I don't feel coddled by my parents, either, though I'm very grateful that Mara can stay with them this evening so I can go watch Lee coach high school basketball without having to hold a squirmy toddler through two games. That's about as supportive as they get, but it's plenty.
I'd say that 20/30-somethings are interested in this book because they're the ones doing the bulk of putting kids to bed these days. I'm sure there are equivalent stories if not in the same context from previous generations.
Yeah, I meant to say that too: not only do I think this arrested development thing is basically bogus, I also think it's not the reason we're all amused by the book. I also think it would make me laugh if I didn't have kids. It says "fuck" and reveals parental exasperation to the parents but not the kids. That's funny.
I dunno. I think we're allowed to joke about our adulthood in ways that our parents (or maybe in heebie's case, grandparents) were unable to do.
When I was a kid, I imagined adulthood as the time when I would get to do whatever the fuck I wanted to do. This, by my parents standards, was a childish way to look at the world, and yet it's pretty much the way my life has turned out. (And mind you, by most objective standards, I qualify as a responsible adult nowadays.)
I imagined adulthood as the time when I would get to do whatever the fuck I wanted to do
Me too and holy shit but I couldn't have been further from the truth.
I also think it's not the reason we're all amused by the book.
This I agree with. Absent the word "fuck," it sounds no different than something Erma Bombeck might have written.
The best thing about being an adult is that no one can tell me that I have too many flashlights.
I get to eat HP's Easter candy and general candy that daycare seems to send home all the fucking time, after she goes to bed.
Me too and holy shit but I couldn't have been further from the truth.
Word. Maybe PF doesn't have kids.
The best thing about being an adult is that no one can tell me that I have too many flaeshlights.
The difference between adulthood in the chronological sense and adulthood-in-the-sense-in-which-Macy-Halford-doesn't-think-we're-adults (call it Adulthood) is that the latter goes together with one's maintaining an unreflective belief in one's right to exert arbitrary authority over one's offspring - the unironic "because I said so". This involves society's, and your kid's, believing in that right. The possibility of the latter is dependent on a number of social conditions that no longer obtain in most UMC contexts.
The best thing about being an adult is that no one can tell me that I have too many flashlights.
Heh, are you one of those guys reading candlepower forum and such?
10: Well, I don't even have one, so that statement is also true.
I'm worried that too many threads right now are borderline parenting threads and I'm going to drive off readers.
12: No, I'm not that far gone. I don't think I've ever spend more than $30 on a flashlight, not like those nuts who are blowing $300 on them. I just like having lots of decent, inexpensive flashlights. Tacticool!
I have a flashlight on my key chain. It has been very handy, but the switch is poorly designed. Sometimes I'll be sitting at my desk and my pocket is glowing.
re: 16
Heh, that seems totally odd to me, but people say exactly the same thing to me about cameras.
'You have how many?'
At one time I had enough that I didn't actually know.
Plus, I have nice hand-sized LED flashlight that is very bright. Also, I have a few Mag lights ranging in size from the pen light I keep in the car to the big kind police use to beat suspects.
My only response to this was to start singing the title to the chorus of "Who the F*** is That?".
My primary light for work is this with the metal clip removed.
I also think it would make me laugh if I didn't have kids.
It would make me laugh if I didn't have kids, but wouldn't be the same. What makes me deeply identify with it on a visceral level is that it illustrates an exasperating experience I go through on a fairly regular basis.
Does anyone else feel a need for a T-shirt that says STOP WHINING AND CRACK ON?
23: The "KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON" fad isn't far enough in the past for that.
21: I only have one that uses CR123s. They're so expensive! For batteries!
I have a solar-powered flashlight/radio/cell phone charger. (It also has a hand crank.)
Anyhow, to the OP: There's nothing new under the sun, except iPods. Having said that, it does seem like the narrative around Generation X parenting is somewhat different than with previous generations. A couple of friends were featured in an article about the "grups" phenomenon, a few years back. And the article was completely inaccurate in describing the ways they're different from their parents' generation of parents. I dunno, I think it all comes down to the same feelings I have when I happen to be on campus and seen the current cohort of undergrads, and think "how can they possibly be so young?!" Today's parents might have a few different cultural signifiers that they value, and there might even be some major demographic shifts (our recent conversation about religion comes to mind), but ultimately I just don't think there's much there.
re: 26
I can't help but hear that in a Galifianakis-in-the-Hangover voice.
I have a few friends (mostly with children) who like to claim proudly that they aren't real proper grown-ups. I refrain from calling them fucking idiots. FFS, I'm 40, I have 4 kids, a mortgage and enjoy being generally competent - being an adult isn't a fucking insult, or something to be avoided.
One of Many gets it right in 11, I think.
One change, is that when I was a kid, my mum usually wore dresses. I am always in jeans. Does this mean I am immature? No, it means I don't have to do so much washing if I wear jeans every day.
Now, my mum wears trousers and tops, and only wears dresses at weddings.
One benefit of parenthood: Eliminates the misery of the "paradox of choice", as regards free time
29: It's a funny movie and worth 90 minutes of your life, but it's pretty much just Dude, Where's My Car? set in Vegas.
Maybe PF doesn't have kids.
PF has kids, and I grant that the birth of my first was probably the key "grownup moment" in my life. But me and my kids play baseball or ride bikes or whatever pretty much whenever I feel like it.
Yes, yes, I have to work and make a living and keep appointments and whatnot, and I haven't got the time to be an expert on current music or play Dungeons & Dragons all day. But compared to my parents, I'm footloose.
Speaking of "The Hangover", I'm confused by the success of "The Hangover Part 2" followed by box-office failure of "The Hangover Part 3". What does this bode for this summer's "The Hangover Part 4"?
33: That was a great movie. Not "Airplane" great, but still very good.
I imagined adulthood as the time when I would get to do whatever the fuck I wanted to do
This is actually exactly how my dad described adulthood to me when I was a kid. I still can't tell if that was a cruel joke or if his life is just much better than mine.
re: 30.1
Yeah, I have a few friends who seem quite invested in their identity as 'kidults', which, given that they are getting on for the same age as me, seems silly. I don't know if they think that admitting to yourself that you are an adult somehow means you have to stop doing stupid/fun stuff, and start wearing tweed, or something.
you are an adult somehow means you have to stop doing stupid/fun stuff, and start wearing tweed,
Thanks to the idiosyncrasies of the Heroinopolis educational system, becoming an adult for me meant I could start doing stupid/fun stuff and stop wearing tweed.
I very much liked the sensation, when I first moved out of the house, that no one knew/cared where I was at any given point. My parents were pretty relaxed, and I just let them know where I'd be as a courtesy rather than to get permission, for the last two years of high school. And yet it still felt totally free and liberating.
Why is it that my generation is infatuated with the notion that they're still a kid on the inside?This seems to be begging the question. Is this unique to your/our generation? I'm pretty sure it was the Baby Boomers who trademarked and sold merchandise with the phrase "don't trust anyone over 30" on it. Obviously, that's not exactly the same phenomenon as this "Go the F to Sleep" book, but it seems related somehow.
We already know that each generation thinks they invented sex, right? Well, maybe the same is true of adulthood or whatever.
From the OP: Why is it that my generation is infatuated with the notion that they're still a kid on the inside?
Terrified by it is probably closer to the truth. And the stuff about elaborate sleep rituals surely cannot be the real reason. I know for a fact there are many parents of our generation who have mastered the art of shutting the poor tots away into their dark, monster-teeming bedrooms without having to put on the equivalent of a small off-Broadway show to put them to sleep.
I think that in the process of beating around the bush, Macy gives a clue as to what the real terror is when she mentions "coddling by their parents, which is still going on" of the child-rearing people she has in mind. The sense of incomplete adulthood bedeviling much of this generation is financial; having independent means and, indeed, being able to support our parents in their old age is the definition of adulthood that many of us grew up with. But mentioning that would be impolite, so we talk about being "Wes Anderson-ified" instead.
Having said all that: Go the F*k To Sleep looks funny. Though Baby, Mix Me a Drink (Baby Be of Use) looks more my speed.
I don't know why, but I keep reading the title of this thread in the sidebar as "Go To F* The Sheep".
There's a book called Rejuvenile that came out about six or seven years ago that valorizes the trend in adult dodgeball leagues and cupcakes and so forth. It is my enemy.
42.4: My parents were way ahead of these guys.
I think there is an extent to which we're getting more childish, but almost all in a good way. So we aren't expected to become callous, deny ourselves the pleasure of life, beat our kids, etc. as adults? I call that progress; we sure as fuck aren't shirking our responsibilties or exhibiting other negative features of children - that there's more irregular employment is the work of the plutocracy.
Also maybe some parallel to domesticated animals resembling the young of their wild forbears.
I'm pretty sure it was the Baby Boomers who trademarked and sold merchandise with the phrase "don't trust anyone over 30" on it.
Fuckin' parvenus. "All politicians over 35 ought to be shot", said I.
I'm worried that too many threads right now are borderline parenting threads and I'm going to drive off readers.
Flashlights! I have 15-20, including four headbands. I keep picking up sets at home depot for $9.99
What, we define adulthood as the number of external claims on one, or responsibilities shouldered? So, like Obama or MNC CEO is the most adult of all? Just checking.
Freud defined maturity as the postponement of gratification, dudes. That is not the creation of new mutual or interlocking dependencies, which are gratifying and fun!.
Kids having kids, the bunch of youse.
Pretty much any piece of journalism that asks the question "what does this say about the current generation?" is unadulterated bullshit.
But compared to my parents, I'm footloose.
Why were your parents so un-footloose? My parents always seemed to have a pretty good time - my dad (although he travelled a lot) worked shorter hours than C does now, and we did a lot of crazy stuff without much money.
What gets me about the neo-kid stuff (the dodgeball leagues and cupcakes stuff, not the not being an authoritarian asshole stuff) is that it feels kind of forced and fake. If you really could take a bunch of people who took pure, childlike pleasure in the world and enjoyed dodgeball, it would be awesome, but in practice with those kinds of things it just feels like everyone is still faking their way through it and what they really care about is their mortgage or professional success or whatever. Kinda like a corporate retreat. This may just be my experience.
51: Someone's not getting an invite to my bunny suit cuddle party!
One of the alternatives being lost with religion is the tradition of renunciation. In India, and I read recently in Heian Japan, it was very common for someone to renounce the "responsible" life and join an order or become a mendicant. This is not a second childhood, not about "service to others" which just reinforces the grasping, but about being honest and admitting that all that bullshit we get off on ain't worth very much at all. That means especially those vices of power responsibility we like to pretend are virtues.
53: "Very common"? There are something like 5 million sadhus -- out of more than a billion people.
Certainly that whole "stages of life" thing is kind of anathema to a lot of my generation, but this is America, we've always been skeptical of old world stuff. If how things are now is different, its been different for a long time.
As my friends and I near forty, I'm starting to hear some angst about aging and becoming adult. I'm not feeling it, though. I've been pretty delighted because I feel like I'm coming into my own. I've been forty since I was twelve, but at least now it is age appropriate. I was always fairly square, early to bed, and a maternal scold. But now that role fits my age! Finally!
Sometimes when my students are taking a test, I play a game where I decide what age each student essentially is.
55: Same here. When I was 21 my girlfriend's nickname for me was "Old Man."
Unfortunately, my pastime of choice is sitting around making bitchy comments about people while I crochet lace doilies. I don't think I'm going to come into my own for another forty years yet, at which point I probably wouldn't know what to do with my own whatever it turns out to be.
58: LB, have you read the Mapp and Lucia books? You are reminding me of Georgie and his embroidery. (E. F. Benson also wrote a couple of insane books called Colin (I and II), which are just like The Omen only way more gay.
Er, only the title was supposed to be italicized.
Why were your parents so un-footloose?
Well, they had four times as many kids as I did. (I've got two.) My father got his PhD when the eighth kid was about five years old. One marriage for 62 years. Hard-core penny pinchers. Hard-core Catholics. Grownups!
59: I have. Hmm. Maybe I should explore the possibilities of a toupee.
LB, that gives you a little time to start building up your detective agency. Get the pieces in place now while you wait for youths to come confide in you about mysterious happenings.
57: Let's hope that's why she called you "old man."
51: It feels fake because it is fake. Cupcakes just aren't that interesting and if you just felt like having a nostalgic childhood snack, you'd eat one without having to make a big deal out of it.
Why is it that my generation is infatuated with the notion that they're still a kid on the inside?
42 is right that it's more fear than infatuation. On the other hand my parents' generation (60+, classic boomer) at least did grow up much quicker than mine (35+, gen x or y or whatever the marketeers called us) did. My father got his first full time job before his twentieth, was married a few years later, got his first child at twentysix, his last of four at thirtyone. He's always worked, spent decades doing volunteer work with mentally disabled children, has had his own allotment for years and has been quietly competent in what seems to be everything his entire life. I otoh still lived in a student flat less than ten years ago, at almost thirty years old and I wasn't even the oldest there....
Cupcakes just aren't that interesting
Rice Krispee treats, by contrast, remain fascinating and delicious.
I am not a kidult and I despise those people, but it's probably because I'm perpetually 19 and still fetishize my freedom and "adulthood." I fucking hate the pedophilic obsession with childhood innocence, perhaps because I was never innocent or happy as a child and always resented people who thought childhood was somehow free of angst and self-loathing. I'm not sure it's better to be someone whose attitude toward being an adult is essentially that if it's legal, I pretty much *have* to do it. (I'm not that bad, but I know people who are like me in this way and are even worse.)
I saw Bridesmaids this weekend (it's very funny) and was gratified that the kidult woman obsessed with Pixar-themed shit and talking about her perfect Disneyland honeymoon turns out to have a nightmarish sex life with her husband, who is so horrified by adult sexuality and bodily fluids that they can barely stand to touch each other.
I talked to my students about this yesterday, about the fact that they all talk about "our American freedoms!" so blithely but most of them live in deadly terror of rocking the boat even in the context of the social norms of their family and friends; what do they know about testing the limits of their actual freedoms? I think it freaked them out a bit.
58: Unfortunately, my pastime of choice is sitting around making bitchy comments about people while I crochet lace doilies.
You could always switch to antimacassars.
I was, like Megan, a premature curmudgeon. I don't know why, really. Just bitter about life. Nowadays though, I go into the comic book shop, and it seems like everyone there is exactly as much older than me as they've always been.
When I was a kid and we wanted to have fun playing sports, we would play catch (if there were only a few of us) or play real game, like soccer or baseball. The closest I ever came to playing dodgeball outside of gym class was throwing dirt clods at each other as part of a neighborhood war. Who are these people who are nostalgic for gym class?
42 is good. I was always told that my job was to become successful enough to support my parents. I really chose the wrong career path.
Little Peter Pans and Wendys they may be, but the kids these days seem to be obsessed with getting married at a ridiculously young age and spending the price of a deposit on a decent house doing it.
What's that all about? You're allowed to live together these days. Their parents probably did, until they thought it was time to start a family, or even after. But no, nothing will do but a country house wedding at 25.
Is this about not growing up to the extent you're still living out Prince and Princess Charming fantasies?
what do they know about testing the limits of their actual freedoms?
On a (slightly) related note I enjoyed Beube's post today. I had not previously heard of Ellen Willis, but the passages that Berube quotes are very strong.
77. The comments get off to a cracking start, too.
I know some people who are excited about being an adult and wearing boring clothes and having kids. Without exception, these are people who have jobs that they know will still exist 5 years from now.
Without exception, these are people who have jobs that they know will still exist 5 years from now.
Time machine pilot? I can't think of any jobs like that, tbh, lawyers and doctors included.
I can't really picture a plausible future, short of Armageddon, where someone isn't doing my job in 5 years.
Same here for me and the wife. The police dept and middle schools will likely still be around for a while.
People who work for the FDA, nurses, doctors, teachers, engineers, actuaries, people who work for Raytheon or some place like that ... manager of a successful pizza restaurant. I guess this includes overly optimistic people who view themselves as "entrepreneurs" as well.
I'm with PF. I find that as an adult I can do whatever I want, except that I only have three hours a week to do it in. This is probably a sign of my limited ambitions, since whatever I want means something closer to "eat at McDonald's for lunch" than "summit Kilimanjaro."
While I basically hate everything that the self-consciously whimsical like -- cupcakes, dodgeball, reading kid's books but not to kids -- I'm glad that someone is doing it. Vegetarianism and being in favor of gay rights were once goofy self-conscious put-ons too. The alternative to experimentation is a society that calcifies into a rigid orthodoxy.
69: I think Americans talk a lot and fantasize a lot about things that are now denied them. It's a country of meek rule-followers, so we like talking about how we're ass-kicking anti-authoritarians.
While I basically hate everything that the self-consciously whimsical like -- cupcakes, dodgeball, reading kid's books but not to kids -- I'm glad that someone is doing it. Vegetarianism and being in favor of gay rights were once goofy self-conscious put-ons too.
I don't think this logic is sound.
I eat only cupcakes, for ethical reasons.
Oh I like this post. I haven't read the comments yet but I wanted to give a thumbs up. I get so tired of people in their 30s saying "I haven't figured out what I want to be when I grow up!" with some sort of forced Peter Pan twinkle in the eye. Change careers and stuff. That's all good. But don't hang it on some eternal childhood bullshit. Sometimes I want to play dumb and say as earnestly as possible "wait but you're like 35."
Okay, it's a stupid analogy, and I ban myself, but what's so wrong with self-conscious lifestyle experimentation? I don't get why it inspires so much ire.
I very much liked the sensation, when I first moved out of the house, that no one knew/cared where I was at any given point.
Oh my god yes. My parents wanted to know where I was at every moment so this was incredibly liberating for me. And may be one reason that I feel like adulthood is about getting to do whatever the fuck you want, relative to childhood anyway. I mean yes I have to go to work, but I had to go to school back then, so that's just sort of the baseline.
Adulthood is better than childhood in that it is just as bad but you have lots of options for consolation, some maladaptive but many enjoyable. Maybe I'm a loon, though. One of my childhood fantasies about adulthood was how great it would be to have an office. Drinking also seemed fun, which it turned out to be.
Why is dodgeball childlike but other sports are not?
Baseball is childlike. At least as the Pirates play, it is.
Dodgeball is about unchecked murderous rage such as one has not known since preoedipal days, or not been allowed to act on fully. Dodgeball is like a sport invented by Melanie Klein.
84, 85, 89: There's a fine distinction that I'm not sure I'm phrasing right, but weirdos who are weirdos because what they want to do or how they want to be happens to be weird are great, and I love having people like that around. Weirdos who are weirdos because they like the idea of being weird and so they've found some self-consciously weird thing to do or be should be killed to put them out of my misery.
It's not a perfect distinction, there's some overlap, I myself am not entirely innocent of performative weirdness, and I would have mercy on people who act like that some. But not mostly.
And that's the distinction -- back when being a vegetarian was weird, I would have approved of a vegetarian who was actually concerned about animal rights, or health, or spiritual purity, but would have been desperately annoyed by the kind of person who just wants an excuse to make a fuss about everything they eat. Doing childish things because they're fun, like playing on an unoccupied swingset or reading children's books, is reasonable. Eating cupcakes with icing piled unpleasantly high because it looks adorable that way, on the other hand, is stupid unless you really do like icing that much.
91: Because it's a sport only really played in gym class or by people recreating the feeling of gym class. No non-nostalgic adults play dodgeball for the athletic pleasure of it.
I was never innocent or happy as a child and always resented people who thought childhood was somehow free of angst and self-loathing.
So did I, and then I became an adult. I realized that what I thought was angst is nothing next to the worries that comes with an infant.
95: No non-nostalgic adults play dodgeball for the athletic pleasure of it.
Why not?
94: I'm afraid you're talking about authenticity.
Authenticity is great, except that as soon as you start thinking and talking about it, you've already lost it.
I mean, any fondness for dodgeball is going to be inherently nostalgic, since typically only kids have gotten to play it (and thus any remembered joy will be remembered childhood joy) but I can't see why it would necessarily be more juvenile than, say, soccer, if people were to start playing it regularly.
lifestyle experimentation? I don't get why it inspires so much ire.
Because christ almighty why does everything have to have special significance and be part of a "lifestyle" or be somehow part of that person's magical inner child. People should just do the things they enjoy and STFU and pass me a cupcake.
97: My guess, but I'm not enough of an athlete myself to be able to actually defend the guess, is that it's not actually fun as a game -- that any adult of the sort who plays sports for fun would have more fun, if they're just thinking of the athletic pleasure and not incorporating nostalgia, playing something different.
I liked childhood and I like adulthood, but not my prolonged adolescence separating the two.
The percentage of my time spent doing what I want has been steadily declining, at least for the duration of my life for which I have conscious memory. There was a mild uptick over the four years of college, and again over the three years of law school (although the law school featured significantly less free time than college, without question), and it's possible that college overall might even have represented a mild uptick from high school (although I'm not at all sure about that), but the general trend has definitely been downward.
92: I wish I could find the baseball and democracy soliloquy from Take me Out but I can't seem to.
Oh wait, yay google books. Um, it's longer than I should type out here, so in relevant part:
"And baseball is better than Democracy -- or at least than Democracy as it's practiced in this country -- because unlike Democracy, baseball acknowledges loss.
While conservatives tell you, leave things alone and no one will lose, and liberals tell you, interfere a lot and no one will lose, baseball says: Someone will lose. Not only says it -- insists upon it! So that baseball achieves the tragic vision that Democracy evades. Evades and embodies. Democracy is lovely, but baseball's more mature."
97: Getting hit with a ball hurts once adults are throwing the ball, and the rest of the game isn't developed in any way?
101: why wouldn't it be fun? It seems pretty fun to me.
98: You can't demand perfect authenticity, but there are some fads and some people who achieve nearly perfect inauthenticity, and while hating them is conventional I'm perfectly happy to be conventional that way.
Why is it that my generation is infatuated with the notion that they're still a kid on the inside?
Part of it is what 42 gets at. The other part of it, at least for me, is the realization that when my dad was the age I am now, I was almost 8 years old, and I remember vividly how powerful he seemed to me then, and the authority that he wielded (at least with respect to me), and I don't have any sense of that in my own life now. And it fucking terrifies me.
Sometimes I want to play dumb and say as earnestly as possible "wait but you're like 35."
See, this is just what I want to see to everyone I know who SQUEEEEEs over every idiotic piece of Hello, Kitty tat. Actually, I want to say something ruder. (Same goes for wearing those little multi-colored plastic dime store barettes past the age of 8 -- I am most certainly looking at you @vit@l r0/nn3l.)
105: you mean like team tactics or whatever? Presumably that's the sort of thing that will evolve once you don't cap player age at seven.
I force myself not to hate inauthentic fads just because I'm different that way.
But the performative weirdness enables the authentic weirdness. Now, you can be a vegetarian for authentic reasons, but that's because you had performative weirdos clearing the way. Most people do conventional things for conventional reasons. If being an adult and eating cupcakes is embarrassing, then they won't eat cupcakes even if they like them. But now you have the performative weirdos opening gourmet cupcake shops, and suddenly it's okay to just like cupcakes if you like them.
And does the distinction really hold up? Can we cleanly distinguish performative desires and authentic ones?
Living in LA helped me learn to love fads. Well, most fads. I never quite cottoned to sticking e up your butt.
Are drama geeks performative or authentic weirdos?
Dodgeball is lame because it's played by weak hipsters who don't take it seriously. If they wanted to learn cold, hard adult lessons they'd man up and use metal spiked balls and play to the death.
What about goths? Performative or authentic?
110: Perhaps. The rules of tennis are equally simple, at least. I just don't like getting hit with stuff.
Can we cleanly distinguish performative desires and authentic ones?
Even zoning board have trouble with that.
I get so tired of people in their 30s saying "I haven't figured out what I want to be when I grow up!" with some sort of forced Peter Pan twinkle in the eye
At a job interview recently the last person I spoke with asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I responded by pointing out that I was nearly thirty, but I played along for the rest of the answer.
More seriously, I'm fine with fads. Fake childishness seems kind of cloying and annoying to me for some other reason. I will say that my childhood nostalgia has been lessened a lot by having an actual kid to take care of, because you learn the truth about children: they are fucking crazy.
Actually I think 115 gets much closer to the reason people play dodgeball as adults than some "failure to launch" malarkey; the people who are into it tend to be non-athletic, or at least non-jock-y, and finding a team sport that you can participate in as an adult without prior youth experience in that sport is really difficult (cf. the discussions of how horrible office softball is -- and softball is designed to be an accessible sport for non-jocks!). The nice thing about dodgeball is that there are no ringers, in other words.
If being an adult and eating cupcakes is embarrassing
Is the trendy cupcake fad somehow based in the notion that this is true? That would actually make some sense. But--does anyone actually percieve this to be true? I've never been aware of it.
Now, you can be a vegetarian for authentic reasons, but that's because you had performative weirdos clearing the way.
I don't think this is right.
Can we cleanly distinguish performative desires and authentic ones?
No, not cleanly. There are some weirdos I'm very fond of who, once I use the word performative, are clearly in the performative box. (Pretty much all fashion weirdos are performative, and I love some fashion weirdos.) I'm not sure exactly what a better word for the distinction I'm gesturing at is, but goddamnit I know it when I see it.
Softball is a TERRIBLE sport for beginners. I played on the faculty-staff intramural team last year, and my total playing time was probably under 30 seconds, if you add up everything I did all season. I kept wondering if it would look too awkward for me to leisurely walk away and go jog around the sports complex, so that I'd at least get some exercise out of the whole deal.
I hate trend-following, like one year everyone is eating cupcakes, the next year everyone is sticking e up their butt, but if someone has some philosophy that dictates they do one or the other, then it doesn't bother me.
Actually I think 115 gets much closer to the reason people play dodgeball as adults than some "failure to launch" malarkey; the people who are into it tend to be non-athletic, or at least non-jock-y, and finding a team sport that you can participate in as an adult without prior youth experience in that sport is really difficult (cf. the discussions of how horrible office softball is -- and softball is designed to be an accessible sport for non-jocks!). The nice thing about dodgeball is that there are no ringers, in other words.
That, and the fact that for a lot of people playing dodgeball was apparently a really stressful and hurtful part of their childhood. (C.f. the dodgeball scene in one of the early episodes of Freaks and Geeks.) Playing dodgeball as an adult is a way to experience the fun you supposedly should have had playing it as a kid.
124: all sports are terrible for beginners, except for those that are 1. non-competitive or that 2. everybody's shitty at (like dodgeball). Also, you could play a lot of softball and not get any exercise out of the deal.
I'm actually wondering how long office softball has to live. I figure there's a percentage level of participation in Little League that the population has already dropped below, thirty years after which office softball leagues will be no more. It's a very low athleticism but high skill sport, that's only been thought of as a natural non-serious recreational sport because so much of the population picked up the skills as kids.
I don't think you need to go full bore "authenticity or nothing" to find some kinds of performtivity exhausting, over the top, overly fake, or bothersome for some other reason.
116: I like Sifu's question and Walt's observation in 112.
I mean, Deadheads are really annoying, right, and are guilty of just the sort of self-conscious-but-non-ironic whimsy that reasonable people abhor. But the ones I've known have all been unusually smart and decent people. They're nice and they're funny and they make good vegetarian snacks.
(Okay, okay, I admit it: I like the music, too, so I'm probably a hopeless case.)
Somebody in my office is trying to convince me to play office volleyball, which just sounds like a terrible idea. I'm more tempted to look for an ultimate league, since that's a sport that -- while I am in no way in cardiovascular shape for it -- I'm actually skilled at. But even so I don't really want to step into a league where I'm wildly outclassed. Maybe I'll stick to riding my bike around by myself.
123: I can't give you any citations, but the people in 19th century utopian movements sound like people trying things on for size.
127: Some are more terrible than others. Softball combines long periods of involuntary inactivity with the extremely difficult occasional task of hitting a small moving ball with a stick. In dodgeball, you just have to wing it at the slowest opponent.
I thought the attraction of softball was tht you could drink while playing. But I've never been on a team.
Part of being a grownup IMO is being willing to do things that you suck at.
121: This sort of makes me sad, because I'm wistful about never having played team sports and now being long past the life stage where I'm ever going to get good enough at any sport to enjoy playing it recreationally, despite being in pretty good shape for almost forty. So the concept sounds nice, but I really don't want to play dodgeball or associate with anyone else who does.
119 - christ.
108 - but all you have to do is have your own kid and you swiftly realise that your parents were totally winging it.
136.2: That's sort of my reaction to 108 as well -- I spend a lot of time interacting with my kids and thinking "Huh, so this is what it was like being Dad in 1981."
I have not played dodgeball as an adult, and I would stay far away from a dodgeball league because I would assume it's all insufferable hipsters, but I actually *enjoy* dodgeball (well the dodging half of it) as a sport. In fact there are few sporting activities I enjoy more than dodging. It involves one-on-one outthinking of people, quickness, and being small. This is my skill-set!
but all you have to do is have your own kid and you swiftly realise that your parents were totally winging it.
Oh sure. But a) I can recognize that intellectually but not be able to accept it emotionally (which is where I am right now) and b) it's not *quite* so simple as that. Even in the best case scenario I'm at least a couple of years away from having a kid.
That said, kickball is a much better idea for a nostalgia sport.
being long past the life stage where I'm ever going to get good enough at any sport to enjoy playing it recreationally
That isn't true. You just need to find a group of people who are, on average, all low skill and learn together.
Ignoring, for the moment, the logistical challenges, I promise you that, for example, if you had a group of 6 people who had never played basketball and decided that, every week you would get together and play 3 on 3 for 2-3 hours you would either hurt yourself (if people were too competitive or too out of control) or have a good time.
The problem is that it's impossible to get a group of adults who can commit to 2-3 hours a week at a chosen time.
Have you thought about being a chimney sweep?
139 - but do you actually feel less of a grown-up because you don't have a Joshlet to impress?
Chimney sweeps don't play kickball?
141: Oh, sure, if the logistics were worked out like that I could learn to play anything as well as the average forty-something. But those logistics -- finding that many people at about my non-existent skill level with enough time and interest to commit to it to learn together -- are really implausible.
But those logistics ... are really implausible.
This reminds me of my midly depressing conclusion that I have gafiated rather than fafiated (with "it all" refering in my case to table-top RPGs rather than fandom generally).
While the logistics are (extremely) challenging, I've also started to fill my free time with other concerns. Some but not all of which would count as more "adult."
You could invent a sport. Then nobody would know how to play! Or you could pick up bike polo. I'm pretty sure nobody knows how to play that, either.
112
And does the distinction really hold up? Can we cleanly distinguish performative desires and authentic ones?
Well, no, of course we can't, absent mind-reading technology or spontaneous confessions, and no one very few people would actually admit "Yup, I'm wearing this cape just for the fun of getting in peoples' way and looking like an idiot in public". That's why LB is not personally killing people or trying to enact into law her bloody-minded value statement espoused in 94.
But just because third parties can't tell the distinction between "I'm a vegan because of moral beliefs about treating animals well" and "I'm a vegan because I'm a finicky eater and I enjoy making people work twice as hard as usual to accomodate me" doesn't mean the distinction doesn't exist. It's still meaningful about character, it's just very rarely possible to reach an objective standard of proof of it.
Okay, I admit it: I totally judge people who wear capes.
And I'm going to go ahead and not share my thoughts about veganism.
148: I had friends at Berkeley who would occasionally joust on bikes with shopping cars. But I don't think they had any way of scoring.
Or you could pick up bike polo.
I recently saw a couple of people setting up for (what I assume was) bike polo in the parking lot of the High School.
It looked like an activity with a high potential for injury.
That's why LB is not personally killing people or trying to enact into law her bloody-minded value statement espoused in 94.
[Whistles innocently.]
98% OT...
|| The thing that is perplexing to me about the people I went to middle school with, never expected to hear from again, and am now hearing from again a lot because they are planning a 20-year high school reunion and collectively found me on facebook, is the attitude expressed herein:
"OK Brent [Lastname]'s brother and Andrea's sister are ignoring my messages!! Not sure how else to get in touch!! I may try a search for [local university] to find Andrea but not sure of her new last name!!"
Do they think that everyone has been sitting around breathlessly waiting to hear from the people they spent a few miserable years with in a town they, unlike those people, left, probably enthusiastically?
|>
I very much enjoyed playing dodgeball as a kid. More and more as I came out of my shell and started kicking some serious ass at it.
I have the same impression as Heebie about dodgeball. I remember looooving dodgeball, but a lot of that must be because kids can't wing that big red ball all that hard. The physics don't make for a pleasant game for full size adults. That said, I do know some people who play dodgeball authentically, as an athletic sport, but they play on a room-sized trampoline.
I find myself wanting to make alienating status updates but then I remember a great many people find my status updates alienating already, and those are people I like.
157: not leaving a town best left enthusiastically can do funny things to a person, one suspects.
"Holy crap, this reunion is going to be the biggest thing to hit this town in years! We have to make sure nobody misses out!"
Room-sized trampoline. Careful. An intro page before that one played some crappy music.
162 is only improved by the apparent lack of a link.
I spent some time in a pool last week hitting people in the face with a rubber ball. It was pretty terrific.
I'm an adult now, I've got my own reasons to drink.
I think I'll call my dad up an invite him.
Personal to Sifu: was that alienating do you think? Probably shot myself in the foot by making it verbally overwrought.
167: anybody who would be alienated by that might not be the best reunion company in any case.
Dude. Played some jungle water polo with a casual group a couple summers ago. That was a spectacularly fun couple of hours.
We play a kickboxing dodge game, as a class warmup sometimes.
One person has a boxing glove on, they are trying to hit the other people in the class, who are trying to dodge them. On the shoulder, nothing savage. If hit, you have to freeze with your hand held at head height and can only be released if another class mate can kick the outstretched hand. Couple of minutes of that and you are knackered.
It's fun, but does feel pretty childish, I must admit.
See we used the hardish foam rubber soccer balls mostly, rather than playground balls. Still heavy enough to throw but unlikely to break any noses
162: We did something kind of like that for our official high school graduation party, except only half the room was trampolines. The rest was a bunch of mountains made of foam leading to a tarzan rope over a ball pit. Yes, silly, and childish, but technically, I was still a child. It was really fun and I was surprised I enjoyed it.
Do they think that everyone has been sitting around breathlessly waiting to hear from the people they spent a few miserable years with in a town they, unlike those people, left, probably enthusiastically?
I fit the 'left enthusiastically' category, but I was still a bit miffed when no one bothered to inform me of our 10-year class reunion. Geez people, my parents still live in the exact same place, you could ask them for my address. (This was pre-Facebook.)
11 is so, so very right and is essentially the heart of a dispute between myself and the boyfriend over the importance of addressing adults/people generally as Mr./Ms. Surname.
141: I can tell you from personal experience that this is absolutely true. In my 30s, after a completely non-athletic childhood and young adulthood, I got a night job with a bunch of jocks, and played basketball for several hours a week during the day. I got to be genuinely mediocre at it, and had a blast. I took up tennis, too.
But I was in my 30s with no kids, so I wasn't really an adult and could play at whatever I wanted to.
I got a night job with a bunch of jocks, and played basketball for several hours a week during the day. I got to be genuinely mediocre at it, and had a blast.
See!
I think basketball is a game that actually is well suited to beginners (as long as you aren't playing with people who will take advantage of your inexperience). Particularly if you aren't playing 5-on-5 (so the court isn't too crowded) it's possible to learn the game just by trying things and seeing what works and what doesn't.
16: Despite all my time spent at goth clubs, I've always felt like an outsider to the scene, but I think it's layer upon layer of authentic performance and sincere self-parody. You spend time putting outfit and makeup together and you expect people at the club to appreciate it. You strike a dramatic pose and go RAWR and then everyone has a laugh about it. Everyone partitions the music into stuff that sucks and stuff they dance to, and everyone's partition is different, and it's okay. (I only like goth/industrial music that's old enough to drink.)
Every once in a while at the club I go to, some hipster douchebags come in to make fun of the regulars by dancing silly (they're trying to caricature us, but it's impossible to caricature people who are dancing like chickens on fire in slow motion looking for their contact lenses to begin with). This unites the rivetheads, cybergoths, new romantics, swing goths, steampunks, and industrial kids in blazing hatred like nothing else, and I think the main reason it feels disrespectful is the douchebags didn't dress up. Also, we were ironic first.
When I was 19 and stupid, my best friend and I, who both happened to have shaved heads at the time, and access to a giant rubber ball about triple the size of the ones you ordinarily see, invented the game of Headball. It was like air hockey, except the ball was the puck, the hockey mallets were our craniums, and the table was his parents' basement.
134
Do they think that everyone has been sitting around breathlessly waiting to hear from the people they spent a few miserable years with in a town they, unlike those people, left, probably enthusiastically?
Maybe they're just as blasé and calm and casual about it as you are (well, they must be more excited about it than you or you'd both be organizing it, but maybe they're only a little bit more excited than you), but they have no understanding of the correct way to use exclamation marks. It's an unfortunately common problem.
the douchebags didn't dress up
Aren't hipsters in a constant state of costume themselves? Are you being more ironic or are they?
(I only like goth/industrial music that's old enough to drink.)
Man, I went to a goth club in LA a couple years ago and the music sucked. It was all relatively recent stuff, natch.
no understanding of the correct way to use exclamation marks
What's the rule on the correct way? Only in case of fire?
141, 146. I'm unathletic and not in the best of shape, and only after the commencement of my 30s learned, much to my astonishment, that actually I kind of love playing sports. Tennis is a good beginner sport, in the sense that there are lessons everywhere available and you can play singles, so you're not subject to the pressure of feeling like you're letting down your side. However, it's not fun until you're relatively competent, which can take a while, and it can be very frustrating until then.
Soccer is insanely fun right off the bat, but it's hard to find a game where people are at your level and genuinely uncompetitive. I was deeply sad, in the midst of other sadnesses, that my soccer game became a casualty of my breakup -- it was a perfect match for me, as it was peopled mostly by smokers and slackers, who were totally laid back and had about three inches of functioning lung, but who were mostly European and Latin American and so knew the rules like the backs of their hands and were enthusiastic and fun people to boot. It was a hard thing to lose, and I miss it.
(Relatedly, I was sorry to read of Flippanter's troubles, although I think that was in another thread so perhaps he's not checking here. Because I'm insane in this way, and also because I felt like I had to do it to survive, I basically made a part time career out of dealing, very systematically and methodically, with my breakup, which was horrible for reasons that are probably different from Flippanter's. However, if he's interested in my somewhat derangedly programmatic advice, I'd be happy to give it.)
I think the overlap between douchebag and hipster is very narrow, if it exists at all. Certainly there are douchebags who admire hipsters, just as there are hipsters on friendly terms with a few douchebags. But I think the circles touch rather than intersecting.
A coworker is playing adult kickball every Friday. She is having a blast. Everybody seems to join her in hatred of the one team that takes the game super-seriously. Having enemies is a good way to bond, I suppose.
I don't play any of these kidult games--but I totally would, if it were easy. Every time I spend time with my niece and nephews and second cousins and whatnot, I'm usually the first to suggest kick-the-can or capture-the-flag.
I think basketball is a game that actually is well suited to beginners (as long as you aren't playing with people who will take advantage of your inexperience). Particularly if you aren't playing 5-on-5 (so the court isn't too crowded) it's possible to learn the game just by trying things and seeing what works and what doesn't.
This sort of thing always makes me feel like I should definitely never bother trying to play any sport. There is no way I could do anything recognizable as "learning the game" that way.
Particularly if you aren't playing 5-on-5 (so the court isn't too crowded)
5-on-5 fullcourt isn't crowded, and is a great way to learn if you've got the lungs for the running. Larger teams give you the opportunity to balance out relative abilities.
183
What's the rule on the correct way? Only in case of fire?
Well, the relevant part is that multiple exclamation marks are never acceptable except for crazy people, when quoting them, or when depicting them in fiction.
184.last: It's been years since I had anything that could be called, even generously, a "break-up," and yet I am curious. I feel like I dealt with them wrong, because, while my methods made me stop being upset and angry, they also resulted in me never wanting to date again.
185: I invite you to spend a week in the Mission District of San Francisco.
181: They didn't dress for the occasion. I don't wear whiteface and black lace to go to Bender's or El Rio for a PBR.
I invite you to spend a week in the Mission District of San Francisco.
Ok! Who am I staying with? Is she pretty?
Whiteface And Black Lace would make for a good title to a Latoya Jackson album.
Tennis is a good beginner sport, in the sense that there are lessons everywhere available and you can play singles, so you're not subject to the pressure of feeling like you're letting down your side. However, it's not fun until you're relatively competent, which can take a while, and it can be very frustrating until then.
I loved playing tennis against a wall. Seriously. You could work up speed and accuracy at your own pace. Your own slight incompetence provides variety of return angles, etc.
after the commencement of my 30s learned, much to my astonishment, that actually I kind of love playing sports
This happened to me, but only with non-team sports. Actually, the realization that I like being "active" struck me as a very thirtysomething, adult sort of thing.
And then another adult-feeling thing related to that is the accumulation of gear. I own single-sport-appropriate articles of clothing for three different sports!
I own single-sport-appropriate articles of clothing for three different sports!
Swimming doesn't count.
Ooh, I didn't even count swimming! Probably since I can only sort of doggie paddle around. I counted biking, yoga, and running.
I loved playing tennis against a wall.
That never worked for me the one time I tried it. The wall was serving and it was Ad Out. To break my concentration, the wall told a really racist joke about the Williams.
I loved playing tennis against a wall.
Of course I meant John Wall
I'm trying to remember if I've ever played a team sport outside of gym class or summer camp. I guess I must have played a bit of kickball and soccer, but not much.
People looking for sports that have a quick learning curve might want to check out snowboarding. I've never tried it but everyone says that after a first day or two of black and blue all over misery you're good enough to have tons of fun. There's also climbing which doesn't have that fast a learning curve but it doesn't matter since as long as you're climbing on an appropriate difficulty route, you'll be having fun. In general if you live in an area with real mountains not to far away, it's a good way of combining getting to know people exercise, and pretty. Unfortunately the nearest mountains to NYC are out in Wyoming, not exactly close enough for a weekend outing.
193: You'll be staying with Bum Jovi.
He is Not Pretty.
it's possible to learn the game just by trying things and seeing what works and what doesn't.
This sort of thing always makes me feel like I should definitely never bother trying to play any sport. There is no way I could do anything recognizable as "learning the game" that way.
I'd bet money that isn't true. I used to teach a lot of beginners' clinics. I did a fair amount of explaining and diagramming up front, and I am sure some people learned that way. But the games themselves, halting and inept and unskilled, gave most people the most information. A combination is nice, with the instructor stopping play and discussing what just happened. But if you're starting from only ever watching a few games on TV, I think you would still have enough of a framework to figure out what works with your skills and your teammates within a couple hours of play.
202: Dude looks like the Grumpus Under The Rug.
Unfortunately the nearest mountains to NYC are out in Wyoming, not exactly close enough for a weekend outing.
Are you talking mountain climbing (i.e., hiking) or rock climbing? I've gone rock climbing in Acadia National Park in Maine; it's awesome.
I mean, you don't have so many choices that you can't work through them in an unskilled game.
I will try a great big throw!
I will try a little throw to the person standing right next to me.
I will try a medium throw to the running person looking at me.
I will stand still and see if anything happens.
I will run away from the thrower and see if she throws to me.
I will run to the thrower and see if she throws to me.
You can hardly not learn how to play, considering how fast you are taking in information each time, and there are tens of repeated trials.
Best opening line in the history of fiction: "There was a Grumpus living under the rug."
205 Fair enough, Acadia would be a pretty nice place for climbing. It's still a little far for a weekend trip. The Gunks are closer but based on what I've heard and read they're the sort of cliff-in-forest thing that I did and found boring in college.
208 I've heard really great things about the shawgunks actually.
A couple of summers ago my friends and I spent, like, a whole day playing four-square. It was pretty fun.
184: I try never to turn down advice. I don't always follow it, but taking advice gratefully is a manifestation of growing up.
I don't know, but I feel like an adult, even when I don't have my shit together. spend an entire day reading the Internet and talking to imaginary friends.
but taking advice gratefully is a manifestation of growing up
So the fuck what. I'll take your advice if I want, and ignore it if I want, dad.
213: Boy, you'll take my advice as long as you live under my roof. First of all, never buy a vintage British sports car or motorcycle. Next, very few people can consistently beat market returns, and you aren't one of them. Finally, no one ever complained about someone who wore a nice blue blazer to their birthday party/christening/anniversary dinner/commencement/Super Bowl.
First of all, never buy a vintage British sports car or motorcycle.
ahahahahahahahahaha!
The second worst (in terms of time/money commitment to payoff) hobby of them all!
Is the worst hobby prostitution?
I'm wondering whether the most worst is owning a small plane or a boat. Although there's also being a gentleman farmer for sucking down time and money.
Wooden boat building is the worst. By far. But vintage British motorsports collecting is definitely second.
never buy a vintage British sports car or motorcycle
And the corollary: there's nothing more expensive than a cheap motorcycle.
On the other hand, if I were filthy rich, I'd quickly buy my father a Brough Superior.
If you have a shoebox (or an album) of old family photos, take a look at your parents (or, if you're under age 30 or so) your grandparents at age 30, 35, 40, 45, and so on. People really did older much sooner, or they arrived at an adult middle age at a much earlier age. To put it another way: 40 is the new 30!
But (Macy) Halford's argument about adults and kids and sleep seems more than a little strained.
Also, what DS said way upthread about financial anxiety.
I think Go the F to Sleep is quite funny. I suspect my parents would have found it funny too, back in the day when its point was relevant to them.
114: She's a phony, but she's a real phony.
If you have a shoebox (or an album) of old family photos, take a look at your parents (or, if you're under age 30 or so) your grandparents at age 30, 35, 40, 45, and so on. People really did older much sooner, or they arrived at an adult middle age at a much earlier age.
Not true of my parents. I've seen plenty of photos of them, and my mom looked consistently younger than her age, my dad about what you'd expect in our generation (yours and mine). My grandparents are a different story, but I suspect the experience of the war has a lot to do with it. The few prewar photos I've seen show only my maternal grandfather looking 'old' by todays standards. He's also the only one who grew up in what by present day Western standards would be extreme poverty. Galician peasants in the teens and twenties lived at about the level of peasants in a poor Third World country today.
My mother at my age was better looking than I've ever been.
206: You seem to be presuming that the game is mostly known in advance. In which case (e.g. if the players have seen the game played before) I agree it seems like many of the remaining rules could be learned by trial and error quite quickly.
But here are some alternative actions they might try under conditions of genuine ignorance:
I will try a somersault.
I will try tackling the person with the ball.
I will try tackling someone else.
I will dig a hole in the ground.
I will recite the Latin 2nd declension.
I will try yelling.
I will try waving my arms in the air.
I will take off my shoes.
I will spin around in circles until I get dizzy.
I will run straight in one direction for as long as I can.
I will pull a candy bar out of my pocket and eat it.
I will jump up and down.
I will try to lasso another player with my scarf.
I will run up to the player with the ball and forcibly grab it.
I will hug another player.
Just figuring out 10 plausible things to try from the thousands of possible actions is most of the work of learning the game without direct instruction. Figuring out which moves are appropriate in which contexts is comparatively simple.
||
Mavericks in 5, and I'm being generous. They could have played better defense, but Westbrook could have been better. Durant is gonna dominate this league for a decade.
Dirk may be only in the top thirty all-time instead of top ten like Carlisle says, but I am hard pressed to think of a better shooter ever. So if Dirk is the best shooter, and one of the best playoff scorers, and one of the best 4th quarter players, maybe we can move him up into the teens all-time
|>
I like the Mavs to win this series as well, I think, and I also like Dirk, but calling him a "great" playoff scorer does not exactly comport with reality.
I mean, unless you only started watching the Mavs this year.
as long as you're climbing on doing something at an appropriate difficulty routelevel, you'll be having fun.
Isn't this the definition of fun for any activity? Thank you, Chicks-Send-Me-High.
231 I'd say he has been a pretty amazing playoff scorer over the years. Off the top of my head I can only remember one series where he played badly out of about two dozen total. Even great players will occasionally have a few bad games in a row. On the other hand, top ten all time is insane, and even top thirty might be pushing it. Unless we're limiting it to the 21C, in which case, yeah, probably is top ten.
I'm not making any predictions except to say I'd be almost as shocked at a sweep as I would be for OKC to win the next four. Durant is great, and played great in game 1, Westbrook underperformed and Dirk isn't going to be scoring 48 on fifteen FGA's again. (That last is one of the most insane stat lines I've ever seen) He even played some excellent defense in the first half.
I've been reminded in the last couple of years that I still like hiking (after doing very little of it in my 20s, but a lot while growing up*).
*Yeah, that's right. I've been an adult for years.
Also, apparently Canadians are more interested in baseball than in basketball that does not involve LeBron James.
11 is so, so very right and is essentially the heart of a dispute between myself and the boyfriend over the importance of addressing adults/people generally as Mr./Ms. Surname.
I strongly support whichever of you is in favour of this, not because it's a recognition of being grown up, but because if your forced to call every salesperson who forces themselves on your attention by their first name, it doesn't leave you any way to distinguish your actual friends.
184. Some friends of mine discovered they were properly grown up early in their relationship when they decided to go and play tennis and discovered that neither of them could reliably hit the ball over the net.
Dirk is very, very good but McManus's claim that he is "one of the best playoff scorers" and that that fact alone justifies putting him in the 20 best player ever list is nonsense; I don't think he ever led the league or was in the top 3 in playoff scoring for his career and for many of his years wasn't in the top 10.
Room-sized trampoline. Careful. An intro page before that one played some crappy music.
I started laughing out loud when I saw the "Free Wifi" bullet-point; I was imagining a trampoline-roomful of 30-somethings trying to manipulate their ipads & macbooks as they did somersaults.
I think the overlap between douchebag and hipster is very narrow, if it exists at all.
185: I invite you to spend a week in the Mission District of San Francisco.
I've now spent 8 days here, although I haven't gotten out all that much, and my sympathies are still with 185. Hipsters can be douchebaggy, but there's a distinct archetype, the douchebag, and he's not a hipster. (I've been told that in SF he lives somewhere called the Marina.)
That said, the Mission does seem to have a large number of contenders for "douchiest bar in SF." It's an interactive Google Maps overlay, so it must be true.
Last summer, I was walking along the east border of the Presidio and saw two guys in sort of preppy-like dress walking the other way. I can't remember if they made what seemed like "gay chicken" jokes about each other before or after one of them veered towards the outhouse/restroom that a Muni bus driver had just entered, loudly banged on the door a few times, and then laughed as if something clever had just happened.
As amusing as 226 is, surely you realize you can rule most of those out with some extremely basic rule explanation and deduction from the nature of the setting (e.g. this is the game of basketball, played on a court -- which obviously you are not going to try to dig a hole in -- where the goal is to get the ball through the opponent's basket, and to get there you bounce or "dribble" the ball while walking/running). The average person, especially the average adult person, has absorbed that much information about basketball already without having stepped on a court. Conditions of pure and absolute ignorance, paired with inability to deduce the most basic facts from context, are not common, and would usually be accompanied by mental and physical disorders severe enough to have intervened before the afflicted party could plausibly be found on a court being instructed by Megan. She is therefore correct not to take it into account.
The hardest work of learning a game is not ruling out a list of a billion very obviously silly and irrelevant actions. It's in learning to do the things associated with the game that look easy in theory but are not easy in practice. For some people, this is a much steeper learning curve than for others. I leaned toward swimming and track as sports when I was a kid because, like many an uncoordinated nerd, I grew tired of explaining to the coaches of sports like basketball or baseball or football that the basic skills they thought should be easy to pick up were, for me, not easy.
Lee's been the assistant coach for off-season basketball players at the high school I attended long ago. Last night I weant to watch their double-header and ended up having to keep stats for the team. In some ways, that's useful in terms of learning the game because of how much you have to watch at once. I only missed who was responsible for a foul once per game, so I was plenty mature.
I've been thinking for the past few years that I'd really like to play basketball, though I'm glad I didn't play in HS, when (among other things) I was anorexic and morally inflexible enough that I thought intentional fouls were unjustifiable. I'd still probably have trouble with the last bit, but who in some rec league would care?
Teaching people martial arts I'm always struck by how easily some people just immediately learn the movements, even if they aren't familiar to them, and some people literally never do. I'm not talking about some sort of exotic flowery movements: just simple things like standing and lifting one's left straight up and rotating on the ball of one foot. Some people seem to be kinaesthetically/proprioceptively blind, in the way that some people are tone-deaf or colour-blind. You can explain in great detail, demonstrate, give precise pointers on where the movement is incorrect, have other people come and make the same observation, then they say, 'Oh, yeah, now I understand' as if a light has dawned, and do it exactly the same as they did before.
Usual bell-curve distribution of traits, I expect, but it is striking when you meet someone at either end of the distribution.
Why is it that my generation is infatuated with the notion that they're still a kid on the inside?
Michael Marshall Smith had a bit on this in, I think, "Only Forward" which was beautifully written and I can't quite remember it, but it went along the lines of:
You have an inner child; and he's locked away inside you and almost never sees anything of what you see. Everything we struggle for is an effort to break through; you do adrenaline sports because you're trying to recapture the pure excitement of how it felt to be thrown in the air by your parents; you'll never see a horror film as purely terrifying as the shadow in the corner of your bedroom was, you'll never feel love or pain or loss as simply and as intensely as you did when you were a child.
By the way - and I thought Martin Wisse would have got this - the reason why your dad had a proper job and owned a house before you did isn't that he's a titan of real masculinity and genuine values (although of course he totes *is* - he's your dad!), it's that THEY PAID HIM MORE BACK THEN and house prices were LOWER. Also, the reason why so many of them were into really complicated hobbies? They weren't PUTTING IN AS MANY HOURS. All this bollocks is a way of not talking about stagnant wages, raging inequality, and property insanity.
Really. That's really it. *And* the pompous old wankers of his day moaned that the kids were growing up too fast with all their Vespas and button-down shirts and money, and also that they were young and irresponsible for objecting to pointless wars and not all joining the British Legion.
All this bollocks is a way of not talking about stagnant wages, raging inequality, and property insanity.
This, definitely, yeah. Plus, in the UK at least, the effective death of council housing.
THEY PAID HIM MORE BACK THEN and house prices were LOWER
This is certainly true. My father bought a house (bog standard semi) in a London suburb in 1953 for a year and a half's salary as a Civil Service EO. That would be equivalent to getting one for £45,000 now. On the other hand I'm not sure he worked much less than me. He usually left the house at 8:00 and got back around 7:00. Awkward commute, but still.
On average, we're doing more hours than we used to, and commuting more too. (The Situationists were so right about commuting.)
I have the impression that the UK is particularly demented when it comes to property costs, at least compared to much of Europe. A cursory google doesn't find me comparisons across Europe with housing costs correlated with average earnings, though.
I have the impression that the UK is particularly demented when it comes to property costs
Yes. A little research shows that the same house now would go for about £450k. A stretch for two pretty well paid people, certainly not a first house, as it was for my dad. I mean it's neither large nor convenient, and prices have fallen!
I take Alex's point about commuting, but that's much more a London problem. If he went back to Leeds he's probably be able to walk in in half an hour.
I'm paid on the same pay scale as a university lecturer [and I'm not at the bottom of that scale], and my wife earns more than me. By any historical standards that would be, at least, solidly middle-class even if it puts us among the less financially well-off of many of our friends. Anything approximating a classic post-war middle-class lifestyle, however, would be entirely unaffordable and housing is a substantial part of that.
You can make the case that the period from the 40s through to late 70s was a historical high water mark, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't all be fucking pissed off at what has been done through successive waves of social/economic change since then.
Some of this stuff relates to heebie's "male vs. female carriage." It seems almost like most men dancing try to maintain their usual male carriage and fail to commit to dancing, and that most women playing sports try to maintain their usual male carriage and fail to commit to sporting, each to their detriment.
Certainly I know I fail to commit to dancing. Partly because I'm no good at it and feel silly.
242 Well, yes. It's not that the rules are so inherently easy to learn, as much as that people already know most of it. Maybe that was Megan's point.
For someone like me, who is terrified of ruining everyone else's fun, or ruining my team's chances, by breaking the rules, the trial and error method would fill me with dread, and I would never be satisfied that I *really* knew how to play until I read the rulebook thoroughly.
Perhaps I'm atypical.
253 - fuck yes. C earns more now than his dad or my dad did at retirement (within the last 5 years) and we don't have anywhere near their standard of living. Part of that is still having 4 children at home, but a lot of it is housing costs, although we have a very modest mortgage relatively speaking - our house is smaller than the one I grew up in (and felt poorer than my friends in!) and our equity is now more than our remaining mortgage.
I read the other day that the average first time buyer here is 37 - that is pretty depressing, in a country where wealth acquisition via property-buying is seen as standard.
I don't think he ever led the league or was in the top 3 in playoff scoring for his career
Have to look up by individuals
Career playoff averages, among those with lots of games
Dirk Nowitzki 25.8
Kobe Bryant 25.4
Larry Bird 23.8
Michael Jordan 33.4
Wilt Chamberlain 22.5
Moses Malone 22.1
Kareem Jabbar 24.3
Magic Johnson 19.5
Tim Duncan 22.7
Bill Russell 16.2
George Gervin 26.5
George Mikan 23.0
Jerry West 29.1
Elgin Baylor 27.0
I don't want to count Iverson or McGrady, Wade and LeBron haven't been around long enough to see if they can keep it up...
...and the other point is to look to see how many are power forwards.
If you know what this number means
Elgin Baylor Career playoff WS/48 .134
Dirk Career playoff WS/48 .213
We can't buy [I'm 39]: living in London and having a salary that's not 6 figures. It's so far out of the bounds of possibility I don't even really worry about it, but it would be nice if monthly rent + bills on a nice-ish but by no means luxurious 2 bed flat wasn't the guts of 20K+ a year, which is, after all, roughly median wage after tax.
Michael Jordan career WS/48 .255
Dwyane Wade career playoff WS/48 .187
Hakeem .189
Lebron James .229
Jerry West .203
George Gervin .146
Kobe Bryant .158
All this bollocks is a way of not talking about stagnant wages, raging inequality, and property insanity.
Hey, I brought economic factors into 79.
261. You did, and I agree with what you said, but I still argue that nobody should be confident that their job will exist in 5 years. It's all very well for LB to assert that somebody will be doing the work she does in 5 years; very likely, but why does she assume it will be her, or for anything approaching the same money.
The fact that most people regard it as more likely than not that the system will screw them over, whatever they do and through no fault of their own is hardly a huge incentive to "growing up".
Yeah. If you DON'T think the system will screw you over if you act responsibly, you likely start acting responsibly. Not a lot of 28-year-olds in that position.
For the sake of argument, I'm extremely confident that I'll have my job in five years, unless I choose not to.
264. Good for you. A year ago I'd have said the same thing, but here I am on my way...
258: You should move to Pittsburgh. 20k (in dollars) is enough to rent or buy a house pretty much where you want if you are fine without a garage and only four bedrooms.
Clearly Heebie is less worried about the bursting of the higher education bubble than I am...
Bob, checking Basketball Reference, I'll concede that you are have a better case than I'd thought -- on an individual season basis, Dirk was never the best or top 3 scorer, which is what I was thinking of, and on a per season basis he comes in a like 127 all time in PPG; also, his counting stats in the playoffs are low when compared to the greats, though there are obvious problems with using playoff counting stats to judge individual performance. However, he comes in at 13 all time for career average playoff ppg (which, if you think about it, is an odd stat, but whatevs).
Anyhow, I'm happy to say that Dirk had an incredible game last night, is easily one of the top ten power forwards ever and likely will retire in the top 5 at that position (though, for most of NBA history, that was a much different and less important position).
As best I can tell, we're diverting public funds that used to go to universities into subsidizing student loans for rising tuition. But the social mandate that all nice people must have a college diploma seems robust. So I can't see my job security slipping any time soon.
(That diverting is not direct. I'm just saying one's going down and one's going up, and proportionally.)
But the social mandate that all nice people must have a college diploma seems robust.
I wonder if that's going to break. We're not terribly wealthy, but our income level is well above the line where everyone starts expecting that their kids are going to college. But at the current rate of increase, the relationship between tuition and our savings and our incomes in seven years, when Sally goes to college, looks absurd -- it's like buying a Lamborghini.
"If something can't go on, it won't." I'm starting to think that either tuition is going to come back down, or middle-class kids are going to stop going to college.
I think there will be a population trickle down. Strong students will flood the public universities. The upper-middle students will be pushed down onto the weaker schools and community colleges. The lower-middle students will get exploited by for-profits. The bottom quartile of high school grads will still sit the whole thing out.
But at the current rate of increase, the relationship between tuition and our savings and our incomes in seven years, when Sally goes to college, looks absurd -- it's like buying a Lamborghini.
Are you talking about fancy private college or in-state tuition at state schools?
Because if it's just the former, I'm happy for my kids to go to a state-school, and that becoming more common seems like a more likely equilibrium than either tuition going down or middle-class kids giving up on college altogether.
But if the latter is getting out-of-reach for a representative person whose income level is well above the line where everyone starts expecting that their kids are going to college, that would be scary. And I have a vague sense that things are getting more expensive, but I haven't really looked closely at prices, so I don't know.
All four-year colleges are very expensive for everyone.
The school at which I am sitting, technically a state-related school and not a state school, costs $14k a year for an undergrad. That doesn't include housing or food or book and it is over double what it was in 2000. It's now $24k for out of state kids.
The link in 275 is weird, because it's taking California's formerly free system as typical. $4K in tuition is not crazy for an in-state public university, nor out of reach unaffordable for a middle class family.
SUNY's twenty grand a year now (not just tuition, the full cost) for instate students. We couldn't do that for two kids without borrowing, but it is cheaper than private schools.
Cost-per-credit-hour at the community college I went to has more than doubled since I went there less than ten years ago.
In terms of my prediction above, LB's choice will be: should the kids go to a sufficiently low-prestige school that they can get awesome financial aid package, or should they and parents go into massive debt? Gradually schools will become populated by people doing the former, paid for by people doing the latter.
Actually, that's not a prediction. That's a current description.
281: and has been the case for decades, no?
I should spend the next couple of years trying to talk myself into the SUNY schools. Nothing against state schools generally, and it's not that I've ever heard that the SUNYs were bad, just that I've never heard that they were notably good.
I was trying to google information about the various full-ride scholarships for middle class people at the Ivys, and I found something horrible.
282: Well, the prestige at which the trade-off happens keeps slipping, for any given strength student.
283: The flip side is Sally and Newt will be surrounded by stronger students in the SUNY system than they would have been in your day.
I'm reminded of that story a few months back about the woman who was hundreds of thousands in debt after graduating from Northeastern with a sociology degree, which contained the immortal line "when you get into a top seventy school, you go."
283: we've had this conversation before, and we're opposite sides of it, I know, but in my view, as someone who is completely comfortable sending her kids to public schools generally, without much regard for their supposed reputations, this seems like something that ought to be very easy to talk yourself into.
Recently someone on NPR gave the following rule of thumb: don't pick a major/school combination that gives you more student debt than your expected starting yearly salary.
I went to a state school on a full scholarship, but it may work for other people.
289: Which is another way of saying, "Don't major in sociology unless you are a scholarship student or have rich parents."
I managed to make it through well over three decades of life without going to a private school. Now that I am (about to), those suckers are (going to be) paying me (a tiny, tiny amount). Okay, there are other reasons that it might be (is?) a terrible decision, but at least I won't owe anybody money.
With the implication being that if you have your heart set on sociology, drop down a few tiers on school prestige. Obviously there aren't tiers available to all students.
288: Yeah, a lot of it is guilt about quailing before the idea of giving my kids the same deal I got -- my parents would pay the full shot at any school I could get into. And I really don't have anything against state schools generally, I just have no positive impression of the SUNY's at all.
291: Why? Sociology is one of the big majors for law enforcement, and so the grad departments are usually doing pretty well, from everything I've heard. I mean, of course, the academic market sucks for everyone right now, but you'd be a lot better off in sociology than in the humanities, or even in some of the other social sciences.
247
By the way - and I thought Martin Wisse would have got this - the reason why your dad had a proper job and owned a house before you did isn't that he's a titan of real masculinity and genuine values (although of course he totes *is* - he's your dad!), it's that THEY PAID HIM MORE BACK THEN and house prices were LOWER. Also, the reason why so many of them were into really complicated hobbies? They weren't PUTTING IN AS MANY HOURS. All this bollocks is a way of not talking about stagnant wages, raging inequality, and property insanity
Minor detail: this is the Netherlands, which is nowhere near as bad as the US or UK (yet). Wages and work-life balance have held up much better here than where most of y'all live. The same for property prices -- they have gone up -- but not to the same insane amounts as they did across the North Sea.
Omit these changes and you still see people "growing up" much later than their parents' generation did.
Besides which, the people who seems the most afraid/unwilling to grow up are those with rich mommies and daddies or already have a quite good jobs themselves.
I always find anxiety over private/public schools odd, just because my parents went to strong state schools and never once raised (in fast, actively and assertively shut down) the possibility that we would go anywhere but the U.C.'s. But that's back when we were keeping Clark Kerr's promise. Now I don't know what parents should expect or plan for.
***
Well, yes. It's not that the rules are so inherently easy to learn, as much as that people already know most of it. Maybe that was Megan's point.
For someone like me, who is terrified of ruining everyone else's fun, or ruining my team's chances, by breaking the rules, the trial and error method would fill me with dread, and I would never be satisfied that I *really* knew how to play until I read the rulebook thoroughly.
Perhaps I'm atypical.
Well, expecting perfect play out of yourself in your first attempt is going to put up huge barriers for you. I wasn't even talking about the rules, which are likewise easy to absorb when you notice that people don't tuck the disc/ball under their arms and make a dash for the endzone. I meant useful play that gets you involved in the game. But you would pick up both, even if all had to go on was a few minutes of watching the play and very basic familiarity with common concepts. Oh, there are lines on the ground? Usually lines mean stay on one side. We're socialized primates; that's exactly the sort of stuff we pick up rapidly. You'd get 80% of what is going on within an hour or so, and if you weren't putting immense pressure on yourself, that would be plenty to enjoy playing a casual game.
***
Ttam, I did a lot of physically adjusting people's bodies and mirror work. I wish my trainer were a little bit more assertive about manipulating me physically. Sometimes that's fastest, even though I know what she means when she tells me very specifically to activate certain muscles.
295: I thought cops took criminal justice or poli sci.
Just train your kids to be super interested in Agriculture, Human Ecology, or Industrial and Labor Relations, and you can send them to Cornell.
I wish my trainer were a little bit more assertive about manipulating me physically.
Pics please.
I knew a guy at my first law firm with a degree in Agricultural Economics from Cornell. Almost exactly the same requirements as Economics, but much much cheaper.
The other problem with the SUNY system is that it seems cruel to make someone go to college in Stony Brook. The real problem in New York public education is the decline of City College.
For people who like to have lots of job opportunity in decent paying jobs, I can highly recommend degrees in anything ag related. We had more job postings than graduates every year I was at Cal Poly.
298: Around here they take Sociology if they're going to a university, criminal justice at a community college.
Re 298.last
I can see that would work for certain movements really well but we have no mirror available and I wouldn't be comfortable touching some people. As a nearly 40 year old bloke, touching 18 year old girls is just a recipe for trouble. Although, to be fair, the particular people i have in mind are mostly male.If we did have a mirror that could be very useful.
Oswego and Fredonia make Stony Brook look like renaissance Florence
As a nearly 40 year old bloke, touching 18 year old girls is just a recipe for trouble.
Probably, but we'll have to do a test to know for certain.
OTOH, ttaM doesn't have similar qualms about punching and kicking 18 year old girls.
Cornell is good at ag and math, and Megan and I are both happy and cool, right ? Right ?
Ehrenreich's _The Hearts of Men_ covers a lot of the econ/expectations/immaturity pattern a generation earlier. I don't think it matters unless people are avoiding really useful work, and I don't see that slacking correlates with bunny suits more than with beer and TV. My grandparent's dressing for bridge and the country club was performative, but *that was mature then* - the authentic unedited self was riskily rude.
Oh, also! Since we don't have a mirror now, my trainer has been filming me with her iPhone. Super useful for diagnosis and self-correction.
Stony Brook has this remarkable property of not even being a college town. (Basically all the rich assholes who live there stop anything aimed at students from opening.) I don't know much about Oswego or Fredonia, but Stony Brook sucks in a way that say Durham NH (to pick a very small state university town that I've been in) doesn't.
The Cornell public/private mix is quite fascinating. Are there other schools that do that?
I don't know, but the state schools ha all the awesome majors, like "horticulture" and "textiles."
Re 308
Yeah. Funnily enough I suspect they would be much more comfortable with me sticking to that, too. Damned rules/laws.
310, 312 -- You know, I had the thought in 312 as something that might creep people out. I wonder if borrowing someone's own phone to film/critique them on would work better. You could give a facial reason that they'd have the clip to look at later if it was on their phone not yours, but I bet it'd also be more comfortable for the filmee retaining control of the video.
314: I know Alfred in New York is a private that runs the NYS College of Ceramics, thought there were others associated with SUNY but this list seems to indicate just it and Cornell.
You'll notice that I haven't linked to "Megan's Many Push-ups" yet. Haven't quite figured out how to monetize that.
Seriously, they're about the dullest clips ever.
Recently someone on NPR gave the following rule of thumb: don't pick a major/school combination that gives you more student debt than your expected starting yearly salary.
Heh. As some of you know, I was seriously considering going to a one-year MA program at a schmancy school that in one year, I said ONE YEAR was going to cost substantially more than a likely yearly salary. A friend of mine said "what is this, a financial literacy test?!"
I'm sort of in a funk because I have to officially tell them to fuck off in the next few days. I'm not sure why I haven't gone ahead and done it.
Does that rule of thumb give you pause, then?
I just have no positive impression of the SUNY's at all.
Not even Binghamton? I actually visited when I was looking at colleges (20 *shudder* years ago); it had a good reputation at the time, and if campus hadn't been so isolated from the town I might have gone there.
I've been to Binghamtom and I would see that as a plus.
I know a couple good mathematicians who did their undergrad at Binghamton, actually. Are Sally or Newt going to be mathematicians?
My guess is not mathematicians, although how can you tell at this age?
Yeah, Binghamton if anywhere -- it's not that I have a strong opinion that the SUNYs suck, I just have no real impression of them at all.
At this point, Sally's a structural engineer/architect, and Newt's a celebrity chef. Next week, either or both could decide to be a teapot.
I have never gotten the issue people have with state schools. I went to a state school that isn't even in a highly regarded state. I and everyone I know from there is currently gainfully employed. Now the people I know all were in applied fields like CS and engineering. I don't know how the humanities people fair. It probably isn't so good for the academic tract, but I assume the graduate school you went to would be a much bigger deal than undergrad anyway.
More neo-kid dodgeball business: L.A. is a cool place in the sense that you can live the life of a child but make a grown-up's living.
322: No, I had already decided not to go. I think I was unclear: I was seriously considering the program only until I found out I was getting $0.00 in aid and realized how much it would cost.
not mathematicians, although how can you tell at this age?
So very probably not mathematicians, though there are decently socialized examples, including probably heebie.
@327
I hear that Stony Brook has a top notch teapot program.
Further to 327: To coo over my brilliant children a bit, the other week my father the architect decided to figure out what Sally was learning in her middle school engineering class, and asked her "So, if you have a beam supported at the endpoints, what part of the beam is in tension and what part is in compression?"
It took her a couple of seconds, and you could hear the gears in her head grinding, but after a pause she came up with: "Well, the weight of the beam pulls it down in the middle, which means the top of the beam is in compression and the bottom is in tension." Dad was very pleased with the school.
Ooooh, that is impressive. I'm surprised an architect could understand her answer.
Smearcase, it's still a raw deal. There's some cognitive dissonance in being offered something that you still have to pay a lot of money. It's hard to square you like me and I deserve this with I can't have it and you're not helping.
Regardless, you're worth it.
Don't make my father fly three thousand miles to look disapprovingly at you.
334, 336: Yeah, if that doesn't wake JRoth from the dead, nothing will.
Equations of motion for this situation, please:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n5AfHYST6E
what Sally was learning in her middle school engineering class
Ooh! I wish my middle school had had engineering classes (though if it did, I don't know that I'd have thought to take them).
It's a specialized STEM school -- everyone takes engineering.
That is nifty! I wish we would be living somewhere with a larger and more thriving public school system than we probably will when Jane is Sally's age.
I'm really pleased with the school. Worried by and about it -- it's still a startup, and it's administratively very rickety -- but the academics make me very happy.
You'll get to experience the value of STEM school research firsthand.
chris y (265), I'm sorry about your situation. Is this related to Britain's new austerity regime?
I'm starting to think that either tuition is going to come back down, or middle-class kids are going to stop going to college.
I've been thinking this for several years, ever since a financial advisor told us that the rule (the rule of prudent college saving) is to put away 500 dollars per month per child, from the time of birth through to high school graduation. That's to avoid any serious reliance on loans, of course. But who can afford this?!
280
In terms of my prediction above, LB's choice will be: should the kids go to a sufficiently low-prestige school that they can get awesome financial aid package, ...
Don't high prestige schools often have better financial aid packages (because they are richer)?
294
Yeah, a lot of it is guilt about quailing before the idea of giving my kids the same deal I got -- my parents would pay the full shot at any school I could get into. ...
Hmm, perhaps you can get your parents to offer the same deal to your kids. Grandparents are notoriously softhearted.
Don't make my father fly three thousand miles to look disapprovingly at you.
They teach us to withstand the hard looks of engineers in the first Seismic class. In the second class we learn to ignore their weeping. It is for their own good and the safety of all humanity.
I'm not sure just how much the Breaths make but at the very top private schools you can basically count on zero tuition cost if you're making under 200k and you have two kids close in age. You're not going to pay full tuition in those places under those circumstances unless you're making well over 250k. Or in other words, Harvard will be a cheaper option than anything else except a very cheap state school with the kids commuting from home.
284 I was trying to google information about the various full-ride scholarships for middle class people at the Ivys, and I found something horrible.
It used to be next to impossible to find out about these things. I wonder if the Internet has made it easier in the last decade or so. When I was applying to colleges, my parents told me they would pay for a state school, and otherwise I would need to get a scholarship. (The working assumption, based on rumors and some sort of worksheet estimator thing, was that need-based financial aid would be insufficient for them to pay for a more expensive school without sacrificing their retirement savings, which as far as I can tell was basically accurate.) My high school guidance counselors claimed that none of the Ivies, MIT, Caltech, Stanford, etc. gave any merit scholarships whatsoever. None of the other information I had suggested otherwise. Chicago admitted to giving some, although they were secretive about how many, so it was the most prestigious place I even bothered to apply to. A few months later I met someone who got a full merit scholarship to Caltech, and realized my guidance counselors were clueless.
Then, Chicago was basically like a school designed to optimize my personal happiness, so it all worked out for the best.
350: Is that a new innovation, or is that also something my guidance counselors were ignorant about? I was always told that middle-class people would pay similar amounts at any sufficiently expensive school.
Grandparents are notoriously softhearted.
Best Shearer sentence ever.
353: it's pretty new. Last ten years, I'd think?
My dad's a professor at a private college, and I never had an inkling that going to a private college could be affordable no matter how much of an academic superstar I was.
(The working assumption, based on rumors and some sort of worksheet estimator thing, was that need-based financial aid would be insufficient for them to pay for a more expensive school without sacrificing their retirement savings, which as far as I can tell was basically accurate.)
Same here. The message from all corners was "The tuition may not be as high as the sticker price, but it will comprise all of your parents' easily accessible money, however much that is."
353 It started right at the end of the nineties with the institution of all-cash/no loan financial aid packages at Harvard and I think Yale and has gotten both more generous and has expanded to a bunch of other schools since then. A couple years ago after a lot of googling I found a breakdown of financial aid for Princeton and some other equivalent school by income group, percentage receiving aid from the university, average amount of aid award. For all the under 150K groups 100% of US students were getting aid, with an average award ranging from well above total tuition to somewhat above total tuition, room, board, and fees. The 150K-200K group had most people getting aid with an average award slightly above tuition. Even in the 200-250K category a majority were receiving financial aid.
356.1: I think winning or ranking highly in the sort of national-level competitions that have name recognition is sufficient but not necessary to get full scholarships at good private universities. (It's also sufficient to get unsolicited offers of admission and full scholarships from schools ranging from obscure public institutions in square states to places like NYU.)
Sally should get started early on this, in other words.
I was lucky enough to never get accepted to any private schools.
351 matches my experience, but I'd mostly settled on a public school anyway. I only applied to 2 places. This was probably a mistake, though my total college fees (tuition) amounted to less than $20,000 over 4 years.
I applied to Harvard, but not seriously (as in, I didn't approach it the way I would have, had I thought 1) I'd get in and 2) I'd go). Then there were administrative problems related to a misspelling of my name in the application files. I'd already accepted elsewhere by the time I was waitlisted.
357
... and I think Yale ...
I had a relative graduate from Yale a few years ago. The financial aid for families in the 100k-200k income range got significantly more generous partway through. Say around 2006. I remember reading that Harvard also increased their aid around then. But I don't think that a less wealthy school like say Cornell can afford to be as liberal.
Also, I was told later that significant merit aid in the Ivies would start after the first year, if you could merit it. This was all mid-90s.
From early 2008, not sure if they were able to maintain this through the downturn. Very few other schools can compete on "need-based" aid at this level.
Under Harvard's plan, families earning between $60,000 and $120,000 will pay a small percentage of their annual income for tuition, room, and board, jumping to 10% for those earning between $120,000 and $180,000. At Yale, families with incomes below $120,000 will see their financial contribution slashed by more than 50%, while most families with incomes between $120,000 and $200,000 will see their costs drop by 33% or more.
Speaking (belatedly) of lame sports: "One hundred thousand points for fucking Gryffindor".
"Are". "Were". What's a few hours between friends?
361: I did not apply to Harvard. This continues to make my mom sad and/or disappointed. I don't really know why.
I tell my students that it matters much less what they major in, and much more which skills they pick up. In other words, it's basically a pro-liberal arts position, with reminders that if they expect to go into math or science-y professions, then they should take courses in those areas regardless of their major.
It's also useful to remind them that majoring in, say, journalism, doesn't do a whole hell of a lot for getting a job in journalism, and that majoring in philosophy (which my fellow philosophy majors in undergrad used to joke qualified us all to go work at McDonald's) can be a great choice that will prepare you for a wide range of post-college careers and opportunities.
For LB: Do the SUNY schools have honors colleges? I've found that they can make a huge difference.
Whining about how adults aren't adult any more is the easiest single form of social criticism, because it means nothing and can be stated on the basis of no evidence.
It goes hand in hand with the complain that children aren't children any more, but are forced to grow up at age 5. I suppose this isn't necessarily in contradiction with the other worry because you could say that everyone's being forced into an eternal teenagehood. I think the appearance of this probably comes from marketers' concentration on the 18-to-34 demographic, because they're the world's biggest suckers.
Anyway, I repeat my iron rule: the moment someone starts complaining about how grown men wear short pants now, you can stop listening. It has not failed me yet.
My cute mom just sent me a link to the book in the OP, in which she abbreviated it "Go The *uck To Sleep".
371: Heather Heebie has Two Mommies? A cute one and a ...? Or maybe a multitude of mommies, each with a distinguishing characteristic.
One mommy with many heads. Kind of like a dragon.
