Our New House

We are in escrow and the green house is on the market, hopefully to sell very soon. This new house is about a mile away from where we currently live -- it's a great location near friends and in a nice neighborhood, and the house is pretty much exactly what we want. The backyard is a bit smaller than what we have now, but the house is one-story with 4 bedrooms, a nice-sized kitchen and great room, dining room, and a beautiful master suite. I've posted a number of pictures below -- just pretend the current owners' stuff (and dogs) isn't there!

Great Room

Kitchen/Great Room

Kitchen

Hall Bathroom

Backyard

Backyard

Master Bedroom

Tub in Master Bath

Yoda, I Am

Don't you wish you could be Yoda too? Take the quiz to find out which Star Wars character you are at http://www.liquidgeneration.com/Media/Default.aspx?MediaId=1415

SPOILER: If you haven't read the book Middlesex, and I do recommend it, you should know that I talk about some of the plot points extensively in this post. I don't think I give away much that the author doesn't also give away in the first page of the book, but if you expect to read the book at some point, consider yourself warned.

I've just finished reading a very good book, Middlesex, that everyone else read a couple of years ago. I was supposed to read it a couple of years ago too, when my book club read it, but I wasn't able to go to the meeting so I didn't read the book till now. In it, a hermaphrodite, Calliope/Cal, describes the family events that led to his/her birth and being raised to the age of 14 as a girl before discovering that she was actually genetically male. In an interesting coincidence, I also watched a 20/20 special on transgendered children, or children who believe they were born into the wrong body because they feel themselves to be the other gender. The special profiled three children: a teen who is biologically female but is now living life as a boy; the saddest 10-year-old I've ever seen, who was born a boy but has always felt she was a girl, watching jealously as her twin sister was everything she wanted to be (she is now living as a girl); and a 6-year-old who was born male but lives as the girl she's been proclaiming herself to be since she was two. It was riveting TV. And it made me thing more about what happens to the main character in Middlesex.

As Calliope reaches puberty, she begins to sense that her body is different from those of female classmates, and she is uncomfortable with the sexual feelings she has for girls, especially the one she refers to as the Object (of her affection, of course). But until that tender age fails to produce breasts and crushes on boys, Callie is comfortable being a girl -- in fact, up until that time, she thinks of herself as a very pretty girl. But after an examination at the emergency room following an accident reveals that something is amiss between her legs and her parents take her to an expert in gender reassignment and other intersex issues, she is so disturbed at the prospect of hormones and surgery to keep her a woman that she runs away from her family and begins living as a young man, never to return to her former female self.

Based solely on what the special about 20/20 said, it would seem that the novel, while compelling, is just plain... well, wrong. The "sexologist" Callie sees notes in his report how remarkable it is that, although chromosomally she is XY, having been raised as a girl, she feels herself to be female, but she is horrified enough at his conclusiont hat she is a biologically male (and in the knowledge that she is attracted to females) that she leaves everything she knows and transforms herself into a male. What little I learned about transgendered individuals indicates that there is one more, evidently even more important factor in determining gender than biology or socialization, a kind of gender identification we are all born with, something that Calliope would presumably not be able to just turn on its ear in order to transform into Cal.

I do recognize that transgendered (feeling oneself to be the opposite sex of the body one is born into) is different than intersexual (born somehow neither completely male nor female in a biological or genetic sense), and I don't know anything about how gender identity works in intersexuals, but all this sure has got me thinking about how central the concept of gender is in our lives. It seems so basic, so cut and dried: you have one set of plumping and you're a girl, the other and you're a guy. Apparently not. Off to do some research on the subject...

Last Week Wasn't So Hot

A week ago Saturday, someone broke into our cars and stole our Transpods (thingy to play iPods in the car). Actually, "broke in" is probably over-stating things somewhat, since we had accidentally left our garage door open that night and the cars weren't locked or anything. They also took all our CDs, most of which were homemade mixes. I hate the idea of a couple of punks out there sitting around making fun of my mix CDs! The scariest thing about it was that the owner's manual for Reasonable Man's car was sitting out on the seat when we discovered the theft the next morning, as though they were trying to figue out how to steal the car. We suspect that was what attracted them to our garage in the first place.

On Monday, I received the replacement power cord for my laptop that I'd ordered the week before -- I actually did a little dance when I discovered it on my doorstep -- only to discover that my laptop still would not take power from it. It seems the little accident that broke the power cord also broke the piece the cord attaches to in the computer. When I took the computer to the repair place to see about having it fixed, the guy told me that I was looking at at least 3 hours of labor and probably less than a 50% chance the repair would work, at which point I started crying. There is one day a month on which any kind of bad news will start me bawling, and unfortunately for the guy at the computer repair place, last Monday was that day. And the nicer he was, the worse it got.

Things improved a bit mid-week, just because nothing else bad happened -- I went about my business hauling the kids around, getting the data from my laptop transferred to an external hard drive, keeping the house in order, and actually cooking dinner almost every night. Then Friday, when I was actually doing a good deed and was the only school mom to show up to help put snacks together for the kids to have during STAR testing this week, I turned my ankle and ended up with a nastily bruised foot that I could barely walk on for the first day or so. (Don't ask me why it was my foot that ended up hurt -- that's what always happens when I twist my ankle for some reason.) So I've been limping around the last few days.

None of that is catastrophic -- just pain in the ass. I'm hoping for better luck this week.

What I've Learned About Weight Loss

I have a lot in common with "One Day At A Time" cutiepie Valerie Bertinelli these days. She and I both would like to lose 30 lbs. We both are kind of surprised that we ended up this fat. We both have tried to do it on our own and have not found success. And so we have both decided to pursue a smaller self by following a commercial diet plan.

That's where our similarities end. I am doing Weight Watchers, which has worked for me in the past. I decided on my own to go back in there, face the scale, and start working on this already. Valerie, on the other hand, got a call from the Jenny Craig people, asking her if she'd like to use their system to lose weight and do commercials showing her progress, a la Kirstie Alley. I think I got the better end of the deal here. Maybe Val is going to make a buttload of money doing Jenny Craig for free, but who wants to get a phone call from some corporate suit to the effect of "We noticed you're fat -- want a job?"

Valerie got to guest-host on "The View," and People magazine did a cover story on her. I don't care about the People cover, but I'd love to be a co-host on "The View." Also, on the People cover, which states right there in bold print that she is a size 14 (aka still a "misses" size and not all that uncommon a number to find on the jeans of America's 40-something women), Val is sporting a top that can best be described as a grecian muumuu, aka NOT FLATTERING. Normal-sized legs in normal-sized jeans peek out below. Who did this to her? I'm sure glad I get to dress myself.

Size 14 is another thing Valerie and I do not have in common. While size 14 is reason enough for her to feel fat enough to go on a diet in front of the entire nation, I will probably be a nice, well-proportioned size 14 after I lose 30 lbs. Also, I'm not sure she realizes that, even right now, 30 pounds overweight, she still looks like Valerie freaking Bertinelli. I, on the other hand, will never look like Valerie Bertinelli no matter how much weight I lose. No one will ask me to do Jenny Craig commercials or guest appearances on sitcoms, much less watch a show about a braless single mom with a creepy building super hanging around all the time just to experience my hotness every week, the way guys did with Valerie did in the 70s.

On the other hand, the fact that I was never a regular on "Touched by an Angel" probably still puts me one up on Ms. Bertinelli.

In any case, I do wish her luck, but I'm not looking forward to the inevitable appearance on Oprah in a bikini six months from now.

Virginia Tech

Another sad week for our country as we try to make sense of yet another instance of a disturbed man with access to weapons bringing his twisted version of revenge on the world to fruition and taking innocentl lives in the process. Interestingly, the main point of discussion seems to have quickly moved from "why did this happen and how can we prevent it from happening again?" to "how should the media cover these events, and was all of the coverage this time, particularly the taped rantings of the perpetrator appearing on TV, appropriate?"

I do think how these things are covered is important, as is the question of whether those tapes should have been aired, and I see the difficulty faced by networks who want to give the people what they want and know that people will tune in in droves searching for the latest information but find themselves with air to fill and nothing new to report. These kinds of events are the bread and butter of networks like CNN, and we can argue that people should be paying as much attention to the kids dying over in Iraq till we're blue in the face, but we all know that if, during a week like this one, MSNBC or CNN decides to cut away from Virginia Tech coverage, however repetitive, to do a story about our troops in the Middle East, most people are going to change the change the channel. It sucks, but that's the reality.

Much more important in my opinion than how the media covers these stories is the fact that they happen at all. Today is the eighth anniversary of the Columbine shootings in Littleton, Colorado; yesterday was the twelfth anniversary of the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. One thing has clearly not changed in twelve years: our culture has not stopped producing angry, disturbed young men who believe violence and death are the price the world has to pay for their rage.

I don't know if there's any way to weed them out before they do these things. It seems, every time another one of these tragedies occurs, that there were many signs that these situations were brewing, that these young men had told people around them, either explicitly or through writings, drawings or actions, that they were time bombs waiting to go off. Occasionally we do hear a story where things went the other way -- where the friend a potential shooter confided in tells someone in time to stop the shootings from happening. But that clearly isn't happening often enough. So many times, people are too frightened to take the warning signs seriously, or there isn't more they can do than to suggest a student visit the campus counseling center.

So what can we do? Well, to me it seems like a no-brainer to limit the access of guns, but apparently this is something that will never happen here because the NRA is the most powerful lobby in America, more powerful than the reality of the bodies of dead sons and daughters being removed from a high school, an Amish school house, a university building, or a middle school. In Virginia, it was apparently more important for citizens to have the right to buy one gun per month (how many months does it take to assemble an arsenal?) than it was to make sure a college student who had never committed a felony but who had been involuntarily committed wouldn't be allowed to buy two handguns and fifty rounds of ammunition. And in the Oval Office, someone decided the first order of business in responding to this situation was to appease the gun lobby by affirming the president's support of the unlimited right to bear arms, and that he could express his sympathy to the victim's families later. Is this the country you want to live in?

Why Can't I Make Time to Post?

Here are the other things I make time to do online every day:

Check my email
Read through all the entertainment news that I have listed on my My Yahoo page
Go to Television Without Pity and read recaps of any shows I watched the night before
Go to Pop Culture Junk Mail and see what kind of cool, retro, 80s, funny or crazy stuff Gayle has found lately
Go to the Superficial and read celebrity gossip
Go to That's What She Said and read any new posts about The Office and then the comments, possibly adding my own
Go to Mick LaSalle's blog and read any new posts and then the comments, possibly adding my own

Every day, I have many thoughts about many different things, many of which are worth putting in my blog. Those thoughts are the reason I started my blog in the first place. And yet, although I think about putting those thoughts and ideas down in my blog and I rarely do it, which makes me annoyed with myself and starts a whole snowball effect of "if I didn't blog about This Big Thing, I can't just blog about That Little Thing because" -- why? It'll make me seem like a shallow person? I'm not sure. Sometimes it's true that all I'm really thinking about is American Idol, or something someone did that really pissed me off five years ago. Those things are part of who I am -- so what? If I talk to my friends about those things, why shouldn't I put them in this space, as long as they aren't gossipy things that would be hurtful to someone I know?

Long story short -- I'm going to try to do better. Watch this space...

On My Mind

American Idol: Addictive. I never watched before this season -- why? Chris Sligh was my early favorite, and I was pretty surprised when he got the boot this past week, but not too disappointed -- he was kind of doing a slow fade in the last few weeks. I think Jordan Sparks is my favorite now...

Jesus Camp: Reasonable Man and I watched this documentary the other night, and it's not an exaggeration to say it scared the crap out of us. I don't have a problem with Christianity at all, but indoctrinating defenseless kids with the idea that their generation has to be an army for the cause, doing all they can to spread their "message" (which is intolerance from what I can tell), that their entire purpose in life is to devote themselves to Christ, and that God has a plan for their lives (so they have no free will, and there is a right choice and a wrong one at every fork in the road of their lives?), seems wrong-headed in cruel. Over and over, they showed kids sobbing during sermons, presumably because they are full of sin and know they have to repent? These are little kids. The few that they focused on seemed lovely and smart and articulate, definitely capable of doing real good in the world, but it was hard to see the path they had been sent on as the right one.

That's What She Said: On, a lighter note, if you are a devotee of The Office like I am (I even have a Dunder-Miffilin baseball cap!), this podcast is for you. I've gorged myself on their approximately 90-minute podcasts covering every episode of this season, in which they explicate the 20-or-so minutes of air-time Office shenanigans plus and deleted scenes they can find at nbc.com. Pure bliss for a Jammer like me.

The five episodes of The Office on NBC this past Thursday didn't hurt either. And finally, after six weeks of reruns, a new episode this coming week!

The Omnivore's Dilemma and The Better World Shopper's Guide: In the former, which I read for my book club, I learned that virtually every processed food we eat is packed with corn, the wrongheaded political and economic reasons our country produces an ocean of corn in the first place, the difference between the organic ideal and the industrialized organic food we're seeing so much of these days, and so much more. I carry the latter title in my purse to help me use the money I spend to support socially responsible companies and avoid the ones that aren't. Going to Safeway is ever so much more complicated, but I've learned a lot and I know I'm feeding my family better than before.

The View: I tape it every day and watch the "hot topics" discussions they start with most days. As someone who has generally avoided reading much about current events since approximately January 2001, I'm learning a lot about the issues of the day, and I have to applaud a show that lets four women get up there and say what they really think (even though I think most of what Elisabeth Hasselbeck thinks is lame).

Drake Bell of Nickelodeon's Drake & Josh: He's Mermaid's obsession, but we were impressed when we saw him sing at Arden Fair Mall last weekend (just him and a guitar, plus he sang Blackbird, one of my favorite Beatles' songs) and he was very sweet to Mermaid when we got his autograph and chatted with him. The girl has good taste :-)

What I've Been Doing Lately

The house: We have pretty much made up our minds that we want to move. We want a house that's bigger, one that is one-story and has at least four bedrooms, and one with a better master bedroom/closet/bathroom configuration, one that is here in South Davis. Not many of those come on the market, so for now we are waiting, and keeping our eyes and ears open. And because I have serious anxiety about the idea of selling our current house, I've been working, slowly and steadily, on getting it ready to sell. Spring came early this year -- at the end of February, more or less -- so I've been doing lots of work out in the yard, and I've also been doing some painting inside. I've painted the family room a more neutral shade of yellow -- more of a cream -- and I'm still seesawing back and forth about changing the red accent walls to something more neutral as well. On the one hand, our real estate agent advised me to paint them. On the other -- this house is full of color, and anyone who doesn't like color isn't going to buy it with some of the other bright colors I've chosen for other rooms anyway. To me, the red accent wall with our fireplace is the highlight of the entire house, and I imagine that half the people who walk in would love it and the other half would hate it.

I know this isn't hugely important, but it's the kind of thing I've been thinking about lately.

I've also been doing a lot of work at school lately. The first week of this month was the spring Scholastic Book Fair, and I'm one of 5 chairpeople for that. I actually wrote a long post about kids and money last weekend, which Blogger ate, but I think I can summarize it here pretty easily:

Considering how out-of-control materialistic we are as a society, it's touching how most 6-year-olds still think a couple of dollars is a lot of money. They walk into that book fair thinking they're going to be able to buy everything in sight.

Tax is a difficult concept for pretty much everyone under the age of 10.

A lot of kids want to share with their friends, and for every generous kid, there's one who is willing to exploit their friendship in order to get stuff. That's why we made a new rule during this book fair, that if you want to buy something for your friend, a forty-five cent eraser is fine and a five-dollar book is not.

I personally don't let my kids spend money at the book fair unless I'm right there with them (since I'm a co-chair, that's quite a bit of the time).

When promoting the book fair, Scholastic is all about the books. Then you open the doors and the kids flood in, and they are all about the stuff. A huge portion of the profits from Scholastic book fairs comes from third graders buying highlighters they don't need, bendy pencils that don't write well, scented erasers, notebooks, planners (!?), bookmarks, and pens with all manner of junk attached to the ends of them. I have mixed feelings about this stuff. I love to shop, and some of the stuff is awfully cute, so I can understand the attraction to it. But I also hate the fact that we are basically exploiting kids who have a few dollars and want to spend it so much on junk they don't need. I just read a book about the ill effects of advertising to kids, and the bottom line is that it is shameful how much marketing is directed at kids who are too young to know they are being manipulated.

In general, though, I love the book fair. It's fun to work on something that people enjoy so much.

I'm also working on our annual Parents' Night Out auction, which is this coming Saturday on the UCD campus. For the third year, I am collecting reservations, and I'll also be helping to set up on the day of the event. Fun stuff :-)

So that's what I've been doing lately. Not terribly exciting, but it's keeping me busy.

Jumpstart This Blog

I really let this thing psych me out. I know I didn't write the whole month of December because I didn't finish my Nano novel this year and then felt like, hey, if I couldn't find time to write my novel, I shouldn't be writing in my blog either. That's stupid and doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but I know that's what happened. So anyway: guess what, world? I didn't finish my Nano novel this year. I was struggling with it anyway, and then I went for a week of outdoor ed with my daughter's class in the middle of November and came home sick and was just never able to get back in the rhythm again. It started to feel like torture and that is not why I do Nano each November. So that's that. I will most like try again next November.

The other reason I slack off writing here is that I get lots of ideas about things to write about and then I know I will want to write something long and brilliant about each topic and that scares me away from writing at all. That's something I've been fighting against since I started this blog, and it's probably close to the reason I don't write enough in general, and the reason that Nano has been so great for me every November till this past one. But anyway -- I'm vowing to set that aside and get back on track. I'd like to say I'm going to post here everyday, but I know that's a lofty and unrealistic goal, so instead I'm going to say that I want to post here several times a week and go from there.

To get myself started, I'm going to do a series of posts here today to kind of describe what's been going on in my life and in my brain lately -- kind of like cleaning out the closets -- and hopefully that will get me going toward that elusive goal of posting more regularly.

The Oscars

I'm going to pretend that people will actually check in here to see what I thought about the Oscars and post my review of it, as though I'm some kind of entertainment journalist or something. Why not?

- General thoughts -- most of the telecast was incredibly boring, but in the end I thoroughly enjoyed it, mostly because a) enough of the people and films I wanted to win awards actually did and b) I spent the second half of the telecast posting comments on the blog of my favorite movie critic, Mick Lasalle, and this morning he actually referred to TWO of the things I said in his blog entry about the Oscars. How cool is that? (Look, most of us are total geeks about something, and I am a geek about movie reviews. Not actual MOVIES, you understand -- although I am quite picky about what I see, since I've had kids I don't get out and see movies nearly often enough. But I do read movie reviews pretty voraciously, and pride myself on knowing critics think about all the movies I'm not seeing. This makes it possible for me to both enjoy the Oscars every year even if I haven't seen any of the movies AND scream like Abigail Breslin when I see a movie critic I respect mention a couple of my comments in his blog. I respect your right to find that obnoxious.)

Anyway, if you are interested, here is where Mick and some other fans and I were making comments during the Oscars last night: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/mlasalle/detail?blogid=38&entry_id=13823#comments
And here, in the first paragraph and in item 8, is where he agrees with two of my comments: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/mlasalle/detail?blogid=38&entry_id=13838

And that's enough about that.

- I really wanted Jennifer Hudson to win for Best Supporting Actress. She was awesome in "Dreamgirls" and I have her singing "And I Am Telling You" on my iPod -- it gives me goosebumps every time. I did NOT want Eddie Murphy to win because every time he started singing, it reminded me of his old "James Brown Hot Tub Party" skit from SNL, and also, I think he's a pig. So it made me pretty happy when she won and he didn't.

- I didn't think Alan Arkin was great in "Little Miss Sunshine" but I enjoyed his performance and was pleased that he won. (I actually would have loved to see Steve Carrell be nominated for his performance. That guy is a GENIUS). I also liked it that "LMS" won a screenplay award (even though, as a writer, it irritates me to no end that the screenplay awards are always kind of the consolation prize. My favorite movies invariably win screenplay awards and not Best Director or Picture.). For whatever reason, Reasonable Man's and my favorite "LMS" moment comes the first time they are all running to get in the moving van, and Alan Arkin yells "Get in here, you dumb bastard!" at Steve Carrell, and both the guy who said the line and the guy who wrote it got Oscars, so that was a good thing.

- I really liked "LMS" but wasn't disappointed it didn't win Best Picture because it wasn't that great. It was a really entertaining and well-done little movie and I think it's cool that it got nominated, but it's not like last year where I thought "Brokeback Mountain" was robbed or anything like that.

- We saw "The Queen" last weekend, and I thought it was a pretty solid and interesting movie that was obviously owned by Helen Mirren's performance, and good for her for winning. There's been quite a long streak of young, thin, glamorous actresses winning Best Actress going back to at least the late 90s, so it was nice to see someone break that mold -- at least the young part. She certainly looked thin and glamorous enough to suit me.

- I don't have any particular feelings about "The Departed" doing well. It's something I can't deal with really violent movies -- it's supposed to be pretty good, and being that Martin Scorsese is a highly respected director, it's very nice for him to get an Oscar. (Just for fun, I looked at his filmography on IMDB and was not surprised to find that I have seen total of about 1.6 of his movies -- I watched "Goodfellas" in its entirety, made it about a third of the way through "Cape Fear" before the tension got to me, and I saw his portion of "New York Stories," although the only thing I can really remember about it was that Rosanna Arquette was bitchy and had awesome hair.) So whatever on that. I didn't have a strong rooting interest for anything nominated for Best Picture anyway.

- The actual telecast -- ugh. Why weren't Best Supporting Actor and Actress the first two awards like usual? Starting off with Best Art Direction is not the way to go. I like Ellen Degeneres and thought she did a good job, but what did she have to work with? There just wasn't much energy to any of the proceedings, and by the time Clint Eastwood came out to give a lifetime achievement award to the Italian composer guy, I was about ready to slit my wrists.

- My vote for most fabulous dress/style goes to Kate Winslett. She always manages to wear some color no one else has on and just completely rock it. Her movie, "Little Children" as well as "Notes on a Scandal" are the only nominated movies I'd still like to see -- I read both books, found them just okay, but want to see what really good actresses can do with the material.

- I lied -- I'd also like to see "West Bank Story," which won for Best Live Short Film -- that looked like a good one.

I guess that's about it...

Getting Scammed

The other day I got scammed. And the stupid thing is, I had a very strong sense it was happening while it was happening, and I just went along with it.

On Friday afternoon, two girls knocked on my front door. As soon as I saw them, I know I got that "oh, crap" look on my face, because they told me "oh, don't worry, we're your neighbors." That got me to come outside and talk to them. The fact is, a lot of students live on our street, and I have no idea what any of them actually look like. Then they told me their under-17 girls' soccer team had qualified to play in a tournament in Orlando, Florida, and they were raising money to go. Suspicious point number 1: these girls definitely looked older than 16 -- but I wasn't really thinking about that at the time.

They pulled out a dog-eared leaflet and assured me that it wasn't magazine subscriptions -- it was sets of books, their coach had gotten them hooked up with Borders somehow, and the books were really nice and if I didn't want a set for myself, I could send them to the women's shelter, that's what a lot of their customers had been doing, etc. At this point, I was totally ignoring everything that was a little fishy about this (clearly this had no connection to Borders; sets of books are actually worse than magazine subscriptions; the girls are talking fast and keep evading my question of how much the books cost) and hearing what I want to: raising money for the soccer trip to Florida, donating books to a women's shelter. I like to donate to worthy causes, and these girls are so nice and friendly. I want to believe them.

Finally they give me a price, around $34, and I agree to send a set of set of books to the women's shelter. One of them sits down on the bench on my porch (after asking if it's okay; the other keeps telling me their coach says they have to come back and do me some other kind of favor, like washing my car) and I chat with the other girl. I ask her how long she's played soccer. She says 14 years. If she's about 16, that means she's been played soccer since she was 2? But I don't do the math till later. The girl continues spinning some tale about her father being in the military, which doesn't seem to have anything to do with playing soccer. I write out a check to "Kays Naturals" as instructed. My total is $48. I think that's a lot for shipping and handling, but still go along.

The girls thank me profusely as I hand them the check. One of them asks me about my nosering. The other, who has a nosering, comments on how painful getting her nose pierced was. They tell me they only have one more house to go to before they're done and I wonder which of my neighbors they're going to go suck up to next. As they are backing down my front walk, one of them asks if they can send me a postcard from Brazil. Brazil? They realize their mistake immediately. "Oh, sorry, Orlando!" one says! "We went to Brazil last year!" Unfortunately, at the same time, the other blurts out "we're going to Brazil after!" My eyes narrow, they hurry off, and I go inside.

Amazingly, I still think about it for a while. Sure, there were a few lies in there, but maybe a set of nice books is going to arrive from a women's shelter? Don't be stupid, I tell myself. I take the receipt they've given me, and right there in black and white it says that the person from whom I received it won't earn points toward the trip they are working for if I cancel my order. It's the whole "young people earning points/trying to win a contest" BS that I know how to spot a mile away -- I've been turning these people away from my doorstep for years. How could I have fallen for it? I Google "Kays Naturals" and found several items about this particular scam, including this warning:

"IF YOU PURCHASED MAGAZINE SUBSCRIPTIONS OR BOOK ORDERS TWO NIGHTS AGO FROM TWO TEENAGE GIRLS SAYING IT WAS FOR A SOCCER TEAM FUND RAISER THEN YOU ARE A VICTIM OF A SCAM."

I filled out the info on the back to cancel my order and wrote a little note indicating that I knew I'd been lied to. Then I got online with my bank and cancelled the check, just to be on the safe side. I certainly don't trust them to cancel my order. So in the end, no harm done -- these people aren't getting my money. Still, I can't stop thinking about it. I've actually had the desire to drive around and see if I can spot these girls, just to confront them and tell them "hey, I'm not stupid -- do you really think I didn't know you were lying to me?" Somehow, their discovering at some other place and time that I stopped payment on my check isn't nearly satisfying enough.

This whole episode makes me wonder:

Why did I just go along with it? I knew early on that many things weren't right, but apparently I was still made just socially uncomfortable enough in these situations to just smile and go along, despite having developed the assertiveness to say "no thanks" and close the door on people just like them years ago. All I can say at this point is, it won't happen to me again. I'm envisioning the next time one of these kids comes to my door and wondering what I'll say.

The other question is, who are these kids, and why do they want to do this kind of work? It turns out there's plenty of information about them online, and they are being exploited as much as their potential customers. The sleazy "travelling magazine sales crew" industry rounds up young people with promises of travel and easy money, then subjects them to all manner of dangers and abuses. To read more, see http://www.thenyrm.com/000658.html and visit www.magcrew.com.