If teenage girls were all like Bella Swan, it would be 1708.

Or, Why I won't be letting my daughter read Twilight at 13.

I read the Twilight books. I actually read the first two before books three and four were even out. I was ahead of the curve on this one, since my husband's high school students gave him the heads up. So, as a favour to him, I read the books, which he duly stocked in his classroom. At least, he did the first two.
He may add the third to the collection. He will likely never add the fourth.
It's not just the sex (and if that was a spoiler for you, tough). It's the attitude towards sex.
That Stephanie Meyer treated sex as something that happens after marriage in the first two books was something cute and sweet. That sex (and marriage) becomes entangled in ideas of predestination, fate and inevitability, rather than just love, is a problem for me.
Take, for instance, the werewolves and their imprinting. The werewolf meets the right mate and the two fall in love, no matter what. Meyer, early on, in an unimportant character, introduces the idea that a werewolf, who will age slowly because of the change, will imprint on a baby, if that baby is the right person, and will duly maintain a protective, rather than romantic or sexual, relationship with the child until the child is of age.
There's something so sick wrapped in that harmless idea, that someone will love you your whole life, acting as an uncle or a close family friend might, and then taking that relationship somewhere else. Is it Mormon idea? I don't know. But I do know that I don't like it. I don't like the idea that girls will read this and think it's okay to try to cultivate a romantic relationship with an adult close to their family. Adults attempting inappropriately romantic relationship with family friend's children are abusers.
It's not my only issue, but Jacob imprinting on newborn (though growing fast) Renesmee, the vampire-human hybrid, is a definite problem for me.
Another problem is that Bella gets married and throws herself completely into her relationship with Edward, to the exclusion of our family and friends. Yes, it's because she's a vampire, but is that really an example we want our own teenage girls to have. This heady, romantic, sexual relationship, as typical in intensity as any first love/lust, is treated as something that can be taken as an excuse to escape, to become someone new. Putting all ones eggs in a basket - and the wrong basket at that. High school graduation does not make one an adult, and going to college is not a light experience that one can commit to half-heartedly.
In the end, I hate the be-all-and-end-all Meyer gives married life for Bella. It changes everything for her in irrepairable ways.
At least she hit that nail on the head.

This comic by Lucy Knisley sums up the ridiculousness of the books nicely. They are a black hole that sucks you in and it's nigh impossible to think critically of them while caught in their thrall. After, it's much easier to see that they have all the substance and nutritional value of a bag of chips, with the same quality that lures you to keep eating, without thinking.

If you're such a poet, twist your tongue and show it

I took a class at Dalhousie University in Creative Writing from Andrew Wainwright. Dr. Wainwright was a published poet and novelist, as well as a scholar of literature, particularly Canadian Literature. I'd already taken his CanLit class (and was thankful for the introduction to Tomson Highway's Kiss of the Fur Queen, one of my favourite books). One day, at the beginning of class, he pulled out the Globe and Mail's Review. It was probably a Monday since that's a Saturday edition thing. Anyway, on the cover was Coke Machine Glow, the recently published book of poems by The Tragically Hip's Gord Downie.
"To get on the cover of the Review as a poet, you have to be a rockstar. What does that say about culture in Canada?" Wainwright said.
I have never forgotten, ever, that I will never make the front page of a newspaper as a poet, unless I get to be a rockstar first.

By the way, I read Coke Machine Glow. It's okay. Downie writes better song lyrics. The poems come across as B-roll, stuff not good enough to make a song.

All that to get at this: I have a list of influential people in my life. I don't usually list it off, or make a big deal out of it. At the same time, I know who they are. Some of them know (or knew) who they are.
In the past year, two of them have died. Wainwright, as far as I know, is not one of them, though he did influence me quite a bit.
The first one to die was Malcolm Stone, the copyeditor at the paper where I worked when I was 21. Malcolm was the dirtiest old hipster you ever saw. He lived in a farmhouse, had no running water and made his living teaching bridge and correcting the grammar and spelling of his local community paper.
He was, in a way, my hero. He was a connoisseur of French fries, a lover of canned goods, and a gourmand in all the best ways. His New Yorker was a pleasure to be savoured, as was his weekly Wednesday copy of the New York Times (purchased solely for the food section). He loved to write headlines influenced by song lyrics.
I didn't know what to make of him at first, but once I got past the cigarette aura, I admired him. He was the ultimate freespirit.
I excelled at copyediting and I knew it was, in part, because I had been under the tutelage of a man who carried around a battered copy of the American Heritage dictionnary.

This week, my former boss died. A heart attack felled him in his office Monday morning. It would have been sunny, I think, and he may have just watered his plants. He would have already had his coffee. He always had his coffee ready first.
That's the one thing he and Malcolm had in common - they both liked coffee and drank more than I could ever manage.
Bernie hired me, with no real "finance" experience to be his assistant. I think it was because I claimed to know databases. I did know databases - it had just been a long time since I'd played around with one.
Bernie would give me a task and let me do it. I would come back and ask questions, but I normally figured it out. If I got frustrated (as I did when it came time to making the blank budget files work), he'd just ask me a couple of questions and send me back to work on it. I did get it eventually, and I felt good about what I had managed to do.
I felt like I could have been an accountant if I'd wanted, which is something for a girl who wanted nothing more than to be a journalist. See, I already had the word thing down pat.
Bernie's best quality, his most influential quality, was making you feel like you could do something if you put your mind to it. He treated everyone as capable. Some people said you had to go with a fully formulated plan of action, and it was true. If something needed to be done, you needed to know what. But once you knew what it was, Bernie was willing to let you figure out how to get there.
He was my boss at a time when I didn't know what I wanted to do, and I wish I could have kept working for him.

Atheism and me

Here's the thing: I was raised an atheist.
My parents are reasonable people. My dad was raised a Catholic. When Vatican II came in when he was in his early twenties, he actually understood what the priests were saying for the first time. And that was enough for him. My mom was the "sinner" her friends took to church on "Take a Sinner Sunday." While she attended a variety of churches growing up, none of them stuck.
I think my parents raised my brother and I with a pretty strict moral code, much of it centred around the idea of "Judge not lest ye be judged." Because what gives one person the right to judge who you are and what you do? If it's not the legal system, you should probably keep your mouth shut.
I didn't have to reject a church or a system of beliefs to get to where I am today. It is well-documented that I was a know-it-all 14-year-old who caught on to the fact that believing that your own religion is the only right one leads to a world of trouble.
At the same time, had I decided to join a church or hold a certain system of beliefs as an adult, I know my parents, as long as I didn't try to recruit them, would have been accepting of that.
So here, at 28, is the code I follow:
1. Everyone's beliefs are legitimate.
2. That said, I don't have to tolerate people who force their beliefs on me.
3. There's a right and a wrong and a bunch of shades of grey in between and you can trust the majority of people to inherently understand that.
4. That said, people's understanding of right and wrong can be clouded by many things, including religion.
5. There's not much point in arguing with people about their faith.
6. I will raise my own children to be open-minded to all faiths and creeds. If they want to follow a particular one, I will accepting of that.
7. I will speak out against the dangers of fundamentalism when confronted with it.
8. I will not become a fundamentalist myself, therefore I will not go around preaching about the lack of a god. I will debate when engaged, but I will try not to rage. Though I will rage when talking things over with likeminded people (ie, my parents).
9. I do believe that there is something in the universe that is amazing - that so many small factors, from environment to evolution to sheer survival instinct (not only of humans, but of every species on Earth) brought us to where we are today. I do not believe there was a grand order to things, outside the natural order.

I heard Stuart A. Kaufmann on the radio before Christmas, talking about this. I felt like he was saying what I'd been feeling for years. He wrote Reinventing The Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason and Religion.

Bleeding Hearts

My dad grew up in the city. He spent his summers up in Chatham, supposedly doing country boy things. But they were vacation country boy things. My mom, on the other hand, grew up in the country. Her parents had a cow for milk, chickens for eggs and a garden for vegetables. My mom wore navy blue tights that dyed her legs blue when they got wet ordered from the Simpsons catalogue, but many of her clothes were handmade. Or hand-me-downs.
My mom's chores involved things like weeding a garden. My father's did not.

Fast forward thirty or forty years. My mom and dad have met, married and had two children. They've had a house with a large vegetable garden, cared for by my grandfather, my mother and occasionally, my brother and I, though mostly we just eat all the peas. We have moved into a new house with a huge lawn and flower beds, but no fence, so no garden. My mom takes great pride in finding things that will grow in these little patches around the yard.
One day, she arrives home and in the garage, in her wheelbarrow, are her bleeding hearts.
It's June. They were in full bloom, dripping with blossoms.
My father cut them down. And it wouldn't have been easy either since he couldn't just mow them over, which was the fate of my mother's rose bush ten years before. This act of mutiny in the garden took forethought and planning. Which is my mother is foaming at the mouth, muttering something involving the words blooms, stupid, man and blind.
I decide it is best to leave for a bit and let my mom exact her revenge. I can hear her in the desk next door, rifling for something in my craft and school supplies, still muttering. I wait before descending to the kitchen.
There, on the table, are the bleeding hearts. The table has been spread with a garbage bag. At the head of the table, at my usual seat, is a looseleaf gravestone that reads, "RIP Bleeding Hearts."
I smiled at my mom. And then I left because I didn't need to see my father's reaction.

Years later, I will tend toward the dramatic when my own husband causes me to rage against the stupidity of man. I will tell him, quite uncharitably, that our daughter could have died because he didn't put the car seat back together properly (instead of noting that he did a fabulous job freeing it of cracker crumbs). That I will fall down the stairs and kill myself if he keeps turning out the light before I make it up the stairs. That I am only doing these things to make an impression, to remind him that he really should get out the instruction manual for the car seat. That, despite his last name, he doesn't have to be a stereotypical cheap Scot about the electrical bill when it comes to two minutes of light. That, while he's unlikely to pull out the carrots instead of the weeds in our vegetable garden, he's still male and he'll still manage to do something that makes me crazy just because I'm female.