Penny Wiseacre

Things I have learned in a month of writing So What, Who Cares?

As I've alluded to before, email newsletters are my day job. I believe in email as an editorial format*. There are ways to do it well. I wanted to do some after-hours experimentation with the medium and the format, both for personal and professional gratification. And that's how I ended up launching So What, Who Cares?

I've got a month's experience under my belt. I thought I'd share what I've learned here with you, who have patiently tuned in on other experiments I've done in the ongoing quest to Do Things Better.

The rules for reading at 35,000 feet

As I start this, I am winging my way over Wyoming. One timer on my desktop is ticking down the minutes I have left on my three-hour block of Gogo InFlight service; the other is measuring out my selah. Whatever, haters. At least I'm not carrying around a kitchen timer shaped like a pomodoro. Yet.

I'm online only because I had a few lingering work to-dos to wrap up and I didn't want to do them tonight after I land. Most of the time, if I am not responsible for keeping a small human from becoming the complaint every other passenger has on a flight, I am flying like it's 1990: I start reading the minute I sit down and I stop only when it's time to deplane.

Packing for a trip is a ten-minute chore for me. Selecting my reading material is a whole other matter. I have rules, and so the reading material has to comply with my criteria:

Do not read mainstream women's magazines, aka "service" magazines. I'm talking your Self, Glamour, Allure, Redbook, etc. Those magazines exist because of their healthy ad sales, and they're basically a hundred-plus pages of introducing you to problems you did not realize were problems until someone said something.

You do not need to rile yourself up and/or manage the anxiety/irritation/self-loathing spiral that comes from realizing that you just crafted a to-do list based on directives issued by people who think phrases like "a nude lip" or "a cropped pant" or "a pop of color" are not degrading our language and therefore our thought processes.

Do read magazines that are like dispatches from a strange fictional land. I really like Vanity Fair for this, because they clearly have a dozen writers on the "obscure members of royalty and their difficulty in doing anything other than having scandalous marriages" beat.

Also, sandwiched between  articles on movie star erotomaniacs of yesteryear and Cheryl Tunt-level insane rich people of now, you'll find a devastatingly incisive and well-reported piece on foreign affairs or the financial markets.

That said, Vogue is also an acceptable runner-up. I still recall fondly the flight where I was reading the house tour and the writer rhapsodized about the down-to-earth people who owned a five-story brownstone in Manhattan, and how they liked nothing better than swimming laps in their turquoise-tiled pool in the basement, then swaddling themselves in clean, snowy white robes before taking the elevator to the balcony garden to enjoy the snow. You know, as the humble do.

(Oh, for the glory days when Julia Reed and Jeffrey Steingarten were raising that magazine's IQ.)

Do know your reading pace and pack books accordingly. The happiest flight I have ever taken was the San Francisco to Honolulu jaunt where I read approximately half of Cryptonomicon. I actually saved the back half of that book for the return leg, so that I could repeat the same delightful experience of reading without the niggling fear that I'd run out of book before we landed.

This pacing rule is the reason I once went through security at Logan twice. I realized that I had no interest in spending an entire flight catching up on reading that felt like homework, and the only decent bookstore (for an airport range of "decent") was outside the gate. And that is how I came to own a hardcover copy of Under the Dome, which I finished five minutes before landing.

This story brings me to my next two points ...

Research what you bring, bookwise. The three worst flights of my life did not involve turbulence, medical emergencies or the side effects from my daughter's twelve-hour nursing strike. One is linked to my horrified read of John Shirley's Wetbones -- I had thought, "I loved City Come A Walkin', so surely I'll like this?"

The second was a flight to DC where I made the error of picking up a Jodi Picoult book and loathing everyone in it PLUS the twist at the end. (Subsequent flips through other Picoult books has confirmed that she is not the author for me, because of that formula. I can't even recall which book I read, only that I loathed the adult female protagonist and despised the last two chapters even more.)

The last one is linked to reading Sarah's Key, because when you are a pregnant lady reading about children dying thanks to grown-ups' cowardice and brutality, you end the flight muttering, "I hate everyone and this is why I stick to sci-fi and fantasy whenever I get tired of nonfiction."

And ...

Manage your mood with your reading. Think about it: You're locked in a metal tube for however many hours. Your ability to do anything other than sit and eat and read and write is really limited. So maybe an airplane isn't the best place to crack open anything that's going to make you really upset or amp you up to the point where you've got a fifty item to-do list organized into three levels of subtasks. Airplane reading is the "I've been meaning to get to that!" reading, not the "Crap, I've had that on my to-do list" reading.

Do not ever rely on an airport bookstore or newsstand. Because that's how you end up with Jodi Picoult or Tatiana de Rosnay.

Once I finish this up -- I'm over South Dakota now, because that is what happens when you go 544 miles per hour -- I'll wrap up my background research for a meeting I have, and then I'll crack open my Kindle. I know, I know -- I said I like to fly like it's 1990. But let's get to the last rule ...

Never hesitate to use whatever means necessary to bring the reading material you need.

Happy flying and happy reading, everyone! See you on the ground.

You can't spell "parent-y" without "Type A"

I have been a fan of Brigid Schulte's work for the Washington Post -- a quick Evernote search shows that I've saved ten of her articles and blog posts -- and I'm very excited to read Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has The Time ... when I have the time(*). Her beat is on family policy, life-work issues and the area where your day job and your life overlap, even when nobody wants them to.

She's done at least two NPR interviews in the last week, and this one on Morning Edition stood out for this quote:

There's physical labor that goes along with that, but there's also mental labor. You're keeping track of everything, you know? You've got all this stuff going on in your mind: the to-do lists, and "Did I remember the carpool?" and "Oh, my goodness, I gotta fill out the Girl Scout forms," ... all this stuff that kind of gets crowded in there along with all the stuff you've got to do at work. Men generally don't have that. They have one sphere, which is work.

I keep chewing on it for two reasons. First, her experience about the mental labor is my experience with the mental labor.

I am still, frankly, gobsmacked that it took me until last fall to tell my husband, "It would be a good idea if you had the numbers for our date-night babysitter, our nanny and the preschool in your phone."

Why, why, why did I just assume the duty of sole parental communicator without even thinking about it? For that matter, why did it take me until last weekend to say, "You know what? From now on, I'm forwarding you all the emails I get for coordinating playdates and birthday parties. There's no reason I should be the sole keeper of the calendar for our kid's social life."

Don't be THAT family in a restaurant, baby & toddler edition

One in an ongoing series called "Parenting: It's Not About You!" Or a series called "Things I Write When Warming Up For Paying Work."

 I subscribe to the theory that children are savages and it's a parent's duty to society to civilize their particular savage(s). Since one of the hallmarks of civilization is being able to go to a restaurant without doing anything to justify the waitstaff garnishing your food with their saliva, it stands to reason that you've got to teach your kids how to comport themselves in these places.

But children aren't the only ones who need to learn; parents should recognize that they're also expected to behave well. Here's how to not be an entitled jerk or make your fellow restaurant patrons hate your baby.

5 things you can do online before you drop dead unexpectedly

I will never say it was lucky that my dad died suddenly, but I will say the experience provided many unexpected learning opportunities that I feel lucky to have had.

What "Gone Girl" taught me about slacking on the housework

Yesterday, Jonathan Chait suggested that maybe women could get over their disgruntlement over doing more housework than their male partners by just ... well, by just doing less. Or as he put it:

Women in general just have higher standards of cleanliness than men do. People who care a lot about neater homes spend more time cleaning them because that makes them happy. And while I agree in general that domestic life requires more gender equality, the housework problem has a partial solution that’s simpler and more elegant: Do less of it.

Let us skip-hop around the stereotypes innately baked into the assumptions about hetero partnerships here and break down the risible assumptions in the passage above. Then I will explain how they tie into last summer's breakout novel, Gone Girl, which will eventually be used by time management consultants as an inspiring story about the power of a well crafted to-do list.

Tech is parenting is you're doing it wrong always

After I had Trix in fall 2010, I spent a lot of hours planted in the glider, on account of having an infant who refused to be put down for more than a few seconds. (At left, the typical result whenever I put the baby down for even a diaper change.) Since I was a tad wary about the effects of cortisol on Trix's plastic little mind, I figured, what the hell, I'll just hold the baby until we figure out how this works.

(Oh, that cortisol/brain-damage business. As KJ Dell'Anotonia writes, it's "the headlines and the easy takeaways that stick with sleep-deprived, anxious parents.")

ANYWAY. Baby stuck to my side 24/7 + nursing on demand every 90-120 minutes = the most profound sleep deprivation I've ever experienced, with an unsurprising drop in my ability to concentrate on anything. I'd try to read something on my Kindle and words would literally float around. But I needed something to entertain the bored jibbering monkey in my forebrain.

In 2010, the American Academy of Pediatrics was sticking to its recommendation that children under the age of 2 watch no television, and that was one of the few parenting ideals I was determined to put to into practice. Since I had grown up on half hour chunks of television doled out on a daily basis, I reasoned that my kid would be well off with an equally disciplined media diet.

Prep School: Ten things you need to put in a go bag

September is National Preparedness Month, so I'll be posting a six-part series on things you can do to plan ahead and reduce the impact of disasters, natural or otherwise. Today's post is on the importance of assembling a go-bag so you're not frantically scrambling for stuff while chaos unravels around you.

(P.S. Part one was on ten quick and easy emergency prep activities. Part two was on the ten types of paperwork you need to have under control.)

Prep School: Ten quick things you can do to prepare for emergencies

September is National Preparedness Month, so I'll be posting a six-part series on things you can do to plan ahead and reduce the impact of disasters, natural or otherwise. Today's post is on quick and inexpensive things you can do now that could come in handy later.

How to fly with children: Bring money

This is third and final entry in a series on flying with children without losing your ever-loving mind. Prior installments stress the importance of bribery and the joy of insanely detailed checklists.

Last May, my husband got tapped for a big-deal work thing out in Boston, and the only downside to his big-deal work thing in Boston is that the dates overlapped with a long-planned week in southwestern Florida. So he flew off to Boston and I flew our kid and our stuff out to Florida.

The photo at left depicts everything I schlepped around a long-term parking lot at 6 in the morning. The big duffel bag held all of our family's stuff for the week. The backpack at the right was the sole carry-on bag I elected to schlep; Trixie's insulated lunch box was clipped to the front. The carseat in the middle obviously carried the most precious cargo: Bunny, without whom my daughter would refuse to move. So she sat with him too.

As I was hauling things in and out of the car while keeping up my end of the conversation with Trix, I felt like I was schlepping everything we owned. Looking more objectively at the whole thing now, I see that it was actually a fairly light packing job. And that sums up the key to packing for any trip with the kids: Go light.

After the jump, I'll explain how to pack lightly with a toddler, and toss in the rest of the best practices for flying with the shorties. Spoiler alert: Many of them involve money.