The value of re-making your home

By Caitlin Kelly

Kotowski Palace in Warsaw, interior design (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As someone passionate about interior design, and who has studied it seriously at the New York School of Interior Design, I enjoy this blog, the public face of an American design firm, McAlpine Tankersley.

I liked this recent post about why it’s worth re-making your home:

Change is always necessary to promote growth and without varying from the comfortable and the everyday, lessons are seldom learned. Faced with potential, however, fear kicks in and says, “let’s just keep things the way they are”; even if a situation is stagnant, it’s my stagnant situation and I’ll sit in it. But how can change have value? An example I can show (because you do tend to come here for visuals to accompany my soapbox) was evident in Bobby’s personal Montgomery home.

In the ten years he lived in this English cottage, the interior underwent three major transformations. As designers, we always use our personal homes as living, active laboratories. We try things out on our tireless, often unsuspecting, families before we suggest them to our clients. Experimentation and change in our environs are personal tools of lesson and discovery.

This is so true!

I’ve lived for 25 (!) years in the same top-floor, 1,000 square foot one bedroom apartment. I doubt I’ll live anywhere else, which is a little depressing, (it’s small and New York is brutally expensive for most larger spaces in neighborhoods we like), but also focuses us intently on making our home the prettiest, most efficient and most comfortable and welcoming we can make it.

It’s absolutely been my design lab.

When I moved in, it was all a bland, boring beige, with cat-pee-stained/stinky oatmeal-colored wall-to-wall-carpet. Gross!

I’ve changed the wall colors here many times, currently a deep mustard in the bathroom, a cool beige in the kitchen, a soft gray in the bedroom and dining room, and a soft yellow-green in the living room and hallway; since there are few doors, the sight-lines make a major difference if the colors and tones relate poorly.

I’d also rather invest in fewer, better items, (like many Europeans do, living in small spaces) than face the expense of designing, furnishing, cleaning and maintaining a large(r) house. Not to mention the cost of new roof/boiler/furnace and all the attendant work of cleaning and maintaining any outdoor property.

If you’re wealthy, great!

But if you’re not, re-using your home-space to its best advantage is often more about being creative and open-minded: re-purposing, re-covering, repainting, moving things around, editing heavily, building your own items and scoring great finds at flea markets, tag sales and auctions.

I read every shelter magazine out there, every month, so I see the blinged-out mega-mansions some people live in.

But I also read blogs like Design Sponge and Apartment Therapy, which feature regular folk with smaller budgets or less opulent taste.

As we finish up our kitchen renovation — one for which I waited 25 years — I already see the enormous difference it makes, emotionally and practically, in our lives. We didn’t pour $50,000 or $100,000, (yes, people do) into our small galley kitchen.

But we did splurge on some items: honed granite counters, high-end appliances (a Bertazzoni gas range and Bosch dishwasher), and spend-y Farrow & Ball paint for custom-made cabinets and walls.

I love the little surprises that (happily) occurred — the shelves we bought have a subtle green-ish gray stain that perfectly matches the cabinets. The narrow grooves in our drawers and cabinets (in lieu of external hardware) create runnels of sunlight reflected from the windows. The new cream tile, with its glossy surface, bounces much more light, both artificial and natural.

At Luxor Design Northgate Mall / louis-quinze style interior. Definitely more formal than our place! (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s been an amazing experience, and the second reno we’ve done; we re-did our one, tiny (5 by 7 foot) bathroom four years ago.

I gained a lot of confidence from the results, and now hope to find some part-time work as a designer using these as my portfolio.

The next major step?

Refinishing and darkening our hardwood floors.

Have you re-made your home?

Changed its colors or designs?

The kitchen renovation: Part Three

By Caitlin Kelly

Swoon!

It’s starting to feel like a kitchen, kids!

We gratefully — while away on vacation in Canada — missed two weeks of noise, dirt and dust while the crew demolished our 30+ year-old kitchen, with its ugly molding, not-nice wooden cabinets and peeling tile floor.

Gone is the dishwasher whose replacement basket, (can you say rip-off?!) would have cost us $300. Gone is the chipped porcelain sink. Gone is the complete lack of a place to safely and cleanly stow garbage; we now have a slide-out bin with two containers.

We still await the installation of: counters, sink and faucet, outlets and the staining and finishing of the floor. And we got herringbone flooring, as my heart had fervently desired, a gift from the contractor who scored it for a fraction of the original price.

The crew of two, both Turkish, speak Turkish to one another and step onto the balcony to have a cigarette or make a phone call. They work crazy hard with no breaks. One, Mike, did our bathroom four years ago and it’s good to have someone I know, like and trust with me in my home all day.

I’m honored that Mike, whose career expertise is working with tile, (and these guys normally work on much larger and wealthier projects than ours), loved my tile choice. Yay!

The workmanship is terrific — the wooden drawers slide smoothly and stop slowly and firmly. When I noticed a 1/8th of an inch (probably less) difference in one, it was fixed within seconds. We could have saved some money by buying Ikea cabinets, but I wanted exactly what I wanted, and the smooth, solid, heavy wood, with dovetailed drawers, made to our exact specifications, feels good.

It’s helpful to actually be here now, as a few surprises showed up — like the installation of the wrong accent tile. The right tile arrived and is even prettier than I’d hoped.

It is both gratifying and terrifying to watch my design — even road-tested with 3D scale models — come into full color and shape. A lovely surprise? The insets which replace drawer handles reflect daylight from the nearby windows. So does the glossy, creamy tile, making the small, narrow room much brighter than before.

Here are some photos of it…the final blog post will be the Big Reveal.

You can see the herringbone floor; gray-green cabinets (which will not have exterior hardware); the stove; wall tile (yet ungrouted), and the space where the accent tile will go.

This is the cost of doing business…a corner of our living room filled with tools for the duration.

And there goes our balcony…needed as a place to cut tile. Mike did it there — in February! — last time.

With his permission, Mike…and the sink side of the kitchen.

There will be three of these Restoration Hardware sconces, each 10″ in diameter. An unpleasant surprise? The illustration on the RH website shows a lovely glow — but not the fact that the bulb protrudes and is visible.

Here’s my lovely husband making a silly face as he grills a week’s worth of meat on our balcony — with our table as a windbreak.

Is it better to lose (and lose some more) than always “win”?

By Caitlin Kelly

Sport in childhood. Association football, shown above, is a team sport which also provides opportunities to nurture social interaction skills. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

From The New York Times:

Trophies were once rare things — sterling silver loving cups bought from jewelry stores for truly special occasions. But in the 1960s, they began to be mass-produced, marketed in catalogs to teachers and coaches,
and sold in sporting-goods stores.

Today, participation trophies and prizes are almost a given, as children are constantly assured that they are winners. One Maryland summer program gives awards every day — and the “day” is one hour long. In
Southern California, a regional branch of the American Youth Soccer Organization hands out roughly 3,500 awards each season — each player gets one, while around a third get two. Nationally, A.Y.S.O. local
branches typically spend as much as 12 percent of their yearly budgets
on trophies.

It adds up: trophy and award sales are now an estimated $3 billion-a-year industry in the United States and Canada. Po Bronson and I have spent years reporting on the effects of praise and rewards on kids. The science is clear. Awards can be powerful motivators, but nonstop recognition does not inspire children to succeed. Instead, it can cause them to underachieve.

The story had attracted 282 comments within a few hours of its publication…here’s part of one, from a male reader in New York City:

We want fame. We want adoration. We never want to break the from adolescence, no, from infancy, when we were center of the universe and a whimper could get our diaper changed.

And this admission, from a young woman in Chicago:

I’m 24 and a college graduate, and my peers and I were constantly praised from kindergarten through college. Like in the article, we all got trophies and certificates of achievement in grade and middle school, high grades in high school (partially so we could get into good colleges) and good grades for just showing up to class in college.

Competitive skills are not inherently developed; they are learned. What we have now is a group of young people coming out of college and high school who are just discovering that it takes more than showing up to succeed in life, and it is in no small part due to the “everybody is special” culture that we were steeped in as adolescents.

I think there’s a fine line between wanting non-stop attention and false adulation — “Great job!” I hear parents coo when some small child does…anything…these days — and genuine encouragement to persist in the face of disappointment and rejection.

PCHS NJROTC Awards (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I had an interesting moment about four or five years ago, after a board meeting of fellow journalists for a national group. Three of us were walking to dinner, chatting — we had each applied that year for the same ultra-competitive fellowship, worth $20,000 to $40,000.

None of us won.

We all went back to our busy lives and personal challenges, and we’re all still here, all still in the game. We didn’t curl up in the fetal position, sucking our thumbs and whining to one another about it.

Ever. At all. You lose, pick yourself up and get on with it.

I applied last year again, as one of 278 applicants, and became one of 14 finalists.

I lost again.

I’d planned to re-apply this year but I decided to take a break.  Will I apply yet again? Probably.

Losing is dis-spiriting, indeed, but I think “winning” every time you compete for something is crazy.

English: English Premier League trophy, inscribed with “The Barclays Premiership” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Life is too difficult!

You’ll never win every date/job/fellowship/grant/award/book contract/raise/promotion you want. No one does. (And if you do, I wonder how far you’re stretching and growing…)

But in a culture that usually only cheers and celebrates heroes and the wealthy, those whose visible proof of success wins them lots of attention and praise and high-fives, (all pleasant, certainly), it’s a challenge to remember — and to teach children — that failure is normal, to be expected and builds tenacity and resilience.

And those are the true building blocks of solid, lasting self-confidence.

In his book about children’s resilience, fellow Canadian Paul Tough argues strongly for the idea of grit.

Here’s an interesting post from the fab Maria Popova, she of BrainPickings fame, on how to hop off the hamster wheel of self-esteem addiction.

What say you?

Have you won awards or accolades you knew were bogus?

How are you teaching your own children to handle disappointment and loss?

“It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place”

By Caitlin Kelly

The Red Queen’s race (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

The words are from Alice in Wonderland, spoken by the Red Queen.

Sadly, they still apply to millions of American workers, (and those in struggling economies worldwide), for whom the “economic recovery” means little. Their wages are stagnant, their costs rising.

From a recent edition of The New York Times:

For all but the most highly educated and affluent Americans, incomes have stagnated, or worse, for more than a decade. The census report found that median household income, adjusted for inflation, was $51,017 in 2012, down about 9 percent from an inflation-adjusted peak of $56,080 in 1999, mostly as a result of the longest and most damaging recession since the Depression. Most people have had no gains since the economy hit bottom in 2009.

The government’s authoritative annual report on incomes, poverty and health insurance, released Tuesday, underscores that the economic recovery has largely failed to reach the poor and the middle class, even as the unemployment rate continues to sink and growth has returned.

Government programs remain a lifeline for millions. Unemployment insurance, whose eligibility the federal government expanded in response to the downturn, kept 1.7 million people out of poverty last year. Food stamps, if counted as income, would have kept out four million.

Since the recession ended in 2009, income gains have accrued almost entirely to the top earners, the Census Bureau found. The top 5 percent of earners — households making more than about $191,000 a year — have recovered their losses and earned about as much in 2012 as they did before the recession. But those in the bottom 80 percent of the income distribution are generally making considerably less than they had been,hit by high rates of unemployment and nonexistent wage growth.

New York continues to be deeply inhospitable to anyone earning  low wages, like the women profiled here, who work multiple jobs and still cannot afford housing, sleeping instead in shelters:

More than one out of four families in shelters, 28 percent, include at least one employed adult, city figures show, and 16 percent of single adults in shelters hold jobs.

Mostly female, they are engaged in a variety of low-wage jobs as security guards, bank tellers, sales clerks, computer instructors, home health aides and office support staff members. At work they present an image of adult responsibility, while in the shelter they must obey curfews and show evidence that they are actively looking for housing and saving part of their paycheck.

Advocates of affordable housing say that the employed homeless are proof of the widening gap between wages and rents — which rose in the city even during the latest recession — and, given the shortage of subsidized housing, of just how difficult it is to escape the shelter system, even for people with jobs.

In 2011, I was asked to testify to New York’s City Council.

I’d never before been part of the political process, except for voting, as some news journalists are required by their employers to avoid any such signs of partiality.

The city was considering passing a “living wage” bill, which would have required employers accepting city subsidies for development to pay their staff $10/hour.

I assure you that $10/hr, even full-time, is no living — but mere survival in a city where it’s virtually impossible to find any apartment costing less than $1,000 a month.

It was an eye-opening and depressing day as I waited six hours to give my allotted two minutes of testimony. The only people left, wearily waiting, were the councilors listening to us — and the impassioned black pastors of low-income-area churches, fighting hard for social justice in the form of economic redress.

I had written a book about low-wage retail work, the third largest industry in the U.S. and one which employs millions in wearying, poorly-paid work, “Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail.” I’d worked for 2.5 years, part-time, for a multinational outdoor clothing brand much beloved by customers, so I’d seen that life, even briefly.

I saw there, firsthand, the frustration of selling a $600 ski jacket to a banker whisking his family off to Aspen, (whose firm had likely helped to wreck the economy in 2008), while we were earning, at most, $11/hour with no commission. As members of the 99 percent serving the 1 percent, we were just another servant class.

It was chillingly instructive.

I also saw my coworkers, several with multiple young children, desperate to flee.

The living wage bill did pass here.

But for millions of workers, still, a hard-earned income — or several — doesn’t provide a life of any ease or comfort.

English: Photo of Jared Bernstein testifying to the US Senate on May 26, 2005. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

From the Times:

“The good news from today’s 2012 income and poverty results is that for the first year since the Great Recession hit, things aren’t getting worse,” Jared Bernstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a former Obama economics official and a contributor to The New York Times’s Economix blog, wrote in his analysis of the numbers. “The bad news is that three years into an economic recovery, they’re not getting
better either.”

And, once more from the Times, from Robert Reich:

Put simply, most people are on a downward escalator. Although jobs are slowly returning, pay is not. Most jobs created since the start of the recovery, in 2009, pay less than the jobs that were lost during the Great Recession. This means many people are working harder than ever, but still getting nowhere. They’re increasingly pessimistic about their chances of ever doing better.

As their wages and benefits shrink, though, they see corporate executives and Wall Street bankers doing far better than ever before. And they are keenly aware of bailouts and special subsidies for agribusinesses, pharma, oil and gas, military contractors, finance and every other well-connected industry.

Alice in Wonderland eventually awoke from her visions. It was just, all of it — the Red Queen, the Mad Hatter, Tweedledee and Tweedledum — a very odd dream.

Not for the rest of us.

How are you doing economically these days?

Better? Worse? The same?

Do you feel hopeful that things will improve for you — or others?

The greater pleasure of taking (more) time

By Caitlin Kelly

Cover via Amazon

Loved this post, from one of my new favorite blogs, key + arrow, written by a young couple in Austin, Texas. This, from georgia, on the sensual, slow-moving pleasure of shaving, old-style:

I use an old style safety razor..the kind your grandpa may have used. A big heavy piece of chrome and a single double sided blade.

Once I found myself in the position of trying to explain why I prefer to use this older style to a friend of mine. He’s like most guys these days and use whatever 4 blade vibrating head gel strip gizmo they have selling these days.

As i described the process involved in preparing for a proper shave, the pleasure, the advantages….one item provoked the strongest reaction.

He couldn’t understand why I took up to 20 minutes or more to shave and that’s really when it hit me. When you look at the rise of technology and the death of manly rituals, inevitably the clock is to blame. We have sacrificed a whole host of simple pleasures for the sake of time and we are ultimately the poorer for it.

The pipe gives way to the cigarette. The ocean liner gives way to the airplane. The restaurant becomes the drive-through and the conversation becomes the text message…and all because we, as society, continue to believe that if we could just save a bit more time in our day we’d be able to really get to the things we wanted to do.

Ironically, in the pursuit of having enough time to do what we want we are forced to dilute or discard the very things we wanted in the first place…

While it’s easy for city folk to romanticize oldey-timey hand-hewn rusticity — who really wants to chop (all their) wood and haul their water? — I agree with his point of view.

Slow down!

One of the things that vacation reminds me to do — and I always, eagerly, do it wholeheartedly — is mostly ignore technology and its pinging, ringing, buzzing, beeping, dinging, lit-up demands.

Respondrightnow!

Or else.

Or else, what, exactly?

Unless you’re a head of state or awaiting the news of someone’s imminent birth or death, is anything really that urgent?

There is something so lovely and soothing and sensual about slowing down and doing things with a measured, thoughtful, focused attention.

Twice on our recent vacation in Canada, I simply lay down for a good half hour or more, once on the mossy edge of a granite lake-side and once on the smooth, rounded grey stones of another lake. I watched dragonflies and ants and small leopard frogs and got up again with pine-cone gum embedded in my leggings.

Whatever.

I also emerged completely refreshed.

You can’t really speed up the making of risotto, one of my favorite time-consuming recipes. Nor can you quickly and enjoyably make bread or soup or pastry or bathe a baby or give someone a really good massage or arrange flowers or stare into the night sky.

All of these activities take time.

They require our attentiveness. They can’t be rushed, without spoiling the experience.

Which is, in my view, the whole point of the blessing of our senses. If you don’t stop to even notice the roses, how can you make time to bury your nose in those pink or orange or creamy white petals and smell them?

Do you really want to rush patting your dog or cat? Hugging your sweetie?

One of my favorite books on this topic is by a fellow Canadian, Carl Honore, a fellow alum of the national newspaper, The Globe and Mail.

Here’s his 2005 TED talk in praise of slowness, the subject of his book of the same name; he was prompted to write the book when he found he couldn’t slow down at bedtime when he read to his small boy, tempted to do it at his usual frenzied pace.

In his talk, he says:

“We live in a world obsessed with speed…to quote Carrie Fisher, these days, even instant gratification takes too long…We’re hurrying through our lives instead of living them.”

How about you?

Do you ever slow down?

How does this affect your quality of life?

Really? You’re not this mean, are you?

By Caitlin Kelly

Internet_cafe Tokyo japan (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This post, from the Huffington Post, caught my attention, and not in a good way:

The Internet has done amazing, wonderful, stupendous things for
connecting the world, promoting freedom and diversity, enabling distance
learning and online friendships, and establishing whole new worlds of
commerce, but there is a dark side to it that is really starting to
bother me. All of this interconnectedness has created a meanness in us,
or maybe it has simply revealed a mean spirit that was there all along,
but I wish it would go away. Even kind, loving people I know are
susceptible to it, and my hope is that this post will get folks to
reconsider before hitting return.

I’m talking about the Mean Photo. You know, the snapshot of someone
grocery shopping, or going to the prom, or on the subway who probably
thinks she looks perfectly okay, but some stranger (or worse, a friend)
takes a picture and posts it on the Internet for the rest of us to share
and “like” and write snide, superior comments.

If I see one more picture with the caption, “Oh. Dear. God!” I may just lose it.

That is a human being in that picture. A person who got up that day,
got dressed and left the house without ever thinking it would make her
the subject of public ridicule, simply because her shorts are too tight.
Maybe she’s gained a lot of weight recently due to a medical condition
and can’t afford new clothes, or doesn’t want to buy things in a size
she intends to reduce. Maybe it’s a single mom who had to choose
between doing the laundry and going to her son’s baseball game, so here
she is, cheering him on, making the better choice, even though this
outfit is all she had to put on.

I’ve never seen a site like this that mocks people, nor do any of my 600+ Facebook friends indulge in this special brand of nastiness, (at least on that site), so this was news to me.

But — seriously?

As someone who was bullied for three years in high school, I have zero tolerance for this sort of shit.

Bullying, in any form, makes me insane. It’s cheap, crude, pathetic behavior on the part of people who have some sick need to project their toxic insecurities and judgement onto others.

Here’s a wild idea. It’s easy to remember because it’s the first three letters of the alphabet: ABC.

Always Be Compassionate.

I get it…we all have lousy days. We all have times that our lizard brain kicks in and starts spewing. We’re not saints and some of us have no desire to be one, either.

But, a default position that others are struggling (too) is probably a safe choice, because:

You have no idea what someone else is facing, emotionally, financially, intellectually, physically.

You have no idea why someone’s hair needs a cut or their shoes are scuffed and filthy or their kids aren’t wearing designer clothes like yours do.

You have no idea why they’re driving a crappy, banged-up old car or don’t have a car at all.

You have no idea why someone is 30 or 50 or 100 pounds overweight.

Like the man in my building who was trim and handsome for years — and now has such big jowls I didn’t recognize him when I saw him the other day.

He isn’t eating donuts or being a lazy slob stuck to the sofa.

He has a brain tumor, and a brave wife and a gorgeous little white dog, and his medications have blown him up into someone who looks like he can’t stop eating.

His appearance breaks my heart — and all I think is “There but for the grace of God…”

I can’t fathom a world in which people are using their phones and the Internet to mock others for malicious amusement.

Can you?

Related articles

• Bullying: We are the problem (ctworkingmoms.com)
• The Bullying Epidemic (bet.com)
• Back-to-School Bully Busting – A Safety Guide for Parents by SimpliSafe Home Security (simplisafe.com)
• Hate in a new form welcome to the Internet! (rucreativebloggingfa13.wordpress.com)
• How do I, as a reporter, tell the story of a student being bullied? (ask.metafilter.com)
• Internet bullying and why it needs to stop (atddublin.com)

No, I don’t want to “Smile, honey!”

By Caitlin Kelly

Here’s a powerful essay from The New York Times about one mother’s ferocious, non-smiley 10-year-old daughter, Birdy.

A few excerpts:

I am a radical, card-carrying feminist, and still I put out smiles indiscriminately, hoping to please not only friends and family but also my son’s orthodontist, the barista who rolls his eyes while I fumble apologetically through my wallet, and the ex-boyfriend who cheated on me. If I had all that energy back — all the hours and neurochemicals and facial musculature I have expended in my wanton pursuit of likedness — I could propel myself to Mars and back. Or, at the very least, write the book “Mars and Back: Gendered Constraints and Wasted Smiling.”…

Birdy is polite in a “Can you please help me find my rain boots?” and “Thank you, I’d love another deviled egg” kind of way. But when strangers talk to her, she is like, “Whatever.” She looks away, scowling. She does not smile or encourage.

I bite my tongue so that I won’t hiss at her to be nice.

Girls and women often hear this order — mostly from men, and often while walking in public, lost in our own thoughts: “Smile, honey!”

Because….?

It’s our job to respond to you?

It’s our job to be cheerful at all times?

It’s our job to immediately re-arrange our facial features at your command?

It’s our job to reassure you that you’re every bit as attractive and charming as you think you are?

It’s our job to put you at ease — no matter what our true mood is in that moment?

Seriously.

Smile Like You Mean It (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In high school, I was badly bullied every day, loudly, for about three years by a small group of boys. My nickname was Doglin and they’d bark at me in the hallways, their taunts echoing off all the metal lockers and the long terrazzo hallways.

It didn’t matter what I wore or how I reacted or how smart I was or how many friends I had — the daily public humiliation continued.

It’s not our job to make you feel better about yourself by making our face, body or behavior more appealing!

Smile 2 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I also like this post, about why women don’t need to be pretty either (h/t to Small Dog Syndrome):

You Don’t Have to Be Pretty. You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked “female”.

I’m not saying that you SHOULDN’T be pretty if you want to. (You don’t owe UN-prettiness to feminism, in other words.) Pretty is pleasant, and fun, and satisfying, and makes people smile, often even at you. But in the hierarchy of importance, pretty stands several rungs down from happy, is way below healthy, and if done as a penance, or an obligation, can be so far away from independent that you may have to squint really hard to see it in the haze.

And here’s an excerpt from a recent, powerful essay on the issue from Salon.com:

Yesterday, I missed a train and I was frustrated, hot and tired. A man standing in the station decided it was a good time to pass his hand along my arm as I ran by and whisper, “You’d be even prettier if you smiled.”  Here’s the thing about “Smile, baby,” the more commonly uttered variant of the same sentiment: No woman wants to hear it.  And every woman wonders, no matter how briefly, about what could happen if she doesn’t smile.  I was in a crowded place and perfectly safe, but that is actually, in the end, irrelevant.  I have, in the past, been followed by men like him.

Without exception, this phrase means a man is entirely comfortable telling a woman, probably one he doesn’t even know, what he wants her to do with her body to please him.  This suggests a lack of respect for other people’s bodily integrity and autonomy.  The phrase, and others more sexually explicit, are verbal expressions of male entitlement.  The touching would reinforce that suggestion. Two “inconsequential” little words.  A small thing, until you consider street harassment as the normalization of male dominance.

Gentlemen, do you care if a woman doesn’t smile at you?

Do you care, ladies, if men think you’re angry or ugly when you fail to acknowledge their gaze?

Which teacher(s) changed your life?

By Caitlin Kelly

I went back to my Toronto high school, (the same one Margaret Atwood attended), yesterday to guest lecture about what it’s like to write for a living. But if it hadn’t been for the powerful encouragement of my English teachers there — Mr. Bullen and Mr. Bickell, one who has since died and one retired — would I even have become a writer?

Or felt as confident of my choice?

From my earliest years, I was winning awards for my writing, a clue that this might be a good choice for me vocationally. We look to teachers, for better or worse, for adult appraisals of our talents and skills. A cruel or indifferent teacher can crush us, (and often does), pushing us away from a life we might have enjoyed or thrived in had we simply ignored them.

Our teachers, from early childhood on, leave powerful and lasting impressions on who we are and what we might become.

English: Teachers from the Exploratorium’s Teacher Institute examine the “String Thing” they built. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Like you, I suspect, I can still name my grade school teachers and some of their quirks, like Miss Dalton, ferocious and Irish, who taught us to memorize the shape of countries by tracing their borders with carbon paper or Miss Brough, (rhymes with rough!), who had us use dictionaries in Grade Eight to read The Scarlet Letter. Every fresh paragraph meant flipping it open to find a new word — but she taught us never to fear the unfamiliar.

My ninth-grade English teacher, in my most turbulent and unhappy year at private school, left the most lasting impression of all. She was tall, strikingly beautiful, with long, thick black hair and single. Unlike most our ancient, widowed or never-married staff, she offered a vision of someone we might like to become.

I was a mess then: angry, lonely, in trouble all time. Yet she was kind to me and treated me with the same attention as the better–behaved students in her class, for which I was miserably grateful.

In high school, bullied, I was difficult again. This time it was Ana, (we could — daringly — first-name her!), our Yugoslav art teacher, who added joy, beauty and humor to our tedious suburban Toronto days.

I ran into her years later and she introduced me, affectionately, to a fellow teacher’s wife: “This is Caitlin. She was always pain in ass.” True.

But she loved me anyway and, like Ms. Z.,  had still welcomed me into her classroom, her compassion and calm a needed refuge for me.

English: A special education teacher assists one of her students. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In their classrooms, I was allowed to be all of me: smart, sassy, funny, difficult. There were consequences, but there was also badly-needed comfort, acceptance and encouragement of a messy, creative complicated girl.

Great teachers see the pilot lights that flicker within us, that of our possibility and potential, sometimes long before we even know it’s there. They help us ignite the flame of our passion — for biology or German or computers or watercolors — that may light and warm us, possibly for decades to come.

A great teacher can also help us grow (up) emotionally and intellectually, can show us a different, perhaps more useful or social or interesting way of being or thinking or behaving than what we see inside our own families or amongst our peers.

My husband, Jose, is a photo editor at The New York Times, and helped them win a Pulitzer prize for photos taken on 9/11. He’s photographed the Olympics, three Presidents, war, Superbowls.

He was once, though, a minister’s son in Santa Fe, modestly expecting, and expected to become a teacher, as had many of his relatives.

But in tenth grade a teacher saw some photos he had taken for the high school yearbook. Mrs. Frank told him he had talent and should consider pursuing it as a career; when some of his basketball photos ended up in the local paper, that was it.

Career chosen!

I’ve done a fair bit of teaching — at the undergraduate college level, and to adults. I love it. It’s such a thrill when students “get it.”

Here’s a powerful and moving video about a teacher in Los Angeles — faced with suicide attempts by fifth-graders — determined to help her young students feel good about themselves.

Which teacher most affected you and your later life?

How and why?

As a teacher — which I know many of you are — how do you feel about your power to affect your students?

The power of scent

By Caitlin Kelly

The first time I met my husband, the evening ended with an unusual flourish when he took off the red silk Buddhist prayer shawl he’d worn as a muffler and wrapped me in it. Its soft folds smelled of his cologne, 1881.

Done!

I love fragrance, especially those  created by L’Artisan Parfumeur, Diptyque, Creed, Joe Malone and Hermes.

I discovered this one, Escale a Portofino by Dior, in a duty-free shop. Created in 2008, it’s light and citrus-y, as are many of my favorites like this, “O’ de Lancome, launched in 1969. Delicious!

Have you ever sniffed “Diorissimo”, created in 1956? It’s like stepping into a huge field of lily of the valley and jasmine! As a teenager, I used to babysit for a woman who wore it — her home smelled so delicious as she prepared to go out for the evening.

Scent has such tremendous power.

My late stepmother, a ferocious creature, wore Caleche, a crisp number by Hermes. I’d like to wear it as well, but still consider it “hers.”

One of the craziest/sexiest beaux in my past wore Kouros. If I smell someone wearing it today, my knees still buckle a bit at the memories…

Twinings brand Earl Grey tea leaves (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On the worst days, a few smells can instantly soothe me — Earl Grey tea, fresh lilacs, pinon, the ocean, dried, sun-warmed pine needles, sweetgrass, Roger & Gallet’s carnation-scented soap, well-worn leather, Balkan Sobranie loose pipe tobacco, a clean dog or horse.

Catholics are accustomed to one of my favorite smells — that of the incense, swung vigorously from a censer, during Mass — which Episcopalians use much less frequently, often deriding its use as “smells and bells.”

Jose and I share an unlikely childhood memory of Maja soap — a favorite of his father, (a Baptist minister in New Mexico) and my mother, (a sophisticated bohemian traveling the world for years.) It was created in 1921, and is Spanish, still made by Myrurgia.

English: Display bottle by PENHALIGON’S, London, UK. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I wear a British scent created in 1902 for men, Penhaligon’s Blenheim Bouquet, which Burberry designer Christopher Bailey recently named as the smell he’s been wearing since childhood. The bottle is elegant, understated, with a stiff gray grosgrain bow and a little bulbous cap.

As someone working alone at home most of the time, I can (sadly) go for days without putting on nice clothes or make-up.

But I wear scent daily.

Other favorites include Tiempe Passate and Prada Iris.

What are some of your favorite smells?

Twenty more things that make me happy

By Caitlin Kelly

— My black cashmere turtleneck

— Driving a winding country road in late afternoon sunshine

— The soft, white silence specific to fresh snowfall

— The sound that skates make carving into the ice

— Making a delicious meal for someone hungry and appreciative

— Laughing with Jose

—  A glossy, slippery pile of unread British magazines — Vogue, Country Living, World of Interiors

World of Interiors (Photo credit: qwincowper)

— A glossy, slippery pile of unread French design magazines — Cote Sud/Est/Ouest, Marie Claire Decoration, Elle Decor

— An upcoming flight, preferably to a foreign country

— A large, icy-cold martini; (Tanqueray, dry, olives, no ice)

Tanqueray (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

— Speaking French

— The sillage of a delicious fragrance, a crisp classic like 1881, Blenheim Bouquet or Caleche

— Gratefully applauding until my palms sting after a spectacular performance of music, dance or theater

— A fierce hug

— The white French bulldog with the jeweled hot pink collar who lives in my building, who explodes with joy when she sees me and lets me adore her in return

French Bulldog (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

— A country auction, returning with a car full of affordable loot

— An hour’s conversation with someone I love

— A stack of new books

— Croissants slathered with raspberry jam

— Paris, anytime, any season

Bonus: staring into a roaring fire in a fireplace, firepit or woodstove

How about you?