Author: elenloth

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Children are an {individual|collective} responsibility

A few years back, someone linked me to this essay by Barbara Kingsolver, from 1992: “Everybody’s Somebody’s Baby.” It’s a beautiful reflection on the nature of children in society, and what it means when we treat them the way we do.

My second afternoon in Spain, standing on a crowded bus, as we ricocheted around a corner and my daughter reached starfish-like for stability, a man in a black beret stood up and gently helped her into his seat. In his weightless bearing I caught sight of the decades-old child, treasured by the manifold mothers of his neighborhood, growing up the way leavened dough rises surely to the kindness of bread. 

Kingsolver

My working theory, here, is that in America, we see children as Not Belonging in public life paradoxically because so many of us have been pressured into having them. I know that I am lucky: I wanted children, and I have an amazing child. But other people are childfree by choice, and while some are benevolent towards the mere existence of children, others cannot stand to have them around.

I think the optimal solution, like most optimal solutions, lies somewhere in the middle: We stop pressuring people to have kids when they don’t want them; and we stop acting like kids are this horrible Other Species, barely even human (see the man who called a child “it” in the essay).

It’s absolutely appropriate to say that children should not be in some places; not every location, every entertainment, is intended to be enjoyed by every human. But bans like that need to be considered thoughtfully and reasonably. Take weddings, for example, the source of so much internecine drama. It’s absolutely fine for the people getting married to say “We would like to have a party that is just adults” – it sets a certain tone, it allows for fragile objects to be placed on tables, etc etc etc. But the spirit of that request does not mean banning the 17yo twin when her 18yo twin had the good fortune to be born at 11:47 pm, rather than 12:01 AM. It does not mean banning a nursing infant who is not even ambulatory yet (a ban which functionally also bans the other half of the Nursing Dyad). Acknowledging that children are part of our world means making places for children – not just banning them from things. Allowing the 17yo twin or the nursing infant does not require you to also allow the shrieking, running 5yo. (Though if you want the 5yo’s parents to attend, the best chance of that happening is to provide on-site childcare, since the logistics of babysitting in a strange city are dicey at best, and all the normal family caregivers are likely at the wedding already.)

And all this comes back to the question raised in the subject line here: are children an Individual responsibility, or a Collective one? My feeling is Collective.

(And I will ask another friend if I can get a copy of her essay “Parenthood, and the Irrational Concept of ‘Choice’,” to also post up here, because it handles the question of Individual vs. Collective so well.)

I found this tweet today, and it seems quite applicable.

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRfKUh7L/https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRfKUh7L/

This TikTok expresses a similar idea through an explicitly leftist lens: that if you build a community that is inhospitable to children, you functionally make it inhospitable to women, and all you will do is reconstruct the existing patriarchy.

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Insulin should be free

Today I saw this tweet, and I agree.

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Impossibly nerdy finding

Today I found this scribbled on a piece of steno paper: 

im elenloth. man lasto beth i caran-ner. i nen-ner. i perihoth. i narlothcham.

“Caran-ner” is not defined, but that means Redman.

Nen-ner seems to mean water-man, but I’m not sure what that is supposed to indicate.

There are also definitions listed; “perihoth” means Minibosses and “narlothcham” means Armcannon.

I was probably listing out some DJ set from Magfest.

I initially thought this paper would have been from around 07 or 08, but next to “narlothcham” i also have the Pashto letter ฺš written as a pronunciation guide for the ch, so this is probably more like 2010 or 2011.

This is a hell of a look inside my brain.

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Budgeting isn’t dieting

Mandatory disclaimer: I am writing this post from the perspective of a middle-class person addressing other middle-class people. I do not wish to imply that Anyone Can Do These Things; only people with a certain ration of Income to Needs can solve problems like this by budgeting. If your reaction to this post is “but I can’t budget my way out of poverty,” then do not fret: this post is not at or about you. If your reaction to this post is “but not EVERYONE can budget their way out of poverty,” then I will reiterate the intended audience for this post: Middle-class people. Not Everyone. Thank you for understanding!

A few weeks ago, I read a secondary source (Reddit post about an article, haha!) that discussed the question of “Is budget culture as harmful as diet culture?”

Seeing this concerned me, because I’m well aware of (and pretty vocal about!) how damaging diet culture is, and how the whole weight loss scheme system is destroying generations of people’s bodies and minds. And at the same time, I’m a huge proponent of being conscious of your budget, making sure you’re spending carefully, and things of that nature. So my immediate concern was: am I perpetuating a harmful shame culture by being so enthusiastic about budgeting?

But today, I had a small analogy-epiphany about it. In my view, budgeting isn’t the idea of dieting that says consuming is sinful, taking up space is sinful, your natural inclinations are evil and must be punished, good things must be “earned” and aren’t there to simply be enjoyed.

Rather, I think that budgeting is much closer to the idea that I subscribe to re: bodies and food and exercise. Namely: you exist and you do things. Eating food lets you do things, food is fuel, you need food in order to let your body do all this amazing stuff. It’s not a perfect philosophy; for example, it doesn’t address the frequent moralizing about disability or the ableism that can permeate even fat-positive spaces. But in general, I’ve found it the best way for me to conceptualize food and exercise and weight. Having A Body is the thing that lets me Do Stuff. That’s awesome.

In a similar fashion, having a budget (knowing what you are spending money on, and making sure that you are spending money on what you want to spend money on) is Having A Finance that lets you Do Stuff.

In your life, you undoubtedly have goals. Are you hoping to purchase a house? Send your children to college without the crippling burden of student debt? Pay off your own debts? Save for your retirement? Having a budget lets you actively choose those long-term goals in addition to living your day-to-day life now. (And unlike calories, dollars really are a zero sum game: dollars in, dollars out. Finance is binary like that in a way that Bodies are not.)

My personal view is that the best first step is to look at your Descriptive Budget: what am I currently spending money on? How do those expenses stack up against my total household income? How many of those expenses are recurring (mortgage) or periodic (car insurance)? And is my income biweekly, monthly, quarterly, or irregular (e.g. book advance)? Taking all of those things into account for the Descriptive Budget will help you formulate a Prescriptive Budget if you find you are over-spending on some things (like travel, or cute enamel pins on Etsy, or whatever).

To bring the analogy back around full circle: The actual, harmful, diet-culture-equivalent thing for Finance would be something akin to the Prosperity Gospel: the idea that you are only worthy if your income, or net worth, or whatever is above a certain level. That is the unhealthy thinking, in the world of personal finance.

But the healthy thing – the thing I’m advocating for, in all of my “being the finance nerd” in my social circles, is this: We should focus on the Stuff We Want To Do (save for future? go on trips to broaden our horizons?), and then take actions so that we can accomplish that Stuff.

Don’t look at the number on the scale. Don’t look at the total net worth in your spreadsheet. Look at what you’re able to do, look at what you want to do, and remember those long-term goals when you are making short-term spending decisions!

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Cobblestone Jack

“hey remember that time you summoned a dretch to interrogate him about his demon lord’s plans and he begged you not to send him back to the Abyss so you gave him a task that was non infinite but might as well be?”

Will add alt text later!
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A short D&D concept: Kord’s Arena

Imagine a world in which the church of Kord runs sanctioned fight clubs, where people can do various types of combat sports (such as boxing, wrestling, feats of strength, etc) to the greater glory of the god.

Doping/non-doping (magic/non-magic) options are available: the national or international level Non-Magical championships would take place in a large arena with an Antimagic Field cast over the fighting area. For the Magical championships, a facilitator with Detect Magic or a similar spell on would identify and announce each spell present on the competitors immediately before the match.

Each arena, even the smallest, would be staffed by a low-level cleric or paladin of Kord who tends wounds after the match.

This concept can easily be expanded to other deities in other pantheons, e.g. Tulkas.

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The Advice Column Paradox

I didn’t invent this term, but I think it’s a really excellent one, so I’m going to share it here. If you have an earlier citation for the use of this phrase, please leave it in the comments!

The Advice Column Paradox: nobody writes into an advice column when things are going well.

The Advice Column Paradox: nobody writes into an advice column when things are going well. When we vent to our friends about our marriages, but don’t share the positive things, they may think things are worse than they are; but sometimes, there just aren’t positive things. (It’s why I always took pains to say “There’s good stuff too, I just don’t need help processing THAT” whenever we had these discussions. I try to be self-aware at least a little bit.)

It is very common to see, on Internet advice boards like r/relationships or r/AmITheAsshole, people complaining in the commenters always jump straight to “omg, divorce!” But what those people miss, I think, is the core of this paradox. If you are writing in to an Internet advice column, it is because something has gone wrong. Something may have gone so very wrong that they are writing in to an anonymous forum to ask for help. There is a strong possibility that they feel ashamed or afraid to ask the other people in their lives for help. The people who say “Modern couples are too quick to divorce” are either not saying that in good faith, or are ignorant of the fact of the Paradox. I don’t have a snappy name for this one; maybe we can call it the “Why So Much Divorce Corollary” or something.

Ultimately, this paradox and the corollary of people being confused by it is an example of selection bias. “You Should Break Up” being given as relationship advice is not overly common, percentage-wise; if half the advice column responses are “Break up!” and 1 in 100 people are writing into an advice column in the first place, then only half a percent of relationships are getting the “you should break up” advice. If you scale that out into the real numbers, it’s even smaller.

So, no: Advice column readers are not “too hasty” to tell people to divorce. And our culture is not somehow “devaluing” marriage by telling someone who is locked out of a bathroom while pregnant, or worse, that they need to leave to protect themself.

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Rules, Agreements, and Boundaries

This post is another one where I mostly just link to someone else’s work and say “Hey! They make a really good point! Go read this!

Like so: Kimchi Cuddles: Rules, Agreements, and Boundaries

Let’s use the Billy Graham Rule as an example, because it’s atrocious, and thus nobody here will argue with me on the *merits* of the rule, so it stays all hypothetical.

In brief, the idea is that it’s not healthy to put a Rule on another adult. Instead, you can only choose to control your own behavior.

Rule: “You, Billy, cannot be alone in a room with another woman.”

The Rule tries to control what another person does.

Agreement: “We, Billy and Ruth, agree that we will not be alone in a room with a member of a different sex.”

The Agreement is something that two people agree to, together, about their behaviors.

Boundary: “Billy, if you ever spend time alone in a room with another woman, I will no longer spend time with you.”

The boundary is controlling your own behavior and your own response to the actions of others.

I think part of why Rule/Boundary gets blurred a lot is because of our whole cultural idea that marriage means two people become one unit. That’s a very romantic idea, of course; but it’s not practical even as a metaphor. Even in a marriage, we remain separate individuals with our own needs and wants. (I recently had someone try to tell me that legal marriage makes two people legally one entity, which, LOL nope. That’s not how that works at all.) One heart cannot hold all of this.

As a coda: Kimchi Cuddles is an explicitly non-monogamous comic, but I’ve appreciated it for a long time. I find it has a lot of observations that apply just as well for monogamous people as they do for non-mono folks.

Some of the comments in this Reddit post are also pretty on point. It’s not possible for another person to “break” your boundaries. There’s a verb that’s more applicable to the direct object “rules.” If someone violates your boundaries, then you just proceed with the action that you said would happen when your boundary got crossed. You can’t control the other person. You can’t push with a rope. You can only control your own actions, and reactions, and so forth.