Drinks of years byegone

Two of my favorite drinks have been discontinued for several years.

Snapple Tru Root beer didn't taste like any root beer I've had since then. It was clear, and the taste was somewhat lighter than most root beers, but also somewhat spicier. It had a twist off cap that was hard for me to twist off when I was a kid, and it was kind of shaped like a bottle of vinegar. I think they stopped making this drink sometime in the late 90s.





Fresh Samantha's was bought by Odewalla, and they still make some of their drinks. But they don't make my favorite one, which was the Fresh Samantha Soy Shake. It had this taste like milk but dryer, and had some vanilla in it maybe. I was introduced to it by this vegan friend of mine in college who also introduced me to a great bagel shop that I went on to use regularly for 4 years, tofu cream cheese (sounds weird, but I actually like it more than cream cheese!) and a store right near my college that had puppies for sale in the window. We were great friends my first semester in college when we took 3 classes together and sat near each other and then walked to the subway together after class. After that he dropped out of college and I never saw him again. I don't even remember his last name to look him up on facebook, and I'm not sure he would be on there. it's weird how people come in and out of your life like that.

On lying

You know that feeling you got when you were a kid (or an adult) and were caught lying? That mixture of dread and shame at disappointing someone, and fear of what your parents are going to do when they find out?

I had a problem with lying when I was a teenager. I don't know if it was really a *problem* though. Some OTDers are of the opinion that if your parents will never accept you for who you are, it's ok to lie about what you are doing. And that lying is a good thing in that case, becuase you are preserving your relationship. My brother is of that opinion, which is why at 26 he still gets to live at home, even while secretly dating someone not jewish. I was honest with my parents and was told I could not move back home after college.

But not all of us are great liars- I'm not. Or at least I wasn't at first, although I got better with age. I learned that the best lies are the ones that contain some or most of the truth. In fact, you can tell the truth and sometimes people will think it's a lie.

Once when I was around 19, my brother and I had a secret party while my parents were away on vacation. We had maybe 30-40 friends over, did the usual things college students do when they have an open house (drank a lot of beer, some people hooked up, felt like badasses for breaking the rules, spent an entire day cleaning up afterward). When my parents came home from their vacation, my mom found a few chips on the floor somewhere that we had missed and asked - did you guys have a bunch of people over while we were gone? My brother, not missing a beat, answered "Sure, we had a party with like 40 people when you were gone." And my mom..get this...thought he was being sarcastic, and said something nasty like "ha ha there's no way you guys have 40 friends."

But there was a time before that, before I figured out how to lie effectively, when I got caught lying a lot. When I was 15 I had a secret boyfriend. He was 16. I was just starting to experiment with going OTD, and had secretly been eating non-kosher food and breaking shabbas for a few months. I also was secretly hanging out with my boyfriend. I would tell my parents I was taking the bus to the hospital where I was volunteering that summer, and instead would take a bus that went in the opposite direction, right to my boyfriend's house. Where we would make out (mostly just kissing) and feel like badasses for breaking the rules. It was pretty innocent, compared to what most kids our age were probably doing. Just exciting. I was just growing out of the extremely geeky stage I went through for..oh..all of my life up until high school (ok I admit, I'm still actually a geek), and this was the first boy who had ever showed interest in me. And he was nice and charming, and cute. He was on his own path 'off the derech' and bragged to me about setting his black hat on fire.

One weekend my best friend had a great idea- I would go visit her for shabbas, and then her boyfriend and my boyfriend would stay at her neighbors house, and we would all meet up for shabbas meals and hang out!

By that point my parents already suspected I had a secret boyfriend, and they made me promise he wouldn't be there if I went to this girl's house for shabbas. They didn't think I should be dating until I was ready to get married (Dating for "tachlis"). I of course said he wouldn't be there, because otherwise they wouldn't have let me go.

So..we went there for shabbas, we all hung out, it was good times. Then Sunday morning my dad showed up to drive me home, and my friends mom asked if he could give a ride home to my boyfriend.

And there it was. That feeling, in the pit of your stomach, when you know you have fucked up really really badly and things are about to go really really wrong. And it did. Since that moment, I have never had a good relationship with my parents again. When we got home from my friends house (my dad did NOT give my boyfriend a ride), after a long and awkward 40 minute drive in which I was freaking out and my dad was completely and ominously silent, my dad grounded me indefinitely. Which ended up being about 4 months with no tv, no phone, no computer, no stereo, just me and my thoughts and school. Which led to a weak-ass suicide attempt and some self cutting, which they never found out about. But that's a whole other story.

After that day, my parents approached our relationship as if I were their enemy. After locking me up in my room for 4 months, they put spyware on my computer that took pictures of what I was doing- which I found out about when my dad confronted me for saying things over instant messenger of a sexual nature (I think it was a joke about whipped cream or something) to my boyfriend (different boyfriend) a couple of years later when I was 17. They put even more rules on what I could or couldn't do. My dad kept trying to get me to sign "contracts" (probably not legally binding since I was a minor and he made them up on his computer) saying I wouldn't do things like date my boyfriend anymore- as if, at 15, signing a piece of paper my dad forced me to sign meant anything. He loved those damn contracts. I think I broke every single one he made me sign.

All these rules led to more lying on my part. I didn't break up with that guy when my parents caught us- we kept on having a 'relationship' (in which we didn't actually see each other, but talked all the time), for months afterward. I learned even more elaborate ways to lie to my parents. When my parents forbade me from using the phone, I would stay up until they had all gone to sleep and call him from a portable phone. I would hide in a room my mom used for storage while calling him, since at the time my cousin was living in our house and sharing a room with me (and my parents asked her to keep an eye on me).

Which led to that feeling all over again, when my parents picked up the phone mid-convo once and figured that out. Which led to them taking away all portable phones in the house so I couldn't use them in other rooms. After they did that, I would walk from school to a local pay phone and somehow call him from that payphone..I don't remember the details, but in my fuzzy memory of this is something about calling the payphone at his yeshiva and he was there at a certain pre-arranged time. Eventually I dumped him though, since he went and held hands with another girl.

Anyways what was I talking about? Oh right, lying. That feeling in the pit of your stomach when you are caught in the lie. Maybe in reaction to that, I am very very honest at this point in my life. I'd rather piss people off for what I am doing, then be caught in a lie about what I'm doing. But it took me a long long LONG time to get over that shame feeling. I kept lying to my parents throughout most of college.

I still feel that feeling whenever I tell members in my family about what I'm doing with my life. Not that I'm ashamed about my life...but I know they are disappointed in me, and it's hard to constantly be telling people things that you know disappoint them. Even when you strongly believe that their disappointment is misplaced. But part of it is that whenever I tell a relative or friend that I'm not religious, that I'm married, and that my husband isn't jewish, I'm also telling them that I have been lying to them for years...for all those years they thought I was religious, when I wasn't. So every time I 'come out' to a relative, I have to admit that I've been lying this whole time.

It's funny though that now the whole thing is kind of backwards..it used to be that I was ashamed for not being religious and covered it up by lying. Now I'm ashamed about the lies that I told that implied I was religious, when I wasn't.

Meanwhile, my grandfather recently had open heart surgery, and while I want to call him (and feel like if I don't call him now, I'll probably never talk to him again), something is holding me back. That something is that I will have to go through this whole process of telling him that I'm not religious, that I'm married, and that my husband isn't Jewish. I know my grandmother knows, so he probably knows, but I would still have to talk to him about it. Every time I have to say it, it's a painful reminder of all the years I have lied about who I am, and an admission of those lies, mixed up with all the disappointment I know my family feels whenever they hear it. And right now I can't bring myself to make that call and do it all over again.

Happy birthday B!!!

Today is B's 26th birthday (so now he is only a year younger than me again, instead of two years younger!) (technically he is almost exactly one and a half years younger than me).

Anyways yesterday we went to trader joes to stock up on yummy birthday food- for lunch we got a bunch of sushi and some lobster ravioli that I'm going to make a goat cheese sauce for, and we have filet minion and baked potatoes for dinner, with chocolate lava cakes for dessert.

For presents, I got him a super awesome beard trimmer that has some magical vacuum thing that vacuums up beard hairs RIGHT FROM YOUR FACE (crazyness!). The entire time I've known him, he's been trimming his beard with a scissor, which makes his beard look all patchy right after he trims it. Also I got him a movie he has been talking about for months...it's funny, cause I got this movie for his birthday almost 2 months ago, and then a month ago we were at a borders and he was like "let's go look for that movie!" So we went to look for it, but thankfully they didn't have it. (the whole time I was like "oh no he's going to ruin my present!") Then like a week ago B was like "hey if I download that movie, would you watch it with me?" and I've been pretending like I don't want to watch it so that he wouldn't download it...and we finally made it to his birthday so I can give it to him!

He doesn't know any of this though, cause he's still asleep. :) But I hear him starting to wake up, so it's present time!!!! :)

Thoughts on the election/ republican party/ gay marriage laws

1. Jon Corzine losing New Jersey is not a "referendum on the Obama Agenda". It's a referendum on him being a shitty and corrupt governor

2. A practicing pagan dude /republican won a seat on the NY city council. What does he do first? Diss the atheists:

I don't think any of this is really relevant to the City Council race. It's like talking about what church you pray at. That you understand the divine is the most important part.

Important part...except for 20% of the country. Asshat.

3. A republican was running for a seat on the house of representatives in NY. Rethuglican leaders decided that since she was pro choice and actually a moderate, they would throw their support behind a socially conservative third party candidate. So basically, this republican, who won the republican primary, was not given public (and no doubt financial) support of her own party because she did not support socially conservative views. As a result, she dropped out of the race a few days ago, threw her support behind the democrat, and the republicans lost another seat in the house.

It's funny, one of the few viable social movements right now is this socially conservative movement- they are the ones out on the streets making noise and holding protests. Mostly involving pictures of dead babies. But still. Meanwhile, they are screwing over the republican party by undermining the traditional (since the Reagen years, if that can be called traditional) alliance between fiscal conservatives and social conservatives. Yes, it's not all them, and Bush and his complete lack of fiscal conservativeness is partially to blame. But now they are taking it a step further, and actually undermining democratically elected party candidates based on social views. This undermines the democratic process itself, because now candidates elected through the democratic primary system are falling prey to those who are supported by grassroots (and not representative) efforts. But in doing so they are also sowing the seeds of their party's ultimate destruction. Because ultimately, there are not enough socially conservative people out there to win elections. The republicans have become an older (on average) white man (and to a lesser extent older white women) party, and due to demographic changes in the United States, if that is the only social group they appeal to they will soon not be able to win anything. Of course that is the group with the most money, and they have the most to lose by democratic changes that might actually help non-whites and non-males get ahead. But I think if things keep going this way we will see the demise of the republican party in our lifetime.

4. So, Maine repealed their gay marriage laws. You all probably know my views on this by now (If not they they can be summed up as: Tyranny of the majority against the minority! we should not put discrimination up to a vote!). But interestingly, what no one is talking about is that Maine ALSO yesterday established by vote that the state should start approving medical marijuana dispensaries and expanded the types of illnesses for which you can be prescribed medical marijuana- and this won by 58%.

As far as I can tell from the internets, medical marijuana laws were first passed in 1998. Gay marriage laws were first passed in 2004, although there were legalized gay domestic partnerships going back as far as 1997. In the 11-12 years since these laws were first passed, 5 states have legalized gay marriage, and an additional 10 have legalized some kind of civil union or domestic partnership for gay couples. In roughly the same time period, 10 states have passed medical marijuana laws, and an additional 7 have quietly decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana. I wonder which issue will pass in all 50 states first?

Not a lot of major legal change on the state level has happened since I've been alive, or at least since I have been following politics (which started some time around 9/11). I was born in 1982, right at the beginingish of the Reagen era.

Prior to my birth there was a lot of legal and social change. In the 1970s there were major changes in divorce laws that slowly spread through the states, making no-fault divorce legal. In 1970 California was the first state to legalize No-fault divorce: prior to the 1970s if you got divorced, you would have to go to court and prove that someone had did something wrong that fell into 4 categories- abandonment, abuse, adultery or a spouse had committed some kind of felony. In 1970 California passed no fault divorce laws, which made it legal to divorce no matter what- and you did not have to show one spouse was at fault in order to get divorced. By 1977, 9 states in total had passed no-fault divorce laws. By 1983 (1 year after I was born) all but two states had passed no-fault divorce laws (interesting fact- NY never did pass one of those laws).

In the 1950s and 1960s something similar happened with anti-miscegenation laws (laws that made it illegal to marry someone from a different race)..these legal reforms slowly spread throughout the 50 states until the ones that were left were struck down by the supreme court in 1967.

In my generation I think the same type of social change will happen with Gay marriage and Medical marijuana. These two issues are slowly making their way around the states. For now it seems very frustrating, and change is slow. But it's happening.

This is from the wiki on anti-miscegenation laws:

Most white Americans in the 1950s were opposed to interracial marriage and did not see laws banning interracial marriage as an affront to the principles of American democracy. A 1958 Gallup poll showed that 96 percent of white Americans disapproved of interracial marriage. However, attitudes towards bans on interracial marriage quickly changed in the 1960s

96% disapproval rating in 1958! That is WAY higher then the disapproval rating for gay marriage! And yet by 1967 the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virgina struck down all anti-miscegenation laws. And even though this was less than 10 years after 90 freakin 6 percent of white people disapproved of interracial marriage, by 1967 when they struck down those laws, it only affected 17 states (all in the south)- because 33 states had already struck down the laws all by themselves.

There is hope. We are on the path towards the just conclusion. How long it will take, I don't know, but if history is any indication...probably another 10 years at least. It's exciting to watch social change in motion. I hope that 20 years from now I will be teaching my students about the spread of gay marriage laws and the massive rise in incarceration rates in the 1990s and 2000s, followed by a decline in incarceration rates after the decriminalization of non-violent drug use in the 2010s. I truly believe this will happen within our life times. Now go out there and make it happen!

Sharkley!

"Candygram"

"I'm only a dolphin ma'am"

"A dolphin? Well ok.."

Dogs are awesome!

According to CNN dogs can help kids learn to read. Who knew?

In doggie news, this Sunday is our doggie Halloween parade at a nursing home. Barkley has his shark(ley) costume and we've been having him try it on and then giving him lots of treats. He seems to be ok with it. Hopefully we'll get a few pictures to post. :)

Also in doggie news on Monday B came back from the dog park with a stray black lab he had found wandering in the middle of the street. We took him to the SPCA so he can hopefully get cleaned up and adopted out (I mean really, would they euthanize a purebred black lab that only needs a bath and some flea medicine to be adoptable? I keep telling myself no, but I'm not sure). Man I wish we could have kept him...I love giant dogs, and black labs are totally my favorite. But there's no way we could have him in our tiny apartment right now, especially with Barkley and our other 3 kitties. Speaking of which- our kitties all get along fine with Barkley now, but they were NOT happy at all when the black lab came in for a few minute before we took him to the SPCA. So it seems if ever get another dog we will get to go through the whole fun 6 month adjustment period again.

When parents are too toxic to tolerate

When Parents Are Too Toxic to Tolerate

By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D.
Published: October 19, 2009

You can divorce an abusive spouse. You can call it quits if your lover mistreats you. But what can you do if the source of your misery is your own parent?

Granted, no parent is perfect. And whining about parental failure, real or not, is practically an American pastime that keeps the therapeutic community dutifully employed.

But just as there are ordinary good-enough parents who mysteriously produce a difficult child, there are some decent people who have the misfortune of having a truly toxic parent.

A patient of mine, a lovely woman in her 60s whom I treated for depression, recently asked my advice about how to deal with her aging mother.

“She’s always been extremely abusive of me and my siblings,” she said, as I recall. “Once, on my birthday, she left me a message wishing that I get a disease. Can you believe it?”

Over the years, she had tried to have a relationship with her mother, but the encounters were always painful and upsetting; her mother remained harshly critical and demeaning.

Whether her mother was mentally ill, just plain mean or both was unclear, but there was no question that my patient had decided long ago that the only way to deal with her mother was to avoid her at all costs.

Now that her mother was approaching death, she was torn about yet another effort at reconciliation. “I feel I should try,” my patient told me, “but I know she’ll be awful to me.”

Should she visit and perhaps forgive her mother, or protect herself and live with a sense of guilt, however unjustified? Tough call, and clearly not mine to make.

But it did make me wonder about how therapists deal with adult patients who have toxic parents.

The topic gets little, if any, attention in standard textbooks or in the psychiatric literature, perhaps reflecting the common and mistaken notion that adults, unlike children and the elderly, are not vulnerable to such emotional abuse.

All too often, I think, therapists have a bias to salvage relationships, even those that might be harmful to a patient. Instead, it is crucial to be open-minded and to consider whether maintaining the relationship is really healthy and desirable.

Likewise, the assumption that parents are predisposed to love their children unconditionally and protect them from harm is not universally true. I remember one patient, a man in his mid-20s, who came to me for depression and rock-bottom self-esteem.

It didn’t take long to find out why. He had recently come out as gay to his devoutly religious parents, who responded by disowning him. It gets worse: at a subsequent family dinner, his father took him aside and told him it would have been better if he, rather than his younger brother, had died in a car accident several years earlier.

Though terribly hurt and angry, this young man still hoped he could get his parents to accept his sexuality and asked me to meet with the three of them.

The session did not go well. The parents insisted that his “lifestyle” was a grave sin, incompatible with their deeply held religious beliefs. When I tried to explain that the scientific consensus was that he had no more choice about his sexual orientation than the color of his eyes, they were unmoved. They simply could not accept him as he was.

I was stunned by their implacable hostility and convinced that they were a psychological menace to my patient. As such, I had to do something I have never contemplated before in treatment.

At the next session I suggested that for his psychological well-being he might consider, at least for now, forgoing a relationship with his parents.

I felt this was a drastic measure, akin to amputating a gangrenous limb to save a patient’s life. My patient could not escape all the negative feelings and thoughts about himself that he had internalized from his parents. But at least I could protect him from even more psychological harm.

Easier said than done. He accepted my suggestion with sad resignation, though he did make a few efforts to contact them over the next year. They never responded.

Of course, relationships are rarely all good or bad; even the most abusive parents can sometimes be loving, which is why severing a bond should be a tough, and rare, decision.

Dr. Judith Lewis Herman, a trauma expert who is a clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, said she tried to empower patients to take action to protect themselves without giving direct advice.

“Sometimes we consider a paradoxical intervention and say to a patient, ‘I really admire your loyalty to your parents — even at the expense of failing to protect yourself in any way from harm,’ ” Dr. Herman told me in an interview.

The hope is that patients come to see the psychological cost of a harmful relationship and act to change it.

Eventually, my patient made a full recovery from his depression and started dating, though his parents’ absence in his life was never far from his thoughts.

No wonder. Research on early attachment, both in humans and in nonhuman primates, shows that we are hard-wired for bonding — even to those who aren’t very nice to us.

We also know that although prolonged childhood trauma can be toxic to the brain, adults retain the ability later in life to rewire their brains by new experience, including therapy and psychotropic medication.

For example, prolonged stress can kill cells in the hippocampus, a brain area critical for memory. The good news is that adults are able to grow new neurons in this area in the course of normal development. Also, antidepressants encourage the development of new cells in the hippocampus.

It is no stretch, then, to say that having a toxic parent may be harmful to a child’s brain, let alone his feelings. But that damage need not be written in stone.

Of course, we cannot undo history with therapy. But we can help mend brains and minds by removing or reducing stress.

Sometimes, as drastic as it sounds, that means letting go of a toxic parent.

Dr. Richard A. Friedman is a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College

When people find out I no longer talk to my mother they make faces like it’s a really sad thing, and some of my friends occasionally ask if I have ‘made up’ with her yet. But I’m pretty happy with my decision and have no plans to resume contact with her. I don’t think I would have been able to cut her off if she hadn’t cut me off first. But our relationship was never great, ever since I told my parents at age 17 that I was no longer religious- and every time I talked to her I felt like she was trying to shame me. By cutting me off first I feel as if she actually did me a favor.

Meanwhile I have continued talking to my father occasionally (ok, we talked once since I got married 5 months ago, right before Rosh Hashana), who refuses to meet my husband and tries to avoid talking about him. But that relationship is not really making me happy either. When he’s not trying to shame me, he is making all sorts of suggestions for religious events I can bring my husband to so that “maybe he’ll see how great this religion is and want to convert.” To a religion I don’t even keep! It’s not like B is a serial killer or a rapist or something, he’s just an atheist! I don’t know what the future holds for my relationship with my father, but I don’t think it’s going to be great.

After this experience I feel a certain kinship to gay people…having been disowned and kicked out of my family for “coming out” as an atheist and having a partner who is also an atheist. At least now I know how to NOT treat my own children.

Brief update on life

It's been a while, I know. I guess in Jew news, my uncle from Israel called last week. The one who called me the day of my wedding to say I was still in the family. That wedding day phone call was actually the first time he ever called me, so this was the second. We talked a bit about my dissertation (he actually also has a PhD in sociology, except he now teaches chumash (bible studies) to elementary school students), and he tried to convince me that I should go to shul with B for Simchat Torah so B can "check it out" and see how awesome Judaism is?? I told him I'd think about it, cause I still don't have the ovaries to just flat out tell my relatives no apparently. Need to work on that.

In money news, I finally changed my cell phone plan yesterday after waiting 2 farkin years for the old one to expire. See, two years ago some dude from my cell phone company called me up and somehow convinced me that it would actually be cheaper to get 2 phone lines and a 'family plan.' Why I bought into this I will never know, especially since at the time B hadn't even moved in yet, so what the heck would I need two lines for! So then I was trapped in this stupid cell phone plan for 2 years that cost me $80 a month because this dude lied and it was NOT cheaper once you took into account taxes.

Anyways, it finally expired a week ago so yesterday I got rid of the second line and reduced my plan for the first line- so instead of paying $65 + tax a month for 600 anytime minutes + free roaming + free nights/weekends starting at 7pm, I'm now paying $35 + tax a month for 200 anytime minutes + free roaming + free nights/ weekends starting at 7pm. Oh did I mention I also looked at my minutes usage for the last year, and I have NEVER talked more than 200 minutes a month during daytime hours? It seems that actually living with the one person I want to talk to on a regular basis (and keeping in touch with other friends on the internet instead of the phone) means I never use my phone minutes. I'm very pleased with actually having a bill go DOWN in price for once. Next to tackle is the cable/internet bill which has risen from $93 a month to $170 a month over the last 3 years (with no change in service) because my cable company is a monopoly and is full of bastards.

Anyways, the point of this whole rant is to say that these companies are full of shysters. The cell phone lady kept trying to convince me it would be cheaper to get a plan that was actually more expensive (The $40 a month plan that has more minutes), when it would clearly not be because of, well, math. Then she tried to tell me it would be $7 extra a month to have my free minutes start at 7pm, when I had the website open in front of me that said $5 a month. Then I had to talk to some dude, who offered me a $50 credit to keep my second phone line. Then he finally transferred me to some other lady about canceling the second line, who started off by being all "ARE WE IN DANGER OF LOSING YOUR BUSINESS TODAY?" in an accusatory tone, and then tried to convince me that I could still use a second line, even though I (lied and) told her I live alone! Are you farking kidding me? I'm getting much better at dealing with them though- two years ago I clearly was not great given that this dude convinced me to get this horrible plan, but in the meanwhile I've had 2 years of dealing with students trying to put one over at me, and those skills totally translate into 'fighting with cell phone companies' skills! :) Totally proud of myself right now! :)

Pick Barkley's Halloween costume!

Our dog park is located on land owned by a nursing home. Every Halloween (and Christmas) a bunch of dog park members take their dogs to visit the nursing home residents, with all the dogs dressed up in costumes. We're thinking of going this year with Barkley (and also walking him around in the costume all day Halloween, cause hey, it's fun and it makes people smile)

So, help us figure out what Barkley should wear this year!


Here is our lovely Barkley.

Shall he dress as:


Lobster Dog?


Sharkley?


Pirate Dog, AKA Captain Bark?


The Joker?

Vote in the poll on the right side of this page! :)

Loving your children unconditionally

The New York Times has an interesting article today about how making your love for you children conditional can cause long lasting psychological effects, and doesn't get you what you want anyways. Some excerpts:

It turned out that children who received conditional approval were indeed somewhat more likely to act as the parent wanted. But compliance came at a steep price. First, these children tended to resent and dislike their parents. Second, they were apt to say that the way they acted was often due more to a “strong internal pressure” than to “a real sense of choice.” Moreover, their happiness after succeeding at something was usually short-lived, and they often felt guilty or ashamed.

The studies found that both positive and negative conditional parenting were harmful, but in slightly different ways. The positive kind sometimes succeeded in getting children to work harder on academic tasks, but at the cost of unhealthy feelings of “internal compulsion.” Negative conditional parenting didn’t even work in the short run; it just increased the teenagers’ negative feelings about their parents.

the data suggest that love withdrawal isn’t particularly effective at getting compliance, much less at promoting moral development. Even if we did succeed in making children obey us, though — say, by using positive reinforcement — is obedience worth the possible long-term psychological harm? Should parental love be used as a tool for controlling children?

The snarky side of me wants to email this article to my parents (especially my mom), but I'm going to refrain.

My dad just called...

For the first time since April. Yesterday he sent me an e-card that said "Dear Abandoning Eden and B, Happy New year!" and "ps when would be a good time to call."

I was happy to see he actually typed out B's name in the happy new years card thereby acknowledging his existence. And that he included B in a card to me, thereby (in my view) acknowledging that B is part of my family.

So he called today and we talked for about half an hour. I told him about my awesome honeymoon, updated him on a bunch of stuff in life, he updated me on my grandfather (still senile) and on his Shul (moved to a bigger building) and we chatted for a bit. Towards the end he was all "I haven't called you before cause I was afraid you'd be angry, but you sound normal" and I was all "well I was pretty angry at you right after I got married, but now I don't really care" and "You know I can't come visit as long as you refuse to meet B, but you can call me sometimes if you want" and he was all "Well I'll speak with you again soon."

Also he said he's not stepping into my relationship with my Mom, and that "me and her will have to work that out." So yeah, for now, back to talking to dad I guess, but I don't exactly feel like working out things with my mom, since I can't imagine how that could go down...what am I going to do, apologize for getting married? Beg her to talk to me again? Um, no.

Meanwhile, earlier this week B burnt 3 of his fingers when he was pouring hot bacon grease into a jar (for those of you who don't eat bacon- you can't pour bacon grease down the sink cause it will clog the sink, so we pour it in jars and then throw out the jar when it gets full). You can see pictures of his hideous burns over at his blog (warning: they are seriously hideous). I can confirm his reports of pacing up and down and crying...it was really bad, and now he has blisters (aka second degree burns) on 3 of his fingers. But awesomely, I just added him to my health insurance about 3 weeks ago, so we were able to go to the doctor the next morning when one of the burns turned into what the nurse later said was "the biggest blister she had ever seen." They gave him some fancy burn cream and fancy non-stick gauze that's specifically for burns, and B went back this morning for a follow up appointment to make sure it is healing right. Thank jebus for health insurance, cause a month ago he would have toughed it out with regular sticky gauze, neosporin and bandaids.

Bad dates of years past

I was commenting on someone else's blog about what exactly a dating 'horror story' is... I think her horror stories (the date only went on for an hour and a half! He only sprung for coffee!) are way too tame compared to some of mine.

Which reminded me. Last year I started a series of blog posts about past crazy dudes I have dated. I spent about 3 years single before I met my husband (apart from a couple of short 'relationships' here or there that never lasted longer than 2 months), and went on a lot of crazy dates in that time. But then I got engaged to B, and had other things to write about (a ton of wedding plans, for one) so I never really finished the series. And I don't think I ever will. But I think I can manage a few dating horror stories.

Here are my top three dating horror stories of all time:

The third worst date ever: The dude who, during the course of a 1 hour coffee shop first date, told me all about how he posted naked pornographic pictures of his ex girlfriend on the internet when she had a broken pelvis (i didn't ask why her pelvis was broken). I already posted about that story on my blog so you can read the details there if you care to.

The second worst date I've ever been on was the last guy I dated in 2005. Because of this guy I decided to take a year off from dating in 2006.

So this guy, he asked me out for a drink at a bar. We go to this bar, he pays for beer for both of us, and we have our drink and are enjoying each others company. Conversation is flowing nicely, and I thought things were going well. Then he says something like "Damn, I want to get us a second drink, but I only brought enough cash for one drink." and I said something like "Oh that's no problem, I can pay for a second round." And that's when the shit hit the fan.

This dude starts off angry and eventually starts YELLING in the very public bar, about how he was taught that women shouldn't pay for drinks, he just doesn't think that's right, and then starts going off on how feminists (or rather "Feminazis") are taking over the world, etc, etc. After about 10 minutes of this diatribe I got up and left.

Needless to say, there was no second date. Did I mention that last year at Thanksgiving my husband introduced me to his family as a "Professional feminist" since basically i am...I've published in two of the top feminist journals already, and all my research is on women and work. Yeah, that was never going to work.

I might also add that my husband self-identifies as a feminist, and every time he says something along those lines I get all gushy inside and love him even more for it. :)

Which leaves my best dating horror story of all time. Valentines day 2005. (Actually come to think of it, all 3 of these horror stories happened in 2005, which probably all contributed to my year off from dating in 2006).

Unlike the first two stories, this was not a first date. This was with a guy who I had been dating about 6 weeks. Things were going pretty well with this guy, although I had some reservations about him. For one, I was beginning to suspect he was an alcoholic. He had just a few too many stories about how he "drank 2 six packs of beer last night and passed out." Every date we went on involved alcohol in some way. In general I'm not much of a drinker- in fact, nowadays I hardly drink at all, and I can't even remember the last time I had something with alcohol in it (it was probably the champagne we had on our honeymoon 2 months ago). But I drank more in those 6 weeks of dating this dude than in any other 6 week period of my life.

Which brings me to valentines day 2005. We decided to stay in and watch a movie, and we got a pizza and he brought over some nice Italian wine. Only he brought over two bottles of wine, because he 'couldn't decide which one to bring.' So, we watch the movie, eat the pizza, and split the first bottle of wine. And then the second bottle of wine. At this point I was pretty much drunk, but he kept going. I had half empty bottles of jagermeister and vodka, left over from a new years party- he proceeded to finish BOTH of these off, on his own.

Then he dropped the bottle of vodka on the kitchen floor. Miraculously it didn't break- until he picked it up and dropped it AGAIN at which point it shattered all over the floor. So, I drunkenly started picking up the pieces of glass that were now everywhere. My date helped by drunkenly stepping on a giant piece of glass, which went straight into his foot. But I guess he was too drunk to feel it, because he didn't realize he was bleeding until about 10 minutes later, when he had already tracked blood all over my apartment (which was carpeted). At which point he drunkenly freaked out about it. He went to the bathroom, got the glass out and started washing off his foot in the bathtub (destroying my bathroom rug in the process- there was so much blood on it I had to throw it out afterwords). Meanwhile I tried to wipe up the blood stains in the living room- mind you, I was totally drunk this whole time, and wiping up blood is just not a fun thing to do even when you're sober.

Over the course of the evening a whole bunch of other fun things happened too:
a) He tried to pay me to let him smoke cigarettes in my apartment, even though the door to the outdoors was literally right outside my apartment door, and I lived on the first floor. He kept offering me more and more money until I finally convinced him to go outside.
b) I went with him when he went to smoke outside. It was pouring rain, but he didn't stay under the awning by the door. Instead he started running around the parking lot in the rain
c) then he started taking all his clothes off in the rain cause "he didn't like wet clothes." Outdoors. In public. In February.
d) THEN he started peeing against the wall of my apartment building...right next to the window of someone's basement apartment.
e) Also over the course of the night he revealed to me that when he was in Italy on a student exchange program about a year before this, he went on a 3 week coke binge
f) for which he was kicked out of his student exchange program
g) during which he spent $5000 on coke, all from credit card advances
h) and apparently the credit card companies were calling him every day and he had no way of paying them back so he was just avoiding their calls
i) also that night he told me he loved me for the first (and last) time. Awww...?

After he cut his foot, he spent the night moaning on the couch repeating over and over again "I'm dying, don't leave me" "I"m dying, I love you, don't leave me." I lived in a studio apartment at the time, so I got to hear him moaning until around 3am. I asked if he wanted to go to the hospital for his foot but he declined. In the morning he slunk away before I was really awake, and after he didn't call me back for 2 days (probably from the shame of revealing all his horrible secrets while simultaneously trashing my apartment) I broke up with him over instant messenger.

So kind readers, what are your craziest ever dating stories?

In recent news

No wonder B can't find a job...the unemployment rate in our city is now hovering around 11 percent! Now I'm sure that's not hitting the white male college educated folks as much as some other groups...but then again, recent college graduates and late 20somethings are one of hardest hit groups out there in terms of employment (or the lack thereof). Seems like the older baby boomers don't want to give up their jobs now that their 401ks have tanked. Speaking of which, I have a great idea, lets make it so that your job automatically invests your retirement plan in what is now essentially monopoly money! Assuming you have a job of course.

Meanwhile, I've seen the job market in our city as I've been helping my husband look for job postings, and what everyone wants now is several years of experience. Never mind if you have a college degree, if you haven't been a secretary for the past 5 years we don't want to hire you in our secretary job. Cause there's no way someone with *just* a college degree and no secretary experience can possibly be a good secretary. Besides, we have 300 recently laid off secretaries just lining up to apply! And good luck with any job with more status than a secretary..for that you need at least 5 years experience and a graduate degree.

Which brings me to the Obama speech this morning. Yes, lets motivate the young so they all stay in school and go to college, thereby ensuring a future job for me and my academic ilk. I like that. But meanwhile, what good is a college education anymore? What good is working your ass off for years, excelling at everything, if at the end of years of higher education you end up where my husband is now and where it's looking more and more likely I'll be a year from now (after a decade of higher education)- unemployed.

So yeah, Obama is encouraging the young kids to put in an effort. But he's also reinforcing the great American myth- the myth that if you just work hard enough, and pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and study hard in school, one day you will be president. Or at least employed.

I lost my faith in that myth long ago.

In general, I am losing the hope I had when Obama was elected, although not enough to take my Obama sign out of my apartment window. He has a chance to get it back though. If tomorrow he stands in front of congress, grows a pair, and declares that a public option for health insurance is necessary, it may restore a little of the hope I had for his presidency. If he even pushes through all the other reforms without a public option, I will be less happy, but I won't lose all hope.

If he doesn't, well, the sign is definitely coming down.

Fall

Taking Barkley for a walk at 10pm and not a human to be found a block in any direction. We pass two cats on their own adventures. Next week the moving trucks will roll in, and on Tuesday's walk I'll have my pick of no worse for the wear furniture. For now they wait at their summer hideaways, and the the ones who stay (who are older and more cautious) stay inside for fear perhaps of the fresh graffiti in front of my house that says:

Vandal
Sqa
Squad

But with Barkley watching my back I fear no vandal squa squad, so when I should have turned right I turned left. A block further and a group of grad students gathered outside a cafe that had just shut it's doors, taking advantage of the last weeks of warm nights. I turned back at that point, exhausted from a day of meetings and lesson plans and scanning and course websites and trying to squeeze in some last minute dissertating before the real work begins.

On the way home I found a fallen leaf, perfectly yellow. The first of the season.

It's coming.

Oh crap guys + brother stuff

I thought I was all clever a few months back when I created a new gmail account (Abanadoningeden @ gmail) and set it up to forward to my regular account. But I didn't realize until today that I actually DIDN'T set it up to send it to my regular account, which is why I haven't gotten any of your emails. And there were quite a few. Sorry bout that. I'm trying to respond to some now, although I'm going to skip ones that were sent pre-wedding that were all "good luck on your upcoming wedding!" And the one that was all "I'm a closet OTDer cheating on my wife with a non Jewish lady what should I do??" Yeah, not touching that one...

Speaking of which, it's our 3 month wedding anniversary today! Yay for quarter year anniversaries! (or something? whatever, it counts!).

Also, over the weekend I got in contact with my youngest brother E (the one who said B was going to die within a year...and it's already been like 8 months since he said that!) to say hi and what's up and update him on my honeymoon trip. He responded by catching me up on his life and then went on about something in the book of Ezekiel and how it talked about a city (Tyre) falling into the sea. Which it didn't actually do (the city is still around even), but which I apparently reminded him of when I told him about visiting Santorini and how people think it may be Atlantis- which apparently reminded him of this story in Ezekiel which he thinks might have been influenced by the myth of Atlantis.

It annoys the crap out of me when religious people try to bring the bible/Torah into EVERY conversation, but I didn't say that. Instead I sent him a link about Tyre the city, and maybe it'll encourage him to start looking up historical data to confirm biblical tall tales, and maybe he'll start thinking about which parts of the tanach might be myth. But meanwhile I'm not going to argue with him about Judaism anymore, which was the subject of a lot of our past emails.

In one respect orthodox people may have it right. I've read some advice they give to people with relatives 'off the derech' and one of the things I've read is how it's better to keep someone close to you and not discuss religion, instead of pushing them away with arguments about religion.

This is now my strategy with my super religious brother. I think it'll be better to keep in touch with him, and be nice to him, and not discuss religion, so if he ever comes to his senses I'll be someone he can come to for help. After all, he's only 21...plenty of time for him to change. And even if he never does, what good would it do to alienate my brother just because of his extreme and crazy religious beliefs (that I used to buy into)? Although I'm still going to call him out on the religious passive aggressiveness (like sending me "good shabbas" text messages every Friday...thankfully he hasn't done that in a while, since I sent him one back that said "I don't celebrate shabbas but happy weekend!").

But yeah, i feel better about that whole situation now that we are in touch again...as an older sister I feel like it's my responsibility to make sure we have a relationship, and even though the reason we hadn't talked in a while was cause he was being a total dick to me about B, I think it's just better this way. I mean, maybe he was being a total dick to me about B in part becuase I was being a total dick about him being more religious? Maybe it's just a mutual general hostile dickishness that needs to change between us.

My new motto is "you can't change other people, you can only change yourself" and part of that is changing the way I react to my family. Like for one, not trying to convince my brother that he's a fool for becoming more religious and giving up on his dreams/hobbies to learn all day in a yeshiva...even if i think it's true.

My parents on the other hand, well I haven't talked to them since before the wedding, and I kinda like it that way. I may get in touch with my dad at some point, but I gotta say...not having my mom in my life has done wonders for my self esteem.

I dream of gardens

I dream of gardens. Yellow crimson watermelon, zucchini, asparagus bushes, red onions, red bell peppers, heirloom carrots, edamame, artichokes, sugar snap peas....these are all things I'm planting in my future garden.

Today I added on that yellow crimson watermelon to my future garden after trying one from the farmer's market. I love the farmer's market, there's always some unusual fruit or vegetable in season, that turns out delicious. A few weeks ago they had the most perfect cherries I've ever tasted; today along with farm fresh bacon and ground beef, we got some purple bell peppers, a zucchini, an assortment of potatoes (purple, red and white), an assortment of baby onions (shallots, baby white, baby red) and a yellow crimson watermelon.

I live in an apartment. Well technically actually I live on the first floor of a victorian row house that's been converted to apartments. I even have a front yard that I am free to use. My entrepreneurial neighbor (who has been unable to find a job since moving here so her husband can go to grad school) has cleared her half of the front yard and planted a vegetable garden. I'm jealous. But not jealous enough to put that amount of effort into a yard at a place I rent, a place I will move out of exactly one year from today when my lease is up.

Instead I watch her plants grow while I grow herbs in pots I put out front. This year I have italian basil and this mini basil plant, sage, a rosemary bush and italian parsley. This morning I chopped up some rosemary I had been drying for a few weeks and picked some sage to dry for burning at a festival next week. It smells nice and sagey when you do that.

Meanwhile I dream of the day I own my own home, where I can claim and fence off part of the backyard so rabbits and Barkley can't get in, and I will grow my vegetable garden. The first year I'll be sure to plant the asparagus bushes since those take 3 years until you can harvest them. Maybe I'll start off with things that don't need trellises to grow, since for all my dreaming of gardens I have little experience growing things that arn't herbs, so I'd like to start smaller. Maybe I'll start with zucchini and onions. Also I want to have some herbs that don't grow well in pots, like cilantro. Of course rosemary and basil since those are essential ingredients in my kitchen. Maybe oregano.

Also, I want sunflowers. And a willow tree. With a little bench under it. One that I plant when it's little and that grows up with my future dream kids.

Yeah...

putting it out there

When I first started going 'off the derech' as they call it, or 'stopped practicing Judaism' as I call it, I was terrified that other people would find out. It was a secret part of me that I could not share with anyone. Eventually I shared it with a very select group of people, but for years at the beginning, after I had started eating at non kosher restaurants (vegetarian at first, then fish, then meat years and years later), and after I had stopped keeping shabbas, it was something only I knew about. From age 15 to age 17 I was completely in the closet about it. In college i would leave my parents house in a skirt and change into jeans at the train station- the one pair of jeans I owned, that I would wash secretly when I knew my mom was going to be running errands all day. By the time I got home I was in a skirt again.

As I got older and became more integrated into the non-jewish world, my situation reversed- now the weird thing to share with only close friends was that I had grown up orthodox jewish. It took a long time to get to here though.

Coming out to my parents as an atheist was still one of the hardest things I've gone through to date. Equally hard was telling them that I was dating someone not jewish, that we lived together, that we had gotten engaged. I guess I never told them I was married, since they had stopped talking to me by then. I anticipate more hard times in the future, when I get pregnant and will probably feel obligated to tell them, if I have a boy and won't have a bris, etc.

If it wasn't for social networking groups like facebook I probably could have gone off to live my life, and never talked to anyone I grew up with again. But facebook does exist, as does a facebook group for my old shul that no less than 5 people have invited me to join, and the people I grew up with and went to school with are all on there, sending me their friend requests. And why deny their requests? We do know each other. We grew up together. So what if we have different religious views in adulthood? My religious views are just as valid as theirs are...in fact, I personally believe mine are more valid and that their beliefs don't hold up to any scrutiny, although I would never say that to them since they didn't ask me, so it's just rude. But I also don't think I should be forced to stay in the closet with my beliefs, and that as a member of a group that is looked down upon (off the derech people) I have a moral obligation to come out to as many people as possible so that we can not be marginalized and forgotten about the way the still-religious people would like us to be.

It's one thing to say that though, and another thing to tell people who you know will disprove and look down on you that you are an atheist, and that you have married someone not jewish. Even if you know they are wrong, and that anyone who is a judgmental asshole is..well, a judgmental asshole, it's tough to face the constant rejection, and to constantly put something out there that you know will make people think less of you.

But I feel as if I'm getting better at it, and telling people about myself no longer carries the anxiety it used to. Today I got an email from S, someone I grew up with, who is now a rabbi (what? You can be a rabbi at my age?) and who presumably got my email address from my facebook page (since we are facebook friends) and added me to his "jewish newsletter" listserve. You know, those little newsletters some rabbis send out with a weekly dvar torah (mini sermon about the weekly torah reading) and some heartwarming story or something. I didn't read it thoroughly, I admit.

But I did write back- "Hey S. Nice to hear from you. However, I am an atheist and I no longer practice judaism, so I don't have any interest in receiving dvar torahs. Please remove my email from your list."

Turns out it does get easier with time.

photo alert

B Posted some photos of our trip to Rome over at his blog, go look over there cause I'm waay too lazy to sort through/post my pictures...like...ever.

Jury Duty

I have it.

What the crap is with this "meet at the courthouse at 8:15" crap anyways?

*sigh*

Lovely

A commenter calling themselves SatmarWhore had this to say about my husband getting in a car accident: "Too bad the fuck didn't die!"

I hope for the sake of satmar people that this self identified satmer whore is not indeed part of their religion, although sadly it would not surprise me if she was.

You know, my best friend in high school was Satmer (a Hassidic sect for those of you not down on the lingo). In my MO high school, we got along well becuase we were both outcasts in the school - her for being too religious (although she had been kicked out of more religious schools for her outspokenness), me for not being religious enough. It was an odd pairing, and we disagreed on many things, but she was the only person from my school that I kept in touch with after high school, and I know she would never wish death on another human being, no matter what their religious preferences.

At times, it helps me to remind myself that there are people like her, and that not all religious people are represented by the cuntloafs who hang out on the internets wishing death on random people's husbands. Because there are way too many religious people out there, and if they all were like this particular one, we would all be sunk.

As for you, satmar whore, I have this old yiddish curse my grandfather taught me:
May you grow like an onion, with your head in the ground and your feet in the air!