Penny Wiseacre

Today in "new ways to miss the point": Finger-wagging about diaper choices

So! We live in a country where parents go without food to diaper their children. I learned about this on Metafilter this morning.

Naturally, the early comments were about why people should use cloth diapers, because this is the Internet and why shouldn't people seize every opportunity to lord their superior choices over other, less fortunate people?

And yes, cloth diapering can be a wonderfully economic alternative, provided you've got the cash up front for the initial investment, you're in a situation where you or your children's caregivers are amenable to the specifics, and you've got the time and facilities for convenient cleaning of your stash.

But there are lots of people who don't have a whole lot of time, or childcare situations which permit cloth diapering, or 24/7 access to washing machines that are just a walk down the hall. Like couponing or using a deep freeze to store homemade staples, clothing diapering is one of those economizing measures that presupposes a certain amount of middle class privilege, i.e. control over one's time and access to the capital that can be sunk into start-up costs like appliances and inventory.

Wearing a clean diaper shouldn't be something only middle class babies enjoy. Until we reach the day where every mother in America gets the Finland-style box of start-up baby essentials and things like washers and dryers are standard in every apartment and daycare center, we may as well accept that sometimes, disposable diapers suit a family's circumstances.

And there are things you can do to help make sure every baby keeps a clean bum:

Donate to a diaper bank. I like Help A Mother Out, mostly because it's easy to set up recurring monthly monetary donations. There's also the National Diaper Bank Network.  There are even cloth diaper banks, if you feel strongly about that.

Use Amazon.com to do good. Thanks to a three-fer of Amazon Mom, Amazon's Subscribe & Save program and Amazon Prime, I can get nearly 300 diapers delivered anywhere for less than $50. I have a standing arrangement with a local emergency shelter: Every month, I email the director to confirm the diaper sizes they need, then make an order through Subscribe & Save to ship a few big boxes to the address she gives me.

(The nice thing about Subscribe & Save is that you can suspend or cancel subscriptions, so this way, I can make sure I'm delivering size 4 diapers one month, size 2 the next.)

I would urge anyone who's motivated to reach out to their local homeless or domestic shelters, or their local food bank, and ask if they'd like a monthly diaper shipment. This is basically frictionless do-gooderism. I can do something useful for someone else in under five minutes and I know what my money's being used for. It literally took ten minutes to email a shelter director and set up the monthly arrangement.

Okay, then! Now that we've solved one problem, let's all write our congresspeople and start lobbying for the big box of baby stuff for all new parents in the U.S. I cannot wait to see a nation of babies crawling about with star-spangled bottoms.

Got any other bright ideas for diapering the babies in your community? Let me know by hitting me up on Twitter at lschmeiser.

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.

Decluttering: just another iteration of the Diderot Effect

Yesterday, the NYT published a fingerwaggy little piece talking about how much more ethical and fulfilled we'll all be once we learn that the real secret to life is living with less. Or at least, that was supposed to be the takeaway message.

What I got out of it was that life is pretty freakin' sweet when you have the kind of privilege that can let you diddybop around the globe without having to fret about student loan payments, or employment prospects upon your return, or whether a hospital bill will bankrupt you. You can afford to live lightly because you never have to think about the just-in-case.

In which I test-drive the Web's advice: IKEA edition

Although we are not slated to be reunited with our household goods for another 22 days, that has not stopped anyone in this household from falling into the logical fallacy of the recently relocated:

1. I moved to a new place. 2. My new place is not my old place. 3. My old place had my old stuff. 4. I am not in my old place. 5. Therefore, I need new stuff.

To be fair, we need a shelf capable of being attached to a wall, as that is where we'll stash our cable modem and AirPort while the floors underneath them are radically redone. And we need a magnetic knife rack, as my idea of a knife drawer was shot down with, "I'm afraid I'd reach in for a knife and pull back a bloody stump." And we need a dish drainer, as we no longer have a dishwasher who is not named "Phil." And now that we have the luxury of not having to work at a kitchen table (which is still in storage), it would be nice to have a desk in our office, and I want to shamelessly ape this set-up.

The most efficient way to pick up all this stuff in one go was IKEA.

The unbearable anxiety of the refrigerator door

This is the kitchen in the house where we used to live. You'll note that there's nothing on the fridge -- not because we wanted to show off the stainless steel doors, but because when you are staging and selling a house, any and all signs of the habitants' lives need to be erased.

To be honest, we haven't had anything on the fridge since mid-2011, when we put the house on the market the first time. I like a naked fridge. I find it soothing.