The Kids are All Right; The Sociopath Next Door

I've been watching The Kids are All Right, and OMG AWKWARD/TENSE.

(photo from Amazon.com)

Do you see on the cover, how the two mothers and two children are having a lovely laughing lunch on the patio with the sperm donor? NO. The whole lunch is an interview of awkward bad questions and awkward unexpected answers that go over poorly ("But I distinctly remember you said in your donor profile that you were interested in international studies?" "Nah, I just ditched all that, because college is a waste of time!" "...I see"), and I just wanted to be ANYWHERE BUT AT THAT LOVELY LUNCH.

And then throughout the movie there is all this snippy bickery unreasonable psychobabble between the two women, and then there is teenagery mouthing off from the kids. And the sperm-donor guy is all laid-back and go-with-the-flowish, and sometimes people were finding it awesome that he was like this and sometimes they were finding it intolerable, and I found them annoying no matter WHAT their reaction was.

Multiple times so far while watching it I have said OUT LOUD, "Oh no no no no no" accompanied by HEAVY WINCING, and I am only on the first hour of it. I don't like the parents or their relationship, I don't like the children or their attitudes, and I don't like how the donor is changing everything around. Also: gratuitous sex. BUT: I keep watching. Because I want to know what happens, and because this is interesting subject matter to mull when I'm not wincing.


Next! I finished reading The Sociopath Next Door.

(photo from Amazon.com)
(also, I am kind of done seeing those creepy eyes now)

As with other sociology/psychology-for-the-masses books, it seems like it's one chapter's worth of material forced by necessity into book-length. I always imagine the authors repeatedly using word-count: "CRAP, still 70,000 words to go!!!...*checking again*...CRAP, now it's 69,901 to go!! I'll take out all the contractions, that'll...I mean THAT WILL help!" I did a ton of skimming: I'd hit a section that was such a total repeat I thought I must have mis-marked my place in the book, and I'd just glide past until it got back to something new. Or I'd get to a case study that was so drawn out I felt like I was reading an actual transcription of that person's life (MUST WE read EVERY LINE of the NEIGHBORS' dialog? MUST WE read what they were EATING as they TALKED?), and I would skimmmmmmmmm until I got to the next little burst of actual material. I also skipped right past stories of animals being hurt/killed: I'm familiar with that part of sociopaths, and I don't need a several-page description to remind me. It's too upsetting to read, and not necessary.

But I strongly recommend that you read skim/read the book too, because the actual material SHORTED OUT MY CIRCUITS. I think of sociopaths as being, you know, the cold-blooded serial killers who as children tortured animals. But the author says that about 4% of the population qualifies as sociopaths, and that the definition includes a lot more than our stock image: most sociopaths aren't violent; they marry and have children; they have jobs as teachers and psychologists and managers. In fact, ESPECIALLY those jobs.

The gist is that a sociopath is someone who understands concepts like love and empathy, but doesn't feel them---and furthermore thinks those concepts are for idiots and cattle, and doesn't WANT to feel them. They tend to be bored, so they play life like a game. Sociopaths can't be "fixed," or trained to feel those feelings. It's not a matter of explaining how they're hurting you so that they'll stop, because they already know that they're doing it, and they're doing it on purpose for that very reason. Most mind-blowing to me: most sociopaths are excellent at FAKING that they DO feel love and empathy: tears, declarations of love and friendship and admiration, being charming and friendly and sweet, etc. If you accuse them of the things they're doing, they'll act hurt---while behind the scenes, they're wondering how far they can push you to believe them instead of yourself, and whether they can make you believe you're the crazy one. As in a mystery novel, such false clues are there for camouflage, and as part of the game. CRAZY.

Reading it, I recognized one of my mother's former co-workers. It was very, very odd to read each sentence and think "Wait!! That's what happened with HER!!" "Wait!! That's EXACTLY how things went!!" I told my mother about it over lunch, and she was remembering little details and pretty much every single one was IN THE BOOK. I found it a huge, huge relief to read it and know that there was an EXPLANATION for why the world seemed to go nuts for awhile there, while other people just WATCHED---and in fact GATHERED AROUND the sociopath in support. It was so perplexing and stressful, and it makes more sense now. It was all a game, a very cleverly played GAME.

The author says that one of the odd things about experiences with sociopaths is that people don't DO anything about it. They can't believe it could actually be happening, and they can't understand how a sociopath's mind works, so they keep thinking "But how could someone do something like that? How could someone have so little regard for someone's feelings? And WHY would they do something like that to someone who never did anything to them?" It makes no sense, so we conclude it isn't true. And the way a sociopath sets things up, WE'D look crazy if we said anything. So we don't, and we fit into the game.

One of the most helpful parts of the book for me was how to figure out if you're dealing with an actual sociopath, as opposed to someone kind of mean and thoughtless, or someone you just have a personality conflict with. A sociopath will (1) repeatedly do mean or inexplicable or thoughtless or inconsiderate things, AND (2) do a "pity play" so you don't do anything about it. The author says: "...bear in mind that the combination of consistently bad or egregiously inadequate behavior with frequent plays for your pity is as close to a warning mark on a conscienceless person's forehead as you will ever be given."

Anyway. I think you should read it. I felt like after I read it, I had a very different outlook on a lot of things, and felt more aware of things around me---but WITHOUT suddenly feeling paranoid about everything. It was more like "Oh!! I felt crazy about ditching that friendship/boss/boyfriend, but this is exactly how it was happening!" And also a good reminder that just because it knows how to quack like a duck doesn't make it a duck: those of us who tend to be a little trusting of smiles and nice words can use a reminder from time to time that we can't let those things distract us from actions that don't match.

Assumptions

Normally my grocery cart is completely representative: three gallons of milk, five loaves of bread, two big blocks of cheese, four pounds of ground turkey, two dozen eggs, a bag of apples, peanut butter and pizza sauce and bananas and baby carrots and apple juice. You could make a pretty good guess about my life, seeing me in my jeans and ponytail at the grocery store at 9:00 in the morning with that cart.

But the other day, when I was running in to get just a couple of odd things and then doing a little impulse-buying, my cart looked totally different: diet Coke, bottle of wine, bag of baby spinach, two small individually-wrapped pieces of salmon, box of Dove ice cream bars, large bag of cat food, small potted plant. It was odd thinking about what kind of different guess someone would make about my life with THAT cart.

I know people sometimes assume certain things about me because of how many children I have. It's not common in our culture or in my area of the country to have so many, and sometimes I don't get a haircut for a long time and I have my hair twisted up in a clip, and no make-up on, and people are thinking, "Hm, religious sect? But she's not wearing a skirt. Catholic, maybe?" People are more likely to think (true or not) that I bake, that I homeschool, that I breastfed, that I'm good with other people's kids, that I believe in God, that I'm opposed to birth control and swearing, that I'm a Republican, that I'm possessed of cow-like patience.

This doesn't make me feel prickly: I know the signals I send out can be misleading, and I make assumptions all the time, too. For example, when I see a woman out with children, I almost inevitably make the mistake of unthinkingly assuming that the children she's with are (1) all hers and (2) all the children she has. If she has an infant, there's no reason she couldn't have several other kids in school or whatever, but I look at her and think, "Awww, I remember those days, just me and my infant firstborn!" She could be looking back at me and thinking, "Awww, I remember those days when it was just me and my 4-year-old, before I had the other eight kids!" Or, if it's when Henry is in preschool, she could be thinking, "She's not a mom, so she's probably feeling critical about the way my kids are acting up."

One reason it's fun that Henry is going to the kind of preschool where the parents have to wait outside to be let in at pick-up time is that over the course of the year I get to find out many of my misassumptions. I see a woman waiting with her little boy to pick up her daughter each day, and then one day when she's telling me about her pregnancy, I find out she has a third-grader, and this will be her second baby, and the boy and girl are a nephew and niece she's taking care of because her sister is on bedrest. Another woman is picking up her own son, but the baby girl in her arms is a child she babysits. One woman has what I think is late-in-life only child, and it turns out he's a caboose: her other children are in high school. A woman my own age turns out to be a preschooler's grandmother: she was a high-school-aged parent, and so was her son. The one guy in the group isn't a stay-at-home dad: he works second shift.


Do you ever feel like people are assuming something about you that's different than what the situation is? Have you learned a real story behind one of your own misassumptions? I love stories like that.

Happy Song; Gel Pack; Free Coffee

Here's a happy song Paul found:


Handheld, by Momus

It's a person singing a love song to his favorite handheld device, and then the handheld device sings back to him. The funny thing is that I can get genuinely choked up over this song. Well, it isn't funny or surprising to my family, as they have also seen me get genuinely choked up over a child's project on the life cycle of the monarch butterfly.

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One of the irritating short people who lives in our house took a plastic ice pack and, while it was thawed and pliable, wove it in and out of the middle bars of a freezer shelf.

I went several months thinking that probably one day we'd defrost the freezer and we could get it out THEN, and then yesterday I couldn't stand it anymore and I used a knife and a hammer. There are shards of this stuff scattered, though I got as many as I could because I see the packet says DO NOT INGEST and DO NOT GET INTO EYES and OMG PLEASE DON'T EVEN LOOK AT IT.

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You know how some bags of Starbucks coffee say that you can exchange the empty bag for a coffee at Starbucks? Do the Starbuckses located within Target stores take those? I could just ask them, I suppose, but I hate asking questions like that. Sometimes the person I ask seems like their goal is to explain at length why it is outrageous of me to expect a positive answer to the question I asked so extremely deferentially and non-expectantly, and so then I end up saying over and over, "Yes, no, I get it....No, I just wondered...No, I completely understand...No, of course you couldn't...Really, you SHOULDN'T, it would be WRONG to...no, I see. Okay. Okay. Okay. YES, okay! Okay, I think I hear my mother calling me."

So I thought I'd just ask you.

Skinny Pants; The Girl My Boyfriend Cheated on Me With, Revisited; Gift Card Plan

I accidentally bought Rob a pair of skinny pants. Ha ha ha, he looked so funny! And he's mostly clueless about what he wears, he just takes the top pair of pants and the top t-shirt from his drawer, so he didn't even notice that he was wearing nearly-skin-tight stretch corduroys all day. With loafers and athletic socks and a polo shirt, I am not even kidding you. Paul and I were exchanging snort-suppressed glances all day. I put the pants in the donation bag as soon as I saw them come through the laundry. Luckily they were on clearance---and besides, the day of snorting was totally worth the price.

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Do you remember me telling you about the girl my boyfriend cheated on me with in high school? She's the one I felt some pity for because when we ran into each other last summer she was wearing a Winnie-the-Pooh t-shirt, and I've seen her a number of times since then and she is NEVER wearing such things, she is ALWAYS wearing cute clothes (not ANNOYINGLY cute, just basic cute---like, cute capris and a pretty cami with an unbuttoned casual-but-fitted shirt over it), so I felt sorry for her because it was probably Desperation Laundry Status at her house and she borrowed a shirt from her oldest child or from her High School Memories box or something, and then THAT'S the day she runs into the girl whose boyfriend she messed around with. Embarrassing.

ANYWAY, her daughter is in William's class this year. As I discovered when I went to Parent Night last night. Oh, HI.

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I was thinking about how many gift cards I was going to want to buy at Christmastime this year, with all five kids in school. Well, really FOUR kids, because Rob is in middle school, and once a child has half a dozen teachers I don't do holiday teacher gifts anymore. So it's six teachers total: one for William, one each for Elizabeth and Edward plus a teaching assistant shared between their two classrooms, and two for Henry. Plus two bus drivers. Plus we have an excellent mail carrier and I like to give her a gift card too.

That's nine gift cards. Which made me feel like ditching the whole thing, until I realized it's about twelve weeks until Christmas and I usually go to Target once a week. If I add a gift card to my cart each time I go, the cost will be more evenly spread out, and I'll be less likely to get overwhelmed by it. Plus, I won't hold up the line by getting my giant heap of small-amount gift cards charged up. I'm glad to have thought of a solution, because it IS something I WANT to do.

One problem I noticed today: they don't have the holiday-themed gift cards out yet. But they did have a pretty butterfly one, which sounds like it would look spring-like but I don't think it does, and so I chose that.

See? It's not holiday, but I don't think it looks ANTI-holiday. If I squint, it looks like two Christmas ornaments! Or a bikini top. Festive!

Can't Get a Date

Have I ever steered you wrong with book/movie recommendations? If so, never mind. But if NOT, then may I suggest Can't Get a Date? (Is this ONLY available on Netflix? Surely not! And yet. And that's the disc I watched, with six episodes. So if you don't have Netflix, NEVER MIND AGAIN.)

Here is what it is: it's a show about people who are totally and perfectly charming people, and yet can't get a date because they are accidentally representing their awesome selves as non-awesome. There are six of them, and I would date ANY ONE OF THEM except that they are all gay and so none of them would have a flip's interest in me. Okay, and also Mandy is too crazy for me and Robert is too uptight but WHATEVER, what I mean is that every single one of them made me feel like why CAN'T they get a date when they are SO AWESOME?? Including Mandy and Robert, because MY taste in laid-back guys has NOTHING to do with other people's intrinsic dateability.

And the real star of the show is the voice-over narrator guy, who asks the hard/funny questions and gets the hard/funny answers and also can I date HIM? because he would probably be my first choice, despite being (1) faceless and (2) kind of unflinching, hard-truth-wise and (3) maybe also gay? it's hard to tell.

Anyway. I laughed. I cried. I had another drink and stayed up way past bedtime for pretty much the first intentional time since having children (i.e., staying up because someone is barfing doesn't count). So you might like it too.

Everyone Can Go Back to School Tomorrow

We have a virus going through our house. Henry got it first: he was kind of tired and dazed and quiet, which should have tipped me off but I was just grateful, and then he got a fever of 103, and he said his throat hurt so I thought "Oh please not strep, please not strep"---and then the next day he was fine. No fever. No sore throat. No quietness.

I wondered at first if maybe the fever killed it off before it took root? or something? We go by what our pediatrician says, which is basically "Fever is good! Make friends with it! Invite it to come over and play! Unless it gets Unspecified Too High, at which point you should panic and freak out and we'll reproach you for not panicking earlier!" (Note: they do not reproach us, except in my head when I am fretting.) The pediatrician's nurse said she draws the line at 102: before 102, let the fever do its work; at 102 and above, medicate if the child is uncomfortable, or let it go if not. My own line is "Try to medicate before they start fever-barfing." (This is a difficult line to find.)

Anyway, I would have been patting fever on the back in a congratulatory manner, except then Rob and Elizabeth got 103 degree fevers and sore throats, and Rob's was 1/10th of a degree from being 104, and they were red-faced and miserable and didn't want to watch television, and both of them fell asleep on chairs in the living room. And they both felt better the next day---and that's when William and Edward got 103-degree fevers and sore throats. And Paul came home from work early with a 103-degree fever and a sore throat, and THAT'S when I got a little alarmed, because kids get fevers all the time but adults often don't. So I googled it, and all I could find were reassurances that adult fevers under 101 were nothing to be concerned about, except of course if it's the first sign of cancer, so don't be ridiculous! Okay, thanks! I'll come back when I'm wondering about an adult fever under 101!

Today EVERYONE IS HOME. Paul is home from work. None of the kids are going to school: two of them are probably well enough, but I didn't want to be like "Oh, hi, I'm calling in THREE of my children with high fevers and sore throats, but here are the other two for you okay bye see you after school!" The good news is that everyone's pretty much fine today: even the sicker kids' fevers are down to "just a little warm," throats are no longer sore, or else sore but not getting worse. Requests for juice, water, applesauce, toast---those continue. It's the kind of sick where everyone is kind of enjoying being sick. Except me, the only one not sick and so HANDMAIDEN TO ALL.

This morning I escaped to the grocery store. We were running low on toast and apple juice and MIND-ALTERING SUBSTANCES. I took my sweet time. I walked down every single aisle. I also got a cup of coffee, which I've never done before because I don't get how it's supposed to work: it's a non-lidded styrofoam cup, and I don't know how to walk around with that while pushing a cart. Today I was willing to sacrifice the time it would take to play out that experiment. And it turns out I'm right: you kind of just have to stand there drinking it. I did manage to walk around, but I was pushing the cart with one hand and my waist, and there were a couple of times that clarified why I so often see coffee spilled all over the plastic seat and handle.

I came home reluctantly, with milk and eggs and juice and applesauce and bread and apple cider doughnuts and Kit-Kats and wine.

Some Mild Whining, Accompanied by Insignificant Fears and Disappointments

I am a little disappointed, because as soon as Miss Grace wrote this:


I realized what I had on my hands here was a perfect excuse for a giveaway. So this morning I went rushing back to Target---and there were no more owl quilts. Nor were there any of the turtle quilts I'd dithered over and decided not to get and then changed my mind about when Stimey mentioned them.

So then on the way home (it was not really on the way) I went to a SECOND Target, and that Target had a few owl quilts and one turtle quilt, but still at full price. I even carried them all over to the price checker just to be sure.

So. Perfect chance for a giveway, thwarted. Plus, there was no other good clearance. I came home with a box of laundry detergent.

I also bought Elizabeth a pair of leggings because she has to wear pants twice a week for gym class and she haaaaaaaaaaates pants and her jeans don't fit her comfortably, so we'll try these. They're the kind that are kind of like sweatpants except a banded waist and bootcut ankles instead of elastic-cinched. But I'm pre-agitated because according to the school dress code, which I had to sign a paper saying I'd read and agreed to follow, "lounge pants and pajamas" are against school policy. And I ASSUME this policy is in place to prevent 8th grade girls from wearing low-slung pajama pants to school and NOT to prevent 1st grade girls from wearing non-jeans pants to gym class, and I further assume that NO ONE is going to (1) care or (2) call me out on this---but I don't really KNOW these things, do I, not ANY of them, so I'm mildly fretterpated and imagining conversations with the principal.

Also, Henry was sick over the weekend: his fever got up to 103.1, which is where even I start raising my eyebrows a little and wondering what the heck. And then...nothing really happened. His fever went down, and he didn't develop any other symptoms. But then today Rob has a fever, and just now William said he was so sleepy and did I think he should have a nap before dinner. So. Sick house time. I shouldn't be surprised: we have children in FOUR different school buildings now. We are going to get EVERYTHING.

And I chaperoned a field trip last week, and now I want to send a bunch of photos to the preschool because someone did that one year when I DIDN'T chaperon [this spelling bugs me too, I assure you, but spell-check and the dictionary both tell me it's the primary spelling even though "chaperone" looks better AND makes more sense] and I LOVED getting a couple of pictures of my kid on a field trip. But Snapfish is having an upload problem, and I emailed them about it and they say it's a known problem and they're working on it---but it's been several weeks and I am getting impatient and fretful.

And also I recently watched a movie and read a book, and both were sub-par. So as you can see, I have a hard life.