Livingston, I Presume

What's in a name?

Dear Abby has had an interesting couple of days. A while back she urged a stepmother to talk with her stepdaughter about her choice to spell the name "Gisella" with four Ms and a silent Q. Yesterday's follow-up column included those readers who thought Abby was clearly trying to squelch the beautiful creativity of the naming process, while those today had some common sense.

I guess it's not hard to figure out on which side of the naming controversy I fall.

It's not that I don't remember the nearly irrepressible urge to name my potential baby daughter Allyssyn or Tiphani. Oh, I clearly do. It's just that I wanted to do that when I was 12, and then I got over it. Also, having named my own child Connery, I can't really fault anyone for going with an unusual name, but spelling the #1 on the Social Security name list with extra letters or weird combinations isn't fooling anyone. Dzakob is still going to be Jacob, just with anger management issues.

And can we talk about -ayden/-aiden/-aden, please? I've got no beef with Aiden as a name. In fact, my beautiful goddaughter's middle name is Aiden. I think it's a great name for a boy or a girl. But, as a nation, we're going a little crazy with the -aden names. It started out innocently enough, with names like Jaden, Braeden, Caden. Nothing wrong there. Now, however, we're entering a long national nightmare where virtually any consonant or consonant cluster can be tacked onto -aden and called a name. How long until Slayden? Daiden? Gayden? I can virtually guarantee that there is some mother out there right now contemplating just that. (In fact, you might be able to find her here. Do not, I repeat, DO NOT read the site while drinking any kind of beverage, unless you enjoy cleaning it off your screen and keyboard following your spit take.) And there is nothing we can do to stop her.

If she were Czech or French or any number of other European nationalities, we would still have a prayer. Many European countries have what can only be called the Name Police, designed to protect innocent babies from becoming Pilot Inspektors or Reignbeaus. (Indeed, had Chip or I been Czech, we might have had a bit of a problem with the Czech Name Police for Connery--though we did have proof in a book that it existed as a first name--but as Americans, they didn't bug us. They know that America is the land of the Moon Unit, after all.)

Still, I'm quite sure that a naming bureaucracy would not garner support from most Americans. (Sadly, it might have more support from the masses than another European import, national health care, but that's another topic entirely.) We want to have the Constitutionally protected right to exert our own individuality through our kids. We can never go back to our own pre-babyhood and stop our parents from naming us Jason when there were already 27 Jasons in the schools we were to attend, but we can damn sure prevent little Wolfgang from suffering the same fate.

Or should that be Wulphgangg?

Every child is unique, whether she is called Emily or Tu Morrow. Why make life harder by saddling a child with the kind of name that demands constant repetition, correction, or stifled laughter? Adolescence will be hard enough without trying to live down Jermajesty or Romeo. Abby, you've still got my vote.

Ode to American Express

I guess it would be best for my liberal street cred if I told you that I cut up my American Express card joyfully and with deliberate, symbolic timing the day after Christmas. After all, there are few symbols as potent in the representation of American consumerism as American Express. Don't leave home without it, you know.

In actuality, I cut up my American Express card today with more than a little nostalgia, and I didn't do it to protest Christmas overconsumption. Put very simply, I couldn't justify paying a $90 annual fee for a card that doesn't give me any value added. It was a business decision, spurred on by some particularly heinous customer service a couple of years back, right after they must have decided U.S.-based calling centers were just too much of a luxury, even for a luxury brand. The weird melancholy I'm feeling about the decision stems from, I think, the acknowledgment that we're not going back overseas--or to the lifestyle we were leading there--any time soon.

One of the main reasons I kept my card all those years--nearly 14, to be exact--was because they really did offer some good benefits if you were living abroad. I could cash a personal check from the States, an option that was occasionally very important. For several years in Prague, they ran the best rental car company, until they sub-contracted it out (sensing a theme here?). I could have had mail delivered to me at an American Express office, if I'd chosen to. I never did, but there it was. It was like the grown-up version of the McDonald's theory of American security: No matter where you are, you're never too far from a McDonald's or an American Express.

Plus--and can I admit this, as a liberal, and have ANY street cred left?--I liked the feeling of having an American Express green card. Not everybody had one, and I liked that it taught me how to use credit responsibly, at least until the dollar tanked. I always said it should be the only card college kids are allowed to have, and only then if American Express holds them to the "charge" card concept of having to pay off the entire balance at the end of the month. Instead, the companies--AmEx included--hand out credit cards to college students like perfume samples at the cosmetics counter and allow students to get into debt up to their eyeballs--and perpetuate a totally unsustainable lifestyle--before they even have their first job. But that's another topic. We have come here to mourn the passing of my American Express card, and that is what I shall do.

I have to say that the customer service rep didn't try too hard to keep me as a customer. Certainly she was courteous, polite, and offered me a nominal credit to stay--plus, I think she was actually in America, which would be a nice change if true--but there were no AOL-like histrionics, no rending of garments to convince me not to cancel. The recorded voice at the end of the call told me I could destroy my card in whatever way I deemed appropriate. If I bury the pieces in the backyard, will a money tree grow? Maybe I'll make a little shrine to our (relatively) carefree, mortgage-free twenties and early thirties when the card represented airline tickets to Istanbul or enough gas to drive us to someplace fun for the weekend. It's the end of an era.

And with that, I'm leaving for headquarters to turn in my liberal card.

Funny

I don't want to kick anyone *cough*connie*cough* while he's down, but you really should go visit this little posting/picture series at Wonkette.

What abstinence-only has wrought

I had a visitor to my blog yesterday who arrived via the following search string:

"i was rubbing against him while i was dancing could i be pregnant"

First of all, let me speak directly to this person in case she should she choose to visit again:

Unless you were rubbing your naked naughties directly on top of his naked naughties, you're almost certainly not pregnant. One of the cruel things that you will discover when you are older and actually *want* to get pregnant is that--for a lot of women, anyway--it's really not as easy to get pregnant as you might think. Still, if you think you and the "him" in question might want to do something other than rub-dance at some point in the future, could I just beg you now to talk to your parents or another trusted adult? At least go visit WebMD. Even if you have no intention of going any further than dancing, you owe it to yourself to learn how everything goes together and how you can prevent untoward happenings such as disease and--yes--pregnancy.

Lecture done. Still, it gravels my ass to think of a poor, scared girl frantically Googling to try to answer a question she should already have the answer to. I'm a believer in the absolute terror of an accidental pregnancy as the primary method of birth control in teens--worked like a charm for me, heaven knows--but anyone who is worried that removing the dictionary-sized space* between her and her boyfriend at the school dance is just not getting the information she needs to make informed choices. As a society, we shouldn't be pawning off our responsibility for providing that information to search engines.

Oh, and person looking for "slutty eskimos"? You're on your own.

*See dances, Mormon

The confusion that is the Netflix queue

As I made my weekly trip to Netflix to manipulate my queue (serious films languish on the bottom while Veronica Mars rockets to the top), I found this:

Nicole, the following movies were chosen based on your interest in:

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
The Chorus
Tipping the Velvet

Do these sound like the interests of a totally sane and harmonious family? NASCAR, a gentle French comedy, and a BBC miniseries about early 20th century lesbians?

*pausing to think*

Unless...wait...maybe there is a link!

Sacha Baron Cohen plays a gay French race car driver in Talladega Nights; the Chorus chronicles the experiences of a French choir, and Tipping the Velvet is about lesbians.

It's six degrees of Sacha Baron Cohen. He is the alpha AND the omega AND the guiding force in our Netflix queue.

Worried about the war

How much NPR/CNN/other news do you parent-readers let your kids access? I ask because we're having an issue in our house with what I think might be TMI for Connery.

We listen to NPR a lot. It's the first thing we turn on after the coffee maker in the morning and one of the last things we turn off before we go to bed. One of the reasons we love NPR is its in-depth news coverage and reporting about all kinds of interesting subjects. However, I think that Connery is really internalizing some of these stories, and I'm not sure it's necessarily healthy for a 3-year-old. He asked me the other day, out of the blue, if there is a war where soldiers are being killed. When I said that there was, he asked more questions. Where is the war? Why are people being hurt? Who's being hurt? I tried to explain things as simply and honestly as I could without detouring into propaganda or really scary shit. He mulled all of this over and then said, "I'd like to go stop the war with my sword."

We talked more about how swords might not be the best way to stop a war, and his next question to me was, "How *do* you stop a war?"

Wow. Good question, my son.

I tried to explain--again as simply as possible--that wars are often started by governments and governments have to stop them. He wanted to know who could stop a war. I told him that presidents can stop wars.

"Could President Bush stop the war?" he asked. When I told him he probably could, he said he wanted to write a letter to President Bush asking him to stop the war. This is what he asked me to write for him:

Dear President Bush:

Can you stop the war? War scares me. You have to stop it. In war, people have swords that can hurt people. It's not good to hurt people.

Thank you for reading my letter.

Then he asked me if Jon Tester could stop the war.

Some of you probably think I'm making this up or using my son as a rhetorical device, but I can assure you that's not the case. We're also making every attempt not to use him as a political instrument. He's been to protest rallies and delivered campaign literature, but I don't want to brainwash him. To Chip and me--secular humanists from way back--going to a women's rights march or attending a political rally is kind of like going to church. It's a way to teach our moral code outside of our home with a community of like-minded individuals. Maybe that will sound like blasphemy to religious readers.

Frankly, overall, I'm not sure how to feel about this nascent political awakening. I'm proud that he can recognize bad in the world, but I'm worried that he is too young to be fretting about war and politics. How young is too young to hear about war and other worldly problems?

Should we turn off the NPR?

Going to take some getting used to

This whole having to be at work at an office at a certain time thing? I'm not sure I like it. It's certainly cut down on my blogging significantly. I hope once I get all the balancing figured out that I'll be able to update more often. In the meantime, check out my blogroll and go read the blogs I don't have time to right now.

Convergence

Why do cool things always seem to happen at the same time?

In contrast to, oh, every other night of the year in Livingston, there are multiple ways we could entertain ourselves this evening. We're committed to Chip's company Christmas party--always a blast--but just to irritate us, we will have to miss:

The Livingston Christmas Stroll (which looks like it might actually be fun this year)...
My new job's Christmas party...

and, most crucially...

The Griz playing UMass-Amherst--where we worked and lived in the late 1990s--in the national semi-finals!

And I don't even like watching football!

I'll content myself with saying that I have no loyalty whatsoever to the Minutemen, stalwart though they may be.

Go Griz!

No nightmare

Please tell me that this persistent, niggling feeling I have that the Montana Republicans have nominated someone who wants to abolish public education to head the Education Committee is just the waking deja vu one gets after a particularly vivid nightmare. Probably one caused by eating too many bananas before bedtime or watching LOST.

Wait a sec. I didn't eat any bananas last night. And LOST is on hiatus until February!

Does that mean they actually *did* nominate Rick Jore to head up the House Education Committee? The same Rick Jore who has said that Montana schools have plenty of money as it is and can't use a dime more?

I'm going back to bed in the hope that I'll wake up screaming, "It was only a nightmare!"

Dora's going down

Normally when I read Heather Armstrong's monthly letters to her daughter, I mentally pledge to do a better job cataloging Connery's childhood and, critically, that of any future child, since I could start fresh and not have already missed writing stories about first teeth and temperament. Oh, and then I laugh like hell because she is so damn funny:

One of my favorite memories of your childhood will be the hours and hours we have spent as a family on this bed, your father and I sitting close together watching you perform somersaults or read books or sing along to Dora. Sadly, I also won’t be able to forget just how much Dora annoys me, and how at night when I’m trying to go to sleep I can’t get her chipper voice to stop playing over and over in my head, how just once I wish Quentin Tarantino were a guest director, and in the middle of the journey over the strawberry mountain, through the chocolate lake to Coney Island, a Deadly Viper Assassination Squad would pop out of the big blue bush and gun Dora down. Because then? Then there would be so much really useful learning.

Would someone give this woman a Pulitzer or something?