Politics & Society

I Suspect Everyone Else Is Smarter, Better-Looking, Taller, Cooler, Cuter, Has Newer and Shinier Objects than I Do (and Is More Modest)

When you are prone to measuring yourself against others, like I am, and when you both work and live out chunks of your life online, as I do, the Internet can be a bitch. It’s easy to get caught up in measuring your impact online, and to suspect that your own self-worth is tied to it. It’s easy, for example, to measure your popularity and self-esteem in terms of the number of “friends” you have on Facebook, the number of followers on Twitter, the extent of your professional contacts on LinkedIn, your cache of Feedburner subscribers, your Web site’s Google PageRank, tags on Flickr, comments, links, visits, clicks, referrals, Karma on Plurk, and—worst of all!—your Technorati degree of “Authority,” which implies a sort of collected clout and power that, for most of us, doesn’t really exist outside of the unblinking screen that is our dashboard to the world. Those of […]

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Off-Color Commentary

Last week I was in my vet’s lobby with one of my dogs, waiting to check out, when I overhead a conversation behind me. “Of course you don’t like it here, but stop your complaining! We need to stay put for now.” An older woman, maybe in her mid-70s, was talking to her cat, which was meowing loudly from inside its plastic carrier. Hanging from the side of the carrier was an IV bag, and its tube snaked through a side vent into the carrier—and, presumably, the cat. Sprinkles, it turns out, was a well-fed orange tabby who had lived almost all of her 18 years indoors. She’d been healthy her whole life but a few weeks ago started with a cough that sounded like a bark. Of course, I only knew this because the woman shared it freely with the handful of people—including me—in the waiting room. At that

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American Idolatry

Last week I signed on for the Comcast triple play, which brought our triumvirate of phone-internet-TV under Comcast’s wing. It also simultaneously catapulted us back to the Land of DVRs (Digital Video Recorders), a place from which we had reluctantly decamped after our last TiVo box died months ago. With DVRs, we’ve learned to start the recorder, then begin watching shows 10 or 15 minutes after they actually begin. The practice allows us to blissfully sail straight through commercials on a kind of joyride. Fast-forwarding makes me feel giddy and anarchic, like I am engaging in something revolutionary—albeit a lame sort of Digital Age revolution, its rebels armed with thumb-controlled remotes, asses planted firmly on the couch. So last night the kids and I were parked for the season finale of “American Idol,” a program that we love to both deride and debate about… but never miss. For us, the

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A Retro Road Trip in a New World

When you’re from New England, the whole concept of taking a “Road Trip” means driving an hour to the beach. So when my friend Beccy suggested we take a road trip to Niagara Falls during our kids’ spring break, I mentally padded the usual duration with an extra hour or two and impetuously answered Yes. As I’ve established, I’m notoriously terrible with directions. I should have paused before answering. I should have considered that Beccy is from the Midwest, where folks will drive for two hours on a Sunday morning just to worship at church. She comes from a place where people traverse vast distances over flat earth to get almost anywhere. Or, nowhere: When my friend Jen was growing up in Nebraska, her parents routinely piled six kids into their Country Squire just to head out for a drive. So this is how I found myself, last week, journeying

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New Media as Community Theater—All the World’s a Stage

I am a total sucker for community theater, especially musical theater. What I love isn’t so much the corny show tunes or the predictable story lines, but the players’ infectious energy for taking risks. I was reminded of this a few weekends ago when I went to see a local production of Godspell. Because I have an artsy teenager who does tech crew, I’ve sat through lots of high school musicals over the past few years. I always come away shining with true admiration for the kids on stage. As we all know, adolescence is really tough. There’s probably no time in your life when you are more prone to self-doubt and insecurity, and there’s no time (at least for boys) when your voice performs less than predictably. It’s easier to blend in with the crowd than to call attention to yourself. It’s easier to not set yourself apart. Godspell

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Competitive Parenting As Child’s Play

If April is the cruelest month, March has to be the strangest. At least, this March: What a strange few weeks it’s been. Silda Spitzer stands by Eliot; Gilligan’s Mary Ann is a stoner. Then, last night, as I was watching my daughter thumb through a new catalog from a local toy store, I noticed small icons at the bottom of each product description. It turns out that they are “ExpressCodes,” or ratings that indicate “how the product can assist in reaching your child’s developmental milestones.” Yeah, seriously: A basketball, for example, is called out for propelling a kid toward the milestone of Eye/Hand Coordination (“hands manipulating objects, things fitting together, coordination”) and Gross Motor (“physical play, running, throwing, jumping”). A set of plastic dinosaurs promote Eye/Hand along with Fine Motor (“grasping, manipulating, writing, drawing”), Socialization (“cooperative play, making friends, sharing”), and Creative Expression (“imaginative play, artistic ability”).

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Me and TomTom—True Love Always

Around Christmas, I met TomTom. We’ve been inseparable ever since. TomTom, if you don’t know, is a portable GPS navigation system. It mounts on the car dashboard, and its voice commands guide you to your destination. For someone like me—I get lost finding my way back to the table after a visit to the restaurant bathroom—it’s a godsend. Since we met, I’ve realized that he’s all that I’d ever want. And, as with any good relationship, he’s full of small surprises I didn’t even realize I’d want, but now find I can’t live without. What’s more, he’s opened up new horizons for me, encouraging me to venture into places I would have considered off limits before he was my companion. What’s all that if not the essence of a good relationship? Can you see why I love him? In fact, let me count the ways… Trust. TomTom gets me from

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Is 18 the New 8?

In her book released last fall, Deceptively Delicious, Jessica Seinfeld slips chickpeas into her chocolate chip cookies and purees butternut squash into her mac and cheese. The general premise is that kid food is fried and white. But if you can slip in something on the sly—say, cauliflower into mashed potatoes, or sweet potato into pancakes—then you can trick your kids into eating the stuff you want them to, minus the tantrums and tears. Jessica, who is married to the comic Jerry Seinfeld, has been in the news of late because Missy Chase Lapine, who authored a similar book, called The Sneaky Chef, insists that Deceptively Delicious is nothing but a riff on her ideas. The Seinfelds contest that. But whatever. The problem isn’t whether Jessica was the first mother to hide flaxseed in chicken nuggets and then write about it. The problem is, as Wall Street Journal‘s Raymond Sokolov

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‘Hey, Pretty Lady!’

A few weeks ago, I had some time to kill at Boston’s Logan Airport before a flight to Denver, and eventually to Santa Barbara. I’ve taken the same, lonely trip a dozen times or so, and it’s always a tiring day that reminds me again how profoundly disappointed I am that the seven-league boots I coveted as a kid still aren’t commercially produced. They would, after all, make travel so much more palatable. And quicker. Today was a quiet Tuesday in the terminal, and nothing there (a sundries shop, a TBCY staffed by a yawning clerk) seemed to hold much in the way of a half-hour’s distraction. But as I cased the concourse, the guy who operated the shoeshine stand caught my eye and called out to me, “Hey, Pretty Lady!” he said. “Look at those boots! You need shoe shine!” If you’ve been in a major municipal airport, in

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