Oh my. Google Alerts has informed me that Miss Conduct’s Mind Over Manners is on Amazon.com’s list of books on “modern ethics” that have four-star or higher ratings! Check it out. I’m amused to be in such august company!

… is online here.

So, last night, Mr. Improbable and I went to see “Indulgences” at New Rep. It’s a very good play, funny and sharp and well-acted, hip but not too knowing. Highly recommended.

At any rate, during intermission, I was in the lobby when the house manager came in through a staff-only door and almost bumped a couple of older women. “Oh, my goodness, sorry, guys,” she gasped. “We’re not guys, we’re girls,” one of them snippily responded. Neither of them acknowledged her apology.

So after my trip to the ladies’ room, I went to the ticket counter and asked to speak with the house manager. “Hi,” I said. “I’m Robin Abrahams, and I write the ‘Miss Conduct’ etiquette column in the Globe. And I want you to know that it’s colloquially acceptable to call more than one woman ‘guys,’ and that it’s not acceptable to criticize strangers for minor faux pas. Those women were very rude, and I think you’re perfectly fine.”

Well, she had been feeling bad about it, so she was was delighted, and so was I. I felt like some minor little superhero or something! I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed being “Miss Conduct” quite so much. (Actually, I sometimes find being “Miss Conduct” in public to be kind of a pain, but I’ll write about that some other day.)

But of course you don’t have to be an official etiquette columnist to do this. On the other blog we’re talking about rudeness, and how to respond to it. If the rudeness isn’t directed at you, but at someone else, don’t scold the offender — comfort the offended. Say, “That was unfair. What you did wasn’t wrong” or “You handled that very gracefully,” or even simply, “I’m sorry that person did that to you.” It can make a world of difference; really, it’s like you are taking a shamed person and leading them back into the light by the hand.

I mean, it’s a heck of a lot funnier if you’re Miss Conduct, but it’s just as kind no matter who you are.

On our post about the 00s (see, when you’re writing, you don’t have to figure out what to call them), Stupendousness, who had one heck of a decade, writes this from her 27-year-old perspective:

I feel like a very different person from my 17-year-old self. I believe part of that is clearly due to the continuing maturation of my brain, which is just biological. The way my brain works has changed enough to affect my personality to an extent, and some of that has been involuntary, but I’ve also consciously changed many of my thought-patterns. Or tried. I am much less cynical these days, for example.

Yes. The brain develops a lot between the teenage years and 25 or so. Some of the mistakes we make in our teens and early 20s are the result of lack of experience — but some are due to the simple fact that your brain works about as well as the beater cars most of us were driving at that age. It’ll get you where you want to go most of the time, but it’s not always reliable. Your capacity for executive functioning kind of fades in and out for a while like an AM oldies station two towns over.

I was aware of that myself, in my teens and 20s. I didn’t let myself have a credit card until I was 25. But I sure didn’t know the biology of it, and I bet that, Stupendousness, made your experience rather different. How did you learn about brain development? And it makes me wonder what it would be like if this kind of thing were taught in schools more. It seems (and please, if anyone knows different, tell me) that schools offer a lot of coaching (or at least nagging) about good study and health habits, deferral of gratification, career planning, and the like, without ever explaining to students why it’s going to be hard for them to learn these skills, and why sometimes they’ll find themselves doing exactly the thing they know they shouldn’t. I don’t think students would take this as an excuse to skive off (“Dude! Give me a break! My brain’s not finished yet!”). I think the more dutiful ones — and most young folks do want to be responsible — will give themselves a much-needed break from time to time. And I think it makes the process of learning boring, unfun things more interesting, because you would know you are actually programming your brain.

(Please don’t misunderstand me — I’m not saying that once you’re 25, you’ll never make a regrettable impulse buy, impolitic comment at work, or pitcher of grain-alcohol punch again. We all do things we know we shouldn’t, take short-term pleasures over long-term gain. But certain kinds of judgment really are, biologically, more difficult to sustain before the mid-20s.)

They’re here! And they do actually look a bit like the ones on that “Miss Conduct” doll:

Mr. Improbable and I both like them, but Milo’s not so sure. He’s such a fashion conservative.

In case you can’t tell, the frames* are black on top and green on the bottom. I wanted to blog this whole outfit, because I like it, but we didn’t get a good full shot. Do, though, check out my cool bib necklace. I picked this up for a mere $10 at Buffalo Exchange, a new used-clothing store in Davis Square (and elsewhere — they’re a chain). It looks a lot like this one. I love wearing it with this dress, because it hits right at the neckline and therefore looks like an embellishment on the dress itself. I bet making zipper jewelry would be a fun project — you get a lot of bang for some broken zippers, a piece of felt, and a hank of ribbon.

*Yes, given that Michelle Obama is my fashion muse and inspiration (some might say obsession), I did find it ironic that the make of frames I chose is called “Sarah,” thank you very much.

If you haven’t checked out the discussion on the other blog about whether we are in an epidemic of rudeness, do. It’s really interesting.

Sounds like I’m not the only person for whom the 00s have been a big decade! Thank you for sharing your stories with me.

As I’d mentioned, my understanding of adult development is heavily influenced by the work of Daniel Levinson — you can get the Cliffs’ Notes version of his theory here. (All the language refers to men, and his original study was on the male lifespan; he did wind up writing a second book about women, but if there were any major differences, I would have remembered them, and I don’t. Studying adult development is hard because the specifics of everyone’s life differ, but the people who have done it successfully, like Levinson and Dan McAdams, focus on general themes. Maybe “becoming a grownup” to you means running your own business, or having a baby, or buying your first real car, or doing your first jail stint, but everyone wants to do something in their late teens/early 20s to prove their adulthood, for example.)

And it sounds like a bunch of you all are coming up on the Age 30 Transition, or have recently gone through it. This is a really helpful concept to understand, especially if you’re within five years of 30.

One of the major things I loved about Sassy Curmudgeon‘s “Ten Years of Twenties” post is her acknowledgment of the dark side of the 20s:

When I was 22, a 28 year-old friend of mine sat me down and gave it to me straight. “The next four to five years are going to suck,” she said. “But then it gets awesome.” I smiled and nodded and truly believed that life would not suck for me, because I was starry-eyed and ambitious and different, and she was fucking old anyway, so what did she know? She was right, of course. Being 22 through 27 just kind of blows. It’s not a constant state of blowing, though—it’s like a fine wine; the blow ripens over time until you get a nice, full-bodied suck.

This is why the Age 30 Transition needs to happen. The media give one’s 20s great play as a time of dating, urban adventures, maximum good looks and minimum responsibility, but the fact is, that’s not how most of us experience it. For most of us, it’s a hard time: a time of piecing together the scraps of adult life from whatever’s nearest, all the while not fully knowing yourself well enough to know what you really need from and can contribute to a relationship, a career, a community. It’s a mad scramble for jobs that aren’t too demeaning, dates that aren’t too depressing, used furniture that looks more “shabby chic” than “trailer park panache,” and trying to find something affordable at H&M that can get you through a job interview.

As you near your 30s, you’ve got a little ground under your feet and can start to make some decisions. Maybe that job you took right after graduation because you had to have a job isn’t the right one for you, and law programs have been looking surprisingly tempting. Maybe that job you took is turning out to be a real career, after all, and you’re thinking about moving away from your home town to go work at headquarters. You start realizing what works for you and what doesn’t, and you’ve begun to develop the experience, financial resources, and general life savvy to get what you want. (Among my group of friends, we referred to this time as “Everyone who’s married gets divorced, everyone who’s single gets married, everyone in grad school drops out, everyone in the workforce goes to grad school.”)

So for those of you still doing the patchwork-quilting of the 20s, hang in there. And those of you starting to lift up your heads and say, “Hey, wait, why am I working at/dating/living in X when I’m really a totally Y kind of person?” — fasten your seatbelts. It may be a bumpy ride for a year or two … but it’s worth it.

Over the past month or so, I’ve gotten a little obsessed with style blogs, especially those written by academics or freelancers. You know how sometimes you get interested in something, or hungry for some particular food, and it feels like a whim — “You know, I never really knew what the Holy Roman Empire actually was, let me Wikipedia that,” or “Dang, pretzels would be good right now.” And then sometimes it feels like a need, as though your body or mind are suffering some kind of deficiency that needs to be made up.

This one felt more like a need, and I was wondering what was up with that.

To an extent, it clearly had to do with the fact that I haven’t gotten out much in December and January — in December, I had to cancel almost all my social plans due to illness, and I’m still trying to figure out how social life works when you can’t drink and more or less can’t eat, either. (Any local readers know a hip Cambridge joint that specializes in steel-cut oatmeal and herbal tea? Didn’t think so.) So a bit of it was compensatory for my lack of a social life — if I couldn’t go out, I could at least get inspiration from style blogs and put some fun outfits together for when I could.

But the fact that I was focusing so much on the writers and academics, and their work wardrobes, was my real clue to what was going on.

I think this is the resolution I make every New Year — Jewish and Gregorian and school and fiscal and anything else — concentrate. Work when I am working, play when I am playing. It’s hard, isn’t it, for those of us who work on the computer? I’m not saying I even want to work more, or harder, or whatever. Just that when I’m writing, I should write (and not shop for cardigans on eBay), and when I am done working, there should be no vague guilt or occasional checking of e-mail.

Anyway, this is why, I think, I’ve been so interested in style blogs by academics and writers and other people for whom work and life and play and duty get blurry around the edges. Because one way you can define those edges is through how you dress. And when you’re a freelancer, you need all the help you can get. (Oh, all right, I am writing this in my bathrobe, okay?)

So one of my new — not resolutions, but practices — is to get dressed and get out more in order to do my work. I live in a city rich with coffee shops and libraries, and ought to take more advantage of them. I’m suspecting this will help my productivity and my mood (writers, academics, at-home parents, and other home-employed people — you know that dazed, almost jet-lagged feeling when the sun goes down and you realize you haven’t been out of the house all day? Hate that!) as well as the local economy.

Off to choose an outfit!

… is that what we’ve decided the last decade should be called? If so, the Oughts were, for me, the Dids. During the past ten years, I

- Met and married Mr. Improbable
- Got my PhD
- Converted to Judaism
- Taught college for two years
- Started writing the Miss Conduct column, and eventually two blogs
- Wrote my first book

… along with various other life-transition experiences, like starting to travel overseas and getting a dog.

That list isn’t meant to be “ooh, haven’t I accomplished an impressive lot,” but as evidence of what a huge decade of transition the 00s were for me. According to psychologists who study adult development, we spend about half our adult life in periods of transition. Sometimes it can be hard to know when you’re in one of those phases — maybe you don’t realize you’re in transition until you’ve already made the change.

What are you doing when you’re not in transition? Building on what you’ve got. Which is how I’m feeling at the moment: all the major pieces in my life are in place. Now it’s up to me to do something with them, to start husbanding and growing my resources.

I don’t ever recall before having a calendar decade match so closely with a personal turning point (which is probably why I got such a kick out of that post by the blogger who was born in a year ending in zero) before. Have you? How were the Oughts for you?

It’s been a while since I posted a recipe, hasn’t it? This one was sent to me by a Bosnian friend when I had to stop eating spices, tomatoes, etc. It’s kind of surprising, but very good — I’ve made it several times already. Here, somewhat edited for your ease of reading, is J’s Recipe for Potato-Stuffed Bell Peppers:

Ingredients
1. Bell peppers. stuffable. and by stuffable i mean no funky shapes.
2. potatoes (didn’t see that coming did you). any kind. really.
3. onion (if you like)
4. salt
5. oil
6. SOUR CREAM.

preheat the oven to 350 at some point during this process.

1. get some bell peppers. pick your colour. if you’re not afraid of sweetness go for the orange or yellow. otherwise do red or green or hell, mix it up. make one of each and pick your favorite.

2. potatoes! peel them (google it) and then cut them into little squares. how little? this little. left over potatoes are not a big deal, i’ll tell you what to do with those at the end.

3. if you like onion, peel one that’s smaller then a bell pepper and grate it. then squeeze the grated bits to drain them (this is fun and not at all gross). then put those… on the side somewhere… the onion is a nice addition but won’t make or break the dish. [Note from Robin: I usually also season the potatoes with paprika and dill.]

4. drain the potatoes. then add oil, salt, and drained grated onion if you like, mix it all together and then stuff the peppers. when you stuff them, stuff them loosely – you don’t need to shove the potatoes in there. but fill up the peppers and then place them on the side in an oiled baking pan. your hands will get oily, so rub the pepper before putting it down in the pan. if you have any extra potatoes just spill them around the peppers. they get all nice and crunchy and i like them.

5. bake for about an hour.

6. when you put the peppers in your plate and cut them all up and stuff… douse them in SOUR CREAM. this is the most important part. SOUR CREAM. ok… maybe not… some people would disagree with me, but that’s because they are FOOLS.

I was able to get J to agree that Greek yogurt was an acceptable variant for SOUR CREAM, but she’s right, that is the part that makes the dish. (My easy tzatziki is also good.)

This is also good with pine nuts served on the side for those who would like to add them.

… is online here.

My new glasses, I mean. (Which should arrive shortly, and pictures will be posted.) This little lady came up on my daily Google Alerts search for “Miss Conduct.”

You can have her, on eBay, for the low price of $27. She is described as follows:

THIS RETRO WOOD PUPPET IS A REPRODUCTION OF A 1940′S PIN-UP GIRL. IT MEASURES ABOUT 6″ X 13″. PULL THE STRING AND WATCH HER MOVE. THE PUPPET WILL BRING YOU BACK TO THE FUN TOYS OF THE 20TH CENTURY THAT EXISTED BEFORE COMPUTOR GAMES DOMINATED THE SCENE.

I do like that skirt …

Since we apparently have a number of clothesline fans on the blog, I thought I’d share one of my favorite pieces of art with you all. It’s called “Fruit Bats,” by Lin Onus, an aboriginal Australian artist, and it riffs on the laundry hoists that are ubiquitous throughout Australia. This bit is a detail — check out the whole piece and its critical description.

I’ll be chatting today from noon-1 Eastern time here. You can read the transcript afterward if you can’t attend the live chat.

… and my further top five from 2009 (I’m enjoying your recommendations too, folks!)

6. The American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld. I reviewed this here.

7. Rebuilt by Michael Chorost. See, here we go with that description problem again … this is a memoir by a man who got a cochlear implant at age 30. Yaaaaaawn. But it is, in fact, a brilliant, funny, honest and compassionate look at what it means to be a social being, the difference between hearing and listening, and the nature of relationships.

8. Still Woman Enough by Loretta Lynn with Patsi Bale Cox. I’d planned to write about Loretta Lynn’s second autobiography — the one she wrote after her husband died, when she could really tell the truth — when I first read it, but shortly after that, the Roman Polanski scandal broke and I couldn’t, because I couldn’t wrap my head around Ms. Lynn’s marriage at age 13. Months after I’ve read the book, I still don’t know what to make of it. Ms. Lynn’s intelligence and ignorance are both on astonishing display as she recounts her improbable life.

9. Guns, Germs, & Steel by Jared Diamond. Yes, finally, like the rest of the world, I read this classic of “Why Everything Is the Way It Is and Not Some Other Way Entirely, and by the Way It Has Nothing to Do with Race.” Good book, although a number of folks in one of my chats mentioned that it’s fairly repetitious, which indeed it was.

10. Under the Dome by Stephen King. I said I liked King on a wide canvas? Here, he gives himself an entire Maine town to characterize — and kill. It’s no spoiler to say that 300 pages in, I was already beginning to wonder if enough people would survive to finish the 1,000+-page novel. Whatever your politics, the first 400 pages or so after “the dome” of the title descends will make you angry — either by reminding you of the Bush administration, or by painting an unfair picture of it. Then the action kicks in. Don’t make any social plans after you hit page 600 or so.