Untimely Ripped

If you’ve had a child in the last ten years or so - or rather, if you’ve seriously contemplated having a child for more than about fifteen minutes of your life - there’s one fact you’ve probably heard: Caesarean rates in the first world, especially in the US, are too high. Every few months brings along another article like this one, deploring the Caesarean rate and explaining (1) why it’s so high and (2) what doctors and patients should be doing to solve it, and aren’t. In many circles, unmedicated natural childbirth is held to be the best possible birthing experience — “our birthright” according to one midwife — and women who end up having a Caesarean for causes which aren’t immediately and obviously life-threatening for the baby (for instance, prolapsed cord) quite often feel that they’ve somehow been denied a good birth, or that they have let themselves or the baby down. On Plans, we were discussing how “birth is not a competition”, but human nature is such that some people will inevitably regard it as one; to have had an unmedicated birth somehow gives you a head start in the Good Parenting Stakes, and to have had a Caesarean shows lamentable weakness.

Cell Phone Dependency

An interesting and frightening thing happened this weekend. My brother lost his cell phone. Or rather, my brother lost his cell phone, failed to show up at two or three places he said he was going to be, and no one heard from him for nearly three days.

As it turns out, it had fallen out of his pocket in someone else’s car and then had the battery die, so the other person was driving it around for a couple of days all unsuspecting. And he didn’t show up at his previously scheduled events because the Clinton campaign* called the restaurant where he works at the last minute to schedule a huge dinner, which he then got roped into working even though he was supposed to be off that day, and he couldn’t tell anyone because he didn’t have his phone.

But the whole thing was kind of scary, because it made me realize I have no other way to reach him. I sort of kind of have an email address for him, but I’m never sure if it’s the address he’s still using any more, because he’s not much of an emailer. (At least, not to his geeky sister.) Since he works at a restaurant, he doesn’t really have a “work phone,” (though my parents did go to the restaurant and leave him a physical note-style message when they got a call from the person who did have the phone.) I don’t know the phone numbers of any of his friends. Conversely, I suspect he doesn’t know my phone number without looking it up in his own phone. Hence, the loss of his cell phone pretty much meant that my brother fell off the face of the earth.

Blatant or Latent?

Last night, Mark and I went out to dinner in Durham, NC. We went to the area of a few blocks of trendy independent restaurants, bookstores, and retailers intent on appealing to cool college students. We parked in a well-maintained public parking lot, surrounded by a very upscale apartment complex on one side, the shops on the other side of the street, and the swanky restaurant where Mark’s company had its holiday party on a third side. Given daylight savings time, it was still broad daylight.

As we got out of the car and started to cross the parking lot, we were stopped by a 30s-ish white guy in an expensive SUV. He rolled down his window and said, “Excuse me, can you tell me if this area is safe? I don’t know anything about Durham.” I honestly think it took me a couple of seconds to be able to answer him.

To say that he knew nothing about Durham was obviously an overstatement, because he clearly knew just enough about Durham to have 1) found his way to the trendy part of town, and 2) formed a very poor and stereotyped opinion of the city. And just to be clear, he wasn’t asking if this was a safe place to park his car. He was asking if he was going to get mugged or shot.

The Placebo Price Effect

On my way home from work, I heard this story on Marketplace explaining a new drug placebo study done recently. From the story:

Participants thought they were testing a new drug for pain relief. In fact, everybody got placebos. Only one difference. Some were told the pills cost $2.50, while others were told they only cost a dime. Dan Ariely, author of “Predictably Irrational,” was the lead researcher.

DAN ARIELY: What we found was that the expensive pill reduced pain to a much larger degree than the cheap pills.

This could be significant for the $59 billion generic drug industry. The study helps explain why patients generally prefer brand-name drugs, and why consumers think they are more effective than generic drugs, even though they have the same active ingredients. Glen Melnick is a health economics professor at USC.

Stash

I knit. I have an account on Ravelry, a self-described “knit and crochet community”, and I go to a weekly stitch-n-bitch to hang out and chat knitting with other knitters. I design knitted goods and publish the patterns. I am a knitter.

Among knitting circles, a collection of yarn in one’s possession (butnot on one’s person) is known as a “stash”. Until recently, I thought of my stash as like a yarn waiting room. Yarns hang out in the stash,waiting for me to knit them into finished objects (”FOs”).

A stash begins innocently enough. You finish a hat and have a quarter ball left over. It waits in a drawer with your needles,eventually gathering friends from that sweater you bought an extra ball for, the yarn for your mom’s holiday gift, some nice yarn to add stripesto a sweater (but decided you liked better plain), some gorgeous yarn you got on megasale and think might be gloves someday, etc…

Recently, though, I’ve become aware of a more sinister side to the stash.

Look Your Age

After all that thinking I did about societal expectations surrounding looking professional, I found myself also wondering about a related question. How does a person go about looking their age? This is something that comes up a lot on shows like “What Not to Wear,” in which they frequently chastise the person getting the wardrobe makeover for not dressing appropriately for their age, be it by dressing too young or too old. I often get comments (regardless of what I’m wearing) that I look “so young;” by contrast, Mark is often thought to be older than his actual age (and he goes to work in a t-shirt and jeans every day!) So how do we, as a society, go about determining what the archetype of a certain age looks like? TV, ads, general life experience?

I wish someone would tell me, because I’m apparently an outlier, and it’s getting annoying. If I am a person and I am the age I am, how can I not look my age?

And if it turns out that most of the people I know have this problem, how has the overall picture of what a person’s age is supposed to look like become so skewed?

-posted by Dana

What is professional hair, anyway?

I’ve been thinking about my hair a lot lately. Partly this is because it’s got split ends, and I need to have it trimmed. But then I started thinking about how much I should have it cut. Should it be just a trim, or should I really get it cut?

I’ve pretty much always had long hair. Very long. By the end of my third year of college, it was getting to the point that I could sit on the ends when it was down. I got it cut short for the first time after I returned from my semester abroad, in a sort of “I have the confidence to do something really different now!” act of independence. They cut off 25″ all in one go. Then I grew it out again for 2.5 years, only to get it cut short again in the middle of my second miserable year of grad school, this time with the hope that it would symbolize some sort of grand turning point for many things in my life then. It didn’t work, but they did take off 12″ that time, and it did mean that while I remained depressed for the rest of year, I didn’t have to worry too much about brushing my hair.

Anyway, I’ve recovered since then, and I’ve been letting my hair grow again ever since, so it’s back down to almost my waist. And I like it. So why would I want to cut it? Why do I sort of feel like I’m expected to cut it?

Some time last year, at whatever time of year it was that the local paper decided most new college grads would be seriously looking for job interviews or going to their first real jobs, there was an article about “how to look professional.” Most of it was dedicated to discussion of different levels of casual vs. formal professional clothing, but two things stood out to me from their suggestions for women:

What makes a role model?

I’m reading Veronica Chambers’ Kickboxing Geishas: How Modern Japanese Women Are Changing Their Nation, and I just came to a part where Chambers describes the unexpected reaction she got when asking young Japanese college women about their role models. Coming from the US, she had clearly been thinking of it as a very standard question, along the lines of “Where do you want to be in five years?,” and so on. But instead, she ended up writing this:

The most obvious question to ask, when you are reporting on women and their changing roles in society, is: Who are your role models? Even if the answer is pat - “my mother,” “Hillary Clinton,” “Maya Angelou” - it tells you something about the woman and how she thinks of herself. Perhaps because Japan is not, by nature, a country of individualists, the role model question gets a lot of blank stares. “I don’t have any role models,” a girl named Gaga tells me at Sacred Heart [University]. “My parents taught me when I was small, you can choose your own way.” Akiko, another student, says, “I think I don’t have a certain person, but an image: someone who’s independent, strong, and caring.” I wonder, too, if it is because the national culture is so private, that it is hard to develop the kind of admiration and deep-seated affiliation that one feels for a role model: be it a senior employee at your company or someone you see on TV.

I wonder how many women at [Canon executive] Masako Nara’s company know how important it was for her to be called by her maiden name and the deal she struck with a coworker to make it happen. How many of Satako’s female coworkers know how uncomfortable she was at the late night drinking parties that were once part of her job, and how relieved she was to get more international clients who prefer lunch to dinner for work-related socializing? My sense, again and again, was that women told me stories they did not share with their colleagues, or even sometimes with their friends. It occurs to me that in order for someone to be a role model, they must reveal not only their strengths, but their vulnerabilities. It’s in the interplay between the two, and how they overcome the latter, that we find something worthy of admiring.

-Chambers, 84

Eyes wide shut?

This weekend, we got to see a taiko drum performance. Despite some difficulty making it out the door in time, a required stop for gas, and driving in freezing rain turning to snow, we made it more or less on time. Unfortunately, we ended up with seats that left something to be desired. Entering when we did, we ended up sitting behind the sound board in the theater. Normally, this wouldn’t have been so bad, except that the person operating the sound board was also filming the performance, and spent most of it standing in front of us in order to operate the camera. Perhaps the reason she was able to spend all of her time filming was because it was a drum performance, and the sound equipment was completely unnecessary. It looked like it was turned on, but it wasn’t actually in use.

Even when they were playing quietly, the drummers were entirely audible even from the back of the theater. When they really put their weight into it, I could feel the sound rumbling through my chest and vibrating up through the floor into my feet. It was exactly the effect that people with very expensive sound systems in their cars try to duplicate at stoplights, without any of the distortion that usually makes a mockery of such attempts. As I sat, looking at the back of the camera operator and feeling the sound roll through me, I spent some time thinking about how I tend to experience these kinds of events.

Ingredients of Morality?

A recent New York Times magazine article, The Moral Instinct, touches on issues near and dear to my Unitarian Universalist heart; different ideas of morality. The article discusses how human beings are somewhat hardwired to have a moral code. However, just what that morality can entail can vary wildy from culture to culture, but most ideas of cultural wrongs can be boiled down to violations of a few different kinds of taboos: