My mother was always embarrassing the hell out of me when I was a kid. Always the proverbial squeaky wheel, she was constantly asserting herself in stores and with customer service reps, asking questions, comparing prices, requesting refunds, and dragging her easily mortified teenage daughter behind her.

And it wasn't just in stores, either. My mother was also quick to march into school to demand why bullies were picking on her children and way the school was not doing anything about it. I came home one day with bruises up and down my arms, and she went to talk to my teachers and principle the next day, raising hell in her polite, Midwestern way. She fought tooth and nail to get my sister help she needed to accommodate a learning disability. She asserted herself when doctors condescended to her, or didn't listen to her, or made her uncomfortable. She spent hours on the phone, navigating an endless loop of red tape and dropped calls and transfers and fifteen people in order to right a mistake on our insurance, repeating information over and over. I would listen from the other room as all of the regular data was occasionally interspersed with "Yes, I'm his wife, and no, I will not put him on the phone."

She was an advocate on every level. And it embarrassed me. I would sit - cringing, aghast - as she argued and asserted for herself and for her family.

"Mom," I'd hiss. "Stop it."

To this day, I don't know exactly what it was that embarrassed me so badly. But I will never forget the frustration on my mother's face when she would occasionally have to turn the phone over to my father, who could often accomplish in five minutes what took her hours to do. And not because of anything that he was doing differently, but because the person on the other end of the line took my dad more seriously.

Today, I spent an hour on the phone with the power company on behalf of one of my cognitively disabled clients. Last month, he'd received a power bill that was nine times its normal size. After talking to four different people, reconfirming the reading of the meter, and running tests on all of the appliances, we discovered that the power company had screwed up and misread the meter. They apologized and sent a second, accurate bill, which we received. Except that they charged a late fee because the original $400+ bill - the wildly inaccurate bill that my client couldn't afford to pay - hadn't been paid on time.

So I called the power company. And I politely explained the problem and requested that the late fee be removed from the bill.

"The fee is not my client's fault, and he is on a fixed income. He should not have to pay it."

The guy on the phone didn't lose his temper - he didn't yell - but he said "M'am, I'm going to have to ask you to stop being so difficult."

There are a lot of words that society - or, if you like, the patriarchy - uses to describe women. "Difficult" is one of them. "Hysterical." "Whiny." "Emotional." "Irrational." I could go on, but you get the idea. Most of these words are commonly used, and some are even almost innocuous. Sexism is insidious like that. An entire woman's opinions, needs, emotions, and struggles completely erased or dismissed with stupid key words. "She's just being emotional." "M'am, I'm going to have to ask you to stop being so difficult."

Living on my own, and relying on myself for the first time in my short life, has given me a new appreciation for the struggles that my mother has faced. Which is why this interview with Rachel Simmons, author of When Being a Good Girl is Bad, struck me so deeply.

Q: You talk about your mother's influence. One example you mention in the book was her embarrassing you by asking for cold fries to be reheated at Roy Rogers. Can you describe how that helped you?

My mother embarrassed me every day, it felt like, with her assertiveness. Anytime she spoke up for herself, I wanted to throw myself under a bus. It took years, but I finally realized that my own ability to assert my needs had come from watching her. I joke with parents and say, Embarrass your daughters as often as you can — you are giving them a real script to use when they are ready to use it.

Amen.

1. From this entry on Jezebel... two of these songs really took me back to being a kid and watching Sesame Street. "We All Sing With the Same Voice" is classic, and the "Cooperation Makes It Happen" song... not only did I watch it over and over again on my Sesame Street tape, but my mom would always sing it when she wanted us to clean something up.





2. My Milk Toof

The cutest webcomic you will EVER READ. EVER. I LOVE IT.

There is an AMAZING post going on over in sf_drama about "stuff we remember from childhood." (Like Shelley Duvall's Mother Goose Rock N' Rhyme, Rock-a-doodle, Once Upon a Forest, and Fern Gully.) If you want a blast to the past, go over there and watch the bazillion YouTube videos that have been posted.

Can I just say now that Disney Channel was way more awesome and trippy when I was a kid? Now it's all of these slightly creepy teenagers singing crappy songs.

Enjoy this clip from Adventures in Wonderland.

Can you see why?

I would run screaming from the room and Mom would have to follow me and drag me out from underneath my bed.

I have spent five hours cleaning my room. I should have gone to bed forever ago, but I started and I couldn't stop. I threw out a whole bunch of paper and trash and perhaps, more importantly, put together a huge box and two garbage bags full of clothes and other stuff to go to Goodwill. I have way, way too much shit, and a majority of that is clothing that mostly doesn't even fit me anymore. I also have an obscene number of t-shirts. I weeded out the ones I really wanted and put the others in the donation bag. A great deal of the ones I got rid of were t-shirts that I'd saved out of sentimentality - from when I worked at the Cherokee reservation those few summers in middle school, Latin Club shirts, Special Olympics Volunteer shirts, Heart and Hand Volunteer shirts, Stonecrest Swim Team shirts, and even a Cetronia Elementary shirt. I almost cried when I tossed them into the huge, black bag, but I bit my lip and did it anyway. There are things that I don't need to hold on to, and I need to start learning that now.

I also chucked a great deal of paper and also broken shoes. I had, like, five pairs of broken, unwearable shoes. What is wrong with me?

I had more room in the closet, and by shifting and moving stuff around I also managed to clean off the surface of my dresser, which hasn't happened in ages. I found a makeup bag filled with lipstick tubes, which puzzled me because I almost never, ever wear makeup. As exhaustion began to wear on me, I started feeling a little daffy. I put on my pajamas and took the makeup bag into the bathroom with me.

I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, and took out each lipstick one by one and placed them on the counter. Eighteen tubes of lipstick and one tiny pot of lip gloss and a single lip liner were perched on the ceramic. I ran my fingers over them and they toppled like dominoes. I picked one up and rubbed it across my lips. I haven't really ever worn lipstick (not formally, anyway) and I kind of missed and went outside of the edges. I felt like I was six.

Cinnamon Swirl. Too brown. Starlight. Too frosty. Sugarbear. Crushed Berries. Deep Kiss. Too dark, too purple, too trampy. I don't even know where I acquired most of these - probably an accumulation of years of having a mother who is a Clinique-freak and selling Avon for Girl Scouts when I was twelve - but none of them looked right. I don't wear makeup well in general, and each shade made me resemble something odd and different - my mother, my aunt Ruth, my grade-school piano teacher Mrs. Ernest. I kept putting them on and wiping them off with toilet paper, which was slowly accumulating in the trash can in a tiny mountain of stains and pigment.

Some of them were crisp and pointy, like brand-new lipstick is supposed to look. Others had been worn down flat, as though I'd written suggestive messages on a lover's mirror with them. Some of them were slick, others waxy. I ran them on and rubbed my lips together and wiped them off. On and off. I tried to use the lip liner and ended up drawing a tight swirl on my chin. I left the tiny pot of lip gloss for last. It was soft and warm, and I dipped my index finger in it. The color was a weary shade of brown. It made me look dead.

I brushed them all into the trash can. They fell with soft, syncopated thuds, muffled by the crumpled toilet paper.

The only one that survived the slaughter was "Simply Red," because it was such a shade of fire engine that I suspected it would come into some use in the costuming arena, i.e. Rocky Horror. The others were all gone. My lips were now raw and chapped. I put on some Burt's Bees balm and brushed my teeth. In the sink, the water was tinged a muddy red.

When I was a little girl, I remember my grandmother approaching me and rubbing my lips viciously with her thumbs. "Are you wearing lipstick?" she asked. "Are you wearing makeup?" There was a soft look of surprise as she saw the clean pad of her thumb. "Oh," she said. "I guess not." My lips have always been this color. Thank my Cuban ancestors.

I feel like I can breathe a little easier in my room. And now, I need to go to bed.

I just ate a tuna fish sandwich and watched Mister Roger's Neighborhood.

Sometimes I just want to be a kid again. Sometimes I just want to lay on the prickly grass of my lawn in the middle of the summer, sucking on a grape Popsicle and reading Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.

But now I have to write a paper and fill out forms. Bleh.

(Some fun Margaret trivia: "In the 1970s Blume experienced very few attempts at banning or censoring her work. According to her, this changed practically overnight after the 1980 presidental election. She states that one night a woman phoned, asking if she had written Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. When Blume replied affirmatively, the caller then labeled her a "Communist" and hung up. Blume often jokes that she never did figure out if the harasser equated Communism with menstruation or religion, the two major concerns in 12 year old Margaret's life.")

check out xkcd

Off to Baltimore for the day to see mlfoley! Woohoo!

Why The Adventures of Pete & Pete is the greatest show ever:

Artie: (trying to shake his turtle friend from amnesia) Don't you remember Paris? You, me, Hemingway, the shiny tugboat?

Sometime, when I have more time, I'm going to argue at length why my generation was the last generation of kids with good television programming available to us.

I'm too tired to write anything of substance, but I thought I'd pass this on to my fellow Generation Xers [and Yers].

Are You Afraid of the Dark?

Also, Democratic Underground's Hate Mailbag is the most entertaining thing ever.

When I was seven, I wrote and illustrated my first book. And by “first book,” I mean I commandeered a pad of my father’s work stationary, blackened out his contact information with a pen, and wrote on the individual slips, stapling the entire thing together and presenting it proudly to my mother. The title, “The Biggest Turkey Can’t Find the Farm,” wasn’t exactly a harbinger of my future as a neurotic grammar freak, but the story did belie my slightly dark sense of humor.

The story was a fairly simple one: a lost turkey goes from place to place attempting to find his home. He wanders into a cityscape, a zoo, a hotel, each scene with a “WANTED: TURKEY” sign on walls or posts or doors. “Is this the farm?” He is then prodded, chased, or threatened out of said establishment, mournfully declaring “No, it is not here” as he scuttles away from chefs, police officers, and zoo keepers.

The second to last page shows him finally wandering into a farm scene: rooster crowing, picket fence, red barn. He skitters about triumphantly. “Is this the farm? Yes! Yes it is!” Then, the page is turned, and the turkey is sitting, cooked, on a tray among sweet potatoes and cranberry orange relish.

“I wish I did not come here.”

My mother was torn between laughter and horror. I can’t even imagine what she thought was going on inside my head.