Today I Learned...

I love to be scared by horror movies, but it almost never happens. The Ring is the high water mark of scary for me, and even that didn't reach great heights of fear, it just lingered for a while. Video games have done better, but I'm clearly the tail end of the bell curve when it comes to scarability. So when I tell you that I watched three movies from Rambling Beach Cat's first list of 10 short scary movies and am afraid to watch more alone, I want you to understand my full meaning.

I'm beginning to think that horror and comedy are alike in that they either need to be short, or serving something else. Everyone knows a good horror movie makes your brain do all the work for them, but I get resentful if I don't feel the movie is doing it's fair share. Maintaining pacing such that I feel the movie is rewarding me for my imagination, but giving suspense time to build, and not relying on jump scares, is almost impossible over a 90 minute movie. But it turns out to be ridiculously possible in a 2 minute period. They give me a seed, I work myself up over a myriad of possibilities, and they pick one before I've had a chance to acclimate, thus simultaneously giving me a sense of closure and one of fear.

It's also much more forgiving. Of the three I watched (Bedfellows, The Closet, and Red Balloon), The Closet was the least impressive. It was tense and then there was a jump scare and that was about it. But that is absolutely enough to sustain 200 seconds without my ADD kicking in.

Coincidentally, I also saw a live stand up anthology act last night (and by last night I mean Halloween, which is when I originally wrote this). The theme was supposed to be "comedians tell their dark secrets", but only some of them got the memo. The ones that did were my favorites. One of the sucky things about doing a lot of open mics and watching a lot of local comedy is that I'd heard a lot of material before. One of the neat things about doing a lot of open mics and watching a lot of local comedy is that I could recognize when a performer is capable of doing traditional stand up, but changed to "emotional story delivered with humor" for the night. I did not laugh the most at her, but I felt more emotionally fulfilled.

This reminded me of why I like British comedy: it's very slow burn. Where Americans are constantly trying to go for the laughs, British comics are constantly just-under-the-threshold funny, punctuated by something absolutely amazing. Like horror, I can appreciate a single short funny thing, and then I'm done. Or it can use horror/humor as a tool to explore something else. Christopher Titus and Mama are in many ways talking about the same thing.

Hypothesis: parents reminding you bring your jacket or pointing out the highway exit are not disproportionately annoying because of the implication you can't remember your own jacket or notice an exit- I myself have forgotten both of those things, and never more often than when my parents are around. The extra annoyance actually stems from the implication that I couldn't cope if I did forget my jacket. This was a reasonable assumption when I was four, but in recent years I have gained the ability to tough it out for the walk from the car to the restaurant without freezing to death. Similarly, when I was on my learner's permit, it was necessary to point out exits a mile in advance, but now I can handle both fast lane changes *and* getting off the highway and turning around. I'm crafty like that.

After several boring attempts to cheer myself up, I stumbled upon Fatherhood Dreams, about gay fathers in Canada. This one managed to be both thought provoking and not horribly depressing, which is nice. I don't know enough to have coherent thoughts, but here are some things I found interesting:

there's a single gay man who has a dearth of good options for having kids. There's essentially no chance of adoption because birth mothers prefer couples, and it's impossible to find a surrogate who will work for the rate mandated by the Canadian government (he eventually illegally pays a surrogate a higher amount). I probably don't want kids, but when I think about that decision, it's always with the knowledge that I totally could if I wanted to. Single men who want kids, which includes my best friend, really don't have that option. Apparently How I Met Your Mother covered this exact issue, with a woman who'd never wanted kids finding out she physically couldn't and feeling really weird about how sad it made her.

This guy was also interesting because he views his decision to parent, and parent solo, as separating him from the gay community. He'd still like to fall in love and marry, but he assumes the odds of doing that with two newborns are negligible, and that having kids will always severely limit his options. It struck me as very sad that he probably burned a lot of bridges to come out as gay (just going by his age, he doesn't mention anything), and then has to burn a lot of the new bridges in order to become a parent. It's a reminder of what an incredibly strong drive the parental instinct is.

There's a couple that adopted, and they were chosen (by the baby's grandmother, who was the one calling the shots) in part because the grandmother felt that this would keep a place for her daughter in the baby's parental pantheon.

There is something really amazing about watching something adorably mundane, like parents playing with their baby, and knowing how upset it would make certain idiots.

One of the failed attempts to cheer me up was a documentary on the early days of the AIDS epidemic in San Fransisco. I wonder how much of the difference in resonance between this and Fatherhood Dreams is due to documentary quality, and how much is due to where gay culture was when I grew up.

The most interesting part of Teen Mom is the couple that gave their daughter up for adoption. In Season 1, the pattern was as follows: Boy is sad about adoption, but girl is devastated, because girl's body knows there was a baby and now it's gone. Very typically gendered reactions. But come season 2, girl is kind of over it. She's still sad, but she's had her pain validated and processed in the myriad of support resources for birth mothers, and she can take comfort in what a good life her daughter has with her adoptive parents. Both kids have been very clear that they could have raised a baby, and would have done so, but felt the adoptive parents could give her a better life. And they're probably right on both counts: these kids seem to have better heads on their shoulders than the others on the show, and he especially seems like a better father than the others, but they're still in high school, and would be swimming against the tide of their very screwed up home lives.

So while "your child is better off" is pure comfort for the girl, who is simply missing her daughter, it's bittersweet for the boy, because the fact that his daughter is better off with her adoptive family makes him feel like a failure as a man, that he was so unable to provide that she was better off with someone else. And unlike his girlfriend, who could go to a birth mother's retreat and find piles of validation just sitting there*, the boy is pretty much alone. Obviously responses to adoption are varied, but nearly all girls and women are going to have common language of hormonal bonding. The landscape for men in much larger: some find out years later or never know at all, some are happy to be off the hook, some participate fully with the mothers in placing the child for adoption, some watch from the sidelines, torn but not wanting it enough to intervene. There aren't any retreats for them. The best he gets is a phone call with another birth father.

It's hard to judge how much of the next part is reality TV editing, since we only hear people talk about it, not demonstrate it, but it seems pretty plausible: both kids shut down significantly post-birth, and stop doing things they used to find pleasurable. Obviously some of that is depression, but a large chunk stems from wanting to prove that they gave up their daughter to benefit her, not them. Honestly, that's something I never thought of in regards to adoption. It seems so win win: baby gets parents who want her and are in a position to raise her well, birth parents get to continue their lives without the encumbrance of a baby. But I was missing just how much people bond with even initially-unwanted children. And while I hate to see them torturing themselves, I really respect where it's coming from.


*For certain very emotionally wrenching definitions of "just sitting there"

Watching Teen Mom, just to see if I missed something book store clerk was implying, and I'm actually sort of impressed. The two moms with relationship drama are boring, but the other two couples show two things I rarely if ever see on television: the aftermath of adoption for the birth parents, and woman-on-man abuse.

I'm not sure what I can say about the adoption couple besides "suck it, people worried about post-abortion syndrome". We tend to whitewash how wrenching it is to give up your baby, and the show does a great job of demonstrating how much they love their daughter and haven't stopped being her parents. The (most) heartbreaking part is that both of their parents attacked them for the adoption before and after because "all you need is love." and continually telling them how awful it is that they gave the baby up.

You actually start out sympathetic to the woman in the other interesting couple- she's trapped inside with their baby all day, she wants to get her GED, her fiancee is unsupportive. But over two episodes you see her get more and more demanding, more and more hostile, ending with (in ep 3, which I'm watching now) her grabbing his throat and slapping him. And you can see how even though he's significantly bigger than her, he feels absolutely powerless to do a thing about it. And how she pulls all the classic abuser moves ("you know I didn't mean to hit you, right?") even though she's not only smaller than him, but completely financially dependent. Where else do you see that, ever?

I know reality TV is a misnomer and I have no idea what's actually happening, and their voice overs make me want to stab the TV, but these are important stories that TV never tells, even if they're not strictly factual.

When I read Maus (about a Holocaust survivor and his son), the only thing I would say about it was that it felt very honest. At the time, I thought it was a cop out, because I didn't want to admit that I hadn't enjoyed this book that everyone else loved, and was about such a horrible thing. I no longer think that. I know this because I'm reading A Child Called It now, a very detailed autobiographical account of one of the worst abuse case in Caifornia history, and I don't feel like it has any emotional heft at all.

I feel like an asshole criticizing the writing. ""Pleaded"? The only speaking words you should ever use are "Said" and "Asked". Didn't you have time for a writing class in between your mom locking you in a room with a bleach/ammonia mixture?" I feel no such compunction about criticizing the reader of the audiotape, so let's really pile on him: the reader is awful. Both on a strictly technical level (his volume is uneven, making it hard to hear) and on an "conveying how the main character feels" level. So the book isn't accomplishing anything on a wordsmith level.*

On a story level, there is no story. It's just a list of awful things his mother did to him, with an occasional "this made me feel bad" and "my father did nothing" mixed in. Without some exploration of why the people involved acted the way they did, it just feels like autobiographical torture porn. I have a list of specific things I wish had been addressed, but that's really besides the point, because it's not my story. But I feel strongly that the book needed some context about something.

There have been accusations that the book was made up or exaggerated. Before I started the book, I decided I didn't care. Once you've been documented starving, beating, and stabbing your child, I stop giving you the benefit of a doubt when he accuses you of abuse that doesn't leave marks. No one has a perfectly accurate memory of childhood, much less one that traumatic, and his brother's accusations of attention seeking seemed like exactly the sort of thing a non-abused sibling would say about their abused sibling to make them feel less guilty about standing by while their mom starved him. But in the absence of explanations, some of the abuse really does ring false. Elaborate humiliation-based abuse is not only very rare, but disproportionately likely to be a false accusation. On some level, I feel like using a child like a slave, and beating and starving him as incentive systems, doesn't need an explanation for why it was done. I can guess. But forcing a child to eat his brother's feces? That's a lot of work and you're going to get messy. It doesn't *never* happen, but it's rare enough that I'd at least like a hint of explanation for it.

I'm sort of weirdly drawn to comparing this Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. My original thought was that it's a testimony to the power of writing: Amy Chua somehow makes hours of music practice fun to read about, Dave Pelzner made being locked in a room with a clorx/ammonia mix seem mundanely annoying. But I think there's a case to make that BHotTM is also very minor torture porn: it's litany of shitty things she did to her daughters with only a bare, ineffective attempt to reflect on why. And yet I finished BHotTM in a day, while the only reason I'm still reading ACCI is that it's my only book on tape, it's short, and I feel like maybe I'll see some growth in the sequels.

Upon further further research, it seems like Pelzer has made a career out of having been abused, and tells a lot of easily verifiable lies designed to make him seem more impressive or tragic. Which still doesn't mean he wasn't abused: when you're forced to learn how to lie at age 8 in order to feed yourself, it's hard to lose the habit. But it does make the book fundamentally less interesting.

*I feel compelled to note here that yesterday a close friend offhandedly said that I don't like books that are too easy to read, and I had to spot him that one. There are simply worded things I'll read, and I don't like overly poetic writing, but I am all about the compound sentences.

Just finished Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. First thought? Too soon. Her younger daughter hasn't even finished high school yet; there's no way we can know the long term effects of her parenting. More than that, her writing feels like someone who has learned something but doesn't fully understand it yet. As an example: having a pet is very much against her style of child rearing. She gets a puppy to bribe her youngest into learning a violin piece, then obsesses about making the puppy learn tricks so she can impress people (in a fight with her husband, she accuses him of not caring about anyone, that the kids and the dog would never reach their potential if it were up to him. He assume the fight is over because she's making funny jokes about bettering the dog). At some point, she calms down about this enough to stop attempting to teach the dog complicated tricks. Then she calms down enough to get a second dog for no real reason. But she's unable to explain why or how any of that happened. This is third hand, but a friend of mine read a number of reviewers who said the same pattern applied to her historical/economic scholarly articles: she records data without synthesizing or drawing conclusions.

Which brings me to another point: she's not just a practitioner of Chinese Parenting, she's a product of it. And she is not a rousing endorsement. She says she pushes her kids because "nothing is any fun until you're good at it." This is a terrible thing to teach your children for a number of reasons, but three of them are: many things continue to not be fun even when you're good at them, and by then you've wasted a bunch of time on it, and jesus christ, they're four, they don't need to do *anything* for six hours a day except sleep. And if you look at Chua as an adult, you see someone who never developed internal motivation, who drifted into a career in which she's technically competent but has no passion for and derives little enjoyment from, because it was prestigious, and wouldn't know where to start changing things to make herself happy.* At some point, someone needed to teach her how to assess whether you're in a temporary frustration or genuinely don't enjoy a thing.

When called on her atrocious behavior, she has claimed that 1. the stories are exaggerated for effect and 2. the book is about her learning not to do that. The first claim seems weakened by the fact that when pressed for specifics, she stands by every thing she wrote (on the other hand, the ending does seem more or less made up). As for the second, it's hard to tell because the book is so devoid of introspection and analysis, but she looks a lot more like someone who failed and gave up than someone who learned and grew. She finally gives her daughter the option to quit violin (she chooses to continue but at a less intense level) and take up an activity of her choice (Tennis), but, against her daughter's desire to just do tennis without intervention, screams criticism at her and keeps looking for better coaching for her. Nor does she express any regret about anything she did up to that point. She talks about other people thinking she did the wrong thing, but still maintains she was correct, or at worst following the right ideology in a world that didn't appreciate it.

She also never drops her belief that she's doing this "for the kids." From my perspective, that's physically impossible: the kids didn't enjoy it, it won't benefit them later in life**, and the opportunity costs were enormous***. Her counterargument that she was miserable too doesn't impress me: if she was truly miserable, she could have stopped doing it, a choice she didn't give her children. She is also clearly getting off on the accolades her children receive.**** What I found most disturbing was the pride she took when adults complimented the children's love of music -"Wow, that piece was so her", "She must really love music to play so well"- when she's the one providing all the motivation to play (and in the first case, enforcing it by denying the child water and bathroom privileges). That's not evidence of success, it's evidence that adults are imperceptive.

So this book certainly isn't a helpful parenting model, and the author has not succeeded in her stated purpose of demonstrating her own personal growth. It is, however, a very quick read and extremely interesting. And educational as hell, if you're willing to put some time into reading between the lines.

*She does talk about shifting from corporate law to academia because she doesn't enjoy corporate law, but I still think this assessment is solid. Among other things, she doesn't talk about enjoying academia, and whenever she has some success, it "just happened," rather than being something *she did*.

**Even if they become classical musicians, it's not like that's a career with a lot of external rewards.

***See: never being allowed to socialize, ever.

****And in general was extremely concerned with how her children were perceived. They should eat caviar not because it's delicious, or even an interesting experience, but because if they don't then people will think they're uncultured. They shouldn't make fun of foreign names not because it's mean, but because, again, it makes them look uncultured.

There's a quote in The Artificial Ear from the hearing parents of a deaf child, that put her in a mainstream classroom instruction because they "wanted to give her a normal childhood" and "didn't want deafness to define her." Those are reasonable goals, but... you can't give her a normal childhood by putting her in an area where normal children have normal childhoods. We talked in about the need for peers in regards to gifted ed, but it's even starker here: being surrounded by people you can't communicate* with isn't normal, and won't lead to normal development. And claiming she can get normal emotional development from a clearly abnormal situation strikes me as a serious acceptance issue on the part of the parents.

*If I remember correctly, the kid was not yet good enough at lip reading and speech to interact well with hearing children. obviously getting her to that point is a good goal, but you can't reach it by pretending you're already there.

So if poor/working class parents practice "natural growth" and middle class parents practice "concerted cultivation", what do Chinese mothers practice? I'm going to go with "forcing the motherfucking flower to bloom." Excerpt, about a woman's daughter's failure to play a fairly difficult piano piece at age 7:

Back at the piano, Lulu made me pay. She punched, thrashed and kicked. She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds. I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never be destroyed again. Then I hauled Lulu's dollhouse to the car and told her I'd donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn't have "The Little White Donkey" perfect by the next day. When Lulu said, "I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?" I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. When she still kept playing it wrong, I told her she was purposely working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn't do it. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic....

I rolled up my sleeves and went back to Lulu. I used every weapon and tactic I could think of. We worked right through dinner into the night, and I wouldn't let Lulu get up, not for water, not even to go to the bathroom. The house became a war zone, and I lost my voice yelling, but still there seemed to be only negative progress, and even I began to have doubts.

This apparently isn't a parody, but I'm not convinced it's not a deliberate exaggeration to drum up publicity for her book, especially since her parents were Philipino by nationality, she was born in the US, and she married a white (Jewish?) man. The attempt worked, I'm on the library waiting list for it now. I'm withhold comment on her actual parenting style until then, but I do want to comment on this:

, Chinese parents believe that their kids owe them everything. The reason for this is a little unclear, but it's probably a combination of Confucian filial piety and the fact that the parents have sacrificed and done so much for their children. (And it's true that Chinese mothers get in the trenches, putting in long grueling hours personally tutoring, training, interrogating and spying on their kids.) Anyway, the understanding is that Chinese children must spend their lives repaying their parents by obeying them and making them proud.

By contrast, I don't think most Westerners have the same view of children being permanently indebted to their parents. My husband, Jed, actually has the opposite view. "Children don't choose their parents," he once said to me. "They don't even choose to be born. It's parents who foist life on their kids, so it's the parents' responsibility to provide for them. Kids don't owe their parents anything. Their duty will be to their own kids." This strikes me as a terrible deal for the Western parent.

Her husband could be quoting me, because I've said the exact same thing several times. And yes, it is a bum deal for the parents, which is why I fully support a wide variety of birth control methods. But that's not actually a counterargument to "this was a result of your choice, not theirs." There's a special level of hell for someone who makes herself miserable to make you miserable and then expects you to pay her back for it later on. Yes, good parenting involves a certain amount of things that incidentally make your children miserable, and they will in turn make you miserable for that, but there is something sinister about measuring your success as a parent by how miserable you made them, and then translating that back into them owing you. If you don't like the deal- and I'm not particularly fond of it myself- don't have kids.

Good news everyone: I finished Unequal Childhoods and will be going into another nonfiction fast for a bit, so I will maybe be shutting up for a bit, except actually I finished last week and was waiting to post this till I finished the posts I'd held in reserve (yes, this was me pacing myself), and I keep coming up with new things to say, so maybe not.

If there's one piece of good news in the book, it's the dearth of an influence of race. Black families in the study had to deal with slightly more crap than their white counterparts, but in general, being SES trumped race. Middle class families practice "concerted cultivation", which means signing your kid up for 5 million activities, encouraging him to use words as magic spells, and vigorously fighting educators on his behalf, and poor and working class families practice "natural growth", which means giving your kid lots of autonomy to go out and play, expecting obedience to adults, and a lot of deference from you to authority figures. This surprised me because every other study I've read (see Black Picket Fences for an example, but I've read it in many other places) report black middle class families doing less concerted cultivation than white middle class families. Either this study is a fluke, or the difference lies in the definition of middle class: most studies use income level, but UC used the social status of the parent's job (interesting/high autonomy/requires education=middle class, boring/low autonomy/doesn't require education = working class, none = poor. Note that this means you can end up with a working class family having more money than a middle class family, if the working class parent has a high paying union job and the middle class parent is an arty type. But I don't think that was the case for any of the focal families). Further proof that the S is in SES for a reason.

There's also a number of interesting tidbits about teachers in the book. I have friends who are teachers (and are reading this), so I want to make it clear that I know not all teachers are like this, but in general: aaargh. The teachers at the poor school complain about parents who don't care and don't do enough. The teachers at the rich school complain about parents who are too quick to intervene and over schedule their kids. And that's okay. People like things that make their job easier. I complain about my devs not documenting even though it's a basic fact of my job. But somehow when teachers do it (not all teachers, but not just the ones in this book either), it takes on this edge of sanctimony. They're not suggesting you do more/less/different because it would make their job easier, no, they're suggesting it for the welfare of your child, you over protective/neglectful bitch. And it is always the mothers they're complaining about.

The author mentions that no poor kid would ever take food (from their family, in their family's house) without asking a parent first. This is one of those things that simultaneously made me understand something a new light, made perfect sense as soon as heard it, and would never, ever have come up with on my own, event though it made perfect sense as soon as I heard it. It may also be my new definition of poor.

At the end of the book, the author admits you can't make poor/working class parents act like middle class parents by giving them money, but nonetheless thinks we should do that. She also suggests things like scholarships for extracurriculars, which I think is a fantastic idea and have contributed to organizations that do just that, but I wish she didn't assume the government is the one to do it. I wonder if providing an advocate would do any good- someone to go to the dentist with the family and explain to the mother what "tooth decay" means (actual example from book), to yell at the school if a kid's special needs testing feel through the cracks (again, actual example), and maybe slip in a $25 registration fee for band now and again. So like Treehouse, but without requiring the kids to go into foster care. I'm already on board with extracurriculars at schools, including publicly funded ones, but this is just another reason for it.