I’m wondering if I’m the only person who believes that people should have to pass IQ and personality tests before being given a driver’s license.
I “commuted” 180 miles round trip 2 days a week for 5 years, and found that my faith in humanity was drastically undermined by the behavior I witnessed on the road. People behave in such a way as they never would if waiting their turn in line or dealing with someone face to face. Couple that with a generalized lack of attention, and the road is a dangerous place to be indeed.
For example, today, on my 9-mile drive from work to home:
1. Driver #1 sits in the lane for the duration of the green left-turn arrow, then zips out at the last second and dives into the far right lane, turning right on a red light without stopping first (apparently, since he/she had stopped at a green light, she/he was then granted one go-at-a-red-light pass).
2. Driver #2 proceeds down busy 3-lane road at ~ 7 mph under the speed limit, then turns on her left turn signal, pulls into the right (parking) lane, and turns right.
3. Driver #3 merges onto the highway at a blistering 37 miles per hour.
4. Driver #4 changes lanes, from the right to a left, in the middle of an intersection, proceeds in the left lane ~13 mph under the speed limit for approximately 1/2 of a mile, and then goes back into the right lane to turn right (this is not the same as driver #2, alas).
What is wrong with these people?
Nobody knows how to merge, people either don’t use their turn signals or use them too late to be of any use to anyone, most people seem to be driving cars without cruise control and are completely unable to maintain a consistent speed on the highway, and way too many people cross center lines at random or hug one line or another, seeming to indicate an intention to change into a different lane, but failing to actually do so.
Many of these drivers are talking on their cell phones, and apparently have forgotten that a) they are driving a car, and/or b) they are not the only person on the road. Besides DWD (Driving While Dumb) we have DWD2 (Driving While Distracted), DWoCP (Driving while on a Cell Phone), DWT (Driving While Texting), DWO (Driving While Old) and DWY&C (Driving While Young and Clueless).
A few weeks ago a man driving a large pickup, and pulling a VERY long trailer, simply merged onto the highway and into my lane without looking at me once. If I had not been able to get into the left lane instantly he would have “taken me out.” He never noticed — he was talking on a cell phone, which he was holding up to his left ear, the result of which a) he couldn’t see me and b) he didn’t notice and/or c) he didn’t care.
In general people seem to be getting away with worse and worse driving abilities and habits, although maybe this is just my opnion.
In any case, it would be good for everyone if people drove smarter and stopped treating their car like a living room or a phone booth. Remember: Your primary job is to a) drive your car safely and b) be considerate of everyone else on the road. If you can’t do those two things, please stay home, or at the very least, stay out of the driver’s seat.
the day after her return home from college for Thanksgiving break, following 18 months of an “on-again-off-again,” apparently troubled, relationship.
Now of course, he is to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, and maybe I should avoid “jumping on the bandwagon” by writing about this, but I have children, and can only imagine the pain both of these sets of parents must be feeling at this point.
What crucial emotional piece is missing that would allow anyone to do such a thing?
So, my kids are at their dad’s until tomorrow; my husband’s kids are with their mom until tomorrow; tomorrow the hordes descend and we will have 7 people in a 1600 square foot house for 3 days heavenhelpus.
Today, though, we slept in (10), and have been puttering around all morning. The pumpkin is roasted for the pie, the Christmas cake is in the oven (recipe below), hubby is doing extensive research on the life of Saul Bellow after I read a review of his new book of letters in the NYTimes Review of Books.
We still need to wash sheets and towels, clean the bathroom, get the porch furniture off the, well, porch (and the tiki torches; tiki torches still out on November 25!), and I need to practice for hours to prepare for Sunday’s concert (Franck Sonata for PIANO and violin).
But a good day.
I’ve been thinking, as I putter, about the holidays past, especially those of my adulthood, and the wonderful friends I’ve shared them with.
JF and countless Thanksgivings (to her mother’s great chagrin) — we had a tradition of making butter cookies cut out in the shape of turkeys and elaborately decorating them with orange, yellow, red, and brown frosting; then we would make Christmas cookies together and she would take some home with her. Her mother, a terrific food snob, would refuse even to touch the cutouts, and if she wanted a pfeffernuse or springerle or schnecken which happened to be nestled under a cutout, would ask J to move the cutout out of the way for her. Last night J texted me for wine advice for the best stuffing recipe ever (New Basics Cookbook), and when we see each other we go to the bookstore and buy each other’s children books for Christmas, even if it’s August.
Tammyguck (Tammy + Chuck through the mouth of a 2-year old, now 20) — every holiday from around 1986 to 1996 was shared in one way or the other. We were there one Halloween evening while Guck had Phantom of the Opera on really loud on the stereo and some trick-or-treaters were afraid to come to the door. They live in California now (Tammyguck, not the trick-or-treaters); saw Tammy for the first time in 8 years last summer. She looks exactly the same as she did in 1986. Despite this, I was very happy to see her.
These thoughts lead me to thoughts of other wonderful friends, many of whom have gotten me through some pretty difficult times in my life — JK, MS, especially. I don’t know what I would have done without you.
One has only to click here to see some of the articles talking about how psychologically and physically beneficial it is to have close friendships. Even Oprah thinks so, so it must be true. They provide emotional support, honesty and advice and sympathy and recipes, they let you know that you are not alone in the world. I’m very lucky, and very grateful for my friends, and hope that I have been as good a friend to them as they have been to me.
And now for the recipes:
The Best Turkey Stuffing Ever, from The New Basics Cookbook
Cut a large loaf of bread into 1″ squares; spread in a pan for 10-12 hours to dry out. Put in large mixing bowl.
Sauté
3 c. chopped celery, with leaves
2 c. chopped onions (good if 1/2 is a sweet onion)
in 2 T. vegetable oil over low heat until softened but not browned, ~ 10 minutes. Put veggies in the large mixing bowl with the bread.
Brown 1 lb. bulk sweet Italian sausage in pan from the vegetables, breaking into chunks. Add to mixing bowl.
Add to the bowl:
2 tart apples, cut into 1/2″ cubes
1 c. toasted and chopped hazelnuts
1 c. dried pitted cherries
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. dried thyme leaves
1 tsp. dried sage leaves
freshly ground black pepper.
Toss together.
Mix 1 c. tawny port (or Gamay Beaujolais, or Marsala) and 1 c. chicken stock.
Add liquid to dressing and toss, smush together with hands until “stuffing” consistency.
Stuff the turkey (but not until right before ready to put it in the oven), and put the remaining stuffing in a bowl and cover with foil.
Roast the turkey at 325˚ on a bed of celery ribs, carrots and onion, basting occasionally with melted butter + 3/4 c. tawny port or the wine you used above, every 15 minutes for the last hour. Roast the remaining stuffing for the last hour, basting with turkey juices once in a while.
Sheriji’s Christmas Cake (adapted from The Joy of Cooking)
This recipe has the unique and wonderful direction near the end; it’s how I recognize that I’ve found the recipe every year when I’m trying to remember which cookbook it’s in (I have several, dozen).
And all candied fruits must be removed from the premises before beginning. It would truly be tragic if any accidentally made their way into this cake, for all involved, directly or indirectly.
Put 2 sticks of butter into your mixer and turn it on at medium speed. Allow to beat for a long time so the butter is really smooth and creamy.
When butter is smooth and creamy, add 2 c. dark brown sugar, and beat 3-5 minutes until lighter in color and texture. Scrape the sides of the bowl at least once so that you are sure all of the butter and sugar are fully incorporated.
Add: 1/2 c. dark molasses, and the grated zest and juice of an orange and a lemon.
When well blended, add the flour mixture in 3 parts alternating with 3/4 c. brandy in 2 parts, beating on low speed and scraping occasionally to make sure everything is worked in.
Then add, gently:
2 c. currants
2 c. raisins (regular or golden)
2 c. dried figs cut into small pieces
You can also add 2 c. walnuts and 2 c. dates, but I don’t like either of these, so I just leave them out.
Put into 3 8-1/2″ bread pans that have been well buttered. Bake at 300˚ for 3 hours. “The cake may appear done at 2-1/2 hours; simply ignore this.” It does say that if the cakes are starting to brown significantly at 2-1/2 hours you can make a foil tent over the top of them. I have done this.
Cool in the pan on the rack for an hour, then remove from the pan. Be very careful about this — they tend to fall apart.
These are good right away, but even better if you make in November, wrap them in cheesecloth, and brush the cheesecloth with brandy every week or so for a month to get them good and drunk just in time for Christmas.
Thanks for reading! I have almost 200 regular visits each day now, and am really enjoying the comments and conversation.
Hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving.
May your turkey brown perfectly, may your champagne fizz delightfully, and may your J, Z, or Q be useful on a triple-letter or triple-word score.
Ah, scrabble. (Click on and watch — it’s one of the funniest things ever.)
In “The Ethicist” column of the November 5 New York Times, a woman living in Mumbai, India asks Randy Cohen if it is ethical to employ a 14-year old girl as household help. The prospective employer recognizes that most children of this age, in this country, will seek such employment, and admits that she would be extremely considerate of the girl’s age in the tasks which she would require the girl to complete. Her concern is twofold: 1) should she “encourage” what she considers to be exploitation by employing the girl? and 2), how she would feel about this girl working while her son is “studying and playing”?
Cohen advises the writer that such employment could only be seen as an advantage, especially if she, the employer, demonstrated fairness in encouraging the girl to go to school and complete her homework, and if she stuck to her commitment to only asking her to complete age-appropriate tasks.
According to the article:
Jacqueline Novogratz, C.E.O. of the Acumen Fund, a nonprofit that takes an entrepreneurial approach to combating global poverty, suggests: “The employer could help the girl pay for school fees so that she can attend school and then have her come afterward to help clean the house. The combination of part-time work with full-time schooling provides the girl’s family with a sense of dignity, and it gives the girl greater choice in her life.”
Despite this, the woman later writes to Cohen confessing that she did not hire the girl, despite the likelihood that the girl would work elsewhere, and potentially not be treated as well as the woman would have treated her, out of concern for the guilt she would feel watching the girl work while her son was not.
I have a lot of trouble with this decision, for two main reasons.
First of all, what’s wrong with the idea of a 14-year old working? I had part-time jobs at 14; had actually grown up working on my father’s farm from a VERY young age, but worked at an ice-cream shop in the summers so I could have some spending money. The motivation for this young girl to work so she can help her impoverished family is much more noble than my desire for a pair of Adidas sneakers (white, with green stripes), a new pair of Levi’s, and Heart (the one with Crazy on You on it) and REO Speedwagon (You Can Tune a Piano but You Can’t Tuna Fish) albums.
Secondly, what does this have to do with the woman’s guilt? Can she really be so selfish that she can allow this to be a bigger concern than the well-being and potential opportunities available to this girl through such employment, especially if she followed Novogratz’s advice as quoted above?
And isn’t it possible that this could have been a GOOD example to her son, on all accounts?
I wish this woman could have looked a little bit further outside herself and her own superficial feelings. Much good could have been done, for many.
In a comment after my recent post “Functional Illiteracy” a woman proposed that feminism was to blame for the decline in the literacy of our children. Her argument is that if mom isn’t at home when the kids get home from school, full of energy and ready to help them with their homework while providing a plate of warm cookies and a nice pot of stew bubbling on the stove, then all is lost. (She also bemoaned the fact that all those women working only served to make the world more expensive, the direct result of which she and her family spent their first seven years living in a “trailor” and were only now able to own a home because of the real estate crash.)
To paraphrase: What children need is discipline, supervision, and structure, and none of these things can be provided if mom works.
My first reaction won’t be quoted directly here, but when I stopped tearing at my hair and screaming, I decided I wanted to propose this as a possibility just to see what the world’s reaction was.
*****
According to the Department for Professional Employees, the number of working women has risen from 5.1 million in 1900 to 65.7 million in 2005, and is expected to reach 76 million by 2014. In 2004 nearly half of all job-holders were women, although more women than men still work part time, and make 55-75% what their male counterparts do in most fields. (This is shameful, btw, but I won’t go off on a tangent.) The usual fields are also still well represented by women: teaching, nursing (82-98%) vs. engineering (10%) or airline pilot (3%). It is also noted that most mothers, even of young children, participate in some way in the work force.
*****
My grandmother divorced her husband when my mom was in 1st grade. He was an alcoholic, and abusive, and my grandma decided she’d had enough. She had worked as a secretary before getting married, but had stopped upon her marriage. Once divorced, and not being paid any child support despite a court order, she had to go to work to support herself and her two daughters.
My mother-in-law was a public school teacher in Canada while my father-in-law was in seminary when she found herself unexpectedly expecting First Son (my husband). When she informed her principal of this upcoming blessed event, she was told that he would do her the “favor” of allowing her to continue until Christmas. As she would probably be “showing” before then it was important that she disguise this fact as much as possible so as not to make any of her colleagues or students “uncomfortable.” I can’t help but wonder if this principal also called each student’s parent and advised them against having any further children, as this could also cause some “discomfort” for the already-present children. Somehow I doubt it.
When the chair of the music department at the small, liberal-arts college where I used to teach and work as staff accompanist found out that I was going to be adopting a child and starting my doctorate he decided that it was “inappropriate” for me to continue teaching as, and I quote, my “attentions should be directed elsewhere.” I was promptly removed from the list of any courses I had been teaching, although it was determined that it would okay for me to continue to accompany students on juries and recitals. (Isn’t this illegal?)
Anyway. . .
*****
Kant once wrote that it was so offensive for women to speak in public that they might as well grow a beard.
*****
I find myself being drawn down the path from the idea of men society deciding whether it’s appropriate for women to work or not, as well as deciding which endeavours are appropriate (teaching, nursing) and which not (engineering, math, science) to the fear and villification of women’s bodies throughout history. Women and their “parts” and processes are evil, unclean; we are temptresses and witches. “. . .men. . .defined by the lofty spheres of reason and intellect, while women, with their mysterious biological cycles, represent the base, dark, stormy, unpredictable realms of nature and emotion. . .” (Caroline Knapp, Appetites, p. 92)
So many tangents, so little time.
*****
Just one more.
My husband and I just watched Forty Shades of Blue, made in 2005. Dina Korzun plays Lara, a Russian girl who had met the successful and influential, but volatile, music producer Alan James (Rip Torn), when he was in Moscow on a business trip. They now have a 3 1/2 year old son, and live in his house in Memphis, although they are not married until the end of the movie. Lara is lost, an empty shell. Our first sight of her is as she strolls like an automaton through the aisles of a swank department store; later in the movie she stands, drunk and helpless, on the street, trying to figure out how to get home while the father of her child is upstairs in a hotel room with one of “his” singers. She’s unhappy, and she knows it, but as she explains to Alan’s mostly-estranged son, played by Darren Burrouws, she “has more than anyone [she] knows; [she] doesn’t have a right to want more.”
This idea, that we don’t have the right, is probably more common than we think. I’ve felt that way myself.
Sure, if the family is stressed and running in 65 different directions and no one’s “driving the ship,” then the children’s homework might suffer. But that could be as much a result of poor planning, disorganization, or over-scheduling poor little Junior or Juniorette; or perhaps “dad” is a little bit useless around the house. According to a British study, women spend an average of 3 hours per day on housework, men an hour and 40 minutes; this is considered a drastic improvement. I imagine it might help the cause even more if men were aware of the studies which show that those who “help” (how offensive is this? They help?) with the housework have more sex.
Is it time now to take a deep breath and hearken back to the “good ol’ days,” when men were considered superior and a woman’s Place Was in the Home?
Perhaps what we need, instead, is a society which supports our right, and ability, to do both.
Caroline Knapp again:
If only we lived in a culture that made ambition compatible with motherhood and family life, that presented models of women who were integrated and whole: strong, sexual, ambitious, cued into their own varied appetites and demands, and equipped with the freedom and resources to explore all of them. If only women felt less isolated in their frustration and fatigue, less torn between competing hungers, less compelled to keep nine balls in the air at once, and less prone to blame themselves when those balls come crashing to the floor. If only we exercised our own power, which is considerable but woefully underused; if only we defined desire on our own terms.
And what is the cost to us as women if we spend our lives denying our very selves? Being made to believe that we aren’t good enough, smart enough, capable enough, responsible enough, articulate enough, valuable enough to make a contribution to society other than the one that is prescribed for us?
I fear this post has devolved into rambling incoherence. There are so many thoughts and ideas competing for my attention, I find myself writing and deleting much that seems too tangential. I’ll leave you with a few parting clips as my closing thoughts.
*****
I clicked “publish,” decided I was going to avoid one more tangent, started to write this out as a separate post, and then decided it absolutely HAD to be included in this one. This probably isn’t very “professional” of me, but so far no one’s paying me to be here, so I guess it’s okay.
Caroline Knapp, one more time:
. . .a dash of Hegelian despair can be a useful thing, a check against consumer culture’s blaring strains of false promise, and also fodder for a deeper kind of acceptance. To know that hunger is an essential part of what it means to be human, that it’s possibly epic and anguished and intrinsically insatiable, is at least to muffle the blare, to introduce a sense of proportion.
And yet proportion is hard to hold onto, and may be particularly hard for women. During an interview on National Public Radio’s “The Connection,” conducted following the publication of her 1999 book, “The Whole Woman,” feminist Germaine Greer described something she sees with increasing frequency: the weeping woman, the woman stopped at a traffic light with tears streaming down her face, or exiting a stall in the ladies’ room with red-rimmed eyes, or slumped in her seat at the movie theater, clutching a handful of Kleenex. The weeping is always private, indulged on the sly, and Greer sees the sorrow behind it as a cultural phenomenon as well as an individual one, a reaction to the lingering understanding among women that despite several decades of social change, the world remains largely indifferent, disdainful, even hostile to their most defining qualities and concerns.
Women weep, Greer believes, because they feel powerless, and because they are exhausted and overworked and lonely. Women weep because their own needs are unsatisfied, continually swept into the background as they tend to the needs of others. They weep because the men in their lives so often seem incapable of speaking the language of intimacy, and because their children grow up and become distant, and because they are expected to acquiesce to this distance, and because they live lives of chronically lowered expectations and chronic adjustment to the world of men, the power and strength of a woman’s emotions considered pathological or hysterical or sloppy, her interest in connection considered trival, her core being never quite seen or known or fully appreciated, her true self out of alignment with so much that is valued and recognized and worshipped in the world around her; her love, in a word, unrequited.
In a nod to the diminishment of outrage that began to take hold in the eighties, Greer told her interviewer, “We tried to mobilize women’s anger. We spent years telling women to get in touch with their rage, and I think I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s just not enough rage to go around. Women don’t get angry enough. What women do is get sad.”
This sentiment stayed with me for a long time. I was driving from Boston to Rhode Island while I heard it, to visit a friend for the weekend, and I spent much of the trip thinking about the steady press of sorrow in a woman’s life, the feeling of discord that may run through her days, the singular loneliness of living in a wrld that emphasizes and rewards so many qualities that may run counter to her central humanity: independence instead of interdependence; distance instead of closeness; self-seeking instead of cooperation; the external world instead of the internal world; glamour and wealth and celebrity instead of kindness and generosity and warmth. I thought about the private pain of women, expressed with so much wordless anguish: the anorexic, isolated and terrified and working so relentlessly to starve away her own hunger; the shoplifter, trying to compensate for what she never had with a Clark bar; the self-cutter, lashing at her own skin instead of out at the world; the bulimic, hunched over a toilet bowl, retching out a river of need. I thought about thwarted connections–a girls’ from her mother, a woman’s from her culture–and then I did something I almost never do: I pulled my car over to the side of the road, and I sat there, and I wept.
In the October 25 issue of the New Yorker, Lauren Collins writes about David Cameron’s goals for a “Big Society” in England. She begins the article by writing about a picturesque hamlet in central Dorset, which is, ironically, “bisected by a brook that was once used as a latrine.” The residents of this town recently each voluntarily contributed to the purchase of a replacement marker after all (3) of their town markers had been stolen over a 5 month period in 2008. Understandably, the residents were determined that the replacement sign would not be subject to the same fate, and have used a one-and-a-half ton hunk of limestone as the new marker.
This is all well and good, but I think they should have taken advantage of this now lost opportunity and, since all physical evidence had been removed, changed the name of their town. Instead, they are, and will remain to be, Shitterton, Dorset.
I’m wondering if I’m the only person who believes that people should have to pass IQ and personality tests before being given a driver’s license.
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