Young parenthood's end

The brief, restful period between toddlerhood and teenagerhood -- when the kids can dress and entertain themselves well enough to let you use the toilet or get a couple hours' work done without posing any significant risk of creating physical destruction or psychological mayhem -- has abruptly ended in our house. It's in part because of what goes on in young minds and bodies, and in part because of what goes on in an erratic world. Not only do I find myself using absurd phrases like "urges" and "perfectly natural" in the same sentence, but today I'm experiencing a sense of fear unlike anything I've felt since 9/11.

Both kids grew suddenly sick over the weekend. Is it THE flu? We'll probably never know, since the health care system is making every effort not to find out. (Since doctors tell you to stay the freak away if you suspect flu, where are all these H1N1 statistics coming from anyway?) For the first time in my 13 years, four weeks and five days of parenthood, there is a bug on the loose that prefers youngsters to oldsters. For the first time, being alive is riskier for them than it is for me. It shouldn't be that way.

Right now my wife's out for a walk, I'm in my natural habitat in front of the Mac, and the kids are konked out in bed. We must hope that the week ends with them once again being the spunky ones and us, in comparison, lame.

The public relations option

The story has become so familiar: the brave, upbeat single mom/loving dad/innocent child is diagnosed with a scary illness; will certainly die without expensive treatment; loses or has never had insurance, or has the claim denied; faces a life of misery even if s/he does survive because of the debt the treatment will create. A friend or clergyman appeals to the community for donations and they pour in, but they are never enough. Perhaps acknowledging privately that it isn't fair for more-appealing patients to get on TV while the vast majority of people in the same situation suffer privately, everybody involved proceeds to package the patient into a medical version of those up-close-and-personal profiles at the Olympics. The medical case becomes an element of the narrative, but only one among many.

I will go to my Guvmint Death Bed not understanding why the so-called public option is as distasteful as it is to so many people; I suppose if public libraries were being proposed now they would be characterized as the place where Adolf Hitler and the Devil go to check their e-mail between job interviews. But I do know that if this country continues to choose misery over health, these exceptional cases are going to become the norm. I foresee the rise -- and for all I know it may already be happening -- of a new breed of public relations practice that specializes in preparing hard-luck medical cases for public viewing. And fundraising.

It'll start small, when a local p.r. practitioner like me hears about a local case that's going south because of uninsurance or underinsurance and makes a few suggestions. (Indeed this has happened to me.) But it could grow. The demand is certainly there. I foresee a national 501(c)3 (perhaps called The Public Option) that lets donors "adopt" a medical patient in the way that overseas aid agencies have long used the faces and narratives of adorable foreign children to provoke sympathy. The Public Option's tagline will be "Just send us the bill" and that's what we'll do: we'll try to negotiate prices down so as not to waste donors' money, but after dickering as long and hard as humanly possible, we'll pay. When the claim is settled we'll send the patient a little certificate with a picture of a smiling fish on it that says, "You're off the hook!"

Hang on... hasn't the fish already been used as the symbol of a rapidly growing charitable movement? One that took the most generous impulses of the ancient world and packaged them into a humanistic philosophy? Didn't they have some really good copywriters who drafted brand language around treating our neighbors as we wish to be treated? Whatever happened to those guys? I'll have to have a trademark attorney look into it.

Attention, please!

When I was taking private pilot lessons at New Jersey's Teterboro Airport 10 years ago, my instructor told me the hardest thing about flying was talking on the radio. It was amazing but true: the moment I picked up the handset my situational awareness shattered; instead of focusing on the airspace and my position in it, a huge proportion of my brainpower suddenly shifted to the seemingly simple acts of speaking and listening.

Never was this more evident than one gorgeous weekend day when I was soloing over New York City. Usually I preferred to head west, over the hills and lakes of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, or even better, north over the Hudson. I enjoyed looking at the greenery and steepled villages on the riverbanks, and I liked the fact that, aside from avoiding West Point, the airspace was uncomplicated.

Recognizing that I needed more navigation practice, on this day I chose instead to go south and east, around the Statue of Liberty and over Brooklyn and Queens. Or... was it the Bronx? Yonkers? With the world's most famous landmarks to guide me, how on earth could I get lost? But I did.

I initiated a procedure known as the Four C's: Climb, Confess, Communicate, Comply. Climbing almost certainly put me in the airspace controlled by JFK or LaGuardia, subjecting me to huge penalties. But working a checklist is about the only thing you can do to prevent disorientation from evolving into panic so that's what I did. Then I swallowed my pride and made the hardest radio call ever:

"Teterboro, student pilot. Would you give me a vector back to the field?"

It isn't required to identify oneself as a student pilot, and I usually avoided doing so, but in this case I thought it might be wise to subtly convey to the controller -- and the dozens of other pilots on the same frequency -- that there was someone potentially dangerous in the sky.

The controller's response? "Return to the field."

I vomited my pride in order to swallow it again and replied: "Student pilot. I'm lost. Please give me a vector back to the field."

Again: "Return to the field." What the hell was going on? My transponder was working so the controller knew my location; why not just tell me, Turn left 20 degrees, descend to 5,000 feet, report when field is in sight -- or whatever the case may have been?

Instead the exchange merely distracted me further from my objective. I flew around, quite aimlessly, until I recognized something and joined the landing pattern. There was no FAA officer waiting to issue me a ticket when I returned my rented plane. No summons came in the mail. Nobody said a thing. I had just discovered a dirty secret of aviation: that the typical suburban street is better controlled than our airspace.

The episode flashed back to me with yesterday's news that a Teterboro controller has been suspended for having an "apparently inappropriate" conversation with his girlfriend during last week's fatal midair collision over the Hudson. I absolutely believe the recent research studies, cited by proponents of banning phone use while driving, showing that attempting to converse with somebody who is not present is so taxing to the brain that it leaves little energy for anything else. It isn't hard to imagine that the controller had no idea he was being negligent when he decided to have a little chit-chat. Neither do the SUV drivers who think everything's going fine until they hear a thump and find a little girl under their tires.

The habit of being constantly in touch is now so deeply ingrained in our culture that making personal calls at work -- even hazardous work -- has come to seem like normal behavior. In states where personal liberties are considered more consequential than accidental deaths, no bans will ever be forthcoming. They wouldn't work anyway. It's up to each of us to find some time each day to push that red button, push it hard, and make sure the phone is truly and deeply off.

Very compressive!

TV's are square. These flat rectangles we're all watching these days -- I don't know what they are. Viewscreens? Windscreens? They definitely ain't TV's.

Whether I rot my brain watching a square screen or a rectangular screen or a sesquicentennihemisemidemihexagonal screen isn't important. What is important, I think, is that the image bear some resemblance to the image the content creator wants us to see. Since flatscreens took over, about half of us seem to be watching compressed images, usually horizontally but also sometimes vertically. On my own set, whenever I get the commercial stations set right, PBS looks wrong. I can't keep going into setup to fix this! I haven't got the strength!

Nor have I got the strength to keep telling people that they're seeing things incorrectly. Perception is subjective so I can't prove it anyway. The whole phenomenon raises troubling questions, I think, about reality. If a representation of reality can't be trusted to be perceived consistently from one person to the next, what about reality itself? No chance.

"Outer Limits" used to threaten to take control of the vertical and the horizontal, but what's actually happened is, nobody's in control of them. Just fix your sets, people!

"Purchased for self"

Of all the kinds of content that the Internet has helped to generate, product reviews may be the most fascinating. I long ago ditched my Consumer Reports subscription in favor of reading reviews on Amazon.com, and I carefully consider what I see there before making a major purchase (the one caveat being that sometimes people give a product a negative review when they're really dissatisfied with the shipping speed or what they had for breakfast that day).

I've watched with interest as other sites have adopted the Amazon model. Sometimes they paint a sad picture; while shopping for a grill recently I was struck by the small number of reviews at HomeDepot.com and the lack of enthusiasm in them, indicating that the ultimate bricks-and-mortar retailer has made an underwhelming transition to cyberspace. Most recently I spent some time with the reviews at AmericanGirl.com while looking for a birthday present for my daughter, and there discovered evidence of a community that interests the amateur anthropologist in me.

In addition to five-star ratings in five categories (quality, product appearance, age appropriateness, educational value and play value) the American Girl site asks reviewers, "What is your relationship to the child that you purchased for?" The seven possible answers are:

• Mother
• Father
• Grandparent
• Aunt
• Uncle
• Friend
• Purchased for self

The surprise for me was how many reviewers who are clearly adults chose "purchased for self,"calling into question what the phrases "age appropriateness" and "the child that you purchased for" really mean. A reviewer nicknamed edina wrote:

American Girl clothes for dolls are very well made, so detailed that they are delightful to adults too. I like the outfits that are more classic and the historical ones from the 20th century. Nice work, designers and seamstresses!

One called LuluT wrote, about Rebecca, the company's new Jewish character:

This is a beautiful doll and I'm glad I've added her to my collection. Her best feature is her hair because it is curly and full. However, her worst feature is also her hair because it is rather "crunchy," difficult to work with, and can easily look unruly. Even with the hair pick, it is still hard to keep her hair looking as nice as it does in the catalog and in online photos. I would highly recommend this doll to a collector who will use it primarily for display but I would not give it to a young girl because of the hair.

Lulu, firstly, that's how Jewish hair can be, so you may simply be suffering from a touch of verisimilitude; and secondly, if your motivation in buying Rebecca was to display her, Toy Story style, why are you actually playing with her? And why keep her away from an actual child?

Perhaps even odder than the large number of "Purchased for self" reviews on AmericanGirl.com is the fact that I could not find a single review from a father. Get ready, American Girl community, because after my daughter unwraps her present, this daddy is crashing your world.

NOW he's a man (ish)

To a 13-year-old, the thought of being treated as an adult is intoxicating -- so much so that new bar mitzvahs like my son cling to it despite being told repeatedly that maturity and the ability to read from an old book are not the same thing.

A few days after his ceremony, however, I received more-definitive evidence that my baby is growing up. Attempting to check his online medical chart, I got only as far as a screen telling me to mind my own damn business (or words to that effect). While I can still control my 10-year-old daughter's medical fate, now that my son is 13, his chart is off limits to me. If I want to regain access, I need to print a form and get his signature.

That's right: I need to get a permission slip. I'm not sure I can do it. Every parent-child relationship undergoes role reversals over time, but I thought it would take longer and would involve either money or personal hygiene. Having to asking my kid's permission -- for anything -- is truly a new stage in my life, and in his.

Contentious content

My commie lit-crit professors used to be all like, "The proletariat's seizure of the means of cultural production will inevitably lead to a rupture in the bourgeoisie's despotic control and manipulation of the gaze," and I used to be all like, "Huh? What? Is that guy talking about the gays again? Is this going to be on the final?"

Now it seems their dystopian vision has come true: culture workers are busily turning themselves into a sub-proletariat, driving down wages and living standards so precipitously that revolutionary conditions seem like a real possibility. Thanks, Internet.

Whether writing is, for a given writer, a passion or a career or both is beside the point. How to explain the new and (at least in my experience) unprecedented impulse to commoditize writing? My recent pokings and proddings of various job-hunting sites have revealed a category of work that is unlike anything we've encountered before: a need to string words together just barely well enough to be able to call them writing. The word-strings need not mean much of anything.

Consider Textbroker, where "our deep database of knowledgeable authors is exactly the right resource to solve your content solutions fast."

(Mockery break: how do you solve a solution? Now back to the blog.)

For writers, Textbroker promises, "the better you write, the more you can earn." That certainly sounds like an appealing alternative to the traditional method of determining writers' compensation, tushy-smooching. But Textbroker's five-tier payment plan tops out at five cents per word, or $25 for a 500-word article. Textboker calls this level "professional quality." Things go down from there to "excellent quality" (1.4 cents/word), "good quality" (1 cent per word) and "legible" (seven-tenths of a cent per word).

I don't know which is more ridiculous and distressing: that somewhere out there is a writer willing to work for seven-tenths of a cent per word, or that somewhere out there is a client whose project plan calls for a merely "legible" product. What's that company's vision statement: "To be more-or-less adequate in our industry"?

Content wants to be free, it once was said. So let it. At least then you don't have to file a W-2.

Mall together now

My 7-year-old, non-updatable GPS is always trying to send me around my own neighborhood, the reason being that 7 years ago my neighborhood did not exist; it was an Air Force base in the process of closing and there was a security gate very close to where I now live. A lot of agencies did a lot of work transferring the massive property to civilian use (though arguably not quite enough; they forgot about a hospital building, leading to a panicky asbestos-ceiling-tile excavation after we'd all moved in) so that now, looking at my GPS's images of the area makes me feel like the hapless hero of one of the alternative-reality stories I'm fond of reading in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. ("Something was not quite right... hadn't Grandma's beloved rose of sharon always been to the right of the back door?")

Anyway I think bailout money should be used to do something similar with shopping centers. A mall with an empty storefront is a cancer to a community. Just as some cities hit particularly hard by the credit crunch have begun buying and repurposing residential real estate, I think the real estate community (guided by the not-invisible hand of government if need be) should consolidate malls by finding new homes for surviving tenants and demolishing the ghost malls. The properties should be turned into a new breed of park: one where public amenities like playgrounds and skateparks share space with small-scale commercial enterprises like ice cream sellers and sunglass kiosks. Permits to run these enterprises should be issued liberally, not restrictively. Indeed, they should be given away, not treated as a tax as is usually the case.

Under this plan, desperate investors get bailed out but instead of the money disappearing up Wall Street's a-hole, society receives tangible benefits to society: new parks and opportunities for entrepreneurs to start a life in business with very low startup costs. Public-private partnerships have already accomplished much bigger, more complicated deals, like my neighborhood and nearby Stapleton, the former civilian airport. If we think just a tad smaller, we could all benefit in a big way.