I get a lot of pop culture second hand.  For whatever reason most of “reality”-inspired entertainment doesn’t do much for me.  So it is via water cooler talk and magazines that I have, over the years, learned about who got voted off the island, which American Idol contestant was known for his crazy hair, and the fact that “real” housewives exist in various cities.

In this vein, I have never seen an episode of “The Hills.”  My understanding of it is that it is somewhat scripted, but still a reality show.  I see its stars pictured in red carpet photos, but don’t really know who they are or what they do.  I learned from a recent article though, that the answer to that is, “not much.”  Apparently I was missing very little.  Nevertheless, I wrapped up reading this article from The Daily Beast feeling sorry for two of them.

Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt, I learned, were victims of both the reality television industry and their own stupidity.  If you have ever watched even one episode of their show then you know more about their exploits than I do.  But after reading The Daily Beast’s piece I can’t help but think that perhaps the couple’s current situation (out of work, unemployable, living off their parents, and with a mountain of debt) isn’t entirely their fault.

Today’s cult of celebrity has created the opportunity to become famous for nothing.  This is especially true of people who are young, dramatic, and attractive.  We tune in to see what antics they’ll put on each week.  We sit on our couches in pajama pants and cheer or jeer them, and they laugh all the way to the bank while we fast forward through commercials for Herbal Essences and Lean Cuisine.  The problem, though, is that we are a fickle lot.  The characters (for that is what these people are to us) that entertain us for a season or two become dull thereafter.  (What else do you expect when their fame is not tied to anything of substance.)  And yet they are led to believe – per Pratt and Montag’s 20/20 hindsight – that what they have is sustainable.

If the most glamorous and volatile of the human race were those people in their 30s or 40s perhaps the reality television industry never would have gotten off the ground.  By then we have more street smarts about us, more life experience, and more to lose.  For many (most?) of us, fame and fortune just aren’t big enough carrots to justify the sacrifice of one’s privacy and dignity.  Lucky, though, for the fast-talking Hollywood producers of the world, newly minted adults in their early twenties are much more captivating, and also much more gullible.

Montag and Pratt tell a sad tale.  They tell of cranking the publicity machine nonstop for several years, each year being required to generate more drama than the year before in order to keep us captivated.  Like any drug addict, the public needs more and more of a good thing until no amount can sate us.  At that point, instead of mortgaging our futures for one last hit we go cold turkey.  We walk away and say to Reality Star X, “Sorry, but you’re just not doing it for me anymore.  I’m on to the next Kardashian now.”  And the sad irony of it, at least in the case of these two starlets, is that it was their future we mortgaged, not our own.

It is at this point that I have to stop and point out that Montag and Pratt walked into this life with their eyes open.  Lots of people their age would have had more sense than to make the decisions they made.  They would have made some lasting investments in themselves (education and/or connections).  They would have saved a dollar or two.  And they wouldn’t have built a life of lies in order to keep a flighty audience engaged.  But I go back to the fact that they were young, largely stupid, and sold a very appealing bill of goods.

So I wonder about the larger cost of reality television.  I believe that the ultimate responsibility lies with the person who decides to walk in front of the camera and put his or her life on display.  No one forced these people to make this choice.  And if the end result is a life in shambles, well, it isn’t like the reality television landscape isn’t littered with warning tales.  Nevertheless, it makes me sad.  It makes me sad that we are a society that finds someone else’s personal implosion adequate fodder for our own entertainment; that we created this market in the first place.  And it also makes me sad that so many people are willing to sacrifice themselves for us, to lie down on the altar of a prime time air slot without regard for the damage that may ultimately be done.  Yes the stars are the most culpable.  But we are enablers of their bad decisions.  And I wonder why that doesn’t weigh more heavily on us.

Earlier this week Jamie Oliver posted an open letter to the United Nations Secretary General regarding the global health risks associated with obesity and obesity-related illnesses.  After reading his letter, something about it didn’t sit right with me.  It’s not that I didn’t agree with his position.  I’ve stated quite plainly on this blog that I believe that education is a key and missing component of our nation’s obesity epidemic.  Rather than the content, it was the delivery mechanism that gave me pause.

The open letter.  Somehow it strikes me as passive aggressive.  It takes a dialogue that was presumably between two parties and makes it public, the sole intention of which can only ever be to bring public opinion into the fold.  If I have wronged you and I apologize in an open letter, then it seems I care more about redeeming my good name in the public eye than I do about expressing genuine contrition.  If I want to persuade you of something (as was the case in the Jamie Oliver letter) and I do it in an open letter, then I am likely trying to subject you to a much greater pressure than I can exert on my own, rather than to merely make you aware of my concerns.  Something about the open letter reeks of ulterior motives.

And yet, I suspect it is an effective means of communication.  Nevertheless, I wonder if there are situations where such a public vehicle undermines the message it carries.  (There must be.)  It would have required much more effort and finagling to get a letter like Mr. Oliver’s into the hands of the UN Secretary General exclusively.  By comparison publishing such a letter on a website is a slapdash affair.  Were I the UN Secretary General I think I might be inclined to take Mr. Oliver’s position more seriously had he gone to more effort and used more discretion in getting it to me privately.

I don’t question Jamie Oliver’s motives.  I think he truly cares about the long-term benefits of a healthy diet and the cultural supports required to sustain one.  But as I look at his tactics I see the influence of modern technology.  Lately we seem to believe that the widest net we can cast is the most effective one.  We deploy Facebook and Twitter and websites.  We seem to believe that merely by exposing our message to the largest number of people possible we will make the most progress.  But I can’t help but fear that the signal to noise ratio is getting smaller and smaller.  Had Jamie Oliver managed to secure a private 15-minute meeting with the UN Secretary General would it have done more to further his cause than to post an open letter and expect public pressure to do the heavy lifting for him?

So much communication these days is scatter shot.  We throw things at the wall, watch them stick, and assume that our job is done.  But not every message is best communicated on a  billboard.  Sometimes (likely more often than we think) a message comes through stronger and clearer when communicated with specific focus to a small number of people who have the means and interest to act on it.  The thing about this approach, though, is that it is much harder.  Twenty years ago it was easier to reach a couple of key people than millions of people with cursory interest.  Today the inverse is true.  We have so many types of information competing for our attention that it’s difficult for anything to cut through the din.  And that is why I think that far too often we overlook the impact of face-to-face communication.  We forget how compelling it is to hear another person’s perspective directly from his mouth.  It is easy to deliver a strong message from behind the shield of a computer screen.  It is much harder to deliver that message in person, without edit and proofreading capabilities, and with the risk of rejection on the table.  Live and in-person communication is frequently not easy, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t also frequently the best choice.

Much has been made in recent years of the costs of factory farming.  The antibiotics.  The sewage.  The animals who die of illness before they can be slaughtered.  Because of these things it is now reasonably easy to find grass fed beef, free range eggs, pastured hens, and so on.  But there is another cost of factory farming that I hadn’t really contemplated until I read this article from The Atlantic on the psychology of factory farming.

Author James McWilliams posits that large scale animal husbandry divorces humans from the unique welfare of individual animals; that commoditizing them eliminates the unhappy business of seeing an animal you carefully raised be slaughtered because the rancher no longer has any kind of relationship with each animal whose demise might cause him guilt or remorse.  McWilliams comments that in the bluntest terms, factory farming allows the rancher “to kill thousands of animals a year and remain a happy person.”

As I pondered the implications of that statement I surprised myself.  I thought that, upon reflection, I would reach the conclusion that the bond between animal and rancher should exist for its own sake; that animals have a right to such a relationship.  Interestingly, though (at least to me…) that’s not where I landed.  I think the psychology of factory farming is dangerous not because the animals are deprived of any relationship.  I find it more important that they are deprived of the byproducts of such a relationship.

When we have a relationship with an animal we treat it accordingly.  We ensure that it is healthy.  We ensure that it isn’t overly stressed.  We ensure that its life is reasonably comfortable.  These qualities translate differently for steers than for lap dogs, naturally.  But they still exist in some measure in both situations.  When our level of concern for an animal relates to its ability to produce a profit, and not to our personal relationship to it we treat it much differently.  We don’t worry about its levels of stress or comfort.  We worry about its health only to the extent that such health affects profit margins.  We allow ourselves to get away with behavior which under any other circumstances we would find abusive.

I believe that in the long run we only hurt ourselves with this approach to animal husbandry.  We poison our land with petroleum-based fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides that grow the grain that feeds the animals.  We increase the strength and drug resistance of various bacteria by pumping animal feed full of antibiotics.  We increase the saturated fat content and decrease the omega-3 and omega-6 content of the meat we consume.  And, by supporting an industry that produces meat so cheaply we ultimately consume more meat and animal fat than is healthy.  We lose on every count.

Don’t mistake me, though.  It’s not only about the human fallout for me.  I don’t view livestock as pets, but I still believe that animals deserve some base level of care that is not met by factory farming.  Further still, as humans I believe it is innate to us to develop relationships – with each other, with pets, with working animals, and with food animals.  In the case of food animals our ability and desire to bond with those animals in some sense protects us from ourselves.

With factory farming we have managed to turn a blind eye to one of our basic human predilections and many people think that it’s a win-win situation because hamburger meat costs $1.49/pound.  But the fact remains, we pay the price somewhere, even if it isn’t at the grocery store checkout line.

Many thanks to loyal reader Rebecca at It’s Kili Time for recommending this article to me.  I love getting blog fodder from readers!

Sometimes we women just don’t do ourselves any favors.

That was the thought that coursed through my mind as I read this article entitled “Do Women Choose Beauty Over Health?”  According to the United States Surgeon General Dr. Regina Benjamin, women are inclined to forego exercise on any given day because they don’t want their hair to get sweaty or to have to wash it.

Really?  We need the Surgeon General to tell us that fitness is more important than good hair?  Unfortunately the answer is Yes.

I suppose when you get into the heart of the issue it’s a little more understandable than it sounds on its face.  Dr. Benjamin explained that lots of women (especially African American women such as herself) spend a great deal of time and money achieving a certain hairstyle.  The thought of going to that time and expense again is a big disincentive to exercise.  She also commented that this is particularly true when we are looking for reasons not to work out in the first place.

What breaks my heart about this phenomenon is that it points to how little we actually count health in our estimation of beauty.  When we see a beautiful woman with glowing skin, white teeth, and shiny hair we immediately want to know about her daily personal care routine and what products she uses.  We don’t wonder about whether whole grains and lots of produce are key components of her diet.  We don’t readily consider what she does to keep her stress levels low and get enough sleep.  We don’t ask if exercise is a regular part of her life.  And yet when we get down to it the things that we find most attractive in ourselves and others are typically the byproducts of a healthy lifestyle.

This outlook holds true on the new website YouBeauty which works to inspire women to live healthy lifestyles through the incentives of improved appearances.  However, in spite of its basic premise the site’s CEO commented that the best way to get women to do anything healthy is to tell them it will make them more beautiful – eat broccoli, work up a good sweat, you name it.

I’ve addressed the issue of vanity in a couple of different posts recently (here and here), and I’m not quite sure why it’s resonating with me so much right now.  I suspect it has a lot to do with the fact that at 31 weeks pregnant I’ve had to sacrifice much of my vanity and focus much more heavily on my health.  My baby needs me to be healthy, not beautiful.  What interests me about this is that it’s not at all uncommon for pregnant women to find renewed energy for a healthy lifestyle.  When we are growing another life we take great care of ourselves.  We eat balanced diets.  We are willing to gain weight.  We go organic.  We drink more water and rest more.  We give up caffeine.  These changes and sacrifices are not insignificant.  We do all of these things for our babies, yet we are disinclined to do them for ourselves.

This makes me sad because it means that what effort we go to is always for someone else.  Whether it’s a husband or a job interview or a 20th high school reunion, the fact remains that we are certainly willing to jump through all sorts of hoops for our looks.  But by and large those hoops don’t benefit us.  In a perfect world we would all eat nine servings of fruits and vegetables each day, sleep eight hours each night, exercise for an hour five days a week, and drink 64 ounces of water daily.  We would do these things for ourselves – to live longer, healthier, and happier lives.

I’m not here to say that superficial indulgences aren’t perfectly acceptable from time to time.  (This is the part where I confess that the zippered makeup case in my purse contains at least 20 different seasonally updated shades of lipstick, gloss, and liner at any given time…)  But those indulgences should be the frosting, not the foundation.

Ladies, healthy is beautiful.  If we’re going to go through contortions for our appearances, let’s at least go about it in ways that benefit our health.  I’ll go to the gym if you will.  Deal?

Could you go an entire year without looking in a mirror?  Would you want to?  And further still, do you think it would benefit you in any way to do so?

I ask this question because UCLA grad student Kjerstin Gruys is going to do just that.  One year without looking at her own reflection even once.  (Not even on her wedding day.)  The Stylelist.com article on the topic comments that, “Feeling the already constant pressure to look perfect intensified by wedding planning, Gruys’ self-described “struggle with poor body image” made her wonder if a year without mirrors could lead to greater self-acceptance and appreciation for her body.”

Coming on the heels of my recent post about the benefits of vanity, I wonder how this topic will sit with you.  I posited in my earlier post that there are benefits to having a modicum of vanity; that having an interest in our appearance can (when applied in moderation) help drive us to make healthy decisions.  It was a position that was roundly shot down by many of my commenters.  So let’s consider a different perspective.  The premise is this: we are too focused on our looks.  We worry too much about how we appear to other people, and that obsession, for some people, devolves into full-throttle psychological disorders.  By wholly eliminating our access to our own visage, we will minimize our concern with appearances and realize the greater significance of other aspects of our lives.

I don’t altogether disagree with that position.  I am sure that there are better things for me to worry about throughout the day than whether or not the bottom eyeliner on my left eye has smudged yet or not.  (It smudges every day, but only the left eye.  So strange!)  If such trivialities were removed from my life for an entire year, I can see how I might become less concerned with appearances overall.

What I think will actually be more interesting, though, is for Gruys to note and document what changes she observes in other people’s behavior toward her during this year.  She still intends to wear makeup and has learned to apply it by feel.  Presumably she will still wear matching clothes and style her hair as well.  But with less attention paid to all of these endeavors, will she find that she is taken less seriously?  Will people in public treat her differently?  Will she find that, on the whole, all the time she previously spend focusing on her appearance was wasted?

On another note, I’m a little confused about the sheer mechanics of this exercise.  Within the confines of your own home it would be easy enough to remove or avoid  mirrors.  But what about in public?  Every ladies’ restroom I’ve ever entered has a mirror hanging over the sink.  How will she wash her hands without, even if inadvertently, catching a glimpse of herself?  What about seeing your own reflection in the window of your car as you unlock it?  What do you say to your stylist after having your haircut?  “Thanks, but I can’t tell you whether or not I’m happy with what you just did”?  The practical application of this experiment seems a bit unrealistic to me.

And this brings up the most important point.  This experiment is just that, an experiment.  It is a gimmick to test a hypothesis (and to score a book deal).  For those purposes I can understand going to some length to contrive a life without mirrors.  But if life without mirrors isn’t reality, wouldn’t the more worthwhile exercise be to consider these same questions of vanity and obsession within the natural environment of our lives?  I’m sure the point here is to take the idea to its logical extreme in order to test a theory.  I doubt that Gruys will end the year with a decision to swear of mirrors for good.  But I think the lasting value of her experiment will be to determine how she allows the personal or societal pressure to focus on her looks to influence the way she lives her life.  I hope I am reminded of her story when the book (to be cleverly titled “Mirror, Mirror, Off the Wall”) comes out, as I will be curious to her perspective in hindsight.

This is a busy time of year for baseball fans.  The mid-season trade deadline passed on July 31st, although with some finagling teams can continue to execute trades until the end of this month.  It’s unnerving if your team loses a good player (as mine did…).  It’s exciting if your team picks one up.  Either way, at this time of year when the weather is hot and miserable, the season is feeling sluggish, and the postseason lineup is still debatable, the mid-season trade deadline injects a bit of excitement into the game.  And, in a strange episode of life imitating sports, I just made a swap of my own.

Yesterday, at 26 weeks and change into my second pregnancy, I switched to a new OB.

That single sentence represents a complex web of emotions for me.  It represents the frustration and anger I felt with my old OB.  It represents my disappointment at having to reconcile myself to the fact that I was in the wrong hands.  It represents the triumph of knowing that I took control of the situation and made the right decision for me and my baby.  And it represents the warmth and comfort of a friend who talked through my situation with me, recommended her OB without hesitation, and called her doctor’s office on my behalf to help ensure that I could get an appointment.

Being an adult is not always easy.  Actually, more times than not, it’s really difficult – especially if we want to do it well.  Confrontation, both of people and of situations, takes courage that can be hard to muster.  After the deal-breaker appointment with my old OB I sat with a pit in my stomach for five days without telling a soul as I came to grips with the change I needed to make.  I wrestled with myself, working hard to determine if my convictions were rooted in reason or prenatal hormones.  And eventually I knew that I had to do something very hard.

The act of leaving my old OB (whom I’d been with for 10 years and 1.5 pregnancies) was easy.  I didn’t even have to tell him my reasons if I didn’t want to.  All I had to do was sign a piece of paper releasing my records to my new doctor and be on my way.  But I didn’t want to do it that way.

My last appointment in his office was with another doctor in his practice (scheduled as such before I’d made the decision to leave).  Since my new doctor couldn’t get me in right away, I had to keep that last appointment, knowing that when I went in I likely wouldn’t see my own doctor unless it was in passing.  Aware that I might not have the opportunity for a verbal explanation, and fearing that I might dilute my feelings in a face-to-face encounter, I wrote a letter.  I hoped to give it to him myself, but he was out of the office and I had to leave it with his receptionist.

In it I told him the reasons for my transition to a new doctor – namely the fact that specific aspects of his treatment of my pregnancy made me question the quality of the care I was getting.  I told him in detail what he had done to make me doubt him.  And I told him that his actions were entirely preventable.  I told him that while I defended him after IEP’s fraught delivery, I didn’t intend to let something go wrong again just because I didn’t have the nerve to abandon a doctor who wasn’t giving me his full attention.

He hasn’t contacted me, and I’m not surprised.  Frankly, I don’t need him to.  What I need him to do is take my words to heart and consider whether he’s being the kind of doctor his patients deserve.  If my departure can solicit that kind of self-evaluation, then it’s worth it to me.

I’ve only had one appointment with her, but so far I like my new OB.  She had read my transferred records before seeing me.  She listened as I explained the circumstances behind my 26-week switch.  She asked pointed and astute questions about IEP’s delivery, and tried to assess (as best she could without having been there) why it was so problematic, and what we might do to prevent similar problems with my next delivery.  She was warm.  She was kind.  She seemed genuinely concerned about what I’d been through to this point.  And she seemed committed to giving me a better birth experience with my second delivery than I had with my first.

Being an adult is sometimes hard.  Doing it well is frequently hard.  But I’ve found in my life that I have more regrets about skirting confrontation than I do about facing it.  I have a son to raise.  And before too long I’ll have two.  I want them to see me be honest and forthright.  I want them to see me do things that are hard because they are right.  I want them to learn by example what it means not only to be a good adult, but to be a good human being.

No one wants to admit that a doctor they’ve been with for 10 years is asleep at the switch.  But I have a family to take care of.  And in this case, taking care of my son meant doing something hard even before he is born.  I’m sure he doesn’t appreciate it now.  But it represents a trend I hope to continue throughout my kids’ lives; a trend that I hope they will appreciate one day, provided I continue to do it right.

When it comes to firing someone, there is a right way and a wrong way.  When it comes to breaking up with someone the rules are less clear but still somewhat defined.  When the split falls somewhere around the halfway point along the continuum between these two situations I suspect that the rules are especially vague.  Nevertheless, I can’t help but wonder if Tiger Woods still managed to do it wrong.

It came out this week that Woods fired his longtime caddie Steve Williams.  Williams had been with him for 12 years, since nearly the beginning of the golfing phenom’s career.  And in a move that was apparently as shocking to Williams himself as it was to the rest of us, Woods has cut him loose.

I don’t fault Tiger for changing caddies.  He has a job to do (although he’s been riding the bench lately) and if he feels that a new caddy is going to improve his performance then he should make that change.  But, like most aspects of Tiger Woods’ life in the past couple of years, this one isn’t quite so simple.  The difference here is that Williams has been fiercely loyal to Tiger.  Such loyalty isn’t all that impressive when your boss is the number one golfer in the world and you take a percentage of all his winnings.  It becomes more so when your boss becomes mired in a tawdry sex scandal, tumbles in the rankings, and sits out of multiple tournaments nursing various injuries.

What I’d like to have seen out of Woods this week is something of a mea culpa.  I wish he’d said something to the tune of, “It’s not Stevie’s fault that my life is in a shambles, or that I need to make radical changes just to recalibrate myself.  He’s a hell of a caddy and anyone else on the tour will be lucky to have him.  I’m grateful for his loyalty both on and off the golf course.”  That, however, is not what he said.  Paying mere lip service to the man who carried his bag for more than a decade he said, “I want to express my deepest gratitude to Stevie for all his help, but I think it’s time for a change,”  Something about it feels obligatory.

When you get right down to it, Tiger Woods’ life is really not my business.  Whether he is gracious or surly in his professional life affects me no more than any one else whose professional life doesn’t intersect with my own.  Nevertheless, for better or worse, he plays a big role in setting the tone in the sports world.  Young people look at him and want to model themselves after him.  I think he missed an opportunity here.  (If we’re being frank, he’s missed a lot of opportunities lately.)  He could have fallen on his sword a bit, taken some accountability for the fact that he got himself into this mess, and softened the ground for Williams before going public with the split.  That wasn’t the path he chose, though.

It’s such a tricky business looking to athletes to model citizenship for us.  Professional athletes have reached the pinnacle of their respective sports by being singularly focused on their performance and competitive edge.  In many cases other traits – like grace and gratitude – get left behind.  And yet we try to build up the image of a well-rounded individual to suit our own desires.  Naturally there are exceptions here, but by and large I have to believe we’re better served by making role models out of people whom we know to be worthy of our discipleship, rather than people whose lives are bright and shiny on the outside, but may not be so when the curtain is lifted.

Breaking up is never easy.  I suspect it is even harder when the world is watching.  And that is why it confounds me that Woods didn’t do it more carefully.  Apparently, even after nearly two years of disappointment, my expectations are still too high.

Last month the nation took notice when Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas announced in the The New York Times Magazine that he had been living in the U.S. illegally since the age of 12.  As a follow-up to that article he was interviewed by Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday; an interview that I listened to with rapt attention.

Of all that was fascinating about Vargas’ story, the element that most captivated me was the one that I felt was most overlooked – the circumstances under which he left his home country.  In his NYT piece Vargas describes it this way:

One August morning nearly two decades ago, my mother woke me and put me in a cab. She handed me a jacket. “Baka malamig doon” were among the few words she said. (“It might be cold there.”) When I arrived at the Philippines’ Ninoy Aquino International Airport with her, my aunt and a family friend, I was introduced to a man I’d never seen. They told me he was my uncle. He held my hand as I boarded an airplane for the first time. It was 1993, and I was 12.

In the NPR interview Vargas elaborated that he has never left the U.S. since his arrival here in 1993, and has not seen his mother since the day he left her.  He commented that he understood from a very young age that his future lay in America; that he did not know how or when that future might begin, only that some day it would.

But back to his departure from the Philippines.  I cannot fathom it.  For starters, having been lucky enough to be born in a developed nation, much less into a happy, educated, and stable family, I cannot entirely wrap my head around what it must be like to grow up knowing that everything around you is something you’re trying to escape.  Further still, I cannot imagine, at the age of 12 – old enough to understand the magnitude of what’s happening, yet not old enough to control any of it – being shipped off with a stranger with no prior warning and very little explanation.  And yet the way Vargas tells it, this was not by any means the most poignant moment of his journey as an illegal immigrant.  But I would imagine that this kind of thing happens all the time.

The promise of a better life, that’s what motivates these often-heart-wrenching stories.  Vargas beat the odds – most illegal immigrants do not go on to work for the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and the New York Times.  (Even the most advantaged journalists struggle to compete for those jobs.)  But in spite of the odds of any notable success being slim, those odds are perceived as an improvement over a person’s status quo.

So I wonder, does the promise of that better life offer enough hope to assuage the pain of being ripped from your mother at the dawn of your adolescence?  Are those wounds that can ever heal?  In his NPR interview Vargas didn’t speak about there being wounds there at all (which isn’t to say that they aren’t there and were perhaps just too personal to discuss, or simply not the point of his story).  But if this story were mine I can only imagine that that August morning in 1993 would be a pivotal moment in my experience, rather than merely the introduction.

I wonder if he thinks it was worth it.  I wonder if the promise of a better life – a promise which for Vargas was actually realized – was enough to offset what had to have been a traumatic moment.  Even more so I wonder about the people who do not end up as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists – the people who end up picking fruit or cleaning hotel rooms.  For those people was that promise, which America maybe didn’t make good on, enough to soothe the loss of what they left behind?

When I was pregnant with IEP I quite specifically did not want to know if he was a boy or a girl.  Not typically prone to sixth senses about things, I had the strong sensation throughout that pregnancy that I was not supposed to know.  I felt that my job was to focus on keeping myself and my baby healthy – getting rest and exercise and maintaining a balanced diet – and that knowing the sex would just be a distraction.  GAP (who probably would have opted to find out the sex) graciously indulged my desire to remain in the dark.  And so it was that it was in my delivery room that we first heard the words, “It’s a boy” (in a decidedly uncelebratory tone…).

Because my first pregnancy was routine throughout, textbook even, I was able to make the decision not to find out my baby’s sex very much about me and my desires.  This time around, it all went down differently.

In mid-May I went in for my 16-week prenatal appointment during which blood was drawn for my Quad Screen.  Four days later I got a phone call informing me that my test results indicated the baby had an elevated risk for Downs Syndrome.  Three days after that GAP and I met with a genetic counselor.  I had a detailed ultrasound looking for physical markers of Downs, the results of which were encouraging, but inconclusive.  We ultimately decided to have an amniocentesis done to determine with certainty whether or not our baby was healthy.  The whole ordeal was overwhelming, and stressful, and frightening.

The great thing about an amnio is that it is extraordinarily accurate.  The bad thing about an amnio is that the results take days to determine.  Our initial results (which looked specifically for Downs) took five days.  The full panel of results took more than a week.  In the five days between the time the amnio was performed and the time the initial results were given to us we: drove three hours to spend Memorial Day weekend with GAPs family, smiled extensively for professional pictures of the entire family (19 of us including six kids aged three and under), cried as we left IEP with his grandparents and drove three hours back home to leave for vacation, caught a delayed flight to Chicago, missed our connection to Dublin, spent 24 unplanned hours in Chicago waiting for the next Aer Lingus flight to Dublin, flew to Dublin, and drove to Belfast.  It was not exactly an easy few days.  And that is how it came to pass that we were standing on a street corner in Belfast when we got the genetic counselor’s phone call telling us that our baby is healthy.

We ducked into a mostly-empty bar to call our parents with the news.  GAP drank a pint of Smithwick’s and I drank a Coke.  We breathed a great sigh of relief, and continued our sightseeing knowing our baby was fine.

At this point we still didn’t know the sex.

Until my Quad Screen results came back, I had assumed that we would take the same approach to finding out the baby’s sex as we had the first time around.  I contemplated finding out for IEP’s sake, thinking that something as abstract as a pregnancy would be easier for a two-year-old to grasp if he knew whether he was getting a brother or a sister.  But since IEP is only beginning to understand that he himself is a boy I eventually settled back into my original philosophy – focus on having a healthy pregnancy.  The Downs Syndrome fears, however, changed my whole paradigm.

The decision which was once all about me and my idiosyncracies (again, because GAP had always left it up to me) was no longer about me, and all about the baby.  I decided that if the amnio results came back positive for Downs we would find out the sex; that in that situation I wouldn’t comfortable leaving any unknown hanging in the balance.  As I waited to have the amnio done and then waited again for the results this approach – this “I should find out everything I can about this baby” approach – seeped deep into every thought I had about the pregnancy.

Later that evening in Belfast we sat in a pub waiting to order dinner.  It was only 1:00pm at home.  A single phone call back to our genetic counselor was all it would take to find out the sex if we wanted to.  After days of hoping for the best but bracing for the worst most of my convictions about waiting to find out the baby’s sex had crumbled.  So when GAP said, “Oh let’s find out,” that was all it took for me to pick up the phone and call.

We are having another boy, and I couldn’t be happier.

As for my thoughts on finding out the sex, well, they are quite varied at this point.  Most of all, it feels weird knowing.  When you don’t find out the sex you’re always explaining yourself.  “Is it a boy or a girl?” people would ask.  “Oh, we didn’t find out.”  Then there was always an awkward pause where I was presumably supposed to justify that decision.  There is something about knowing the sex that makes conversations with people (especially strangers) much easier.

But beyond that bit of prenatal culture shock my dominant thought is that my opinions on the matter carry no weight outside of my own family.  I did what was right for me both times, and made a different decision each time.  If my own circumstances can sway my decision from one pregnancy to the next, who am I to weigh the merits of finding out for somebody else?  It is a highly personal decision, and unless it’s my own pregnancy it has nothing to do with me.  Thankfully, most of the time it is a fun decision that is not riddled with health concerns.  But rarely do we know the full story of another person’s pregnancy.  We don’t know what factors influenced her decision.  And frankly it’s none of our business.

My baby is healthy.  And truly, that is the only thing that matters.

I remember the first time I heard the phrase “retail therapy.”  I was working at my first job out of college and a colleague – a few years older, very pretty, and very sophisticated (I had a bit of a girl crush on her) – mentioned that she was going shopping after work because it had been a long week and she needed some retail therapy.  “Ohhhhhh,” I thought, recognizing the sentiment, ”It has a name!”

Ever since then I’ve considered retail therapy a privileged person’s excuse for placating her materialism.  (Which certainly isn’t to say that I haven’t indulged in it myself.)  So I was surprised to learn this week that a study has proven that retail therapy is psychologically legit.  I made my way through the article waiting for the other shoe to drop.  As I neared the end I expected to read that the temporary mood boost afforded by shopping is short lived, and gives way to buyer’s remorse and feelings of guilt.  Conversely, while the article conceded that the negative moods that lead to retail therapy can spike impulsive behavior, the net effect is that ”…retail therapy has lasting positive impacts on mood. Feelings of regret and guilt are not associated with the unplanned purchases made to repair a bad mood.”

My mixed response to this news surprised me.  On one hand, I though, ”Hooray!  Affirmation!”  On the other hand I thought, “Really?  Is this how we want to encourage people to work through bum moods?”

I think my second response stems back to a particular moment of my adolescence when I experienced exactly the same feelings of guilt and remorse that the article said don’t correspond to retail therapy.  As a kid I was a huge penny pincher.  I collected my allowance for weeks and weeks in a hinged wooden piggy bank.  I remember that at one point in second grade I had accumulated $80 thanks to my miserly ways.  And while, for the most part, I enjoyed counting my pennies and congratulating my incredible fiscal restraint (yes, GAP, this is all true…), there were moments when I felt like a prisoner of my own piggy bank.  Eventually I snapped.  When I was 15 I decided to let my hair down for once and go on a bit of a shopping spree.  Wielding my Loony Toons checkbook with conviction I spent about $350 in the course of a few hours.  I experienced an incredible high in the process, but that happiness quickly gave way to the sense that I’d made a huge mistake.  Sitting in my bedroom surrounded by shopping bags I felt deflated (much like my checking account balance…).

In retrospect I think it was the extreme swing in my behavior that left me feeling like I’d gotten in over my head.  The article mentions that most people spend about $59 to perk up a bad mood, and $115 to celebrate an achievement.  And those figures are for adults, who, presumably, earn more than $15 per week doing household chores.  This context allows me to see that my $350 spending spree as a 15-year-old was far more impulsive than I realized.

As an adult I have settled into more moderate spending patterns.  Part of me is happy to learn that whatever emotional boost I get from a new blouse or trip to the cosmetics counter is psychological fact.  But I also worry that this study may lure people into the belief that they have carte blanche to solve their problems with spending.  I hear stories on the news about how many Americans have no savings accumulated, how much credit card debt we carry, and how our proclivity to spend money we don’t have has gotten us into trouble time and again.  Nevertheless, whether your splurge is a $500 handbag or a $5 cappucino, it’s still nice knowing that with some regard for our relative means, we can indulge ourselves without major regret.

Epilogue – My ill-advised shopping spree did help me stumble into my favorite retail therapy trick.  When I’m in the mood to shop, but don’t actually need anything, I go about it as I usually would, perusing clothing racks, trying things on etc.  Once I’ve settled on the collection of things I want to buy I take them to the counter and ask the salesperson to put them on hold for me.  If I really want them, I’ll continue thinking about them for a couple of days and be willing to go back for a planned purchase.  But nine times out of 10 I don’t.  I’ve sated my impulse desire to shop without actually spending anything.