Appearance, the key to snap judgements

I’ve been a stay-at-home mom for twenty-plus years. People tend to have certain preconceived ideas about what stay-at-home moms do every day and just how smart they could possibly be if they don’t do something that approximates the nine-to-five thing. Throw in shorts, a tank top, and flip flops, and I can almost watch their estimation of my I.Q. drop when I show up for my son’s doctor’s appointments. I can’t stand when someone talks down to me, and invariably, if I’m dressed for comfort in the hundred-plus temperatures of Georgia’s summers, someone will. As frustrating as that is for me, I will still sometimes refuse to put on more “appropriate” clothing to take my son to the doctor. Seriously, it’s a doctor’s appointment, not a job interview. Unless I’m in something really messy, it should be a come-as-you-are kind of event. Just because I’m coming from home and not work doesn’t mean I should be treated less competently.

Do Men and Women Communicate Differently?

Yes, men and women communicate differently. I've been online for almost 20 years. I don't remember what I was like before, but I do know that the online experience has changed me, radically. A lot of online spaces are male dominated. You don't get a lot of respect for pulling the “you hurt my feelings” routine. No one cares about your feelings. Suck it up and move on, or don't come back. For the most part, men don't spend a lot of time worried about their “tone,” and they're certainly not overly concerned with whether women think it's polite to disagree.

I've heard people put this kind of behavior down to a lack of civility that occurs when we aren't face to face, but my husband disagrees. Being an actual man, I take his word for it when he says that guys really are like that with each other when women aren't around.

I cut my internet teeth, and by association, my communication teeth on things like newsgroups, irc channels, and email lists. Even when they were predominately, or even exclusively, female groupings, those early online years were ruled by what I think of as male communication patterns. If you had something to say, you said it, and as long as no one started swearing or name-calling, it was all good.

Gradually, things began to change, though. As more and more women entered the internet without the experience of being called The Whore of Babylon on a newsgroup (true story), they expected people to treat them like they'd always been treated in real life. The definition of a flame war went from hysterically screaming invective to, “I don't like your tone,” and “If you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all.” It still catches me by surprise when I find myself in areas where people are more concerned with how you say something than the substance of what you're actually trying to say.

My own communication patterns may be permanently warped by the internet. I learned how to write and argue, taught by people who demanded that I stick to the facts of a matter and support my opinions. Any hurt feelings I may have developed in the process were my own to deal with. I find myself completely unprepared when I run into people who truly believe that it's a personal attack to disagree with someone's opinion. I've been shaped by my experiences online, and apparently, I argue like a man.

Organization -- or How I've already lost the battle

In the years before we had computers and scanners and highspeed internet connections, I thought I was at war with paper. No matter how much of the stuff I threw away, more managed to find its way into the house. The post office delivered bills and junk mail. My husband came home from work with magazines and newspapers. Even my kids got in on the action with bulletins and crafts from church. I'd throw away what I could and helplessly pile the rest somewhere out of the way of our daily lives to be dealt with later. Occasionally, I’d get fed up with the pile of paper masquerading as a centerpiece on my kitchen table and break it down into smaller, more manageable piles that would fool me into thinking I’d actually accomplished something. The cycle of rebuilding and demolishing that pile seemed never-ending—and continues to this day.

The promise of a paperless society thrilled me to no end. I signed up for and paid my bills online. I transferred subscriptions to electronic format. I formed a partnership with my scanner and saved important documents to hard drives. I backed up, saved, tagged, bookmarked, and indexed until I thought I had it all figured out.

I whittled down the list of things on paper to the bare minimum, and still the post office failed to remove me from their list of appointed rounds. There was always something new in the box, but now my war had spread to two fronts. What used to show up in my mailbox now showed up in my email. My bank would send me a notice that I had a new bill. The billing company would send me one to tell me that the new statement was ready. What used to be one bill in the mail was now two separate emails—more if either felt the need to confirm the payment after it was sent. My paperless society was drowning me in email, instead of paper. How was this an improvement?

While the information overload has never gotten in the way of anything I wanted to do, this is my only real failure on the organizational front. Whether it's paper or electronic, keeping track of all the information around me defeats me, daily. I've added calendars, alarms, and both physical and electronic notes just to keep up. I'm too stubborn to surrender, so I keep fighting, even though I think it's a losing proposition.

House Rules

I cook for 7 people, and I do it at least once a day. Since our family includes people with major food sensitivities, I make almost everything from scratch, including breads. I’ve never attempted to write out the list of kitchen rules, but everyone here knows they exist.

#1: Don’t piss off Mom. (No one delivers gluten-free pizza around here.)

#2: The kitchen sink belongs to the people working in the kitchen. (Wash your grease-covered hands elsewhere, and then clean out the sink. Remember rule #1.)

#3: Loiterers will be appropriated and given the title dogsbody. (Look it up.)

#3.5: Those convicted of loitering by the Court of Mom are stuck as dogsbody until Mom pardons them. (Sneaking off behind my back is bad and guaranteed to put you on the wrong side of rule #1.)

#4: The kitchen knives are sharp. (I mean debone-yourself-accidentally sharp. If you do something stupid with one of my knives, do not come to me for sympathy. You have been warned.)

#5: It is the job of the cook to taste the food for seasoning before it is served. (In short, keep your mitts off of it until it’s on the table. It looks bad when half of the meal is already gone before grandma gets through the door.)

For the health and comfort of all (rule #1), I’ve found it necessary to add the following non-kitchen rule.

#6: The tile floor is henceforth considered the only food-safe flooring in the house. (As I write this, there's a plate of pork chop bones on the coffee table in the living room. Maybe the words coffee and table confused you. Missing the family mealtime does not excuse you from eating at the dining table like the rest of the civilized savages.)

Productivity -- Or what a butterfly looks like

We have a concept in our house of something we call the butterfly effect. Our butterfly effect has nothing to do with Ashton Kutcher or chaos theory; although, it does cause a fair amount of chaos. It's the effect that can be seen when you interrupt someone, point off to the side, and say, “Ooh, butterfly.” When the person turns back to you, they've totally forgotten what they were about to say or do. That's the effect interruptions have on people. When they go back to what they were doing, they have to take the time to remember where they were in their thoughts and actions at that moment before the interruption. Each interruption magnifies this effect because it raises the risk that something will be missed or forgotten for good.

What I like to read

I don't have a favorite book or author. I'll read all sorts of things if the mood strikes, but for pure entertainment, I usually reach for fantasy. I'm a world-building junkie. Once an author gets me past the basics of engaging characters and a plot that actually goes somewhere, the thing that makes a book or series unforgettable for me is the world the author creates. Whether it's traditional fantasy, like C. S. Friedman's Coldfire Trilogy which is set on another planet, or the newer classification of urban fantasy, like Ilona Andrews' Magic series that is set on a modern Earth that has slightly different rules than the ones we're used to, it's the world the author creates that determines if I'm going to love it or trash it before I finish it.

I'm enthralled by authors who can take a world, populate it with beings or abilities that don't exist on Earth, give it a history and customs that should be completely unrecognizable to me, and craft it in such a way that by the end of the book, it's not only familiar but comfortable. I love a good fantasy book so much that I feel shortchanged if the author doesn't follow up with another story set in the same universe. I enjoy the time I spend reading them, and I want to visit those worlds again, so I tend to stick with authors who write series, rather than one-offs.

So I'm going to use this thing

I've decided that since I had this blog page just lying around doing nothing, and since I'm now writing all this stuff for class every week, that I should kill two birds with one stone and put some of it up here. Not everything, of course. Some of it just sucks too much to put it out in public.