kellementology

life according to me

Category: Learning

  • And so I begin again.

     

    In the last many days, I’ve had time to think about this space in my life and its accumulation of nearly two years of what passes for me these days — me in writing, that is.  Whenever I run through the archives and skim the content,  so many thoughts come to mind about when the piece was written — the season, the weather on a given day, what I was preoccupied with or annoyed about.  It’s been more and more difficult to write here and so the frequency has decreased and I’ve found myself adjusting to that, but not particularly enjoying it.  I’ve taken the time on my occasional walks to make mental plans where I’d whip myself into writerly shape working on one project at this point in the day and another later on, somehow fitting it all in.

    The implementation lasted one day.

    One.

    I’d decided to do some admin work related to my sites and busied myself in all that it entails, which is a lot when one might consider that I currently qualify for the old dog aspect of the whole can’t teach new tricks classification.  Bound and determined to prove it wrong, I spent ridiculous amounts of time reading codex and phoning and thinking and whining to get everything moved and it just never worked.

    With every piece I had nearly worked out, another arose and on a computer screen it looks like two window open with several tabs to access in each one.  My head spun with angst over root directories and files, php and FTPs, domains and DNS.  Having much experience in the area of reading research, I can tell you that when content is dense, even proficient readers default to subvocalizing in order to digest and comprehend new information.  It helps — but only if one is also willing to repeat the process over and over with little or no distraction.

    Ahem.

    I Twittered much.  I wallowed in Bubble Bazinganess.  I bonded with Facebook finally, and satisfied my creative spirit cooking, shooting photos of what I’d cooked, editing those photos, and then finally writing about what I’d cooked.  *insert note regarding food obsession here* It only fills the hours, but it never quite fills the spot that this space fills and the longer it was unavailable to me, the more I realized that although I could live without it, I just didn’t want to.

    I thought about people who have lost posessions in a fire, or who have had property vandalized.  I morbidly recalled my trauma induced by the loss of my hard drive on my beloved MacBook and all the glorious photos of our trip to the UK and several years of my son’s boyhood.   I conjured up all the images of loss I could to add to my incessant mulling over of not having this space because I may have been careless.  And if I had, nothing could be done other than start again, because that’s what I do.  I’m good at it.

    So that’s what I was ready to do this morning when I sat down.  Start again.

    And metaphorically, that’s what I’ve decided to say I’ve done, because clearly my archives are in order and everything is up and running.  But I have perspective I didn’t have a week or so ago and need to put it to good use.

    It seemed appropriate to make a few visual changes to celebrate moving on with new purpose.

    Ahhh……

    If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.

    Be satisfied with what you have.

    Every cloud has a silver lining.

    Dude, make it a double.  That was a close call.

  • Making a plan for myself, maybe.

    Yesterday, I avoided coming up here to sit at the keyboard, to sort through emails, to sip my coffee while scrolling through the early morning cacophony that is Twitter.  I’ve been doing this for more time than I like to acknowledge.  Instead, I straightened things up around the kitchen and the rest of the house, started some laundry, and pulled a stool up to the kitchen counter to make a plan of sorts.  It was a scary concept, but I was armed with a pad of paper, stickies, and a sharp pencil.  It was going to happen, or else.

    I also silently vowed to get in the car to get groceries before noon — something I resist doing like one might resist jumping into an ice cold pool buck naked just because it was there.

    (more…)

  • Construction and Ugly Cookies

     

    I’m exhausted, and I’m always surprised when I realize it.  Like someone who doesn’t spend 12 hours a day at the office shouldn’t be tired — ever.  So not only am I exhausted, I’m annoyed that I’m exhausted.

    It’s pretty pathetic.  No, I’m pathetic.

    To give myself half a break today, I’m looking at the disaster area that used to be my house, realizing that my black mood is most likely the result of construction that isn’t due to conclude for another two weeks — well, and deciding to engage in nearly two weeks of baking and writing about cookies.  What in hell was I thinking?

    It’s always exciting when construction begins, but I’ve been through it twice before, so know that it gets stressful. I should know better, but the last two times, I was out of the house all day and didn’t have to watch and worry.  As nice as it is to be able to see all the changes happening each day, it’s not pleasant to see all the kinks in the plans, as well.  Add this additional cost to that additional cost, and the persistent drone from the talking heads on the television about the nation’s economic woes only makes it worse.  This morning I wanted to pull the covers over my head, wish the crew could let themselves in, and let them work as if I didn’t exist — which would be a bit strange considering the lump I’d make on the bed sitting in the middle of an empty room.

    Our room is the only one in the house that’s nearly empty.  The others have all had our possessions shoved into them and smaller items perched on top, stacked in ways I’d never have attempted in any other situation.  We’ve been lucky that only one thing has been broken, and it wasn’t valuable from a monetary sense, but did have some pleasant memories attached to it.

    There’s dust everywhere.  Even though plastic sheets are draped from time to time, it seems not to matter because the garage door is open, and the constant breeze through the house just distributes the particles everywhere.  In the beginning, I tried to vacuum at the end of each day in the small area where we can actually move around, but have given that up since I’ve run out of space to set things that weren’t packed.  I have dishes that have survived more than 100 years sitting in the middle of my family room.  As I stare at them, I wonder what I’m going to do with them.  Even if I purchased more boxes, there’s no more room in the garage to put anything.  And next week, the painters come.

    Being the foodie I am, you’d think that sitting in front of my Mac tending to my food blog and cooking to my heart’s content would keep me happily occupied, wouldn’t you?  And it should, but at this point, I’m tired of that, too.  In fact, I’m so tired of it, I’m questioning why I’m doing it — and not just the cookie making.  Somewhere along the line, it has consumed my entire life and I make time for little else.  Like I said — pathetic.

    All I want to do is clean my house.  I want to organize the piles and go through boxes and stacks.  I’m supposed to be choosing hardware for the doors and stair rails, but I’m not.  I should be tossing things we don’t need, and organizing yet another donation of items we no longer use, but can’t.  There’s no space to do it in.

    Taking a shower is a pain, and putting on makeup or doing anything with my hair involves squeezing into a little space in front of my mirror in between the cat food tray and litter box, so I don’t.  But when I have to, there are usually strange men walking back and forth and it’s not that comfortable acting like I don’t care if they can see me putting on my eyebrows or peering at the wrinkles under my eyes in my magnifying mirror.  But who cares, right?

    And the scariest part of all of this — Christmas is how many days away?  I can’t even imagine how I’m going to pull that off.  But I’ll try, and it will be great *whips superficial happy face from back pocket.* If one or two — okay, so maybe three bad days in the course of this is all I’ll have, then I guess that’s not too horrible.

    I just wish the intensity wouldn’t build up in me like it does, surprising me when I should come to expect it.

    And when it finally wraps its ugly coils around my throat, I don’t want to have to squelch my anger, or feel guilty over it and have to go into my “count my blessings” mode.  I don’t want to have a little heart to heart with myself about how nice it’s going to be when it’s all finished, or be thankful for what we have because we’re so fortunate, because I’ve already done that.  I do that every single day.  Relentlessly. It doesn’t erase the upwelling of ugliness that permeates every pore in my skin, and so I give in to it.

    What I do want is to take a hot bath.  I want bubbles, and candles, and wine with that bath, please, and a book that almost reads itself.  Just one bath.  That’s all.

    Maybe then, my mood could possibly improve to grey with chances of silver linings.

    But writing it here helps, and eating five or six of the ugliest cookies I’ve ever seen.

    Okay, so, maybe only sort of ugly.

    But ugly.

  • Carly Simon and Memories about Choices

    Carly Simon and Memories about Choices

     

    Yesterday was a marathon of driving from one end of the county to the opposite and in weather more conducive to July than November.  To be more accurate, it’s cooler in July here than it has been the last many days.  I’ve given up wishing and hoping for weather that smells and feels like Fall, let alone the winter that is barely four weeks away.

    But when I’ve got a task to do that should have been completed weeks ago, I set my route and try not to think about it.  I just go, like I’m on auto pilot.  First one store, then the next.  Speak with one salesperson, then another — all the while taking mental notes and feeling my brain ready to explode with so many others’ opinions.

    I’d say that it’s because I’m thorough, but it’s closer to being an approval problem.

    Carly Simon helped.  Helped with the searching — not the approval problem.  I rarely listen to music while I’m in the car preferring quiet more, but felt I needed something to get me in and out of the car with each stop I made.  So Carly it was — and only because I sadly do not carry CDs in my car, let alone an iPod.

    My afternoon of driving was saturated with memories of the who and what I used to be when “Anticipation” and “You’re So Vain” could be heard on the radio when people actually listened to music on radios.  But my favorite was  “That’s the Way I Always Heard it Should Be,” the haunting melody something I loved even though at that point in my life, I wouldn’t have been able to relate to the words — a giving up of one’s self to something others did just because that’s what was done.

    I was too naive to see things that way.  I was too busy looking for fairy tales of my own and thinking they were something that existed instead of something created.  It takes a few mistakes to arrive at that conclusion.

    “But you say it’s time we moved in together/Raised a family of our own you and me/Well that’s the way I’ve always heard it should be/You want to marry me/We’ll marry…’

    I had no remorse about the eventuality of marriage because all of the other strings attached to the decision  were far more interesting, like having an engagement ring, choosing fabric for a dress I would make myself, selecting perfect invitations, a just right location.  You’re thinking there’s a minor problem with that line of thinking, yes?  The matter of “choosing to spend my life with someone who would never have understood me” type of a problem.

    “The couples cling and claw/And drown in love’s debris./You say we’ll soar like two birds through the clouds,/ But soon you’ll cage me on your shelf — I’ll never learn to be just me first,/By myself…”

    No, we didn’t get married.  The invitations were never ordered and the ring was given back.

    Funny what a song can make you remember, isn’t it?

    But I did end up finding what I was looking for on my marathon search yesterday.  It’s a vanity of sorts for part of our home renovation work.  I know you may not quite “see” it the way I do, and that it’s different than what you might put in your home.  I’m used to that.

    It’s because somehow along the way, I’ve learned to be just me first, by myself.

    Or — that I’ve already polled a zillion people on the choice since gawd forbid someone besides myself will have to look at it while they’re sitting on the toilet and think, “What in hell was that woman thinking?”

    But I’m used to people not seeing what I see in life and understand.

    You can still throw in your two cents worth on the vanity if you want.

    Yes, it's for the bathroom.

    Still not convinced?

    After all, it’s just a bathroom vanity, right?

    But when I look at it from now on, I will most likely hear Carly Simon’s melody reminding me that I have made some amazingly good choices in life.

  • Oh Look. Writing.

    Somehow, all the time I used to look forward to — all the time I spent thinking about what I might write here is gone.  The unfortunate aspect of this is that the writing voice I hear during the day has faded, its insistent prodding, its litany of opening lines, and reminders of possible topics have been pushed aside by life.  And what a small life it is.

    Sounds dramatic, doesn’t it?

    It should be, but I don’t have the time right now to make it that way.  Too much dust and food, and excuses.  It isn’t that I don’t want to write here.  Honestly.  It’s more about the type of writer I am.

    I have to use a food analogy.  Sorry.

    If you turn the burner on low and let the water simmer, then turn up the heat as the water approaches the boil, then that would be me.  There’s no turning me on high and cutting to the chase.  I could do that if I wanted, but what’s the point?

    Writing is a catharsis for me and if I can’t spend the time, then the words stay in my mind.  And I’m egotistical enough to know that once I’ve formed the perfect line of words to convey the just right thought, they’ll be forgotten unless I write them down.  It’s sad.

    I do get credit for:

    1) working on a cookbook for a friend which entailed making most of the recipes and snapping photos, right?

    2) spending more time than I wanted –surprisingly — looking at products for our home renovation.

    3)  getting ready to visit several blogging friends for a week!

    4)  having to reposition myself in my home while contractors tear it to shreds and dust settles on every possible surface.

    Excuses.

    Sad, because so much has happened that I have thoughts about — some lovely, and others, not so much.  And all of which would have been written at one point in time.  But no.  And it’s horrible.

    The other problem is, even if I write here, everyone has either left the building, or has stopped writing, their bloggy wonderfulness seemingly forever ended, their words and photos, just sitting, no longer collecting comments.  *sigh*

    What to do?

    Sign up for that writing class at UCSD extension so I’ll actually write?  Continue to wallow through this strange new life of mine?

    What?

  • Piggy Banks: I’ll bet Warren Buffet had one.

    Cute Piggy Bank If I remember correctly, my sister got a piggy bank for her fourth birthday.  She is the youngest in our family, so it’s never been quite clear as to why my younger brother and myself were passed up on the piggy gifting.  It was a cute little pig — fat-bellied and pink, just like she was when she was little.  She’s thin as a whip now (smart, too…) and no longer has her piggy bank (thanks to the bottom-dwelling loser who crawled through her bedroom window and broke it, stealing her money…), but I’m thinking that owning one while she was growing up must have put the idea of saving into her brain in a fierce kind of way.  By the time she was 20, she had a nice little nest egg in the bank, a flashy sports car, and her own condominium.

    Yes, she did.

    My brother and I have never been as thrilled as she has been to save money, and I’m thinking it’s because we didn’t have piggy banks.  You know, tainted at an early age?  Marked and doomed to be spend thrifts?  We must have thought that money grew on trees, or that we’d make excellent tax payers when we grew up.  You know, sort of simulate the economy single handedly?  I know Uncle Sam probably has a special place reserved for each of us some day…

    …AFTER we all survive the financial doom and gloom that continues to unfold before us all.

    I recently bought a very cute piggy for one of my nieces who turned two, thinking not only that it was the cutest thing I’d ever seen, but that maybe I could accomplish a few thing with my purchase (since I never bought one for my three sons or any of my nieces or nephews except the youngest…):I love this Piggy Bank

    1.  Say Happy Birthday to a real cutie pie (and give her the gift that will pay big rewards later in life…SAVINGS, a sense of self-worth, independence, moo-lah — wait, that would be a cow bank…)

    2.  Stimulate the economy by doing more than just clicking ads…(I’m extremely good at this…Ask me how to S.P.E.N.D.)

    3. Support the talented blogger, Lynn of Korff Ceramic Originals who makes these incredibly cute and well-made banks (plus a whole lot more…)

    4.  Out class those who are burying their savings in Folger’s coffee cans in their back yards (which is what my mother would have done if she still had a back yard to dig in…)

    Think about it.

    Piggy banks can be excellent for those of us well beyond toddlerhood, too, right?  It’s never too late to save.  They can be used for incentive:  money for every mile you run, or sit up you complete, or pound you lose. You can save loose change from the washer or your teen aged son’s bedroom floor — your husband’s pockets.  Set a goal and insert the coinage or paper.  It works.  Little by little.

    Hell, if I used one to deposit the money I saved for each glass of wine I didn’t drink, I’d have a nice little nest egg in about a week.  But I worry about the future of all those wineries I stimulate.

    Ask Warren Buffet.  He knows. I’ll bet he had a piggy bank when he was growing up, too. Think about it.  The holidays are around the corner, and Lynn personalizes…How cool is that?
    I’m thinking I just may need more piggy banks…Piggy Bank

  • Middle Aged Anomaly Tucks in Ass Each Morning

    I click “Write” on my WordPress dashboard, waiting for the spinning wheel that is my brain to slow knowing that it won’t and that focusing on a single stream of steady thought on any one idea will seem impossible.

    No, be impossible.

    In 20 minute’s time, I’ve gone from thinking about working out a recipe for apple cinnamon nut ice cream, to worrying about the huge bowl of bread dough I have fermenting in the fridge, then mulling over tonight’s debate between Palin and Biden before reading through most of this Slate article and being completely distracted by a list linked inside that article. Or maybe it was somewhere else on the page…can’t remember.

    I don’t normally spend my time reading these types of articles, but once in a while, one will catch my eye because the writing is good and it actually feels as if there’s a person behind that writing. Quite a concept, yes?  Aspects of it will get me thinking, of course, and the entire time, somewhere hovering above it all (at least today) are Natalie Goldberg’s words about writers I scanned over this morning in the bathroom:

    Writers live twice.  They go along with their regular life, are as fast as anyone in the grocery store, crossing the street, getting dressed for work in the morning.  But there’s another part of them that they have been training.  The one that lives everything a second time.  That sits down and sees their life again and goes over it.  Looks at the texture and details.

    Okay, so Natalie, I haven’t been “training” because that would imply that this living twice business is something I choose to do.  You don’t choose it.  “It” chooses you.  For example, not only have I thought about what I’ve described just now, but I’ve thought about it many times since, and am now thinking about it again.  And yet again when revising this paragraph.  Still thinking…

    I do this all day long.

    It’s like watching myself live my life and even though it’s odd, it provides me quite a bit of time to think about how and why I do what I do.  As much as I can say there’s a soothing (insane) aspect to it, unfortunately it doesn’t lend itself to improving my productivity.  Bills are sitting in front of me, there are quite a few piles of recipes I’ve torn from magazines ready to be recycled sitting in the middle of my family room floor (where they’ve migrated after being on the kitchen counter for several days), and I need to get off my derrier to go for a walk today.

    But I’ve arrived at the conclusion that the bloggosphere can be quite the brutal place — at times, what I imagine it would feel like to go through a carwash without my car, each spray of water or rotating brush pushing me first one way, and then another and never quite making it to the end.

    I’m tired of it but have no one to blame but myself.  I think much of it stems from the fact that who I am and what I have to say here doesn’t exactly fit anywhere.  This conclusion isn’t earth-shattering, nor is it meant to be accompanied by a whine. I don’t whine.  I have been known to climb up on a soapbox and metaphorically flip the world the bird, however — just not as much as I used to.

    *sigh*

    I am a middle-aged woman.  That I enjoy who I am at this particular point in my life doesn’t really change the fact that I’m somewhat of an oddity in the Bloggosphere.  Sometimes, it’s overwhelming to be surrounded by twenty and thirty somethings with toddlers, techies with jargon I never completely understand, snarling, snarking political junkies, celeb gossip mongers, and the increasingly less than attractive you-too-can-make-money-at-home crowd.

    I’m an anomaly.  And I guess that’s the most annoying part of this since I always have been, so why should my persona here be less so?  One would think I’d get used to being reminded that I’ve always been a square peg.

    I have no stories to tell about my toddlers, my Satanical boss, my commute, my gigabytes, and there is no way in hell I could ever sit down here and try to be funny every freaking day because people want a cheap laugh.  But I’m also not going to wallow in the bathos of my life (liar, liar, pants on fire…), lamenting about mistakes and missed opportunities. No, really.

    What I will do is continue to look in the mirror each day, and after taking more than the normal minute or so to scan my body and realize it doesn’t exactly look like it used to even five years ago, suck in my stomach, tuck in my ass, smile and know that I am me.  Still.

    Sounds like a warning, doesn’t it?

    Heh.

  • Learning from Writers

    I’ve been reading portions of William Zinsser’s Inventing the Truth, a collection of pieces by talented writers on The Art and Craft of Memoir. It lays open in a place that I’ll see it throughout the day so that I can noncommittally pick it up and think about what the writers have to say about their respective experiences writing memoir.

    One of the pieces,”Points of Departure,” by  Jill Ker Conway discusses so many different things worth my consideration.  But what I can’t get past is the sheer magnitude of her life — and that I’ve never heard of her before.  How does that happen, and why, after learning of it all, do I not feel insignificant?

    Most likely because I’ve never suffered from being or feeling insignificant.  Of course, everything is relative, so it’s easy to say that I’ve been significant to my family, or good friends, or a student here and there.  Perhaps even to birds I’ve trapped inside and released before they hurt themselves crashing against a window to get out.  Definitely the IRS since they can depend on us for tax dollars. But I’m not talking about any of that.  It’s so much larger than the tiny details that we essentially are.

    I wander through my day and think, “What does it mean?”

    I’ve learned that Anne Lamott’s KFKD will play, relentlessly telling me all things non-constructive — anything to keep me from actually writing something relevant.

    Anything.

    At least if I continue to read Conway, I’ll write, but I’ll want to write about what distracts me, such as her opinion about women being “lodged in family networks [being] very attractive to the political right because it provides a good reason for keeping [them] from establishing a strong independent identity of their own.”

    That’s a few good days of writing all by itself.

    Instead, I’ll think more about what she has to say about memories and their separation from the emotion they so readily evoke.

    I’ll also think about her question, “Why did it happen that way?”

    In the meantime, I’ll write, too.

    It’s easier to take on.

    Girls are certainly different now, aren't they?

  • Time for a Remodel

    I’m truly in a quandry.  As I look back over the past year, so much has changed that no one would notice but me.  I’m speaking of my blog world, and not the real world, which is so chaotic right now.  I’d like to say that I believe I can impact change on the latter, but for as much as I harp, I’m not close to being a blip on the radar of change. With respect to cyberspace, that’s different.

    There’s been a shift of my interests there,  and when I think carefully about that shift, it seems that it’s been coerced by the group that loves to look at, think about, and cook great food.  It’s compelling, and I imagine at times that I have some small shop with a large window in front that people can walk by each day, gazing at what I’ve put out for them, to tempt them to stop and look a bit longer, or perhaps even walk inside and stay for a while.  The key word would be imagine.

    I once imagined or even longed for a shop of my own one day, but I’ve decided that having an imaginary shop is much less expensive, and perhaps just as rewarding considering I do get to decide what to prepare, and enjoy it myself.

    But as I’ve said before, it’s quite time consuming keeping that shop, and so this place is pushed aside.  And when I have time for neither, this is the space I want to fill.  Often the other is more of a compulsion, a responsibility, a job.

    Writing here has never felt that way.

    I’m not quite sure how that happened, but I find it all very interesting — interesting enough to wonder about something.  What if the two were combined?  Others have done it.  And as I read through the many food blogs I enjoy, I notice that because their writers only keep one blog, they are more inclined to write about other facets of life and living.  It’s nice. 

    But I was thinking of something different.  Certainly it’s been done before, and a perfect example of someone who does it very well is Pioneer Woman.  I’ve always thought that having a single place that contains a space for everything that keeps my brain occupied would be perfect, but have always been limited by my knowledge of how all of this website business works.  Finding time to write, cook, photograph, and learn how to set up and manage an involved website would be quite daunting for me, but I think I could do it. The only aspect of it all that’s holding me back is being unsure about whether the two can actually coexist.

    In the long run, I think it would help me be a bit more humane to my readers here.  It must seem at times as if I’m schizophrenic, ranting about politics, moaning over my pets, or snarking about whatever unfortunate person is being lambasted in the press.  Somehow, I think that if each of those personalities could fit into its own box, it would be so much more neat and orderly.

    Labeled.  You know how I crave labels…

    So think about that.  You know, give it a good three or four seconds of your valuable time and let me know what you think.

    In the mean time, I have to get my real world shaped up.  I may not be building a lodge like Pioneer Woman, but this place certainly needs some attention.  I’ve long complained about the damage our pets have done to the carpet, and have finally decided to have someone come out to give an estimate on floors.  I want to get rid of all the carpet so I can enjoy my aging pets who will continue to leak, drip, and drop their various and assorted bodily unmentionables regardless of how much I dab and complain about it.  No more carpet would mean no more dust, fuss, or muss.

    The challenging part of this is that our bathrooms need to be done as well.  Needing to be done can be defined as taking out all the early ’80’s fake burnished gold metal that seems to be covering everything, ripping out the shower since it’s feeble at best, and the tile since it’s really good at growing mold that I don’t want to know the scientific name for or what it’s doing to us.

    So if we have the floors done first, then have the bathrooms done, the work on the bathrooms will mess up the floors.  If we wait to do the bathrooms first, then the carpet continues to be the disgusting eyesore it’s become. 

    In a nut shell, I don’t want to have another blog about being any kind of a weekend warrior when it comes to remodeling or redecorating on a budget.  But it’s one of the things my brain spends time on, so it could have its very own space for you, kind reader, to skip if you’re not into the Martha side of life.

    Just thinking, that’s all.

    Good thing it’s free, right?

    Okay, back to work.

    It would be so nice if it was all free!

  • Sex Ed and Politics

    Yesterday morning after I returned from dropping the MoH off at work, I had the dubious pleasure of listening to NPR report on local attitudes about sex education for 5th graders.  Obviously, there’s been quite a bit of talk on the subject since McCain was forced by the GOP bigdogs to chose Sarah Palin as his running mate.

    In the sound byte, a woman squealed in a key that would rival that of a soprano, that her son was “toooooooooooooooooooooo young for that!”

    That.

    “That” would be learning about his body.  Learning to understand how it works and feels and how not to feel strange or guilty over any of it.

    I believe that parents should talk to their kids about hormonally charged bodily functions, puberty, and sex — preferrably before a teacher does.  In today’s world, that means before the age of 12 in many schools. But I know absolutely that many parents don’t.

    It doesn’t seem to be a conscientious decision on their part not to as much as one influenced by discomfort, although those quoted on the radio had definite opinions about it:

    • 5th graders are too young to hear about “that stuff”
    • “it” will make them uncomfortable about their bodies
    • “it” will make them wonder about it, thereby increasing the likelihood that they’ll become sexually active sooner than they may have had they not heard about it.
    • blah, blah, blah
    • yadda, yadda, yadda

    Give me a break.  I’m thinking that digging a hole in the backyard just big enough for one’s head may help with ignorance of this magnitude.

    Then there’s the other side:  if you don’t speak to your kids about sex, they’ll hear about it elsewhere.

    Okay, so unfortunately, there is some truth to that.  I used to be amazed by what kids brought to school.  Whether it was from their parents, older brothers and sisters, observation, watching television, movies, or surfing the Internet, they knew about “it.”

    When the time for “SEX ED” rolled around each year, I winced and groused about why the P.E. or Science teachers weren’t given the responsibility of teaching the subject matter instead of myself, an English teacher.  After all, I’d have looked forward to eating glass more than yet again having to instruct a room full of snickering adolescents from a giant penis displayed from the overhead projector.

    Kids would peer through the window first thing each morning to see what topic was on the agenda for the day, just waiting to sit down and write their private questions to be put in the box and drawn out to be addressed during open discussion.  I had to censor a few from time to time because I was surprised about what some of my 11-year-olds already knew, and there were distinct limits to what the coursework entailed:  physiology, function, reproduction, and disease.  Absolutely nothing about birth control and definitely nothing about sex.

    At our house, the RTR  learned about the birds and the bees first through informal questions and natural curiousity.  Then, when he was in the 4th grade, he learned what the school described as “human physiology” and was required to give a comprehensive report to the MoH and myself to get credit for his learning.

    The philosophy for why the kids were taught so young was because they wouldn’t deal with the information in a way that was goofy, or silly.  That because they hadn’t reached puberty yet, they wouldn’t be squirmy about the information and would handle it like all the other information they were learning.

    I thought at the time, fine.  And the RTR did stand in front of the two of us with composure and confidence while the two of us squirmed a bit with discomfort about our then 9-year-old talking about penises and breasts, testicles, and vaginas complete with labeled diagrams all tucked nicely in his project folder.

    But I also know that kids can behave in a particular way depending on how something is handled at home.  If something isn’t discussed, or treated as if it’s inappropriate to think about, or worse, joked about, then guess what?  That’s how they often act when it comes up at school.   Big surprise, right?

    When it comes right down to it, even if kids are taught the ins and outs of sex (sorry, I couldn’t resist…)by their parents, at school, or from the now questionable sources I was subjected to when I was fourteen, they’ll do what they want when the time comes — and it won’t have anything to do with any politician that I can think of.

    In fact, I know a lot of adults who behave in the same fashion, and it’s the direct result of NOT thinking with one’s brain.

    Sarah Palin is trying to seduce independent voters. But she comes across like a whip-wielding mistress who wants to discipline a naughty America.
    "Sarah Palin is trying to seduce independent voters. But she comes across like a whip-wielding mistress who wants to discipline a naughty America" (Slate)