I don’t get many things right the first time
In fact, I am told that a lot
Now I know all the wrong turns
The stumbles and falls brought me here

I wanted to play the kids Squeeze’s 45s and Under but I didn’t have it on my iPhone.  This was after I had sung the same six or so lines of “Goodbye Girl” over and over again while I washed dishes.  Maybe they didn’t really want to hear Squeeze sing it, but I wanted them to hear Squeeze sing it.  Sometimes I pretend that I can’t hear them protesting while I scroll through the artists list.

Except they were spared because I didn’t have any Squeeze on the iPhone.

I didn’t really feel like listening to anything else, but I already had the music app open, so I put on Ben Fold’s Rockin’ the Suburbs.  I sang loudly through the first two songs, as if that would help the twins like the album better.  Because my voice warbling off-key louder than Ben Fold’s voice makes it that much more enjoyable.  The twins ignored me.

“You know that one of our wedding songs is on this album,” I told them.

“Oh my G-d, do we have to listen to something in Hebrew?”

“No, it’s in English.  Do you want me to skip to it?  It’s a love song.”

The Wolvog rested his forehead on the table, as if mushy songs shove him downward like an upperclassman dangling his head over a toilet.  “Please.”

“Okay, I’m going to take that to mean that I should skip to it.”

I skipped straight to the “Luckiest” at the end of the album.  Actually, first I fought the iPhone to get the screen to turn from the horizontal view to the vertical view.  Then I muttered to myself about how I didn’t know how to get back to the song choices.  And then I pushed a bunch of buttons.  And then the Wolvog came over to help me even though if I was actually successful, he was going to have to hear a mushy love song.  Then I skipped straight to the “Luckiest.”

They both stared at me while I sang the first verse by myself, but then I coaxed the Wolvog to dance with me.  He formally placed one hand around my waist and weaved his fingers through mine in our outstretched hands.  We swayed around the kitchen while I rested my cheek on the top of his head.

“When I danced with your daddy at our wedding to this song, I had no idea that 12 years later, I would be dancing with my little boy in our kitchen.”

I know that is always true.  We can always look back at a moment and realize what we didn’t know back then which is taking place now.  But there was something about that song, about the concept of fate, of holding my son’s hand, of the scent of his head, that created a bridge between the then and now, bunching together all the tiny moments as if they were just flowers in a bouquet.  They seemed so important in the moment; the fights and the phone calls and the awards and the deaths and the births and the blood draws and the movies and museum trips and jumping the waves on the beach.  Moments — when you’re in them — seem so huge, so all encompassing, capable of changing your mood, of blotting out the sun.  And then 12 years pass and those individual moments seem as tiny as beads gathered on a simple string: all the same size, all small and round and pretty to think about as you sway in the kitchen.

“Were there iPhones when you got married?” the Wolvog asked, breaking into my thoughts.

“No.”

“Do you know they’re releasing iOS 7 soon and it’s going to have many amazing features.”

“Shhhh, you’re destroying my perfect moment of remembering my wedding and realizing that I’m dancing with my son to the same song I danced with my husband.”

“I want to dance too,” the ChickieNob told me as the song ended, and the Wolvog started it back up again (any excuse to touch my phone).  The ChickieNob danced with me until Josh came home and cut in.  He moved slowly, at first holding me formally and then sliding his arms around me until we were in a long hug so I could cry into his shirt.

I am the luckiest; I recognize that now even though there have been times when it hasn’t felt that way.  I didn’t get things right the first time or the fifth time or really any of the times that we tried without assistance.  But all those wrong turns and stumbles and falls brought me right back here, from the library where I married Josh to the kitchen where I made him dinner, and it brought me to those two children ignoring my music as well as their dancing parents.  I would never wish for the wrong turns and stumbles and falls, but I am glad that this is where I ended up.  I can’t imagine any of those other tries — those other boyfriends and those other pregnancies — being as sweet as this.

*******

Every single year, we get a do-over.  We get to do every single day again just with a different year tacked to the end of the date.  Today is the last day of 5773 on the Jewish calendar.  Tonight, Rosh Hashanah — the Jewish new year — begins, and it brings with it a lot of hope.  That this year will be different, this year will be better, that whatever didn’t work in the past year won’t be repeated again, that whatever worked in the past year will continue to be perfected.  Humans never learn.  But I like this idea of hope sometimes.  Today, it’s a small good thing.

L’shana tova — happy new year, everyone.  May 5774 bring us all a lot of happiness.

I read Family Building with a Twist’s post about the guilt she feels over sending her child to private school which was compounded by the Slate article with the link-baity title and opening:

Title: If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person
Lede: You are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad like murderer bad—but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad. So, pretty bad.

Right, not link-baity in the least.  I purposefully am linking to Family Building with a Twist’s post and not the Slate one, though you will find a link to the Slate one from KeAnne’s post.

Perhaps it is indicative of the poor education the author claimed to get, but her reasoning was so simplistic and dismissive that I don’t really think you need to actually read it to get pretty much the gist of it from this: whether you are sending your kids to private school due to family traditions, a care about their education, religious reasons, behavioural reasons, learning differences, or problems with safety in the local school, you are a terrible person for not opting in to your public school.

As a former private school teacher and product of the public school system who has now sent her own children to both private and public schools, I think I have a fairly decent scope of the situation.

I’ve worked at hoity toity, almost-$40,000-per-year-tuition private schools that served a gourmet lunch on china plates with silverware.  I’ve worked at experiential education schools that had no permanent buildings on campus in order to have complete respect for the environment.  I’ve worked at happy, friendly, community-building private schools that churned out free-thinkers rather than focusing on hardcore academics.  I even taught college for two years at a nice, sprawling public institution.

And I’ve experienced public school my entire life: from kindergarten through graduate school.

And all I can say is that the school should fit the child; not the other way around.  All schools are like huge ships, too big to turn quickly.  Private school or public school — they cannot cater to a single child.  So just as not every body type fits every article of clothing despite it being the correct size, not every learning type fits every school despite it containing an appropriate grade for your child.

And it’s a parent’s job to make sure that they’ve placed their child in their best learning environment.  THIS is more important than public vs. private because in either situation, a child in their wrong learning environment does more to tax and disrupt the system than removing kids from public school.  A child scared of the outdoors can’t thrive in an experiental outdoor-ed program, and if placed there, sucks out resources such as the teacher’s attention at a rate that depletes the system.  A child who is a free-spirit can’t thrive in a restrictive, traditional, uniform-wearing school.  Place them in that environment just because she has a legacy at that school, and what you’ll have is a student who detracts from the community, negatively impacting the education of the students around her.

And the same is true for placing a child who won’t thrive in public school in the public school system.

Of course, there are times when that can’t be helped.  Financial realities get in the way.  Your home base doesn’t have the resources for your child.  There are children who end up needing to remain in public school despite the fact that public school clearly doesn’t fit them.  Unlike Slate’s author, I’ll never say the choices are easy.  That they’re all do-able.  Sometimes, when it comes to your child’s education or their special needs, you have a kid who clearly doesn’t fit the system but there is very little you can do to get them out of that system.

And those are the times when I think we need to offer those kids an apology: I am so sorry that the world is so unbalanced that we can’t even get a child into an education system that fits them.

For the most part, I think public school is a little bit like vanilla ice cream: most people wouldn’t pick it as a first choice, but we can all agree that it serves as a decent base for a host of other toppings.  I know kids who go to public school, and that is the extent of their education.  And that is fine: just like a plain scoop of vanilla ice cream.  You’re still getting ice cream, and who (except for the lactose-intolerant) is going to complain about ice cream in the same way that you are getting a basic education, and who is going to complain about a basic education?  But the people who end up really enjoying that vanilla ice cream are the ones who layer on the toppings: in-school extra enrichment programs, after school activities, or kickass volunteers who come to the school the same time your child is there to bring their expertise for everyone’s benefit.

I think private schools tend to be like flavoured ice cream.  The flavour actually matters.  You can’t ask someone who hates pistachio ice cream to eat a big, heaping dish of pistachio ice cream and enjoy it.  Can they gag their way through it?  Sure.  But they won’t thrive.  But give someone who likes pistachio ice cream that dish and they’ll lick it clean.  And they’ll figure out ways to improve the ice cream for other pistachio lovers.  The same goes for Rocky Road or rum raisin: preferences (and learning styles) matter in the ice cream shop.  Not all options are equally great for all customers.

I enjoy other flavours of ice cream more than vanilla, but I’m a perfectly content vanilla-eater and a perfectly content product of the public school system, so much so that I went to a public college and public graduate school.  For myself, I would always choose vanilla because I like the flexibility of building my own flavours by adding or removing toppings.

We’re still trying to figure out our kids, whether they’re okay with vanilla (with a heap of toppings) or whether they would really do something amazing with a differently flavoured school.  Some of that changes from year to year.

I agree with the author of the Slate article who says that we need to commit to schools beyond paying taxes: we need to get in there and bring our personal expertise to help the next generation.  I go into my local public school and volunteer two days per week teaching writing — for free.  I do this because I believe strongly that all children should have a lot of exposure to writing at a young age, because I am a decent teacher and can convey the information to them, and because I enjoy teaching and this is a way I can teach without having to commit to a daily classroom.  I can do this because I have a flexible job, timewise.  The days I volunteer, I end up working from 9 pm to midnight.  That’s my choice, and I would never ask another person to make the choices I make in terms of giving to the community and having a fairly sucky schedule in return.  There are plenty of other things a family could do that goes beyond contributing money that could benefit your local school, whether or not you have children there.

But volunteerism: that’s not a sustainable change.  That change is only in place as long as I am there or you are there or Jim down the street is there.  No one else can fit the me-shaped spaces we create when we give back to community.  So for Slate to suggest that it’s as easy as pie; we’ll all just pitch in and help out and all will be fine in a few generations is reductive.  When we’re gone, our work is gone too.  And in the case of charter schools — a whole extra bucket of fish that Slate never taps into within their article — while they are more sustainable, they truly serve more like life boats during the Titanic.  The kids who get in them get rescued from the school system while the rest of the school — the main ship in this analogy — sinks under the water, dragging down the people who remain trapped in that system.

As a whole, just as we should take people on face value and realize that while there are certain characteristics that may change but people don’t overhaul a whole personality, we should also recognize that schools may tweak tiny aspects of their program, but overall, their personality doesn’t change.

So choose a school based on what fits rather than asking the child to conform to the largely intractable personality of the education program.  Doing so not only is best for YOUR child, but for the children who needs to be around your child since a child in the wrong education program tends to be a child who disrupts and taxes the system, destroying it for others.  So no, I don’t think you’re a bad person if you put your child in private school.  I think you’re a good parent for paying attention to actually raising your child vs. just keeping them alive.  And I think you’re a good citizen for choosing a school that fits your child rather than putting them in the wrong system that detracts from all around them.

A few weeks ago, I asked a question about phone call lateness which raised a tangential question: do you always pick up the phone when it rings?

I’m always a bit surprised when someone answers the phone to tell me that they can’t talk.  Why didn’t they just allow voice mail to pick up?  Then we would have effectively accomplished the same thing: you would know I want to talk, I would know you can’t talk at the moment, you would call me back.  I don’t take it personally if I call someone, knowing they’re home, and they don’t pick up.  I just assume that they are busy inside the house.  Not everyone sits around, drumming their fingers on the table, waiting for me to call.

Plus, if it goes to voice mail, I can say what I needed to say.  If they pick up and say they can’t talk, I now need to go write down the question I was going to ask them so I still remember it when they call back.

This is obviously different from screening out phone solicitors.  I mean, I don’t pick up for phone solicitors at all, even if I’m not busy.  (I apologize, phone solicitors, but I will never buy something over the phone so it feels like a waste of your time too if I pick up.)  I don’t screen anyone else’s call though.  I pick up for everyone who isn’t a phone solicitor if I can talk.  So if I’m not picking up, it means that I can’t talk or I’m not home.

But some of the answers on that phone lateness post (and whether you turn your cell phone off at night) made me wonder if I was being rude by not picking up.  Was it better to pick up the phone and explain that I really don’t have time to speak?  Would people respect that and allow me to get off the phone immediately, or would they argue with me that the thing they had to say would only take a second?  There are times when I’m cooking when even a second is a second too long.

So, am I the only one?  Do you answer the phone when you can’t speak to tell the person you can’t speak, or do you allow it to go to voice mail/the answering machine and then call them back later?  Do you take it personally when you know someone is home and not answering?

Keiko sent me the Mindset List for the class of 2017, the incoming freshman at Beloit College.  The point is to give people the students’ frame of reference, building the lens through which they see the world.  These kids have never known a world with a living Jerry Garcia.  I was in my grandmother’s apartment when I learned that Jerry died.  I got on the phone immediately with my boyfriend.  Jerry was dead and THESE FRESHMAN WEREN’T EVEN BORN YET.

Their whole lives, the Olympics have been every two years.  They’ve never had a four year wait between Olympics.  They have always had USB ports on their computers — WE DIDN’T EVEN HAVE COMPUTERS.  Most of them have never had chicken pox.

The list made me feel very very old.

I looked at the list of the people who started college in 1998 since it was the first Mindset List they created, but even that one made me feel old.  Those kids never had records.  They don’t remember the Cold War or the Challenger blowing up.

They think our Star Wars special effects are “pathetic.”  Fuck them!

These lists have made me become very ornery, yelling in a cranky manner at the screen about my uphill walk to school both ways.  And how we liked it.

*******

The twins and I have started the fifth Harry Potter and joined the Order of the Phoenix.  I know I originally said that I would wait until they were much older for Book 5.  But I started thinking about how books 1 – 3 go together in terms of scariness.  And then there is a steep drop to 4 and 5.  And then another steep drop to 6 and 7.  So if they could do 4, they could also do 5.  Whereas in 6, we start getting into the idea of murder splitting a soul and the concept of what makes a person take another person’s life (and the fact that there are people out there who kill not because they have a problem with the other person but because they enjoy the act of killing).  And 6 kicks off that idea that there is nowhere that is completely safe and no one who will always be there to protect you, which I think are very scare thoughts for a child.  So… yeah… drawing a hard line for a bit longer with Book 6, but allowing Book 5 to happen now.

I am so happy to be back with Harry, even though we were totally grooving on the Kairos.  We’ll come back to you, Murry family.

*******

This is it: LAST TWO DAYS.  This is over on Saturday.  It’s the last chance to get Measure of Love at $1.99. (Amazon featured it as a monthly deal for the Kindle for the entire month of August.)  I would deeply appreciate any help you could give in getting word out about the promotion.  Telling a friend, Facebooking it, tweeting it, blogging about it, etc.

If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “I sure would like to do something nice for Melissa,” helping me spread word for these final two days would be it.  That would be the nice thing you could do that I would really really appreciate.

*******

And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Not Just Baby” (Life as Two)
• “Grief Intelligence: a Primer” (Huffington Post)
• “Should We Stop Blaming Facebook for Our Unhappiness?” (BlogHer) — thank you, Lori!
• “Next Chapter: Surrogacy” (Moonfish and Buttermilk)
• “Dear Friends of Waiting Adoptive Moms: Some Things to Know (also, we’re sorry)” (Wonderment, etc)
• “Knowing Our Limits; Even When it Hurts” (Where the *Bleep* is Our Stork?)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Stupid Broken Eggs has a post about her mother’s recipe for gravy (which we call tomato sauce); how her mother gave her the card with the recipe written out, and the first time she made the recipe back for her mother.  She writes, “Will my son or daughter ever come to be? Will I ever get to pass this recipe on to them? Will they ever get to make their version of The Gravy for me?”  Since she doesn’t know the answer to that, she has turned the recipe over to the Internet, giving all of us the opportunity to share in her family.  I LOVE this post.  And yes, I’m going to try my hand at the recipe; sans meat.

Invincible Spring has a post about the panda twins born at the National Zoo.  Admittedly, I only heard about the one panda who lived.  There was another panda who was born still.  She writes, “And when I read that she groomed her dead baby for 17 minutes before relinquishing it to keepers for an autopsy, not only did I cry; I felt I got it, a little.”  My heart hurt on her play with the word “endangered” at the end.

Inconception has a post about how she thought about people living child-free after infertility before she made the decision herself, and how she views them now.  I love, love, love the end: “The reality of it is, now that I’ve made it, walking away from treatment is one of the bravest decisions I have ever made in my life.”

And lastly, Battlefish cracked me up with her post about bra shopping.  As someone who would go to the ends of the earth for a good bra, she’s hit upon one of my favourite topics.  I too am guilty of holding onto bras I know I will never wear again.  Now I’m just waiting for the update to find out if the bra was any good.

The roundup to the Roundup: The Mindset List made me feel old.  Started Harry Potter 5 with the twins.  Measure of Love is on sale for only two more days (and I’d love your help continuing to get word out).  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between August 23rd and 30th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

It’s funny that A brought up Adele because she was the example I gave Josh when we were talking about the Miley Cyrus performance at the VMAs.  For the record, I wasn’t upset with her performance because I think you get what you get when you turn on MTV.  I expect MTV to be exactly like that, and they once again delivered.  We personally skip that channel accordingly — our kids don’t watch the VMAs.  That is partially because you get performances like Miley Cyrus’s and partially because like MTV itself, it really isn’t about music anymore.  Music is shunted to the background.  At the forefront are the lights and pyrotechnics and special effects and computer capabilities and dancing.

So I wasn’t upset in the same way that I’m not upset by the idea of strippers or strip clubs.  That’s sort of what the VMAs were in that moment; a televised strip club performance without the pole.  Woman onstage, scantily clad, shaking her body and rubbing her crotch so you think about sex.  Not really such a big deal unless you’re morally opposed to strip clubs, and I’m not morally opposed to them even though I choose not to go to them.  I don’t expect anything different from strip clubs OR MTV at this point; I think both have established exactly what they’re trying to sell.

So Josh and I were talking over dinner.  I watched Miley’s performance online (in order to rage properly about the Daft Punk lyrics that weren’t), he didn’t.  I think he should just so he can stop asking me to remind him what twerking is.  But we were also talking about the comparisons that were being made between Justin Timberlake and Miley Cyrus, both Disney kids who grew up to take very difference performance paths.

It isn’t a fair comparison.  Justin Timberlake has a penis.  Because he as a penis, he is allowed to sing and be judged by the quality of his voice, the complexity of his lyrics, and the skill of his delivery.  And that is all.  No one talks about whether Justin Timberlake has love handles or whether his hair is sexy or whether his clothes are too form-fitting or not form-fitting enough.  His weight could go up or down, and unless it was a remarkable difference, no one would comment.  And even then, only to worry about an underlying problem.

And yet Lady Gaga’s weight goes up and down and that is worthy of not just being a footnote in an article, but the article itself.

*******

Whenever the topic of women being objectified in order to succeed in the music industry is thrown out there for discussion, people trot out Adele.  Look, they say, she is highly successful.  It’s all about her voice.

And yes, Adele is a superstar who has plowed her own path.  While her physical attributes are discussed just as much as her music, she commands big attention.  Sure, Huffington Post has a tag on their site for “adele weight,” but perhaps what we all mean by trotting Adele out there as our example is that she is not bending to critics in the same way that other women have in the past.  She keeps demanding that people make it about her voice, lyrics, and delivery.

But, as A pointed out, the larger problem is that for every one Adele, there are 17,000 Miley Cyruses.  Somewhere along the way, the music industry got the message that we want all those Miley Cyruses.  If that concept didn’t sell, if people didn’t tune in, if it didn’t get attention, they would stop producing it.

Sex sells.  Drama sells.  Controversy sells.

*******

I think it’s clear to see this within blogging as well.  There are people who blog to keep their family informed about their kids, and others who use their blog as a scrapbook.  I’m not referring to those bloggers, but rather, those of us (myself included) who write for an amorphous audience.  We send words out there and hope someone reads them.

Speaking in generalizations (as opposed to individual cases), what are the big female bloggers known for vs. male bloggers?  Getting fired, estranged from family, having an ill child, divorce.  We are attracted to people who allow their lives to all hang out.  The more honest, the better.  The more drama, the better.  We tune into their lives in the same way we watch soap operas, treating these very real people as if they’re characters.  The more naked they blog, the more interested we get.

And yes, naked blogging is a good thing, but not all raw and honest blogging is naked in the same way.  We know that people respond to nakedness, and some people take that to mean being authentic; true to themselves and honest in their portrayal of their world.  And others take nakedness to mean putting everything out there: even if it could get you in trouble or hurt another person or are thoughts the universe really doesn’t need.

It’s similar to the nude portraits hanging in the National Gallery.  They present a naked body, just as Miley Cyrus presented her half-naked body the other night.  And yet no one would say that Miley Cyrus and a Velázquez painting accomplish the same thing.

*******

Because there is little guidance (it’s not as if our mothers were blogging and have passed down their thoughts about the online world to our generation) and because humans are prone to repeating what we see around us already works, a lot of naked blogging turns more into a Miley Cyrus performance than a Velázquez or — to go back to Miley’s musical contemporary — Adele. We all know how to create Mileys hence why so many Mileys exist on the music scene; women with half-decent voices who can also dance and have a lot of confidence to draw the eye who are also willing to strip down into little clothing to catch your attention.  Whereas we don’t really know how to recreate Adeles, hence why so few of them exist.  They’re the anomaly; the wildly successful woman who breaks out of the mold.

The same thing happens within blogging.  Yes, there are the Adeles of the blogging world who write with honesty, presenting a truthful view of their life, laying themselves semi-bare and examining their foibles and their triumphs.  They conserve certain aspects of their life, and speak with circumspect so they rarely upset other people.  They hold back enough for themselves so they don’t give away their entire being.  They have writing talent, and people read them in enormous numbers.  But it’s hard to recreate that in another blogger.  What works for one doesn’t work for another because they don’t have that same je ne sais quoi.  But we do know how to make a Miley-of-a-writer.  All you have to do is bitch about other people, detail the intimate, no-holds-barred moments of your relationships, embarrass the subject of your post, and do it all without your subject’s permission.  That’s Miley Cyrus-like naked blogging.

For every Adele of the blogosphere, there are 17,000 Miley Cyrus’s of the blogosphere who think that the only way to get attention is to take it all off.  To hold nothing back.  To bend to what other people deem blogging trends and shape their site to match what others want.

I can count the number of bloggers I read who are Adele-like AND have a readership in the thousands on one hand.  I mean, most bloggers I read fit that Adele-like description in online comportment, but they’re read by only a hundred or so people.  They write like an Adele, but they’re unknowns, like a blues singer playing at a bar vs. a megastar booking the Barclay Center.  The vast majority of widely-read bloggers I know (and yes, this is based on my limited scope of the blogosphere; you may read a very different section of the blogosphere and have walked away with a different point-of-view) — meaning their readership is in thousands and above — are more Miley-like in the way they write.

There’s nothing wrong with that, per se — remember, I didn’t have a problem with Miley’s performance.  But based on the way we discuss the online world, I get a feeling more of us hope to be Adeles than Mileys.

I know I do.

*******

How many women do you read who write about the world around them vs. what is happening in their house?  Every reference I’ve seen from a man regarding naked blogging refers to business.  Every reference I’ve seen from a woman regarding naked blogging refers to our personal story.

Think about how many men provide commentary on current events, popular culture, or specific topics such as technology.  How many women do that and hit it big?

Women are told to make it personal, to put their lives out there (as opposed to their opinions).  Even food bloggers are encouraged (for good reason: stories sell) to make their recipes personal.  Tell a story.  Explain how much their kids like this recipe for chicken nuggets.  And once you get to general diarists, forget it.  You mine blog posts from your life, and if your life isn’t very exciting at the moment, you can create linkbait, as the Bloggess says.

Women can get a big audience by being naked with their words and grinding against topics, a la Miley Cyrus.  And to be fair, I can only think of one widely-read male blogger who has built his audience on providing that personal story and vulnerability.

For the most part, it seems that men get popular for their thoughts and women get popular for their drama, in the same way that Justin Timberlake can get attention by his voice and Miley Cyrus can get attention by her gyrations.

This isn’t as simple as refusing to watch a channel or not reading Miley Cyrus-like bloggers or asking female singers to put some clothes on.  I’m talking about this problem without offering any solutions because I don’t believe there are any solutions at this moment except to overhaul entirely how we back women into corners.  It’s a problem that is much larger than the VMAs or strip clubs or drama-filled blogs.

At it’s core, it’s a statement by the world how — as a whole — it views women.

Even though there is no solution that can be carried out by a single person or even a large group of people, I still think it’s worth discussing, especially with the twins.  I want them to figure out ways to get attention that don’t include being objectified, even if they hold the power in that objectification by inviting people to objectify them on their own terms.  I want them to think about what they’re sending out there, and whether they’re holding anything back for themselves.  I don’t want them to give to the world in a way that depletes them; that takes away.  I want them to give to the world in a way that is sustainable and replenishing.

And perhaps that is the most obvious distinction between the Miley Cyruses of the world vs. the Adeles.  Miley gave away all that sex appeal, but what did she get back?  Only the message to give away more sex appeal.  Adele gave away her music, her thoughts, her voice.  And the message she receives is to continue presenting her talent.  The same goes for blogging as well.  If you’re getting back a message to present more drama, more vitriol, more information than you’re truly comfortable sharing, you’re writing in a way that will ultimately deplete rather than sustain.

And I think we’d all like to be here for a good, long time.  So write sustainably.