A bit of morning cheer — the Washington Post ran a roundup review of etiquette books, including Mind Over Manners:

It makes perfect sense — it’s rather cheering, really — that the etiquette columnist for the Boston Globe is not an imperious WASP but a Midwestern-born converted Jew who has blunt things to say about both Christopher Hitchens and the soi-disant war on Christmas.

The review itself is a brilliant piece of writing, absolutely laugh-out-loud funny: I haven’t heard of “Michael Lindgren … a musician and poet who divides his time, politely, between Manhattan and Pennsylvania” before, but I’ll be looking his stuff up from now on. Really, I’d urge you to read this one even if my book weren’t included, it’s so good.

Last week’s episode of “The Office” was, even more than usual, a virtual seminar in How Not to Do Things, from How Not to Play Office Politics to How Not to RSVP to a Wedding (“I’ll just text you for directions the day of. And put me down for whatever’s fanciest. Unless there’s ribs.”)

However, there is one thing that Pam Beesley-soon-to-be-Halpert got right, and that she’s gotten right before: how to call someone out on bad behavior.

In this episode, Michael warns Pam that if she lies to him, her baby will be born a liar, because he will imbibe dishonesty through her breast milk. To which Pam replies, “Please don’t talk about my breast milk.”

That’s how you do it. You don’t interpret the behavior, you describe it, as neutrally and objectively as possible, in a calm voice. If Pam had said, “Please respect my privacy,” or “Please don’t say things that are work-inappropriate,” that would be an invitation — as she knows all too well — for a long digression on Michael Scott’s part as to why talking about his employee’s breast milk is not an invasion of privacy or inappropriate at work. Because anyone who will talk about his employee’s breast milk, pretty well by definition, does not understand the concepts of privacy and appropriateness. But he could hardly argue that he was, as a matter of empirical fact, talking about her breast milk.

She has done this before with Michael, most notably when she said, “Please don’t throw garbage at me.” And here’s the thing: it works. It works about as well as anything will work with the Michael Scotts in our lives. He never did throw garbage at her again after that, nor, at least for the rest of the episode, did he talk about her breast milk.

Of course, he continues to violate all norms of social conduct in every other way, because he is Michael Scott, and has the emotional development and social skills of a not particularly cool kindergartner.* This is what’s frustrating about people like that — and we all have them, in some version or another, in our lives — they never generalize to an overarching principle. Tell them not to throw garbage at you, and they’ll just put butter on your desk.

But hey, at least they’re not throwing garbage at you anymore. Sometimes that’s as good as it gets.

*I know at least one kindergartner whose empathy, humor, and sense of occasion far outstrips that of Michael Scott, so if you are the parent of a similar one, please don’t take what I said personally. That’s why I added that “not particularly cool” clause.

I have a chronic illness that flares up from time to time. If you’re a personal friend*, you probably know what it is; if you aren’t, you don’t need to. It’s not life-threatening, or even painful, but it’s capable of knocking me down to about 30% of operating capacity for days at a time. There’s medicine that helps — sometimes — and things I can do to minimize the chances of a flareup — sometimes. The body is a complex system affected in many ways by many things, and there’s no easy if-X-then-Y with this one.

(The main reason I’m not saying what it is isn’t because I’m terribly private, or that it’s terribly disgusting, but because people feel compelled, when hearing of another’s illness, to either share their own stories of much worse suffering or else suggest this new medicine or diet or asana that worked wonders for their sister-in-law who had the exact same thing, really! Neither of these are lines of discourse that most sick people are at home to. Although it does motivate us to get our strength back, so we can pop you one.)

Part of my New Year’s resolutions last week was to get better. To heal myself. Not physically, because I can’t do that, but to reconcile my body and my mind and my responsibilities and my relationships so that I don’t make things any worse than they have to be. I recently finished Loretta Lynn’s second autobiography, Still Woman Enough, and one line jumped out for its pure simplicity and sense: “I do not believe in pain if there is any way around it.” A woman who has had as much pain in her life as Loretta Lynn damn well knows what she’s talking about, and damn well knows that pain does not ennoble. We’ll be talking about Ms. Lynn — and about Tina Turner, too — a bit later.

I wasn’t intending to spend my New Year’s energy on that project, but guess what, the Days of Awe this year turned into the Days of Aw Crap, It’s Back Again. If the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are like a dangerous ocean voyage, the good Lord decreed that I was going to spend most of my time in sickbay. So I figured, okay, that’s my challenge for this year. It wasn’t what I’d planned to focus on, but you can’t order up life lessons like they’re adult-ed seminars. God don’t run no JuCo.

Anyway, here are my resolutions:

1. Don’t use my illness as an excuse to get out of doing things that I really can do, and that would be good for me, but that I just don’t want to do. Sometimes I will bail out on things when I’m sick because I’m embarrassed to compromise. I don’t want to call a friend and say, “I can’t make our dinner date tonight because I don’t feel well, but I’d love to see you–could you come over for a quick after-work cup of tea instead?” It’s easier to pretend that “something came up” and I need to reschedule entirely. I feel weird going to the gym and only working out for 15 minutes. It’s easier not to go at all. But hey, my friends love and accept me, and I’m sure everyone at the gym is paying attention to their own workouts and not timing mine.

… but …

2. Don’t be all macho or martyrish and force myself to do things that I really can’t. I’m not doing anyone any favors by promising things I can’t deliver. Nor am I doing myself any favors by pushing my limits, either because I don’t want to believe that I have them, or because I want to punish myself for being so weak and stupid as to get sick in the first place.

3. Do what I can to keep it under control. Oh, all right — it’s a stomach thing, okay? And I will pop you one if you give me unsolicited advice. Anyway, the point is, there’s certain things I can eat or avoid eating that put me at lesser risk for having a flareup. Small, frequent, high-fiber/high-fat meals are good; coffee and raw vegetables and too much rich food are bad. Sometimes. Mostly. Like I said, it’s a complex system.

… but …

4. Don’t blame myself when I do get sick, even if I got sick during a time when I wasn’t eating “right.” I’m not ignoring the reality of the connection — although as mentioned it’s by no means a hard-and-fast causality — between my habits and my health, but I truly don’t have to paint it in moral terms. Getting sick doesn’t mean God is punishing me for having a latte. It means I took a small gamble and lost. And we take a gamble every day just by getting out of bed, let alone leaving the house.

… and finally …

5. When I’m sick, to realize that the inevitable feelings of low self-worth and hopelessness are part of the symptoms. I don’t have to fight the feelings, but I don’t have to believe in them, either. That’s a tricky line to walk, but I think I can do it. I did pretty well with that last week, and I’m proud of myself for it.

I’m posting this because maybe you haz a sick, too. A lot of people do. And a lot of us are ashamed of it. We are a problem-solving, can-do, bootstrapping nation with a medical tradition that doesn’t handle chronic and complicated illnesses terribly well. (I’m about the furthest thing from a New Ager when it comes to medicine — don’t give me a smudge stick and healing dances if I need penicillin, already. But that doesn’t mean I think Western medicine has it all figured out right now. If it did, we wouldn’t continue to do research.) And 21st-century American culture has raised body-shaming to something akin to a religious tradition.

So maybe if you haz a sick, you could stop beating yourself up over it. Do the right thing by yourself, as much as you can, and when you can’t, well, that’s life. You can’t always be perfect, and even if suffering is the price you pay for a fall, that doesn’t mean it’s the price you deserve to pay.

Love yourself. Forgive yourself. Heal yourself.

Comments open, and please don’t take my “Don’t give me advice!” screeches to mean that I don’t want to hear what’s worked for you in dealing with your own chronic or recurrent illnesses. I very much do. I mean, please don’t tell me what to eat, that’s all.

*I’ve always thought the term “personal friend” was redundant and stupid, and in most cases, it is. But sometimes it is the right phrase. I do feel I have a relationship with my regular readers and commenters, but you aren’t people I know in everyday life. Friends, but not “personal friends.”

You do not have to engage in physical intimacy with someone who makes you uncomfortable, ever. Politeness requires nothing more than a handshake.

Hugs are to be earned.

(Photos by AFP/GETTY on the London Telegraph.)

Remember when I walked from midtown Manhattan to Park Slope because I thought taxicabs were wild animals? Oh, yes, you do.

Anyway, here is a good article from today’s Globe that explains the whole metaphor-as-thought thing at greater length than I was able to. Check it out.

… is online here.

Salon’s Cary Tennis answers a question from a woman that begins,

I’m still single at 32 and hate it. I absolutely want to find and fall in love with a man I can spend the rest of my life with. The problem is, I keep ruining things by sleeping with men too soon, often right away. And each time I make this mistake, I am left even more hopeless, feeling worthless, terrified and convinced that I’ll never find a man who wants more from me than sex …

and goes on to describe a typical situation:

But after our first real date, I never hear from him again. Because this is not my first rodeo, I slowly come to realize, AGAIN, that I’ve completely ruined any chance he and I ever had by sleeping with him right away. And it’s my fault; I ruined it and now I feel absolutely worthless. The whole thing crashes down and it’s MY FAULT. My fault for being spontaneous, for wanting to have fun, for being a fun girl. It’s MY FAULT because it’s my responsibility to say no, to know that a guy couldn’t possibly stop it and beyond that, has no reason to do so.

No, hon, it’s not your fault. You know why you’re 32 and single? It’s not because you have sex too soon. It’s because you haven’t met the right guy yet. It’s that simple, and that hard to accept.

If a man was going to fall in love with you, he will do so regardless of whether you sleep with him on the first date or not. I have known women who have postponed even kissing until their wedding night. I have known women who have slept with men on the first date. I have known women who have slept with men before the first date. I have known women who were single and pregnant with a baby they planned to give up for adoption when they met Mr. Right. I myself was having a herpes outbreak on my first date with Mr. Improbable. (It was a nice way to find out that he holds hands real good.)

When you find the right one, you’ve found the right one. If you’re asking, “What date is should be the booty date?” or “Is it okay to ask a guy out?” or “When should I tell her I have herpes?” … you’re asking the wrong question. Because if you’ve found the right person, these issues of timing don’t matter a whit. And if you haven’t, it doesn’t matter how perfect your timing is. They still won’t love you.

We really want to think that if we do all the right things, the universe will bring us the love we deserve. If we hold out on a guy physically just long enough to get him intrigued, but not so long that he’ll think we’re a tease, he’ll love us. If we come up with the perfect opening line, that hot babe at the bar will go home with us.

It doesn’t work like that. Another person is not merely an obstacle course to the physical and emotional intimacy you crave. They are an individual with their own desires, and hopes, and fears. I think when you’ve been single for a long time, it’s easy to forget that. (Oh, hell, I know when you’ve been single for a long time, it’s easy to forget that, because I’ve been there.) Finding love isn’t some kind of battle that can be won by superior tactics.

I remember, when I was single and unhappy, someone said to me: “You just have to find someone you want, who wants you.” I hated him for saying that. I wanted to think there was something I could do. Or stop doing. I wanted control.

But he was right.

And when you take in that lesson, you gain in freedom what you lose in false hope.

That post on “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” was supposed to run today, not yesterday; I got the date wrong when I set it up. So no post for you! If you don’t get over to the Miss Conduct blog much, you might want to check out this question that I posted yesterday — it’s generating some excellent discussion.

Oh, wait, I’ve got a little sumpin’ sumpin’ for you. In the fine internet tradition of Friday Dog Blogging, here is one of Milo. He has stolen something very important and is looking very guilty.

Do you think this is his way of saying he wants a little two-legged brother or sister? Not gonna happen, little man!

(Note to any concerned dog lovers: this happened shortly after we got Milo. He gave up the pills immediately without a fight, as we have trained him to do. We do NOT normally leave medicines where he can get them, and he developed common sense about living a in a house very quickly and won’t try to play with anything that isn’t one of his toys.)

If you, too, are a fellow “Mad Men” addict who finds it hard to get from Sunday to Sunday (or Monday to Monday, if like us you download from iTunes), here’s a midweek fix for you, courtesy of Hulu: the half-hour “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” These were done in the late 1950s … you can imagine Don and Betty, pre-kids, kicking back in the evening with a drink and a smoke and enjoying these little tales of deception and intrigue.

They really are quite good, and Mr. Hitchcock’s mini-monologues before the commercial breaks are wonderful. The man had presence. He had issues, but he had presence. I can just imagine Don squirming in his seat and muttering to Betty, “Don’t they understand that without advertising, they wouldn’t get their programs on the air?” (A point that’s frequently made about “Mad Men” is that Sterling Cooper is an unusually behind-the-times ad firm. Even in the early 1960s, there were firms that were hiring and promoting women and Jews, and appealing to youth culture, and using irony. Mr. Hitchcock’s delightfully insulting intros to the commercials were clearly beloved by his advertisers, but I can’t imagine Sterling Cooper allowing this for one of their clients.)

I’ve always been more of a book than a movie person, and my first introduction to Alfred Hitchcock wasn’t as a director, but as an editor of a mystery magazine and subsequent anthologies with titles like “Stories to Stay Awake By” and “Slay Ride.” Nedra Tyre, Henry Slesar, Robert Bloch, Lawrence Block … ah, the names bring back happy times. I had a whole stack of those paperback anthologies as a kid. I bought a “Best Of” anthology about a year ago, to take on the train when I was going to New York to meet my publishers, which is probably what led me to start watching his show on Hulu.

One thing that hit me when I was reading the anthology last year, and that is incredibly noticeable in the show: there didn’t used to be no-fault divorce. Which meant that, if your marriage wasn’t working out, you either had to find cause, or if the divorce was agreed upon by both parties, one partner had to take the fall (I think “mental cruelty” was a common out), or else … you got creative. Which of course is where the murder mystery tends to start. It’s really astonishing how many of his stories (magazine and television) are about husbands and wives killing each other. Now, I’m hardly politically correct enough to maintain that a murder-mystery show ought to be providing us with good role models, but is it completely out of the question that, at least once in a while, the husband and wife might not be adversaries but co-conspirators? It is in the world of the Hitch, apparently.

Another thing to pay attention to if you watch the show is how, if the criminal gets away at the end, Mr. Hitchcock’s final monologue always includes the fact that they were ultimately convicted offscreen. He says this with a Severus Snape-like contemptuousness, and although Mr. Hitchcock’s default vocal setting appeared to be “contempt,” it does seem rather special in this case. I think the network, or the advertisers, were pushing him to maintain a certain morality to the show that he didn’t agree with. “But of course, they were cot and brot to jus-tisssssssss,” he spits.

At any rate, do check them out. They’re quite fun. You can start with this one, if your populist rage against bankers hasn’t been assuaged by Ben Bernanke’s assertion that the recession is over. What revenge against bankers looked like in a simpler time …

David Brooks of the Nashua Telegraph — a fan of the Igs and an all-around good guy — has a good question on his blog: have you read a book if you’ve listened to the audio version?

When somebody asks you if you’ve read a certain book, and you’ve only listened to it in audio version, what do you say? “Yes?” “Yes with an asterisk”? “No, but I’ve heard it”? “No”?

What about you?

This reminded me of a similar question: if you have been e-mailing back and forth with someone, or having a dialogue on Facebook, or chatting online, do you say you’ve been “talking” to them? I usually will, unless there’s something specific about the technology that I wanted to make a point of, e.g., “So, I was Facebooking with Mimi, and I noticed she still hasn’t changed her relationship status!” But if I’m just reporting the substance of the conversation, I’ll say “talking.” I suppose it seems weirdly over-specific to fixate on the technology itself, as though the technology were the important thing and not the conversation.

What about you?