Greetings, Earthling

I tend to like funny cards about
kids, dogs and bodily functions.
 

I have discovered an easy way to cheer myself up – and also feel more organized.

When I have some extra minutes and dollars, I stop by the greeting-card section of whatever store I am in – supermarket, Target, drug store – and buy whatever strikes my fancy.

Here’s the organized part: I now have a drawer full of great cards for whenever I need one for someone.

I tend to like only funny cards. In fact, I totally don’t get the “serious” ones. If you have a serious sentiment to tell someone, wouldn’t you want to write it yourself? (We also have – this was my husband’s idea – a few boxes of blank Crane cards lying around for just that purpose.)

In this article, Hallmark says that while funny is ok for Father’s Day, if you give your mom a funny Mother’s Day card, she’ll cry. I, a mother, totally don’t get that.

Nor do I get when people get sniffy about being sent an email rather than a written card. When KJ Dell‘Antonia wrote about a cool app for iPads that allows you to have a paper card sent to someone in the New York Times “Motherlode” blog, one commenter wrote, “Appalling. I am frankly hurt when I receive an e-card: the person couldn't be bothered to find a piece of paper, envelope, and stamp?” Easy solution to this, I think: don’t send that person any communication of any kind.

Aside from that, though, I like sending cards, electronic or paper. In fact, I once, on impulse, bought a box of cards (maybe because they were purple) and used them to write hello to the first eight people who occurred to me.

That was fun. I should do it again.

Proud To Be Loud

Actually, I’m not, but I’ve come to accept it.

For years and through the whole slew of apartments and houses we’ve lived in, I’ve noticed I could always hear our family – like when I was still in the elevator or out in the yard. I could hear my husband and kids talking, laughing, crowing.

I tried to convince myself that everyone can hear their own family like this, that it’s some sort of mystical, special sense.

It’s not, though, is it?

When we call each other to dinner, we never walk all the way up the stairs and quietly knock, whispering, “Dinner’s ready.”

We bellow “DINNER’S READY!” or my son’s simpler “FOOD!” from wherever we are.

When we are excited in a conversation, we get louder. The excitement can be happy: my kids telling me what happened at school today. (They can get so loud, I have to say, “You know, I’m right here next to you in the car.”) Or it can be negative: my son said, recently, when I couldn’t find my keys, that I “probably offended all sailors within a one-mile radius.”

I know people exist who live freakily hushed lives, diffidently whispering, tip-toeing around … unlike, say, my husband who recently clumped, in his bicycle shoes, from our bedroom, down the hall and down the stairs. When he got to me, he asked happily, “Did ya hear me coming?”

I’m with the little boy I saw recently in a cart his slightly sheepish father was pushing around the supermarket. Every few minutes, this little boy would just sing out, an amazing noise coming out of his tiny body. He sounded like a very loud bird, which made him very happy.

Here’s to the noise of life. May I never be too grumpy to enjoy it.

‘Allo, Grandma!

This is still not me, but grandmas rock.
 Image courtesy of graur razvan ionut

FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I don’t mean to brag (OK, maybe a little), but though I am approaching 50, I work out 4-6 times a week, cranking the elliptical trainer to its maximum incline (5) and resistance (20) and running, according to the machine, 7 miles.

Here’s the thing: when I was younger with young children, I would still go to the gym several times a week and I’d still set the incline and resistance till it felt “right,” but those settings would be, at best, somewhere in the mid-range, and I thought I was doing good if I went 2 miles.

What changed?

I think I am getting ready to be a kick-ass grandma.

I first came across “the grandma hypothesis” in the books of anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. The grandma hypothesis is the idea that human women survive well past the age when they themselves can reproduce because the help they provided back when we were hunter-gatherers, in child-care and food-gathering, made a huge difference in their community’s survival. Anthropologists like Hrdy found that children in hunter-gatherer communities with an involved grandma are twice as likely to survive. Others found that women over the age of 40 were just as strong as 20-year-old women and were much better at foraging (they were more knowledgeable and, perhaps, they were also less ditzy than the hormone-addled young-uns). For all the talk of men as hunters, the "haul" these grandmas brought in often represented the bulk of the group’s calories.

Now that I’m older and wiser, I’m going to get some serious shit done.

Why Are Women’s Clothes So Uncomfortable?

Don't even get me started
about these shoes.

I was recently in an office tower, not a place I generally frequent. And there were women in business attire: unflattering pants made of synthetic material, straining where the woman was rounded, short tight skirt that affected the woman’s stride, worn bare-legged with her feet jammed into high-heeled shoes with pointy little compartments where the toes are supposed to, somehow, fit, a drapey, see-through blouse with a weird bow, again made of synthetic material, hot and unbreathable and shiny, bizarre clunky jewelry meant to “accessorize.”

Meanwhile, here come the men. Suits. So, OK, ties are not the most practical piece of clothing ever invented, but other than those, a man in a suit is wearing pants, jacket, shirt, shoes that fit his feet and allow him to walk. And many of the men were in khakis and button-downs, without ties.

Why are women’s clothes so uncomfortable, impractical and hard to put together? In interviews, President Obama explains he has only gray suits and blue suits in his closet. He’s got enough decisions to make, he said, he doesn’t want to "be distracted by trivia." But how easy would it be for a female president to find such easy yet professional outfits?

A childhood friend of mine refused to consider any career that required her to wear panty hose. (She became a teacher, then a lawyer.)

Honestly, I think it’s a conspiracy. When you have to concentrate on how you walk (so you don’t fall over), how you sit (so you don’t flash someone), whether your mascara is running or your lipstick is on your teeth or the waves (or straightness) you spent an hour putting into your hair that morning are disappearing, you can’t concentrate on more important things.

 

But why do women conspire against themselves like this?

Easier Read Than Done

Shh, it's a surprise for my dad.

I bought my dad a building kit.

Final product: a robot that waddles like a duck.

It will be right up my dad’s alley.

He likes working with his hands. And he is not averse to reading the instructions.

I don’t mind reading instructions … Well, I don’t like reading product instructions, since they often read like they were translated from Japanese into English by someone who only speaks Portuguese … But I love reading how-to’s. I went through a long spate where I read books (as in multiple) about how to be more efficient and organized. My husband referred to those books as my “productivity porn.”

What I don’t like is the doing.

It is never as easy as the reading.

Step 1 will be perfectly straight-forward. Say you are reading about how to change a tire. The first step might read, “Remove the hubcap.” But how do you do that, exactly? They don’t say, assuming that every idiot knows how to remove a hubcap which, umm, I don’t. Then you need to loosen the lug nuts, but they are all impossibly tight and you are getting sweaty leaning all your weight on the wrench (or as the directions I’ve cited suggest, hitting it with a god-damned rock). It’s actually pretty decent of these directions to acknowledge that you are going to have difficulty. Most don’t.

I think it’s interesting that my husband far prefers how-to videos (found on YouTube) over written how-to’s, even for something like a food recipe.

However, I lack the patience to sit and watch a 20-minute video. Perhaps I am fooling myself, but reading seems to zip along so much faster.

Ultimately, I realize, that’s my problem: no patience.

Hey! Maybe I can read up on that.

What Were We Thinking?

How are humans different from other animals?

Our brains are big, at least in relation to our bodies, right?

And we use those brains to make tools, right?

But when was the last time you made a tool?

You hear a lot about how our present environment is not what our bodies evolved for. High-fat, high-sugar food is way too plentiful for us, whose bodies evolved to be driven to hunt and gather when food was scarce. Also, our environment does not force us to move – I read recently that the average amount of time Americans spent in vigorous physical activity is less than 2 minutes per day – for obese adult women, it is mere seconds – when it should be, at a bare minimum, 30 minutes per day. Our bodies are meant to move; it’s been speculated we evolved to be long-distance runners, with our ancestors routinely covering 20+ miles at a time, literally running other animals to death.

I think the same is true of our brains: we live now in vastly different environments than the ones our brains evolved for. However, the present-day environment might be pushing our brains to perform better, not worse.

There’s the Flynn Effect. Dr. Flynn discovered that IQs have increased dramatically over the last 100 years. Basically, IQ tests are always being normed; that is, a group of people will take the test and the average of that group will be declared to be 100 or average IQ. But Flynn compared test results from the past and present. A person who scored a 100 in the past would, today, be considered borderline retarded (70), while a person who scored 100 today would have scored 130 (cusp of genius) back in the day.

Makes you want to go back in time and be the smart one, right?

When Recipes Lie

Yesterday, I made a really good recipe I found on chow.com, for a “wild mushroom and beef stir fry.” But it illustrates one of my pet peeves re recipes: when recipes grossly underestimate the amount of oil (or butter) necessary to sauté or, in this case, stir-fry, something. I think recipe writers do this because, then, their nutritional information comes out looking better. In this particular case, the recipe called for you to drizzle one teaspoon of oil into the wok. Woks are huge; a teaspoon of oil, or even a tablespoon, doesn’t begin to cover the surface.

Another pet peeve: recipes that grossly underestimate the time it takes to make the dish. You’ll find a recipe that calls for you to zest and juice several lemons, shell and devein multiple pounds of shrimp and mince about a dozen different things – and the prep time given will be “15 minutes.”  Yeah, right.

Some recipes get gratuitously fancy. In one of my newest cookbooks, which actually does have some nice recipes, every time the author calls for allspice, she doesn’t just call for allspice, she calls for allspice berries which she then instructs you to grind yourself. Really?

Or the recipe author will instruct you to keep that turkey carcass or the muddy outer leaves of your leek, and “use them to make stock.” That makes me feel guilty when I do what I do: I take all those weird organs out of the chicken and I throw them the hell out.

I don’t mind if they tell me I could do something with these things or I might want to try using a mortar and pestle, but don’t make out like it’s the only option.

I’m trying to get dinner on the table here.