if people put a sweetened drink into their mouth and spit it out, the brain was fooled, however, and tended to force the body to put out as much energy as if you swallowed the drink. Those who had artificially sweetened drinks did not show any improvement over water.
I also eat sports gels, though I don't often eat sports bar anymore. They seem to require too much energy for digestion unless you are going to be going at a walking pace for a long time. But I never EVER drink Gatorade or gels or bars when I am not working out. They are not real food. You will always be better off eating real food than fake food, unless it's going to make you throw up (which it can for a long workout for me, or when I am really ill). Don't tell me you can't figure out how to pack some portable good food, either, unless you have a serious problem with chewing and swallowing. I keep a pack of nuts in my purse at all times for emergencies, and if you know you're going to need to eat, throw a banana or an apple into your bag--they are the ultimate portable snacks and require no work at all.
I sometimes take in a protein drink, but only if I've been working out for 4 or more hours and really feel like I won't get in enough protein to build up my muscles. I say this as a vegetarian who would prefer to be vegan. A lot of days, the only protein I get is in the form of green veggies, beans, nuts, and soy milk or tofu. I don't normally worry about not getting enough protein, except in really extreme circumstances. In general Americans get WAY TOO MUCH PROTEIN. If you are a regular American meat-eater, you do not need to add extra protein to your diet in almost any circumstance (I can't think of any off the top of my head, but I will try to remain open-minded on this). A protein drink for breakfast isn't healthier than some carbs for breakfast. Our country has this bizarre obsession with extreme diets. Carbs are not bad for you. Carbs are your main source of fuel as an athlete and a regular human. Sugar is not really bad for you, either. Neither is fat. Just get a good balance of all of them and you will be fine. I suppose if you want to argue about fats, you will convince me that olive oil is better than Crisco, but you do need fat in your diet to feel full and to properly digest some foods.
I think that eating well is the way to make sure your body gets the nutrition it needs. When people tell me they want to lose weight, I often find myself giving them the bizarre advice (they think) that they should concentrate more on making sure they get enough of the good stuff (10 fruit and vegetable servings a day) than on not eating the bad stuff. Wouldn't you feel a whole lot better if you spent every day reminding yourself that you NEED to eat more fruits and vegetables instead of--don't eat that chocolate cake? The biggest problem I see with supplements in general is that people seem to use them as an excuse to eat crappy food the rest of the day. Don’t use vitamins as an excuse in your mind for you not to eat well. Just because you are taking a pill does not mean that you can forego your healthy vegetables, fruits, and fats.
"I wish I could do high school over"
Reasons I hate this:
1. People for whom high school was really the best time in their life are generally people who frighten me. They are people who are not living life to the fullest right now. If your life really doesn't get more interesting after high school, what is wrong with you? If your idea of a good life is being popular in high school, um, really? That's a pretty small pool and it doesn't show me much about your character. Don't you have dreams of changing the world? Why aren't you doing something about those dreams?
2. It is condescending. The underlying message is that whatever problems you have as a teen, my problems as an adult are SO much bigger and you should really thank your lucky stars you don't have them. It reminds me of when men tell women "don't worry your pretty little head over that." It's a power play, meaning, you don't get to speak because your thoughts are trivial and small.
3. Teen years are often years without power, but with growing responsibility and pressure. If someone really wants to go back to that time, you can give up your power. There's no one stopping you but yourself. Give up your power, let someone else take charge of your life. The reason you don't do that? Because you would hate it. Everyone wants the power of adulthood. People who claim they don't are lying, or are being only partially truthful (perhaps even to themselves),
4. Yes, adult problems are big, but teens see adult problems as well as their own teen powerlessness. Teens right now are watching the country add more and more debt and they will be the ones expected to deal with it. My kids are as uninterested in politics as most teens, but this is largely because they do not have the power to vote or do anything about it. They ARE interested in the debt because it is something that adults are forcing them to accept and bear the burden of, even as children.
5. High school is hell. Buffy TVS is many things, but above all, it is an exploration of this truth on every level. If you are oblivious to the pain that high school is for so many teens, then you are part of the problem. You may be more than part of the problem. You are enjoying your place as a privileged person and not noticing the many, MANY groups who are the bottom of the barrel for no reason other than stupid cultural expectations about race, gender, and sexual orientation. People grow up for a reason, and when they really grow up, that is a good thing.
Another variation on the "I wish I could do high school over" message is "You will agree with me when you are older."
This is a neat way to end the argument. Sure, there are things that are difficult to explain to a teen. But try. Don't just cut off the conversation by telling them that their point of view has no value.
Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog
- Mette Ivie Harrison's profile
- 436 followers
