You're fooling yourself when you read quotes like this:

The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves.
---Willem de Kooning

First, I'm not sure that his summary of an attitude is a real attitude held by others. It seems more like a task than an orientation: and interviews with artists reflect it that way.

Second, and most important, I don't think we are very good at putting order into ourselves. Part of the day's task for me is trying to create order in my day, so I can plan what resources I need. But I find it's always useful to have extra clothes around for Joy.

A cell phone for little kids, eh?

Before you shudder, think about the times you WANT them to call. And then about how few phones are around these days.

Firefly thought about this, and did it right. They set up a phone that only goes to preprogrammed numbers and 911, so you know who could be called, or be calling, your kid. And it comes with fixable times so you know it isn't a three hour phone call every evening you're paying for.

Check it out. I'm still going to wait a bit before Joy gets one, but I know what she'll be getting.

It happened again. A phone call to someone with the potential for a smooth transaction or the normal frozen stubbornness inherent in customer service. And a breakthrough.

The breakthrough? The thing that made a difference between smooth sailing and another series of phone calls?

A habit, really. I said, "Yes, sir" when confirming something. And he warmed up, and his questions became less hostile, and a different ending was aimed for. He wanted things to work out well for the person who called him "sir." I've had the same result from "Yes, ma'am" before, too. I don't remember it frequently enough for it to smooth all my paths, but considering its magical effects, I should. This is the kind of spell Harry Potter would be thrilled with: suddenly the muggles want him to win, rather than staying focused on themselves.

As a parent, therefore, one of my jobs, difficult as it is in the culture of Los Angeles, is to get my child to occasionally say, "Yes, sir." and "Yes, ma'am" and observe the effects. It is difficult because I am surrounded by adults who insist that they be treated like children, addressed by their first names on first acquaintance, as if their experience and understanding had frozen in high school. A little googling teaches me that sir and ma'am are controversialand there are people who carry it too far.

Any thoughts?

Schools and District Attorneys are not rational beings, capable of exercising judgement.

That is perhaps the only conclusion I can get out of this article.

Fortunately, I read people with a better sense of perspective, who, like the author of the original report, know that the correct response in middle school to being sexually harassed is to hit back.

If your daughter doesn't know how to do that, teach her. That's your responsibility. And if the school calls you and tells you that your daughter hit someone because she said he grabbed her butt, express your disappointment that your daughter was not well enough trained to break his arm, and say that it won't happen again, and suggest that if he wants to take responsibility for training thugs and defending them, you will continue to announce this fact at PTA meetings until you have enough people to complain about him to get him transferred. Should a district attorney intervene, suggest that you will talk about this with everyone you know, and everyone you don't know, until he is too hot a political potato to be in the DA's office, and will keep up after that just for fun.

At the behest of Jordan, I have read up on the unfamiliar literature of cooperation. I can summarize the rules they come up with as follows:

1. Be nice. Start by cooperating with everyone and cooperate as long as they do.

2. Retaliate. When they don't cooperate, stop cooperating. Call them on it. Make your expectations clear. Do not withdraw socially: stay present so that your non-cooperation is obvious.

3. Forgive. When they resume cooperating, cooperate with them.

4. Non-envy. Don't keep track of anyone's score but your own.

5. Transparency. Tell everyone your strategy. Let them know what to expect.

It's a good set of rules, I'll grant you. It is the kind of thing I would be happy to teach my daughter. But it is a very limited set of rules: there are vast areas where it does not apply. An easy example of non-applicability: courtship.

Just met in passing Randy Rose, the guy who invented Big Sunday. For those who don't know, it's a board game that teaches the strategy of American Football (if you've ever wondered what is going on as you watch the game, this may be your best place to start). It covers the running game, passing game, penalties, the two minute warning, and even NFL coaches and players seem to recognize their game on the board.

If you know someone of junior high age, he's old enough to understand the game: though it takes one game with the instructions in your face, after that, you concentrate on strategy. Not so bad, eh?

An interesting contrast here

Most Americans these days agree that couples should stay together only so long as both parties love each other. That should you fall deeply and irretrievably in love with someone else, you owe it to yourself to follow your heart. That you shouldn't remain in an unhappy union purely for the sake of the children. Marriage, the thinking goes, should entail joy and mutual self-fulfillment.

But not if movie characters act that way. We disapprove of other people who walk out on marriages because of "love" or "self-fulfillment" or the usual minor unhappinesses that occur in every marriage. Hollywood stacks the deck: you're leaving because he's a fascist heroin addict.

This is not so minor a matter as sorting out how fiction writers might most slyly manipulate their audiences' affections. Plenty of real relationships break up for no other reason than that one or both parties is "unhappy," or "in love" with someone else. Yet here in the world, we cannot stack our own decks. We can't rewrite the role of a partner with whom we've grown dissatisfied in such a way as to make our urge to flee more defensible. If your husband isn't, conveniently, a heroin addict, well--he simply isn't.

We may officially embrace the view that a partnership can justifiably be dissolved for reasons of "unhappiness" or "love." Yet we are not only the protagonists but the audiences of our own lives. Thus the same onlooker's standards of judgment apply to our private dramas as they do to entertainment. When we act trustingly on those ostensibly shared social precepts I began with, we're often shocked to discover that we don't sympathize with ourselves.

I've always found that Kim Du Toit could supply it.

In fact, I picked out this essay because of it.

Then I re-read it.

Nothing to see here.

More worrying for society, however, is this. Older men (like myself) have always been cheerfully cynical about the whole love/sex thing: De Beers has built a global empire on it. Nothing surprising about that: experience breeds familiarity, and cynicism. What should worry women as a group is that the same attitude is manifesting itself in younger men.

How have younger men become prematurely cynical about women? I’ll tell you, in three short words.

Feminist social policy.

It starts almost as boys become young men, in middle- and high schools. All sorts of policies which favor the girls are put in place: “gender-correcting” (ie. female-biased) subject matter and testing, policies which pronounce pretty much that any boy accused of molesting a woman is guilty, regardless of his actual guilt, and policies which automatically set men up as the Big Bad Wolf: no touching, no flirting, no blah blah blah. The message of all these policies can be summed up quite simply: you are bad, and you have to keep away.

Fine; so they keep away. What the boys do, and it’s a logical progression, is that they either feign indifference towards women, or they actually become indifferent. The response, by the way, is also predictable: girls become desperate to attract the indifferent boys—with predictable results.

As soon as young men realize that the playing field is being tilted against them, and in favor of girls, they start to feel aggrieved. Never mind whether such a feeling is justified; it’s a simple fact. Why date a girl, put up with all her clinging nonsense, when you can hire a lap dancer to come to your frat house?

Happens all the time: people miss obvious things, preferring more complicated things that might suit them better.

t is expedient to find a matter intractably complex if its simple elucidation is not to your liking. If, for instance, a simple solution to a simple problem presents itself, but that solution sits well with the views of your political enemies, then you should deny the simplicity of the problem and even the possiblity of a solution. Not only does this wrest the problem back to your own side, where a crack gaggle of obfuscators and theorists can find a complex and refractory expression of it that is both politically favourable and profitably intractable, but it also affords the opportunity of characterising your political enemies as simple-minded fools. In this way, the sensible but simple view is eschewed in favour of the propitious and abstruse view. Some obfuscators and theorists, in a repose of complacency, have even been so open about this trick as to coin a word: “problematise”.

An example: premarital sex. The real rule set is simple. But people don't want it, so they problematize their way into things that don't work, and then wonder what went wrong.

The most neglected athletic skill that any kid can learn is sportsmanship.

It doesn't take skill, but it does take determination, and the willingness of coaches (and parents) to realize that their childrens' careers are not affected by a loss (even one with a bad referee) in a game.

Take a moment and read. My favorite quote:

In sports, someone always wins and someone loses.

Lynch saw in this not a recipe for despair but the greatest of teachable moments for his young, inexperienced team.

One particularly brutal game sticks in Lynch's mind: "We -- a varsity team -- were getting crushed by another school's junior varsity." How's that for humiliation for a 16-year-old? "In games like that," Lynch said, "a boy's tendency is to pretend you don't care, to stop putting your best on the line."

I know what he was talking about. I've seen that "whatever" look on the faces of a team that's losing badly.

Lynch would have none of that. At halftime, he launched into his typical pep talk: "We're down 7-0. We're not going to win this game, but we've got 40 minutes. How are we going to respond? We can fall apart, we can blame each other, or we can give our best effort for 40 minutes more."

It worked. The margin of defeat didn't shrink, but the kids played their hearts out. "When you ask kids like that, they'll deliver," Lynch said.

"As the game went on, I watched our goalie continue to make save after save," he recalled. "And I thought, 'We talk to kids about doing the right thing when no one's looking. But actually, it takes a lot of courage to do the right thing when a lot of people are looking.' "

In other words, it's humiliating to give your all and still get killed. But the guys on Lynch's team refused to give up.


I'd suggest that Self-Reliance and The Conduct of Life are worthwhile reads for young people, too. Not least because in the process of reading them, you affirm and disagree, which defines you even better.

Girls learn that they have to be thin from their parents.

And they don't learn that it's healthier to be thin: they learn that thinness is a good all by itself and defines whether they are feminine or not.

In other words, they learn at a young age (as little as 5), that they will spend the rest of their lives trying to look like a Barbie doll, and that they are less feminine when they don't. It's this kind of insecurity that teenage boys will have no problem exploiting to get what they are after. Sure, when she's in her late twenties, she will be able to say ruefully, "It seems everyone's first boyfriend is a jerk" -- but she won't realize that she was set up, most notably by the fact that as she was growing up, her mother was on diets all the time.

Well, a tragedy if you're French, anyway. It seems that the mayor's office has decided that Paris should be respectable and has banned nude and topless sunbathing.

Result? Well, maybe central Paris is a little more tourist-friendly. Not wildly so, but, after all, it's safer than Amesterdam.

I've been told by friends that Nintendo makes games that girls enjoy, like Tetris and Sims. Does anyone have any other recommendations?

In the most recent Letters to the Editor section of Atlantic Monthly, an author, whose article the previous month had been on novels for teens, finally wrote out the moral to her previous article in response to some letters:

What girls are discovering, to their infinite heartbreak, is that boys will happily agree to any form of sexual experimentation a girl cares to offer, but will reserve certain honors for the girls who build power in the ancient ways. If you want a boy to invite you to the prom, or treat you well, or to speak highly of you to his friends, or to spend long hours thinking about how he can work his way into your heart -- if what you want from him is courtship, romance, and respect -- the very last thing you should do is ambush him with a sexual favor. That girls no longer know this to the marrow of their bones -- that this knowledge comes to them in a slow awakening of misery and shame -- is testament to how badly our culture has failed them.

The young man in his 20's who pointed this out to me said, "This is just weird shit. No girl that I know wants all that 'courtship, romance and respect' stuff, and most of them make fun of those who do in front of me. Sure, I'll take any sex on offer -- who wouldn't? -- but this other stuff is too old for words."

I'll throw it out to comments: is either of them missing the point?

Meanwhile, this is all sounding reminiscent of some advice I was offered when younger: "There are a lot of women who will volunteer to become your mistress. It's up to you, but the usual pattern is to accept it, enjoy yourself, and move on when she becomes too demanding. In general, mistresses are not worth marrying. It's the ones who intrigue you that you should pay attention to." At the time, there was a serious herpes epidemic: so free sex had limited appeal, and I didn't take the advice to enjoy and forget. It was the late 70's, after women had decisively lost the "battle of the sexes", and, since they've never regained anything like their former power, it just didn't seem worth bothering with.