I've been hearing this phrase with ever greater urgency from fellow Boomers for a decade or so. When Chani, in a recent blogpost, argued that she tore up the memo that "told me I was supposed to have low self-regard and take crap from people," I felt some response larger than a comment was needed.
Chani complained about a woman who was talking endlessly about herself (another creeping Boomer affliction, but also seen at all ages). The woman was admittedly spitting out negativity best left unspoken: TMI. She had also committed the cardinal sin of showing no interest in Chani's life.
Sound familiar? Yes, folks, men and women are the worst people around. No one really cares about you; everyone, including you, is really concerned with self-gratification and survival.
We are all about "me." (Actually, younger people seem to be more about "duty," but that's another post.)
Chani's complaint that she has lived "consumed with the needs and wants of others," which in my experience is not that uncommon a refrain among women, misses the mark. Living for the needs of others is not self-effacing, it is self-aggrandizing and self-affirming.
The put-upon nurturer is in reality saying, "I am the only thing standing between these people and utter chaos." One of the big gains of motherhood and similar traditional roles that I have observed is that women who may have been self-questioning gain enormous confidence as "executives" in the lives of others.
No one does anything except for gain of some kind. The nurturer gets something from nurturing, or else he or she wouldn't do it. Maybe it is approval, a sense of importance, feeling that one is "good."
A change that sounds more appropriate to me than to tear up the memo, is to realize that doing what one is told is no longer appealing. The "oughts" of the past no longer make sense to us; there's nothing in them for us any more.
That's because all our time, from birth to death, has always been really "for me" and "about me." Let's not fool ourselves.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
No More Waiting for the Doctor
In the past month I've had about a good half dozen medical appointments and at not one of them -- not one! -- was I ushered in without a wait, even though I was perfectly on time, often early. One time it was more than an hour. This morning I put my foot down.
When the receptionist deigned to appear, ten minutes past my 8:00 am appointment, cheerily asking how everyone was, I said loudly, "You're late."
Silence. Several late-coming jump-the-line patients edged over to her desk, so I called out "You're not going to ignore the clipboard on which everyone signed in order of arrival, are you?"
"Let me boot up the computer," she said.
"If you hadn't arrived late that would be done already," I replied.
What is wrong with these people?
They can't make an appointment even if you're sick for less than three weeks later, but when you arrive you have to wait for their royal highnesses to give you the service you pay for? There's 10 percent unemployment out there and it's catching.
OK, part of it is that it's an HMO, Kaiser Permanente, to be precise. "Better than nothing," as a cab driver told me. Not much.
Kaiser is imperious and quixotic with its rates, but short on service. They remind me of Helen Hunt's famous scene in As Good As It Gets:
When the receptionist deigned to appear, ten minutes past my 8:00 am appointment, cheerily asking how everyone was, I said loudly, "You're late."
Silence. Several late-coming jump-the-line patients edged over to her desk, so I called out "You're not going to ignore the clipboard on which everyone signed in order of arrival, are you?"
"Let me boot up the computer," she said.
"If you hadn't arrived late that would be done already," I replied.
What is wrong with these people?
They can't make an appointment even if you're sick for less than three weeks later, but when you arrive you have to wait for their royal highnesses to give you the service you pay for? There's 10 percent unemployment out there and it's catching.
OK, part of it is that it's an HMO, Kaiser Permanente, to be precise. "Better than nothing," as a cab driver told me. Not much.
Kaiser is imperious and quixotic with its rates, but short on service. They remind me of Helen Hunt's famous scene in As Good As It Gets:
CAROL (HH): Fucking HMO bastard pieces of shit... I'm sorry...Health pseudoreform or not, I refuse to wait any more. If they make an appointment, they keep it.
DR. BETTES: No. Actually, I think that's their technical name.
Friday, December 04, 2009
The Write-Right Rite
This week I banged out a story late in the day, tired and rubbing against deadline, and it came back from the copy editor without a scratch. "Perfect," she said. I realized then that I had become one of the geezer reporters of yore.
I'm talking about the days in which newsroom afternoons meant work in a deafening din of manual typewriter keys hitting on the platen behind the paper, mixed in with the "ding!" of carriages returning. When I started working, such places existed.
Every newsroom had some legendary grizzled man who arrived five minutes before deadline with a cigar in his mouth and the smell of gin on his breath, sat at his desk and banged out his requisite 700 to 1,500 words without ever having to x-out anything. His story was ready to print with a minute to spare.
Of course, the rest of us -- in particular, me -- had to compose ploddingly, cross out words, replace entire pages, curse and turn out something that would go through several eyes and red pencils before it was printed.
All that is gone. The Washington Post's closing of news bureaus in several cities and The Washington Times' abandonment of paid subscriptions augur the demise of newspapers in the nation's capital, where I live.
Yet the truly ominous writing on the wall is for standards of writing and, more broadly, language. In sum, the editorial process.
Of course, fact-checking arguably went out the window not long after Watergate in the major press.
Remember the lawsuit over entirely made up quotes in no less than The New Yorker? Iran-Contra, uncovered by small and independent publications, happened because no one in the major media was actually reporting news. The self-important news peacocks in the White House and State Department briefing rooms were all transcribing press releases.
Now the guardians of language are being tossed out. To cut costs, the Post and many other papers have eliminated copy editors, the people who fussed at punctuation, style and more grammatical rules than you ever knew existed.
These people turned every wannabe-novelist's inchoate thoughts into clear and precise statements that anyone with a modicum of education -- papers used to aim for 10th grade -- could understand. Now writing by people who can't tell the difference between "affect" and "effect" sees the light of day every day.
The news business has devolved to bad blogging that comes a day late on dead trees. No wonder it's sinking.
I'm talking about the days in which newsroom afternoons meant work in a deafening din of manual typewriter keys hitting on the platen behind the paper, mixed in with the "ding!" of carriages returning. When I started working, such places existed.
Every newsroom had some legendary grizzled man who arrived five minutes before deadline with a cigar in his mouth and the smell of gin on his breath, sat at his desk and banged out his requisite 700 to 1,500 words without ever having to x-out anything. His story was ready to print with a minute to spare.
Of course, the rest of us -- in particular, me -- had to compose ploddingly, cross out words, replace entire pages, curse and turn out something that would go through several eyes and red pencils before it was printed.
All that is gone. The Washington Post's closing of news bureaus in several cities and The Washington Times' abandonment of paid subscriptions augur the demise of newspapers in the nation's capital, where I live.
Yet the truly ominous writing on the wall is for standards of writing and, more broadly, language. In sum, the editorial process.
Of course, fact-checking arguably went out the window not long after Watergate in the major press.
Remember the lawsuit over entirely made up quotes in no less than The New Yorker? Iran-Contra, uncovered by small and independent publications, happened because no one in the major media was actually reporting news. The self-important news peacocks in the White House and State Department briefing rooms were all transcribing press releases.
Now the guardians of language are being tossed out. To cut costs, the Post and many other papers have eliminated copy editors, the people who fussed at punctuation, style and more grammatical rules than you ever knew existed.
These people turned every wannabe-novelist's inchoate thoughts into clear and precise statements that anyone with a modicum of education -- papers used to aim for 10th grade -- could understand. Now writing by people who can't tell the difference between "affect" and "effect" sees the light of day every day.
The news business has devolved to bad blogging that comes a day late on dead trees. No wonder it's sinking.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)