“Motherhood is a trap for women”

The title of this post is the chapter title of a book by a French author named Corinne Maier, who has written a best-selling book extolling 40 reasons not to have children. I haven’t read the book, but there was a fascinating article about it in the Globe and Mail last week.

Maier rails against France’s equivalent of the culture of the soccer mom, coining the term mèredeuf: “French speakers recognize it instantly as a contraction of mère de famille, the traditional phrase for a full-time mother, a housewife, a woman who makes mothering her career. But the contraction turns it into something that sounds like a combination of merde and oeuf, carrying the implication that these patriotic mega-moms are ‘egg-shitters.'”

As I was reading the article, I started out thinking I’d write a post refuting her 40 reasons against having children one by one, but I think that might end up somewhere between tedious and futile. (Her reasons not to have children are laid out as chapter titles, and appear at the very end of the Globe article. They include the title to this post, plus such pithy advice as:

Don’t become a travelling feeding bottle.

You will inevitably be disappointed by your child.

A child will kill the fond memories of your childhood.

To be a mother, or to succeed: You must choose.

Matter of fact, I like to think this whole blog is a sort of refutation of her theses; that blog demonstrates that motherhood can be fulfilling while it exasperates, uplifting even though it demoralizes, and it doesn’t have to mean the end of an otherwise productive life outside the home or a functioning intellect.

Maier, a practicing psychaitrist, is herself is a mother of two children, ages 10 and 13. She seems able to separate her criticism of the state of motherhood from criticism of her own children, but I can’t help but feel sorry for her kids. If she truly believes what she has written (which is not a given, mind you, as she seems to have a knack for writing inflamatory texts) then one can’t help but extrapolate some latent dissatisfaction with her children, of which they will inevitably become aware.

Of the whole article about her book, the quote that intrigued me the most was her assessment of why people choose to have children:

“Generally speaking, people who have children have them for the wrong reasons,” she says. “They have them because they’re afraid of being alone, and they want to grasp a tiny bit of immortality. And anyway, we never get that immortality. You are doing something that is very foolish for society just because you have believed something that is not true.”

Now this is an interesting question. Why did you have children? Was it always in your grand plan? Was it something you did because that’s what everybody does after they finish school and get married and establish a career and buy a house? Did you do it because somebody else wanted you to do it?

To me, it was always a given, an irrefutable fact of my life. The only thing I ever wanted to be was a mother; everything else was just a means to that end. I’ll even risk tripping over the raw edges of hyperbole by admitting that I believe having children is my higher calling, and my greater purpose in life. Granted, it’s not the only reason I’m here, but I like to think it’s a large part of it. The irony is that I’ve cultivated a reasonably successful career on the side and that the path my life has taken has precluded me from being a full-time stay-at-home mom — but I genuinely don’t think it’s diminished my ability to be the best possible mother to my boys.

Maybe seven or eight years ago, I was seeing a psychologist for a while. I had some shit to work through, left over from some of the crappy things my ex-husband said and did. One day, after I had been speaking about my childhood, the psychologist told me that when I speak about my childhood, there is a look of bliss that comes over me, and that one of the best things I could do was to raise a bunch of children the way my parents had raised me.

So I did. And I will. And while I won’t profess to be loving every minute of it, I’m pretty sure I could come up with at least 400 reasons why having children is the best possible thing I could have done with my life.

Error messages – sorry!

Sigh. I don’t know what happened, but please ignore the extraneous error messages and wonky formatting.

I did an SQL db backup last night, but everything was fine later in the evening. According to Google, I’m getting the funky messages because of a disk size problem at my host’s end. I’ve raised a ticket, so hopefully I can get it fixed today… although I really don’t have any time to be puddling around with it this week!

Argh!!!

Anyway, the blog functionality seems to be working, and you should be able to comment and click through as usual.

Anybody recommend a good hosting service? I’m losing patience quickly here.

10-pages-in book review: Everything’s Eventual

It’s a bit of a challenge to write the usual 10-pages-in book review when we’re talking about a book of short stories. I’m about half way through this book, and I’ve consumed (it’s a deliberate word choice; reading Stephen King is a literary gastronomic delight for me) a little bit less than half of the stories and the other half remain unexplored territory. But I really wanted to write a post about this book because of the excitement and sense of discovery it has inspired in me. The book, by the way, is Stephen King’s Everything’s Eventual, a collection of short stories released way back in 2002.

When the movie 1408 came out this past summer and the ads trumpeted that it was based on a Stephen King story, I was perplexed. I only saw the trailer, but it sure didn’t look like any Stephen King story I’d ever read, and I was pretty sure I’d read all the ones that had been anthologized.

When they started advertising for the DVD release a couple of weeks ago, it piqued my curiousity again and I went looking for the story on which the movie was based. I stood for a long time in Chapters, flipping through the pages of Everything’s Eventual and reading a paragraph or two out of most of the stories, and the more I read, the more convinced I became that I was holding in my hand a whole collection of Stephen King stories that I hadn’t read before. I was beyond delighted and bought the book on the spot.

That evening, I started reading it on the bus on the way home and sure enough – I recognized the second story, a rather hair-raising story about a young boy who meets the devil while fishing on the banks of the river near his home. It was the description of the devil that triggered it for me, a pallid but otherwise ordinary fellow in a black suit who just happened to have deep flaming pits where his eyes should have been. No doubt, I had read that story before. But the first story was only vaguely familiar and the third story was definitely virgin territory. So either some of the stories were anthologized elsewhere, or I got interrupted the first time I had the book and never got back to it. Since it would have been issued around the time Tristan was a newborn, I suppose that’s conceivable, but just barely.

All this to say, I am again beyond delighted to be savouring an entire book of undiscovered (for me, at least) Stephen King stories. The stories so far run the gamut from melancholy but only vaguely odd (“The Death of Jack Hamilton”) to creepy (“Everything’s Eventual”) to genuinely frightening (“The Man in the Black Suit.”) Now that “1408” is out on DVD, I’m debating whether to read the story first or watch the movie first. Ordinarily, I’d choose the story, but I do love me some John Cusack.

Aside from the simple joy of reading good stories, I love this anthology because it’s basically an annotated version. King’s introduction to the book acts as a sort of elegy for the short story as a literary form, and each story is introduced by a few paragraphs that explain how he conceived and realized it. I’m absolutely fascinated by the processes of writing, from inspiration to creation, and am especially intrigued by Stephen King’s insights. Much as I enjoy the stories themselves, I think I enjoy each snippet of insight into the process just as much.

As if finding a whole, thick anthology of fresh Stephen King isn’t enough of a gift, I’ve made another discovery. As I’ve said before, I’ve long been a Stephen King stalker fan. There were a few books back in the 1990s that weren’t very good – I’m thinking Rose Madder, Gerald’s Game – and that seemed more like he was calling them in through the haze of his then-drug and alcohol addiction. But, simply because even on his worst day he’s better than most, I’ve always gotten around to reading just about everything he’s written… with the exception of his Dark Tower books. I don’t know why, maybe it was the term “Gunslinger” that always turned me off. For whatever reason, I decided back in the day that I didn’t like that series and was always annoyed to discover a shiny new Stephen King book in the bookstore only to realize it was yet another one of the Dark Tower books.

Well, there is a short story in Everything’s Eventual called “The Little Sisters of Eluria” that is a kind of prequel to the Dark Tower series, set in the time just before Roland sets off on his epic quest. It was an engaging story, one of the best in the book so far, and I have no idea why I ever rejected the Dark Tower series in the first place. So now, in addition to a delicious new anthology, I’ve got an entire series of seven brand new epics to read; it’s like finding out JK Rowling released seven more Harry Potter books while you weren’t looking!

On this, the Canadian day of Thanksgiving, I’m extremely thankful to have not only a good book to read on a rainy holiday, but a whole line-up of new reading material stretching out ahead of me!

Snog-worthy literary characters

I was going to save this meme for later in the week, but I got so wrapped up in the writing of it that I couldn’t bear to leave it in the can.

Veronica at Toddled Dredge wrote a post about posts she has not written, and one of those topics was seized upon by her commenters as a post that should be written. Thus, the meme that wasn’t, but is: my top ten ‘snoggable’ literary characters.

This was a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. I mean, a “kissable” character is not the same as a “favourite” literary character. Arthur Dent from the Hitchhiker’s Trilogy, for example, and Garp, while among my favourite and most memorable literary characters, are not exactly the ones I’d most like to lock lips with. Plus, I’ve lamented before about my absolutely horrible memory for the details of a book once I’ve closed the cover for the last time. But once I got rolling, I realized that (a) there are lots of kissable literary characters out there and (b) I have ecclectic tastes in literature – and men.

My top ten most snoggable literary characters are:

10. Andy, the narrator from Generation X. I’m a sucker for a quick wit and tasty turns of phrase.

9. Jasper Jackson from The Calligrapher. An artist, a lover of poetry and a sensualist… but above all, a rogue. I’ve never been immune to the charms of a rogue.

8. Remus Lupin from the Harry Potter series. I almost chose Sirius Black for this slot, but it’s his fierceness that I find attractive. For kissability, you want the more sensitive soul, right? Lupin it is.

7. Luke Skywalker. You may argue that he isn’t exactly a literary character, but it was in reading the book that my 10-year-old self truly pined for Luke Skywalker.

6. Rhett Butler from Gone with the Wind. See rogue comment above. (Not so much the movie version, though. I think the moustache detracts from the kissability factor.)

5. Henry DeTamble from The Time Traveler’s Wife. Swoon.

4. Holden Caufield, from Catcher in the Rye. Moody and dark… and maybe I could ‘save’ him with a few good kisses?

3. Ricardo Carlos Manoso, aka “Ranger“, from Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum books. Mysterious, dark, rich and almost unbearably sexy. I’m not ordinarily a fan of the darkly handsome, but Ranger must be the hottest character in fiction. Ever.

2. Louis de Pointe du Lac from the Vampire Chronicles. Lestat is way too arrogant, but Louis is sensitive, and thoughtful, and oh so sensual. Plus, Brad Pitt plays him in the movie. I mean really, this one was a no-brainer.

1. Ponyboy Curtis from The Outsiders. My inner-14-year-old left no doubt that this would be my number-one choice. Vulnerable, thoughtful, and a writer, but fiercely loyal and tough enough to fight for what he believes in. Sigh.

Want to play along? Consider yourself tagged!

Feedreader questions

Okay, I have some questions for y’all.

First, why do you truncate your blog’s feed? It seems to be the vast majority of the “personal” bloggers I read truncate their feeds, while the majority of the business bloggers use a full feed. I’ve seen lots of debates on which is better, but I’m curious as to why YOU do it.

Care to take part in my highly scientific poll on the matter? If you have more to say, you can always leave a comment, too!

And for those of you simply reading feeds instead of publishing them, what do you think? Does it matter to you whether the author publishes the full post or just a snippet?

FWIW, I leave the full feed simply because that’s what I prefer when I’m reading. I’ve had some issues with scraping, and had one site shut down for using my content without attribution, but now that I’ve figured out how to add an attribution tag through feedburner that says “This item is from Postcards from the Mothership” I haven’t had any problems.

And now, a more technical question for the Web savvy among you. In the feed reader, I notice that some blog titles have an avatar or icon beside them. Occasionally, this even appears beside the URL in the address bar or beside my favourites in IE.

How do you do that? How do you get your little icony avatar thing to be picked up by the feed readers?

Penny for your thoughts?

According to a news report this week, the Canadian government has been considering the elimination of the lowly penny. The article says that only one-third of Canadians regularly use the penny.

What the heck are the other 2/3 doing?

I mean, I know use of a debit card has probably widely surpassed the use of actual cash in most transaction. I only ever carry about $20 at a time myself. But everybody has to be using cash at least some of the time. Think about this: Tim Horton’s sells 76% of Canada’s coffee and baked goods (source) and they don’t take debit — how can only one-third of Canadians be using cash?

Mmmm, doughnuts…

Anyway, I’m not sure I’m on board with this idea of dropping the penny. I’m sure that there are far more pennies held hostage in jars, piggy banks and change trays across the country than are actually exchanged in commerce on a given day, but just because something doesn’t work as well as it used to doesn’t mean we should simply get rid of it. Heck, we still keep William Shatner around, don’t we?

My boys are still at that tender age when they believe me when I lie to them, and the sticky-fingered little monkeys like to filch coins off the dressers and countertops where Beloved and I dump them from our pockets. So far, it’s been an easy sell to tell them they’re only allowed to take the shiny, copper-coloured “pirate coins”, which are of course far more valuable than those bulky one- and two- dollar coins. Tristan, bless his clever little heart, has only in the past month or so figured out what a quarter is and that it is infinitely more valuable than the other coins because that’s what fits in all the candy machines. (Sheesh, that’s 2500% inflation since I was a kid – I still remember penny gumballs!)

What do you think? Is there a better use for the $130M the government spends each year keeping the penny in circulation? Or are you a traditionalist who thinks we need to keep the penny alive, at least so we can use it in wishing wells and fountains throughout the country?

(Edited to add: the title of this post was edited to reflect the brilliant comment by Trixie. I’m embarrassed I didn’t think of it myself first!)

Nasty Flickr messages

Well, that was disturbing. I got a notification that someone sent me a note on Flickr, and I had four messages from four different users:

  • Why did you post pornographic images on my photo?.
  • I Don’t get the mail you just sent me, are you trying to call me a pedophile?.
  • Do that again and i will call the cops..
  • You have been reported to flickr..

Needless to say, I was more than a little freaked. And when I tried to reply to any of them, it said my account had been blocked.

I did a bit of research, and apparently this is a widespread and growing problem with Flickr. The accounts are legitimate, but the owners are not aware that their accounts are being used. They have somehow given up their Yahoo! IDs and passwords to some sort of phishing expedition, likely an offer of a photo award. There’s a detailed explanation on Flickr, which has really done very little to settle the curdled feeling in my stomach.

I can’t help but wonder if it’s coincidence that I got these messages mere days after joining a discussion group attached to the photo pool I told you about, where images of kids are being “stolen” from Flickr to create fake profiles on Orkut.

Sigh.

Just wanted to tell you about it in case it happens to you.

Get yer blog on – moving to your own domain

A couple of people have asked me about moving to a self-hosted domain, and recently Maggie (hi Maggie!) asked me about customizing a blog.

This is more a recap of what I did, rather than a tutorial. I only wish I’d done this years ago! I was so intimidated by the process, though, that I was too scared to try it out. Maybe by sharing this, I can show you how easy (no really!) it can be.

Anyway, this will be long, so I’ve tucked most of it below the fold…
Continue reading “Get yer blog on – moving to your own domain”

Hey you! Lurker! This one’s for you

Huhn. I thought I had to wait until January for International Delurking week to beg y’all to come out of hiding, but apparently today is (ahem) “The Great Mofo Delurk” day. Don’t believe me? It must be true, cuz they’ve got BADGES!

The Great Mofo Delurk 2007

So! You, over there, the one who visits every day but never says hello. And you! The one who just stumbled over here looking for Star Wars porn – sorry to disappoint you, but you could at least leave a comment to let us know you were here.

Out yerselves, quiet lurkers, and be known in the brilliant klieg lights of the comment box – this is your day to shine.

The one where her preschoolers use Google to find porn

The boys were playing on the computer the other day, while I was sitting on the couch nearby reading. I couldn’t see the monitor from where I was sitting, but I could hear the sound.

They’re getting quite proficient with the computer, and can load and play games pretty much without supervision. Their game of choice is Star Wars Lego, so when I heard rap music instead of the Star Wars theme bleating from the speakers, I was more intrigued than concerned.

I came around the corner in time to see they had made their way to You Tube, and were watching a video with Jamie Kennedy’s name plastered across the top. It was a stop-motion animation of Star Wars Lego minifigs set to some rap song, and as I blinked in surprise at the screen, the Princess-Leia-in-her-metal-bikini minifig was bent over double and spanked by a Police Man minifig.

(You’ll pardon me for not linking to it. I’m not sure if I could find it again if I wanted to, and I’m not sure I want to.)

Part of me is absurdly pleased with their computer literacy. I’ve watched Simon, who can’t spell and who is still dicey on his letter recognition, use Google to get to his favourite sites – which, prior to this week, were limited to Nickelodeon and the Wiggles and did not include Star Wars porn.

In this case, they had put their little (three and five year old, mind you) heads together, and used the Google search box in the toolbar. Tristan knows that Star Wars starts with S – heck, he can probably even spell it by now – and the autofill on the toolbar did the rest. One, two, three clicks on the Google search results and who knows what they could have come up with.

Needless to say, we’re now looking into parental controls for the Internet.