Kat and Phoebe discuss a dead squirrel, a controversial magazine cover, and a New York Times essay on air conditioning by the world's smuggest, sweatiest man.
I appreciated the discussion of the New Yorker cover. I'd been blissfully unaware of the online kerfuffle, but I've been mulling over the cover's meaning since it arrived in my mailbox.
I fall into the slice of New Yorker readers that Phoebe highlighted: I'm a mom who doesn't have a nanny, who in any case probably couldn't afford a nanny, and I'm in perpetual danger of sliding into judgement of parents like the invisible ones in the cover image who, as Yang put it, are paying other people to "raise their children." (I agree with Phoebe that this phrasing is likely to raise hackles, but I sometimes find myself using it in my own mind. If you're putting in many of the hours, as Kat says, then you're doing at least one major part of the raising.)
I tend to agree with Yang that the cover depicts its scene "without animus toward anyone" -- one of the things I find most fascinating about it. The "Cover Story" blurb at newyorker.com notes that the cartoonist "chose to portray a scene that is both familiar and overlooked" -- another thing that makes it so compelling, imo.
I think of a New Yorker cover has having two parts -- the image itself, and then its title at the bottom of the first page. What I found most provocative about this cover is its title: "A Mother's Work." On the one hand, the seated nanny is a mother, and her work has likely helped fund her own child's evident thriving. On the other hand, many of us still think of the work depicted in this image as "a mother's work" -- that is, a task which rightly belonged to the invisible mothers of these children, who have farmed it out to other women. (Cf. the French "école Maternelle" -- what a judgement embedded in that name!) The title pokes at the crux of the issue, which was also touched on the episode: even in these enlightened days, even if we're loathe to admit it to ourselves, many of us still think of this as "a mother's work," and we reserve our judgements for the mother (not the father) who chooses to pay someone else to do it.
It’s a vexed issue , to put it mildly. I needed a nanny, my work & my husband’s don’t allow for the rigid time frames of childcare. We had no parents able to help even to get a haircut. We both reduced hours at work to reduce hours that our kids spent with the nanny. But neither of our careers were amenable to full time extraction from them with ability to return. Most families who care do what is best at the time for all members, but short term V’s long term can conflict. It amazed me that still, even now, it seems all about blaming the mother. One of my friends needed an aupair for a year due to massive health issues with 2 toddlers ( like , she was in ICU, then at home almost immobile for months). Her husband had to work to pay the bills. No parents/ in laws able to help ( old, overseas, own health problems). Would a pic of her kids being taken to the park by the nanny then be taken out of context?
Strong disagree on the supposed wonders of the dishwasher. I've lived with a dishwasher I didn't use for at least the last 13 years. I don't find dishwashing to be anywhere near the onerous task that it's often described as, and the dishwasher never felt like it was actually saving significant time. We just wash the dishes after every meal, and it works out fine.
And yes, I'm a man and I used the word "we" to refer to me and my wife ( and my toddler, who has yet to be initiated into the joys of dishwashing), and before anyone starts sneering about yet another man saying "we" in relation to household chores, we actually share the cooking and dishwashing equally, trading off every other night, and my wife doesn't want to use the dishwasher either. We're even looking into getting rid of ours now that, as recent homebuyers, we finally own the damn thing, and we'd both rather use that under-counter space for storage instead of an appliance we never use.
I said the same thing to my Mom (mother of four), and she took the opportunity to *seriously* condescend to me and explain to me that big advantage of a dishwasher is less transmitted disease. She said that she noticed everyone getting sick a lot less when we got ours. Maybe we all just sucked at washing dishes previously.
I have a dishwasher. My SIL has 2 with her 4 kids.
BUT one of the enduring memories of growing up ( no one had a dishwasher) is mum washing, dad drying & putting away dishes while they chatted about the day, life , etc. us kids also at times involved depending on homework etc. sometimes I think these little things like dishwashers change the flow for the worse. But still, not getting rid of mine
There was a dead baby chick out in front of this grocery store on Kauai that I had to walk to several times...I think nobody wanted to acknowledge it so it was there for several days. Anyway on day three I just picked it up and put it in the trash. I like to think it enabled everyone to enjoy their vacation a little more, or at least think about death a little less.
Kat & Phoebe, I think you would both appreciate Noah Rothman's book on "The Rise of the New Puritans." You were empirically coming to his conclusions through the discussion of the New Yorker cover and the abstemious air conditioner today. I am reminded also of H.L. Mencken's definition of Puritanism: "“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” https://www.amazon.com/Rise-New-Puritans-Fighting-Progressives/dp/0063160005
A New Yorker subscription is a burden I no longer carry. That magazine's descent into idiocy has allowed me to reclaim a great deal of my free time and generally simplify my life. I remain blissfully unaware of the dynamics of insecure New York writers and their domestic help.
I fell in love with dryers while living in various student accomodations that had communal washing machines and dryers. Before that, my family always hung clothes either on a line outside when the weather allowed, or on drying racks inside that took a good chunk of space in our small living room. I bought a dryer as soon as could afford one and have never looked back.
Also, one thing that gets overlooked is that when drying clothes on a rack or a line inside, the air gets colder and damper, which means one has to raise the heating in the room so it doesn't get too cold and moldy. In that case, I'm sure it's better to have the dryer on for a couple of hours rather than having the heating up for days.
A last thing is that in some places letting clothes dry outside kind of defeats the purpose of washing them in the first place. I have lived in a place where everything left outside gets covered with a layer of soot from the the pollution. In some areas, parasitic flies lay their eggs on clothes, whitch allows the larvae to find their way to human skin more easily. In those cases, using a dryer is the more hygienic solution.
Does Toronto not have crows? I thought roadkill usually got eaten before it could sit there for months and decay like that.
Years ago I lived in Denmark and we didn't have a dryer. You could hang clothes inside, but there wasn't that much space, so we also hung clothes on a covered porch even though it was winter. This required some wardrobe planning, because jeans took a solid 3 days to dry as they froze and thawed. A dryer can be pretty handy.
Now my mom truly is a dedicated hippie who regards dryer use as something to avoid at all costs, but since it hardly ever rains here and it's mostly very warm, it's not a problem. She even has a basement that she uses in winter, but when she stuck a dehumidifier down there my husband the engineer type clutched his hair and explained that she would be better off just using the dryer. She's pretty frugal with the AC too but we've finally convinced her that she doesn't have to be quite so ascetic and she can turn it on when it hits 80 inside.
I appreciated the discussion of the New Yorker cover. I'd been blissfully unaware of the online kerfuffle, but I've been mulling over the cover's meaning since it arrived in my mailbox.
I fall into the slice of New Yorker readers that Phoebe highlighted: I'm a mom who doesn't have a nanny, who in any case probably couldn't afford a nanny, and I'm in perpetual danger of sliding into judgement of parents like the invisible ones in the cover image who, as Yang put it, are paying other people to "raise their children." (I agree with Phoebe that this phrasing is likely to raise hackles, but I sometimes find myself using it in my own mind. If you're putting in many of the hours, as Kat says, then you're doing at least one major part of the raising.)
I tend to agree with Yang that the cover depicts its scene "without animus toward anyone" -- one of the things I find most fascinating about it. The "Cover Story" blurb at newyorker.com notes that the cartoonist "chose to portray a scene that is both familiar and overlooked" -- another thing that makes it so compelling, imo.
I think of a New Yorker cover has having two parts -- the image itself, and then its title at the bottom of the first page. What I found most provocative about this cover is its title: "A Mother's Work." On the one hand, the seated nanny is a mother, and her work has likely helped fund her own child's evident thriving. On the other hand, many of us still think of the work depicted in this image as "a mother's work" -- that is, a task which rightly belonged to the invisible mothers of these children, who have farmed it out to other women. (Cf. the French "école Maternelle" -- what a judgement embedded in that name!) The title pokes at the crux of the issue, which was also touched on the episode: even in these enlightened days, even if we're loathe to admit it to ourselves, many of us still think of this as "a mother's work," and we reserve our judgements for the mother (not the father) who chooses to pay someone else to do it.
It’s a vexed issue , to put it mildly. I needed a nanny, my work & my husband’s don’t allow for the rigid time frames of childcare. We had no parents able to help even to get a haircut. We both reduced hours at work to reduce hours that our kids spent with the nanny. But neither of our careers were amenable to full time extraction from them with ability to return. Most families who care do what is best at the time for all members, but short term V’s long term can conflict. It amazed me that still, even now, it seems all about blaming the mother. One of my friends needed an aupair for a year due to massive health issues with 2 toddlers ( like , she was in ICU, then at home almost immobile for months). Her husband had to work to pay the bills. No parents/ in laws able to help ( old, overseas, own health problems). Would a pic of her kids being taken to the park by the nanny then be taken out of context?
Strong disagree on the supposed wonders of the dishwasher. I've lived with a dishwasher I didn't use for at least the last 13 years. I don't find dishwashing to be anywhere near the onerous task that it's often described as, and the dishwasher never felt like it was actually saving significant time. We just wash the dishes after every meal, and it works out fine.
And yes, I'm a man and I used the word "we" to refer to me and my wife ( and my toddler, who has yet to be initiated into the joys of dishwashing), and before anyone starts sneering about yet another man saying "we" in relation to household chores, we actually share the cooking and dishwashing equally, trading off every other night, and my wife doesn't want to use the dishwasher either. We're even looking into getting rid of ours now that, as recent homebuyers, we finally own the damn thing, and we'd both rather use that under-counter space for storage instead of an appliance we never use.
I said the same thing to my Mom (mother of four), and she took the opportunity to *seriously* condescend to me and explain to me that big advantage of a dishwasher is less transmitted disease. She said that she noticed everyone getting sick a lot less when we got ours. Maybe we all just sucked at washing dishes previously.
I have a dishwasher. My SIL has 2 with her 4 kids.
BUT one of the enduring memories of growing up ( no one had a dishwasher) is mum washing, dad drying & putting away dishes while they chatted about the day, life , etc. us kids also at times involved depending on homework etc. sometimes I think these little things like dishwashers change the flow for the worse. But still, not getting rid of mine
There was a dead baby chick out in front of this grocery store on Kauai that I had to walk to several times...I think nobody wanted to acknowledge it so it was there for several days. Anyway on day three I just picked it up and put it in the trash. I like to think it enabled everyone to enjoy their vacation a little more, or at least think about death a little less.
There are so many wild chickens on Kauai. A dead baby chick is like the collateral damage of fecundity.
Doing god’s work
Kat & Phoebe, I think you would both appreciate Noah Rothman's book on "The Rise of the New Puritans." You were empirically coming to his conclusions through the discussion of the New Yorker cover and the abstemious air conditioner today. I am reminded also of H.L. Mencken's definition of Puritanism: "“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” https://www.amazon.com/Rise-New-Puritans-Fighting-Progressives/dp/0063160005
A New Yorker subscription is a burden I no longer carry. That magazine's descent into idiocy has allowed me to reclaim a great deal of my free time and generally simplify my life. I remain blissfully unaware of the dynamics of insecure New York writers and their domestic help.
I fell in love with dryers while living in various student accomodations that had communal washing machines and dryers. Before that, my family always hung clothes either on a line outside when the weather allowed, or on drying racks inside that took a good chunk of space in our small living room. I bought a dryer as soon as could afford one and have never looked back.
Also, one thing that gets overlooked is that when drying clothes on a rack or a line inside, the air gets colder and damper, which means one has to raise the heating in the room so it doesn't get too cold and moldy. In that case, I'm sure it's better to have the dryer on for a couple of hours rather than having the heating up for days.
A last thing is that in some places letting clothes dry outside kind of defeats the purpose of washing them in the first place. I have lived in a place where everything left outside gets covered with a layer of soot from the the pollution. In some areas, parasitic flies lay their eggs on clothes, whitch allows the larvae to find their way to human skin more easily. In those cases, using a dryer is the more hygienic solution.
Does Toronto not have crows? I thought roadkill usually got eaten before it could sit there for months and decay like that.
Years ago I lived in Denmark and we didn't have a dryer. You could hang clothes inside, but there wasn't that much space, so we also hung clothes on a covered porch even though it was winter. This required some wardrobe planning, because jeans took a solid 3 days to dry as they froze and thawed. A dryer can be pretty handy.
Now my mom truly is a dedicated hippie who regards dryer use as something to avoid at all costs, but since it hardly ever rains here and it's mostly very warm, it's not a problem. She even has a basement that she uses in winter, but when she stuck a dehumidifier down there my husband the engineer type clutched his hair and explained that she would be better off just using the dryer. She's pretty frugal with the AC too but we've finally convinced her that she doesn't have to be quite so ascetic and she can turn it on when it hits 80 inside.
You can always get lip service to claims of abstainances.