What is DC2 (rising 8th grader) doing this summer?

Still no idea what DC1 is doing!  It’s the busy part of the semester for hir and so far no acceptances anywhere so we assume zie is heading home.

DC2 is going to one in-person summer camp at my Uni, which unfortunately happens to be the same week as one other week-long in-person summer camp that zie wanted to go to more but didn’t find out about until later.  I’m sorry, DC2!

Zie is taking an online self-paced keyboarding II class (which has a fancy new name since DC1 took it, but it’s still the same class) this summer from the school district so zie has room for both Spanish and Orchestra next year.

We’ve decided to try out the Green Brothers’ Study Hall.  Reddit suggests it’s insanely easy (though nobody has talked about the courses DC2 was interested in specifically).  So we suspect it will be good for a precocious almost-12 year old.

One of the things that our local school district is bad at besides teaching about diverse groups is writing.  So we’re trying out one of the out school writing camps.

Then there’s regular skating, violin, and piano lessons.  No camps for these this year, which is weird because there’s usually a strings camp.  DC2 is also interested in joining an older minecraft group facilitated by the same guy zie used to do Spanish minecraft with, but we’ll see if zie has time first.

We also are hoping to have each of the kids plan and make a meal each week.

It seems like a pretty busy summer for a summer that doesn’t really have much leaving the house in it.  It’s also going to be way less expensive than the same summers that DC1 had at this age.  I think DC2 will still have time for working on art and reading books etc.  But we’ll have to be careful not to overload things.

The in-laws said they had no plans for family get-togethers.  DH’s sister’s family is spending a month with her in-laws.  So I think it’s unlikely we will be doing much travel unless I bring the family with me to summer conferences.  DC1 may end up needing to travel once zie figures out hir summer plans, but that is seeming less likely each week.

Link love

The British punish their far right politicians.  Why aren’t we?

In case you missed the conversation in the comments on this Wednesday’s post, they are MUCH better than the post itself and deserve a read through.  I will be very surprised if Stirrup Queens doesn’t link to it this week with the same comment.

Ask the grumpies: Progress on personal goal?

Debbie M asks:

What is your favorite way you’ve made progress on some personal goal?

I wish I had an answer.  I don’t!  Maybe I’m just bad at personal goals?  I have work goals, but lately I’ve been failing at them.  (Though I keep trying!) [Update: when I first wrote the answer to this question I’d had a big spate of rejections at work… I’m a bit more even-keeled now there.]  I think I’m goal oriented, but only at work, and when I have a goal I tend to focus on it maybe too much.  So maybe it’s healthy for me to not have goals in my personal life because that would turn it into work and I couldn’t actually enjoy it?  I don’t know.

I mean I guess we’ve had money goals and I’ve enjoyed the way the stock market has helped us be able to pay full tuition for DC1.  Hopefully that will also work with DC2!

In terms of favorite way to make progress with a monetary goal– I like taking the money out before I ever really see it so it doesn’t feel like a loss.  Like, having 529 plan money auto-deducted from the savings account right around when I get paid.  Or having money taken directly from my paycheck to go towards my retirement accounts so it never actually ends up in my bank account.  Then I like mostly ignoring it so I don’t notice losses.  (Checking in only occasionally means it’s almost always a net gain!)  So I guess automatic progress without me having to do anything after the initial set-up.  Set and forget!  That’s my favorite way to make progress on a personal goal.

Grumpy Nation– Do you have better answers for Debbie M?  Inspire us!

Do I really have it together? Have I been hiding things?

From 2024: This draft got updated in 2020… and then probably didn’t get published because like, I wasn’t ok through all of the pandemic and a lot of people really weren’t ok, so it seemed like, kind of a tone-deaf post and then when it wasn’t tone-deaf politics were bringing me down (I assume Trump’s election is why it didn’t get posted originally).  Politics are still terrible, but… I mean, they do put things in perspective.     

Do I really have it together now?  I’m not as sure!  But I think I really did have it together back in 2015.  It’s been a rough decade or so.  I blame Citizens United.

From July 2020:  This post is from 2015!  Just sitting there, in the drafts, unpublished!  As an update, High School English seems to have beaten DC1’s perfectionist tendencies out of hir. 

From 2015:

There’s a common theme on some of the more… dramatic… lifestyle blogs.  This idea that nobody has it together.   Everybody fights with their spouse.  Everybody has massive major problems.  They’re just lying and pretending that everything is ok.

On the whole, yes, I mostly have it together.  And that’s ok.

Not like I don’t do stupid things:  See recent trip sans credit card.  But it’s hard not to see the humor in that, and I’m very good at pushing the annoyance out to the CC company and not to myself.  This is why I had a back-up plan, why I kept calling the first company, but it’s irritating when the back-up plan fails.  And I know I’m supposed to use the CC at least once a year, but meh, I have a lot going on and I’m going to forget from time to time.  I don’t think this means anything deep about me.

I do get very stressed out at work on occasion.  But these stresses are usually because of taking opportunities.  I’ve done research long enough that I know it’s messy and sometimes I am just going to fail flat on my face.  But that is far better than not taking chances at all, and every failure really is a learning experience.  That doesn’t help when I feel like I’m back in grad school with a paper due on a short deadline that I haven’t even started that someone really important is going to be judging me on but I can’t work on it because I have these five other much easier projects where I know what I’m supposed to do also looming.  But I also know that more famous people than I will end up submitting something crappier than I did and that there will be second and third chances to redeem myself before a final deadline.  If I end up not getting included, that sometimes happens with even very good papers, and at least I tried.  I feel a lot calmer though when I have a path going forward– it’s the omigod omigod what am I going to do that freaks me out.  When that’s happening I’m too stressed to blog about it.  When it’s over I wonder what the big deal was.

Yes, my husband and my marriage and my family life really are as idyllic as advertised.  So is #2’s.  I don’t know if it’s that we both married our high school sweethearts so we’ve gotten all our major fights out decade ago, or if it’s that our husbands are chill amazing guys (they are), or what, but there’s trust and teamwork.

My kids are great.  Age seven was a bit of a pill, but age eight is much better.  We still have worries about perfectionism with DC1.  DC2’s eczema has cleared up and zie has outgrown hir food allergies.  They’re both amazing and wonderful and challenging and active and tiring and they want to be good kids.  I cannot complain.

I really just don’t worry about my appearance.  I’m sure if many of you had my appearance you’d worry about it (and you’d look a lot nicer even though you were worrying, or because of it).  I just can’t care and I don’t have to because it’s fine if I look a bit dowdy at work.

Making more money than I ever dreamed (especially since my dreams were not actually that big– I dream bigger now) helps a lot.  Once we passed a certain savings level it was a lot easier to say, “well, it’s only money and we have money.”  (This was true even when “certain savings level” was a 6K emergency slush fund, but now we can handle losing bigger amounts like 4.5K prepaid to a daycare that goes out of business.)

My life now is just so much better than it was in middle school (something I still, deep down, probably haven’t gotten over) that I can’t complain.

Sometimes genuinely bad things happen.  Infertility.  Miscarriage.  Pets die.  Grandparents die.  Mothers get cancer.  Fathers get shingles.  Extended family members get into horrible financial difficulties or teenage pregnancy or trouble with the law.  These are real and horrible.  The kind of things that put minor stuff in perspective.

So, what’s the point:  1.  Not everybody is lying.  2.  How a person reacts to setbacks is important.  3.  Don’t manufacture problems because you want to be “brutally honest” unless you’re  a performance artist.

What reference manager do you use?

I’ve been using endnote because the university buys it for us and I like it better than refworks.

Recently one of my new coauthors has been using Zotero and it has a lot of advantages over endnotes, so I’m thinking about switching.

What reference manager do you use and what do you like or dislike about it?

Link love

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/01/us/united-methodist-church-lgbtq-clergy-reaj/index.html

Ask the grumpies: Recent good change in your life?

Debbie M asks:

What was a recent good change in your life?

Not that recent, but learning about roasted vegetables was pretty cool.  Every time I make them I’m like, we should make these more often.  My new tennis shoes are comfortable.  Sister Kitty is nice because she loves me and it’s so weird that she wants my attention and not just food when I come home.  Though I wish she and Nice Kitty got along better.

Man, I don’t know.  I hope I get an equity raise.

I know these are supposed to be uplifting questions and they really should be.

Grumpy Nation, tell us about good changes in your life!  They don’t have to be recent unless you have something recent!

Do people really love it when bad things happen to people and hate it when good things happen to people?: A deliberately controversial post

Preface:

Here’s another draft from 2014 that never got finished.  Let’s see if we can finish it now!  And provoke discussion!  BTW, newer readers– back in the day when we had more bandwidth (though I’m not sure why we had more bandwidth?  I guess everything was easier pre-Trump) we used to occasionally post deliberately controversial posts wherein we would post what was basically a position piece and then encourage discussion (both assenting and dissenting) in the comments.  (If we didn’t want to allow for dissent, we would not post with the debatable or deliberately controversial tags.)  (Debatable was for smaller posts where we didn’t feel like there was as much discussion to be had.)  If you’re interested in the conversations from these, check out the “deliberately controversial” tag and especially read through the comments section– Grumpy Nation has always been full of intelligent and thought-provoking commenters.

This post was inspired by the comments section in a lauravanderkam post.

crabs in a bucket, mommy blogs

We don’t go those places anymore.  (One of us never did)

Love leightpf.wordpress.com  Read the patty books by carolyn wells… Change the radio station…

chat history 5/6/14

Alas, google conversations seems to have deleted the chat history from before a certain point.  2014 definitely isn’t in there.  So much lost!  Leightpf.wordpress.com is now private access, but it was a wonderful blog from someone who spoke confidently (and correctly!) about personal finance, particularly personal finance for upper-middle-class earners.  Unapologetic.  The Patty Fairfield books are an early 20th century series about a nice girl who was always the “popular girl” and was from a working-rich family (her dad is a lawyer, IIRC) and everyone liked her and she did fun things– free on gutenberg or for kindle.  (Her mom did die before the series started, but her father eventually remarried one of her older friends, which is a bit sketchy.)  The comments on the goodreads post for the second book sum up how it’s an antidote to h8ers.  Ok, with that context (or lack therof)… what was it we wanted to say?

Post start:

In the comments section of a Laura Vanderkam post, Leanne says:

I also don’t understand why most people respond so strongly to the “hardship” stories. It’s not my personal preference; I find “success” stories much more interesting. I’d rather look up for inspiration than down for validation, but I think that viewpoint is more the exception than the rule, unfortunately, at least for adults.

We agree.  I feel really sad when my friends have to deal with hardship and health problems (and I listen because it’s my friend!) and I certainly don’t actively seek out such stories from other people.

Many people do.  They prefer blogposts where people have hardships and health scares.  They love when someone’s “perfect” life is shown not to be so perfect after all.  They love divorces and finding out the gossip of what happened to cause the divorce (so long as it’s not the boring “we grew apart”).  The Financial Blogsnark sub-reddit is almost entirely comments about some woman named “Hope” who has been a financial train-wreck for over a decade.  (How do I know this?  I don’t keep up regularly with many personal finance blogs anymore, but saw a post title on a blog roll and checked in and then I, TBH, wondered what had happened to the Frugal Girl when she signed a new lease and this sub-reddit had the whole story.  That said, I would have been happier with “we grew apart.”)

Back in the day, I used to spend a lot of time on mommy forums and mommy blogs, and there was definitely a big negative contingent of people who loved to hate on successful women.  (And lots of dramatic fights about WOHM vs. SAHM etc. etc. etc.)  It was a big time-suck, and although some useful things came out of participating in those fora and reading those blogs, it’s nice to be away from the drama and negativity.  IRL, people just aren’t that negative when your kids are doing well and you’re balancing work and child-rearing like they are online.  Maybe they feel that way deep down, but at least they’re polite enough not to say anything or to yuck anyone’s yum, so to speak.  Or at least not to me.

I don’t know what the scientific evidence says– do people prefer sad or happy things?  Popular fiction sales suggest that the average person likes to read about people getting out of bad situations.  So maybe a little bit of both?  And, of course, there’s also the people who enjoy best sellers of fine literature where everything ends sadly.

So it could just be that there are different kinds of people.  There’s a couple of econ papers that find that on average people are happier getting off of Facebook, but that is driven by the contingent of people who get jealous of others’ successes.  Not everyone feels threatened by curated lifestyles, but a good proportion of people do.  Not everyone likes reading sad stories, but a good proportion of people do.  Some people really do enjoy schadenfreude.

For another perspective, in the comments section Ana says:

As far as why negative posts get more interest, its likely partly because we find flaws more relatable than perfection… if someone describes a challenge they are facing, I can give advice, support, commiserate, & also learn from the advice and experience of other commenters—much more of a productive discussion.

Which may be true for some, but there are definitely people who are there for the schadenfreude and not to help.

Grumpy Nation:  Do you think people enjoy when good things happen or bad things happen to other people?  Under what circumstances?  Discuss in the comments below!

 

 

 

 

RBOC

• PG&E is throwing regular dividends again.  We got $15.32 this quarter.  (“We’re rich!” DH quipped.)
• DH solved his moka problem by buying a fancy new moka pot.  Problem:  It is small and only makes a little moka.  Potential Solution:  Buy all three sizes?
• DH has not had success ordering from Proper Cloth so far.  The first time the cut was just weird– narrow around the neck and back.  The second time there were weird poofs in the love handle area, and more noticeably, between the top and second buttons, as if there was just more fabric on one side than the other.  He gets a third and final redo.  I think he should just get more lands end shirts and use a local tailor, but if Proper Cloth gets his measurements correct then he could just order perfect shirts from there.  So far a big “if.”
• Jeff Denning has a new paper out that suggests FGA is correct and expanded federal loans DID expand the prices of professional graduate degrees.
• Jetpens videos sometimes make me want to start journaling, but then I remember I have a blog.  I think I prefer blogging to journaling.  It’s more interactive.  AND when I have a question that I need help on, I have a built in base to ask! #grumpynation
• I undripped all of PG&E.  I should never have dripped it to begin with, but I dunno, we didn’t need the cash and it was easy to do.  I’m not sure I would have invested the dividends so maybe it was an ok thing to do.  But now I feel like I really do need to get away from owning single stocks.  It’s easier to reinvest when it’s worth a lot than when it’s worth not that much, which is silly since you’re supposed to buy low sell high.  But what can you do?  (It looks like I undripped it back in 2011 because I knew I shouldn’t have dripped it in the first place, but at some point I re-dripped half of it.  Now it’s all undripped again.)
• I’ve had to stop reading one of the blogs I used to read regularly.  One of the commenters is a bigot who is always “what about the mens” and various things about DEI being bad etc.  Lots of very cheerful trolling on his part.  That wouldn’t be a problem, except that the blogger in question thanked everyone for being so civil in their disagreements, reposting a post where the guy was full-on bigoted and people were being polite to him as the example.  Except the bigot’s attacks, while phrased politely, were not actually polite– they were attacks.  But oh, free speech, what would you have me do.  (Be more like John Scalzi!  As they say, once you let a Nazi stay, you have a Nazi bar.  Not that this guy was a full-on Nazi– he’s likely pro-Israel, though I usually skip his comments so I don’t know for sure.)  Anyhow, the guy does this dramatic I’m being cancelled and leaving forever, and instead of saying bye bye don’t let the door hit you on the way out, the blogger said no don’t go, and then had several followup posts asking for the guy to come back and comment — he is looking forward to the “discussion.”  Like, WTF?  So, there goes that.  I don’t know how to explain that being treated as a thought exercise is not actually polite discourse when you’re part of a marginalized group, and really kind of sucks for other people reading as well.
• When you’re living in a red state and these things aren’t theoretical anymore (unlike, say, Minnesota), bigoted discourse is even more irritating.
• DC2 took The Man Who Has it All (amazon affiliate link meaning we get a tiny bit of money if you purchase through this link– support local bookstores instead!) to school and read through half of it before zie realized the joke.  Then zie read bits aloud on the bus and everyone thought it was hilarious.  But also they were like, wait what?  (Also, we have the British version of the book because there wasn’t a US one when I got it, but there is now!)
• I think one of the other core professors this year isn’t doing as good a job as the people who usually teach the course (which is sometimes me, but not this year– I’m doing the other core this year) because my students are gushing over how wonderful I am and I’m not really doing anything different from my usual.  (Usually people think I’m a great teacher, maybe a little bit hard, but this past week has been absurd amounts of praise for my teaching.  I’m like, put it in the course evals.)  Also they didn’t learn some really key things that are supposed to be taught in that other course.

Link Love

Click to access estimating-program-effects-on-program-participants-brief.pdf

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/22/columbia-university-student-protests-israel-gaza

https://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2024/04/ok-walters-continues-unsuccessful.html

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-021-03967-2