As part of Blog Action Day, today’s post will be on water conservation and how the selfish father—the father who wants to spend time by himself taking 30 minute showers while singing Huey Lewis and the News, and the father who prides himself on his sprinkler system and water guzzling Kentucky Bluegrass—can help conserve water. Water conservation has become an increasingly big issue lately; the documentary Blue Gold: World Water Wars posits that, soon, water everywhere, will be a precious commodity, and many world powers are already vying for its control. There are a ton of resources online that give lists of how to conserve water, this list, and this one, and this one, and I assume that today there are even more lists since thousands of bloggers around the world have signed up to participate in this effort to spread water conservation awareness.
So what are 10 things the selfish father specifically can do to conserve water? Mind you, as I mentioned above, the selfish father loves to waste water on himself and making his house and yard look nice. So how can the selfish father and the rest of us modify our behaviors to join the rest of the forward thinking world in conserving water?
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It’s almost unfair really, teams of marketing experts thinking up how to sell this and that to kids three and four decades younger than them. The word statutory of “statutory rape” comes from the same root as status. Essentially, when one is older, one is more capable—not to mention culpable—of taking advantage of those that are younger. That’s a simple concept, and essentially the same thing is at play when talking about children’s advertising. Children are helpless against the amount of time teams of grownups spend tailoring a product especially for them. There are countless specialists that marketers employ, among them, child psychologists, who know exactly what will make a child nag for an item if she/he sees it in a store, be it features that toys show in stores—I can think of a particular example of a little dog I saw that said, “Take me home and see how much fun we can have”—or on television.
In this post, I’ll be talking a bit more about advertising in general, before moving on to a quick roundup of commercial free entertainment we can use to keep our children away from advertisements.
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I’ve recently realized that I took this blog and ran with it without ever taking the time to define selfish. Also, while I’ve offered some advice on how to combat selfish leanings, I think that creating self-awareness is some of the best medicine I can offer, and I’ve chosen to do this in an easy-to-remember list form. This list will be kind of all over the place as I’ve been thinking about my own selfishness for some time now and I’ve been able to decipher just how deep it runs—basically into every aspect of my life. I’ve broken this into 4 categories and, after each, I’ll offer some advice about spinning these behaviors into positive behaviors, making the selfish father involved and participatory rather than distant and absent.
First, there are the obvious signs of selfishness.
The selfish father may
1. Become angry when he must give up time to help his wife or kids.
2. Neglect chores to watch television or sit on the computer.
3. Not go to gatherings with his wife and kids.
4. Choose what the family does, versus letting it be a collaborative choice.
5. Talk/browse on the phone/laptop during family time.
6. Use childcare resources more than necessary.
7. Look for unneeded things to do.
8. Sleep/lounge longer than necessary.
9. Not take the time to fix wear and tear on the household.
10. Spend too much time with friends.
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A lot of folks are getting (have gotten) really excited about Your Baby Can Read, the innovative system developed by Dr. Robert Titzer that helps kids recognize words by as early as 9 months old. Other folks are on the fence about it, including my wife, citing what Titzer calls “reading” the same thing as asking a kid to look at a picture of a bellybutton and then point to her/his bellybutton. The main thing my wife says is that it’s not developmentally appropriate. In other words, rather than participating in an activity that may not be helping one way or another, they should be doing what every other 9 month old has always done, they should be getting to know their bodies, concentrating on motor skills, and learning how to express themselves.
I still don’t know what I feel about Your Baby Can Read. Seeing it in a store with “As Seen on TV” emblazoned across the cover sure isn’t putting it in my win category. My feelings are, if it’s so innovative and good for kids, then Titzer should have worked with certain people to ensure it’s offered for free to as many children as possible rather than trying to make all this money. But, the reason I wanted to start the post with this is to say that it is definitely good for at least one reason: it gets parents actively involved with their children’s learning process, which I’m going to be spending most of my time on in this post. Another reason I started with this was to illustrate how the debate about Your Baby Can Read shows, first of all, reading is indisputably interpreted as an activity that builds intelligence, and second that people like to argue about and resist the fact that reading can make someone smarter.
So let’s argue about it.
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Last week I mentioned several documentaries about food—Supersize Me, Food Matters, The Beautiful Truth—and believe me, there’s many more where they came from—Food Inc., How to Cook Your Life, King Corn, and many more. Plus, there are those Michael Pollan books—The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food. It’s a pretty big issue these days. I’m going to try to get to the meat of what all of these sources say with just 10 easy to digest bullet points. I tried to do 5, and then 7, until I finally settled on 10. This list would have been much longer had I included points on eating green and cruelty free, but I’ve spared you all today since I’m only talking about diet and nutrition.
- Shop primarily along the walls of the grocery store.
- Rarely eat it if it has corn in it (maltodextrin counts) and isn’t supposed to, like tortillas, except tortillas are usually fried; in which case, see #5. Also, never eat it (or drink it) if the corn comes as some kind of syrup.
- A “healthy” diet can cure and prevent sickness, and it is much cheaper than medicine. It also hasn’t killed anyone like medicine, which is responsible for 106,000 deaths a year, which doesn’t include accidental overdoses, allergic reactions, or clinical errors. Yep, medicine kills that many people a year that take it correctly.
- Take your vitamins, at least a multivitamin and vitamin C. The number one thing people against vitamins will say is, “Oh, you just pee it out.” Not true. If you pee out any vitamins it’s overage, not waste. What this means is that vitamins in your pee indicate your body is well nourished and fortified, probably because you’ve been taking vitamins.
- Don’t eat fast food; actually, don’t eat any fried food.
- Make sure at least 51% of each meal is raw.
- Eat as organically as you can afford/are comfortable with.
- You don’t need dessert. In fact, you don’t need anything that’s not already sweet. If you absolutely must sweeten something, use raw honey.
- Don’t drink calories. Don’t think diet soda is some kind of magical elixir either. Though it may say 0, it keeps you from losing weight. Diet soda also contains phosphorus, which takes calcium out of your bones. Yeah, leaching is the proper term, it leaches calcium from your bones. Plus, it can make you continue to crave sweet stuff, which, well, see #8.
- Eat less per sitting, but sit down to eat more, and when you sit down, eat “healthy.”
Sure, that’s what all of these people say. And I do believe it. I wouldn’t have spent all that time wording those 10 points correctly if I didn’t believe it. However, following through with all of this is another story. This story:
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Posted in Food, Happiness
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When I had the idea to start this blog, I bought a bunch of books on fatherhood—Bill Cosby’s Fatherhood, Dr. Aaron Hass’s The Gift of Fatherhood, and I also bought a book that a group of UNCW writers put together called Book of Dads, which features Clyde Edgerton, in rare nonfiction form, shaving his testicles. I’m a fan of Clyde’s, so I immediately flipped to his piece and read it, but as far as everything else, I just let it sit on the shelf. The other day when we were organizing the armoire, for it is seems to be the new place that accumulates clutter these days, I found Hass’s book and flipped through to find a bunch of the regular fatherhood stuff. Tell you the truth, I almost closed it when I saw he had quoted “Cat’s in the Cradle” by Harry Chapin in its entirety at the front, choruses and everything, over and over.
Anyway, I didn’t close the book, and flipped to a page where he provides a bunch of blanks to write in what kind of fathers we’ll be. I cringed, but read on. “Having a child,” he writes, “may evoke previously repressed feelings of anger, frustration, deprivation, and resentment.” Admittedly, this is me, and probably the majority of young fathers out there. But this was something that I noticed long ago, feelings that were strengthened at times when I was stressed from school, or when I had a couple beers. This post is about how I’ve handled these feelings using the one thing in all three of our lives that I have complete control over—food.
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This will be a somewhat longer post, and I’ll post these kinds of cultural studies essays maybe once every season or so as a way to broaden the discussion a bit. This post in particular is also a way I can indulge myself by regurgitating some of the neat things I’ve come across while attempting to answer the question I posed last week: What does Mr. Cuppy’s job getting taken over by technology have to do with being a selfish father? Here’s what I’ve found.
The way we communicate with each other and with our devices is pretty neat. My wife works on her schoolwork from her computer and emails it to me for proofreading. Anything that needs printing is sent via Bluetooth to a distant printer. We like each other’s posts on Facebook, and comment on each other’s wall. In our home, we don’t have cable television; movies are sent to the computer and then to the television. Or, they’re simply streamed over Netflix. Most of you know all this, and of course, the home can get much more advanced, but this post isn’t to cover what all of the new technology is, but to discover what all of this individual (meaning by one’s self) interaction with devices does to the contemporary family. How has family life changed with the introduction of these amenities? And has it made married life and raising children any easier, or harder?
The goal for this post is to first get a good idea of what family was when my parents were growing up in the 70s, as well as when their parents were growing up in the 50s. By doing this, I’ll be able to highlight a few ways in which the family has been changed by various elements of technology, and seek to understand if this neat technology has any negative effects on the family. Ultimately, what I hope to do is show that technology brings out the selfishness in us, and it’s something we must learn to pitch aside in favor of spending quality time with our significant others and our kids.
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I didn’t watch Lassie too much growing up; it wasn’t in my regular Nickelodeon repertoire along with Doug, Clarissa Explains it All, Guts, and, of course, the paradigm shifting Pete and Pete. But it did air in the mornings at some point when I was young, I believe, right after Mr. Wizard or something, unless I saw it somewhere else. Regardless of the source, I only remember one episode: “The New Refrigerator” which originally aired on September 6th, 1959.
It’s really good. Ruth Martin gets an electric refrigerator and, as a result, the Martins put their old icebox out in the shed. Well Lassie doesn’t like this one bit, and won’t eat his food, that was customarily kept cool in the icebox, out of the refrigerator. Mr. Cuppy, the iceman, is beginning to feel the strain of refrigerators on his business and there are many shots of him looking depressed—like John Henry, technology is overtaking his livelihood. Both of these situations are familiar, of course, but what do they have to do with being a father?
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Sometimes, when my wife asks me to vacuum while she’s out, I’ll run the vacuum around really quick without ever plugging it in to make it look like I sucked the dirt, hair, crushed cheerios, and skin cells up, but really it’s all still there, making friends with, and itself becoming, grime.
Recollecting, I realize now that this vacuum shortcut reverberates into a lot of my day-to-day functions. I love to spray out a bowl I used for leftover stir-fry and rub all the crap off with a finger, no soap at all, and place it in the dish rack. I’ll use a knife once, wipe it on my jeans, and place it back in the knife block, even if I’ve cut a piece of cheese.
Though most of these actions don’t have any serious ramifications (maybe mold?) and there’s really no way to prove I’ve done them—short of this blog I mean, and the mold—taking these shortcuts must mean something in the larger scheme of things.
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I wear 15% of the clothes in my closet. This isn’t saying I have such a large collection of clothing that I couldn’t possibly wear it all, or that I’m some hoarder that holds onto every sparkly vest, tunic, and pair of MC Hammer pants he considers a “find” at Goodwill. I’ve always been pretty modest with my clothing, only buying what I need.
Nevertheless, despite this reserved approach, I’ve still managed to amass a closet full of unworn clothes. The far left of my part of the closet looks like an old country yard with cars and parts sitting in unkept yellow grass. Yet, I can’t consign or take them to Goodwill because, while my waistline swells, I still dream of fitting into them.
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