Thanks for answering, now shut up

A few weeks ago, Amy Dickinson asked her readers what their thoughts were on kids’ sports teams’ busy schedules, after one of her readers complained that her kids missed out on family outings, holidays, summer vacations, and general “being a kid” time. Amy wrote, “The message this sends to kids is that the family revolves around their interests and that they need to be busy and hyper-scheduled in order to have full and successful lives. Unfortunately, kids from families who can't or won't adhere to these rigorous schedules are shut out of participating in sports activities that are healthy and life-enhancing,” before issuing her invitation for parents and kids to comment on the matter.

Considering the shrill, unreasonable letters she normally prints, Amy must have been shocked to hear from a rational, level-headed 12-year-old, who wrote, “When you play at a competitive level, you may have two games on the weekend, practice all year and have tournaments on three-day weekends. If you don't want to have games on the holiday weekends, then you can join a recreational team that doesn't have practice and games year-round. On an intense team, you should know this stuff and be prepared for it.”Amy kindly thanks the kid for his thoughtful answer, and then goes on to, well, treat him like an idiot. Amy’s full response follows, with my notes in boldface.

“What some parents object to (because the kid clearly doesn’t understand) is the idea that to compete at a competitive level (Amy shows her misunderstanding of the meaning of competitive) kids have to miss parts of their childhoods that we (The Adults?) value very much, such as time with family and friends (kind of a non-issue, assuming that the sport-kid’s friends are on the team with him or her, and the family attends games), as well as time spent in the community (and what child doesn’t love, um, that?).

“You are very articulate about the trade-offs you've had to make, but maybe you shouldn't have to choose between family experiences and success on the sports field. (Or maybe everyone who wants to excel at a particular activity does have to make those kinds of commitments. After all, as the kid writes, if a student wants to achieve the balance that Amy speaks of, he may join a recreational team.)

“You should have both.”

Did she even read the kid’s letter? Or did she just dismiss it out of hand because it didn’t mirror the same unchecked outrage that seethes from her pores? I fear we shall never know for certain, and yet—and yet—I suspect dismissal, of the out-of-hand variety.

But Amy Dickinson not really giving a crap is old news. Moving on to a new theme in the Agony Antagonist, I’d like to address a problem I’ve noticed in the advice columns lately: Namely, that it’s all fine and good for an advice columnist to say what would be proper in a certain situation—that one should feel morally justified in telling one’s friend to leave the baby at home sometimes, or that the proper way to deal with a cougher in a movie theater is to alert the usher—but in many cases, the advice given, if followed, would simply lead to ever-more-uncomfortable situations.

Case in point: Prudie’s latest column answers a letter from a girl who writes in to complain that her boyfriend did not buy her a birthday gift, but only got her a card. She complains further that, before her birthday, her boyfriend mentioned getting her a gift, so she had every right to expect one, and that her friends now are going so far as to say that she should dump him. The advice-seeker claims to have an imagination that sometimes “runs wild,” and to only want to know from Prudie whether she is being unreasonable.

Prudie, not unreasonably it seems to me, allows that in relationships, one may address hurt feelings. “Don't be accusatory or melodramatic,” she says. “Just tell him the way you told me—you know money is tight, but you were a little hurt when he didn't give you the gift he'd mentioned, and then ask him if something's up.”

Like I said, I’m not one to advocate not speaking up when something’s wrong. But perhaps Prudie might consider that the girl who admits her imagination runs wild—to the point where she believes that the absent gift is illustrative of something larger—and who’s spent the last several weeks since her birthday mulling over her friends’ bad advice may not be in a position to do what Prudie asks her to do: Not be accusatory or melodramatic.

In fact, what I suspect will happen, is “Giftless” will start off with every intention of not being accusatory or melodramatic. She will remind her boyfriend of the previously mentioned gift that he never gave her. Her lower lip will tremble. Her eyes will well with tears, which she will valiantly blink back. She will think, as she discusses this, as non-melodramatically as she can, about how her boyfriend probably forgot to buy the afore-promised gift because he was off flirting with his chemistry lab partner, just like he always does, even though he never admits it.

Her boyfriend is probably kind of embarrassed by the whole thing. I’m guessing that he thought he’d have the money to buy the gift, but at the last minute realized he didn’t. Giftless says she and her boyfriend are both students with part-time jobs, so it seems likely that finances were an issue.

Also likely: That the boyfriend worked a long time on writing something on the inside of the card to show Giftless how much he cares. Now, it’s true. We’re not five years old anymore, and anyway, boyfriends should not treat their girlfriends like they treated their mothers back in kindergarten. But the point remains that Boyfriend, if he is already feeling embarrassed about the situation, will probably not react well to Giftless’ tactless handling of the subject.

Giftless: Listen, I have something I need to talk to you about. As soul mates, we really need to be able to discuss when one of us is hurt by the other one, don’t you think?

Boyfriend: Ummm ...

Giftless: So, I know money’s tight, but I was a little hurt when you didn’t give me that gift you mentioned buying me for my birthday. Is anything up?

Boyfriend: You scrounging little money grubber. You know I’ve been eating ramen for the last three months, and you have the nerve to ask me why I didn’t get you a “real” present? And you obviously didn’t appreciate the card I gave you! I spent all night trying to put into words how I feel about you, and you don’t care because all that matters to you is money—things! Well, forget it. Find a new soul mate. We’re through.

I suppose that if you read into this that the Agony Antagonist has a lot of pent-up frustration about men and relationships and speaking one’s mind, you’d be right. But enough people—men and women both—exist who are very very touchy about things like money, responsibility, and emotions, that one would expect a seasoned advice professional like Prudie to keep this in mind when answering a question posed by an obviously very emotional, touchy, and irresponsible girl.

Advice news from all over

Ask Ellie, over there at the Chicago Sun-Times, had a “Play Advice Columnist for a Day” contest in her March 18 column. The lucky letter-writer, whose problems became fodder for a nation of frustrated and lonely people with their own agendas, wrote in to say that she is married to a man who was her “first,” who doesn’t fulfill her sexually, and who she doesn’t even consider manly anymore, though she does see him as a friend. Consequently, she’s taken up with a married man, and boy is the sex hot. Should she stay with her boring husband, or move on to lustier fields? Ellie gives her advice first, which sounds a lot like this:

Blah blah blah sanctity of marriage blah blah hard work blah blah blah commitment blah blah counseling.

And then a bunch of readers say basically the same thing. But here’s the thing I love: Among all the clucking hens repeating, “Save your marriage—brawk!” there’s one bright young, bitter shining star who tells it like it is:

If he had such a low libido all along, why marry him? Since she has so little respect for him (and this other man's wife), marriage counseling or any attempts on her part to reconcile their sexual appetites will be a waste of time, because this repulsive woman will cheat again. She needs to spare this man further cruelty (I'm sure he already knows what's happening) and get a divorce, stop seeing that married scumbag, then get the serious help she needs, so she will realize relationships are just that -- relating to others and not always putting your selfish needs first. (My wife had several affairs last year and I am still angry and humiliated).

Oh, how I love it. And he’s right, too. The letter-writer is repulsive, she did make a mistake in marrying the first guy who came along, and if she were at all concerned with the so-called sanctity of marriage, she wouldn’t have cheated in the first place. Brawk!

Ask Amy gives us this little gem, in her April 18 column, from a lady, Carol, who wants to share a neologism coined by her late friend. Apparently, after her friend was diagnosed with ALS, her ex-husband moved back in with her to serve as a caretaker. She felt that calling him her “ex” was a bit cold, so she called him her “wasband” or her “hasbend.” Get it??? Because he was her husband, and now he’s a has-been husband? Am I wrong in thinking that this either comes from a very bitter place in a dying woman’s heart, or else she had an extraordinarily bad sense of humor? I mean, he took care of her when she took ill, giving up his freedom and any chance at a social life in order to do so. Why be mean about it, lady? Dead lady? Waslady?

In other news, Prudie is taking people to task with a little more venom than usual, I see. To the 47-year-old man who wants to ask out his attractive 20-ish friend, she has these words:

You are what every girl is dreaming of: a middle-aged guy with a miserable track record, a daughter her own age, and apparently no self-insight. Sure, dating women more than two decades younger after multiple marital disasters is standard behavior for billionaires and movie stars, but at least those guys are billionaires or movie stars. It's good that you're hesitating; maybe your gut is telling you this young woman would be appalled by your putting the moves on her.

Ow. Though really, tough love and all. One gets the feeling that the guy was not going to come to that totally reasonable conclusion on his own. Re. the sister-in-law who told the letter-writer’s husband that her son was upset that his Easter card didn’t come with a $50 bill:

I don't even know the woman, and I already have a really bad attitude toward her. You have a right to be furious, but the larger issue here is that your beloved little nephew is being raised by a money-grubbing manipulator.

Bingo. On the money again. (No pun intended.) And to the restaurant manager who wants to know how he can dissuade his regular customer from leaving used Kleenex on the table:

Let's see—you have a lovely customer who has been coming in multiple times a week for 15 years, often bringing many guests, and you would like to inform her that a personal habit of hers is repulsive to you and she's no longer welcome unless she straightens out. That sounds like a business strategy! Do you berate your male customers if they leave wee-wee on the rim of the urinal?

Oh yes. This is how it’s done, if Ask Amy and Dear Abby and the weirdly unsatisfying Ask Ellie would like to take notes. Well done, Prudie. You’ve made the Agony Antagonist a very happy woman. For today.

Children hump and dogs urinating, everyone's got to make a living

Emily Yoffe is Dear Prudence, hostess and chief towel-snapper at online journal Slate’s entrée into the world of advicery, and like most of Slate’s offerings, Dear Prudence earns about a 7 (out of 10) on the imaginary scale in my head that measures good, entertaining, and cutting-edge writing. Most newspapers—the ones that I read anyway (I read exactly one newspaper)—consistently rate about a 6, and when you turn to all online writing outlets (this page included, bien sûr), the rating drops alarmingly; so even though 7 seems pretty stingy, I mean it as a compliment. Really I do.

In her most recent column (March 22), Prudence tackles a few interesting issues, one of which presents the disturbing image of a four-year-old girl, flush-faced, in almost a trancelike state, humping an ottoman. Yes, I said it: Humping an ottoman. The girl’s mother, Puzzled, says she has “generally been tolerant of” the behavior (which she calls “doing that thing,” and goddamn if that isn’t the best euphemism I’ve heard in a while) but realizes that it can be off-putting in certain situations, such as when sitting around the dinner table with the in-laws, shopping at the grocery store, or just being in any situation that involves you, your hump-happy daughter, someone else, and an inanimate object of a certain height (coffee table, stairs, chairs).

Prudie gives the only advice that anyone could give, really, which is that the girl is at an age where she should realize that there are some things that are appropriate only in certain places (like making peepee potty, for example), and that anytime that old familiar feeling should arise, she should abscond to the bathroom in order to make sweet love to the toilet. Now, that’s all fine and good, mind you—walking the line between absolute permissiveness and early-instilled bodily shame—but it got me thinking: How, exactly, does one have that conversation with a four-year-old? I’ve known a few four-year-olds in my life, and I can say with absolute certainty that there are four-year-olds and there are four-year-olds. A friend of mine, in fact, just the other day was recounting a story about his four-year-old daughter, in which he was feeding his girl dinner and the cat jumped on the table. “Fucking cat,” he said, knocking it onto the floor. “Daddy, you don’t like fucking cats very much, do you?” At which point he realized that he needed to explain that although “fucking” was a word that he used, and that she was welcome to use it around him, it wasn’t a word to be used around, say, grandparents, teachers, other kids, etc. So that’s a smart kid, I guess: one who can listen to and respond to logic. I know not all kids can do this, though. My niece, for example, at that age would have listened to the explanation dull-eyed and slack-jawed, and as soon as it was over started running away from her lecturer, shouting “Fucking fucking fucking fucking!” until someone yanked her into her time-out chair and started talking about taking things away from her if she didn’t stop that infernal cursing.

I guess what I’m saying is, it’s an online article. There shouldn’t be any word-count issues, and if there were, why not simply run the one letter this week, with an expanded explanation of how Dear Prudie plans on getting the four-year-old child to understand and apply appropriate behavior in circumstances in which everyone around the child is talking about boring, boring things and “doing that thing” just feels so good. (I’m reminded suddenly of two of my own childhood friends who used to hump the floor—they called it “doing the bumps.” This was long before I did my own bumps, in college, and it was a completely different thing. I think my mom got me to refrain from doing the bumps by telling me such behavior was beneath me. Which was true: I chose the more sophisticated route of getting myself off by inching up and down a banister in our basement staircase. Oh, how I loved that banister. But I digress.)

Another thing: The tone of Puzzled’s letter implies an absolute lack of boundaries. Take a look at the first sentences: “I am the mother of a beautiful, clever, generally well-behaved 4-year-old girl. I adore her, and she's a delight to be with in public and sweet as pie with other adults.” Just a guess, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Puzzled is the mother who looks admiringly at her child as the little beast runs into your shins with her tiny shopping cart at the Fred Meyer. Oh, wouldn’t want to stifle little snookums’ creativity, would we? Little snookums wanna be all full up wit Fwee Will! Ugh. One hopes that Puzzled somehow figures out how to implement Prudie’s plan, seeing as how she so clearly has never spoken to her child before except to slather her with the most opulent praise.

Letter #4 is from Well-Mannered Doggie Owner, and indeed she does sound to live up to her name. WMDO was out walking her dog, she says (on leash, one hopes), when she met up with a man she’d never seen before, just as her dog was making peepee potty on someone’s lawn. “You know I live here,” he says, shaking his head. “Genius.” WMDO does not feel she was in the wrong in this situation. Does Prudie?

You bet your sweet ass she does, WMDO. Me? Not so much. Look, here’s the deal: From her answer, it appears that Prudie lives either on a 700-acre ranch or in the middle of downtown Manhattan, where there are no yards and everything is concrete or public property. Because honestly? Really? Truly? There is no way that anyone who owns a dog and doesn’t live in one of those two locations could possibly follow her advice, which is—for anyone who wants a good laugh—to only let your dog pee on your land or on public property. For the rest of us—anyone who lives in an apartment building in a mixed-residential area or in a house on a smaller lot—forget about it. Even if you have a yard that’s large enough for purposes of everyday excretion but you’d like to take your dog on a walk around the block every now and then—in fact, even if you’ve made sure that your dog just peed before you take him on said walk—you’re going to run into trouble. Dogs pee a lot, frankly. And dogs are unpredictable, too. Some dogs like to pee in the same spot day after day; with others, you’ll take them to last week’s favorite spot and … nuthin.

Prudie’s right, of course, in that once a dog pees somewhere all dogs will pee there. No property owner is going to be happy to see a dog peeing on his lawn; but on the other hand, there are a lot of unforeseen consequences of property ownership. In my parent’s neighborhood, near the high school, there’s a lot of garbage from fast-food restaurants and ashtray detritus. If you own property near a body of water, you’ll likely face accretion or deletion of your land. Maybe the house next door to yours always has the loudest, more abrasive Christmas light display. These are all known exceptions to private property ownership, and every buyer takes them on. You want a yard that’s totally free of dog piss? Fence it in. Buy a condo. Buy a houseboat. You have options. (Some of them are stupid, apparently.)

Back to the issue of being a well-mannered dog owner (and Lord knows I’m not one) or a well-mannered anything, for that matter, listen: My rule of thumb? Just be better-mannered than most other people and no one will have the right to take you to task. In the case of dog ownership, this means (1) keep your dog on a leash, (2) don’t let your dog bark uncontrollably, (3) pick up poop, (4) don’t let your dog jump on people unless they’ve indicated that they like it, (5) if your dog is mean, keep it away from other people. Another example: At a restaurant recently, I told my boyfriend that we were entitled to sit at a four-top for lunch because it adjoined a four-top that one lady had claimed for herself. “We’re not the biggest assholes here, she is, and that’s what matters.” Unfortunately, the lady heard me, which actually did make me the biggest asshole there. But you know what I mean.