Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Books read in March 2020

New:

1. Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know by Malcolm Gladwell

Reread:

1. Seduction in Death

Sunday, March 29, 2020

The three milk pitcher trick

I've always HATED changing milk bags. It takes me less than 30 seconds, but I HATE it.

But my mommy taught me a trick that makes it far less annoying: get three milk pitchers.

There are three bags in a 4L bag of milk. When you bring the bag of milk home, immediately put each bag in a separate pitcher. Cut open one of the bags, leave the other two sitting in the fridge.

Then, when you finish a bag, you don't have to change the milk bag, you just have to cut open the bag in the next pitcher.

I know it doesn't make sense to hear me say that, but discarding the old bag and simply opening the new bag is somehow way less annoying that changing the bag.

It also means you can wash the old pitcher with your next batch of dishes, rather than getting stuck in the "If I wash it now it will take even more time to change the milk bag, but if I don't wash it now it will be gross" trap.

I never would have thought such a simple change could save so much frustration, but it totally does! Thanks, Mom!

Saturday, March 28, 2020

Things They Should Invent: free supply delivery for self-isolating people

People who come back from travel or otherwise may have been exposed to COVID-19 are supposed to self-isolate for 14 days, without even stopping at the grocery store!

Also, grocery delivery times are multiple days!

Solution: free supply delivery for self-isolating people

You make a list, and they bring you everything on your list. Then a few days later, they bring you another delivery of whatever else you need.

To make this work, they'll need to provide people with what they actually want. Not a pre-made kit of what you theoretically should need, not a list of "basic" foods to select from. They need to actually bring people any commercially-available item they want.  No test of "worthiness".

And it shouldn't be limited to just food. Maybe you need shampoo or socks or sauvignon blanc. Maybe if you're going to be working from home for two weeks, you desperately need a desk and chair. So that people maintain their self-isolation, they need to be promptly delivered whatever it is they might need, so they have no incentive to go to the store!

But how do we keep people from taking advantage of this and getting infinite free stuff?

Solution: everyone self-isolating gets a self-isolating allowance. A fairly generous amount regardless of their financial situation and ability to earn income in isolation - for argument's sake, let's say $1,000 for a 14-day self-isolation.

The self-isolation delivery service will give them up to $1,000 per person of stuff for free. At the end of the 14-day period, they get a cheque or direct deposit for any remaining balance. So if they had $500 worth of stuff delivered, they get a $500 cheque at the end. If they had $20 worth of stuff delivered, they get a $980 cheque at the end. If they had nothing delivered, they get a $1,000 cheque at the end.

If people need or want more than $1,000 worth of stuff delivered, they have to pay for the portion in excess of $1,000. So if you need some diamonds delivered to your home as soon as you get back from vacation because you're fresh out, that can totally be made to happen, you just have to pay for them.

The goal here is to remove any temptation to go out, and the way to do that is to give people whatever they would normally be going out for, without value judgement.

Monday, March 23, 2020

Disillusionment (Part 2)

This post contains descriptions of racism and other stereotypes.

"So," you're wondering, "you're a Harry Potter fan. Why is your big "disillusionment at discovering someone is transphobic" post about Heather Mallick rather than J.K. Rowling?"

And the answer to that is I got emotional closure on Harry Potter at the end of Book 7. All was well, I closed the book and walked away. I have no need to revisit Hogwarts - I may well go my entire life without ever looking at another Harry Potter fic, and not even notice its absence.

But there's another problem.

When it J.K. Rowling's transphobia reached my Twitter feed, people also started posting about various stereotypes contained the Harry Potter series. (The linked article is but one example - there were many examples, but I'm struggling to re-find them.)

I'm not worldly enough to have spotted these stereotypes.  I'm not worldly enough to extrapolate from the examples given in these articles to spot other stereotypes.

All of which is a problem because last year, completely ignorant of all these issues, I gave Fairy Goddaughter Harry Potter for her seventh birthday.


Harry Potter is one of the fandoms I share with Fairy Goddaughter's mother (who really needs a blog nickname!). We read the books together. We were high school classmates when it began, Fairy Goddaughter's Mother was a newlywed when it ended.

In the months leading up to her seventh birthday, Fairy Goddaughter was expressing interest in the character of Hermione Granger. Who is she? Is she smart? Is she powerful? So her mother decided Fairy Goddaughter was ready, and allowed me the honour of giving Fairy Goddaughter her metaphorical Hogwarts letter.

Then I had a creative idea - literally my first creative idea since my head injury! Fairy Goddaughter should be invited to Hogwarts with an actual Hogwarts letter!

Inspired - and rejoicing in the sensation of inspiration, which I never thought I'd feel again! - I ran around the neighbourhood looking for everything I needed.  Hogwarts letters are written on parchment! But it turns out real parchment doesn't look like I'd imagined. Luckily, Deserres had stationery that looked more like a Hogwarts letter than actual parchment does. Hogwarts letters are written in green calligraphy! I've tried calligraphy pens before, they just make a mess. Luckily, Deserres had these markers with slanted tips that produce writing that looks more like calligraphy than I can produce with a calligraphy pen. Hogwarts letters are delivered by owl! They don't yet have a service where you can get an actual owl to deliver a letter to a given address, so instead I ran around to every store that sells toys, looking for the closest approximation of a Hogwarts owl.

Using my green calligraphyesque marker and my parchment-emulating stationery, I wrote Fairy Goddaughter a letter about how these books have meant so much to her mother and to me, and I hope she has an equally magical time at Hogwarts.

I packed up the beautiful Harry Potter box set in a shipping box, rolled up the letter like a scroll, tucked it under the owl so it would look like the owl was holding it, and sent it off to Fairy Goddaughter, full of pride and anticipation that she gets to set off on her magical journey, and full of glee and delight that my post-head-injury brain actually thought of and implemented a creative idea.


And, completely unbeknownst to me, I was handing her a book full of harmful stereotypes that I'm not worldly enough to detect. And I have every reason to believe Fairy Goddaughter's parents aren't either. (Fairy Goddaughter's Mother and I have talked at length over the years about how our sheltered upbringing in a small town with very little diversity didn't equip us to detect things like stereotypes and racism.) And we all enthusiastically presented it as a magical happy place.


What do you do about this?? How do adults who are too sheltered to notice stereotypes learn about stereotypes in order to guide children appropriately?


In life in general, people likely become aware of stereotypes because people around them use stereotypes with a critical mass of frequency. The lack of diversity where I grew up meant I didn't have this exposure. I can't say with confidence that no one was racist (and, as I learn more about the world, I'm coming to realize that fallacies like white saviour syndrome and othering were rampant), but rather that there was no one for the racist people to be racist towards, at least not with enough frequency for us to notice patterns and develop awareness of stereotypes. 


Most, if not all, of the stereotypes I've become aware of in my life have been from people pointing out examples of racism. They provide a screenshot or a link: "See, this is racist!"

And I wouldn't have been able to determine that independently, by which I mean that the racist words or images read as a sequence of nonsense to me.

For example, some 20 years after I started watching Monty Python, I learned that the embassy scene in Monty Python's Cycling Tour episode involves what I learned is called "yellowface" - racist, stereotypical depictions of Chinese people. Watching it the first time as a teenager, I didn't even realize that they were trying to depict Chinese people. I thought it was just a bunch of people in strange costumes and silly voices behaving erratically (to be expected from the comedy troupe that brought us Gumbies).

But I can't extrapolate from this to see what else might be racist. I can't even tell you with certainty that Gumbies aren't racist. (What I've read about their origin suggests that there's no racial or ethnic or stereotyping component, but I can't rule out the possibility that I'm just not seeing it.)

So how do I learn this? Do I have to go around listening to racist people, or is there another way? I do try to read books by people of a variety of races (and am always open to new recommendations), I try to pay attention and believe people when they say something is racist, but that's insufficient for me to learn what I need to know. Even though I'm reading, paying attention, listening, and believing people, the next example of racism that's pointed out to me always ends up being a completely different thing that also read to me as meaningless nonsense, that I  couldn't extrapolate from previous things. I fully recognize that I need to educate myself and not put the burden on racialized people to teach me, but . . . so far it isn't working, and I don't know what else to do.


My parents would have told you that it's a good thing that I don't know anything about racism or stereotypes. And, if that were true of every single child, they would be right. If no one knew any stereotypes, there would be no such thing as stereotypes.

But the problem is that some people are targeted by stereotypes. Stereotypes are used to hurt them. So they have the burden of being hurt and of people like me not being able to see it.  If no one knew any stereotypes there wouldn't be any stereotypes, but if enough people know them that they can be used to harm, then other people's ignorance exacerbates the situation.

What do we do about this?


***

As with the previous post, it's not really about me and my feelings, it's about how this fits into the system.

When I learned about the stereotypes present in Harry Potter, I found myself wondering why the editor didn't remove them. J.K. Rowling wasn't famous when she wrote the first book, I doubt she would have had the clout to reject a "Dude, this looks really racist!" edit.

But . . . what if the editor was in the same position as me? In my own job I'm sometimes called upon to edit, and I don't know many stereotypes. Have I inadvertently let some through???

My own anti-racism education was, as you can see, insufficient. It was a topic in school around Grade 9 I think, and it didn't do anything. There was some "stereotypes are bad", and we sat there and agreed "Yes, stereotypes are bad!" but never gained the ability to recognize stereotypes when being used by other people.

One of the examples of stereotypes used was the notion that Polish people are stupid.  My own mother was born in Poland . . . and I had never heard of this stereotype! My Polish relatives are intelligent, classy people, my non-Polish relatives are less so, and I'd never heard another human being express an opinion on Polishness. I managed to grow up without even being exposed to stereotypes about my own ethnicity!

And because I'd never been exposed to this stereotype (or any of the others used as examples), it sort of reinforced in myself (and, likely, my classmates) the idea that stereotypes are Other - not something that happens in real life, not something that we'll ever encounter.


So the problem reinforces and feeds on itself. People like me who grow up sheltered aren't exposed to stereotypes, which gets in the way of teaching us about stereotypes, which leaves us oblivious and useless to people who are harmed by stereotypes.

What do we even do about this?


And then there's the fact that I love buying books for children. Even though I don't celebrate xmas myself, it's the occasion when I most often get to see my baby cousins, so I delight in going to Mabel's Fables, picking out books for each child, wrapping them paper shiny enough to make a child believe the package must contain magic . . . and, all this time, how many stereotypes have I unknowingly placed in their innocent hands? Thereby normalizing the stereotypes without any of us even realizing it, and perpetuating the cycle for another generation?

Sunday, March 15, 2020

A self-psychology exercise

In the aftermath of my head injury, I stumbled upon a self-psychology technique that may be useful to some people struggling with social distancing. This isn't helpful to everyone, but I'm sharing it here for anyone who can use it.


Many people find themselves from time to time imagining what life would be like if they didn't have to go to work/school today, or at all. If they could do whatever they wanted today, or in life in general. For example, you might think about how nice it would be to have a snow day like when you were a kid. Or, in the aftermath of my head injury, I often thought about how nice it would be to be retired like my parents.

Now, I'm not suggesting that a pandemic is a snow day! But they do, from time to time, have some moments of similarity.


So when you notice one of these moments of similarity, simply take note of it. Simply pause and say to yourself "If I could do whatever whatever I wanted today, I'd be doing exactly this."

Waking up naturally rather than to an alarm? That's a moment! Playing peek-a-boo and making your baby giggle? That's a moment! Putting your feet up and tuning into your favourite TV show? That's a moment!


I know, it sounds like I'm leading up to trying to convince you that quarantine is exactly like retirement and that you should feel grateful.

But that's not what I'm trying to do here. I know full well that this will vary widely from person to person, and that people who chafe at the idea of staying home likely have a very different vision of what they'd be doing in retirement. And I'm not trying to convince you to feel anything or to change your emotions.

I'm just saying, when you have a moment, take note of it. No emotions required. You don't have to feel grateful for the moment, you don't have to savour the moment, you don't have to stop feeling any negative feelings that you might be having about the pandemic or about any other aspect of life.

Simply note to yourself: "Right at this exact moment, I am doing exactly what I would be if I could do whatever I want."


Some people will find that comforting. If it turns out you find it comforting, it may help you get through this. If doesn't add to your comfort, no harm done. (If it takes away from your comfort, you can totally stop whenever you want.)

Some people will find that there are more moments than they expected. If it turns out you do, it may help you get through this. If you don't experience many moments, no harm done - this exercise simply won't take up your headspace, you can rejoice in your self-knowledge, and life will proceed exactly as if you'd never read this.


In my head injury aftermath, this could press pause on a despair spiral. EVERYTHING IS A HELLSCAPE!!!!!!...but this shower is nice, and there's literally nothing else I'd rather be right this exact moment. And, for at least the duration of that shower, everything wasn't a hellscape. It got me through the next hour or so.

The next few weeks are going to be about getting through the hours. Maybe this will help some people get through some of those hours.