Virgin or Whore
or how 1 apple is not the same as 52 apples

This post is brought to you by an anonymous commenter who says "there is no difference in shopping 'only rarely' at Wal Mart vs. shopping there weekly. If you patronize the establishment then you are no better then the people you criticize. Once a year or once a week, it's exactly the same." regarding my criticism of Wal Mart and my efforts to shop there as little as possible.

This commenter brings up another enormous pet peeve of mine which is the all or nothing mind set. Here they are:

virgin or whore
black or white
life or death
all or nothing
good or evil

First of all, thinking in such stark terms is infantile. It is the first way our brains learn to evaluate the world. When my kid was five he was obsessed by the idea that everyone was either good or evil, nothing in between. It is natural for a kid to think like this. It takes more brain development and critical thinking skills to learn to evaluate the many shades of grey in between two opposite poles. An understanding of simple math can really be useful here and in a minute I'll show you how.

But first let me ask a few questions:

Is a girl who's had sex once a whore?
Is slapping a person the same as killing them?
Is stealing one dollar from someone the same as stealing their life savings?
Is being civil to a person the same as loving them?
Is shopping at Walmart once a year the same as shopping there every week?


Let's plug in some numbers: 1 is the number of times I generally shop at Walmart every year. My commenter is suggesting that going once a year is the same as going fifty two times a year. Is there any way we can prove his/her theory? Here's how it looks mathematically: 1=52. True or false? The only way we can make 1 become the same as 52 is if we somehow add another 51 to it. This means that in order for it to be true that shopping at Walmart once a year is the same as shopping there 52 times a year is if one shops there another 51 times. Which isn't at all the same.

I am bringing this up because this stark and irrational way of evaluating our life choices is something that is getting in the way of progress. If you believe that the only way a person can make a difference is to make 100% change, then you will probably not make any effort at all. Because, why bother? People aren't perfect. People aren't capable of 100%. Ghandi, who I look up to very much, wasn't perfect. Neither was Jesus.

I have gotten annoyed so many times by heckling commenters at my friend Riana's blog. People who seem to be lurking around waiting for her to do just one thing that they think isn't congruent with her efforts to live a slow life. They always end up sounding so stupid. Yes, I said stupid. They say things like "you spent $2.00 on eggs while you're supposedly not spending any money. You're no better than anyone else." What a tiny mind it must take to heckle people who aren't trying to be perfect in the first place for not being perfect.

Most people who are trying to make positive changes to help clean up our planet and their bodies and their homes aren't doing it to be better than other people. People cannot reasonably make huge changes all at once. You need to take it in degrees. Which is how virgins become whores. It takes a whole lot of work to get from one point to the other. To get from one pole to the other. To transform good into evil or evil into good.

The message I want to give today, very clearly, is that everything we do counts. Every dollar we spend in one store is a dollar we aren't spending in another. How we spend our money is one of the most powerful ways we can speak politically. Money is what drives a business to success or failure. Who gives a business money? Customers. So if you normally shop at Walmart every week, it matters if you decide to start spending a little of that money at an independently owned local store. They need you. If someone says to me "Normally I shop at Walmart for all my office supplies but now I'm buying some of it from my local stationer's shop." I would applaud that person's efforts to support a local business. I wouldn't say "Well, that won't make a difference. If you don't stop shopping at Walmart altogether then you are doing nothing worth talking about." Because EVERYTHING WE DO MATTERS.

Every single time you recycle something instead of throwing it into the trash is one less item in the land fill. It's one more item that may be able to be made into something new. You have to consider the sheer numbers of people on the planet. There is power in that. If every person on the planet decided, today, to sing "Amazing Grace" we would hear it all across the universe. One voice may seem insignificant but when we work together we are powerful. Every gesture, every interaction, every choice we make today is a chance to do something positive and it always matters.

If every person who shops at Walmart decided to cut their spending at Walmart in half, Walmart's CEO's would panic. The company would hurt. The company would be less powerful. So why not aim to make change in steps that you can handle?

This has all reminded me how cool math is. But that's for another post.

Anyone else want to leave some naggy little comment? You anonymous people are giving me such good material for posting this week, so thank you.

Bottle cap Connoisseur

Max has well over two hundred bottle caps which he has collected, not from our kitchen as you might have imagined, but from everywhere he goes; parks, downtown, the ocean, and industrial parking lots. I have not exactly encouraged him in this collection. It's good that he is doing everyone a service by picking up trash, it's just not wonderful that my house has become his landfill.

However, for a school math project he was supposed to count one hundred of the same objects, such as pennies, that could fit in a Ziploc bag and be brought to school to share. I thought about what we could conjure up and since just about every kid will bring a bag of pennies or stickers, I thought about his immense bottle cap collection. When we laid them all out for counting I was able to see the beauty in them, the way he does. The way Philip would.

I will certainly cement my popularity amongst the other parents by sending my son to school with one hundred filthy, sharp, rusty, beer bottle caps. They will probably get all Macbeth on their children and make them wash their hands a thousand times when they find out what the kids have been touching. Truth be told, I would be willing to bet that pennies are at least as filthy. Worse even because of all the sweaty palms they've travelled through.

While my mom was here she spoiled Max a little. She doesn't have a lot of money to do it, but it's super sweet because he really doesn't get spoiled by any of his other relatives. Sometimes it's nice for a kid to get lavished on. This is the Aqua-something-or-other set which is super cool. Normally, we build all the sets for him. He is a master at building things from his imagination. But he has never before built a set by following the instructions. Here is the first one he did by himself! I'm sorry if my pride is a little obvious...but these sets are full of tiny pieces and I don't always find them easy to build myself. So naturally I'm impressed.

He doesn't look happy here, but he is.

Last night he read two stories to me. All the ones he's been reading so far have been barely books. They're just learning key words. Which has been exciting...but these books he's reading now are real stories. I don't really imagine my boy is going to be a great reader, but he's doing really well so far. He complains about reading, says he doesn't like it, but he is doing very well. This is the kind of stuff that makes all the crappy, stressful, heart crushing parts of parenting worth while. Seeing your kid's mind expand, explore, and GET IT. I love this part.

His teacher has them working with a lot of math concepts and I was worried that Max was going to be like me and immediately decide that math will make his brain explode. I have been very careful not to expose him to this fear of mine. Instead I have been employing some stealth psychology. I have talked to him casually about how cool math is*. I have mentioned how it can seem really hard at times but that if you stick with it, it gets clear. I've also been telling him how useful it is. But understand, these are tidbits I throw his way. Off hand comments while we do homework. It's useless to say these things to him while he's rebelling against an assignment. By that time his ears are closed. You also can't belabor a point with him or he gets a whiff of something suspicious, like stealth psychology being used to control his mind.

My stealth approach is working. I get excited about how good he is at math, but not too excited lest that make him want to fight it. You see, the guy is exactly like his parents who are very contrary people. We tend to going against the grain. It's a compulsion, like so many factors in our personalities. I don't enjoy swimming against the tide, but if I feel that I'm being pushed mindlessly into the current, I will fight it. Max is like that. He'll go along with things if he feels like he has some choice in it. If he feels like no one really cares. Which I totally respect. He always resists pressure.

I am actually really happy about this quality, though it makes being his parent super challenging, because I can be confident that he's not going to be pressured into doing things he doesn't want to. That's not to say he won't get into trouble, but at least he isn't particularly bendable to other people's wills. Which means that whatever trouble he gets in will be totally his own deal. We won't be able to blame heavy metal music for his transgressions.

Yeah, I know. We're a bunch of difficult pieces of work.

So last night while we were snuggling (the bedtime ritual where most of our important discussions take place) I told him how impressed I was with how good he's becoming at math. He asked me why. So I told him that learning math opens up the whole world to you. I told him that if you can really grasp math, you can do almost anything with your life. I actually believe this is true. So, of course, he asked what he could do with his life if he's good at math. So I told him he could be: a scientist, an inventor, an astronaut, a stunt man, a genius**, or a designer of almost anything.

He got all bright eyed and said "Then I want to be a genius so I can make myself fairy-god-parents so they can make it so I can go back in time when I'm a grown up and see what it was like to be a baby because I don't really remember what it was like and then they could show me what a time machine really looks like and I could go into the future when I'm old but I don't think I'd want to do that because then I would probably be dead and then they would have to push a button to bring me back and then they'd have to somehow make my skin come back which kind of goes away when you're dead."

That's actually the simplified version. There were actually some more complicated twists and turns in his plans for his fairy-god-parents and time travel that I couldn't follow because I'm not a genius.



*It helps that I actually think math is cool. Max can sniff out a lie like a blood hound. I actually get a little excited about math. My abilities are humble, but I have no math fear anymore.

**He still thinks that being a genius is something you choose, like a profession. I don't have the heart to tell him that's it's something you're either born as or not. I also have not told him how much I genuinely hope he doesn't turn out to be one since most of them are very ill-socialized lonely individuals who have bats in the belfry.