The next book i'm tackling is "The Year of Living Biblically", by A. J. Jacobs. A.J. is an extremely engaging writer, and his neuroses and anxieties are all too familiar. While this isn't a theological treatise or a spiritual reflection or anything like that, i'm still excited to add it to my spiritual reading list. After all, some of the books that have provided me with my greatest spiritual awakenings have been fiction, or poetry, or decidedly un-religious. God meets us where we are. And after spending the last couple of years frustrated and baffled by the large pockets of Christianity that insist on a "literal interpretation" and "straight reading" of the Bible, it's refreshing to see someone do exactly that. A.J.'s approach highlights some of the conflicts and difficulties (and absurdities) of this kind of scriptural understanding.

For example, when discussing the struggles that he and his wife had to conceive, he cites the command to "be fruitful and multiply". It's the first thing God tells Adam to do, the first commandment in the Bible.

"Now, if I were taking the Bible absolutely literally, I could be "fruitful" by loading up on peaches at Whole Foods Market and "multiply" by helping my niece with her algebra homework. I could scratch this commandment off my list in twenty minutes flat.
"This hammers home a simple but profound lesson: When it comes to the Bible, there is always -- but always -- some level of interpretation, even on the most seemingly basic rules."

There are a couple of things i want to point out here: first, because the phrase "be fruitful and multiply" is so old, and because the concept of fruitfulness has so long been tied to human fertility, and because the concept of increasing your family has been so important to so many cultures for so long, we forget that this is actually a metaphor. It's easy to see those words and read their meaning and forget that we are interpreting, but we absolutely are. It is not possible for a human being to literally be fruitful, although multiplication is certainly attainable.

Second, i'm neither a history buff nor a math whiz, so i may be wrong here, but i'm not sure that multiplication was invented when God said that. I'm not even sure it was invented whenever that passage was written. I think that the original word is probably more like "increase" than "multiply", which means that even if A.J. had done a few quick sums, he would still have failed at a perfect literal following of the text, because of a translation error. The Bible is full (like, bursting and exploding at the seams full) of translation errors and oddities, and probably tons of transcription errors that we don't even know about. What is the virtue of following the Bible literally if the words are not correct? Do you get points just for trying? And if so, why is it not okay to try to interpret the text? Do you not get points for trying to get closer to the meaning that the author actually intended?

A.J. also had some really great insights about prayer. This is something i've been struggling with a lot lately: why do we pray? How do we pray? When do we pray? What do we pray about? I won't ramble all of my thoughts here now, but i will leave you with A.J.'s:

"In Deuteronomy, the Bible says that we should thank the Lord when we've eaten our fill -- grace after meals, it's called . . .
"I'd like to thank God for the land that he provided so that this food might be grown . . .
"I'd like to thank the farmer who grew the chickpeas for this hummus. And the workers who picked the chickpeas. And the truckers who drove them to the store. And the old Italian lady who sold the hummus to me at Zingone's deli and told me 'Lots of love.' Thank you . . .
The prayers are helpful. They remind me that the food didn't spontaneously generate in my fridge. They make me feel more connected, more grateful, more aware of my place in this complicated hummus cycle. They remind me to taste the hummus instead of shoveling it into my maw like it's a nutrition pill. And they remind me that I'm lucky to have food at all. Basically, they help me get outside of my self-obsessed cranium."

I've been doing a lot of reading and writing and thinking lately (really, for most of my life, if i'm being honest) about food and food ethics and how i can consume more ethically and what is healthy for my body and what is healthy for my mind and heart and spirit and what is healthy for the bodies of others. So connecting that whole food conundrum to spirituality, and particularly to the prayer conundrum, was really eye-opening.

playing house, part two

When someone bought the lot with the mountain on it, the dirt was carted away somewhere. There was a smaller mountain further down the street where we played, but it wasn't the same. One day, when i was eight or nine, i was at the smaller mountain and i made a strange discovery. There was a cedar log -- really almost a whole tree -- abandoned in the dirt. There were no large trees for miles around, and this was not fresh. The branches and roots had been stripped away long since, and the trunk was weathered and dry. It had not been there before, but it had appeared that day, quite inexplicably. I decided that i needed to have it, and i dragged it all the way back to our house, a good two or three blocks.

We had a dirt pile in our back yard (you know, until i wrote this all out, i had no idea how many large piles of dirt were integral parts of my childhood. I really was Tom Sawyer.), left over from when we had put in our pool. It was an above-ground pool, but it was necessary to dig out a small foundation to protect it from tornadoes and windstorms and vigorous swimming. Anyway, with the disappearance of the mountain, the dirt pile in the back yard became more important to us. Though it was nowhere near as large as the dirt pile down the street, it was a lot closer. 

I brought the tree to this pile and set it up in the "house" i had carved into one side. Pieces of the aforementioned playhouse were sometimes integrated into this particular house. My mom hated the dirt pile and often wanted us to move the dirt to the garden, where it could be spread around and used and stop being an eyesore next to the deck. But we loved it and couldn't stand the thought of losing our favorite outside play space.

Somewhere around this same time, my grandparents had a rotting tree in their back yard. Afraid of it falling and breaking the swingset or the shed or the house, or even falling into the neighbor's yard, my grandfather cut it down preemptively. It was a big job and took some time to complete. Step one was piling the branches and logs into a huge stack, easily as tall as a house. While step two was formulating, i began examining the beaver dam-like pile in the yard and discovered that the branches had naturally formed a hollow space in the center. With some judicious rearranging of sticks and wriggling of my childish frame, i managed to crawl inside.

This was my house for what felt like weeks, but was probably no more than ten days. One day, i went to my grandparents' house to discover that my grandfather had fed all of the wood into a mulcher. My home was dissolved. There were other log homes from other fallen trees, but there was never another beaver dam.

Yesterday, my boyfriend asked me to tell him a story. I was bored at work and he was bored at home and we were on Facebook chat, and i started telling him stories about all of my childhood "houses". When i told him about my beaver dam and how sad i was at its loss, he said, "That's because it wasn't our house. If you still had your house there today, we wouldn't be able to live together. You would have had a happy little life by yourself in the beaver dam-esque abode, and never have come to Quincy to meet me . . . and we would never have loved each other."

"I would always love you," i replied. "I just wouldn't know that it was you."

I've been waiting a long time for him.

playing house, part one

Like this, but slightly different colors. And slightly less creepy children.

When i was a kid, i was obsessed with building houses. (When i say "kid", i'm talking about ages 3-14ish). We had a playhouse that my grandparents bought us -- one of those plastic, PlaySkool types of things that came in about six big jigsaw pieces. A tornado in our yard ripped it apart one year, and even though we put it back together, we later decided that we liked it better in pieces. We frequently pulled it apart and rearranged the pieces into different configurations, especially once we got too big to comfortably fit in it. Plus, it was a favorite hangout for jumping spiders, and that shit is inappropriate. Spiders aren't bad enough, and now they have to jump? Really, God?!

We would place some pieces on their sides, arranging them in a rough rectangle, and imagining the walls and ceiling between the gaps. I seem to recall that we had each claimed one storage space in the house; it had cupboards or drawers or something in the "kitchen" that we used to hide our favorite stones and our collections of the colored glass we used as currency. My childhood was so Tom Sawyer-esque.

We lived in a very new development. We were pretty much the only house for miles for the first few years. Even once people started moving in, there were no houses in our immediate vicinity. They were all a few blocks away.

Each time a new house was built, the dirt from the foundation was dumped into a pile across the street from our house. Before long, the pile was over twenty feet high. It was our mountain, and my siblings and cousins and i played on it nearly every day. We mounted expeditions to the peak, we played hide-and-seek in the foothills, we searched for special rocks and sticks and flowers, we claimed different sections as our own property, we dared each other to leap from the summit, we sledded down the steep side and almost into the road. It was more than our house -- it was our country, and we worked the land together.

My Boyfriend Shot My Brother

My very first boyfriend, Fusco, was also a good friend of my brother Adam. He was my first boyfriend, and i was the first of my siblings to date anyone, so it was not very familiar territory. However, we mostly managed to all hang out together without too much awkwardness.

As i settled into the relationship more, i would sometimes hang back and let the boys do things together when Fusco came over. On one such occasion, they went into our back yard to play with Adam's pellet gun. They had set up some paper targets and were having a grand old time.

They were almost out of pellets, and they reloaded the chamber one last time. There were not quite enough pellets to fill the whole chamber. Neither of them counted how many pellets went in.

http://modernpentathlon-tickets.blogspot.com/2012/01/pistol-and-ammo-used-in-olympic-modern.html

When the gun stopped firing, Fusco asked Adam to shoot him in the hand so he could feel how powerful the blast was. Adam obliged. Then, Fusco wanted Adam to feel the blast.

The pellet lodged itself in Adam's diaphragm. It was centimeters away from his aorta, his spine, and lots of other things the severing of which would have resulted in death. The doctors struggled to remove it, as it moved with each breath he took.

He survived and was totally fine in a few weeks, but we always joked about the "war wound" he sustained, right after Hurricane Katrina and in the middle of the War on Terrorism. Of course, this was six years before we knew that he'd have actual war wounds from Afghanistan, but Fusco still felt pretty terrible about the whole thing.

Overheard in the Office 13

"To be honest, the extent of your phobia is kind of funny."

clubhouse

When my cousins and i were younger, we were pretty much inseparable. Me, Agelseb, Adam, and "Lynn" hung out all the time at my grandmother's house. We were constantly forming clubs around various activities that we wanted to be involved in. Usually, they were not activities that we actually were involved in, just activities that sounded exciting. Like our detective club. I think this one was my idea, because it happened during my elementary (ha. pun.) school Sherlock Holmes (told you there was a pun) phase. Anyway, i had a "detective kit" that included such essential items as a magnifying glass and notebook. I don't remember what else it had. But my cousins and i were convinced that we could be detectives, and that opportunities for exploration and crime-solving were around every corner of the tiny, historic, Colonial town we grew up in.

The various club activities are far too chaotic to list here (and by that i mean that we once pretended that there was a mystery in my grandmother's neighbor's house, but there really wasn't, and that that was the only thing we ever did as a club). The point is that, since we were constantly forming new clubs for various activities, we needed a meeting place. We dreamed of a treehouse, or a secret cubbyhole in the attic, or an underground lair. But since we lived neither in a Disney after school special nor in a Bond villain paradise, we were forced to be content with the space under my grandmother's stairs.

That is, until Agelseb and Lynn were struck with sudden brilliance: why not buy a house? The idea occurred to them after seeing a "For Sale" sign in town. They called the number and set up an appointment for 8:30.

How on earth my cousins (who couldn't have been more than six or seven at the time) actually managed to convince the realtor that they were in the market for a house is beyond me. Even they are not totally sure why he thought they were adults. But on the day of their showing, they hid behind a bush on their way to school and went off to the house. The realtor never showed, and their clever ruse was discovered when the school called their parents about their whereabouts. Later, it was discovered that the realtor had been laboring under the mistaken impression that the appointment was for 8:30 pm. I'm not sure how this was discovered. I am sure that my cousins were strictly forbidden to ever call any numbers that they saw anywhere without asking a parent first. And all future club activities were held in the space under my grandmother's stairs.

Prostitots

You know what i'm talking about. Those little tween girls (though i've seen them as young as four years old) who wear skin-tight camisoles with flouncy mini-skirts. The girls who walk around in groups of 3-6, wearing booty shorts with words on their asses.

Prostitots: little whores in training.

When did little girls stop wearing awkward overall/dress things (jumpers? is that what they were called?) with t-shirts underneath? When did it become okay for a fourteen-year-old to sport multiple piercings and highlights? When did children become hyper-sexualized?

I read somewhere once that teenagers are a fairly recent phenomenon created by cultural shifts. It used to be that you were either a child or an adult. Then, suddenly, there was this whole new category: young people who wore their own fashions and listened to their own music and used their own slang. Teenagers, who still needed to ask Mom and Dad's permission to borrow the car or go out with friends or buy things, but disdained the company of "kids". They were their own sub-category of humanity, and they were here to stay.

But lately, it seems to me that we are moving back into two categories. Childhood seems to be disappearing. Even baby shoes, absurdly cute in their tininess, are no longer available only in simple primary colors. Now you can get baby Converse sneakers, skull-emblazoned slip-ons, and even shiny silver baby Uggs. I know adults who shop in the kid's department, not because they have childish taste in clothing, but because children's clothes look like what adults are wearing.

I remember wearing some truly hideous clothes as a child and LOVING them. I remember long-sleeved shirts with ruffled hems, stirrup-pants, and a hot pink nightgown decorated with rainbow colored envelopes. I remember a bowl cut, disastrous bangs, and hair that reached all the way to my (decently covered by loose-fitting, high-waisted jeans) behind.

I also remember being thirteen, having my first job, and being able for the first time to buy my own clothes. I remember my first-ever pair of hip-hugger jeans and how proud i was that i had picked them out and paid for them all on my own. I remember plucking my own eyebrows for the first time, picking out my own haircut, and learning to put on makeup.

These were all important developmental moments for me. These days, moments like that happen almost as soon as a child is able to walk. Sometimes before, when a parent thinks that her daughter is cute in a mini-skirt.

She's not cute. She's horrifying.

Let your kids be kids. Because when you don't, we end up with twenty-two year old women who want to wear Disney princess wedding gowns and can't leave the house unless something they are wearing sparkles. And that is almost as embarrassing to see as a fourteen-year-old with a "My Boyfriend Thinks I'm Studying" t-shirt.

Overheard in the Office 4

"I'm not a serial killer. I just have traits of a serial killer."

Linguistics in Education

This is a reaction paper written for my Curriculum and Methods class, in response to an article called "No Kinda Sense". The article was featured in a book called "The Skin We Speak", by Lisa Delpit and Joanne Kilgour Dowdy.

“There is no more certain a way to insure that people do not listen to you as to not listen to them.”  (Delpit, 43)

Spoken and written dialects have stirred up a lot of controversy in professional and academic environments. Black activists have spoken up on both sides of the debate, some insisting that Black Americans will not be able to rise above their historical oppression until they can prove that they are able to do everything white people can do, including speak Standard American English (SAE). Others recognize the importance and richness of Ebonics, and want Black Americans to be proud of all parts of their culture, including their dialect. Both sides make a certain amount of sense.

The conversation begins to resemble the “English-as-our-national-language” debate; there is no officially mandated standard, merely a long-established habit, and there are a lot of pros and cons on both sides. In an increasingly multicultural nation, English may not be the language of the majority, and making it the official language may be alienating to many of our citizens. In an increasingly multiethnic nation, SAE may not be the dialect of the majority of English speakers, and making it official may be alienating to many of our citizens.

It is important to be able to communicate clearly with others, and some people honestly struggle to understand different dialects. This means that all children must learn to speak, write, and understand the accepted and mandated standard dialect for professional and academic communications, both verbal and written.

Effective communication is a two-way street, however, and we cannot place the entire burden of understanding on the Black kids. There is absolutely no reason that white children can’t learn to speak and understand non-white dialects, including (but not limited to) Ebonics. Indeed, many white children who grew up in predominantly non-white neighborhoods use a non-SAE dialect as their primary means of communication.

When teachers insist upon SAE to the exclusion of all other dialects, students learn that certain modes of communication are unacceptable; beyond that, they learn that their cultures are less valid, interesting, or important than other cultures. What we forget sometimes is that language is not merely a form of expression, but is an expression in and of itself. Spoken cadences, vocabulary and slang terms, and conventions of grammar are all important and valid expressions of culture and history.

When teachers do not allow their students to express themselves in their own dialects, they are not allowing the students to express every part of themselves. Students learn that certain parts of who they are, of their history and cultural identity, will prevent them from achieving academic success. They learn that who they are is holding them back.

The message contained in that lesson goes beyond academics. Children who are told that they express themselves incorrectly will internalize a life-long belief that they have nothing worth expressing, or that no one cares enough about them to take the trouble to understand them. They will learn that as individuals and as members of a particular culture, they have little or no worth to the world, and that they must either become someone else or accept oppression and indignity.

Proficiency in multiple dialects can only be a benefit in an increasingly multicultural world, as long as all dialects are given equal preference and respect. Learning respect for and gaining fluency in different cultural modes of communication leads to respect for and comfort with different cultures. And gaining confidence in their own cultural dialects will give students the strength and courage to face the world.

I Don't Want To Be A Teacher

Here's the thing: I am passionately interested in education. I've mentioned before that i was homeschooled, but i haven't said much about it before. That's a subject for another post. For now, i'll just say that public schools were ill-equipped to handle me appropriately.

I have two BAs, one in English creative writing and one in the psychology of child and adolescent development. I wanted to work as a counselor with high school students. Not a school counselor or a guidance counselor, but a psychologist who worked with troubled children and teenagers.

But once i got to college, my focus shifted. More and more, i saw students who were unprepared for academic success. I saw that students on the extremes of the spectrum (gifted or struggling) felt that their needs were not being met, and that average students were bored and frustrated by teachers who "teach the (standardized) tests".

After my sophomore year, i got a summer job in the admissions department of my college. One of the things i was working on was a spreadsheet for a particular academic review committee. This committee made final decisions about students on the low end of the spectrum. Sometimes it was clear that the student worked hard and wanted to learn, but that a learning disability or family situation had gotten in the way of their academic achievements. Sometimes it was clear that a student simply wasn't able to handle higher education.

Managing this spreadsheet was deeply and profoundly depressing. In many cases, it was simply too late for us to do anything. If a student has reached the 12th grade without attaining at least a 9th grade competency in the three R's, what can a college do to bring them up to speed? This child should have been helped far earlier. But now they have somehow graduated, and there is nothing we can do.

But this wasn't only depressing. It also made me angry, and i couldn't quite put my finger on why. One day, i was asked to write a brief description for the catalogue of our academic support program. As i researched this program, i found something that explained my anger. According to our website, the purpose of this support program was to help students who had graduated from high school without being academically prepared for college.

Boom.

The whole point of high school is to prepare you (academically, socially, psychologically, etc) for whatever comes next. If that is college, great. Your SAT scores may not be off the charts, but you should be able to take that next step. Maybe you need a little extra support. But you should be able to graduate from high school and make a fairly seamless transition to college. And if college is not in your future, it should be because you don't want to go to college, and you should still be intellectually, socially, and psychologically prepared to go out into the workforce. It makes absolutely no sense to me that any person can graduate from high school and not be prepared for that next step. What are the graduation requirements that you have fulfilled?

More and more, this issue worked its way under my skin and itched. My head swirled with the names on the spreadsheet, the experiences of my friends, my own memories of public school. I resolved to take my degree in child and adolescent development, get some advanced degrees in human development (and cognitive processes, research, public policy, etc), and take on public education. I wanted to fix the system.

In my junior year, i made friends with an education professor. He had taught high school English for nearly ten years before returning to his alma mater to train the next generation. He began telling me that i should be a teacher. I resisted this. I didn't want to teach; i only wanted to work in education from the outside. While i conceded that a teaching background might give me credibility and valuable experience in my quest, i also thought it would be good for me to do this research without being biased by my own students. I wanted to look at hard data and make my decisions with an open mind.

In my senior year, i had decided to defer grad school for a time. I wanted to narrow my focus a little more so that i could select an appropriate graduate program. I wanted to pay off my student loans. I wanted a break from school. I had prayed about it and felt that it was right to take some time off before pursuing advanced degrees in psychology. But this friend, Ben, wouldn't let the whole teacher thing go.

More and more, i thought about teaching, and more and more i resisted the idea. I don't like talking to people. Teaching is all about talking to people; and not just students, but also parents and administrators. I'd have to do SAT prep, which would go against the grain of everything i wanted to accomplish. I'd have to make lesson plans, which would be boring. I'd have to do the same thing year after year after year, and i'd be doing it for very little pay. I felt no attraction to that path in life.

People began telling me that i would be a good teacher. People who had no idea that i was thinking about this. People began asking me how my student teaching was going because after four years, they had forgotten that i was double majoring in English and psych and just assumed that i was an education major. I was working in a private school and seeing the things done well and things done badly, and i couldn't stop myself from making mental notes about how i would do things.

Finally, i realized that God was definitely calling me to teach. I was pissed. I tried to argue the point with Him, but He wouldn't cave. He kept making counter-arguments, and although He totally could have, He never resorted to the cheap, "Because I said so," rebuttal. But we both knew that that sentence was between us, the unspoken ultimate ultimatum.

If pressed, i'd have to say that my decision to teach was made reluctantly, even irritably, because everyone else has fucked it up and now i have to go in there and fix it. I want it to be done well, and i realize that the best way to ensure that it is done well is to do it myself. But that doesn't make me any less pissed about it. I still plan to get my advanced degrees in psych and to work in research and administrative positions in the general field of public education. But for now, all of that is being deferred in favor of an M.Ed. I'm going to teach high school English, and i'm going to do it well, and i'm going to be pissed about it.

But i'm going to do it well. Ben insists that, once i get started, i'll love it. I think i probably won't hate all of it. This was never what i wanted to be doing, but life hits you that way sometimes. It's a means to an end, and when all is said and done, there are worse ways to fix public education than simply going in there and teaching. And since we've already tried pretty much all of the worse ways, it may be time to admit that we've run out of options.

I don't want to be a teacher. But i do want there to be more literate people in the world. I do want those who want to go to college to have that opportunity. I do want people to speak and write clearly and correctly. And i have enough self-awareness to know that i can't keep my hands out of this effort. I have to be involved. So i'll teach.

Trapped in a Video Game

I have always had an overactive imagination. I'm not sure whether my imagination grew from restricted TV/computer privileges or whether the pre-existing imagination made the restrictions bearable, but the fact remains that as a child, i was only allowed one hour of TV or computer time each day. For those of you who think you may have read that sentence wrong, allow me to reiterate: in a given day, i could watch one hour of TV, or i could use the computer for one hour. When i was in middle school, the growing prevalence of longer films such as The Fellowship of the Ring convinced my parents to extend our priveleges to three hours a day. But by then, i had already spent much of my childhood outdoors.

Keep in mind that one hour of computer time was hardly restrictive to a seven-year-old in the pre-Facebook era. I mostly used my computer time to play computer games, and i was perfectly happy to invent my own games when not reading or watching "The Magic Schoolbus". In fact, my siblings and i often invented games together. We'd play slaves or pirates or war (or some combination of the three) on the dirt pile by the deck. We'd climb to the top of the swingset and inch our way across. I'm not sure what the point of this was, but it was fun. We'd deconstruct our plastic play house and rearrange the parts into castles and businesses. We'd make whirlpools in the swimming pool, we'd prepare for an apocalypse-level natural disaster in the corner by the peach trees, and we'd build houses out of discarded tree limbs and bricks found in our grandmother's back yard. But our favorite game of all was "Trapped in a Video Game".

The fact that none of us had ever played a video game until 2000 or so did not deter us one whit. We played this game for several years, often adding sequels to the original game that had started us on this crazy adventure.

I'm not sure where the idea came from. I know we were aware of video games, and i know we'd seen Jumanji, so it's possible that it was some combination of the two.

Basically, a highly-anticipated video game was released on the black market. The reason it was only available illegally is that every single person who had played it during the testing phase had mysteriously disappeared. No one knew what had happened to them, but since this epidemic was only affecting players, it was assumed that there was some kind of link. Of course, since this story was written by Hollywood -- i mean, a bunch of homeschooled children who had never played video games -- the game continued through all the testing phases despite the ill-defined danger that threatened all players and was released, albeit illegally.

My siblings and i got our hands on a copy of the game and began playing. It was prefaced by a disclaimer, warning us of the danger that awaited all players. We ignored it, chose our characters, and began to play. Suddenly, we were pulled into the TV screen! We dissolved into pixels and found ourselves inside of a strange, digital world. We realized (because we were psychic, i suppose) that we had to play through the game and defeat it in order to escape and rescue the other players. None of them had been able to finish playing yet because none of them had our intelligence, strength of character, physical fitness, or resilience. (Also, though we didn't know enough about video games to think of this, because most of them were testers who were stuck in a beta test version full of bugs and half-written story lines.)

We were eventually victorious, of course. The game involved a number of dangerous challenges, such as climbing on top of swingsets and jumping around on dirt piles and battling fierce (imaginary) foes. The sequels that i mentioned before all happened as a result of our cunning and courage. After everyone had been freed (and made up some more plausible excuse for their disappearance than "sucked into a TV screen and trapped in the video game"), the makers decided that their game wasn't so dangerous after all. And since we had "defeated" it, ordinary citizens could now play without danger of entrapment. So the weird rumors died out, the game became immensely popular, and the makers decided to capitalize on their success by creating a sequel. Whose testers all mysteriously disappeared.

By the time we got to the third or fourth sequel, the world had pretty much figured out the pattern: testers all disappear, game somehow gets finished anyway, banned because of disappearances, sold on the black market, and then somehow everyone shows up again and the game is fine. So legally, of course, the games couldn't be sold, but no one in our imaginary universe really cared if the games continued to be made and sold. And so my siblings and i were able to buy all the sequels as soon as they were released, and save the world over and over again for many years. You're welcome, world.

And if you're thinking that this all sounds a lot like Spy Kids 3, i'd remind you that these games had pretty much ended by 1998 or 1999, while the first Spy Kids movie didn't come out until 2001. And also that we didn't use any lame 3D special effects.

the old house

From the age of four to the age of thirteen, i lived in a new house, built in a new development. It used to be farmland, and our property still bordered a soybean field. When we moved in, we were the only house in the development. By the time we moved out, there were four or five distinct neighborhoods and no more empty lots.

I had my own room. When we moved in, my brother was two and my mom was pregnant with one of my sisters. I lived in a tiny room downstairs while the upstairs was being finished. In the nine years we lived there, both of my sisters were born, and Aunt Sis moved in. It was the first place that my whole family all lived in together. My sisters shared an upstairs room, and i had another upstairs room to myself.

Nostalgia has a way of making everything rose-colored. The house was not great. It was not very pretty, the upkeep was expensive, we had occasional problems with mice and spiders, the openness of our surroundings left us vulnerable to some very damaging storms (including tornadoes and wind storms), and we lived outside of the delivery zone of all of the restaurants.

But it was home.

What i remember most about that house was its seemingly endless capacity. There were only four of us when we moved in, but the house often sheltered up to ten people at a time, and seven of us lived there full-time. I had cousins who were homeschooled with us and therefore practically lived with us, we had several exchange students, and of course there was Aunt Sis. Whenever we had a need, the house met it. When Aunt Sis moved in, we added on a garage with an apartment over it for her. When we got our first exchange student, he took my room and i moved into an alcove in my sisters' room, which was curtained off into a tiny but servicable space that belonged just to me. When we began homeschooling, we fixed up one part of the basement into a school room, complete with a huge dry erase board and lots of bookshelves. When my dad decided to start his own business, another part of the basement was set aside for his office. Yet another basement space became my brother's bedroom a few years later. And there was still space in the basement for storage, laundry, and a play-space under the stairs.

There was a secret room in my closet, under the eaves. There were apple trees whose fruit was always bitter, though whether this was due to the youth of the trees or the impatience of the harvesters (my siblings and i) was never satisfactorily determined. There were blueberry trees whose fruit was always sweet and plentiful. There was a swingset, a pool, and a plastic playhouse that we happily deconstructed and rebuilt into several exciting new configurations over the years.

I've lived in houses that i liked better, but none with quite the same magical ability to expand to meet our needs. I've lived in houses with better memories, but none with more nostalgia. I've lived in houses where more significant life changes took place, but none with untarnished memories of my whole family together. We moved to a new house a few years before the divorce took place. That old house is the first and last one where we all lived together.

One day, i will have a new home. My husband and i will argue over paint samples, and will hang new light fixtures, and will mow our lawn. We'll install a doggy door, and fix up rooms for our kids, and decide where to put the swimming pool and the swingset. But there is a part of me that will always know that my home is in the old house. I can only hope that my future home will have half the welcomingness of that one, will have half the willingness to expand. I can only hope that my future children will know that there is at least one place in the world that is limited only by their imaginations.

still waiting for my Hogwarts letter

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was published in 1998. I was eight years old. I was aware of it, being a frequent vistor of libraries and book stores, but it wasn't until i saw one of my older cousins reading it that my interest was really piqued. I was reading a lot of Sherlock Holmes and Shakespeare at the time (this is really true; i have always read at a pretty advanced level, though to be fair i should admit that i was also reading the American Girls books and a fair amount of Beverly Cleary), and didn't have time to devote to something if i didn't know i would love it.

I don't think i really started reading it, though, until about 2000. At this point, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was out, so when i had torn through 'Sorcerer's Stone', i didn't even have to wait to start 'Chamber of Secrets'.

Anyway, i was hooked. As a child with an overactive imagination, raised on Winnie the Pooh, Star Wars, and the Chronicles of Narnia (not to mention the Bible, which can out-crazy any epic fantasy narrative), i had a natural love for fantasy and magic stories. And as, you know, a human being, i had a natural love for the underdog.

In the early years, the books came fast and smooth. 2001 saw both the publication of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and the release of the film version of Sorcerer's Stone. I went to a midnight showing in the local theater (it was tiny and dirty, but the owners were smart enough to know that this one movie alone would bring in nearly as much cash as every other movie shown that year) with my parents, my three siblings, my great aunt, four or five cousins, five or six aunts and uncles, and a handful of exchange students. Afterwards, my siblings and cousins and i spent hours debating the various features of the film: things we liked, things we didn't like, things that were better than we could ever have hoped for, key elements in the book that had been mercilessly chopped. "They left out the scene where the milkman gives Aunt Petunia the eggs through the window and they're full of letters?! I can't believe they didn't do that part!!!!" Our parents began threatening not to take us to the next movie, so we began conducting our critical reviews in whispers.

Like many others, my parents went through the "Harry Potter is satanic!" scare. We were forbidden to read them. We read them anyway. Once we got my mom to start reading them, she caved. She saw that the "satanic" elements were greatly exaggerated, that the occultism was no worse than what you saw in the average Disney movie, and that the heroes, while flawed, were still magnificent human beings who taught us all many valuable lessons. Also she was hooked.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was published in 2002. The movies came out predictably one year after another. And then the unthinkable happened.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was not expected to be published until 2004. Although we still had the movies to console us, we had to wait two whole years for the next book. My family are all cinophiles, but we are bibliophiles first, and we all know that the book is almost always better than the movie (Bambi is one notable exception. As terrible as the movie was, the book was unspeakably awful. One of the few books that i simply could not bring myself to finish.)

To make matters worse, it was now 2002, and i was twelve years old. My Hogwarts letter had never arrived.

For the uninitiated, i should explain that Hogwarts students received a letter inviting them to attend Hogwarts to learn magic. This letter generally arrived near the eleventh birthday, as a Hogwarts education began at that tender age. Now, i have a late birthday, so i thought in the back of my mind (where i allow all such irrational fantasies free rein) that perhaps my letter was merely delayed a year. As my twelfth birthday came closer and closer, i even began to indulge in wild fantasies (creeping steadily out of their designated mental corner and into the more ordered and rational parts of my brain) that perhaps American magical academies worked differently than British ones, and maybe i would not start at the American equivalent of Hogwarts until i was twelve. For such a young (and clearly crazy) person, i was startlingly rational and lucid about my fantasies.

I clung to this American-schools-are-different-from-British-ones hope until i was . . . Well, we'll get to that in a minute.

'Order of the Phoenix' was finally on bookshelves, and my family snatched up our copies and spent the next few days trying to tie our shoes, eat our meals, and do our schoolwork while buried in the 870 pages. This endeavor was not wildly successful, but since everyone else in the house was similarly employed no one really noticed or cared. The movies came out regularly enough, with varying levels of faithfulness to the text, and we found further distractions in the release of the Lord of the Rings films.

And then tragedy struck again. The penultimate installment in the series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, would not be released until 2006.

If you think that a sixteen year old high school senior should have other things to occupy her mind, you probably never checked your mailbox with your heart in your throat hoping to see the heavy parchment envelope with the purple seal, and are therefore likely incapable of understanding or appreciating any of this post. How did you make it this far?

Worse yet, the final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was not published until the summer of 2009. I was home from my freshman year of college, and i read the last ever Harry Potter book with fear and trembling.

It is now 2011. Thirteen years after the first book was published in the U.S. I have spent more than half my life waiting for the next Harry Potter book or movie. I find it difficult to imagine a world where new Harry Potter books and movies will not be made (though i suppose there is always the desperate hope of a terrible re-make in thirty years or so). I have collected merchandise, i have knitted Gryffindor scarves, and i have even dressed as Hermione for Halloween. I once wrote a letter to J. K. Rowling. My siblings and cousins and i have spent countless hours discussing and debating this world. I have had Harry Potter-themed dreams, including one with a very exciting Voldemort showdown. (I almost got him.)

It was only when the last book was published that it really hit me: i am probably never going to get my Hogwarts letter. Probably.

I've been told (and have even thought) that J. K. Rowling is not a great writer. I don't care. Could the entire series have benefitted immensely from a good editor who was not afraid of a red pen? Undoubtedly. Have i ever contemplated being that editor? Absolutely. But the intricacies of her plotting leave me awed. And whatever else you can say about her and her writing, you can't deny that Harry Potter changed the world. An entire generation grew up at Hogwarts. This was the greatest cultural phenomenon since Star Wars, and i know i am not the only adult in the world who has not quite given up hope on that long-awaited Hogwarts letter.

Flintstone Vitamins: Why Your Kid Isn't Going to College

It all starts there, with the flavored, chewy, gummy candy vitamins. I can understand making them chewable, since many small children are not able to swallow a pill. But why must they also be delicious? And then we have the bubble-gum flavored cough syrup, the chocolatey drinks to replace actual nutritious food, and a variety of websites devoted to helping parents feed their children.

Seriously?

When i was a kid, we had a rule: You have to try everything once. If you don't like it, you don't have to finish it, and you never have to try it again. But you have to try it. Our parents didn't make a big deal about it, and if we didn't like it, they stuck to their word: we didn't have to eat it. But we had to have some of every food group at least once a day. They were diligent and creative about finding fresh fruits and veggies that we liked, and they were careful to set a good example by eating lots of healthy, delicious foods.

I remember being appalled and a little embarrassed when the neighbor's kid threw a temper tantrum when asked to eat pizza with "green stuff" on it. (The "green stuff" was oregano.) Her parents picked off the dozen or so tiny flakes and then calmed her down so that she could eat her dinner. When my cousin was little, she didn't like cheese. So at a restaurant, when her parents ordered pizza for her, they were careful to say, "She wants plain, regular pizza," which of course meant cheese. My cousin never knew the difference.

If your kid is ten and doesn't want to eat broccoli, that's one thing. You can make him a different vegetable, or tell her to eat a fruit instead. Or, as many crafty parents have suggested, you can simply chop the vegetables finely or puree them and then hide them in spaghetti sauce or a casserole and the kid will never know the difference.

But if we are talking about a three-year-old, make them eat their damned vegetables. You don't have to yell, you don't have to cry, you don't have to threaten or bribe. But you are the parent, and if your kid doesn't respect you when you ask them to eat one bite of carrots, you'd better never let them have your car keys.

If your child refuses to take cough syrup and you give them liquid bubblegum, they have learned that all difficulties in life can be passed over in favor of something delicious. If you then reinforce this lesson with gummy vitamins and chocolate milk meal replacement shakes, your kid is never going to college.

My sister texted me this morning to tell me that she will be taking Honor's English next year. For her class, she is required to read three books. And she gets to pick the books.

I don't know if there is a list that they have to choose from. But i've seen these book lists (even the ones for private schools), and while they do contain a number of classic texts, they also tend to include pop-culture favorites. Now, don't get me wrong: i love Harry Potter and Ella Enchanted as much as the next nerd. But i am under no illusions as to their fitness for a school curriculum. I think that kids should be required to read a certain amount of the really difficult stuff and taught to appreciate it. I think they should be encouraged to find books that they love and to read them incessantly (especially since this will only make it easier for them to read the hard stuff). But if a student doesn't want to read Shakespeare, you can't substitute Twilight and call it an education just because Stephanie Meyer makes Shakespeare references. But this is what your students will expect from you, because when they were six and didn't want to eat spinach, Mom gave them chocolate milk and gummy cartoon characters.

If our parents and teachers can't be adults and enforce certain restrictions and requirements, how can we expect the children in their care to learn to be adults and to set their own guidelines? Having someone else set boundaries for them teaches children self-control, something they will badly need in college and beyond.

Guess what: not everything tastes like candy. Not everything is as much fun to read as the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (which, by the way, i was surprised to discover was pretty great). But you still have to eat your peas, and you still have to read Shakespeare. Get over it.