The School of Life

This week and next are back-to-school weeks for my children. They are spread out between two different schools. While the children haven’t changed schools, they have moved to different campuses—in both cases much larger ones. For me this means figuring out new areas of town, new buildings, new bus routes and stops, plus the usual parents’ meetings and the inevitable checklist/scavenger hunt for the items requested by their teachers.

My daughter, especially, is apprehensive about beginning middle school. She went from an elementary campus with two classes per grade to a preschool-through-12th grade facility with 5000 students. Last year she was one of 25 kids in “Valerie” ‘s class. This year, there are 11 homeroom classes in her grade and hers is simply designated by a letter and a number.

I asked her how the first day of school was. It seems she spends a lot of time trying not to get lost. She likes the novelty of having an electronic photo ID for the cafeteria and being able to choose what she eats, she says two out of her 6 teachers seem nice, one teacher is particularly concerned that the children display appropriate manners and respect for authority (which is fine by me, but the form this takes seems excessive to her), another teacher has berated her for fanning herself during class (it is very hot in Spain in September and none of the children’s schools has air conditioning—fans in Spain are a common and useful accessory for women), she describes being separated from friends by a plume of pushy 8th graders on the courtyard. I mentally picture the courtyard in “Prison Break”.

Already I have failed her. I rented her school books from the parents’ association, but did not pay attention to the last-call date for sign up and payment. Because I signed up late I could not pick up the books until the last day when half the books were missing and many of the ones left were in pretty sorry condition. She says her teachers will berate her for not being prepared and not taking care of her school material. Even though the parents’ association lady assures me the teachers are used to this situation and understanding, my daughter doesn’t believe it. I tend to agree with her. I remember my own experiences with secondary school teachers, especially those that reigned like absolute monarchs over their classrooms. Such teachers could be arbitrary and cruel.

One such pedagogue was my fourth grade parochial school teacher. Mr. G. was not unusual in arranging his students’ desks in alphabetical order; he was unusual in that he called his students by their last name. There was no Mr. or Miss in front of it either—simply “Mason” barked out military style, generally in a tone of voice indicating strong disapproval. Mr. G had military affectations—no doubt adopted to inspire terror in and consolidate his power over the child. Only now, as an adult, can I see how unsuited he would have been to any military environment involving interaction with grown-up peers or superiors.

These were the days when nobody seemed to care about children’s fragile egos. When I asked him once about a C grade I received on a science project, he responded with—“Oh, you’re the one who turned in that piece of crap.” If you had any particularity, you had better hide it from the watchful eye of Mr. G. One of his favorite sports was singling out those children for special humiliation. I remember one girl in our class who blushed easily. Mr. G used to stand her up in front of the class and he see how long it would take her to blush. The highlight of Mr. G’s year was a spring project he called “Real Life.” He introduced “Real Life” with gusto: “Now kiddies, you may think life is coming home from school and having your Mommy fix you cupcakes. Well I can assure you, it’s not. What we’re going to learn about next is ‘real life’.” He then explained that our project was to assume that we were getting out as enlisted personnel from the military and that we had no special job skills. We had to look at the want ads in the newspaper and find a job and apartment.”

Even now I have nightmares that I am back in middle or high school and the bell has rung for class and I can’t find the right classroom, or I get to the classroom and everybody else has started a test and I cannot even begin to answer the first question. I remember desperately looking for the familiar face of a friend amid the sea of people in the cafeteria. I remember the excitement of that special Friday in the month that would be “little round pizza day”. I remember the official rules—there is an honor code where you are obligated to report any transgression of your peers and I remember the unofficial rules—people cheat, they often get away with it, if you turn in your peers you might as well move to another school in another state because your name will be social poison. Your teacher may be a cruel, sadistic tyrant but God forbid you go above their head and complain about them to the administration or, worse yet, ask your parents to do this. Maybe receiving negative grades on their papers (according to a system where a certain number of points are deducted for every transgression against English grammar and composition—thus the end game is limitless) is not very morale enhancing for children, but getting the class lecture afterwards about “how little we respect certain students who must not be named who go whining to authority to complain about their teachers” is worse. Oh and those school elementary school projects, those aren’t projects for the children. Those are contests for the parents…not to mention the little girl who will dig up her dead and buried dog and label its bones in order to win an elementary school science fair, that’s the kind of person who will do anything to get ahead later in life.

Like most people, I had some truly wonderful teachers who believed in and nurtured my potential. I had others who prepared me for “real life”…

US Memorial Day, American and European approaches to patriotism

My children asked me what Memorial Day commemorates. Like many Americans of my generation I never gave Memorial Day much thought beyond associating it with a day off work, barbecues and the beginning of summer. While I had a feeling it had something to do with honoring Americans who had died in wars, I didn’t know the exact answer so I looked it up in Wikipedia, where I learned that it was

« First enacted to honor Union soldiers of the American Civil War – it is celebrated near the day of reunification after the Civil War – it was extended after World War I to honor Americans who have died in all wars. »

The Civil War origin is interesting because, for Americans, this was the most devastating war we have ever fought in terms of American casualties ; the only war since American Independence to have been fought on our own soil and the only war to have significantly impacted American civilians.

I was touched to see many of my American friends on Facebook post pictures of tombstones of their parents or grandparents who had served in the US Armed Forces, kind of exotic too because, in Europe, I have not detected much patriotism or pride in military service among anybody of my generation (children of the Baby Boom). I wonder if this does not have to do with the shadow cast by World War I, World War II or the Spanish Civil War (not to mention the relatively recent independence struggles of many former European colonies). In my children’s British school, two of their required reading books have been about the Blitz and I spent yesterday evening helping my fifth-grade daughter study for a history test on World War I—and was struck by the total of 9 million dead.

I remember an argument with an American boss who was very critical of France’s quick surrender during WWII. I responded that I don’t think they had much will to fight after World War I. Contrary to Germany, the major WWI battles were fought on their own soil. My grandfather, who fought for France in WWII, spent most of the War in German prisoner of war camps, which got progressively worse each time he escaped, marking a progressive descent into Hell. In a perverse way he did not resent the Germans, despite the inhumane living conditions and sadistic practices of the guards in Rawa-Ruska camp in the Ukraine. He felt that they were « just doing their job », whereas he reserved his true ire for his fellow Frenchmen and prisoners of war for their lack of will to fight, for not trying to escape from the POW camps and most of all for turning him in every time he escaped, resulting in various punishments ranging from solitary confinement to having his eye lashes burned off. The most psychologically damaging element of this experience came from witnessing the treatment of people who were far worse off than he. This came about when he and fellow Belgian and French POWs were used to unload train cars, filled with the near-dead occupants being shipped to a nearby concentration camp.

The war ended, my grandfather married my grandmother and they moved to the US, but the memories of his POW experience stayed with him. My uncles describe how he would toss cigarette cartons to the prisoners working along the road in chain gangs in the Rural South of the 1950s. Having been a prisoner himself, he sympathized and knew that cigarettes are their universal currency. My maternal grandfather loved his adopted homeland (he had to reaquire American nationalilty even though his father was American, because he had spent most his life in France and served in the French army during WWII). He became quite the patriotic citizen, inspiring his two older sons to volunteer for military service during the Vietnam war.

To the extent that my grandfather chose to leave France after WWII and immigrate to America and had very ambivalent feelings about his experiences in the French army during WWII, I can see why my experience of patriotism differ drastically from European counterparts whose grandparents lived through World War II or Spanish counterparts, whose grandparents grew up in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War.

The European Union has always felt like a pragmatic union to me. Pragmatism works great when « the rising tide is lifting all ships » but is a hard rallying cry in tough times when people are asked to make sacrifices. Then it gets all to easy to focus on differences and who is not « sacrificing enough ».

It has always seemed to me that nationalistic identification with any one of the European countries is something you are or aren’t born into. It has to do with the fact that your ancestors lived in the same place for many hundreds of years, alongside other people who share a common culture and ethnicity (Although this is changing with more recent waves of immigration…)—a real challenge when you try to build a union among countries, who were fighting each other and themselves 70 and 80 years ago.

As far as a pan-European « identity » among people my age, if it exists, I’d be hardpressed to define it. Patriotism is seen as sort of an embarrassing relic of and painful memory from their grandparents’ generations. The social welfare mentality leads to a lot entitlement regarding what the state should be giving them, but (like many of their generational American counterparts) not so much interest when it comes to giving back. Compulsory military service has mostly been abolished and I don’t see any real respect for voluntary military service here—the general idea seems to be that if you are smart, you choose to earn a lot more money in the private sector. On the other hand, in Europe, going into politics and public administration is seen as a more prestigious career choice than in the US…

One way I do not see a major difference with Europe is my (Gen X) and the following, Boomlet (1980 and later), US generations’ tendency to feel like JFK’s « Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country » failed, along with a lot of the other social ideals of the 1960s—and to full-heartedly embrace a much more 1980s Boomer ethos of individualism and consumerism. However, when I see the Memorial Day Facebook posts I can’t help but wonder if the US, as a much younger country whose inhabitants may or may not share a common ethnicity or past cultural heritage, does benefit from the fact that we have a national identity that is based on choosing and being taught to reaffirm a common set of values. As for the economic crisis, having a strong, federal government definitely makes it easier for the US--a federal government whose structure and integrity we had to fight a Civil War to preserve…so all in all, interesting for me to learn that the origin of Memorial Day was US reunification.

Facebook "friendbore"?

It could be you!

As a frequent offender in this category, and parent of a 'tween child and all the drama that entails, I was telling my husband how schools, or preferably parents, ought to introduce their children to the finer points of "How Not to be a Cad on the Internet".

My husband said: That makes me think of something. I used to have 405 Facebook friends two days ago and today I only have 403.

Maybe they really weren't your "friends" in the first place.

Yeah, but to get unfriend-ed by two people in the space of two days?

Well, didn't you accidentally befriend that person who mortally betrayed us in business because you used the Facebook Email Addresses Ap (and you had forgotten they were still there)? They agreed to friend you and then you "unfriended" them within a space of minutes. That was pretty cold.

(Distracted) I'm still wondering what I might have done recently.

Maybe you're one of "those" people.

What people?

"Friedbores," you know the number one most boring person in your Facebook "news" page. The one whose posting frequency is only matched by the inanity of their subject matter.

Noooh!

Who knows. Maybe you tweeted a few floaters recently and that was it. Problem solved, instant erasure! And like that, you're gone.

Of course, I only thought about this because I worried that the same thing was going to happen to me after a few of my status updates...

Ah the age of technology, when you can go from friendwhore to friendbore in a matter of seconds.

Keep the "crazy" under control

I have an (almost) eleven-year old girl and three boys, twins aged 7 and a 3-yr old. Honestly, most the time, I feel like Lynette from Desperate Housewives. Hearing my 3-yr old son sing “I love my mudder” at breakfast in the morning or the evening cuddle and prayers with the children—the one moment of the day when they resemble anything close to angelic--are all too brief. Mostly my day is like this:

Go onto the Internet to see if the crusty raised bumps in a circle on Twin A’s arm are ringworm. Educate myself on what ringworm is and how do you get rid of this. It turns out ringworm is a fungus and an over-the-counter antifungal cream at the pharmacy will take care of this. Of course you have to remember to put it on every morning and night for about 2 weeks to get results, in the meantime, he’s developed a new “ringworm” on his leg. Crap! More weeks of remembering to put the ringworm cream on Twin A, especially now that we are in later Spring, and I have to remember to put sunscreen on my fair-skinned children’s faces, arms and necks every morning.

Two years ago, when I had to take my daughter to the dermatologist to get rid of some pesky warts (that cream had to be applied morning and night for two months!), the posters of little baby with wrinkled granny face and melanomas or the toddler walking on the beach in swim trunks—with a header like “That tan he got at the beach when he was two is something he’ll keep with him for the rest of his life” made a real impression on me. The dermatologist explained to me that the “freckles” on the kids arms and faces are sun damage. My half-Spanish husband thinks my sunscreen obsession is complete horseshit. His mother and sister have never used a drop of sunscreen in their life and laugh about the British tourists in Mallorca—“Look, they come in two colors: Just arrived and just burned!” I would have loved it if our children had come out with more of a Mediterranean complexion, but considering three of them are as Melanin-deprived as I am, there must be some recessive fair skinned Galician Celt or Vosgeian French genes in the woodpile from his side of the family—so I wish he would be more supportive.

Back to the Internet to do more research, this time on impacted splinters. The 3-yr old got a splinter 6 weeks ago and I don’t think we got all the wood out. Meanwhile, he has a thick callous with a pinprick-sized hole on the bottom of his foot. The suggested remedies run the gamut from “put a piece of bacon on this under a Bandaid and leave it overnight. In the morning it will come out.” To a recommended intervention, cutting the callous out with a sterilized exacto knife. A lot of input from professional carpenters on the different reactions you get based on different types of wood splinters. None of this seems relevant or within my skillset. I talk to my husband about the splinter and the fact that my hairdresser almost died from a staph aurea infection he got in his foot and I guess I should probably call the pediatrician to get it out and he says: “You’re not seriously going to bother the pediatrician to remove a splinter. I had a splinter once for three years.” I retort: “You’ll regret this lack of concern when the baby gets deadly ill with a staph infection,” to which he replies: “Do me a favor keep the crazy under control.” Wickedly, I think how low I can go to win the argument: “How do you know you’re not crazy. I mean, truly crazy people never think they are?”

Why Can’t I be More Like…?

Alpha Catholic Mom: The woman at mass with her six beautifully behaved, children in coordinating outfits, politely listening to the sermon. This is the woman with the beautiful embroidered First Communion banner that looks like it was handmade by Belgian nuns, but of course she did it herself, not to mention she’s actually got her hair-brushed and looks well put-together, herself. Meanwhile, I’ve pulled my wet hair back because I haven’t had time to dry it, have screamed at the children three times that morning to get them dressed and out the door to church on-time, overcome the challenge of getting them past my anti-clerical, unreligious husband who asks them if they’d rather play video games Sunday Morning than talk to “Dear Baby Jesus”—ensues “Talladega Nights” Ricky Bobby impersonation. Once in church, my daughter gets up once to go to the bathroom, the boys making paper airplanes out of the hand-outs, tell me they’re thirsty and ask when it will be over at various points.

Or

The Stepford Wife. The Stepford Wife is tall blond, slender and attractive. It would be easy to hate her, but she is also smart, has a cool sense of self-deprecating humor, and is absolutely nice to everybody. The Stepford Wife is very stylish. I bet she never spend the whole day in work out clothes…and then doesn’t even work out. She may have 3 or more children, but they do not seem to stress her out overly much. I never hear her complaining about the children, or if they do, it’s in a light-hearted way. I bet the Stepford Wife is never riding in a minivan (she’d rather be seen dead) and turns to her children who are fighting in the back seat and says something like: “If you don’t stop fighting with your brother right now, I will a) take away your TV and video-gaming privileges for the week b) no dessert or sugary snacks today c) I will slap you! The Stepford Wife is still pinching herself to verify her good luck at being married to her husband—the dear man. I’m sure she’s never screamed at him with vocabulary that would shame a fishwife from the top of a ski slope or had conversations that revolve around whose turn it is to clean up the dog vomit. My husband wonders a la “Jesse’s Girl:” “Why can’t I find a wife like that!”

I think of a Facebook cartoon that somebody once posted:

Male Prostitute (for women!)

You see a housewife driving by in a stationwagon and a man soliciting her: “For $50 I’ll listen to you all night.” Ha, ha, funny in a disturbing way, because it’s so true. The retort would be the old saw about:

The Woman Who Goes to a Fairy Godmother

…and says: “I don’t want to cook any more; I don’t want to grocery shop; I don’t want to be the one who always has to remember the children’s schedules and drive them to doctors, dentists, birthday parties any more, I don’t want to do the dishes or clean house, I want more pay for the same work…” And then the fairy godmother waved her magic arm and the woman turned into a man.

Like everything, this is a gross over-simplification, because I have other Facebook friends who are stay at home dads, who do every task I listed in the fairy godmother joke and others who clearly are doing a lot to participate in running the house and looking after the kids. I think the difference is being the person who has to organize everything in their head and make sure it gets done, even if other people are helping out and the person who can check out of most these responsibilities, confident that everything to run the household and take care of the children will get done, and if you have something to do, someone will remind you to do it, so you can whole-mindedly devote yourself to some creative or professional endeavor for hours at end without having to stop and write a post-it-note saying something like:

“Remember to call the orthodontist” because the dog ate the daughter’s retainer. “Call the drycleaners and schedule a pick-up”. The clothes are piling up and you need to make sure they haven’t fired you as a client because you can never be there in the exact moment in the 4 hour time window they actually show up to pick up the clothes, “Buy birthday present for Twin B’s friend.”

I finally decided to be “cool mom,” which means buying other children the toys they want, but you wouldn’t think of buying for your own children--for very good reason. I was interrupted from whatever I was doing this weekend by Twin B hyperventilating and wailing like a stuck pig because he had taken down the Lego creator set I bought for his best friends’ birthday party from it’s high, safe perch to “look at it.” Then, his baby brother found it and wreaked destruction. Now, for the uninitiated, Lego Creator is your basic parental nightmare. It is a creative toy and if Twin B ever goes to Caltech or MIT, I can feel a touch of pride that he ultimately, inadvertently got the Lego Creator set he always wanted. Why do I hate Lego Creator? It is because the sets come with a quadrillion tiny, unique pieces that a) your child loses within minutes b) the baby brother steals c) the dog eats (hopefully you don’t have take the dog to the vet for the $1000 operation to unblock his intestinal tract afterwards—thankfully baby brother is 3 now and doesn’t try to eat the tiny pieces)…and then you child comes wailing to you: “Waaaaaaaaaah, I cannot build General Grievous because I’m missing blah, blah (miniscule and indescribable) connector piece.”

Deep Thought: Since when do first graders have 2 hours of homework on the weekends? That is such a drag to supervise. It’s like your 38 and back in school. When I was a kid I didn’t have real homework until third grade; I didn’t put any serious effort into “remembering” to do it until fifth grade; and my parents role was limited to occasionally asking if I had done my homework.

These days when your first-grader has homework: “It’s your homework!” Of course you could leave it to the child to take initiative (at age 7) and remember to do it himself—which if you have a normal child--you can forget about. Take into account, that everybody else’s parent is helping them with their homework, so if you just left it up to the child to “learn a lesson in responsibility”—the teacher is clearly going to think your kid is a loser, with slacker, loser parents who will be really sorry when their child graduates from high school without even being able to get into community college.

Mother-of-Four Children-Under-the-Age-of-12 Fantasy

Sleep away Obedience Camp for Children: I see this as a sort of military themed spend-the-night camp run by former army sergeants, with beneficial activities like 6 AM forced marches and runs to wear the little buggers out, and other group activities to teach them the value of team work and discourage whining tendencies. If only there was a place where you could send your kids off for a month and have them shipped back to you as responsible, considerate, self-motivated, empathetic human beings—future responsible citizens, progeny who will do you proud! This is no doubt a Heinlein “Starship Troopers”-inspired fantasy that highlights my inner, Southern conservative, militarist streak.

Thoughts on Health Care--In Between the Extremes

I haven’t been following the recent health care debate very closely, but I’m glad that Health Care Reform has passed. I find it disingenuous that so many staunch Republicans complain about “the way it was passed” considering their tactics, since the Clinton years, of filibustering everything...and then complaining about how things are not done with more consensus.

Living abroad, I am often treated to people’s uninformed opinions about the way “they”—we Americans--all are—overweight, ignorant, gun-toting, polluting, violators of other countries’ national sovereignty--extremists. What is most amusing, or distressing is the way people have of saying these things in front of you, as if you weren’t one of Them and might be insulted or disagree with your interlocutors. It’s not that there isn’t any truth in any of these assertions, it’s that such statements often reflect uninformed (or minimally informed) truth, issued from a very smug outsider perspective.

Let’s take the least polarizing and most personal accusation: “Americans are fat.” Maybe it’s our Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy, but if we have something negative to say about other people, minimal good manners dictate not saying this until “They” are at least out of ear’s reach. I was once told by an otherwise educated-seeming, middle-class French person that “Americans do not eat vegetables.” “Really, I said, have you ever been in the PRODUCE section of a Publix or a Safeway because they happen to be loaded with vegetables, which would be surprising if there was no market for them…”

Sometimes when people do travel abroad, a very curious thing happens: they have preconceived stereotypes of the “other” place they will be visiting (preferably exotic and different from their place, otherwise what’s the interest of traveling), so the purpose of the trip is to confirm these preconceived notions. The international traveler, with such an agenda, can be surprisingly successful. The person who is convinced that the US is a violent and lawless place will inevitably walk into a random Burger King in Los Angeles and witness a shootout. Meanwhile I, the American, have been to Burger King and other fast food joints in my life (and no I don’t and didn’t eat this food on a regular basis) and have never witnessed one gun or shooting.

I don’t know where this foreign visitor went (I’m not familiar with LA), but I assume it was a bad neighborhood. It wouldn’t occur to me to wander around the rougher Parisian “banlieues” (suburbs) as a blithe tourist. And, if I did such a thing, I would be honest enough to qualify where I was instead of identifying this as the “quintessential French experience.” As for the weight issue, I do recognize and am saddened by the fact that, statistically Americans are overweight. However, the conversation is more interesting when people say something like—“weight and making healthy food choices are often a function of education and economics, and weight gain typically accompanies the rise of processed foods and the practice of working outside the house. Society-wide weight gain, while at a more advanced stage in the US, is a phenomenon currently affecting Most developed nations…”

Now back to social security and health care. I am always surprised to hear so many Americans proclaim: “We have the best health care system in the world.” Most of these people have never lived Anywhere Else in the world. They often rely on statistics and articles that support how bad it is Everywhere Else. This is no substitute for actually having lived Somewhere Else and being able to compare.

I am not a statistics person, and I don’t have any political agenda. These are some simple points that have impressed me living both in the US and abroad:

Spain—

We have private health care insurance here that was very easy to sign up for. The only reason its cost is comparable to private (non-employer affiliated) PPO health insurance in the US is because it is a world-wide policy and will reimburse us 80% of any health care expenses incurred elsewhere, but what makes it expensive is the US portion of the coverage….If this policy were limited to Spain, it would be a Whole Lot cheaper. To obtain this policy, I did not have to fill out any questionnaire on pre-existing conditions or list all the medical or hospital visits my family have had in the past five years.

When my children are sick and I go to the children’s emergency room, I give the receptionist my insurance card and my child’s name—punto y basta. I do not need to call up the insurance company to get any approvals if the emergency room doctor recommends the child stay in the hospital.

My children’s pediatrician gives me his cell phone number That He Will Answer and will visit our house (non-emergency house visits by non-network providers are reimbursed up to 80% by the health insurance) when the children are sick.

I haven’t tried this, but my American friends have. You can also get a family practice doctor to visit you at your house if you are sick and don’t feel well enough to go outside. They said the cost of this was around 100 euros and also reimbursable at 80% by their insurance.

We are not eligible for Seguridad Social (social security) because we do not work for a salary in Spain. Illegal immigrants are, however, eligible for Seguridad Social. They are given a card and affiliated doctor and hospitals and can use the system for non-emergency related health-care. Most Spanish people I know, who can afford it, have private health care insurance, either through their employer or for which they pay, privately.

Yes, they all complain about Seguridad Social—the waits and the difficulty of seeing a specialist or getting very individualized attention, but the key point is that it is there. I am sympathetic to the Spaniards’ complaints about Seguridad Social, not so much to the complaints from illegal and recently legalized immigrants. I don’t say it, but what I am thinking is: “You come from a country that could care less if you die in the street like a dog. So no, I don’t give a damn if you had to wait a long time in line behind a bunch of old Spaniards to get your health care. Those people have been paying into this system for years…Suck it up and be grateful for what you get because in my country, nobody gives you shit for free.”

US

Most aspects of healthcare visits take place with the nurses. Any contact with the doctor is very brief. Some practices have an emergency call number where you will first talk with a call center employee or a nurse. If they deem it necessary, a doctor may call you back.

Any stay in the hospital involves and lengthy and often complex pre-approval process with the insurer. You want to make sure you correctly understood this process or you may get stuck with the bill.

If you are checking into the hospital or need to go to the emergency room and are not spewing blood on the spot (in which case the friend or family member who brought you will be doing this), expect to spend 45 minutes just filling out forms explaining who your Primary and Secondary insurers are and all their contact information and absolving the hospital and its personnel of all blame if they should accidentally feed you into a wood chipper and cut you to a million pieces. If you have insurance, expect a bill that can range from the hundreds to thousands of dollars, depending on your co-pay and deductible. If you do not have insurance and should need emergency hospitalization and advanced medical care in the US, you can wind up with a bill in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. To add insult to injury, there is one last step. You must then interact with their “patient care consultant” to “make sure that your hospital processing is going as smoothly as possible.”


Getting Health Insurance when you are self-employed

If you do not have access to insurance through an employer or professional organization, expect to fill out a very lengthy questionnaire and answer questions about every doctor’s visit, hospital-visit and surgical procedure every person in your family has had in the past five years. If they deem that you are too high-risk, they can refuse to insure you and you will find yourself without insurance in the country with the highest cost of health care in the world (see above for the hundred thousand dollar bill).

When we were just starting JBoss, we had family health coverage through my former employer’s COBRA insurance (much higher than what we paid when this was subsidized by my employer—probably about $900 a month for two adults and a child). Three months away from end of the 18-month obligatory COBRA coverage period, I decided to shop around for a health plan that would cover our small company (just my husband and myself at that point). In the meantime, I became pregnant with twins (and no, this was not the result of any fertility treatments for you crack-pots that think that this was interfering with God’s Plan). I was not just a pregnant woman, I was a pregnant woman with twins, which put me into the High Risk pregnancy category because twins are very often born early and can require very expensive NICU (newborn intensive care unit) hospitalization for a few days to several weeks. The insurance broker was doubtful about finding anybody who would cover us.

At that point, I wondered where I had gone wrong in life. I had gotten a higher education; I worked hard. I considered myself a responsible person, I hadn’t even really waited to the last minute to obtain new insurance coverage and here I was--at risk for falling through the (in the US, practically non-existent) mattress that cushions your fall to the bottom of society—potentially with no health insurance or exorbitantly priced health insurance and the possibility of tens of thousands of dollars worth of medical debt. Things worked out for the best and we did find an HMO program that would accept us and the twins were born at a healthy 8 months, with only one of them requiring a two-day stay at NICU…but there were no guarantees things would turn out this way.

I consider the US to be a very favorable place to become an entrepreneur. Until recently, this did not apply to anybody who (they or their immediate family members) may have an existing medical condition that makes you undesirable to private health care insurers. I know talented people who could not ever work for small start-ups for this reason.

The procedure

This is how the free-market health care system works. Two years ago, I had to have a medically necessary procedure. I had private PPO insurance for which we paid quite a bit, I was sure this wasn’t going to be a problem. The first thing I learned is that Those Doctors Who Can Afford It—which is often to say the good ones—do not choose to affiliate with Cigna or Aetna or Blue Cross or whoever your “premium” health insurance provider is. These doctors may not necessarily have gone to medical school and become surgeons just so they could be driving Maseratis and living in multi-million dollar houses. On the other hand, they want do not want a health insurance bureaucrat, who is not a doctor, telling them how much they can charge or dictating what kind of treatment they should be giving to their patients.

The procedure was quite expensive and Cigna paid for far less than 80% of it. When you sign a contract with a US health insurance provider, what that “80% out of network coverage” really means is that they will pay "80% of what they think your procedure should have cost” out of network. Expect to get lots of bills later down the road from the doctor and hospital when they get lesser reimbursement. What I learned? Cigna and I’m sure they are not the only health insurance company that does this, automatically doesn’t pay a chunk of your bill—on principle. I don’t know what the statistics are on this, but I’m sure 50 to 60% people will stop there and not appeal. If you are successful in your appeal, as I was, at that point they will pay half of what they didn’t pay before, but still a lot less than the 80% you were counting on. Maybe more intrepid people successfully go on to a second appeal; I stopped there.

If you think that a lot of doctors don’t want to affiliate with your health insurance carrier, guess what? Many of the good ones, or at least the ones who seemed to have taken the “bedside manner” course in medical school—Really don’t want to affiliate with Medicare…which you will find out if you happen to have parents.

If you need private health insurance and have had any surgery in the past few years for something they considered a risk, even if whatever they operated for turned out to be benign—expect to automatically be denied health coverage.

So don’t tell me that health care reform is going to “break” our marvelous system. As far as I’m concerned—it isn’t exactly that marvelous and it’s already broken….Yes, I know that other systems aren’t perfect and have their faults as well and that there are a million different technical points you can argue. However, considering that the current free-market American system does not provide all my family members with health coverage, and, for most of my life, I was in the position of this being a Major Problem, I’m going to suck it up pay for this.

For all of you people whingeing about the way this bill was passed, you know what? The rest of us are stuck paying for the Iraq war, which we entered under false pretenses, and the ongoing Afghanistan war, which looks like it’s going to be another Vietnam. We’re stuck paying for the bail-out of the financial system, when most of us had nothing to do with the abuses or obscene payouts going on there…so welcome to our world.

The Reluctant Skiier--Part II "Le Club"

So many of our friends raved about their vacations at Le Club, that we had to try it out. First of all, an important distinction: there are two kinds of Club Meds. The swinging singles type—“Gala Swinga” memorialized in the cult French movies “Les Bronzes” (the tan ones) and “Les Bronzes font du Ski” (The Tan ones go skiing) and the family club med (basically like an all-in-one-vacation with built-in day-camp for your children). Note: Family Club Med is Not the place to meet somebody unless you are a GO, a GM in the market for nice divorcé/es with two or three children, or the teenage children of a GM.

Both versions of Le Club have their own lingo, which seems contrived to my American sensibilities (and hey, we’re the people who gave the world Disney)…or maybe it’s because interacting with complete strangers in a vacation camp environment is not my experience of what the French generally like to do; however, considering Le Club is a cultural phenomenon in France, it must respond to some something they like. The main vocabulary you need to know is that the members are called GM (“gentil membres”, nice members) and the counselors (for lack of better translation) are called GO (gentils organisateurs). The head of the vacation village is called the “Chef de Village”—village chief. The club features dress theme nights and a musical every night after dinner (performed by the GOs). At Family Club, the musical the last evening stars Your Kids.

The genius of Singles Club Med hardly merits explaining. It is perfectly captured in the Gala Swinga theme song from “Les Bronzes” (“Bienvenue a Gala Swinga, il ya du soleil et des nanas, on va s’en fourrer jusque la…” Welcome to Gala Swinga, there is sun and there are chicks, we’re going to stuff ourselves up to here…” This is a parody of the actual club med theme song, which the GMs are invited to sing and line dance to in the evenings after the musical or in the disco. You wouldn’t think grown adults, perfect strangers up until a few days earlier, would want to break into a hokey camp-type song and dance, but a couple of potent “free” cocktails at the club Med bar, and the ambiance of the Club Med Disco can change your perspective there.

The genius of Family Club Med is the realization that vacation with Your Kids, is not always a vacation. This is even more true with a family ski vacation, where the convenience of an all-included formula for ski lift tickets, hotel, meals, entertainment, adult- and kids-group ski classes and onsite equipment rental are a real selling point. You drop your kids off at Le Mini-Club at 8:30 am and don’t need to pick them up until 5 in the evening. Two hours later, you can also drop them off for dinner and after-dinner activities with their friends.

La Bouffe

There is a hierarchy of Club Meds, ranging from 3 to 5 tridents and the meals are all served buffet style, with many options to choose from (including a hamburger, fries, pizza and pasta kids buffet). The French habitués complain that the quality of the food has declined in recent years. The quality does vary according to the individual dishes. I'm not a big fan of their sushi or the buttered??? bacon at breakfast - habitually undercooked slabs of congealed fat. However to your Anglo-Saxon palate (see kids’ buffet), an après-ski snack of oysters and champagne, and foie gras at dinner is a tremendous improvement over cheesy fries. The cheese, for that matter, tends to be melting slabs of Raclette. To the uninitiated, this might smell like fermented gym sock; however after a long day skiing, accompanying potatoes and viande des grisons, it tastes like Heaven. Another note: Unless your are gifted with super-human self-control, reminiscent of Jane Fonda in her anorexic period, Le Club is not the place to go to lose weight.

Another word about dinner: as an American, packing for a ski trip, features two types of clothing—items made with lycra and items made with polartec. At Le Club, French women still dress for dinner, so unless you want to be stuck recycling your one good blouse and sweater over yoga pants like I did every night, pack a few nicer things.

Les Francais

The biggest shock, as an American in French ski resorts, is the different cultural perception about waiting in line. For the American, the ability to form an orderly line and wait your turn is a Basic Underpinning of Society. The French very simply don’t like to do this and don’t consider it rude to cut in front of you. This seems to cut across all social classes. A good friend of mine, whom I consider the epitome of BCBG (bon chic bon genre) manners and elegance told me that from an early age she was socialized into this practice by her very proper mother: “Now you go ahead of me and cut. Nobody will say anything because you’re a child, and then I’ll slip in.” This can only end in frustration. Since Anglo-Saxon good manners consist in being pathologically non-confrontational, I was reduced to seething in silence as everybody nonchalantly cut in front of me to drop off their children at Mini-Club or in the ski line.

My half-French, half-Spanish husband has no such compunctions. When women cut in front of him at the Mini-Club, he tapped them on the shoulder and pointed out: “Excuse me, Madam, but I am in front of you, as is this gentleman over here and that woman over there.” He even got into an altercation with an elderly, handicapped woman. The Anglo-Saxon perspective would be that advanced age and physical infirmity automatically confer a halo of goodness, worthy of respect. The French aren’t past admitting that these conditions occasionally coincide with your basic cantankerous, trouble-making old acid-vat.

Marc at Club Med

Grandmother-aged woman on crutches cuts in front of Marc in the après-ski buffet line.

Marc: Excuse me, Madam, but I was in front of you.
Older Woman: I’m handicapped.
Marc: Well, I have four children

Woman watches in horror as Marc starts to generously fill his plate with the remaining merguez sausages.

Older Woman: Il y en a qui se servent comme des porcs. (Some people help themselves like pigs.)

Marc: You’re rude. Calm down, there’ll be enough for everyone.

The next day, Marc is having lunch with his ski group and tells them the story of his altercation with the “vielle peau” (old acid vat). One of the women says. That sounds like my mother.

Marc replies: That’s impossible.
Ski group companion: Oh no, it’s not. She’s handicapped. Oh look, there she is.

The acid vat approaches the lunch table and smiles wickedly at Marc.

Lessons Learned with a different kind of ski instructor

When I was seventeen, I spent a lot of time with a very dear great aunt and great uncle. The bonds of kinship--beginning with the return of Rene Madec to France from his illustrious and profitable career as a mercenary in 18th century India--in Brittany, like the American South, would take several minutes to explain. Suffice it to say that these Breton relations were “cousins a la mode de Bretagne” and referred to as Mon Oncle and Ma Tante—My Uncle and My Aunt.

Mon Oncle, while retired from his job as a lawyer, spent a lot of time traveling to Paris for various post-professional and non-profit activities. He explained to me that occasional separation was the secret to a long and happy marriage. “Otherwise, you shall have nothing to talk about but the fact that the dog is losing his hairs and Le Service is getting insolent and senile…” Mon Oncle also cautioned against the vice of gambling. “I view it this way. If I spent all my money gambling, how would I be able to afford to see les danseuses (exotic dancers)?”

Ever since my husband and I have decided to spend most our time skiing with groups or friends who share our level of ability (see The Reluctant Skiier Part One l), ski vacations have worked out a lot better for us.

Group 2’s ski instructor was definitely older, but in very good physical condition so I assumed he must be in his early sixties. As opposed to previous group ski lessons with a modus operandi of “keep up and make it down the next slope alive,” Paul spent a lot of time on calisthenics and technique. He had us balancing on one ski, hopping in the air and skiing (waltz-style) in circles with a partner, holding each other’s poles as we went down some of the easier slopes. Paul executed these pirouettes, pliés, relevés and little leaps with grace. While we barely approximated these movements, the inconceivable happened, we started to get better.

Paul also enjoyed logic (math and verbal) puzzles and complex “jeux de mots” (puns) that he would share with us as we waited in line or as he downed one of multiple glasses of wine at our one-hour lunch break. He had also recently discovered the joys of being on the receiving end of a group humor list, facilitated by the new and marvelous invention of the Internet. He shared these stories with us, as well as his opinion of the Swiss, from the point of view of a French-man who has lived there for many years (“a nation of denouncers”).

When Paul learned I was American. He said. “Oh les Americains! I remember the GIs well. They taught me to drive. I was only fourteen, but I accompanied them and they let me drive the jeeps as they were advancing through France.”

At this point, the group and I calculate, with amazement, that Paul must be 80 years old.

He has one son, of whom he is very proud, who brings him some of the finer vintages from Nestle’s private dining room for higher level executives—Chateau Petrus, Cheval Blanc, Haut Brion…

I asked Paul if he has any other children. “No, only one,” he replied. “But I have many siblings. I’m one of thirteen children.”

“Wow, that’s a lot.”

“Well they had to repopulate France after the First World War.”

I remark that I can’t imagine how his mother did it. I find myself exhausted and over-whelmed with four children.

“Oh, it wasn’t that hard. Children weren’t as needy back then as they are today. We had a farm (can’t remember the region, somewhere in Eastern France near Nancy). When we got home from school, we all had our chores. I was in charge of the chickens, another brother was in charge of the cows, another one took care of the rabbits…”

We discuss diet. Paul is a vegetarian. He explains that growing up on a French farm in the 30s, you only ate meat once a week, the rest of the time it was legumes and vegetables. I complain of the difficulty of losing weight. Paul mentions that he managed to lose 40 kilos in the last year. I ask how he did it.

“Oh, it’s not difficult. You just stop eating for a while (ensues a description of some fast of biblical proportions and the importance of slowly returning to eating, just an apple the first day), “but make sure you continue to exercise. It’s always important to exercise, regardless of what you do.” It’s clear, that at 80, Paul is in better physical shape than anybody in our group.

After the second day of skiing I feel like hell. All the muscles in my legs hurt. I can only go down the stairs sideways.

I go to meet Paul at the start of ski group and tell him I won’t be making it that day. He looks disappointed.

“Just give it a try, your muscles will warm up.”

Sheepishly, I explain that I’m out of my medicine. I have ibuprofen (for arthritis in my hands) but can’t take it at the recommended doses unless I also buy my omeprazol stomach protector.

He looks at me in amazement. “You have to take a pill to take another pill? No wonder the pharmacists are so rich!”

He feels sorry for me. Clearly, I come from weaker stock.

Some thoughts on European vs. American attitudes towards childrearing

In Spain or France, it is perfectly acceptable to outsource your children. In the US, it’s not even acceptable to admit you might (occasionally) “want” to outsource your child. In fact, if you are an American mother and haven’t breast fed your child until age three and home-schooled them for the duration of their secondary education, and aren’t out there driving yourself ragged taking your children to all kinds of enriching extra-curricular activities and tutors, muffins for mom, doughnuts for dad, volunteering to be class parent, field trip parent, co-ordinating class parties, birthday parties and playdates, completely terrorized by the possibility that you are failing to give them every advantage in life and Your Child Might Fall Behind…you’re probably falling short as a parent.

When I sent my children to an International school, I learned of such old-fashioned and quaint practices as “cocktail play-dates” -- your children play, while you nurse a drinky-poo and chat with your friends. At the end of such playdates, it might be acceptable to briefly lose your children and wonder out-loud: “I wonder where the little horrors are now?”

Then I realized I could go one step further and live Abroad and send my children to foreign schools. The first thing I noticed about school in Spain was the schools’ failure to send me a directory with the names of my children’s classmates and the contact information for their parents. Somebody explained that this would be considered an un-acceptable breach of privacy here.

When my then 6-yr old sons each made two best friends, being an intrepid American sort, I went and bought some nice “I am not a psycho” stationary and set out to writing:

“Hello, I am X’s mother. X and Y are friends. My son would be very happy to invite Y over to play some day at your convenience. Here is my contact information.”

Some of the mothers responded relatively quickly and graciously. However, others took weeks to respond and gently re-buffed me. I was crushed. I had gone out of my way to make an overture to these people and they made it clear that I was wasting their time. I did not understand. I wasn’t asking for their friendship or any real social interaction with them, I was simply looking for a way for our children (who were already friends) to play together outside school. Another friend explained to me that the idea of a play-date was completely non-existent in Spanish culture and the idea of going out of one’s way to drive across town to facilitate your child’s social life was simply preposterous.

Well my move and the lack of need to co-ordinate playdates left me with more free time. I didn’t have a job. Meanwhile, the children’s schools hadn’t sent me any notices about muffins for mom or doughnuts for dad, reminders about bringing food for friendship salads or snack weeks, or asked to help with science day or field day, so I figured I might as well do the civic thing and volunteer. Once again I sent a hand-written note to my children’s teachers in their correspondence folder…and never heard back. Only later, did a woman who had grown up in the US, and understood my confusion, explain. She told me “Oh the schools are afraid if the parents get too involved they will start telling them how to run things, so they don’t want the parents around.”

No need to worry about school fund-raising auctions, either. My sons’ school is a for-profit entity and my daughter’s school is a joint effort of France’s Education Nationale and Foreign Affairs. Her teachers have been wonderful but you can forget trying to communicate with the administration or (more likely) the secretaries in the administration. My experience of the Lycee Francais administration’s attitude towards the parents is: “The parent has the right to fuck off at any time.”

And, you know what? I’m getting used to it. I take Pilates now, I have a museum-visiting group, I take more lunches with my friends.

We hope they're good at Math...

Parochial School PE and Mardi Gras in the 80s

Among my worst memories growing up, PE (physical education) at Christ the King parochial school features prominently. I am naturally clumsy with poor eye-hand coordination (and this is not in an endearing Bella Swan of Twilight kind of way). PE in the 1980s featured lots of team sports involving throwing, catching and dodging balls as well as the (now) incomprehensible practice of letting the kids pick the teams. Needless to say the team captains were always the most popular and athletic boys and girls. I remember listening to them go down the names of my classmates hoping to avoid the impossible--the humiliation of being picked last or (occasionally) second to last. By fifth grade, I discovered an escape hatch from the disapproving screams of "Way to Go Mason!" as they rolled the ball towards me in kickball...and I tripped over it, or my prayers went unanswered and the baseball came my way in the outfield. I volunteered to be the teacher's grading assistant. I couldn't believe my luck. As my class-mates tromped off to the hated PE, I stayed in the cloistered quiet of the class-room, in the all-powerful role of grader.

By high school, I attended a different school and PE had expanded to include something I was actually good at that required little grace or eye-hand coordination--running. My torment took another form--Mardi Gras--an annual play, dance and float competition among the four years of Girls High School. If you had no discernible dramatic talents and didn't happen to be pretty or popular enough to be elected float queen, you automatically got shuffled into one of the three class dances. Did I mention these dances involved costumes, usually not very flattering ones? With the exception of my Junior Year (where I escaped by going Abroad) I danced as a bat to Michael Jackson's "Thriller," a chipmunk to Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride" and an "Egyptian" (I think this was to the Bangle's "Walk like an Egyptian"). Inevitably the dance captain was some bossy little girl who had been taking ballet or tap since she was two, who did not appreciate my poor execution of her steps and inability to stay on beat, thus interfering with her moment to shine.

You would think this experience would have made me sympathetic to my own children's potential to have inherited this lack of athletic ability. My husband requests that I point out that this defect does not come his side of the gene pool and that he was a very respectable athlete in his day. Nevertheless, I have decided that part of the children's education in Spain should involve their participation in a locally popular extra-curricular activity.

The Royal Conservatory

As a resourceful American woman with access to the Internet, and ideas about her daughter learning grace, deportment and discipline. I found about something called the Conservatory. Note: my daughter also took karate for many years. This was in my "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" phase when I decided "I will have a girl with skin as fair as snow, hair like spun gold, who can kick butt" (alas no Asian ancestry since Gatins' forebear Rene Madec left Quimper as a cabin boy with the French East India Company in the 18th century, had many adventures, became a Nabob and eventually married a descendant of Genghis Khan). "This girl-child will excel at school, dance like an angel and, if necessary, deliver blows like a killer." My daughter actually has rhythm and grace. She passed the auditions and now we're sucking off the teat of socialism as she learns classical ballet, Spanish dance and music theory for 6 hours a week (the hours go up after the first year), at the ridiculous cost of 120 euros a year--roughly one months's tuition, plus the cost of the recital costume in the US. One thing that is nice about state sponsorhip of the arts is that while ballet is a cliche of the aspirant middle and upper-middle class in the US, my daughter's companions at Spanish conservatory come from all walks of life. This program turns professional after 4 years and, for many of these children, it's their ticket to a career as a dancer.

Fundacion Real Madrid Futbol

Meanwhile, what could be more Spanish or even more international than "futbol" (soccer for you Americans). Nothing less than a Real Madrid youth team (haven't noticed that any girls play in the league, but didn't ask either) in a working class suburb would do for my boys' "education." My boys are average height and, while they have respectable gross motor skills, they are up against boys who started playing a lot earlier than they did. The US soccer team for their age was run by a church-league and usually coached by a parent or grand-parent, with one hour-long practice and one game a week, played at a local park or elementary school. On the other hand, the pre-benjamin (7 and under) futbol team for Fundacion Real Madrid has one and a half hour practices twice a week, professional coaches and a ginormous brand-new 10-field stadium near Barajas airport. Oh, and did I mention that they don't cancel games for weather here. Madrid is at 800 meters altitude can get quite cold and wet in the winter. I, wrongly, assumed they could wear their team sweatpants and jacket during the game, but instead they had to strip down to thin nylon shirts and shorts to play in sleet. Recently, their team got beat 8-2 by a bunch of 5 and 6 year-old boys from another Madrid barrio where they take futbol even more seriously.

One of my boys actually likes the game, has a sense of defense and is competitive. The other one couldn't care less. He's the kind that does flips on the goal during practice or looks for four leaf clover while the action passes him by. Both boys get shouted at and made fun of by their more advanced Spanish team-mates. The only saving grace is that they get some popularity points for being exotic twin, Americans. One day at practice, when the less-motivated twin wasn't paying attention and let the goal in, a bulky team-mate kicked his butt. When the little one showed some backbone, ran after the bully and kicked him in the tail-bone, my husband was so proud. The kids all laughed. This was the sort of "education" I was hoping for when I signed them up.

Mathletics

This brings me to my children's latest passion--Mathletics. We discovered this when the boys' school sent home a note saying that all the children would be participating in something called World Maths Day on March 2nd, and gave us their logon and password so they could practice at home. Mathletics educational software, by Australian company 3P Learning, does a very clever job of promoting themselves and successfully bridging the gap between the free, often-school-sponsored competition, World Math Day, and their subscription, for-pay product.

Now for a note of reassurance. The Fleury children are completely normal kids, which is to say that they would rather be watching cartoons and playing video games than doing anything remotely education-related in their free time. In fact it takes a kick in the butt to make sure they do their homework in their free time. We have tried other things to "trick" our children into thinking math was a game, but it never works--they always realize that math is work.

The genius of World Math Day is it flies in the face of current educational trends--don't stress the child out, don't give them time trials, teach them that "we are all winners"--and takes a page out of the book of Game Theory (how can I convince people to play hours of an online or video game, not the Math and Econ Nobel prize-winning kind). I haven't read this, but my husband, who has spent many an hour playing video games, says that the successful games involve competition, time-trials, levels, and "rewards." In World Math Day and Mathletics the children compete in 1-minute speed challenges to answer the greatest number of math questions (addition, subtraction, multipication and division) against children across the world. World Math Day truly was international--in any random game, depending on world time zones my children might be competing against "Jill" from Great Britain, "Mohammed" from Qatar and "Jesus" from Guatemala. Predictably, given the subscription cost, the players in the for-pay game seem to come mostly from Great Britain, the US, Canada and Australia. The child's first name, last initial, country flag, country and school name (if the school participates) will show up when they compete in both games. The children can see how they measure up real-time as a horizontal bar graph tracks the number of questions answered correctly by each child. In Mathletics, the children use the points to go shopping for virtual crap on the Mathletics site. One of my sons learned a lesson about spending his "money" when he lost 200 hard-earned points, accidentally purchasing a hair upgrade for his avatar, he thought he was just trying out. It's amazing how feverishly hard my children are working to purchase things that don't even exist! This business model is genius.

The children's new hero, is World Maths Day Champion Kaya G, a scrawny 11-year old from Australia. One child is an outright admirer and two of them are haterz, who complain that Kaya G was allowed to compete again 2010 and win again, thinking he should have been forced to give other people a turn and share the glory. They watch his video, note that he can go faster because he has a special numeric keypad, and that his avatar "has the most expensive background" on Mathletics.

The interesting lesson in this game is that 1) math is truly an international language and 2) no matter how good you think you are, there is some kid half-way around the world waiting to kick your butt. For some reason, this makes me think of the French News Parody show with puppets, "Les Guignols de L'info". They used to have this parody of a multinational company called "La World Company" with a Sylvester Stallone/Rambo type executive who used to always spout the pompous truism "Le Monde est Mondial": The World is Worldwide. Get used to it baby.

Mad About "Mad Men"

My new television show passion is Mad Men—am about ½ way through Season 3. Although, the pacing has its occasional doldrums, watching this show is a guilty pleasure. Part of the show’s entertainment is the situational irony highlighting all the differences between “then” (late 50s early 60s) and “now.”

Then

Parents are always telling their children to “Go watch television.”

Children attend a birthday and one boy acts unruly. It’s not just his parent who disciplines him. It’s a friend of his parents who gives him a slap.

8-year old Sally Draper puts a plastic dry cleaning bag over her mouth and breathes it in. Her mother gets upset at her for messing up the dry cleaning.

The Draper family goes on a picnic and leaves all their trash on the grass without thinking twice.

Grampa Gene lets his 8-year old daughter drive his Lincoln town car.

Betty Draper brings her baby home in her arms, seated in the passenger seat of the car.

You could say the word stewardess. They were young, cute, flirty and happy to serve.

Roger Sterling worries about an ulcer and “does everything the doctors told him” drinking a daily glass of cream…and winds up getting a heart attack.

The cocktail bar is a central fixture in the Sterling Cooper office. Everybody drinks and chain smokes.

Pre-civil rights: with one unusual exception all the women at the office are secretaries. Plenty of sexually suggestive banter at the office, if any of the women are offended, their job security depends on not showing it. Women aren’t the only outsiders: “Negroes,” “Homos” and “Let’s go talk to some Retail Jews.”

People really dressed up when they went to work or out of the house.

The Cold War: Cuban Missile Crisis and fear that the Russians “Will drop the bomb any day.”


The characters have interesting discussions and interactions with the social issues of their time—integration, the arms race, civil rights, the Surgeon General’s warning about cigarette smoking. It might have been a world filled with danger and uncertainty, but there was also a sense of optimism and excitement about the “Future.” Traveling on airplanes was exotic and exciting, television is the medium of the future, Kennedy has just been elected, Bob Dylan is hot, Space is the new frontier!

Like many of the children of the children of the 60s, I resent that all the fun, excitement and sense of expectation regarding the future disappeared long before I could experience it. We got the aftermath of the Vietnam War and Watergate, followed by the oil shock, economic stagflation, the Iranian hostage crisis, US manufacturing decline and the flower children became yuppies. Instead of optimistically engaging the world around us, we have been taught to stand at a cynical arm's length.

The fictional characters in Mad Men can say and do things that we, in 2010, publicly cannot. While the progressive legislation of the 60s paved the way for a (relatively) more open and inclusive society, the downside is that interesting public dialogue in America today is practically non-existent. You get two ends of the spectrum: the people who are happy not to think, and thus grateful for whatever one-size-fits-all ideology relieves them of this burden, while bestowing on them a corresponding sense of identity and purpose aka imposing their ideology on everybody else or--the equally annoying wishy washy contingent who are so terrorized by what other people think of them--that the prospect of saying anything at all is quite terrifying to them. Such a definitive utterance might be construed as a “value judgment” and, thus expose them as the frauds to post-modernism that they really are.

Since I’m particularly immune to drama with gratuitous Social Message ("Dislike my work at your own risk, I'll accuse you of being unsympathetic to the issues I write about!"), I wouldn’t enjoy Mad Men if it didn’t have some great characters and a compelling plot.

The More Interesting Characters

“Don Draper”
At first couldn’t stand him, but have grown to appreciate the good looking, strong-but-silent type ad exec with a painful past—information about which they dribble out to us as the show progresses. They’ve even managed to convince me that the frequent pans on his blank stare reveal some sort of reflective thought process going on in there. However, the one thing that bothers me the most about him though is the way he constantly cheats on his wife. None of these extra-marital relationships are particularly meaningful; he’s just a serial philanderer. Maybe it’s the female perspective here, I wouldn’t have a problem with this attitude or lifestyle if he were single or he had some arrangement by which his wife were ok with this: it’s the dishonesty that bothers me. Yes, his wife is rather neurotic, but she loves him. Ironically she looks better than almost every single woman he cheats on her with.

Possible writers’ notes on Don Draper’s “sex addiction”

1) This is what most men are genetically programmed to have, but unless they are living in one of your more progressive communes, possessed of extraordinary good looks, financial and/or professional success and strong sense of moral relativity aka Tiger Woods, are rarely able to act on this in a very satisfactory manner.

2) Don Draper, growing up as the abandoned son of a whore, who died upon his birth and left him to be raised by his no-good, alcoholic father who beat and demoralized him and his long-suffering “step” mother, with no love or acceptance from either “parent” or any figure in his life for that matter, lacks a sense of identity and looks for acceptance/affirmation of his masculinity in a stream of meaningless sexual relationships

Betty Draper
Cold, beautiful, ice-princess, Grace Kelly look-a-alike. While I feel somewhat sorry for her, Betty gets on my nerves. Hard not to realize how privileged her situation is when you have the more sympathetic Carla, the black housekeeper, doing most the work to raise Betty’s kids and not complaining about her life…Betty’s constant sulking does not engender much sympathy, wish she would get off the “dime” and actually do something about her unhappiness. Show strays into familiar “Madame Bovary” “Anna Karenina” territory where the only proactive thing, chance at happiness Betty seems to be able to imagine is having an affair, possibly with an older man who will act as a father substitute.

Peggy Olson
Moves out of the secretarial pool to become Sterling Cooper’s first female copywriter “since the war.” Her ambition combines spunk and seeming guilelessness. She might be the only “nice” character if you could forget that she abandoned her infant son…I do have to say Peggy’s mixture of innocence/goodness, her empathy for other people and mostly non-judgmental attitude combined with her desire to go a little wild (and mishaps along the way) make her the most interesting character after Don.

Joan Holloway/Harris
Very curvy office manager who dresses to kill. She initially appears bitchy but then becomes more sympathetic as the show progresses. Her sweetly poisonous lines as she offers advice/tries to undermine the girls are great. "Work hard and well you really won't even have to work will you? You'll be married and living in the suburbs" "He's a doctor, and he's good looking!" Mad Men producers thank you for casting Christina Hendricks in this role and showing that you can be pale, have curves (real curves, not the model look with the boys' backside and the blow-up pneumatic chest) and still be hot.

Pete Campbell
The scheming account exec. who will stop at nothing to get ahead. He occasionally is revealed to be vulnerable and does the occasional good deed, which renders him a little more multi-dimensional. Also sleeps around, no doubt because his father didn’t love and approve of him either.

Burt Cooper
Relatively minor character but entertaining none the less. The exec who no longer does any real work, but plays the “older sage” role. Has an affinity for Eastern philosophy and modern art. Relatively subdued compared to everybody else in the office--his risqué Japanese print of the Octopus and Geisha is hilarious.

Roger Sterling
In his mid-fifties realizes he hasn’t loved his wife for years and fulfills his dream to marry attractive 20-year old secretary. Any woman will do. He is in “in love.” Ironic exchange where Roger tells Don: “I realize that people are envious of me because of how happy I am” to which Don replies: “People don’t think you’re happy; they think you’re foolish.”

An Education

Caveat: My children are surfing the Internet playing with virtual fish as I write this.

Just finished reading Nick Hornby’s screenplay for “An Education”. As an aspiring playwright, I especially enjoyed the introductory section where Hornby tells the story of making this movie based on Lynn Barber’s autobiographical essay about her affair with a shady older man at the beginning of the 1960s.

Hornby points out the challenge in rewriting a memoir where a woman in her sixties writes about her sixteen year-old self. The point of a memoir is to be as smart as possible about one’s younger self. Meanwhile, “in a screenplay, you have to deny the character that insight otherwise there’s no drama, just a character understanding herself and avoiding mistakes.”

This made me think about episodes in my life that contributed to my “Education,” and the distance between the woman I am today and the naïve girl I was when I graduated from college. As I raise my own children, I wonder how to impart some of this acquired knowledge to them, so they can avoid the painful mistakes I made.

Children Interrupt: “Mommy can I make my bed and fold my pajamas for the rest of the year so I can earn $29 to buy some virtual fish and pearls?

Me: “No, but what you can do is think about ways to get a bunch of children around the world to ask their parents for money to buy things that don’t even exist. That’s a smart person who came up with that idea.”

Situation upon graduating from college
Graduated Phi Beta Kappa, Magna Cum Laude from Wellesley with honors degree in English literature.

Applicability and use of this degree in finding real world employment (in my particular case): None.

Sales and Trading job in Global Derivatives:
Failed this recruiting interview at a major international bank based on not being able to tell the department head a convincing story about how “street smart” I was. Not knowing what a derivative was probably didn’t help either, especially after lying about how “motivated I was” to get the job/find gainful employment/not go back home and live with my parents. Apparently I wasn’t the only person who didn’t know what a derivative was…

Thereafter, became extremely preoccupied with how to remedy the street smart situation, or more practically, convince other people I had remedied it.

Fundraising consultant/geisha:
Had to rely on family connections to get this job…was fired after 3 months for, among other failings: “talking while stuffing envelopes” and “forgetting the Xerox color-coding scheme for hand-outs.” The ambiance was straight out of the 1960s Mad Men secretarial pool, staffed by young girls from good families biding their time before marriage and housewives bored with the Junior League. Legendary was the Milf who dressed to emphasize her legs and décolletage as she leaned towards male chief executives at the moment of the crucial ask, imploring them to “think of the children.”

Most useful piece of information learned there—“always send hand-written envelopes with real stamps, girls, when you want to look classy and have strangers read your mail.” Whilst your vulgar (or more honest) operator might actually sleep with the client, a society lady, with well-honed skills, plays on your narcissism, vanity and social ambitions to clean you out. Hopefully it’s for a good cause. Least useful piece of information learned there: listening to The Head talk about all the fun things she did with her friend, The Billionaire. “The very rich are very different.”

Even then, I knew: no they’re not. They just don’t give a shit. Lots of very poor people don’t give a shit either and are “very different” too. The middle class, however, are most definitely not “very different” because they’re typically obsessed with what people think of them and studying the mores of their superiors in hopes of moving up the social ladder.

Temp:
After disastrous fund-raising geisha experience, temped as actual replacement secretary for partners at (what was then) Big Six Accounting and Consulting. Was a big hit because I did not talk to my boyfriend on the phone, smack gum or put my feet on the desk. One Managing Partner of Tax was particularly impressed with me because I came up with the brilliant idea of sorting his mail. Also had to listen to him ask me if “my parents could spell” because my name had an “h” in it. Did not feel it was worth my time to explain that my maternal grandparents grew up in France or that other languages and cultures have other ways of spelling things.

What I learned: If I ever wanted to find out the real dirt on what is going on at a company or what certain people are like, I would definitely ask the secretaries.

Mutual Fund Report Writer:
First real job I got was as a writer for a financial company, editing the annual reports for their mutual funds. The department head who hired me was straight out of Mad Men/had been the head of creative for a major SF ad agency at an earlier point in his life. He hired me because I could write, read books, liked to discuss literature and because he had fond memories of dating Wellesley girls when he got his (never-to-be-used) degree at Harvard Law.

Memorable moment in job: telling billion dollar fund manager that Humpty Dumpty was perhaps not the best metaphor for the currently depressed stock that he expected to rebound because “All the King’s horses and all the King’s men never could put Humpty back together again.”

Grateful for: fun colleagues and wonderful second boss, former school teacher and published poet who showed me that women don't have to undermine each other in the workplace, and that you can be an effective boss without being a total hardass.

Realization: Unless you’re J.K Rowling, writing ability and familiarity with children’s stories are relatively low paying skills. On the other hand, managing OPM (other people’s money) is a great paying job, but only a fool would pay me to do that.

JBoss Years

1998: Possibility: Marc would probably have happily built JBoss at Sun Microsystems for a 40% increase in his Pre-Sales Engineer salary and conferral of “Distinguished Engineer” title. Reality: It was impossible to build JBoss at Sun at that time, even more so for a low-level employee with non-established credentials.

Marc meets founders of WebLogic at JavaOne. They ask him if Sun is still the same fucked up company it used to be. He interviews for job at WebLogic, but this goes nowhere because they are bought by BEA and their hiring is frozen.

Our discussion about Marc leaving his job to become an entrepreneur:

“You’re going to leave a secure job with health care and benefits to write free software? If you are going to put all those hours into something, why not something that will enhance our future and pay for the baby’s college education?”

Ultimately, it was quit his job or go to therapy and pay somebody else to listen to how much he hated his job.

Realization: You have to really suck to not be able to find an equivalent, non-fulfilling job a year later if things don’t work out. In that case, you’re no worse off than you were before, but at least you’ve gotten the “coulda, woulda, shoulda” thing out of your system.

1999: Marc leaves to work on JBoss and receives a 300% salary increase for non-JBoss related software consulting in that period. Comment from a friend and former colleague about his desire to work as a software developer: “You’re moving down the food chain.”


2000: “This is not just a bad business plan, this is a horrible business plan:” Doug Leone, Sequoia Capital.

2001: Marc’s first start-up attempting to commercialize JBoss fails. My husband and I, along with our child and dog, move in with my parents. Marc comments to our lawyer at the time: “We’re the original garage company.” Lawyer replies: No you’re not. You’re the original in-law’s garage company.”

I decide to help him until he gets his feet off the ground, but wind up staying because the momentum really picks up.

2002: Twins are born, home office gets small. We look for office space as part of Georgia Tech’s ATDC Incubator program. ATDC’s response: “JBoss is a consulting company. VC’s don’t invest in consulting companies’ ergo a VC will never invest in you, so you’re not a fit for us.” We get outside office space elsewhere.

2004: We’re still not sure we want them, but top VC firms, attracted by JBoss’s user community and growing business, compete to invest in us. No VC would touch us with a 10-foot pole in 2000 when we had an early stage product and a company that was bleeding overhead. If they had, they would have bought us for pennies on the dollar and we ultimately would have gotten very little equity.

We built JBoss on our own because we have no other option and because it’s “fun to blow shit up” and beat down a billion dollar industry, especially if you can figure out how to get people to pay you to do this and make money that is good for you, whilst laughably small for your fat, established competitors.

Lesson learned: “banks only lend to the rich. Them that has ‘gits.”


Education

David Mamet’s definition of street smart (referring to his Hollywood screenwriting work): “the moment when you’ve been seduced and abandoned sufficiently to tire of it.”

Am I more street smart now? Yes, this is because I’m older and I’ve actually been on the metaphorical “street”.

It occurs to me that the only people who are sufficiently sharp to be street smart without painful experiences are the motherfuckers who are always dreaming up ways to screw over other people first, so they’re super savvy at anticipating how other people plan to screw them.

When you are nobody, with no money and no connections and want to break into an established industry and do things differently you can expect to hear two things: “Who the fuck do you think you are. Piss off.”

Interested in being an entrepreneur? Re-read, the children’s story: The Little Red Hen. The only point anybody wants to “help” you is when it’s time to eat the bread.

Painful Learning Experience: The first partnership contract we signed at JBoss paid us on the basis of production sales of the partners’ software with clients of theirs who also ran JBoss. After several months without getting a check, we looked up their sales structure and realized this particular company didn’t sell production licenses; they sold development licenses.

Realization: Otherwise smart people are particularly prone to falling for low-level cons because it never occurs them that people would take advantage of them in such an obvious way. To this day, I still wonder what advantage these people thought they would obtain by pretending to pay us something as opposed to the ill-will they were going to generate when we figured out what they were up to. The irony: we weren’t even expecting money at that point, we were just were happy to be seen with them…

Growing up/getting more savvy: Being excluded from giving talks at JavaOne, realizing Sun had locked down all the conference space in San Francisco that week, realizing that it never occurred/was not feasible for them to lock down the bar across the street and holding our first alternative JBoss One conference at the Thirsty Bear. Handing out flyers for our conference at Moscone center and being treated like unwanted panhandlers/agitators by Sun’s Key 3 Media lackeys.

Realizing that a normal pass to get into JavaOne cost $1000, but press passes are free: Finding sympathetic editors and becoming the “boat people” of J2EE article publishing the three months before the conference—with multiple authors per article.

Possible advice to children? Per Neal Stephenson’s marine-raider and all-round badass Bobby Shaftoe in Cryptonomicon: “Display Adaptability.”

Ability to effectively transmit the benefits of my experiences to children without them actually experiencing any of this for themselves? Unresolved.

Advice My Mother Gave Me

Most useless advice (transmitted from her mother's memories of house parties in the French countryside in the post-war years): "When you stay at other people's houses make sure you scrub out the bathtub, sink and toilet after you have used them. Don't assume the servants are there to do this for you. They will be reporting any negligence in your personal hygiene back to Madame. Oh, and always tip the servants.

Advice I use most frequently: (my mother worked for many years as a chef and restaurant manager): Always angle your knuckles, on the hand that you are holding the food with, away from the knife when you're slicing. Always serve things that you can re-heat at the last minute when you have large numbers of guests.

Advice my mother gave me that I'm still trying to figure out: An object should either be beautiful or useful.

Conversations Between My Boys

Tw1: I do "this"...

Tw2: Oh no you can't, because my tanks have nano protection...

Tw1: But then my guards come and they have a neutralizer for nano-protection and they arrest you...

Tw2: Yes, but then my samurais have a weapon against your box and they free me...

Tw1: Ok, my tanks, the best of the world come, and they kill you...

Tw2: Well, then my planes come and they kill your tanks...

Tw1: That's not fair, you can't do that!

Tw2: Sure I can, and I kill you!...

Tw1: Whatever...

Author's Note: Twin 1 and Twin 2 are 7-yr old boys

The Reluctant Skiier

Skiing, like golf, was not one of those activities that strengthened the marital bond. Nothing like being tricked onto a descent that is beyond one’s ability, concentrating desperately on making it to the next turn, while spouse cheerfully schusses down slope offering annoying advice, or worse still abandoning you to catapult down and land face forward, backside and legs up…like a sprawling cockroach. Might have screamed from top of slope with vocabulary that would shame a fishwife.

Advice from random man in the gondola: “It’s better to look good than be good.”

Children: the three that are old enough to ski or snowboard are all better than me now. They’re not even teenagers and already patronizing. Every dollar spent on ski or snowboard school is well worth it. Can I keep them in those programs until they are 18?

This feeling was compounded by experience riding in lifts with Other People’s Children, especially their surly teenagers. One sixteen year old girl whined: “Mo’om, I can’t believe you got me this grody sunscreen,” before flicking it off in disgust towards her father. My sister and I had couldn’t resist having fun with this one.

“It’s so hard to be your age, isn’t it?”
“Believe me, you don’t want to get to our age with fair skin like that and no sunscreen. Sun damage! All those unsightly wrinkles.”
“Not to mention the cost of laser treatment to get rid of those liver spots.”

Might be a bad mother: on another gondola ride, proudly explained to a woman that my advanced snowboarder daughter is still in classes so she can do things like the terrain park, where she needs more professional instruction. She replies: “Oh, in the local ER where I work, we call that the trauma park.”

Vocabulary: Seriously cannot imagine myself picking up the jargon. Am I the only one who thinks “Got a face shot in Pow!” sounds like manga porn? On the other hand, did find myself learning useful words like “white out”, for skiing in extreme low visibility and “graupel”, for the precipitation that’s somewhere between freezing rain and snow, and generally flays your face.

Skiing powder: Um…vastly overrated for people of my ability. More like sliding over ice patches and into snow drifts. Hubby’s advice: “Just go faster and you’ll glide over it” not particularly easy to apply when you’re already scared out of your mind.

Must be lacking in adrenaline response because don’t feel need for speed. Can’t get image of people who ski better than me and come home from vacation in various casts out of my mind. It’s hard keeping up with four children as it is; can’t imagine what that would be like if I were in need of massive physical rehabilitation.

Ski boots are: an instrument of torture.

Ski equipment is: a pain to keep up with when you have four children--all those face masks, goggles, mittens, helmets, boots, poles, skis. Not to mention complications when child utters most dreaded word in skiing vocabulary: “I need to pee.”

Ski food: $60 to feed family of five on junk food at the top of the mountain, anybody?

Best part of skiing: kids are fully occupied, ditching afternoon skiing (am tired by then anyway) to sip hot chocolate by the fire and read a book or bake Nestle Toll House cookies and watch the classic movie channel!