Speaking of the powerless, the silenced, PeaceBang blew me out of the water with this insight:

“To be a religious person is to notice everyone, period.”

Read the whole post, it’s thought-provoking and also rather funny. And that line certainly smacked me out of my comfortable feeling that of course I’m a good person, and made me take a hard look at how I treat certain kinds of people.

PeaceBang’s doing some good stuff these days — I tweeted another blog post of hers a day or so ago. Which brings me to: how many of you who don’t follow me on Twitter read the tweets on the right column of this blog? Do you find them interesting, useful, value-added? I don’t often tweet about my personal activities (that seems entirely too “oooh I’m a celebrity”; I don’t assume that because a person enjoys my writing they necessarily want to know what I had for breakfast). I use it mostly to link to stuff I think would be of interest to people who like my writing. Is that what you all want?

How many of you who don’t follow me on Twitter read the Tweets on the side?

Finally following up on some of your excellent comments in response to my post “The powerless are rude.” Sorry I didn’t get to it sooner — I was powerless to do so. Get it?

First off, thank you all for reading my post in the spirit in which it was intended. I certainly never meant to say that those in or with power cannot be rude. I was saying their rudeness comes from a different place, and is likely to express itself in less crude ways. While the store clerk rings up their purchase, the powerful talk on their cell phones — in muted voices, turned away from the less-than-human clerk who cannot be allowed to eavesdrop. The powerless talk louder and look at the clerk, wanting them to be the audience to the Reality Show of My Life.

Nor did I mean to sound as though I were bashing on the underclass — if anything, that post was meant to be a plea for sympathy and tolerance for those whose rudeness comes from a sense of being unheard, unacknowledged, disrespected, either momentarily or over the course of a lifetime. To say: You know what? Try listening to the uncouth people. The coarse people. The ones who don’t dress up their failures in the smooth coat of civility.

Using foul language helps people endure pain. It’s science, yo.

Also, of course, it’s not as though the world were broken down into “the powerful” and “the powerless.” Most of us are advantaged in some ways and disadvantaged in others. And in certain situations, both parties can feel powerless, as Julian Lander pointed out:

But I also want to respond to Clare’s comment about entitlement and condescension encountered by a clerk. In that situation, such as in a store, I think that the clerk is the powerful one: it the clerk who makes it possible or impossible for the customer to complete the transaction, purchase the desired item, and leave with it. For someone who is used to being able to do things like that him- or herself, that can be enormously frustrating, particularly because the customer may perceive him- or herself as being able to complete the transaction just as well as the clerk.

I see this a lot at the drugstore pharmacy. Almost every time I go to get a scrip filled, there is someone arguing with a pharmacist/clerk about whether or not a scrip was called in, how much they have to pay, and so on. Clearly the customer feels powerless and frustrated: you are withholding my medicine! But so does the pharmacist, who is trapped by insurance regulations and dependent on information from doctors.

geekgirl99 made point that I liked:

I think this is a really interesting post. I don’t think this is all there is to it, though. I do think that those who aren’t given enough space start to push back. But at the same time, I think that demanding what you deserve has to be taught, and it is more likely to be taught to the rich than to the poor. I think, for example, that a rich person is more likely to grill a doctor about a diagnosis and be really pushy about it than a poor person.

Yes. People who are socialized to be invisible do, on many occasions, obey that socialization. This is why I can’t think of “entitled” as necessarily being a bad word. You should feel entitled to ask your doctor all the questions you have. You should feel entitled to your bodily privacy and autonomy. You should feel entitled to being treated with dignity. The history of social movements is, in essence, people saying, “We are entitled.” Entitled to an eight-hour workday, to the vote, to sit at a lunch counter, to get married to the person they love. Which is probably why so many social-justice movements wind up being led by the middle class.

Finally, I wanted to address Rubiatonta‘s comment:

Here’s a challenge (and believe me, I know I’m asking a lot here) for all of us to whom civility matters. When someone is being rude, envision them surrounded by love — your love. Don’t glare, or mutter, or react in any way. They’ll notice that they’re not getting the reaction they expected. It will make them stop and wonder. And if enough of us could do this, it would make a real difference.

That’s the compassion meditation, isn’t it, Rubiatonta? The language doesn’t resonate with me, but the general concept does. When people are rude to us, we feel stripped of our power. And our first instinct might be to grab that power back by being rude in return. But of course, the truly powerful move is to not react — or to react with compassion, humor, or a common-sense solution. Good manners does not mean being a doormat. It does mean being grounded enough that you can choose to act, rather than react. It means, to me — feeling powerful.

Hey, all. I’ll be chatting from noon-1pm EST today here. Come on by! Chat are great — it’s like talk radio, with typos!

I believe I mentioned this on Twitter, but one of the biggest Japanese manga publishers has come out with a manga about Mr. Improbable and the Ig Nobel Prizes. Part 1 came out this week, part 2 next week. And I get to be in it, as Mr. Improbable’s loyal sidekick:

That’s not how I wear my hair anymore, but they did an excellent job with my eyebrows. I may take this in to the salon the next time I go to get them waxed.

People, I hope you all know: I never intended to have a life like this. I grew up in a series of aggressively normal Midwestern suburbs. Granted, I was kind of the Sookie Stackhouse of the Midwest: people knew there was something different about me, and weren’t necessarily comfortable with it. (I never had a convincing accent, either.) But this …

I don’t take it for granted, that’s all I mean to say. I know not everyone gets to be a manga sidekick. I know not everyone gets to be paid to write a story about their dog in a national magazine. I wake up sometimes and realize that I was born a Midwestern Christian, daughter of a good union man and a stay-at-home mom, and now I am a genu-wine member of the east coast Jewish media elite. I thought there might be more money involved in that then there’s turned out to be, but you can’t deny it’s still a hell of a long journey.

I’m grateful. I’m mightily amused. I laugh at least once a day at the sheer absurdity, the improbability, of my life. And I know God hears a prayer in that laugh, a prayer that words can’t articulate.

… is online here.

And here’s why I’ve been so quiet around here the past few days — because I’ve been working on this, my first article for Salon!

What a great way to end the week!

It’s quite clear what the blog is, I mean; it’s a blog about mystery fiction. I know some of my readers are fans — or even if not, many of you are all-around book people who enjoy a good review on its own merits. So check out Only Detect, which offers triweekly reviews of a variety of mystery novels, and a good blogroll, all against a tastefully retro wood-paneling background.

My column about crying toddlers in restaurants, and polyamory, got virtually no angry response. No defensive or entitled parents, no militantly childfree gourmands, no traditionalists convinced I am trying to destroy family values by suggesting a father learn to accept his daughter, no humorless polyamorists upset that I suggested they are all open-source geeks.

I am, however, still getting angry letters from people who insist that their dogs do too understand English. And who, in most cases, write with a lack of facility that suggests they believe their own deficiencies with the language must be proof of their pets’ compensatory abilities.

I will never understand people.

So, speaking of toddlers in restaurants (I haven’t felt brave enough to check my Miss Conduct e-mail account yet and see what, if any, fallout there is from yesterday’s column), there was a dustup about kids-in-public on some feminist/women’s blogs a few weeks ago. I’m not going to bother describing the argument because it went right down all the predictable grooves. One of those grooves, though, hit me in a new way: the question “My kids are the most important thing in my life, so if you don’t want to spend time with them, are you even really my friend?”

How do you feel about that? Do you have a “Love me, love my X (kids, spouse, religion, dog, art, profession, family of origin, politics, cooking)” in your life?

I don’t think I do. One “X” is pretty well my limit — if, for example, you actively hate dogs and you’re convinced that the social sciences are, without exception, pure hokum, chances are we’re not going become BFFs. And I can’t imagine being friends at all with someone who actively disliked my husband, in the sense of finding him an unpleasant or morally objectionable person. But if it’s more a situation of, “Hey, Mr. Improbable is a great guy, but I sort of don’t get his sense of humor and I’m prefer you and I mostly hang out on our own” — well, that seems kosher to me, and it would to him, too. I’m sure he has friends who feel I come on a little strong. (No, really.)

But I’m friends with people who dislike dogs, or oppose organized religion, or who have no interest in my psychological research, or don’t read my column/blogs/book, or in various other ways don’t support or show interest in a particular and important part of my identity.

Are kids a wholly different kind of X? I’m guessing not, based on the parents that I’m friends with. With few exceptions, I’m very awkward with children. I’m that friend my mommy friends get together with for grownup time. And that seems to work just fine, because they need those friends, too. And of course, I’m nice to their kids when I see them and I always enjoy hearing stories about them. But I’m not Auntie Robin, and my friends seem okay with that.

What’s your X? Have you ever lost a friend over an X? Are certain X’s qualitatively different from others?

… is online here. I’m dealing with two hyper-controversial issues–one somewhat exotic and one mundane–this Sunday:

1. Polyamory, and
2. Toddlers in fancy restaurants.

Which topic do you think I’ll get the most response on? And do you think the angriest letters will come from:

A. Sexual conservatives
B. Polyamorists
C. Parents
D. Non-parents

ON ANOTHER NOTE: Loving your responses to my post about rudeness and powerlessness. Yes, you are right, I was only looking at one side of the issue, and more or less deliberately so. I didn’t mean that lack of balance to imply that I think the rudeness (and cruelty, and abuse) of the powerful does not exist or is exaggerated. The post was intended more as an evocation of a feeling than a full social analysis. Will write more later about this — but, seriously, you guys are the best. Great stuff.