Father and Mother Parenting

I heard a radio interview yesterday on the differences between mother and father parenting. I'm always a little bothered by the people writing books about this subject because they seem to typecast men and women into traditional roles even while they try to expand them.

First of all, I cook the dinners around here. Got it.

But I shouldn't joke too much. I sometimes wonder if I'm missing something from my fathering. One of the biggest points many of these people make is that fathers tend to play and roughhouse with their children more than mothers do. I don't like to wrestle and roughhouse. Even as a grown man, it brings back flashbacks of my older brother holding me down, tickling me, not letting me up. Rolling around on the floor wrestling, giving piggy-back rides, or having my son launch himself at me for a hug, as he is likely to do, make me feel claustrophobic and panicky. I prefer gentle hugs.

I do not remember my own father hugging me at all, though I suppose he must have. He also did not get down on the floor and play with me. My father and I put jigsaw puzzles together. We fished. He did his best to teach me to play golf, a game whose point escapes me to this day. I preferred poking around the edges of the ponds on the golf course looking for bullfrogs. I remember that, even though I didn't like sports, (I grew up with very bad asthma and couldn't move about quickly), I longed for my father to come outside and play baseball or football with me. I wanted that kind of active camaraderie. The activities we did together required quiet and concentration. I was frequently reprimanded for talking, moving, or making noise. I can feel the same look of frustration cross my face when my son is bouncing around that my father turned my way when he was trying to make a golf shot the instant I asked him a question or dropped to my knees to look at a ladybug in the grass. I believe that we absorb the parenting styles of our parents rather than following some gender-defined pathway. My father imparted to me quiet, concentration, and skill. That's not such a bad gift to receive, but I also feel, at times, like I'm still sitting in a boat fishing with him. I throw my wishes out into the world and wait for a nibble. I do a great job of writing when editors call me up, ask me to write something, and give me a deadline. That's beginning to happen more often these days, but I need to learn how to take the ball and run with it. My father didn't teach me how to aggressively pursue something, he taught me to sit patiently and wait for a nibble.

I feel, at times, that I ought to go out and throw a ball around with my son, but I never learned how to throw a ball around. It feels bizarre, as if my body is being used by someone else. I do not have much patience for that feeling, and I quickly lose patience with ball throwing. We do throw the frisbee quite a bit. I did that often as a child, though with my brother not my father. I love to throw the frisbee because I love to watch it in flight. It always delighted me when I could throw it so that it rose near the end of its flight and drifted gently down into the hands of the person I was playing with.

I hug my children more than my father did, if he ever did. As the at-home-father, I take them to the doctor, the dentist, and the eye doctor. I cook meals and prepare lunches, and I am teaching them to cook. Cooking is one of my eight-year-old son's favorite things to do. He loves to improvise soup.

At times, I feel like I might have missed out on some sort of masculine camaraderie, with my non-roughhousing father and my complete lack of interest in sports. I never even know what sports season it is. I'm secretly jealous of people who get all fired up about the Superbowl and Basketball playoffs and the World Series. Why do none of those things interest me? All I remember my father watching on television is golf. That's the only thing that I can think of that is more boring than playing golf.

I think the writers and researchers on gender roles in parenting need to look a little deeper. I don't quite agree with everything they are saying. They too seem to be immersed in a gender-bias world.

jDarkroom vs. WriteRoom

Since I've been caught up in thoughts of minimalism, I've been playing around with various minimalist word processors. Two, in particular, are frequently pitted against each other in blogs: WriteRoom and jDarkroom. jDarkroom is a java implementation of a Windows-only imitator of WriteRoom.

WriteRoom costs $24, though you get a $5 off coupon if you buy WriteRoom for iPhone. jDarkroom is available on a donation basis, so basically, it's free. If you donate, however, you will be encouraging development on the project and rewarding the coder for work well done.

Most of the reviews I have read can be summed up this way: "I wanted to like jDarkroom, but it is not as good as WriteRoom."

The more I've used both programs, the more I think the reviewers are being unfair to jDarkroom. In some ways, I like it better. It is even more of a minimalist processor than WriteRoom. WriteRoom starts as a full-screen editor when you open it, but when you hit the escape key, it reverts to a standard interface. jDarkroom is simply a full-screen word processor.

Some reviews of jDarkroom have complained of features not working properly. One reviewer, for example, griped that when he opened the help file, there was no way to close it. There are similar complaints, none of which I have found to be a problem in the current implementation. Pressing the escape key always brings you back to the document in process.

I enjoy having the command key short cuts. "Command L" brings up the word count at the bottom of the screen, and since my goal has been to write a certain number of words a day, that is something I rely on. In WriteRoom, you have to move the cursor down to the bottom of the screen to check on the word count. No big deal, but still, the functionality is there in jDarkRoom at the stroke of a couple of keys.

I was bothered, at first, by the dimness of the text in jDarkroom compared to WriteRoom, but over time, my opinion has flipped. The text in WriteRoom seems too bright.

I do appreciate that WriteRoom will save in .rtf, and I am able to italicize text. I don't seem able to format text at all in jDarkRoom. While I haven't tried it, the "edit in WriteRoom" plugin seems like a nice touch.

My verdict is that jDarkroom deserves better recognition than other bloggers are giving it. My only complaint, so far, is that after I save a document, when I quit the program, I still get a message that claims the document is not saved. I find myself arguing with the computer, "I did too save it!" Any time you find yourself talking to your computer, something is wrong.

I still have not abandoned WriteRoom, though I only have ten days left on my free trial. When I ask myself why I might still consider it, I come up with various small reasons. I do use WriteRoom on the iPod Touch as my main note taking software. You can sync the mobile version of WriteRoom to the simpletext.ws website and edit your documents on the web. It would be nice, some day, to have a WriteRoom that also syncs to the website, and so on to the iPod. I have to say though, that, while I hear from some people who can type long bits of text on their iPods or iPhones, I am not one of them.

Scrivener is also introducing more integration with WriteRoom, though currently that is limited to importing from the writeroom.ws website. I like the WriteRoom editor better than Scrivener's full screen mode. (I haven't quite made the switch from Ulysses to Scrivener anyway.)

But both of those reasons fall into the techno-wizardry realm of appeal. You can always copy and paste. Integration between different applications and devices is nice, but it does not result in a significant increase in functionality in most cases. It simply makes you feel better.

WriteRoom maintains it's appeal, I believe, through a certain measure of cool factor. I read reviews, and all the reviewers like WriteRoom. Bloggers about simplicity sing its praises and discount jDarkroom. The commentors who chime in with "Why pay for WriteRoom when you can use free software like Bean or jDarkRoom" sound merely cheap and not in the club.

I have found, however, that jDarkroom is a sound minimalist editor. It's even simpler than WriteRoom, and, with the exception of not being able to save in .rtf, it lacks nothing in functionality.

You just sit down and type on it after all.

Excuse the Absence

I haven't felt that I have much to add to the blog right now. I've been writing every day, and that's occupying my time. I'm still writing at least five hundred words daily. I wanted to write about the difficulties inherent in choosing to live a more simple life. The difficulty with that, however, is I am trying to write about unresolved issues, and that leads the writing down various deadends.

For example, I have had a lifelong obsession with minimalism. Occasionally, I get frustrated with my possessions, and I realize that I could get by with very few. However, in the past, I have regretted cutting it down to the bare minimum, and now, with a family, doing so is even more difficult. For a blog-relevant example, I own four personal bicycles. I use all of them at one time or another. I could reasonably get by with the Xtracycle. Would my life be greatly improved by only having one bicycle? I don't think so. Getting rid of them would just be embracing minimalism as another product, something else to embrace in an effort to improve my life. I am sure the materials needed for maintenance of those four bicycles does not make a significant impact on the Earth's environment. So for now, I am keeping them all.

But that's one of the conundrums: minimalism versus interests. (I'm still hanging on to four portable typewriters and a wall full of books as well, but that's about it for my interests).

I'm also pondering the economy. I'm rereading E.F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. Both his arguments, and Ivan Illich's, are very compelling to me. But what would happen to the economy? How do you make a transition? We bicycled down to the local mall the other day to buy a jump rope, and I was appalled by the scope and variety of material goods there. (The mall is not a place we frequent.) I was also struck by the lack of customers at the mall. Has our economy gone out on a precarious limb because of faulty underlying assumptions? Reading Schumacher and Illich make me excited about the underlying ideas, but when I look at the world around me, I don't see a smooth path to the implementation of those ideas, and to embrace them seems naïve. Nevertheless, I feel that we are going to be forced in the direction of smaller, more local economies by events. Will we embrace more convivial technology in a thoughtful transition to a different type of society, or will we cling to what we have and become further embittered, impoverished, and feel keenly the greater division between rich and poor? Or will we, in fact, have a happy economic recovery and enjoy a seemingly limitless well of natural capital?

At some point, I might have to stop writing circular personal essays for the book and do some research on these questions that interest me.

There are several short responses to the question of "What if we all started saving instead of spending?" Both Amy Dacyczyn in The Complete Tightwad Gazette and Joe Dominguez in Your Money or Your Life spring to mind.

I was going to quote Joe Doniguez take on the issue, but that final essay is not in the updated version of the book. It's back to the library for the original version.

In short, however, the more money we save, the more we have to invest in local business ventures and in our community. It should, after all, be businesses in our community that benefit from our income and not banks. Both Joe Dominguez and Jim Merkel, author of Radical Simplicity, believe that if we reduced our spending, then more people would work part time for the money they needed to live on. If we all worked 20 hour weeks rather than 40, then there would be twice as many jobs available and unemployment would fall. We could also use those extra 20 hours a week to volunteer in our community. It's a nice win/win situation, but I worry that view is also a little on the naïve end. I would love to hear from people who have seen things work out that way.

Jim Merkel also managed to keep his yearly expenses down to about $4000 a year I believe. (Is he still living at that level?) Somehow, he did that and still managed to travel to India. I feel that we live very simply, but $4000 wouldn't even see us through two months. His book, unfortunately, does not go into as much depth as I would like on the skills needed to get by on that amount. As a family of four, I wonder if we could shoot for $16,000 instead. That's still much, much less than we survive on. I'm still looking for Jim Merkel's secret. If we could live on $16,000 a year, then we could pay this house off in three more years. Wouldn't THAT be nice.

And that leads me to the last conundrum I've been working on. I love the idea of eating locally, but that just is not happening with us. Part of it is my children's food preferences -- I grew a lot of Kale this summer, and they retched every time I said that we were having kale. They do love broccoli, but my broccoli growing resulted in one tiny head of broccoli at a time. The other part is expense. We are largely vegetarian, but we eat an occasional hamburger. I bought two pounds of relatively local hamburger at the Coop, and it came to almost $15. Organic onions are $2 a pound around here, while I can buy them 3 pounds for $1 at Lowe's. One month, I'll try to get our grocery budget down low. The month after that, I'll try to eat more locally and organically. It's a constant battle. My ideal food budget for four is $400 a month. Judging from stories on forums I've read, that is a doable amount. I'm just not sure how to get there and eat locally. If I figure that one out, then I'll have a damn fine book.

Right now, I'm writing 500 words a day and wallowing in all these conflicts and dead ends.

Leo's Minimalist Blog

I've never gotten around to bookmarking Leo Babauta's Zen Habits blog here. In part, that's just because I haven't been paying much attention to my blog recently. His blog is one of my favorites, and right now, I'm reading through his book, The Power of Less.

He's starting a new Minimalist Blog. It also looks very interesting.

I agree with him that the way to a greener future lies not so much in buying greener, but in buying less. Unfortunately, we are culturally programmed bo live on more. That's one thing we all need to work on. Several people have commented on the objection that buying less will bring down the economy, including Amy Dacycsyn, in the Tightwad Gazette, Jim Merkel, in Radical Simplicity, and Joe Domiguez and Vicki Robin in Your Money or Your Life. Among their "duh" comments are that capitalism is built on capital, not debt, and if everyone could get by on part time work, there would be more work to go around to all the unemployed.

It's a nice idea. I'm still not sure what I think about it. I've been pondering it for quite a while. It would be great if we could all work three hours a day with 100% employment and enjoy a cohesive social culture that was built around creativity rather than consumption. Perhaps that's our future. Or maybe we'll just descend into a pit of mass poverty for many, and ostentatious opulence for a few -- hey, wait a minute, that's more or less where we are now.

Oh well. Poverty is just a state of mind.

Some First Draft Material from my Book

I'm trying to write a book on Simple Living that deals a little more squarely with our human foibles and the difficulties associated with trying to live simply. I, for one, have always strived for some imagined state of inner and outer peace, and some books, like Duane Elgin's Voluntary Simplicity, seem to hint that a move toward simplicity will naturally result in this Zen-like state. I've spent my life trying to live simply, and it's still a struggle.

I'm setting a deadline for the end of January to finish a rough draft. I hope to end up with something much more book-like than I have here, and I hope to keep personal stories at the center of the book without making it irrelevant to the people who might buy it. As always, rewriting and editing is the most difficult process. In the meantime, I'm enjoying rambling on in the way I do. I'm writing 500 words a day, which is doable for me. This morning, I had to write 2000 to catch up on some slackness over the past few days.

Here's my beginning thoughts on the need for better systems in my life. This is so a first draft:


The Need for a System

am neither systematic nor organized, though I do take an almost obsessive-compulsive delight in tracking my spending to the penny. We have been very successful in living on one income, and, as such, we have avoided all the traps and stresses of trying to run a household with two working parents. I have not been successful in organizing my time, and in order to do the type of work I want to do as an at-home-parent, it is essential that I find the right systems to put in place in order to accomplish the cooking, cleaning, shopping, child care, etc. and still have time for the study, research and writing that will bring in additional income and bring my personal fulfillment. There is certainly an amount of pride in getting household stuff done, but it can hardly be called fulfilling. I have always imagined a certain level of intellectual accomplishment. That is my purpose. My life, however, has often been scattered, fun, but scattered. I want to write books, essays, poems and articles, but it has been a long slow process frustrated by both my inability to organize my time, and my reluctance to make my needs the priority. I do not stick up for myself, though I don’t see it as a result of wimpiness or lack of character, but I have always valued being of service to others. When I was growing up, I wanted to be loving, caring, and kind toward everyone I met. If someone needs something from me, I try to give it. I did not learn to set limits, perhaps, I did not even learn what it means to have limits because when I think of setting one -- don’t interrupt me when I’m working, say -- I raise a big clamor of objections inside my own head: “that’s unreasonable,” “I’m being an asshole,” “what if the kids need something?” If I go out to do something I enjoy when my wife is at work and my children are at school, I feel guilty about it. “I should be finding deals on food, or dumpster diving, or working on the budget, or sweeping the floor, or scooping the shit out of the back yard.” Ideally, I equate trying to create a life for myself through play. I love to hike and backpack. I love to write. I love to read. The advice has always been to do what you love and the money will follow. I both mistrust that advice, and somewhere, I feel that I don’t deserve to do what I love when so many people in the world never get a chance to do what they love. Maybe I took the starving people in India too much to heart. How can I ever help anyone when I force myself to spend the majority of my time on things that I don’t enjoy. Laura has grown very distressed with her job, and I can see the tremendous energy it takes to spend your time doing something you don’t enjoy day after day. That, however, is exactly what I put myself through.

When I’m not cleaning, shopping, cooking or refereeing children, though, I waste time. Even beyond the fact I do not set good limits or do things I enjoy guilt-free, I do not make good use of the free time I have. It’s unclear how much time I waste. Like most people these days, I spend far too many tiny pockets of time throughout the day checking my email or Facebook account. I don’t consider myself to be addicted to the internet, but the time I spend casually checking on things certainly adds up. Ironically, most of the time I spend on the internet involves checking on simplicity issues, either through visiting the Simpleliving.net discussion forums or checking simplicity and frugality websites.

Those have value, but I do not have a system for checking them, or for assimilating the information that I find there. I love Leo Babauta’s Zen Habits blog. Lately, however, he’s been talking about streamlining computer-related tasks -- setting up a streamlined gmail account, setting up a minimalist desktop -- that sort of thing.

I am a sucker for finding more ways to waste time on the computer. When something is presented to me in the name of simplicity, I try it out. Suddenly, I find that hours are going by. How exactly do you hide the menu bar at the top of a Mac screen? How do you get rid of the hard drive icon? Maybe I should try out Launchbar or Quicksilver so I can open programs quickly through keyboard shortcuts rather than waste precious seconds through the use of the mouse.

“Wait a minute,” I tell myself. I simply do not make that much real use of the computer. My real work, my useful work, is mostly writing. For that, I use Ulysses or Bean, and I write in the full screen mode, so there is no clutter on the screen. I use MoneyWell to track our expenses. I use the Mail program that came with the computer, but I really do not receive many email messages that really require my attention. I keep up with family by the phone, for the most part, and I still use snail mail if I feel like writing. (My mother had a computer, but she got rid of it. I never really fell into the habit of using email with my brother and my sisters). I AM on a few list servs, but not a great many of them. And the ones I do subscribe to are not necessary to me in any way. Unsubscribe from them, and from the few newsletters I get from various companies, and I would receive hardly any email. I could get by on checking it once a week.

For the time being, however, if I could just put the iPod Touch down and stop clicking the mail icon every time I’m in between tasks, I would probably gain a couple of hours to my day.

I use the web browser for the web. The web itself pesents interesting challenges. If you sign onto it to check one thing, that only takes a few seconds, generally. As an at-home-parent, however, it’s nice to be sitting down reading something. It’s hard to sit down and make it through an entire book, or even a chapter or two, but a web page! a blog! a discussion board! Maybe you can read a little bit before the kids need something or you go take the dog for a walk. After you find the one piece of information you had been looking for, that more than likely was not that important in itself, then it’s natural to click through a few of the bookmarks. Soon, that becomes the case whenever you turn on the computer. Turn it on to write an essay, click through a few of the bookmarks. Turn it on to enter a receipt, click through a few bookmarks. With so many blogs, discussions, and podcasts centering on different things to do with the computer to simplify your computing experience, the next thing you know you are removing and adding programs, rearranging icons, and trying to learn entirely new systems. I, for one, don’t do that much computing. Like the rule for decluttering -- don’t let anything new into the house -- the rule for simplifying computer use is this -- don’t change anything on your computer, even to make it more simple.

I convince myself, at times, that the computer is one of my interests, a hobby if you will, though I prefer the image of myself as a rough outdoors person, standing outside of my little cabin in the mountains holding a string of fish I just caught from a mountain stream. I do get a certain satisfaction from adjusting my computer one way or another, and there is a sense of tribal connection through blogs that feed some sort of inner, primordial need. (I, too, use dropbox. I, too, am a Mac User). It’s important to remember that none of this is truly important. Your real tribe is your family and neighbors. I get more satisfaction from sitting out on the stoop having a glass of wine with my neighbor than I do from making all the icons disappear from my desktop. I liken the satisfaction gained from using the computer to that of gambling. You drop a word into the slot in the browser, and all this information comes pouring out. It’s so rewarding, that you want to do it again and again. You start to take your social cues from the internet. “Scott bought a Swobo jacket. That looks like a really good one!” “Everyone is using Launchbar, (or Quicksilver), to launch their applications. I should give that a try.”

I’d rather sit out on my rock wall, talking to Jason and Jennifer, or to Kate and Greg, or to David and Teri, or whoever happens to come by with their dogs and their kids and watch the children play in the street and yell “car! car!” occasionally as people cut through our neighborhood.

With the computer, I write essays, books, and stories. I send and receive a minimal amount of important email. I do some task scheduling and some research. That’s it. I should not be using the computer to improve my computing experience. That’s along the same lines as buying an exercise bike when you can just walk or bicycle down to the store, only using the computer to improve your computing experience adds nothing to your health.

I will declare the following system for dealing with the computer:

1. Don’t change a thing that is not necessary.

2. Particularly don’t spend money on new programs.

3. Clear the email system of all listservs and company newsletters.

4. Check email at most once a day.

5. Check To Do lists three times a day.

6. When writing, just write.

There are a few programs that help me organize, and I am glad I bought them. I do, however, have to resist the urge to try out different programs that do the same or similar things. That is a particular temptation with the iPod, (or iPhone for you iPhone users), where new programs generally only cost a dollar or two. I downloaded “Things” for example, to use as a To Do list manager. I also bought the desktop version so I could add things with the desktop keyboard and sync them to the iPod. There are, however, several to do managers, and I keep coming across them and thinking, “hmmm, maybe that would be better.” It is almost always better to stick with what you have. Most of the time, imagined frustrations crop up only when you hear about another program that has a different feature. I am particularly prone to listen to the advice I hear on Podcasts. I have been writing in Ulysses for years, but David Sparks really likes Scrivener. I downloaded the trial version. (I should also point out that I have three manual typewriters, and when I am writing by hand, I switch around between a fountain pen, a standard pencil, and a thick pencil). Clearly, what I need is discipline in getting my work done, not new and improved version of the tools required by my work.

Nice Article on Getting Stolen Bikes Back

The article is here. We have actually recovered a stolen bike through Craigslist, so it does work.

Anyone out there good with flooring?

I'm not much of a handyman. I can build things, and repair things, but it's usually in the cut twice, measure, cut again, measure, curse, bike to the store for more wood vein. Occasionally, however, I think about flooring my office with old pallet wood. I work in the converted garage, and it was fully carpeted, but the washing machine has overflowed a few times too many, so now half of the floor is bare concrete, and the other half is raggedy carpet. It's not the haven of Zen aesthetics I would like it to be. "So," I find myself thinking, "why don't I just pry apart some pallets and put the boards down on the floor?" One of my big problems with projects is that I grossly underestimate the time it will take, and then I get angry, and, after that, I get sloppy. I know that I would need to put down a vapor barrier, and I know from
using a pallet to build a beehive that it takes a superhuman effort to pry a pallet apart. What I can't visualize is how to hold the boards in place and stabilize them. We're not talking tongue and groove flooring here. Does anyone out there in the blog world have any ideas?

I can't find any information on the Internet. That's probably a bad sign. There is a project in North Carolina to turn pallets into flooring, but it looks like a manufacturing effort, not a DIY project.