High; Shoe-Tying; Decluttering; Spoilers and Complaints for Everybody's Fine

Too much coffee + exercise + too many Mr. Goodbars + laughed about something until I got dizzy = I think I might be high.

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Teaching a child to tie his shoes is hellish. No, I'm not going to modify that with a perspective-acknowledging statement. It's hellish. Oh, it's part of parenting? DON'T CARE, STILL HELLISH.

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I got some very satisfying de-cluttering done today. We have a closet I use for storing gifts I bought ahead of time, gifts for the kids to bring to birthday parties, items for care packages, stuff I don't know what else to do with, and gift bags and ribbon and stuff.

ANYWAY, the thing about buying ahead is, it doesn't always pan out. Usually it does, but sometimes I see a great clearance on a whole bunch of mix-and-match Dwell Studio baby girl clothes when my sister-in-law is pregnant with what turns out to be a boy. Or I buy a bunch of Gymboree blankets because I get kind of obsessed with them and start collecting one from each line, figuring I can give them as baby gifts---but then I can't make myself part with any of MY PRECIOUS my friends stop having babies before I run out of blankets. Or I buy gifts for the birthday-party shelf, but party after party goes by and none of the kids choose those gifts to bring and I start getting tired of them taking up space (the gifts, not the kids).

And here it is, the time of year to hide gifts in earnest, so I really NEED the space, but I can't really GET RID OF this perfectly good stuff. The timing was perfect: my blog-friend Misty is reluctantly gathering auction items for a non-profit, and she says she can make an auction item out of ANYTHING. So I packed up a box, and now my problems are her problems and my gift closet is more manageable.

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The next part is going to be full of spoilers for the movie Everybody's Fine (Netflix link) (a movie I think I have now referred to as Everyone is Fine, Everyone's Fine, and The Kids are All Fine). It's the last topic of the post, so if you don't want to read the spoilers you can click away without having to squint-scroll to find the end.

Short version: I didn't buy ANY of it, and I wondered how they got such a good cast to put on this crazy talk. (Long version continues from here.) Maybe a couple of generations ago, a dad would have needed to realize that by pushing his children too hard he was pushing them away, but a guy like Robert De Niro's character, in his sixties living in contemporary times, would not have to be lied to by his wife about such issues as the existence of a grandchild---nor could I picture the whole family being in on such a thing AND being able to pull it off. And if his wife DID lie to him, I think she would have changed her mind on that when she was DYING. And I can't picture four children ALL telling their dad the kinds of AMAZING WHOPPERS they come up with in this movie (they even try to lie to him about THE HEART ATTACK HE JUST HAD, as if that would be a sustainable lie after the doctor came in to talk to him), OR a dad being dim enough to continue to believe stuff he's been allowed to assume. How could he think his son was a conductor and his daughter was a starring dancer, without ever insisting on seeing a performance? Also, I didn't believe his doctor would have discouraged the trip OR that he would have had such immediate results from missing a single dose of medication (though it looked to me as if he was significantly overdosing on his remaining crushed tablets, so maybe that was supposed to be the reason).

Also, everybody is NOT fine, and there is some really nauseating stuff about the dead son going to join his dead mother in heaven and forgiving his dad on his way up. (YES, I cried through it, but I felt MAD about it.) And certainly everyone seemed to take the death of a family member tremendously in stride: a little pang of bittersweet memories and then everything is happy again and the dad is telling his wife's gravestone that all the kids (including the dead one) are fine. And now that the lies are out in the open, everyone can gather around the holiday table in glowing acceptance, yay!

But I liked some of the ideas (parents learning that they have to be open to their children being ordinary; parents putting disappointments into perspective; parents finding that they can pressure their kids to the point that the kids start lying to them) enough that I think I'll try Stanno Tutti Bene, the movie on which this movie was based. Perhaps the original did a better job at keeping things believable. (Oh, shoot, Netflix doesn't have it.)

Also, I liked the exchange between Robert De Niro's character and his son Robert. Also, I loved the part with his early-teens grandson Jack. Also, I liked Robert De Niro, just OVERALL, and I thought his whole performance was very touching (although that made it even harder to believe he could have brought up his children to lie to him like that). Also, I thought they got a lot of really good-quality bit-part actors. Also, I liked the dream scene where he talks to his kids around a table in the yard, and they're children again and the various truths come out. So I'd say my primary feeling is of DISAPPOINTMENT: the movie had such potential, but failed to reach it. Which is kind of funny, since that's one of the major themes of the movie.

How to Get a Kid Into Private School on Sims 2 or Sims II

I realize this is an uncharacteristic post: it's about how to solve a hard part on a VIDEO GAME. But I spent so much time trying to solve it, and had to apologize for snapping at the children over it, and CRIED over it, and vented to Paul in a quavery voice about it, and so I am PUTTING THE INFORMATION HERE in case anyone else wants it. The last time I was this frustrated was when I wrote my Evenflo car seat post, and that's been one of my most enduringly popular posts of ALL TIME (as well as one of the few in which I use Bad Language), so it seems to me this is one of the things the internet is FOR: searching for solutions to EXTREMELY FRUSTRATING PROBLEMS and finding what worked for other people. And so when I solve something extremely frustrating, I like to post it. I think you should, too, in case you were wondering how I thought you should live your blogging life. SHARE THE WEALTH.


So. On Sims 2. Or Sims II, if that's what you typed into the search engine. When you want to get a kid into private school, this is how I finally solved it:

1. Save the game right after you have a Sim call the headmaster to come over for dinner. Don't save it again until you succeed and the child has been accepted into private school. This way, every time you fail you can quit the game without saving, and then you can try again. You can call it cheating, but I'm not listening: EVERY video game my kids play lets them start a level again and again until they get it right, and The Sims is the only one that doesn't allow a single redo.

2. Also, be prepared that your Sims will turn into crazy thwarty McThwartersons as soon as you try to accomplish this task. Mine were all "I think I'll go to bed now!" and "I think I'll take a shower" and "I think I'll suddenly go work on a painting!"---even though normally they were not so strong-willed. I had to keep pausing the game CONSTANTLY, just to make sure all of them were ACTIVELY FOLLOWING MY INSTRUCTIONS. And even so, a Sim was answering the phone when I'd x'ed out that idea THREE TIMES and ALSO replaced it with a new activity, which he ignored! It was...very frustrating. (I should have just switched off free will, but I was too flustered to think of it.)

3. When the headmaster comes over (he will come over right at 5:00, and he might be any one of several different headmasters), ignore the prompt to give him a tour. Don't give him a tour. If you WANT to give him a tour, what you do is select Entertain and then Give Tour, and then click "Go Here" in a room so your Sim will go there. The headmaster will follow. Then click the headmaster and choose "Show Room." Then repeat with a different room. But don't bother! It's incredibly frustrating and takes forever, and my tour-giving Sim kept trying to wander off to take an unneeded shower or sit down for an unneeded rest.

4. Instead, have one Sim talk to him: just Talk, and select Chat, over and over. NO SCHMOOZE. Ignore the suggestion to schmooze. I know there's a Schmooze Score, but ignore it. JUST TALK. DON'T NOBODY SCHMOOZE. The schmooze score will go up with the talking. The schmoozing is like with flirting or hugging or whatever: the score goes DOWN if you do it before there's a relationship established. Probably you can schmooze after there has been enough talking, but I didn't even try, I just talked and talked, and the Schmooze score went up and up.

5. The other Sim should cook a meal. You're supposed to have that Sim select Entertain and then Call to Meal, but this is BUGGY and might not work and might in fact VANISH as an option after you select it. DON'T PANIC. Once the meal is served, have the talking Sim stop talking to the headmaster and go eat, and the headmaster will come over to the table. (I hope. I HOPE the headmaster will come over to the table. It's glitchy, and in a couple of my attempts he wouldn't go there no matter what, which is why you should save the game first. But in the one where I finally won, he did go to the table.) Get as many other people as possible to sit at the table too. (I don't actually know if this is important. But it's what I did the time I succeeded, so now it's like a lucky rabbit foot to me.) Other sites told me not to cook chef salad so I didn't; other sites said to cook pork chops or lobster or salmon, and my Sims always burn the lobster and salmon, so I had them do pork chops. Other sites told me to make sure the Sim doing the cooking was the best cook in the house and that the Sim was pretty high in cooking; the Sim who did the meal had 8 skill points in cooking.

6. Things that I thought might be important, but weren't: having all the family meet the headmaster; having the child talk to and/or impress and/or schmooze the headmaster; entertaining the headmaster by letting him play chess; the tour; the schmoozing; everyone eating together; everyone being awake during the visit.

7. Things that were in fact important: having someone talk a bunch of times to the headmaster to build the relationship; feeding the headmaster a meal; knowing that this part of the game was full of bugs. I ended up with a ZERO score for the tour, and still got the child into private school with a score of 98 out of an apparently necessary 90 points (when I got 83 points, the child's application was rejected). I also ended up with a new facial tic.

Fall Back (Standard Time) Printout to Avoid the Endless Discussions About Whether It's EARLIER or LATER Right Now

I will tell you what kind of talk sends me immediately to the kind of squirmy rage that makes me want to flail futilely at someone's face: "Wait, it would be SIX o'clock, but now it's FIVE o'clock, so it'll be EASIER....wait, no, HARDER to...wait, no. Okay, it WOULD be six o'clock, but we CHANGED..."

I'm not saying I don't start these very Daylight Savings Time discussions myself: I'm powerless not to, which makes me want to flail at my own face. And then I have to listen to Paul doing them and ALSO correcting me that "actually, it's saving, not savingS, and actually that's in the spring," which he's super-lucky hasn't gotten him killed. PLUS, the kids get involved, so there's the added bonus of having these discussions with people who are not understanding the concept at all.

Anyway, this has got to change. (CHANGE. See what I did there?) I'm not going through this again. Well, no, I'm going through it ONE MORE TIME, but this time I'm WRITING IT DOWN. Every time we do that stupid hour-math in the next couple of days and come to an accurate conclusion, I'm writing it down. Next year I will be able to copy this to a word-processing document, increase the font size, print it out, and hang it next to the clock. (Paul tells me I could also make a Google docs document so that ANYONE can print it out. I will work on this, so perhaps when we are looking for this post next year we will find a link to something printable.) (Ha ha, like I'll actually follow through with that.) (I ACTUALLY DID FOLLOW THROUGH WITH THAT: Google Docs Printout.)

FALL BACK
(changing from Daylight Saving Time back to Standard Time)
("gaining an hour")

It will be EASIER to wake up in the morning: you will feel wakeful earlier than usual. However, the children will wake up at a clock-time one hour earlier than usual, so you will actually feel THE SAME amount of restedness, except with the unpleasant feeling of resentment and injustice at the early time on the clock. If you have a teenager, he or she may emerge an hour before you would usually expect, blinking in confusion.

It will be EASIER to go to bed at night: you will feel sleepy earlier than usual. If you have a small child, you'll be dealing with an hour of crankiness and sleepiness as their little internal clock tells them it's sleeping time and you tell them it isn't.

It will be HARDER to wait for meals: you will feel hungry earlier than usual. The children will be cranky and whining for lunch, and you will say, "OMG stop whining for food, it is only TEN O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING." Then you will sneak into the kitchen and have a little nibble because OMG HUNGRY.

It gets light EARLIER in the morning. This is kind of nice for waking up: the kids have awakened us at 4:30 instead of 5:30, but there will be less time sitting sipping coffee resentfully in the dark: soon we will be sitting sipping it resentfully in the morning light.

It gets dark EARLIER in the evening. This sucks right now, and the evening commute is depressing, but it will soon be nice for holiday light enjoyment.

People who forget to change their clocks will arrive places an hour EARLY. If you are having a party on the Sunday of a time change, you should make plans for early arrivers, just in case, and you should put a reminder of the time change on the invitations. If you have a church, it would be thoughtful to arrange to have someone there an hour early with coffee and doughnuts for anyone who otherwise is unlikely to want to wait around in the parking lot for an hour kicking themselves. If you have a store, same possibility as church, especially if you're in a plaza with a bunch of stores: opening an hour "early" one day a year might get you some loyal and grateful customers browsing around while they wait for the rest of the stores to open.

If you want to prepare the children for the change ahead of time, don't bother. Or if you must, you can spend the days before the change waking them up later and putting them to bed later.


See also: Spring Ahead (Daylight Saving Time)

If You Saw a Blogger Out and About, Would You Say Hi?

A couple of weeks ago, Elizabeth was invited to a birthday party at someone's house, and it turned out to be one of those ENORMOUS parties where not only the whole class but also the whole neighborhood and the whole extended family were invited, and where most of the adults stayed because they were friends too. I'd been thinking I would leave and come back after the party, but it was clear I needed to stay: there were over a hundred people there, and people were even having trouble keeping track of their OWN kids, let alone someone else's.

I suffered, but I survived. It was three hours of hanging around with people I didn't know but who knew each other, and I'd say it was exactly as character-building as you'd expect for an introvert. And yet even repeated exposures to such experiences are not changing me into a comfortable and eager social person, despite our culture's unquenchable belief in the idea that exposure = total extinction---and related belief that such things REQUIRE extinction, as if being social and outgoing is the Right Way and being otherwise is Wrong. (BE YOURSELF, unless you're not social, outgoing, beautiful, calm, thin, confident, free of interesting neuroses, and in the top 1% of careers! In which case you should be someone else!) At best I'd say that for me, exposure seems to result in the gradual development of more sophisticated coping mechanisms.

ANYWAY. My point. When I was at this party with so many people, I saw a LOT of women who looked Kind Of Familiar. And it seemed to me that some of them were finding ME Kind Of Familiar, too. And although the most likely explanation is that we've just seen each other in other large groups of parents, it occurred to me that it would not be SO bizarre to run into another blogger at something like this.

And so this is what I was wondering: if YOU recognized a blogger at something like this, or perhaps out shopping at Target, would you say something? I THINK I would, but I'm not sure. It would depend on so many things: How well do I know the blogger? Like, would it soon emerge embarrassingly that I barely skim her blog, or do I read her so carefully I know her pets' names and the name of the paint color she used in her dining room? Do THEY know ME? Like, do we read each other's blogs, or do I just read hers? Do I feel like either of us would be blowing our cover by introducing ourselves? How sure am I that that is indeed her?

What about you? If you saw a blogger out and about, would you say hi? If someone recognized you, would you want them to say hi? HAVE you ever seen a blogger out and about?

Why Don't People Like My Blog?

I have had a thought. Stand back.

If you do much blog reading, you've probably noticed people making negative remarks about their popularity and the size of their readership. "All three of my readers," "I'm not one of the popular kids," etc. It's sometimes expressed as self-deprecation, or sometimes as sad wonderings about what's wrong with them and why no one likes them, or sometimes as confessions of jealousy.

And you might think it would be just the bloggers who have only a few readers, but it's also bloggers who have dozens but wonder why other bloggers have hundreds, and bloggers who have hundreds but wonder why other bloggers have thousands, and bloggers who have thousands but wonder why other bloggers have hundreds of thousands. It's hard to comment on such posts. What can be said other than, "It's not your fault per se: it's because your blog, for whatever reason, lacks the kind of mass appeal you (and pretty much everyone else) are hoping to have"?

I have thought of a different way to think of this situation. I think the blogger/blogging relationship can be thought of like the actor/acting relationship.

There are actors I love who choose projects I can't stand: even if I love love love a particular actor, I'm not going to watch him in a weekly zombie drama. I can want to be SISTERS with a particular actor, and yet I'm not going to watch her in that stupid movie.

And there are actors I think I can't stand, but I'd like them tremendously if I knew them in person. I don't like their WORK, but I'd like THEM if their work wasn't my only way of knowing them. But their work IS my only way of knowing them.

And there are actors I think I love, but I'd cringe and try to get away from them if I knew them in person. I love their WORK, but if I knew them I'd want to cry from the wringing disappointment of who they really are. But...I DO only know their work, so I love them.

Bloggers and their blogs are a comparable situation. There are bloggers we love, who take blogging jobs we're not interested in reading. There are bloggers we think we love, but if knew them (not just met them: some bloggers, like some actors, can be "on" in short-term meeting situations) we wouldn't love them anymore, because what we love is not them but their BLOGS. There are people we know and love in person, but we can barely stand to skim their blogs. And there are bloggers we think we can't stand, but it's really that we don't want to read their writing and/or what they choose to write about---which is quite a different thing from not liking THE PEOPLE. (Of course we might also dislike the people, if we knew them. What I mean is that the blog alone is not sufficient information for a conclusion.)

I think the feeling has been that if the blog is liked, the person is liked---and that therefore if the blog is not liked, the person is not liked. "Why don't people like my blog?" becomes "Why don't people like me?" Thinking of it in a different way (i.e., that the blog is the person's work/hobby, just as acting can be a person's work/hobby) does not automatically solve the problem: most bloggers, like most actors, would of course still prefer that their work be admired, and by as large an audience as possible. But rejection of the work/blog doesn't have to be interpreted as rejection of the person.

Some hobbies (acting, blogging) require an audience. Some (writing in a journal, running, scrapbooking, stamp-collecting) don't. Some (art, music, dance) can go either way, depending on what the person participating in the hobby wants. The audience can't be forced into existence (or complained into existence, or wanted into existence), so the trick is to find the natural fits. There are some things we like to do, and other people like to watch us do them. Yay! There are some things we like to do, and no audience is required. Yay! There are some things we like to do, and no one wants to watch us but we don't mind and we can happily do them without an audience. Yay!

And then there is the category of things we like to do, but only if we have an audience of a certain size---and our audience is not large enough, and so we're miserable and it makes us feel rejected and unliked. Non-yay. I think those are good hobbies to eliminate, to leave more room to focus on the others. (This is why I no longer model, act, sing for an audience, or try out for football.)

Mixed Media

My aunt was visiting and we were having a wonderful time talking and eating hot fudge sundaes and admiring the things she and my mom bought on shopping trips, so it was a really fun week and now my mom and I have post-holiday-blues-like feelings. I've been consoling myself with hour upon hour of a game called Sonny, and I REALLY cannot explain to you why I am playing it. I mean, I CAN: it was Henry's fault, because he was DESPERATE to play it but couldn't figure it out, and so I started helping, and then somehow it was two hours later and I'd been playing a SHOOTING game all that time.

I don't think of myself as LIKING shooting games, but Paul tells me it's because I think of them all as being First-Person Shooter games, which I hate because I hate scared-anticipation and I hate being startled and I don't think quickly. When in fact some games are Turn-Taking games like Sonny, where you can take your time and figure out your move, and then when you're all set you say go, and then it waits patiently for your next move. Plus, it's not gory or gross. Still, there's no getting around the part where I'm aiming guns, shooting them, and saying "DARN it!" when they don't do enough damage.

As soon as Rob got home, Henry and I made HIM play it TOO, because we kept getting really stuck and not knowing what was going on (now we have a Striker's Helm, but how do we get it out of our inventory so we can use it? and what's a "helm" when we are not steering any ships?), and we needed someone else to play it so we could ask questions. Now Rob, Paul, Henry, and I are ALL hooked on it.

Speaking of out of character, I also watched and loved an action movie: Red (Netflix link). We watched it with my aunt one evening, and I was all "I don't know about this," but then I LOVED it. Bruce Willis plays this totally charming, deadly ex-CIA agent. I'm pretty sure the director just had him look at the camera with a wry, amused, affectionate, sidelong-glance tough-guy expression, and put a green screen behind him so he could put that expression in every single scene, and I think I speak for all the ladies in our group when I say IT WORKED.

There was plenty of shooting and action, but nothing gory. And although it got a little scary at the peak of the action, MOST of the action was broken up with humor. And almost all the characters were, like, baby boomers coming out of retirement to kick some mid-thirties next-generation butt, so this is a good movie to watch with your parents. And Helen Mirren is in it, and Morgan Freeman, and John Malkovich playing on the funny/endearing end of his creepy/scary/crazy spectrum. Plus there's Karl Urban for the ladies who prefer a man in his 30s, though it was Bruce Willis who had all three of us looking up his age on Wikipedia to see if it was creepy for us to like him. AND, the female romantic interest is Mary-Louise Parker, who is only a decade younger than Bruce Willis and only LOOKS young enough to be his daughter, so that's kind of awesome too!

And I'm reading Divergent, but in my last reading session something icky and scary happened to one of the characters, and now I feel nervous that that's going to escalate.

Getting Too Big For Those Britches

Yesterday Rob and I had an argument in the car that went extremely well but was nevertheless very unpleasant. He wanted to discuss his theories that no one should be "against" anyone else, and that no one should make any laws that affect anyone else, and that if you can't prove something is untrue you have to treat it exactly as if it's true. I discussed these topics with him for over 30 minutes and didn't lose my cool AT ALL, even when I was making good/calm points and asking good/calm questions, and all he was doing was repeating his few points over and over in an increasingly upset voice and implying he considered me too stupid to follow the obvious logic.

So I should have gone home feeling good about my performance in this first of what will be many, many chances to exercise patience and restraint and the kindness that comes from having a more developed frontal lobe. One of my big worries about the teenage years is that I will lose my temper in a near-constant fashion, because I really do hate Immature Philosophizing---and I DIDN'T lose my temper. But instead of feeling cheered by this, I went home feeling logy and full of ennui. Because it turns out that even when I handled a discussion very well, I STILL hate Immature Philosophizing and having arguments with people. I felt so weary at the idea of the years and years of it I have ahead of me as the kids grow up.

I also felt logy/ennui/weary at the idea that they might not outgrow the ideas I consider immature. It is upsetting that there is so little I can do to control the children's brains so that they will grow up thinking thoughts I agree with. I already knew this was the case going in to this project, but it's bad for morale to be imagining what life could be like when he comes home with his family for Christmas and is still talking this way. Maybe all five of the kids will sit around talking about how much better the world would be if they ran it, and how stupid Paul and I are for not agreeing with them. Then we'll all sit around grimly unwrapping our presents and feeling dissatisfied with each other.

Also, he's outgrowing his pants so I went to my bins to get the next size up and found there WAS NO NEXT SIZE UP. I was going to have to buy him MEN'S sizes. Then I found that actually it's only The Children's Place that doesn't have size 16, but Old Navy and Target still do, so we have one more size to go. But after THAT, it's the MEN'S department!