Already I have a problem with that post title; let’s spend two paragraphs on that and then get to the main point. I’ve been unthinkingly using the term “co-ed” to mean…”girls and boys,” I guess, and I don’t even KNOW what would be a better and more inclusive and more accurate word. I’m not sure “mixed sleepovers” is clear enough. And maybe co-ed is fine! It’s just, I’m remembering how female students were sometimes referred to as “co-eds,” as if making something co-educational means “adding girls to a thing that is by default for boys,” and that is not a connotation I want to bring into the year 2021. But maybe there is no such connotation anymore, just as the word no longer has to refer to an educational context; and maybe “co-ed” easily and neatly includes people who are non-binary, and maybe there is no issue here—but if you know of a better adjective, I’d be grateful to hear it. Or maybe the solution is to remove the adjective, and just say “sleepovers,” but for this post I need a word that means “NOT ONLY GIRLS, AS THE SLEEPOVERS OF MY YOUTH WOULD HAVE BEEN WITHOUT QUESTION.”

(Just now I asked William, age 20 and a combined computer science / linguistics major, if he had any negative connotations with the adjective “co-ed,” and if he thought it excluded/included people who were non-binary, and he said he had no negative connotations and that he thought it could easily be inclusive, since it’s “co-,” which is together/with, and not “bi-” or “duo-” or anything else that means/implies two. So there is one single data point from The Youth.)

ANYWAY. Here is my issue: Elizabeth’s friend group includes boys and girls (and possibly also people who identify otherwise, but that has not yet been confided in me). They all turned 16 in the past year. Once they are all vaccinated, they would like to start having entire-group sleepovers. And it turns out, I have some Upbringing to work through on that!

Elizabeth has actually ALREADY BEEN to sleepovers that included boys, but it was A Particular Boy who has been in that other close neighborhood friend group (which occasionally invites others, as they did with Elizabeth a few times) since preschool. Leaving him out of things just because of his sex would have meant leaving out ONLY HIM, and no one wanted that. (Also, I suspect none of the parents wanted to try to draw the line between “He’s six years old so it’s fine to have him sleep over” and “He’s N years old so it is suddenly no longer fine, and Here’s Why.”) I didn’t know ahead of time that there would be A Boy at the sleepover, and Elizabeth was extremely shruggy/eye-rolly at my raised eyebrows when I picked her up afterward. (The attitude was “GAH, Mom, it’s not *huge sarcastic air quotes* ‘a BOY,’ it’s NOAH.”) Which left me thinking over what it was I thought was so inappropriate about having a boy there. Like, what EXACTLY. And finding I did not have a good, simple answer to that question, all I had was some mental flailing. Like: IT SEEMS LIKE IT’S NOT ALLOWED. …FOR SOME REASON.

Plus, thinking over the rules of my childhood all the way through to the rules at my Christian college, those were…extremely hetero-assumptive. No one even ASKED if we were heterosexual; we were all heterosexual by absolute default. Like, if I’d been interested in girls, I could have had girls in my room with the door locked EVERY DAY/NIGHT OF THE WEEK and there would have been no rule against that. (And in fact, looking back on it it’s PRETTY CLEAR to me that several pairs of roommates in my various college dorms were girlfriends living together.) So I’m looking for policies that make a SHARP TURN from that. And this is where I welcome chipping in, because…what policies DO make a sharp turn from that, other than not having policies?

Do you see what I mean? Any rules I make about WHO can sleep over, WHO can be in the room with the door closed, etc., have to take into account that my children have not yet confided in me what their own situations are, and I don’t wish to make assumptions. And furthermore, I’d like to have policies that don’t include the icky implication that any two people of theoretically-compatibly-attracted status will immediately start having sex if they’re allowed in a room with the door closed. I was pretty annoyed as a teenager that I was not allowed to have male friends in my room, as if there wasn’t any such thing as being “just friends” with a boy. (The explanation for that rule throughout the Christian community, including again my Christian college dorm experience, was that we should “avoid the appearance of evil.” Perhaps we should also avoid teaching children that sex = EVIL.)

But as soon as I try to customize something appropriate, I run into trouble. I start out so well: I think, “Well, what if we get to the TRUE GIST of it, and we say that the rule is that they are not allowed to have someone in their room if they’re…”—wait, how do I complete that sentence in a way that doesn’t feel stupid to say? “You can’t have a person in your room if you’re dating them, or if you might LIKE to date them”? Really, am I going to say those words? And is that actually a rule we want to make? Sometimes when I try to transfer the Christian parenting/school rules of my own upbringing to rules that stand on their own without God/Bible/religion, I find that there IS no transfer, and that the whole concept of the rule needs to be thrown out, and maybe that’s what’s happening in this case. Maybe my kids are allowed to have ANY peers in their rooms, and maybe it’s none of my business what the exact relationship is. Maybe sleepovers can be with WHATEVER friends they want to invite, and we don’t need to discuss what sex those friends are, because that doesn’t actually matter. (If as a teenager I’d had a co-ed sleepover that included even my actual boyfriend, I still wouldn’t have felt inclined to, like, make out with him IN FRONT OF THE GROUP, any more than I felt inclined to make out with him at the school lunch table, or when we went to the beach with a bunch of friends.) WHAT IS IT EXACTLY that I think is inappropriate about certain combinations of people (1) in bedrooms and/or (2) at night, and what part of that thinking needs to be tossed into the trash and which part is legitimate, I guess is a question here.

I was discussing this with Elizabeth, telling her that I was having trouble figuring out (1) if there needs to be rules and (2) if so, WHAT and also WHY, and she was very amused by the whole thing. At one point she said, “You do NOT need to worry about Caleb and Cameron!!” (the main two boys in her friend group) and I said, “No, I know, I’m NOT worried about Caleb and Cameron, I’m worried about…” and I absolutely trailed off, to the escalation of her amusement. I could not finish the sentence! What AM I worried about? Is it in fact NOTHING?

I got up this morning and made a bunch of phone calls, FINALLY, including one that necessitated another phone call, to our pediatrician’s terrible referrals clerk, who asks in a challenging, bet-you-can’t-answer-THIS-one tone for things most patients would not know (“What’s the NPI number?” “Is she also a specialist in X?”) and then acts as if she is literally unable to write the referral without ME PERSONALLY providing that information to her, even if I have successfully answered all her other questions (the practice’s address, phone, fax, email address; the doctor’s first name and last, and specialty). The previous holder of her job had no such trouble, asking just the doctor’s surname, the reason for the visit, the name of the practice, and the day of the appointment; sometimes she’d say “You don’t happen to have their fax number, do you?,” and if I said no, she’d say “No problem, I can find it!” She NEVER asked me for the NPI, presumably because THAT IS NOT SOMETHING PATIENTS GENERALLY KNOW. I look back wistfully upon those happy times.

With another call, a receptionist claimed she could not let me make an appointment for my over-18 child, because of HIPAA. I have gone through HIPAA training twice, and this is not a thing. With only a few exceptions, ANYONE can make an appointment (or refill a prescription, or pick up a prescription) for ANYONE: I can call and make an appointment for my mom, or for my spouse, or for a friend, or for an elderly client/neighbor, or, yes, for my 20-year-old child. HIPAA prevents information from going THE OTHER WAY: the receptionist/clerk may not tell ME anything about the person on whose behalf I’m acting (unless the person in question is my minor child, or unless the office/pharmacy has a document from the person saying it’s okay to tell me things): they may not tell me how long its been since the person’s last appointment, or what kind of appointment the person is due for, or what prescriptions the person is taking, or their recent test restuls. But I may tell the receptionist/clerk anything I want: I may say the type of appointment I’d like to make for the person; I may give the person’s full name and address and insurance information; I may tell the receptionist what the symptoms are or which prescriptions need to be renewed. And the receptionist may schedule the appointment / leave a note for the doctor to renew the prescriptions, without needing to go through any sort of vetting process to make sure I am authorized to make these requests. But I know the futility of arguing with someone who is trying to enforce a rule they didn’t make and think they are required to follow, so I gave up without protest.

I ALSO made a call I THOUGHT would be terrible, and certainly there is still time for this to turn (as with so many other insurance issues) into a long SERIES of frustrating calls—but at least my FIRST call went quickly and easily. Here was the situation, if you enjoy a little empathetic cringe: I had in my hands (1) a bill from my doctor and (2) a letter from my insurance company instructing me not to pay it. (The doctor had apparently asked for a certain type of bloodwork that was not covered under the doctor’s contract with the insurance provider.) I had to call the doctor’s billing department and explain this. (WHY IS THE PATIENT EVER EVER EVER USED AS A MESSENGER BETWEEN DOCTOR AND INSURANCE COMPANY???) And the person I talked to was just “SIGH it would be nice if they would tell US these things! Okay, I’ll take care of this, you should be all set, just call us back if you see anything else about it!” (But my guess is that when they opened the file they DID see that the insurance company HAD notified them; I don’t think they would have canceled it just because I said so. I think they send out the bills on purpose anyway, because a certain percentage of patients will accidentally pay them.)

This batch of calls reminded me how satisfying it was to have Rob make all his own calls before he left to stay with my parents: he was astonished by how LONG everything took, and by how one call could lead to SEVERAL MORE calls. It’s also satisfying to think that at some point all five children will be taking care of all of their own calls/appointments. That’s going to be even better than when they all started taking care of their own seat belts.

One of the many things I am enjoying about being back at my library paging job is that EVEN THOUGH I like the job, I STILL get to experience that delightful “Oh, yay, it’s Friday!”/”Oh, yay, a day off on Monday!” feeling. This happens even when I spend my day off wondering if I should text my supervisor and see if I can come in anyway because I am just itching to get back to my shelf-shifting project and am jealously wondering if my supervisor might have put one of the OTHER LIBRARY PAGES to work on it, NO, LEAVE IT FOR MEEEEEEEEEEE, IT IS MYYYYYYYYYYY PROJECT!!! (There is a sense in which Swistle is an excellent team-player, and another sense in which she the hell is not.)

Shelf-shifting is, as you might expect, when you shift books on the shelves. Sometimes it means moving them to an entirely new place; but more often, it means distributing them more evenly/sensibly among the shelves where they already reside. In a sense, shelf-shifting happens continually as we’re re-shelving: maybe this week’s new James Patterson book won’t fit on the twenty shelves his books are currently inhabiting, so I have to move another James Patterson book either one shelf back or one shelf forward to make room. But usually the term is used for a larger project, such as when an ENTIRE SECTION (e.g., all the large-print books) has gotten to the point where it no longer makes sense to do the little everyday shifts: you’d try to move one book to the next shelf, but in order to do that you’d have to move a book from that shelf to the next shelf, which would require moving one book from THAT shelf to the next shelf, and so on for ten shelves, just to make room for one book. SO THEN: my supervisor might ask me to shelf-shift an entire section. (Or, if I am at loose ends and have noticed an issue, I might shelf-shift a smaller area without being told.)

When I was presented with this type of task for the first time, I thought I wouldn’t like it: it seemed like boring manual labor. But I LOVE it. It’s so satisfying. You start by looking at all the shelves in the section, and estimating how many blank shelves there are total: like, that shelf is about 1/10th empty, that one’s about 1/10th empty, that one’s 1/4th empty, that one’s 1/2 empty, there are three entirely empty shelves at the end of the section, and so on. Then you divide that among how many shelves are allotted to the section: okay, I have approximately five full empty shelves total, and there are forty shelves in this section; so when I’m done shifting, each shelf should be about 1/8th empty.

But! As you’re shifting, there are some Things You Know. For example, you know you should leave more than 1/8th shelf available in the Patterson section. You know it’s likely Berg and King will need more room over the years, but Grafton and Binchy will not. You know you always have a lot of Baldacci and Hilderbrand and Hannah to reshelve, so leave them space because some of their books are for sure checked out right now, and they’ll need shelf to sit on when they come back. And so on!

And you can make the whole area tidier while you’re at it, which I guess doesn’t sound like fun when I type it out, but remember you are being PAID to do this. And: it happens satisfyingly often that, as I am working, I find a misplaced book: maybe every few shelves, I find one mildly out of place, a book I could easily have found if I were looking for it, but it’s still pleasing to move it a few books to the left or right where it belongs; but maybe once per section, I find one WILDLY out of place, a book that was impossibly lost (a 700s book in the 900s! a non-large-print book among the large-print!), and it’s EXTREMELY pleasing to walk it over to where it belongs and feel it clicking into place—as if a little tracking light has lit up on a book-location map, now that the unfindable book is findable again.

(Are you still reading this??? You may want to consider a job at a library.)

Friends, if you are feeling low on energy, may I recommend EATING MORE FOOD? I know decades of women’s magazines have encouraged us to increase our energy levels by EXPENDING energy via exercise (while, interestingly, we simultaneously use that exact same method to DECREASE energy in children and pets), but consider that another idea is to ADD energy, via calories. Like, literally put energy into your body, by eating food, which is the energy humans use.

The weather has been hot, and my job is very physical, and when I am hot and tired I am not hungry. And I have definitely absorbed the message from this culture that if you’re not hungry, don’t eat, because fewer calories is always better than more calories: if you’re not hungry it’s, like, bonus, Free Dieting! But today I was feeling just absolutely sapped, and I was wondering if I needed more vitamins or more yoga or more sleep or what, and then I mentally went over what I’d eaten the last few days, and it seemed like there was an important clue to be found there.

Today I am going to eat even if I am not hungry, and see if that helps. And I don’t mean I am going to add some of the very low-calorie foods we’ve been trained to view as “””healthy”””; I mean I am going to add CALORIES, which is literally the way we measure the energy in food: more calories = more energy. I am going to take ENERGY, and I am going to PUT IT INTO MY BODY, and I am going to see if that INCREASES ENERGY LEVELS IN MY BODY.

The difference between my last trip to the grocery store and this morning’s was MARKED, and I don’t know how to account for it. The store had taken out all the one-way-aisle signs, and perhaps that contributed. Or perhaps it’s all the news items about mask mandates being removed. Or I don’t KNOW what, but what it was LIKE was as if everyone went back to pre-pandemic grocery-store crowding. All of a sudden, the deli section was packed with people standing close to each other. All of a sudden, I was waiting my turn for the milk section, and someone just went around me and went to the milk section, standing RIGHT NEXT TO the person who was already there. As I was waiting my turn for the eggs section, THREE people went around me and got eggs—no social distancing AT ALL. People were acting as if they didn’t even remember that they USED to wait; they were acting as if they couldn’t understand why I was just standing there.

It was nice not to have to go up an aisle I didn’t need just because I needed to go down an aisle in the other direction—but the two-way traffic was difficult not to be jumpy about, after all this time. And it seemed almost as if people had forgotten how to do it: I had to do a fair amount of dodging left and right to get around people, and it seemed as if many people weren’t looking where they were going.

When I was in line and had loaded my items onto the belt and was standing on the 6-foot marker to be appropriately distant from the cashiers (they’ve stopped spacing the lanes, so the cashier for the next lane is standing within 2 feet of where I need to stand to use the credit-card machine, with no barrier between us as there is between me and the cashier of my own lane), the woman behind me in line came RIGHT UP BEHIND ME and started loading her things onto the belt. Like, I was standing AT the end of the belt, and she was RIGHT THERE, within 12-18 inches. I turned and said apologetically (because she seemed like she thought I should get out of her way) “I just don’t want to get within 6 feet of anyone” (indicating distance between me and the cashiers and between me and her), and she looked at me without saying anything and then continued loading her items.

Every section felt full of people who being deliberately and pointedly uncareful. It was so unpleasant, I got only about 3/4ths of what I’d intended to buy: there were a number of sections that were just too swarmed with people. I wasn’t particularly worried about getting sick, but I AM worried about society-in-general giving up SIGNIFICANT safety measures for INSIGNIFICANT gains in comfort/convenience. Like, is it really SO WORTH IT to crowd around the eggs, or can we wait for TEN SECONDS? Is it SO IMPORTANT to start loading things onto the belt RIGHT AWAY, or can it wait for another half-minute?