cranky pixels

Once again, I’m trying to make my diet less like the bottom of a caramel-corn box and more like something made by Morningstar. The problem is sugar. As in, I love it with a deep, abiding passion. It gives me nothing but misery, but I keep coming back. Come on, sugar. Love me the right way.

Anyway, I’m cutting waaaaaay back on my sugar consumption, which is a thing I do from time to time amid oaths of enduring health and vows to do things like exercise regularly (ha) and drink less coffee (HA). I’m not cutting sugar entirely out of my diet; I learned my lesson about that when I tried to Atkins before my wedding and went temporarily bipolar. No, I’m just going for an overall aura of better health. I’m trying to make more from-scratch meals which do not in any way involve fried potato products. If I crave a treat, I’ll make that from scratch too. That way, it takes a little longer (no instant gratification) and I can control how much sugar I put in.

Tonight I made some chocolate chip cookies using Ghirardelli 60% cacao chips, which are less sweet than semisweet morsels, and I cut out about a third of the sugar. I also only used half a bag of chips, so the chip-to-cookie ratio is somewhat less choc-tastic. Still yummy, though.

Slightly Less Unhealthy Chocolate Chip Cookies

Preheat oven to 375 degrees

• 1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter, softened
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp. vanilla extract
• 2 cups unbleached white flour
• 2 tsp. baking soda
• 1/2 tsp. kosher salt
• 1/2 bag bittersweet chocolate chips

1. Cream butter and sugars in mixing bowl. Add eggs and vanilla. Mix thoroughly.
2. Mix flour, baking soda and salt together and add the dry ingredients into the wet mixture untilcompletely mixed.
3. Fold in chocolate chips.
4. Spoon on to an ungreased baking sheet and bake for 11 to 14 minutes.

Now, I know what you’re saying. I missed so many prime health-food opportunities with this recipe. Where is the flax? The wheat germ? Where is the whole-wheat flour? Baby steps, I’m telling you.

Although I think Not So will call in reinforcements should I begin baking with carob chips…

technorati tags:healthy chocolate chip cookie recipe, less unhealthy chocolate chip cookie recipe

Oh, the internet has been so heavy the last few days, hasn’t it? It’s seemed that way to me, and since my opinion is the only one that matters I will simply assume you’re nodding your head (and possibly composing rhyming odes to my perspicacity). I’ve been feeling all riled-up and opinion-having, but that takes a lot of energy. Energy I do not have. Enough, I say! Let the fluffy kittens come out to play!

Today’s fluffy kitten love-fest (or, things that are happy-making and not in the least bit controversial):

My initials on a tee shirt. I am the JNB-est. (Heeeeeeeee.)

Veer has a link to The Art of The Can, an interesting way to get rid of all those Red Bull cans you’ve got laying around. (And by ‘you’ I mean, actually, you. I get wired just thinking about Red Bull.)

Kipiis: a bib clip and alien toy all in one!

(Last night’s scattered post, brought to you by the letter B.)

Can’t connect to internet and am feeling v. sorry for self. Baby is sleeping, finally, but I’m going stir crazy. I haven’t had a break all day. I’ve either been wresting with a whiny baby or pointedly not wrestling with a whiny baby or trying to no avail to get whiny baby to take a nap, since it’s clear he desperately needed one. Then there was the incident with the Chex Mix, which is currently all over our living room floor (after having been stomped into a fine grit by one Whiny Baby, Esq.). At that point, I didn’t even care anymore. “Apparently he’s having some Chex Mix,” I deadpanned as my child began tossing it by the handful. “At least he’s not screaming,” added Not So. And that’s my parenting story for the day.

Oh, waah, poor me. I’m just glad he’s finally down. He’s very tired, and tired babies are not happy babies. He’s been sleeping abominably, which is to say better than when he was cutting molars but not anything resembling “well.” I’ve been staying up much too late because when he finally does go down I’m a) jangled and b) jonesing to get some work done. Which I’d be doing right now, but the laptop and the internet have not been on speaking terms since we hooked up the Apple TV downstairs. (Love the lovely Apple TV, but that’s another story.)

I’d like to work. I’d like to take a bath, maybe change out of the sweats I’ve been wearing all day and into some fresh sweats, for some variety. I’d like to eat some more M&Ms and not think about the baby for a little while. Don’t get me wrong. I like the baby. I like thinking about the baby, talking about the baby, talking TO the baby. But he’s really been relentless today, what with the screaming fits and the whining and the demanding to be held (and then demanding to be put down) and refusing to nap. I get that this is hard for him, this almost-but-not-quite talking, but it’s hard for me, too. He tries to communicate, fails, gets frustrated and screams. I try to understand him, fail, get screamed at. This, my friends? This is a no-win situation.

He’s snuggled up in bed now, all long eyelashes and soft baby-snores. I know the minute I get up and, say, run a bath, he’ll stir, realize I’m not there, and start freaking out. Even if I run back in, he’ll be all overwrought and inconsolable and the only way I’ll be able to get him down again is to nurse and then physically wrap myself around him until he falls back asleep. Even if I stay in bed, the odds that he’ll stay sound asleep are pretty slim. He always, every single night, wakes up at 10:30-11 and freaks out for a while. Some nights the nursing thing works; some nights it doesn’t. But he never skips his 11pm wakeup.

The nursing thing is getting to me, too. Something about being always on. Last night, after Happy Fun Baby’s fifth or sixth wakeup (during which he would not be comforted by anything except the Magic Boob) I actually told him “You don’t need to nurse every freaking hour! You can just sleep!” Naturally the baby ignored me, but I felt somewhat like the Bad Mama you read about on the internet, chastising her child for unreasonable things. The Magic Boobs, though, they are getting mighty sick of being the end-all, be-all source of comfort, food, entertainment and sleep. The Magic Boobs want to stay inside their tee-shirt for one night and not have to work for a living. The Magic Boobs, they are tired.

Just last week I was all indignant about snark-sites like the ones that were popping up around my favorite mama boards. It’s been on my mind, the way anonymity seems to empower some people to take things way too far and then wave the Free Speech banner when called on it.

Then I read this post by Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users, and I realized how big of a deal this really is.

We do not have constitutional provisions for hatred and death threats. We should have better rebuttals in our vocabulary than “if you didn’t have legs, you would leave a trail like a garden slug.” I mean, we’re adults, right? We wouldn’t say that to a person we ran into at the grocery store, would we?

Of course I believe in free speech. Of course I don’t think that we should all be tiptoeing around each other, all politically correct and timid. But it seems awfully convenient to hide behind both free speech and anonymity. “I say what I mean, I just don’t want anyone to know it’s me saying it.” Guh.

Words have power. Saying something out loud is powerful; printing it publicly is even more so. People need to be responsible for their words. If you’re going to publicly threaten someone, you’re responsible for the fallout. Not the person you’re threatening (for finding out about it). Not the community rallying in her support (for “the same oroborus circle jerking that leads to this problem in the first place,” as per Ethan Caplan’s dismissive and unsympathetic post on the subject).

So far, with the exception of one upstanding person, everyone involved with the meankids.org community has pretty much jumped all over Kathy for making “unfounded accusations” and not just chuckling indulgently when people on the internet said they wanted her dead. Mean old Kathy Sierra, pointing out that threatening to kill someone is a crime and that even people on the internet can’t just terrorize an individual they don’t like, willy-nilly. How dare she talk about it? How dare she name names? At the same time, they have all attempted to make clear that it wasn’t their posts that were threatening. They were just bystanders, and now they’re being unfairly targeted simply for their involvement with the community, etc., etc., ad nauseam.

Look. If you let something you know is wrong just happen, guess what? You’re wrong too. Not criminally liable, maybe, but morally suspect. When someone calls you out for your cowardice and inexplicable failure to moderate or discourage overtly threatening behavior? You say you’re sorry and you think twice the next time. You don’t post diatribes on your site suggesting that the victim is merely seeking to bask in the spotlight by making baseless accusations, because if you do that, you simply confirm that you’re an asshole. (I’m not linking to those posts from here, but they’re not hard to find. Also: ick.)

Brian Oberkirch has an excellent post about this on his blog. I agree with him 100%. Go read it.

technorati tags:kathy sierra, internet bullying, hate speech, death threats, creating passionate users, anonymity

By all rights, I should be asleep. The baby is asleep. He curled up at a perfectly reasonable and non-insomniac 9:30pm and is now snoozing peacefully at my side. He’s very cute, my kid. I like him immensely.

The insomnia thing, though, I could do without. I am tired. I am in bed. The cats have been fed, the dishes done, the important e-mails returned and the appropriate files uploaded. Yet do I sleep? I do not. I HAVE THINGS TO DO, PEOPLE. THINGS. THERE WILL BE TIME TO SLEEP WHEN I AM DEAD.

Maybe I’ll go downstairs and have a Calm pill.

In other news, I think I have PMS.

I won’t get involved in meta discussions about snark. I won’t.

Okay. I will.

Here’s the thing: we’re all grownups. We know the internet isn’t the same as a living room with a comfy couch and your bestest friends. It’s public, even the bits of it that require passwords and whatnot, and – gasp! – other people might be listening. You have about the same reasonable expectation of privacy that you’d have in any public place – which is to say, not a lot. Does that mean you never discuss anything remotely personal in public? At a coffee shop, around a big table with all your friends? Come on. Of course you do.

There are two sides to this next part, so listen carefully.

(1) In discussing things on the internet, you are opening yourself up not just for criticism, but for the sort of trainwreck crap that starts so much trouble. Occasionally for no real reason people single you out and say abominable things about you, your life, your family, your choices. Honestly, it has very little to do with you; think about it like someone walking by the big table where you and your friends are sitting at the coffee shop and overhearing your conversation, and then snarking about it with their friends later. Unkind, yes, but ultimately it says more about them than it does about you. People talk. Whatever. (The thing that makes the trainwreck stuff so hard to deal with, of course, is that it comes from people you thought you trusted. Someone else on the message board, one of your friends at the table, nodding and laughing and then going behind your back and laughing at you. That’s not cool, but again – people. They suck.) And you were opening yourself up to that by posting publicly, right?

Here’s where we go into the second part. (2) No. People gossip and snark, yes, letting off steam, exercising their free speech, whatever. But if you’re in the company of friends – or even acquaintances – you have a reasonable expectation of decency. Those italics are there because I honestly believe that we should treat people we barely know with the same courtesy we’d like for ourselves. I know! Crazy talk. (Clearly I have no concept of the inner workings of the interwebs, or whatever. I’m one of those new-age clog-wearing mommybloggers who believe that we should all just get along. Yes yes, get it all out. I’ll wait.)(And no, I don’t accept the argument that the snarkers could totally take it if the same random, unwelcome criticism were leveled against them. It’s disingenuous, and it’s almost universally untrue. How easy is it to say something rude and then expect to get rudeness back? And how does that excuse the fact that you were rude in the first place?)

I just don’t understand why you’d bother to be involved with a community that you not only need to mock but need to create a whole new community to mock. I mean, hey. There’s a lot of fucked up stuff going on in the world. I read Ann Coulter’s column sometimes and break out in hives. I’m not ashamed of saying that publicly, because Ann Coulter? Is a public figure. The people getting drive-bys about their parenting choices and marital problems? Not public figures. Just people like you or me, going through their everyday lives and getting blindsided (how many different accident references can I make in this post?) when someone points out a thread dedicated to mocking their parenting choices or having a group laugh about their husband’s infidelity. That’s not blowing off steam. That’s organized cruelty.

Look. Real life isn’t high school. We all figured out how to play nicely with each other in real life (well, most of us, anyway) – why can’t we apply the same principles to the internet? Don’t self-censor – if someone posts something that really bothers you, disagree or stop reading – but don’t go out of your way to be an unmitigated twat, either.

You’re welcome.

It’s all kerfuffle, all the time at my favorite message board, so instead of letting the meta-angst get me down, I’m here to spread joy and love amongst my readers. I am not unlike the Tooth Fairy in that regard. Also, I steal teeth.

Here are ten things that have made me happy in the last week:

1. New shoes! I am wearing them right now, in fact, and my feet are having a little party.
2. The baby’s molars are almost all the way in, and he’s “only” waking up three or four times during the night (instead of 6-8). That’s practically sleeping through the night! If, of course, by “night” you mean “the hours between 1 and 4am.”
3. Speaking of the baby (and, er, speaking), he’s begun saying “Mama” when he means me. Tee! I’ll miss the meowing, but it’s nice that he hasn’t gone straight from infancy to calling me “Mom.” (Did I mention the meowing? A few weeks ago he started meowing in this wee falsetto that sounded remarkably like the cats. Cute! In addition, he’d come up to me and go “Mom?” in the same falsetto, leading me to wonder which one of us he thought was a cat.)
4. Our AppleTV arrived this morning, whee!
5. I have ten friends on Virb, and only one of them is someone I’m married to!
6. My kid dances like crazy, and it’s the cutest thing in the world to watch.
7. I just had a bowl of rocky road ice cream.
8. I am digging the hell out of Twitter, and Twittervision just makes it better.
9. I tweaked the template for our design blog and it looks pretty damned good, which is exciting since I know almost no CSS.
10. Tomorrow is the last day of my Art History class, at which time I can honestly say I am on “Spring Break.” Hee.

So, spill: what’s been making you happy lately? And if it’s lip gloss, post brand and color, please. A girl needs her connections.

technorati tags:kerfuffle, list, happy