I’m going to discuss Season 4 of HBO’s Big Love so there’ll be spoilers, just so you’re aware.
It’s been, I think, fairly strongly hinted since Season 1 that the final episodes of this series would see Bill back at Juniper Creek as its prophet. Which, if any, of his sister-wives would be with him is another matter. This season appears to be moving toward that end at an almost frantic pace.
The main storyline this season is Bill’s running for the Utah state senate as a Republican. He and Barb will be pretend to be mainline Mormons and then, upon election, he and his three sister-wives will reveal themselves. Bill reckons this will allow them to “live in the light”. Much of this storyline strains credulity. If John Edwards couldn’t keep that love-child a secret, I can’t see how this simple fact about Bill, which is already known by just about everyone who personally knows the guy, wouldn’t derail his chances right out of the gate. But maybe it’ll be like a Charlie Crist thing, where everyone kind of knows the truth but does nothing about it.
On the private front, his family life is falling apart. After discovering that Margene and Ben have kissed, he exiled his son, much as his own father did to him. Barb may be attracted to the manager of his Native-run, Mormon-friendly casino. And Nikki is pushing him to accept his grandfather’s legacy as prophet.
Given that he has already started his own church, was told by the late Roman Grant that he “took” his authority from Heavenly Father, speaks as though his every inane utterance is somehow guided by God, and acts only for his own self-aggrandizement, I can’t see how the show can end in any other way than a very public disgrace and a return to Juniper Creek.
It’s also just occurred to me that my Sundays now include going to my little liberal, progressive church in the mornings and watching a series about FLDS polygamists in the evenings. Everything in balance.
Oh, Huffington Post. I used to like you when you had a lot of this:
But lately, you have a lot more of this:
And a lot of this:
And, well, this:
Come back to me, Huffington Post. Don’t make me go and do something rash like read Mother Jones.
Last night, CBC Television ran the documentary Hyper Parents and Coddled Kids (you can watch online if you’re in Canada). As the title suggests, it’s a look at the relatively recent trend in “helicopter parenting”, although I prefer the Swedish term discussed on the show: curling parents (they sweep all obstacles out of the way). The general thrust of the show was that this over-attentive parenting style is Bad Thing as it leaves children anxious and ill-prepared for adult life.
It’s also fairly one-sided in that the viewer is presented with extreme examples of this trend, such as a mother spending $4000 on her daughter’s first birthday. “It’s a major achievement,” she argues. Or the parents who try to get their children into exclusive $1200 per month pre-schools from the moment they’re conceived, just to give them that advantage. Or the overly-scheduled children who’ve never just played freely. Or the tales of employers having parents negotiate their child’s salary. Finally, we are presented with the tale of a young woman who was raised in this style and despite being fired from several jobs for her attitude, launching a failed business that offered women massages and daily affirmations, declaring bankruptcy, all before she hits thirty, still manages to keep her sense of entitlement and lack of personal accountability.
What you don’t hear is any sense of justification from these parents as to why they’ve chosen this path. Is this worse than the detached parenting styles of previous generations? Not that it should be an either/or question but there’s usually some kind of motivation for this sort of thing and perhaps when they reflect on their own childhood, there’s much they want to do differently.
I do agree with the points the documentary was making, in a general way. Kids’ lives do seem over-scheduled these days. Nobody seems to just send their kids out to play anymore. Playdates must be arranged. If a child kicks a ball for fun, she’s put on the soccer team.
I’m a big fan of Free Range Kids, a blog where the writer often asks why we’ve become obsessed with this perceived constant danger to our kids. I sometimes wonder if we’re so protective of children because we simply don’t trust ourselves to take the leash off once in a while. While our parents were content to send us out of the house until supper time, we think if we did the same thing, we’d do it wrong somehow and something bad would happen.
Of course, there will always be a balance between being involved in your child’s life and allowing them to fail on their own so that they can learn. I don’t think that’s unique to any generation.
The documentary also pointed out that the hyper-parenting trend is something that goes on among the middle t0 upper-classes. Many of the things parents are shown doing in this documentary simply aren’t options for us because we couldn’t afford it. In other words, spending half my take-home pay for daycare just isn’t going to happen. But I wonder if money weren’t an object, would I be much different?
Back in 2006, a writer for Slate.com, David Plotz, decided he was going to read the Bible and blog about it (well, the Torah to be precise. He skipped the New Testament). The idea was to discover the foundation of three of the world’s major religions through the eyes of someone who had little knowledge of it.
So the time came this week when I ran out of books to read and I hadn’t gotten to the library to find any new ones and well, we got a couple of bibles in the house (including a Gaelic language one) so I decided I’d take the same approach.
I started, um, in the beginning with the Book of Genesis. In a couple of chapters, God creates the world, a man, a woman, and every living thing and then gives Adam the job of naming them. Then he makes a tree and tells Adam and Eve they can eat anything in the Garden of Eden except for the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge (which is not identified as an apple), much like Chief Wiggum’s Forbidden Closet of Mystery. Then a serpent (not Satan) tells Eve she’ll be as a god if she eats the fruit, so she does and gets Adam to do so as well.
When confronted by God about this, Adam says “Yeah, well the woman YOU MADE FOR ME went and tempted me so this is, like, your fault.” God banishes them from the Garden and tells Eve “Maybe now you’ll listen to your husband!” And that’s why women don’t get paid as much as men.
God then sends a cherub with a flaming sword to the Garden to keep the newly disgraced humans out. On the next page, He gets mad at the world and the wicked 900 year olds who live in it and floods the place (except for Noah and his family).
Now, here’s my question to the theologians and biblical scholars out there: Did God’s flood drown the cherub in the Garden of Eden? I mean, he was sent there by God to work the door so you’d think he would get a transfer back to Heaven before the big show but then, God’s pretty quick to anger in this book. There is no day where He creates impulse control, which if he did, he would see that it is good. I rather think He just forgot all about the cherub. Poor guy.
I swear, this is better than The Lord of the Rings.
Is my age and also my goal. Every year I declare that this is the year I’m going to lose weight and every year my clothing gets smaller. So this year, I’ve told myself that the only thing I want to do is go down one size in pants from a 40 inch waist to a 38 inch one.
The problem with this is that I hate gyms. And exercise. And healthy people in general. I hate their smug assertion that 30 minutes of cardio kickboxing gives infinitely more pleasure than a six-pack, a bag of Doritos, and HBO. Liars. Besides, as Christopher Hitchens, whom I normally dislike, once wrote convincingly, “…exercise is a pastime only for those who are already slender and physically fit. It just isn’t so much fun when you have a marked tendency to wheeze and throw up, and a cannonball of a belly sloshing around inside the baggy garments.” Nobody needs to see my disgraced form huffing and puffing on a treadmill set to level 2.5.
So I exercise in secret, using coffee breaks to walk up and down five flights of stairs two or three times a day, giving up the post-dinner snacks, and getting into the Wii Fit Plus routines, all so that I may someday, in the far off future no longer have to drag my shameful physique into the office step aerobics class. But for now, all I’d like to do is buy a pair of jeans one size smaller than the ones I’m wearing now.
The Wii Fit Plus arrived yesterday and informed me that I am not only obese, but slouchy and off-balance as well. I am also not walking correctly, apparently.
So I chose my personal trainer (you can chose between a male or a female. I chose the latter - I’ll say it – because she’s hot) and started going through the exercises. So far, it’s not so bad. I kind of like yoga. Who knew? Maybe this will be the thing that finally works.
Besides, I think my trainer likes me.
It’s odd that I’m so used to the idea of moving back to the NB that it doesn’t seem to matter that I’ve had exactly one job interview and have applied for very few actual jobs as there hasn’t been much lately for which to apply. I’m at this point considering applying for a position with frozen food company.
As I’ve mentioned before, the main reasons for moving back is so I’ll be closer to my family, friends, and most other people I know. Then sometimes, as I’m drifting off to sleep, a terrifying thought hits me like a baseball bat to the temple: If I move back, then I’ll be closer to my family, friends, and most other people I know.
Growing up in New Brunswick, I attended non-religious schools and never had to learn things like Catechism as they do in Catholic schools. And even though some teachers couldn’t help but offer their views in class, religious or otherwise, it was generally understood that there was a line between Sunday School and Monday to Friday school.
Here in Quebec, there is a new course to be taught for all grades called Ethics and Religious Culture. Its aim is to instruct children on the province’s Protestant and Catholic heritage, as well as the beliefs of Mulisms, Jews, Hindus, and First Nations, among, I assume, others.
This all seems perfectly reasonable to me. If you’re going to live in the world, it’s probably handy to have some idea of what the people around you believe. It’s not telling children one religion is better than another. Yet some parents are arguing for the right to pull their children from the mandatory class because the course conflicts with the moral and religious instruction they receive at home.
If the simple acknowledgement that other beliefs exist somehow conflicts with your values system, maybe it’s time to rethink that system.
Remember how you’re not supposed to feed a baby solids until after six months? Apparently, it’s now totally cool if you do it at three months.
With us, as I recall, the spoon feeding stage was fairly brief. As soon as he could form a pincer grasp, the spoon was used less and less and he just ate what we ate, albeit in either mushed up or diced form. Apparently we were part of the Baby Led Solids movement. Who knew?
But this also might make him fat. Damn it. How am I supposed to be a good parent if I’m not slavishly following every online article I read, regardless of its source, to the letter?
So I finally took the plunge and emailed the minister at that church I’ve been attending about becoming a member.
Mind you, the last time I committed to something, it was to get married which was put on hold indefinitely after the wee lad decided to make an appearance. So in that sense that I always get things a bit wrong, it likely that the day I actually become a member of something new, I will be offered a gig back in the John and will have to abandon it.
But on the other hand, this Saint John plan has been official for the past six months so maybe it’s time I tempted fate and forced the issue.
Also, I don’t smoke. I was just writing all metaphoric-like.
According to this article, starting infants on solids before six months of age increases the risk of obesity. So let’s add that to the grand list of Things We’re Doing Wrong:
- Started solids at five months
- Formula-fed
- Slept in his own room early on
- Cried it out
- Disposable diapers
- Non-organic pesticide-filled food
- Watches TV (had identified Moe from the Doodlebops as his favourite character)
Parents are also not entirely slim (although his mum has gone all fit n’ foxy at forty due to the weight she’s lost, which I, in turn, found). Add that to a pending move to NB, one of the Canada’s heavier provinces, and he just really doesn’t stand a chance.
Odd that, knock on wood, he hasn’t had much more than the odd cold.
