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Wendy Wasserstein
The news just wrung out word of playwright Wendy Wasserstein's death, which is incredibly sad. She was so funny, so interesting and so young. She also was a single mother to a daughter who is still very little, about 7 or 8 I imagine.
I've read and seen a number of her plays, but what also stuck in my mind is a piece she wrote for a women's magazine, it was probably Elle... at any rate, something like that, about her daughter's extreme premature birth. What I recall of the article was not so much the details but the grace and interest she brought to such a painful, infuriating and terrifying subject. At the time, I had no designs on a family and generally barely registered this sort of material, but for whatever reason, Wasserstein's piece stuck with me and I thought about her experience all throughout my pregnancy and at sharp moments while I was in the hospital with my child.
She was a really interesting woman who wrote quite vividly about the cascade of problems and issues women face as they burst into a world of possibilities and feel around them so many ambitions and simultaneous limitations.
Here's the New York Times obituary.
posted by Elise at 8:35 AM
3 Comments
Sunday Recap
There were a couple of interesting articles in Slate this week.
Whitney Morrill, who wrote last August about her hideous experience with her insurance company, provides an update that I suppose could be reassuring (that getting treated for post-partum depression won't necessarily doom one to a lifetime of punishing high premiums- really, the first installment of her experience was infuriating.) While it is certainly a good thing that Morrill can now afford to be insured, no part of her experience could be called reassuring. Still, her tips on how to possibly help Enormous Insurance Premium Syndrome may be helpful to some.
And now on to the lighter (too light for some, perhaps) topic of music for children. I don't dare listen to any of the samples provided in this article because I am beyond susceptible to the catchiness of catchy tunes, but I appreciate the warnings (avoid the Wiggles) and I like the tone of the piece. It is so much nicer to read the way this father finds himself becoming complicit in this fragment of his kid's world than it is to read Neal Pollack's somewhat snotty "humor" piece for today's New York Times about how happy he is that his son loves the same cool music that he listens to. I'm not criticizing the impulse at all. My kid "dances" to anything and everything I play for him, and we only have 4 CD's of kid music in the first place (one of them is French though and so insipid, it shouldn't count). Pollack is just so self-congratulatory he seems to be demanding his own round of applause.
posted by Elise at 8:29 AM
1 Comments
And Speaking of Recording
There are baby books and then there are grand scale life-as-art (or "art" depending on how you feel about them) projects.
I take a lot of pictures of my kid (and in this way I really have broken with my aforementioned family traditions), and contrary to what everyone told me would happen, I take a lot of pictures of the terrier as well. (I always told people they were mistaken. The dog tends to hog the lens, knowing that he has nothing like a "bad side".) My snapshots are haphazard, based on a momentary amusement. With the exception of one little ongoing jokey series, they are not organized and reveal little.
There are some people who have stamina and discipline, who can create records with a kind of rigorous elegance. Witness, the Obsessive Documenters.
Here is an almost 30-year photo history of the Golberg family in Argentina. When I saw this, I immediately wanted to start snapping tiny black and white portraits of my kid, though the urge passed by the time I tried to get him to take a nap.
One of the interests in these classy professional shots of the Brown sisters is how they never smile at all. Not once between 1975-1999.
Both of these links came from a web site called The Adaption to my Generation, which is not about the recording of family but about obsessive documenting in general. The author has found people who are disciplined enough to take on extreme formal projects, often for the sake of art. One man has snapped a picture of every object he uses since 9.24.2003, another takes a self-portrait at the same minute every morning.
These pages are fascinating not only for their images but also for the way they record transformation. When I see thirty years of the Golbergs spayed out across my monitor, I'm struck by the ways everyone ages, the moments when the brothers resemble each other and then don't, amused by those awkward teenage looks that afflict everyone. In a way, these studies remind me of Michael Apted's "Up" series of documentaries (Seven Up, Seven Plus Seven, 21, 28 Up, 35 Up, 42 Up and 49 Up), where he revisits the same group of people every 7 years that he began interviewing when they were all 7 years-old. While really interesting, the project is often achingly sad and I have thought, while watching it, that it is a good thing to be spared such a clear record of myself.
But of course, as Felix edges closer and closer to being a year old, I do look back at early pictures of him often, and find his change shocking (though hardly surprising). For now, I am more comfortable on the far side of the camera, and I won't rule out doing something more rigorous. I just need a little of that inspiration that comes when one is better rested.
posted by Elise at 5:08 AM
6 Comments
You Can't Handle the Truth
I've never seen Desperate Housewives, but Felicity Huffman was a pleasure to watch in that odd bygone Aaron Sorkin sitcom Sports Night, and in the various Law & Order episodes she graced as, alternately, a lawyer and an interior designer turned prostitute turned murderer. Glancing at her filmography, I see she was also a belligerent law student in the remarkable Reversal of Fortune.
And now Salon has highlighted another fascinating performance in which she tells Leslie Stahl, her 60 Minutes interviewer, to cut the crap. Stahl pulls the usual question out of a can: "Is this the best experience of your life, being a mommy?" (And while some might imagine that Stahl managing to get that question out without actively spitting saccharine is a testament to her professionalism, I would say that I don't appreciate anyone who isn't my kid calling me "mommy.")
Huffman replies that being a mother isn't the best experience of her life and says the whole question is offensive and goes on to say that she doesn't know if she's a good mother.
Everyone, and I include myself here, got bent out of shape when Ayelet Waldman's New York Times piece about her hierarchy of love, but really Stahl's question and the fact that it is so pervasive is just another demand to rate life experience. The answer she was looking for was really reactionary and antifeminist.
Why would it be considered useful or interesting to get women to say that no matter what they've done, having children is the superior experience? Why does everything else have to pale in comparison? Why diminish all other achievements and interests? Huffman had just won a major award for her performance in an incredibly challenging role and Stahl was mildly asking her to disavow her glory.
Rebuffed, Stahl then tried to get Huffman again to focus on her maternal qualities, and was again shut down.
My oldest friend had children early, and I remember one evening when I was visiting, a tremor went through her usually temperate demeanor. "Everyone always says that now that they're here, I probably can't remember my life before I had the kids. I can and it was great!"
Of course having children is remarkable and significant. No one is saying it isn't. But why is there the push to rate all experience? Why does the maternal have to be so special culturally that people have to say that it eclipses all other achievement and interest?
Cheers to Felicity Huffman for keeping her temper and her dignity, for not caving to the demands for cheap sentiment, and for maintaining her privacy while pointing out that her feelings about the maternal sublime are more complicated than a moist-eyed soundbite allows.
posted by Elise at 5:35 AM
1 Comments
Recording
My friend asked if I started speaking early and seemed rather surprised when I told him that I really hadn't the faintest. He inquired if this was from a lack of curiosity on my part, and I admitted that this isn't the kind of information that my family registers. We live pretty much in the moment, which is why we all pack for trips the day we leave. My friend thought I might give it a shot so when my mother called in the evening I quizzed her and not surprisingly, I was right. She told me that she could remember the funny things I used to say and then asked when kids actually start talking so she could have a sense of what "early" speech would be. Since I had no idea what that would be, the conversation quickly moved onward and upward.
The fact of the matter is that I don't come from a family of "recorders." There are few photos of all of us, and even fewer of them make any sense. (Some rather fascinating images of the links of a chain fence with a little athletic blur behind them that is my brother playing baseball prompted a friend of mine once to suggest I have a photography intervention for my parents.) We never had baby books or anything organized.
Now, I have never questioned the blank spots. It's wonderful that there's only a brief record of my teenage years, and I can only recall being frustrated with my parents not knowing the details of my infancy well when I was briefly interested in astrology and no one could remember what time of day I was born. ("It was a respectable hour. Does that help?")
Needless to say I've inherited these tendencies, but this doesn't keep me from feeling a bit uncomfortable when I see the photo displays friends have made of the progress of their families, and there is an inevitable twinge of self-recrimination when I see those plastic folders that make information storage foolproof. I could have gotten a baby book chock-full of prompts, so I wouldn't have to think hard; all I'd have to do is scribble in the blanks. These books are all over the place. I have my pick of any number of them on the cloying to charming continuum.
But instead I have this book full of clean, unlined pages that I try to remember to write in. There is no way this book will ever get filled. I like the idea of having a record, but doing anything about this appeal might be beyond me.
When I was pregnant, and periodically during these first months, people often asked about my history, or that of my mother as a way to try to gauge the future. Were my mother's pregnancies hard or easy? If she didn't have morning sickness, it was less likely that I would. Did I talk early? Maybe my child would too.
There is entertainment in this kind of excavation, but with all the casual information about child development and progress that gets kicked around these days, these details seem almost significant, almost like something that would go into a medical history. Occasionally I wonder if my casual approach might cause me to lose or forget something that might be important someday.
But I am my parents' child and it is unlikely some kind of organizational conversion will happen with any long-term success. I'll collect the information my kid will need for things like passports and other official documents and keep it someplace where it is unlikely to get lost for long. And I'm working on the minimum, writing down in the mostly blank book, the few things that I think he may ask about someday. What his first words were. How old he was when he learned to walk. Happily, should he ever want to get his stars done when he's in high school, I will know what time he was born. Among the best baby presents Felix received was a picture frame with all of his birth vitals engraved on it. There's a big business in newborn statistics. If only preserving the rest were as easy.
posted by Elise at 7:41 AM
1 Comments
Get It Out of My Head
You would think a week without The Wheels on the Bus would be an era of few complaints.
My apologies.
In place of the standard insidiously catchy kiddie tunes was the grown-up earworm Pachelbel's Canon in D-major. The second the teacher began strumming that baseline I was catapulted into a reverie wherein I tried to count the number of movies that have plugged it in and forgot to stand up for "marching" or "swaying"- I can't even remember what it was I forgot to do, I was so caught up. (True confessions: years ago I was learning to edit film, and the picture I was assisting on had a Pachelbel's Canon sequence, the cutting of which was maddening. It did give me a curious party trick: I could hum sections of the piece backwards. No, I can't do it anymore. That skill, like so many has been lost to the sands of time.)
I'm sure this has been asked before in the context of weddings, and even Wikipedia has a page dedicated to the curiosity that is Pachelbel's Canon, but what is it with this piece? What makes it so alluring? Apparently its circa 1680 chord progression can be found in everything from singles by Coolio ("C U When You Get There") to the Blues Traveler song "Hook" and pops up in the opening strains of the Burger King "Hold the pickle, hold the lettuce" jingle.
Do we pick this music for our weddings and our movies and our kids' listening pleasure because it is so familiar? Does it do the work of manufacturing some kind of nostalgia or generalized "happy" feeling so that we don't have to? I've given up on unraveling the enthusiasm for Bach and Handel, but perhaps there is some reason why this piece, this one piece of music is so underfoot.
The fact that I'm sick of it, the fact that I have heard it in countless bad movies and been witness to terrible versions of it at weddings doesn't diminish the central problem that the piece actually is beautiful. I feel sort of sorry for it. As someone whose name is associated with another wildly overused bit of classical music (played on ringtones, bad car horns and apparently by garbage trucks the world over), I feel for it and I hope it can continue to hang on to the little shreds of dignity that manage to persist, and maybe its popularity will ebb a little.
Still, I want a bit of novelty.
Felix doesn't know what he's listening to. He likes practically anything. Chances could be taken, since the kid who can't walk is literally a captive audience.
posted by Elise at 9:20 AM
3 Comments
No Strings on Me... Yet
I know the New York Times needs to keep its engines churning and that means having to lure people into signing up for "Times Select"- the deluxe version of the website that enables one to enjoy the Op-Ed columns, among other delights. Since I'm not an enormous fan of Op-Ed, I never felt I was missing out.
And now I see that the Times is trying to play me. In recent weeks, the Gray Lady has trotted out Judith Warner, whose attitudes I don't find entirely uninteresting, and forced her to grind over the most annoying Parent Issues.
The three headlines I've seen for her column (Warner has been writing a lot of them recently) have trotted out the oldest of old timey "hot button" issues that get everyone dander rustling. She started out with a piece about Vaccines and Autism, moved on to the topic of Barbie (well, actually, the issue was how girls are growing up too quickly and are prone to destroying their toys, but the headline was about Barbie) and just today the teasing headline that begs the curious and irate to pull out a credit card and just subscribe already to see what kind of attitude is being swung around is: "Women Opting Out of Work"
Why is the Times harping on this? It blathered about how "Ivy League" women are "opting out" back in September, and happily this prompted Slate to run a couple of fascinating pieces (on September 23rd and also on September 20th) about how the bigger issue is sloppy reporting and terrible data gathering.
Since I haven't, and probably won't read the Warner editorials, I don't really know what she has to say on the topic, but I am fascinated that the Times is so reluctant to let this non-issue die. Presumably these articles get emailed around a lot which makes the paper feel popular and happy, but I can't help but think it would be nicer if these articles came out of something like actual news.
No, I'm not signing up for Times Select. I'm irked that the Times has played me even this far. I don't like playing marionette.
posted by Elise at 5:46 PM
1 Comments
Knocked Up Celebrities
Clearly I'm interpreting something incorrectly, because every time I hear about another celebrity or celebrity duo getting knocked up, I have this feeling someone's trying to sell me something. When "news" of Angelina Jolie "broke" this week in the form of a canned statement and photograph of her delicate form pooching out a bit, I expected them to run with a credit for her jeans designer at the bottom.
But that's just me being slightly cynical about advertising. Beyond that, does anyone truly believe in these people as people, or their relationships as anything but the steroidal flexing of a highly competent publicity machine? I suspect what is really being sold is not just the fabulous blue jeans la Jolie can shoehorn herself into. We're supposed to buy into their lives, and the dramatic relationship shifts and baby arrivals only serve to keep them in our minds longer, in ways that go beyond any of their movie roles could.
This isn't new in any sense. Anyone who's seen Singin' In the Rain knows about how movie studios concocted relationships to keep fans interested in stars. The remarkable prologue of Scott Wynn's book about Louis B. Mayer, Lion of Hollywood, describes how he went to great lengths to protect Van Johnson's career from the (probable) fact that Johnson was gay. He arranged for Keenan Wynn's wife Evie to divorce Wynn and marry Johnson (for his part in the drama, Keenan got good roles, and some extra money in his 7-year contract). All the public would have seen was the testosterone tug-of-war between two actors over a woman. Adultery! Movies! True love! Beautiful people! Delicious!
So this has been going on for ages and the truth that the glamorous relationships are disguising may be fascinating or lurid or banal, or all of the above who knows?
We don't just have the scandal anymore. The public wants kids. Having babies used to be a liability for actresses. (And it still can be for some, since Kari Wuhrer, who used to on General Hospital, is now suing ABC for killing her soap opera character after she confessed her pregnancy.) But now we know not just that someone is pregnant, but how she found herself in this delicate condition. What else are we buying? Is there a message here about how "good" it is to have kids, how it is a chance for use to resemble our favorite celebrities?
Is it a bummer of me to raise an eyebrow and suggest that we're being fed a conservative line of influence with the news story about the Jolie/Pitt relationship and pregnancy? It doesn't sound reactionary at first, especially since she has two adopted children and conceived her latest one without a marriage license. But it is hard to overlook the way these events are being pushed on us in such aggressive, glossy terms, not acknowledging the oddness of the situation or the obvious complications. The story that's been created is: Pitt wanted a family desperately and his wife wouldn't give him one, so he found someone who not only already had children, but was willing to reproduce with him and this is a good thing. (That said, I am also aware of and mildly interested in the thread of Pitt backlash that has his former wife Aniston gossiping to his ex-girlfriend Ms. Paltrow, who herself in knocked-up again, about how horrible he was to her and how-worst of all- he didn't try to warn her about Jolie's pregnancy before the news story broke slowly over the course of two weeks.)
Of course, pregnant movie stars are fun to look at. It's nice to see former stick insects looking awkward and human, fleshy and happy, or at least not so hard and "cool." Perhaps it eases our envy of those perfect forms to see them changing- changing into something like ours. (Well, not mine, really- I never got that nice basketball look.) But I know that my having a child doesn't really make me anything like anyone else who had one, let alone the Jolies and Paltrows and Garners of screens big and small. I'm not part of their club, even if all the magazines suggest that I could be.
And yet here I am, aware of all of these women's physical states, clearly receptive to the stories. But if something is being sold, clothes or personalities or lifestyles, I have to say, I hope I don't want to buy anything.
posted by Elise at 5:19 PM
4 Comments
Playing By the Rules
Among my sharpest memories of my grammar school education in Virginia, and there are many, was of the endless attention paid to teaching us how to Follow Directions. There were weekly exercises in blindly following ridiculous lists of instructions, which encouraged vague competition and extreme smugness about a- what would you call it? a talent? a propensity?- that wouldn't rate a flicker of interest in anyone.
So in the way that becoming a parent makes everything old new again, I often find that when I am most likely to grit my teeth as a new parent, I am reminded of fourth grade.
Toy guidelines (now that I've confessed my general enchantment with playthings) have become the latest in the string of caregiver rules that bring up and urge to rebel. I want to follow them, and yet they make no sense.
For example:
Felix was given a pile of super classic alphabet blocks, familiar to everyone. Non-threatening, low-tech, impossible to choke on. He enjoys knocking down little towers of letters and hasn't yet figured out that they can be flung all over the place.
But according to the guidelines, Felix shouldn't have these blocks at all. The set he has is labeled as being for ages 2 and up. Then again this completely similar set is supposedly inappropriate for kids under 36 months. And yet, if the blocks have numbers on them, they're apparently safe for an 18-month-old, and if the letters are Greek, they are safe to give to baby who has attained a mere 12 months of age.
A quick consultation with various analyses of toy guidelines provides no help at all. The reasoning behind the age delineations is two-pronged. On the one hand, there is safety and the fear that babies could choke on small parts or strings, or get little fingers caught in toy parts, that sort of thing; on the other there is the anxiety that giving a child a toy too early could make him or her frustrated with the inability to play with it properly. (Here I wonder a little bit if this "frustration" is something that the parent transfers to the kid. I don't know many babies who care too much about playing with something the "right" way, and boring toys quickly get abandoned anyway.)
Well, these are blocks, and I don't think I'm pushing my kid too hard by giving them to him, nor do I think he could get more than the corner of one into his mouth. And so I'm back in Charlottesville, angry at the rules, sorry that I feel mildly anxious about ignoring them and peevish when I follow them. I’m no goody two-shoes, but the arbitrariness of everything, especially safety, is truly annoying.
I'm expecting it just goes on this way.
(Grownups who can't part with this bit of nostalgia, by the way, can always get the alphabet block salt and pepper shakers).
posted by Elise at 10:30 AM
0 Comments
Interlude
Yes, yes, the kid still goes to music, though I've noticed lately that there has been a marked decrease in what I liked to think were the Songs for Grownups.
So now I have to ask, what is the allure of "The Wheels on the Bus"? There are scads of versions of it. It gets sung in every baby group. I can't really discover who wrote it because its origins always get listed as "Traditional" in databases. And here I wonder. . . "Angels Watching Over Me," "The Banks of the Ohio" and "House of the Rising Sun" are what I think of as "traditional"- a song about urban transportation (especially if it's as popular as this one) just seems as if someone would take responsibility for writing it. I mean, it isn't like one of those fabulous songs about trains like the "Death of John Henry." The drama of this song comes not from the beauty and danger of the tracks or the pain of industrialization. Instead, there is only the less romantic, maddening rush hour crowds (the driver says "Move on back!" over and over) and the sad combination of crying babies and their mothers who are unable to quiet them (the mommies on the bus say "Shh, shh, shh," all through the town) and are probably contemplating jumping out the window.
Still, Felix graduated to an "older" (that is to say non-infant) class and there has been some shift in the curriculum. There's a push for the kids do a little more (leading to the inevitable ear-grabbing when Felix gets asked where his eyes are), and a taste of classical music. Today's selection, which I've heard at least as many times as I've heard "The Wheels on the Bus," but it doesn't grate nearly as much: "Air on the G-string" from Bach's Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D Major.
Which leads me to my question of the day. Ever since Felix was born, people have asked about his classical music listening and have hectored me about how Handel and Bach are really best for babies. Does anyone know why Handel and Bach get the gold stars? What's wrong with the other classical superstars?
posted by Elise at 10:33 AM
4 Comments
Ugly Kid Stuff
Everyone talks about it, so it must be true.
Baby things are getting cooler, prettier, hipper, neater. They multitask and feature elegant Scandinavian design.
Some say this is a result of men becoming more involved in kid minutiae (people like to point to them as the motivating force behind the revolution in stroller design, but maybe people were just getting sick of feeling so clumsy and getting stuck under tall curbs).
Others suggest that as young designers come of age and start to have children, they look to surround themselves with objects of beauty. Daddytypes recently mentioned the new Babygadget blog that indeed has tons of beautiful baby design, and I have long been infatuated with the things Sparkablity has on display.
So why is there no progress at all in the world of car seats?
I don't have a car, so this would seem to be a strange complaint from me, but I do take taxis with the kid, and have hopes of traveling with him outside this fair city. Until last week, I had been using a handed-over infant car seat that could be plopped onto a set of wheels. It was kind of clumsy and not so fetching, but it was free and the hospital sprung us with this set-up, so who was I to complain. (Here I should say that if you're in Europe, the Maxi-cosi infant car seat is pretty attractive.)
But Felix has grown and his legs are slopping out of the thing. He needs something bigger, and here is where everything falls apart. Most people at this point stick a carseat in the car and are done with it, but since I don't have one, the problem is tricky. I could resign myself to white-knuckle taxi rides (though for some reason this really terrifies me- I'm relaxed about so many things, but this one gets me all bent out of shape), and then there's the problem of what to do on the rare occasions when we all do hit the road.
There is but one item on the market for people who need carseats with wheels and it is beyond hideous. I now have it. I know it works for me. It is the Sit n' Stroll, and comes in two colors: "Midnight," which is navy blue with a kind of textured wallpaper look to it and "Shoreline" which is much worse- inexplicably beige and navy patchwork. The idea here is that it is a carseat (with the LATCH system and everything) but you can pull up a handle and pop wheels out of the bottom of the thing and you have a somewhat low-sitting stroller that can get you around. It's perfectly functional, works in rear and forward facing scenarios and can handle a kid up to 40 pounds.
But why does it have to be so ugly and why do I care? I should be happy that something exists at all. And yet here I am wishing those Scandinavian designers would get cracking on something gorgeous and lightweight and functional. They're doing it with everything else.
posted by Elise at 10:11 AM
7 Comments
Babes in Toyland
 Among the many promises one hears people making both in advance of having children and afterwards, when it is much too late, is that they will never let their homes become overrun with toys and the cloying nonsense of kiddiness.
Once, more than once, I spoke those vows myself. But now there's been a strange sea change and I swear I'm not suffering the after effects of too much wine or Stockholm Syndrome. I love toys and I love seeing Felix playing with them (like his mother, he will play with anything).
Of course there's something fascinating, as I have realized a couple of times since Felix was born, with figuring out why people choose certain things for kids. The people in Felix's life have remarkable taste, for the most part. One person's kids had great success with the Mozart Cube, which turned out to be a source of incredible horror to some other parents spied it in my living room. The latter set of parents explain carefully at every opportunity the importance of acquiring only silent toys and how only sadists would give noisy things to children. I couldn't bring myself to tell them that my parents found this spectacularly Vegas-esque snake for my kid. The whole thing is like some kind of crazed slot machine, but as long as the On/Off switch works, or the batteries can be extracted, I feel confident that I won't need to investigate alternative migraine prescriptions.
And all of this isn't just for Felix. I play with histoys on my own now, when I'm on the phone, when I'm thinking. Sometimes I reach into my coat pocket and am so grateful to find a little something lingering in there. I can't keep my hands off this guy who makes a great "clacky" sound, and these puzzles hypnotize.
People complain so much about playthings and the threat they pose to adult tastes and sensibilities, and I'm certain they have a point, but there is also a wealth of beauty and idle amusement that I am happy to have access to.
What does this gorgeous felt ball do (besides taunting the dog- not everything exists to thrill the dog)? Nothing. It simply is there to interest and dazzle, and right now when I wish I could shed the skin of responsibility a little bit, that is glorious.
posted by Elise at 7:24 PM
2 Comments
Awwww
So the word for the day is "cute" and not just because Felix has learned how to mimic most of the technology in the house. (When you ask him: "Where is your ear?" He shouts and grabs his ears. When you ask him "Where is your nose?" He shouts and grabs his ears. He won't respond at all to queries about his mouth or eyes.) But this isn't about my angry appliances.
A chunk of this morning was spent ogling the ridiculously squeezable images lovingly gathered and offered up on Cute Overload. My husband found this site and I find my reaction to it a little upsetting. I peer at it, while finding my fascination repellent. As a rule I'm interested only in quotidian cute- the private antics of my kid and terrier, the odd dog I meet on the street, Panda Cams and visions gleaned from Sir David Attenborough's wildlife fests. I'm not really that kind of girl.
But I'm not alone apparently because the Science Times has an article addressing my problem. Everyone is susceptible. And it seems, if I understood the article, that I'm extra receptive to cute because I became a mother comparatively recently. The urge to cuddle the cute thing has apparently been linked in a survival of the species way to fact that the cute thing needs cuddling. It looks adorable and vulnerable so that you'll take care of it.
I didn't make this up, but I'm willing to blame motherhood for little shifts in things like Cute Susceptibility and Cinematic Kid Death Intolerance (which I still have). I do appreciate Dr. Dennis Dutton, quoted in the article, who highlights why I feel a bit peeved with myself, even as I twinkle at the January 1st entry, featuring a picture of Oolong, a bunny who has a stack of cookies balanced on his head.
"Cute cuts through all layers of meaning and says, 'Let's not worry about complexities, just love me.'... That's where the sense of cheapness can come from, and the feeling of being manipulated or taken for a sucker that leads many to reject cuteness as low or shallow."
So, yes, I agree with him. I get all gooky, but I still feel like I've been had.
posted by Elise at 7:29 PM
0 Comments
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