A Random Assortment

~ Getting enough sleep is a movement? I've been preaching sleep for years. I guess my problem is that I haven't started enough movements. (Or alternatively, what we need is more common sense and fewer movements. But common sense doesn't sell books, I guess.)

~ This made me laugh out loud: A response to meternity leave:

8. You must rub sandpaper over your nipples until they are red and bleeding. Once this is achieved, you are required to tug on them 15,000 times a day. You may opt out of this but you are required to feel like a terrible person.

~ "The Cost of Caring: The lives of the immigrant women who tend to the needs of others" is really good and raises some of the problems with buying care:

Mothers and daughters leave their families so that they can do the type of “women’s work”—caring for the young, the elderly, and the infirm—that females in affluent countries no longer want to do or have time to do. They function as what María Ibarra, a professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at San Diego State University, calls “emotional proletarians”: they “produce authentic emotion in exchange for a wage.”

...

During meals in Chappaqua, Emma sometimes felt guilty and lost her appetite. “If you are a mom, you want anything you eat to be shared by your kids,” she said. Sometimes, as she dressed the girls in the morning, she cried as she imagined her youngest children preparing for school with the assistance of the helpers. One of the helpers had a young son. Emma asked her children who cared for the boy while his mother was at their house, but her daughters didn’t know. Emma imagined a chain of mothers parenting other mothers’ children around the globe.

There's a similar problem, I think, with daycare workers who are also parents and feel forced into the job.

~ On life with Alzheimer's (highly recommended):

Outside, people with Alzheimer’s were looked on as broken. In the groups inside these walls, though, everyone had it. Alzheimer’s was normal. In Memory Works, she felt protected. Unhampered. One of the others called it a “safe place,” and that felt right to her. “There is nothing like being different with your own people,” is how she would put it.

More than anything, people with leaky memories came to this sanctuary to find affirmation that they were still a presence in the world, that they were still valid. Ms. Taylor found renewed meaning by being among others like herself.
...
She knew some people with Alzheimer’s wanted their lives ended. Not she. “I have a major philosophical difference with that,” she said once. “I see myself as part of an organism that is the family. I’m part of this connection. I don’t just say, Lights out, that’s it. If I just sit and hum tunes and that’s it, well, that’s still me.”
...
She and her friend wanted to see strategies identified and shared for navigating the everyday mundanities, wisdom to wrench survival out of this disease. Since they were the ones who had it, they felt they were the authorities. As her friend would say to her: “We can contribute. We don’t have to just sit there and take in things.”