Paul had a four-day weekend for 4th of July, and we spent most of it trying to remember what day it was. I am relieved to have things back to relatively normal today. Well, normal + literally 18 mosquito bites around my ankles. Apparently I was insufficiently bug-sprayed for the fireworks.

Edward had his wisdom teeth out and it went well. Paul and I both expected him to do more moping and despairing about the pain/swelling afterward, but he was steadily cheerful and pleasant, cooperatively holding bags of frozen corn to the sides of his face. We have a lot of pudding cups left over, and that is a good problem to have.

The fundraiser is going well! Lots and lots of donations! It is so pleasing and touching and hope-generating, and I have teared up many times. I am keeping everything in a spreadsheet so I can keep easily checking the total without having to do the math myself. ($4023.41 so far!) Have I packed up or mailed out even one single item yet? No! But I will! I’ve placed orders for bee stickers and bee earrings and baby name books and free boxes from the post office. I am sifting through pottery and postcards, trying to choose which ones I think would be best for each person (this has been even more fun than I’d thought it would be, and I’d thought it would be pretty fun). I am examining Swistle skirts with mild stress, hoping not to find those mysterious stains that sometimes appear on clothing that’s been packed away.

I saw online a lot of fellow United States peeps having conflicted feelings about participating in a big celebration of this country when the country in question is doing such terrible and shameful things right now, and it was a relief to see I wasn’t alone. Paul wore his ACLU Statue of Liberty Resist shirt on the 4th of July and got a lot of positive/thumbs-uppy kinds of comments on it; it seemed to beautifully strike that conflicted note.

(image from ACLU.org)

I drank vodka made in America and looked appreciatively at the spreadsheet and ordered my free Penzey’s New Hope spice gift box.

The current refugee/immigrant situation in our country is heartbreaking and appalling and infuriating, if those words were strong enough to describe it, which they are not. I can’t believe we’re choosing to treat people this way. I can’t believe people are ARGUING for it and JUSTIFYING it (as if there were ANY circumstances that would justify treating ANY people that way), instead of briefly imagining themselves and their children as the refugees/immigrants (it is how most of our ancestors arrived in the U.S.; it could happen to us again) and then immediately realizing through the power of empathy that the situation has gone from dicey/unkind to actively inhuman/cruel/evil.

All over the place I see people saying we MUST help, we MUST act, it is immoral NOT to help/act, and I AGREE—and yet, I’m not seeing many ways to FUNNEL these whipped-up feelings into effort except to write to my government representatives and donate money to RAICES and the ACLU and ActBlue Kids and Families at the Border. Those are good things to do, but they feel tepid: they don’t have that ring of HELPING/ACTING I’m looking for and that activists are calling for. The urge, I think, is to go to a camp and take care of the babies, or to sneak food through the camp fences, or to bring towels/sheets/food/clothes to a refugee family setting up a new home here, or to offer up a section of my house as temporary shelter, or to be a lawyer/doctor and donate my services, and those more hands-on options are not currently available to me.

I looked up what IS available to me in my area (@TheRaDR recommends typing “immigration justice” plus your location into a search engine), and the options seem limited to fundraising/advocating. I can make calls, I can answer phones, I can show up to protests, I can volunteer at a fundraiser, I can talk other people into having a fundraiser. This brings me to despair: those are mostly sales/marketing skills, and sales/marketing is the opposite of my skill set. Not only am I very, very bad at it, I HATE it. It is fine for me to experience some misery for this cause, but the misery has to MAKE SENSE: if I am miserable and not raising a single dime, it is a giant waste of time for everyone.

Which made me think, what IS my skill set? What can I DO? I can’t lawyer, I can’t doctor, I don’t want to make phone calls, I don’t want to knock on doors. I am good at caring for babies, but I can’t go to the camps and care for the babies. I am good at shopping for household bargains, but I’m not seeing anywhere near me that is collecting for that (maybe in the not-too-distant future!).

What do I OWN that I could use/give? I have about twice as many sheets and blankets as we need, and I have extra food in the pantry—but again, I’m not seeing anyone near me collecting those. I have some money, and I can give that—but seeing how large the need is, my contribution is puny, a drop in the bucket; I’ll do it, but it’s not enough. I have TIME, but I need to find a way to use it. I have two blogs, which gives me two platforms. I have a box full of Swistle Skirts.

I have a box full of Swistle-made pottery.

I have a box full of brand-new cloth napkins. I have a giant box of postcards. I can write baby-name advice. I can bake. I like to make care packages. I like to send postcards/cards. Can I turn these things I have and can do into what is needed, which is MONEY for LEGAL AID and MEDICAL CARE and REFORM?

Even though I hate the usual kind of fundraising (phone calls, door-to-door, arbitrary emergency goals/deadlines, making children sell overpriced items so that the school gets a teeny percentage of the profits and the merchandise company keeps most of it), that’s not the only kind of fundraising. You know what my favorite fundraiser is? The kind where you make a donation and you get a little prize or treat for doing it: maybe you donate $100 and they send you a t-shirt as a thank-you. My top favorite is where you get to CHOOSE your prize/treat from a selection. Like when NPR says that for THIS donation level they will thank you with your choice of a bird mug or a bird tote, but for THIS donation level they will thank you with a bird mug AND a bird tote, and for THIS donation level they will thank you with a t-shirt. I love that. I know the cost of item gets deducted from my donation—but I end up increasing my donation to get the item, which is what is supposed to happen. The organization gets more money than they would have; I get my bird mug; seeing the bird mug daily reminds me of the organization so I’m more likely to donate again; we’re all happy.

And that is something I can do. It is shopping and it is mailing and THAT IS SOMETHING I CAN DO. And I can do it NOT USING A PHONE. I don’t know if what I have is what you would want, but if it is, you can have it as your prize/treat/thanks for making a donation to one of these charities. And instead of the organization having to take the cost of the incentives out of the donation they receive, I will pay for that part.

I am very concerned that even after explaining it in the paragraph above, someone reading this idea will still misunderstand the concept and think that I am valuing the things I am offering at the donation amounts I am pairing them with—like, that I think a birthday card from me is WORTH $20. *HUGE PAINFUL CRINGE*. So I want to emphasize, perhaps OVERemphasize, that when NPR sends you a mug for donating $60, no one is saying the mug is worth $60: the mug is a little $6 thank-you gift for donating the $60 to a good cause. If NPR sent you something WORTH $60, it would eat up your entire donation and not make any sense for them to do that; if I sent you something WORTH your donation, we’d both be better off if I just sent the money directly to the charity and didn’t get anyone else involved. So that is all I am doing here: sending small gifts as thank-yous/incentives. The main difference is that I am not the organization receiving the money, so nothing gets taken out of your donation, only out of my bank account, which is nicer for the organizations: this is me buying you the $6 mug for your $60 contribution to the charity, so the charity doesn’t have to buy it.

Here is how it will work, if you want to participate: you will make a donation directly to RAICES or The ACLU or ActBlue Kids and Families at the Border. (DON’T SEND ANY MONEY TO ME.) [Edited to add: Amy in the comments section reminds us all to see if your employer has a matching program for donations.] You will email swistle at gmail dot com a screenshot of your donation confirmation, plus the name and mailing address you want to use for the thank-you token, if applicable. You will choose your item, and I will send it to you (or I will put it in a spreadsheet so I remember to send it to you at a later time, if applicable).

If you would like to donate a certain amount of money but would prefer a prize from a lower category (say for example you’re going to donate $100 but what you want is the Calendar Twins prize from the $75 category), you can do that. You could also donate $100 and choose Calendar Twins + Greeting Card, or choose FIVE Greeting Cards. Maybe it’s already obvious that you can do that. But I wanted to say it specifically, so that I don’t accidentally reduce someone’s donation with the prize categories.

Some rewards are limited; I’ll make a note of it here on this same post if they are no longer available.

As usual with giveaways, they’re a real bummer for anyone who doesn’t live in the same country as the giver-awayer (in this case, the United States of America), because international shipping prices make things impractical to the point of ridiculous. I know this sucks. There are only three that work internationally: the greeting card, the every-other-month postcard subscription, and the Swistle’s Favorite Bee Earrings. Or you can have the item shipped to someone you know in the U.S.

$20 donation option:

• Greeting card. I will send you (or someone you choose) a greeting card on the occasion of your choice: birthday, wedding, congratulations, Valentine’s Day, anniversary, Christmas, Easter, pretty much whatever though let’s not test the limits of that. I will write something Swistley in it; you can specify what you want, if you have a preference, though I’ll have override power on what I’m willing to write in my own handwriting and then sign. (But, like, if it’s something I said on the blog once and you liked it, that’s a likely Yes.) This one can be international.

$50+ donation option:

• Treats. I will fill the smallest flat-rate box (it’s quite small: 5-3/8 x 8-5/8 x 1-5/8) or a similarly small box (I’m still working with the logistics on this one) with your choice of homemade cookies, homemade brownies, or an assortment of store-bought treats from my own secret stash of favorites that I hide in a cabinet on my personal sunporch (DO NOT TELL THE CHILDREN). I will send it to you, or you can choose someone else for me to send it to. We might want to wait for cooler weather for shipping.

$75+ donation options:

• Calendar Twins! When I choose my annual wall calendar for the year after the usual long deliberation via blog post, I will have the same one shipped to you. It will be a surprise: I won’t say on the blog which calendar I’ve chosen, not until after all the calendar twins have received their calendars.

• Cloth napkin starter/supplement kit. I will send you eight assorted cloth napkins from my unnecessarily vast collection of brand-new extras. (I like a non-matching assortment, so I buy a four-pack of cloth napkins on clearance, put one or at most two from the pack into rotation at my house, and put the others in a box in the attic to use as replacements when napkins get lost/stained—and/or, more realistically, to wait for the executor of my estate to deal with them.) If you want to, you can mention preferences (colors you like, whether you prefer solid colors or patterns, etc.) and I’ll see what I can do, but let’s be frank about how hodge-podge the results are likely to be. (VERY.)

• Favorite Christmas book. Nearer Christmas, I will send you a used copy (new copies aren’t available anymore) of my favorite Christmas book: This Year It Will Be Different, by Maeve Binchy. I will write a gift inscription in it if you want—like, “To Marigold, Christmas 2019. I hope you will love this book as much as I do! Merry Christmas! Love, Swistle.” Or I can leave it unwritten-in, if you prefer. I can send it to you or someone else of your choice. My default will be to gift-wrap it in Christmas paper, but I can also leave it unwrapped, wrap it in birthday paper, wrap it in non-Christmassy wintery paper, etc.

• Favorite baby-naming book. I will send you a new copy of the latest edition (just came out this year) of my favorite baby names book: The Baby Name Wizard, by Laura Wattenberg. I will write a gift inscription in it if you want—like, “To Megan, July 2019. Happy baby-naming! Love, Swistle  P.S. Your friend Jen says USE MINERVA!” Or I can leave it unwritten-in, if you prefer. I can send it to you or someone else of your choice. If it’s a gift, let me know: I have some cute baby gift-wrap I haven’t had a chance to use yet.

$100+ donation options:

• Postcard subscription. I will send you one postcard every month for a year (twelve postcards total) from my unnecessarily vast collection. If you want to, you can tell me a list of your interests and I’ll see if I can find any postcards to match; it’s fun for me to search through my supply for any owls/wine/trees/medicine/books/stamps/flowers/cows/Christmas/Harry-Potter postcards. I can stamp/write them if you want, or if you prefer I’ll send them blank in an envelope so you can use them yourself.

• Postcard subscription INTERNATIONAL! I will send you one postcard every other month for a year (six postcards total) from my unnecessarily vast collection. If you want to, you can tell me a list of your interests and I’ll see if I can find any postcards to match; it’s fun for me to search through my supply for any owls/wine/trees/medicine/books/stamps/flowers/cows/Christmas/Harry-Potter postcards. I can stamp/write them if you want, or if you prefer I’ll send them blank in an envelope so you can use them yourself.

• Bee Twins! I have three favorite pairs of bee earrings and I have three different vinyl bee stickers on my car. I will send you (or someone you choose) your own pair of bee earrings matching a pair of mine and your own vinyl car sticker matching one of mine (you don’t have to put it on your car; it also works on laptops, notebooks, etc.). [Edited to add: OR, if you would prefer a bee Christmas ornament instead of the earrings, you can have ornament + sticker instead.] There may be a shipping delay, because I’ll get a break on shipping costs if I order multiple pairs of earrings / multiple stickers at the same time, so it would be worthwhile to wait a bit and order all together once I know how many people want this one. ALSO, one of my three favorite pairs of bee earrings ships from England, so it takes extra time. (If you need your Bee Twins kit earlier for any reason, though, like if it’s for a friend’s birthday and it’s coming right up, say so and I will see what I can do.)

• Bee Earring Twins INTERNATIONAL! My top favorite pair of bee earrings can be shipped internationally, it looks like. I checked half a dozen countries and they were all reasonable. So this would be JUST the bee earrings, NO bee sticker, but it looks like it can go anywhere!

$150+ donation option:

• Swistle pottery. I’ll send you (or someone you designate) one of the pieces of pottery (pictures on those posts) I made in my beginner wheel-thrown pottery classes. (The key word here is BEGINNER: these items are…let’s call them “charmingly imperfect.” Or “thick and uneven.” Or “frankly childish.”) You can have me surprise you with which one I send, or you can say which pieces you like best from the pictures and I will attempt to send you one of those—but some of the pieces have already been given as gifts (frankly: most of the best ones), and the seriously defective ones (big cracks, or entire bottom of piece missing) have been discarded, and others may go to people who beat you to the donation option, so if none of the ones you mention are available, then I’ll revert to the idea of surprising you. This option has a risk of breakage: I will package each piece well, but it is still possible it will break on the way, and we will accept that as the universe’s decree of what is for the best.

• Swistle skirt. Here’s the first mention of it, back in 2008! I was mourning that it was out of stock, but I’ve since found a number of them on eBay. All of them are in nice used condition; not perfect, but good enough that I was willing to spend money to acquire them. Here’s a picture of my niece wearing one many years ago. I have at least one of each of these sizes: 14, 12, 10, 8, 6x/7, 6, 5 [size 5s are gone], 4T [4T is gone], 24m, 18m, 12m, 6-9m; or if you don’t care what size, I’ll pick one for you; or you can say “I don’t care about EXACT size but would prefer a larger/smaller one.” I strongly suggest emailing me BEFORE making the donation to make sure I still have the size you want, and to reserve it, so that you don’t make a donation and then find out the one you wanted is gone.

$300+ donation options:

• Private baby name consultation. A single emailed response, similar in style and length to a post on the blog. (If you like, you may choose instead to have the consultation posted on the blog in order to get reader feedback as well.) A letter with fewer issues will have each issue addressed at greater length and in more detail than a letter with a larger number of issues; i.e., if you have twenty issues/questions/concerns, you will get a whole bunch of quite short answers and I’ll divide my total thinking time among them; if you have only one or two main issues/questions/concerns, each one will have a longer and more thorough answer with more time spent on each. (And keep in mind that I am not knowledgeable about baby name usage in other countries/languages, so if for example you live in France and you need a baby name that works for your U.S. and Spanish relatives, you may not get good value out of this.)

• Swistle care package. [Closed for now.] Timing/type up to you: birthday, Valentine’s Day, Christmas-stocking-items care package so you don’t have to fill your own stocking again this year, etc.; or you can ask for a randomly-timed delivery of care package so it’s a surprise. (If you want chocolate/melty things included, we should wait until fall at the earliest.) I can send to you or to someone you choose (one fun request so far: a care package for a new college student).

I have a good update on the situation with Rob’s summer job, which is that the professor who referred him to that job felt pretty terrible about how things went, and said he’d see if any of the projects he was currently working on and/or developing needed a computer/math kid, and one of the projects DID need such a person, and the funding for that project hadn’t quite firmed up but the professor went to the college and said under the circumstances could we perhaps get that going a little faster, and the college agreed and handled it immediately, and so now Rob will be working the rest of the summer on that project. Rob sent emails to several different college officials asking them to confirm his understanding of all the details of the job, which seemed a little salty but on the other hand there had been more than one remark of the “This is why we get things in writing” variety from various officials during the investigation, and those remarks rankled, considering there was nothing Rob did or failed to do that would have made a difference in this particular situation, and considering how even grown-ups with extensive experience (SUCH AS THE PROFESSOR AND THE COLLEGE OFFICIALS) were tricked by the other job. So a little salt seems appropriate.

I was sad to miss my road trip to go pick him up and bring him home (I’d already bought the Pringles and Junior Mints and Entenmann’s snack cakes), but happy to have things resolved so relatively quickly and without him having to work in fast food again (the grease smell in my washing machine and dryer!). And I’m happy to have him staying there for summer: I don’t feel he is very happy when he lives at home, and then that makes me a little sad even though I know it’s developmentally normal/appropriate, and so it is nicer for everyone to have him living semi-independently elsewhere.

I need to go look in the archives to see what Rob was like the summer before he went to college, because I’ve already forgotten, and I’d be interested to know if he was as bad-tempered and weird as William is being. William, usually my mild-mannered and funny de-escalator, has been doing things such as suddenly yelling a very loud swear word over something going wrong on a computer game, or storming around being unreasonable about how he got locked out when he didn’t have his keys with him (he absolutely should have had his keys with him), or sighing loudly because someone else’s laundry is in the dryer and he has to do ALL THE WORK of shoveling it into the waiting laundry basket.

I have had a very! busy! week or so, and it continues busy into the near future, but this particular day is non-busy.

I spent the weekend with some of my favorite people and we had a great time and stayed up late and I drank what might be called too much of a very yummy box rosé that was exactly the right thing for early summer.

I had to leave early the next day because I was taking William to an orientation session at his new college, and it had a separate optional parent orientation that I wasn’t sure I wanted to go to but then I decided what the heck, sounds like it could be fun. And it WAS fun: I got to sleep in a dorm room and eat in a college dining hall, and I got a soft-serve ice cream cone after both lunch and dinner each day, and there were walking tours of the surrounding city, and I met a ton of friendly parents and a few really annoying ones (“Um, I have a question about students in the HONORS program? I just want to say HONORS program a few times so that everyone realizes I must have an HONORS student?”), and there were some soothing informational presentations and some very funny ones, and also there was an “ask a student anything” seminar where parents were clearly venting some last-minute panic (one asked if we would be allowed to stay overnight in our students’ dorm rooms; another asked where the students would pick up their mail, which is not something parents need to research). I was reminded yet again of how much WALKING and STAIRS are involved in anything to do with college. I am still sore.

We returned late on one day, and the next day early I had to bring Elizabeth a couple of hours away to one of the bigger cities where people in our small town have to go to see most medical specialists. This was for her scoliosis: she’s been wearing the brace for awhile, and this was a check-in appointment to see how that was going. They asked her not to wear her brace the night before, and then she had an x-ray of her spine out of the brace, and an x-ray of her wrist; the one of her wrist was to check to see how close she is to being done growing, because once she’s done growing the brace won’t do any good.

And the x-rays showed good news. We had been warned that the brace was only to prevent the curve from getting worse, and that it most likely would not reduce the curve; we could hope for it to do so if we wanted to, but we shouldn’t be disappointed if it didn’t, because that was not the goal. But it HAD reduced the curve, from something in the high twenties to something in the mid-to-high teens. The doctor was in a celebratory mood over it. He said she should keep wearing the brace, but it would probably only be for another six months or so: the wrist x-ray showed she had just finished some rapid adolescent growth (she’s taller than me now, and I’m 5’8″) and was probably very close to being done growing. We’ll go back in six months and see how things look.

Then I had a get-together with another group of favorite people, my wine-and-appetizers group. I made Emily’s Party Bread, without the poppy seeds (I didn’t have any) and with some extra garlic and with parmesan liberally applied after everything else, and it was very good and I ate a whole lot of it along with personally consuming nearly an entire bottle of chardonnay over the course of the evening (I got a ride home), and it was a wonderful time and I highly recommend this “friends” thing if you haven’t checked it out recently.

Today all I have to do is take Henry for his allergy shot. He’s been getting weekly shots for eight months now, and I am not sure they are helping at all. If the allergist were to say “OMG. I just realized I have been giving him the totally wrong shots!! This stuff is for allergies he doesn’t have!!,” I would completely believe it. But the ENT doctor was pleased with the reduction of swelling/color inside his nose, so I guess the shots must be working to some extent. We persevere in part because with allergy shots there is the potential for permanent allergy reduction even after the shots are long over, and I had that happy result myself after getting shots for a couple of years, and so my hope is that what he’s doing is habit sniffing (he is prone to tics, as is his eldest brother) and that the actual allergies ARE being reduced, and then we will only have to work on the habit sniffing, which may self-extinguish please god otherwise it is going to drive us insane.

Another upside of the shots is that he is now completely chill about getting shots. He used to get very, very anxious before his annual flu shot, and he says he is looking forward to not being anxious about it this year.

Next up is Edward’s Remicade infusion, which takes us all day. Most of the time is travel (it’s another trip to a big and distant city), but there is also a very long time waiting for the hospital pharmacy to mix the medication, which they won’t do until the IV is in place, because the medicine is so expensive. I have never worked in a hospital pharmacy, but I have worked in a regular retail pharmacy, and that experience does not give me insight as to why it usually takes two full hours for the pharmacy to mix the medicine. I do know a pharmacy can get very backed up, but at 8:30 in the morning it is hard to understand how they could be THAT backed up, while a child sits with an IV in place waiting for medicine. And I know that an unusual medication can take extra time while the pharmacist looks into the correct mixing methods, but this infusion takes place in a clinic that does 1-3 Remicade infusions per day, so this is routine for this location. One nurse said jokingly that the pharmacy staff hates her and that’s why they make us wait; at first I took this as a total joke, but recently I’ve been wondering if a feud could indeed be the explanation. More likely, though, the explanation is far, far simpler: understaffing. At the pharmacy where I used to work, we were run off our feet and desperately trying to reduce wait times, and then management would come in and say please cut 20 staff hours per week, and then we were down to one technician on a Saturday morning, and giving one-hour wait times we still couldn’t meet. So. That’s probably it for the hospital pharmacy too, and I should feel sorry for them instead of critical.

THEN, this weekend I have to go pick up Rob. I don’t have a satisfying explanation for what I am about to tell you, which is that his summer job (which was through his college though not with his college, and included room and board at his college) turned out to be some sort of scam at worst or mistake at best; the students are currently helping administration with an investigation into what happened and HOW it happened. He worked for four weeks, and won’t be paid for that time, and meanwhile he has missed out on other possible summer jobs. The college is apologetic, and they say the students won’t be asked to reimburse for room/board because it wasn’t the students’ fault, but also could they please leave by the end of the week. I am so disappointed for Rob, and also feeling frantic about his chances of finding another summer job, and also feeling upset at the four weeks of lost income: we are about to have TWO kids in college, and every dollar feels very very important. Well. Nothing to be done about it, and I will enjoy the road trip, and I am very much hoping at some point there will be some details helpful to understanding this situation.

Rob called and told me this news while I was at William’s college orientation. I was between dinner (chicken-and-rice! tater tots! fruit cup! diet Coke with good crushed ice! soft-serve cone!) and a walking tour of the surrounding city. And Paul was texting me questions like do I know where we put the 25-foot plumbing snake, no reason, just asking, and also was Elizabeth’s guidance counselor appointment at the middle school or at the high school? (They went to the middle school; the appointment was at the high school. Also the kitchen sink was badly clogged again, because Paul put all his salsa-making trimmings down the disposal. Which is exactly what badly clogged the sink LAST time.)

If, like me, you have found yourself flailing, the last 2-3 years in particular, for ways to do something, ANYTHING, that might counteract some tiny measure of social harm with social good, then I will pass along this situation I saw on Twitter from @ChicagoLeah:

For the first tweet, I linked to the tweet itself so you can go directly to the thread on Twitter if you want to; for the second two, I linked to the Amazon wishlist in question.

I found this one especially satisfying because I am now 2 for 2 with college-bound children who are not interested in getting all excited about which bedding sets and which color towels. (I have high hopes for four years from now when getting Elizabeth ready.) Choosing from this wishlist gratified my shopping/choosing/decorating desires without having to involve an eye-rolling child. Plus, I got to choose what MY choice would be, which was fun.

If you want to do this too, make sure you choose the Jill Franklin address when you check out: my Amazon checkout process has been all wonky recently, and while it used to default to the wishlist address, this time it defaulted to mine and I had to specifically choose the one for the wishlist. It would be such a pain to get a bedding set delivered to your own house and then have to figure out what to do next.

While I have you here, let me tell you about a Facebook problem I am having, and maybe you have had to solve this and know how to do it. I have my regular personal Facebook account, but I also have one for Swistle Thistle; I use the Swistle Thistle one mostly so that people can get new posts in their Facebook feed if that’s how they like to follow blogs (we’ve all been adrift since the disappearance of Google Reader). I pretty much never go there or interact there or use it for anything else.

Anyway, apparently it had been too long a time since I paid a visit to that account, and I got locked out. Facebook wants me to confirm my identity before it’ll let me back in, and clearly I should have set up one of those “have a friend verify you” situations, but I DIDN’T, OKAY, FINE, I PROMISE TO DO IT IF I EVER GET BACK IN, and now the only other way is for Facebook to show me photos of my Swistle Thistle friends and I identify them by name. But…like, this is set up as a page account or whatever they call it, and people “like” the page rather than “friending” and so it accepts all follows whether I know the people or not, and in many cases I know people as their online identities and not by their actual names. So I failed the test a couple of times and then it wouldn’t let me take it anymore. There’s no workaround that I can see: no “Hey, actually this is a page account and so of course I don’t know the names of everyone following the account, but that doesn’t mean I’m a scammer.”

Oh, they also say I can fix this by posting a photo of myself?? But how on earth would that confirm my identity, and is there any answer that isn’t disturbing?

I realize this is not a common problem. But if you HAPPEN to know how to get around this, I would so appreciate it. Right now anything I post to the blog won’t show up on the Facebook feed.

Because of having a lot of kids, I meet a lot of other moms. Many of them I recognize from years of seeing them in passing at events but I don’t know why specifically they’re familiar to me: were our eldests in preschool together? maybe her kid was in track with my kid? maybe our kids are in band together? maybe we both just have kids in the school system so we see each other around. Sometimes it gradually happens that we get to know each other: we happen to sit near each other at an event and we chat a little, and then later that year we’re standing in line next to each other and we chat a little more, and then finally I know whose mom that is and how we know each other, and if I LIKE her that’s when I come to the big decision, and that’s whether or not to send a Facebook friend request.

I put up a poll yesterday because I was wondering which of two particular kinds of anxiety people have in similar situations. (I know there could be lots of other kinds involved, but these were the specific two I was wondering about.) The poll isn’t over yet, but here’s how it looks right now; I’ll try to remember to update this screenshot when the poll ends:

Edited to add: Here is the final result, which is almost exactly the same:

I was wondering if most people, when they send a Facebook friend request to a casual acquaintance, feel more anxiety about being REJECTED, or about being accepted but the other person didn’t really want to. Like, when you send the friend-request, which outcome makes you feel more stressed to think about: the other person doesn’t accept your friend-request? or the other person DOES accept it, but with a groan because they felt obligated to do so?

I know we can’t know what the other person is thinking/feeling. Like, we don’t know if they didn’t accept the friend-request because they’re never on Facebook, or because they only use Facebook for close friends/family, or because they didn’t see the request for some reason, or because they don’t know our name and our profile photo is of our cat or some flowers so they didn’t recognize us, or what; and we don’t know if someone who DOES accept the friend-request did so with joy, with a groan, or with the same mild “maybe it would be nice to know each other better” feeling in which it was sent. And I’m not saying any of this is anything we OUGHT to worry about: we can make our own decisions and let the other person make theirs, nothing ventured nothing gained, this could be considered a small-potatoes kind of situation, they can just mute us if they don’t want to see us in their feed, we are adults and this doesn’t have to be a big deal, maybe none of us should be on Facebook anymore anyway, etc. So all I’m asking is what YOU FEEL when you send the request: if you’re nervous, what is it that makes you nervous?

(If you’re NOT nervous, super! I know it can be tempting at times like these to express incredulity at the perceived silliness of other people’s feelings, which would only make the anxious people feel worse and so I value your restraint.)

My own anxiety is that the other person will have a heart-sink feeling when they see my request, but that they will accept it anyway because they feel too stressed about saying no, knowing they’ll continue to run into me, with me knowing they didn’t accept. I can talk myself through it enough to send the request anyway, but I do still wince. I don’t worry much that my request will be rejected.

But currently the poll shows there are more people whose main anxiety is that their request will be rejected. This is very interesting to me, and I’m thinking about it a lot: what is the difference between people with one anxiety and people with the other anxiety?

I wondered if it might be tied to the way each person feels when they get a friend-request from someone they don’t want to be friends with: that is, maybe people who accept friend-requests they don’t want to accept would also be the people who worry that their own request will be unwanted and accepted, while people who reject would be the ones who worry about being rejected. But I tend to reject unwanted friend-requests, and yet my anxiety is about being unwanted-but-accepted, so that doesn’t line up.

Well, or maybe it does: maybe the actual anxiety for those who worry about causing pressure is that other people might not have the same accept/reject system we have: lots of anxieties come from a fear of miscommunication, and this seems like it could tie into that. Maybe this poll represents a choice between “fear of rejection” and “fear of miscommunication”? But I’d say there’s more to it than that; I’m just not sure WHAT more there is to it.

What do you think? Which anxiety better describes you, and what do you think makes the difference between which people feel which of the two kinds?

William told me yesterday afternoon that he was supposed to wear “business casual” for a senior event that evening. He does not own anything that is not jeans or a t-shirt. I was somewhat sympathetic, because he seemed pretty anxious about it and I can identify with pre-event clothing anxiety, but on the other hand it seemed unlikely that he had only just been given that information that same day.

Still, I had to take Henry for his weekly allergy shot, and that route takes me right past a Goodwill, and frankly there are few things I find as thrilling as a sudden Clothing Emergency of this sort (I still think with fond thrill of when Elizabeth, age approximately 3, got carsick on the way to Target and I “had to” buy her replacement clothing), so I stopped to see if they had any polos or buttondowns. I found several shirts that looked nice and were also cheap, so I bought them. (One of the nice things about having so many kids is that even if he didn’t like any/all of the shirts, it’s likely SOMEONE will get use out of them.) One of the shirts was pink: he’d mentioned that “someone at school” had told him he looked good in pink, and I love when guys wear pink (while also looking forward to a day when guys wearing pink is no more remarkable than guys wearing blue or grey or white). And he did choose the pink one, and he did look nice in it.

Why was I telling you this rather dull story? Oh, I remember! It is because as I was checking out, the clerk asked if I qualified for the senior citizen discount. This is the first time this has happened to me, and it is not a milestone I savored.

I have heard of senior citizens who won’t ask for the discount because they don’t want to admit they’re that age, and I am not that kind of vain: I will be piping right up and asking for it. But that is so far in my future I have not even started WONDERING about it yet, so it is not pleasing to have someone volunteering the information that I look like I could qualify NOW. It was a little tempting to say yes and take the discount as compensation for my injured feelings.

Coincidentally, my friend Meredith ALSO got asked this question yesterday; she too is many, many years from even the lowest most-generous edge of qualifying. As she put it: “It isn’t like carding for alcohol where you ask almost regardless of age to be on the safe side. In fact MAYBE DO NOT EVER ASK.” SERIOUSLY. If I get carded when I am clearly over the age of 21, the worst thing that happens is that I feel foolishly flattered and later try to work the incident casually into conversation. Getting senior-citizen carded is NOT THAT SAME KIND OF THING.

While I have you here, I will finish the story about the shirts. William’s favorite of the shirts I bought was a pale aqua color, and I noticed only after he tried it on that it had giant bleach splatters up the back. This is one reason that even though Goodwill says they want ALL clothes donated (because they can make scrap/rag bags out of the ones that aren’t good), I generally throw away ruined clothes: my own repeated shopping experience suggests Goodwill must only scrap/rag the items that don’t sell, rather than sorting out the ruined stuff before putting it out on the racks. I know it’s my own responsibility to check each item of clothing carefully before I buy it, but for whatever reason I don’t always think to do it, and so I have sighed over quite a few broken zippers, missing novelty buttons, holes, and now bleach splatters. It’s no big deal: I can just consider it a small donation to Goodwill. But there are a lot of people it WOULD be a big deal to, and I don’t want them despairing over money wasted on my broken zippers and missing novelty buttons and bleach spots.

And so I was about to put the bleach-splashed shirt in the trash, but then William jokingly suggested we could Pinterest it up by adding additional artsy splatters (he was teasing me for this shirt), and I declined this idea but it reminded me of ANOTHER shirt I had long ago that got splattered with bleach, and I just bleached the rest of it and had a nice white shirt (which, yes, got holes in it pretty quickly, but I got maybe a half-dozen wearings out of it before that happened). There was nothing to lose, and so I bleached the aqua shirt, and all the aqua came out quickly and easily, and now it is a nice white shirt for the next time someone in this house needs Business Casual.

Recently we had two situations where something patriotic happened and I went with what I thought was the right response, but then felt very uncertain and worried I’d looked silly. So I did what I mean to do EVERY year, and I LOOKED IT UP. Not that I will necessarily remember those answers for the future.

First situation: school band played the national anthem before a concert. My response: stand up, hand over heart, sing along to the parts I remember. Part I was uncertain about: hand over heart. Everyone who was able to do so stood up, which made that part easy, but a lot of people WEREN’T doing hand-over-heart and I was worried I was overdoing it and/or looking foolish; I wondered if maybe hand-over-heart was just for the pledge and I was mis-applying it.

Second situation: Memorial Day parade, flag was carried past. My response: stand up, hand over heart, hiss at the children and Paul to stand up. Part I was uncertain about: all of that. Also, there were multiple flags scattered throughout the parade: did I need to stand for all of them? keep hand over heart for all of them? I started feeling silly. We were in a sparsely-populated part of the parade route, which made it harder to look to others for cues, but a few people nearby were sitting in lawn chairs and didn’t stand, and others were already standing anyway and didn’t do hand-over-heart, so I felt conspicuous and wondered if I was overdoing it.

My source for information, when I looked it up: Emily Post: Flag Etiquette. (I prefer Judith Martin / Miss Manners, but I had a harder time finding a good online source for her views on flag etiquette, and I wanted something I could link to.)

The conclusion, based on that source: I was not wrong. For the national anthem, civilian citizens are supposed to stand if able to do so, face the flag, and put hand over heart: hand-over-heart is the civilian equivalent of the military salute, which is something I didn’t know. If you’re, say, volunteering at an elementary school, and they start the pledge over the intercom, you’re supposed to face the nearest flag (or the intercom, if no flag is visible), stand up if able to do so, and put your hand over your heart. You don’t have to pledge/sing, you only have to stay quiet if you’re not pledging/singing; you MAY pledge/sing if you’d like to.

For a passing flag in a parade, citizens are supposed to stand, face the flag, and salute (military- or civilian-style as applicable). According to the VFW Auxiliary, this only needs to be done for the FIRST flag of the parade, and not for every single flag scattered throughout the parade, and not for little hand-held flags that people are waving for fun as opposed to carrying ceremonially. That makes sense to me; otherwise, a person would have to remain standing and saluting throughout the entire parade, and that cuts into the cheering/clapping time.

On my recent road trip, I was switching through radio stations as usual (even if you find a good one, you soon lose it to geography), and came upon a station that was doing a show at that moment with two female DJs and no male DJs, and it was a shock to my ears. I am well familiar with the one-female-one-male-DJ format. I am well familiar with the two-or-more-male-DJs format. I am well familiar with groupings of one or two male DJs plus one or two female DJs, or one single DJ doing their own particular radio program. But I don’t remember EVER turning to a radio station that was doing a show with (1) more than one DJ and ALSO (2) none men.

I wish I’d found out what station it was, but I lost it before they said who they were. It sounded very indie. I wonder if it was some local/independent/college station? It demonstrated so clearly yet another way that we think of men as the default and women as the optional add-ons, and don’t even notice it’s like that until it’s done a different way and seems shocking. I never notice it when there are two male DJs; it just seems normal. But hearing two female DJs talking to each other was STARTLING.

To dramatically change the subject: I have been giving the kids small side-dish smoothies sometimes with dinner, as a good way of getting a better variety of fruits and vegetables into picky eaters. I have been buying small $3 packages of fresh spinach leaves to add to these smoothies but then, because I only make smoothies a couple of times per week, and sometimes there is an unfortunate gap between grocery shopping day and the next batch, I often end up throwing away a painful percentage of each bag. I was buying frozen broccoli at the grocery store this morning (not for smoothies) and my eyes fell upon FROZEN SPINACH. I HAD FORGOTTEN ALL ABOUT FROZEN SPINACH. I have been buying frozen fruits, but I forgot I could also buy frozen spinach! I don’t want frozen spinach for, like, SALADS, but it’s PERFECT for smoothies!! …Or so I hope; I haven’t actually tried it yet. But I feel so sure it will be!

I have the uneasy feeling that there was something I was supposed to do this morning. I’m hoping it is just the lingering memory that I need to order Paul some new shoes, because I already did that. I also ordered these for myself:

(image from Converse.com)

I almost didn’t, because I balked at the price even on sale, so when I opened the order confirmation later there was a little moment where I couldn’t remember which way I’d gone on that decision, and then I saw them in the email and my heart leapt up with happiness.

Last night I was folding laundry and making a mental note that Paul needed new shoes and that I should order some in the morning, and I thought for a little while about the life Paul lives. Like, I’m not commenting on whether or not it’s fair, or claiming that it doesn’t fall within agreed-upon labor divisions, or saying that I would be powerless to change it, or saying that he couldn’t come up with similar thoughts about the way I live—but still I wonder, what must it be like to NEVER THINK ABOUT YOUR SOCKS? Like, not only do clean ones appear without you taking any action, but OLD ones disappear and NEW ones appear without you taking any action. You might notice the supply getting a little old/holey, or sometimes it might dwindle to the point where you start to get a little nervous about having enough socks for the week, but you never actually run out and you don’t even have to think about what brand you wear and whether or not it’s on sale or whether any particular sock is ready to be thrown out. WHAT WOULD THAT BE LIKE.

What must it be like to never think about scheduling appointments for the pediatrician, the dentist, the orthodontist, the eye doctor, the various specialists for Crohn’s disease and scoliosis and wisdom teeth and allergies? What must it be like to see the insurance rejections come in with exasperating regularity (“This time we’re claiming we didn’t get the referral, so you get to make that whole batch of phone calls all over again!”), but YOUR only part of the suffering is having to listen to someone talk about how frustrating it is to deal with them? What is it like to be able to confidently go to work without ever worrying about the impact of the children’s schedules or illnesses? What’s it like to be able to schedule a trip without having to make any arrangements for your absence at home?

What do you suppose it’s like to take off your work shirt, onto which you have spilled Crystal Light, and just drop it into the laundry, knowing it will appear back in your closet stain-free but without giving any thought to the process of noticing the stain, treating the stain, buttoning down the pocket flaps because otherwise they get crinkly during laundering, putting it in the washer with another kind of stain remover and also maybe using the soak cycle, remembering to check to make sure the stain is out before putting it in the dryer, re-treating the stain, re-washing, re-checking, drying, remembering to take it out promptly so it doesn’t wrinkle, hanging it up? What is it LIKE to live that way, I wonder, perhaps just sighing a little because you find your pocket flaps buttoned and you wanted them unbuttoned? I think it must be like being very, very rich.