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My beloved alma mater (Beloit College), and my beloved advisor (Tom McBride), each year release the Mindset List, a hilarious and insulting rigmarole of what this year’s entering students don’t know about. With such startling revelations as “55. Rock bands have always played at presidential inaugural parties,” the list reads like an annual scanning of the “Events of 1992″ page on Wikipedia.

I hate this list and it makes me mad, mostly because it doesn’t actually build the understanding it pretends to aim toward. More and more people have no guilt or shame whatsoever in their total lack of knowledge of what came before they were born, and have a borderline-adversarial relationship with the interests of their parents or other adults. We build more lateral connections, with peers and friends and even trusted strangers via blogs or TV, than we do vertical connections, with relatives, educators, and so forth.

The list’s makers insist it is only to give a frame of reference to adults who do not wish to sound irrelevant to the young people in their lives. Yet all the list does is remind everyone how old they are and subtly imply that young people are worse off for their level of knowledge. It makes both sides defensive and both take issue with the items on the list.

The New Yorker asks if the Mindset List is still relevant:

The Beloit list has always been a bit musty, often trading in cultural totems as stale as coffee in a faculty lounge. (See all the lists here.) The reader—young or old, hip or otherwise—can’t help but squirm at lines like: “70. The artist formerly known as Snoop Doggy Dogg has always been rapping.” But for the class of 2014, for whom “‘digital’ has always been in the cultural DNA,” the list seems particularly outmoded. If nothing else, I suspect that kids now know more, rather than less, about these types of cultural trivia and historical fragments, because as each year passes, the information becomes so much easier to obtain.

I wouldn’t go that far. But I do question the list’s relevance every year. Even if a few people my age at Beloit thought of Paul Newman as “the salad dressing guy” (an item of note on our list), that made me feel deeply embarrassed by their ignorance. The Beloit students I know are also embarrassed that the Mindset List is our college’s only entrance into the national consciousness.

This happened a while ago actually. But my buddy Mairead recently put a thing on her wall and I shared my tip to find picture frames at thrift stores. Here are some of my things. They’re blurry because my camera’s not awesome!

L-R: A small postcard map of something neat; Andy Dick (creepy man, good picture); Anthony Kiedis; beloved photo with college newspaper compatriots; and remnants of my Fraggle costume from last Halloween.

L-R: Some hands; Axl Rose; some Florida fishes; a beautiful silk scarf of butterflies that’s too fragile to wear; and a Subversive Cross Stitch rendered by my patient friend Crystal.

L-R on wall: Roger Waters; most beloved departed grandfather; an old photo of some mailboxes from Beloit; favorite surfer Kelly Slater. On shelf: Most beloved mom and dad; photo of me, small, wearing a Sunday dress and somehow holding a large matching rooster.

This New York Times story on parents postponing kindergarten for a year is the latest example of insane, one-up-oriented 21st-century parenting technique.

“I have met mom after mom who is intentionally holding her child back a year,” said Jennifer Finke, a mother of two in Englewood, Colo. “They say they don’t want their kids to be the youngest or shortest. Is that right? Is it fair?”

Or this:

Suzanne Collier, for one. Rather than send her 5-year-old son, John, to kindergarten this year, the 36-year-old mother from Brea, Calif., enrolled him in a “transitional” kindergarten “without all the rigor.” He’s an active child, Ms. Collier said, “and not quite ready to focus on a full day of classroom work.” Citing a study from “The Tipping Point” about Canadian hockey players, which found that the strongest players were the oldest, she said, “If he’s older, he’ll have the strongest chance to do the best.”

The article goes on to explain that there’s added pressure to hold children back a year since if they enter at the correct age they’ll be up to 18 months younger than other children in the same class, which can have serious effects on personal development.

I didn’t go to kindergarten and started first grade instead. Because of the genetic lottery, I always was the tallest girl in my class regardless of age, so size didn’t have any effect on me after starting school early — I can’t speak to that part and do not underestimate how children may get picked on or left out because they are smaller.

But in terms of maturity or life experience, simply being older doesn’t make a damn bit of difference. Someone just like me who had started kindergarten at age 6 would be 19 at her high-school graduation and 23 if she followed it directly with a bachelor’s degree.

She would enter the world of entry-level work two full years after I did and compete against both those who had gone to work right away and those who had spent a year doing community service or some other kind of transitional experience. By age 25 I’ll have four years of full-time work experience where this theoretical person will have two.

More importantly, Americans fall further and further behind the rest of the industrialized world in every core academic subject, and to suggest that our children aren’t capable of or couldn’t find happiness and fulfillment in starting to read or count at the same time they have for decades is the same old overindulgent American helicopter-parenting crapola.

We want our children to be bigger and stronger than other children but don’t mind that they will start their learning and organized socializing a full year later? That sounds like a formula for creating bullies.

Jonathan Franzen follows the people who covertly enforce Cyprus’s policy against trapping songbirds in a July 26 New Yorker feature. Apparently songbirds are the unofficial national delicacy of Cyprus, which I also did not know is a Communist state. The island is beginning to stand out as a bit backwards-looking in the cerebral and modern world of the E.U., hence the policy, which bans practices like using prepared sticks covered in sticky sap or electronic recordings of birds to lure others.

Looking at the picture of hundreds of tiny birds lined up ready to be eaten is pretty sickening. Listen, Cyprus, couldn’t you find a larger food animal, one you could trap without leaving it stuck to something and beating itself to death trying to escape? It’s really cruel. Everyone knows I have a natural affinity toward tiny island nations but you’re pushing it.

Franzen follows a couple of Cypriots who belong to an organization called CABS — the Committee Against Bird Slaughter. They get into some trouble when two locals assault the CABS members, and Franzen and another outsider run as fast as they can until Franzen has an absurdly lucky break:

Heyd continued to retreat, which seemed to me a good idea. When I saw him look back and go pale and break into a dead run, I panicked too. [...]

I saw Heyd running on up through a large garden, speaking to a middle-aged man, and then, looking frightened, continuing to run. I walked up to the garden’s owner and tried to explain the situation, but he spoke only Greek. Seeming at once concerned and suspicious, he fetched his daughter, who was able to tell me, in English, that I’d blundered into the yard of the district director of Greenpeace. She gave me water and two plates of cookies and told my story to her father, who responded with one angry word. “Barbarians!” the daughter translated.

I laughed at this sort of orange-yellow-brown yarn I picked up in a grab bag somewhere. Its makers describe it as “antique gold,” and I kept it around in hopes I’d someday need to make a vintage-looking Cowardly Lion costume or something. Then by chance it fell into the big yarn bin next to this color I like terribly, what you’d probably call a raspberry — a deep, rich pink that could maybe not even be pink anymore.

HARMONIOUS COMPLEMENTARY SITUATION.

For visual interest I’m using a slightly off white and a nice neutral charcoal gray as well. It’s a basic feather-and-fan pattern which lends it the wavy shape. Do not adjust your television set.

p.s. Yes, that is a gold sweater clip holding my side spare yarns together — it is a family hand-me-down from my mom or one of her sisters, and I feel strongly that this new use outside of sweaters honors them all.

Sweet Sophie girl is mine for a few days. My goodness!

Very warm feet are considered a direct consequence of dog-under-desk. Exhibit A:

I find it strange and sad that society moves toward regularizing everyone — rather than valuing and helping people with strange, interesting tendencies or abilities, we cram them into a more standard form. The obvious downside is the collapsing of individuality. Beyond that, though, are the consequences of trying to be or simply seem normal and conventional.

A more extreme example of this is hoarding, which is experiencing a strange media heyday at the intersection of disaster-porn and home makeover shows. Salon recently ran an interview with hoarding expert and Smith professor Randy Frost. He put the problem in a way I’d never thought of:

When most of us look at an object like a bottle cap, we think, “This is useless,” but a hoarder sees the shape and the color and the texture and the form. All these details give it value. Hoarding may not be a deficiency at all — it may be a special gift or a special ability. The problem is being able to control it.

People often wonder aloud what may have happened to some of the great artists in history if their esoteric habits and sometimes destructive personalities were chemically regulated. More than that, who knows how many of our most productive mathematicians and scientists experienced mild forms of autism, how many philosophers experienced enlightenment through bouts of depression, and so forth.

There is no reason for people to suffer when we have ways to ease their pain, and I’m not suggesting otherwise. But I do think we can understand and help in moderation, while not unnecessarily squashing anyone’s “special gifts.”

The one-size-fits-all problem shows up in more benign ways that are arguably as offensive. On a new Style Network show called Tacky House, people nominate their loved ones for a makeover of a room the nominator simply can’t stand because of its poor design.

In the episode I watched, a husband nominated his wife of several years who had designed a room in their home around the Martha’s Vineyard locale where they met and fell in love. She filled the room with arrangements of silk roses, flower-upholstered furniture, and all manner of pastel pinks. “I thought you loved this room,” she mumbled sadly. “How am I supposed to watch football in here?” he said.

Yes, the room was overkill, but there was so much love coming from the wife and so little appreciation coming from the husband that it was uncomfortable to watch. The show’s host corrected the woman’s memory in hindsight (“Martha’s Vineyard is a beach, it’s not full of roses,” he’d say. “But I loved the gardens there,” she’d answer) and wedged a new image into the room.

Yuck:

“You can’t get that at the Second Avenue Deli,” he said, pointing out thick spears of chicken, celery and carrot, and sprigs of dill that were barely contained by the bowl.

I’ve reread this a few times and can’t figure out the list of ingredients. Maybe it’s the awful term “thick spears,” which I could imagine referring to potatoes or something but not celery, not carrots, and certainly not chicken. With the extra comma after carrot, the sentence tells us only the dill was barely contained by the bowl, which sounds like a LOT of dill. Bad show, Julia Moskin.

On the other hand, the article from which I drew the sentence is interesting and worth reading: Can the Jewish Deli Be Reformed?

P.S. Take a moment and reflect on the irony of my earlier post on anti-swearing language elitists combined with this persnickety language dissection. But clear language isn’t an issue of education or elitism — trying to be artificially descriptive or clever muddies the writer’s message.

It’s that time again. Time for the same old tired, nonsensical debate over swearing in the public eye . . .

OMG, SWEARING SHOWS NO VOCABULARY! SMART PEOPLE TOTALLY DON’T SWEAR! LANGUAGE IS DUMBER BECAUSE OF SWEARS!

. . . Brought out again by the New York Times in an article I desperately hope has an ironic title: Why Do Educated People Use Bad Words?

This debate is stupid, illogicked to say the least, and full of dweebs. Try to find an issue where there’s more overlap between conservative religious people and well-to-do liberals. At least people who object to swearing because it offends them religiously have some argumentative ground to stand on — they believe that poor language offends the deity or takes the deity’s name in vain. But to suggest that swearing is some shameful cesspool of the idiocracy is short-sighted and elitist.

Yes, I went there: Elitist. It is a word I use sparely because as a college-educated avid reader, student of language, and allaround nerd, I am vulnerable to it myself. But read the comments on the post, especially those with a high number of reader recommendations — they’re absurd. Of particular note are the comments stating explicitly that smart people do not swear. I’m sorry, internet stranger, have you met any of the smartest people I know? Because almost all of them swear regularly and, more importantly, that has nothing to do with anything. Equating intelligence with lack of swearing opens up a giant logical gap.

Don’t mistake my message here: To not swear is fine also. In the last six months or so I made a decision to clean up my language, if only to increase the impact when I do pull out a swear to make a point. There’s no way anyone who drives in the city of Chicago could ever fall out of practice in the art of fine profanity.

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