Glass House

Its cold and flu season everywhere in the United States. Most people I know either are sick, are getting sick or are recovering. In comparing notes with fellow sufferers, one of the recurring topics is the plethora of mucus that the human body can produce. How do we do it? Where does it come from? And, more ominously, what is it for and where does it go? I received the following from my sister (written by one of her friends) via email, it is a horrifying account of a few hours with a pair of snotty children. Readers be warned, graphic material is contained in the following…
“Yesterday I was reading to the kids when we got to a page that was stuck together. I pried the pages open only to discover a disgusting slimy substance squashed between the pages. When I wiped it with a diaper wipe it was yellowish----more SNOT yucky, yuk, yuk One of those darling babies must have sneezed into it! UGH The day before that, it was early morning and Noah had just finished a sippy cup of juice. I was holding him when he got a coughing attack and proceeded to vomit a snotty substance all over me. He missed himself completely as well as Mika's head but I was drenched. (I was wearing a tank top and pajama bottoms). I managed to scrape the tank top off without getting my hair. Both kids were crying and I ran to the bathroom, grabbed towels, wiped myself off, wiped snotty noses, threw the cover off the bed and sat between two crying sick babies. We put on "Busy People” for the 100th time and everyone got quiet. The remainder of the day was spent wiping snotty noses and watching DVDs and Videos. Later on I came out of the kitchen to find Noah sitting in the middle of a mound of white tissues, pulling them out of the box one at a time all 700 of them. I looked over at Mika a few feet away and she was staring at the rug. I crouched down beside her only to discover she was picking alphabet pasta out of a pile of cat puke and lining them up neatly in a row.”
Ah, the joys of parenting!

Posted by Laurie Feldman at 02:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I belong to a book group. This month we read A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. This is the same guy who wrote The Kite Runner. To summarize, this is a story about two women in Afganistan, before during and after the Taliban period. They are both treated brutally by a variety of people, most importantly, by the same husband (they are co-wives). They become unlikely best friends and when the husband attempts to kill one of them the other one protects her with the result being the death of the husband. Eventually, the “murderess” is killed (death penalty) for this act while the other woman escapes.
In our discussion of this book, the topic of what motivates people to perform acts of kindness, charity and selflessness was raised. Essentially, why do people do good things? A couple of our members argued that a belief in a supreme being was necessary along with a belief that one will be held accountable for one’s behavior in the afterlife. The majority of the group seemed to be surprised by this premise. I was one of them.
Does one have to be able to anticipate a reward in order to behave well? To many of us (including several in my book group) the behavior itself and, perhaps, the response it elicits in others is enough of a motivator. It even seems logical that the assumption that people will only be “good” if they can expect reward or judgment must be preceded by the assumption that people would naturally be more likely to behave badly if they thought they could get away with it. I don’t think this is true. I believe most of us desire to be better than we are, no matter how “good” we may seem to others. And this is just as true for atheists and agnostics as it is for Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and all the other religious preferences we can find.

Posted by Laurie Feldman at 08:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)