OT, but important (and hey, it's MY blog)

On Monday, my son and I went to my friend Siobhan's house for our usual weekly French class. (Note: to save me time and typing, when you see my friend Siobhan mentioned anywhere, please mentally plug in one or more of the following descriptives: classy, gorgeous, politically active, environmentally sound, elegant, funny, brilliant, artistic, sophisticated, down-to-earth, modest, well-read, kind. If you have any questions {as I do} as to why she's slumming with a slob like me, kindly keep them to yourself.)

Anyway: when we got to her place, she apologized for not being completely ready to receive us. Her sister lives in Myanmar, and Siobhan had been lucky enough to manage to get in email contact with her and learn that she was all right, and then of course had to contact the rest of the family to let them know.

Siobhan is on my local homeschooling loop, and posted this today. I know it has nothing to do with homeschooling or magazine editing, but I really wanted to pass it along. I hope you'll do the same.

In case anybody else's kids are also raising money to help the Burmese people recover from cyclone Nargis I thought I would forward this from my sister who has lived in Burma for the last dozen years working for MSN (Doctors Without Borders), ICRC (International Red Cross), and translating for Aung San Suu Kyi. My extended family is also sending money directly to my sister as she has a lot of contacts for getting supplies to people.
..Siobhan
 
...I am recommending four groups, which you will see in the signature of this message, with url links. Some groups are soliciting for aid, which are not really working in the country right now! Of course they need money to start projects, but I don't think this is the time for that. The ones I recommend below are already working, and have high capacity for relief.
 
I am afraid that the govt way typically does not turn out well.  Typically with all the chaos it is easy to think "Well, my family is suffering too..." or to give money first to their favoured groups. In a study of aid for cyclone relief in Bangladesh in the late 90s, it was found that only 3% of such aid reached the disaster victims...
 
For those who want to contribute to Nargis relief funds, here are the organisations which I think can use the money most:
 
For a local NGO which you can donate to online, I recommend Gitameit, whose people are already at work in disaster relief (instead of the usual music). You can also donate to Foundation for the People of Burma at this site, who will do development and reconstruction later, as well as relief:

http://www.gitameit.com/wp/page/4/

For international NGOs with the highest capacity for working in the delta, I recommend:
 
MSF - Holland
http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/news/article.cfm?id=2656

and CARE
http://my.care.org/05/myanmar/?qp_source=170860490000
 
and Merlin
http://www.merlin.org.uk/Lists/News-Detail.aspx?id=687

My Mad Fixations

Someone commented on my recent posting about Paradigm Accelerated Curriculum (PAC) and my refusal of an offered advertisement from them. She thinks that -- oh, well, hell, I don't want to paraphrase for fear I'll be told I misquoted someone; so, as it wasn't a private email, I'll just repost it here in its entirety:
 
"I want to clarify some things. I do not work for PAC, never have, never will. I am about as atheist as they come and have been for some time. I am vehemently against religious agenda of any kind.And yet, I've used PAC, their full course and I loved it. Their English and History are spot on and thorough and their math, while a bit jumpy, is very solid. I never saw any of the things you've mentioned and I've not only spoke to the guy on the phone, but met him in person and he is nothing but genuine. They are not bigots or religious fanatics. I think the things you've chosen to hyperfocus on as being 'problems', really are not.Of course you are entitled to you opinion and you should(rightly) choose proper advertising for your readers. But I think this one time you might be slightly off in your assumptions about a company."
 
I didn't make any assumptions about PAC. I did what I've done with every other potential advertiser:  I went to their site and checked out their product.

A friend of mine explained to me that I'm an obsessive-compulsive personality (which is not the same thing as someone suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder). I really didn't know where she got an idea like that until this morning, when I (for once) had some time to get some work done and felt actual physical discomfort doing anything but going back to PAC’s site and seeing if I had, in fact, misread, misinterpreted, or overreacted.

I just spent over an hour there.

I'm standing by my previous posting about them.

You can't take two steps in the sample lessons they offer without tripping over a quote from or reference to the Bible. And that's in the science lessons.

Just as a really, really typical for-instance, here's what PAC has to say about silver:
 
"Joseph, during biblical times, was sold into slavery for twenty pieces of silver. Later, when he became governor of Egypt, Joseph sold grain to people who paid in silver, copper, and gold coins."
 
Now, look. No matter what religion you are, the fact is that there is no archeological evidence for the existence of Joseph, as slave or as governor of Egypt. Yet he's being referred to in a science lesson, in a paragraph that is immediately followed by one about how much silver used to be in American dimes and quarters and when it was eliminated from them.

There are constant references to the Bible and the Christian God in the sample lessons PAC offers. If those samples are not typical of the curricula customers receive on purchase, how could I or anyone else know that PAC is perfectly fine even for someone who's "as atheist as they come"? If these are not representative of their product, why does PAC have them posted?

I also said in my previous posting that people should judge for themselves as to whether or not I was either overreacting or reading out of context. I'm not asking this rhetorically: am I overreacting to these paragraphs from PAC's second lesson in Integrated Physics and Chemistry?
 
"From 600 AD to 1400 AD, Europe fell into the Dark Ages (also called the Middle Ages). Science did not advance during this era of time. The Bible was forbidden in many countries, thus, learning and knowledge came to a standstill in Europe."
 
"The true science of chemistry replaced the false science of alchemy in the 1600s when church reformers began to demand that common people should be able to read the Bible and write about its application to everyday life and science. The study and publication of chemistry developed because church reformers provided the Bible and other books in the common language of the people."
 
Regardless of what one might think of these as accurate portrayals of history -- is this what you expect to find in a supposedly secular science lesson?

I didn't "assume" that PAC would consistently refer to the Catholic church as "The Roman Church." I simply found it to be so. When I asked a Catholic friend of mine if this was something she'd have found offensive, she said yes -- especially in a work purporting to be religiously neutral.

As for their history being "spot on," here's a sentence whose veracity in that respect I'd question:
 
"The next great civilization in the chronology of world history after the Egyptians was the Greeks."
 
One of my friends, on hearing this, wanted to know when and how exactly China had fallen off the face of the "world."

These are all things I didn't mention in my previous posting on PAC. I was too busy "hyperfocusing" on the picture of Hitler and Auschwitz victims in the lesson on Darwin.

I guess, if hyperfocusing means that one is riveted with stupefied fascination, then yes, I did hyperfocus on that page. That’s the kind of thing that tends to get my attention. Call me funny that way.

As I said in my previous posting on the subject, I realize that I don't have to be in love with a product or company to accept an ad. I just have to feel sure of their appropriateness for a secular audience. PAC failed that test.

However, I'm going to go ahead and be glad about rejecting their ad for a reason that has nothing to do with secular appropriateness, though it has everything to do with my own ideas about intellectual rigor.

I am screamingly wild about Robert Ingersoll. I want to marry him or at least have a mad, steamy affair with him, and never mind the fact that he's been dead for over a hundred years. That's how good a writer he is. (And that's how hot I get for smart, smart men.)

Ingersoll was so ahead of his time that even now, his work can startle. He's like Mark Twain, only never sentimental or mawkish and with about twice the kick.

I live in California, where one of the legal homeschooling options is to register as a private school. These schools must have names. Ours is The Ingersoll Academy.

I mention all this because at the end of one of PAC's physics lessons, there was presented for the reader, apropos of absolutely nothing, a "Life Principle," as follows:  
 
"The superior woman stands erect by bending above the fallen. She rises by lifting others."
 
I'm a screaming redheaded feminist, so this isn't the kind of sentiment that just makes me feel happy all over. It makes me feel barfy all over, to be exact.

I know that I'm not a typical feminist, given the fact that I'm a stay-at-home homeschooling mother who does a lot of cooking and cleaning; but I consider myself to be a feminist in a very basic sense: if you're going to hate me, condescend to me, or deny my intelligence, abilities, or essential rights, you'd damned well better be basing your behavior on something other the fact that I'm a woman.

So any quote that seems to say that, by virtue of my gender, my best and only job must be to take care of children and other needy helpless beings is going to bug me. Not because such work isn't worthy, but because I don't like having it dictated to me.

This particular quote bugged me for another reason. The source of it was simply "Anonymous." Did that mean that no one knew who penned this sentiment, or that the writer at PAC just hadn't looked hard enough?

Turns out, it means “c. none of the above.” Which is where my morning got really interesting.

I could find no references to this quote, either in my books or on the Internet. I did, however, find an eye-opening passage in a speech that Robert Ingersoll gave in 1883, in response to the United States Supreme Court's decision that the Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional.

The whole of the speech can be found on a site called The Secular Web. Here's a link to them:

http://www.infidels.org

and here's a link to the whole speech, in case you feel like taking a gander:

http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/robert_ingersoll/civil_rights.html

And here, finally, is the passage that I think deserves to be quoted in full:
 
"I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample under foot. Men are not superior by reason of the accidents of race or color. They are superior who have the best heart -- the best brain. Superiority is born of honesty, of virtue, of charity, and above all, of the love of liberty. The superior man is the providence of the inferior. He is eyes for the blind, strength for the weak, and a shield for the defenseless. He stands erect by bending above the fallen. He rises by lifting others."
 
Ingersoll was a passionate defender of the rights of women. Long before it was fashionable, he urged the right for women to vote, to be able to own their own property even after marriage, to be able to divorce abusive husbands, and to be treated as human beings. It was a point of pride to him that he never treated his wife like "a beggar," as he put it. He was not the keeper of the cash in his house, and his wife didn't have to ask him for money or explain why she needed it. He once graciously gave an interview to a cub female reporter on her very first assignment, and set her at her ease by telling her how glad he was to have a woman reporter to talk to, as he was "sick of men" and would give her an interview that would "make the men ashamed." He was a feminist.

And now, words of his have been twisted into a cutesy-dootsy little maxim that has nothing to do with what he really said and everything to do with the old idea of women being at their best when they're least visible.

Forget it.

I had a root canal yesterday, and I just paid my taxes a few weeks ago; and I still don't need the money that badly.
 
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Filthy Lucre

Time for a little straight talk about money (also known as moolah, which two of the three people in our apartment call, for reasons that seemed to make sense at some point in our lives, moo-cow moolah, which became moo-cow, and then just moo; so that now, if you stop by at just the right time, you may hear a grownup explaining to her child with a perfectly straight face that she would love to order pizza for dinner, but she just doesn't have the moo).

Sorry. No more digressions. It's all about the moo-cow now.

Secular Homeschooling costs $7 an issue.

Many homeschooling families are getting by on one income.

Which makes $7 a lot of moo.

Let's talk about that.

A very wonderful lady brought her copy of SHM to her local park day gathering. Another gorgeous dame saw it and liked the looks of it so much that she not only ordered a copy of her own, she mentioned it on a homeschooling forum she's a member of.

Which generated SHM's site some decent traffic. Which I need, because my advertising guru Gail is trying to get people interested in advertising on the site, and they aren't inclined to do that until I'm getting more people stopping by.

But I digress.

Except not really, because this is about money, and money is about advertisers, and I basically have none. None on the site, and almost none in the mag itself.

One of the women on the abovementioned forum said that she'd purchased a copy of the first issue, but hasn't ordered the second one, because of the price. "Hopefully it will come down a little," she added, "because I would love to support it."

Let's talk vocabulary for a minute.

Support is what you offer friends and other people you care about. They need you, and you're there for them.

Waiting until this costs less before I buy it is bargain-hunting. It's what you do when money is tight and you're being careful what and how you spend.

Both of these are noble endeavors, but let's not confuse the two.

When I -- the publisher, editor, copy-editor, proofreader, main writer, envelope-sticker, and stamp-buyer for SHM -- have more support, the magazine's price will come down because I'll be able to consistently place a large enough order at the printers that my own costs will come down. Then, thanks to terrific supporters like the two mentioned above, I will be able to offer a real deal to the bargain-hunters, and we'll all be happy.

I cannot lower the price of the magazine until I have more subscribers, because I have basically no advertisers and I can't count on getting them any time soon, in spite of all poor Gail's hard work. The ones who would be appropriate for SHM are unthrilled by our circ numbers; and the ones who'd be happy to place an ad are companies with names like Gracious God's Homeschooling Curriculum For Wee Lambs of Our Lord Jesus.

(I am not making fun of Christians, Christian homeschoolers, or Christian homeschooling educational materials here. I do think it’s humorous that companies with names remarkably similar to the one above really do contact Secular Homeschooling Magazine.)

Per-issue costs to the publisher notwithstanding, $7 an issue is, nevertheless, a large enough sum to give the average homeschooler pause.

It doesn't differ that much from $6.50 an issue, which is the per-issue price of the terrific Home Education Magazine, which is an older, more established journal with advertisers. They, too, had humble beginnings, which gives me hope; but then I look at their advertisers, many of whom wouldn't be appropriate for SHM, and then my shoulders slump down again and I reach for the chocolate.

Of course, in a way HEM does cost much less than SHM, even though they come out more often, because they offer subscriber discounts. I can’t yet. I can’t afford to.
 
SHM is a quarterly. The first issue was 60 pages long; the second is 62.

All text. Long, deep-delving articles with basically no ads. And no religious landmines.

Which means that if you put away $2.50 a month, at the end of three months you can put fifty cents back in the laundry-quarter jar and mail the rest in for a copy of SHM.

If you have a friend who's also interested in reading SHM, you have three months to save up $3.50. Of course, then there's the whole custody-battle aspect of things; but still, three months should give both of you plenty of time to arm-wrestle over who gets to read it first.

If you have no heathen-homeschooler friends and no moo-cow moolah, you might have a local public library. A library supported by your tax dollars. Tell them you want them to subscribe to SHM.

In the meantime, I'll be working on the next issue. And I'll be trying very hard not to think about the morbid conversation I had recently with my math-nerd (that's a compliment at our place) husband. We were talking about per-copy costs -- printers, postage (going up in a couple of weeks), envelopes -- and just to make my day complete, we tried to factor in the time we spend working on the mag.

We even pretended that the time he spends typesetting the magazine doesn't exist. We just looked at me.

We’re not losing money. That’s good news, anyway.

However, I'm not making as much as I'd make if I just gave up and went back to working retail.

I'm not making half as much.

I'm making something like a tenth.

Plus, if I got back behind the counter of a bookstore, I'd get an employee's discount.

Okay, I'm getting back to work on an article I've been trying to finish for weeks now. Trying not to think about all that.

Still -- who do I call if I want to report myself as a sweatshop owner?

Anonymous Is A Woman

When this magazine was still just an idea, I asked for feedback about it. Specifically, feedback as to whether it was the kind of thing that people would mind having around the house for everyone to see.

One woman said that, although she'd love to get the magazine itself, she probably wouldn't have the nerve to order it, because she really didn't need the grief from the mail carrier about the name on the return address.

Well, I don't blame her. I don't always feel like coming out as a secular homeschooler, either. Especially to someone who might not like the idea, and who has some control over when and in what condition my bills get here.

When it comes to the product, I'm idealism itself.

When it comes to people actually getting the chance to read the danged thing, I'm all about the pragmatism.

So when I'm printing up return-address labels, I don't use the name of the magazine. I use my own.

I use my full address, too, right down to the apartment number. Hey, I've got sixteen neighbors in this building. If a copy comes back -- and one does now and then -- I want to know right away.

Gail, our advertising guru, has suggested that just to be on the safe side, I might want to think about getting a post office box.

Part of me is just too cheap. And lazy. Our post office is only several blocks away, but they're fairly icky blocks, especially when you're a woman walking alone. Even during the day, there's enough creepiness that I find myself making excuses to drive. (I combine errands, just so my carbon footprint doesn't become positively Sasquatchean.) And there's no parking lot to the place, which means that I have to take my chances that I'll get within a couple of blocks. Not so bad, unless I'm lugging a box with a couple of hundred copies of the magazine all sealed up and ready to go. But not something I want to have to do every day, or even every week.

More than that, though, I guess I'm just not paranoid enough.

Don't get me wrong. I do take care of myself, in terms of not putting myself in the position of being an easy target. I don't walk late or alone. I always have a phone with me. I'm aware of my surroundings.

But I just can't care that much about my address getting out there, at least to people who paid perfectly good money to hear from me. I live in a gated building, surrounded by people who hear it every time I drop a pot lid. (I've been known to call out, "Sorry!" after such noisemakers go off, even when I'm alone in my apartment.) I have a big hairy Sicilian husband, and I'm never more than a few feet away from something mean and sharp that I'd be more than happy to use on the right person. (Or the wrong person, I guess I should say.)

So if you're thinking about ordering the magazine and are worried about what the neighbors will think, now you know. They'll think you've got a friend in California.

(You don't have to tell them she's a screaming redheaded editor. Even I appreciate having a little privacy.)

The $750,000 Question

Out of the blue, I got a wonderful offer of help regarding the advertising in SHM.

So far, the magazine's team has been made up of my deep supply of words and energy, and my husband's typesetting and layout genius. In terms of the business aspect of the thing, both of us have some basic rough knowledge. We know not to overextend ourselves -- the magazine is a quarterly because between his full-time job and my homeschooling and occasional teaching gigs, that's all we can do right now. It costs what it does because I'm willing to be broke but don't have the money to go into debt.

Our new staff member is someone well acquainted with the business and advertising world, and willing -- happy, even -- to work within the mag's strict advertising deadlines. She liked the looks of the site (and this blog) and almost cried when she saw a copy of the magazine in person. Plus she's really nice, patient, and upbeat; whereas my husband is by turns mildly acidic and affably morose, and I'm obsessively energetic when it comes to deadline writing and researching the hell out of any given subject, but also given to fits of brooding and ranting. So this new addition lends some emotional balance to a mix that was riding perilously close to something right out of Wuthering Heights.

We haven't had a lot of ads in SHM so far because, ironically, the advertisements are critically important to the magazine. Readers have actually been happy to see them -- because they're the right kind of ads. I got the most wonderful fan letter the other day from someone who was excited about being able to see advertisements for products that she knew she could trust -- that is, that wouldn't let her down by looking terrific and promising the moon but then come along with some religious agenda or assume she belonged to a particular belief system.

I priced the magazine on the assumption that, because suitable advertisers would be difficult to find and even more difficult to tempt until our circulation numbers went up, we would be fairly ad-free for a while. Any advertisements we managed to get would be considered a happy windfall, rather than a necessary part of the budget.

So far, it's worked. I'm not rich, but I'm not losing money and we're gaining new readers almost every day. I even considered the idea of having the magazine be ad-free, like The Sun; but our readers want ads, if they're from the right advertisers.

Our wonderful new family member, Gail, has been busy getting the word out about SHM; and yesterday, she found someone who wanted to buy a back-cover advertisement at our new rates. It was a company called Paradigm Accelerated Curriculum.

Right off the bat, I was worried. I already knew how hard it was to get just plain religiously-neutral educational materials for homeschoolers; if there was a completely neutral homeschooling curriculum out there, I sure hadn't heard about it.

I went to take a look at the company's site. I didn't get a great vibe from it; but I reminded myself that I didn't have to love the site. I just had to be sure that their product was religiously neutral.

I clicked on the "mission statement." A little pompous, but not a peep about religion.

But my alarms were still ringing, albeit quietly.

I went to the page about the founder. Several paragraphs about him. Nothing religious except the bare mention of the church he belongs to, and only because it was one organization of many with which he'd worked.

Still nothing that violated our advertising policy. Still not liking it. And no, this isn't the hindsight talking, because I remember saying out loud that I must be being paranoid.

They had sample curricula available for review. I downloaded the first bit of "Basic Science Mysteries." And -- hey, look! Turns out I'm not paranoid!

It was a chapter about basic health. Physical health is important, of course; but so is emotional health. And spiritual health. I wasn't completely sure about what that last one meant until they defined it for me:

"Spiritual health involves your belief system and includes practice of the U.S. National [sic] motto, 'In God We Trust.'" Also, it turns out that people who pray and go to church regularly are better off in every way than those of us who don't.

So much for religiously neutral.

Then I took a look at the sample biology lesson.

I really would have been ready to disqualify them for using the word "tenent" (which isn't actually a word at all; a "tenant," with an "a", is someone who rents lodgings) when they meant "tenet." It wasn't just a typo, either; they used it twice, including once in the special vocabulary sidebar. I know I'm showing my true colors as Professor Nerdetta at the Institute of Nerdology by saying this, but that's the kind of thing that keeps me up nights. Screaming.

So is having a big photograph of Hitler on the page about Darwin.

Well, of course. I mean, you can't have a discussion of the merits of Darwin's writing without a headshot of the big H superimposed over a picture of prisoners in a concentration camp. Can you?

Turns out, you can. And so far as I know, many of my readers would prefer to.

So I called Gail, our hard-working advertising specialist, and apologized for all the work and time she'd put into getting an advertisement that I wouldn't be able to accept. She was totally cool with it, especially after she heard the specifics.

We had a great conversation about what the guy over at PAC was like on the phone. He loved the copy of the magazine Gail had sent him, she reported. He didn't even ask about our circ numbers when he said he wanted a back cover ad.

That and some of the stuff she saw on the site -- she hadn't seen the things I had -- set off a few alarms of her own. She asked him flat-out if this was a religious curriculum.

His answer?

"Why, we've used this in public schools!"

I don't to offend any of my terrific readers (and writers); but I think maybe the fact that this company is apparently based in Texas might have something to do with that.

At any rate, it was quite evasive of him not to give a straight yes or no answer.

Which makes PAC a Level Two Category of inappropriate SHM advertisers.

Level One Inappropriates are well-intentioned, sincere, and just plain don't understand why their products aren't something I'm looking for. They, in turn, fall into two categories.

The first group of these didn't read all the small print. They routinely make advertising inquiries to any magazine with the word "homeschooling" in the title. They don't notice the word secular, or maybe don't know what it means. Why not? We all have gaps in our vocabulary. For instance, I myself don't know what the word "avuncular" means. Never have.

Or, like a friend of mine at park day yesterday, they don't understand that someone would turn away an advertiser. (Boy, did we have a long talk about that one. Well, she's wealthy. The idea of being without money scares her. Whereas I've been broke for decades now, and know firsthand that it's not such a dreadful state at all, if you do it right.)

At any rate: there are some perfectly innocent companies whose products are religious in tone and who want to advertise with SHM. Some of them, as I said, don't get our policy; some understand it, but don't see why they could be seen as violating it.

It took me longer to figure that out. I mean, how can you think that your product is religiously neutral when it mentions Jesus right on the first page?

Two ways. First, there are people who live in areas where, as a homeschooler on a loop I'm on recently said, "religion is as natural as breathing." These people don't see themselves as especially religious, because everyone around them is at least as religious as they are, if not more so. When they sit down to gauge how religious in tone their materials are, they're not seeing all the times they mentioned Jesus; they're thinking of all the times they wanted to and didn't. So they're bewildered by the idea that their material could be inappropriate for a secular forum.

Both of these groups don't bother me, other than the twinge of regret I feel at having to turn away advertising revenue and any possible hurt feelings. What bothers me is the abovementioned Level Two offenders.

These people know jolly well that their materials aren't appropriate to or wanted by secular homeschoolers. I'd like to give them a smidgen of credit by thinking that they really are genuinely concerned about the eternal welfare of souls, but I'm having a hard time believing that a far more mischievous impulse isn't at play.

Look at the answer that guy at PAC gave to Gail. She asked him a direct, simple question. He gave her an answer that might have been the truth, but certainly wasn't the whole truth.

Did I miss that Ten Commandment about not bearing false witness; or is it one that you can get a special dispensation from upstairs to ignore, as long as you're doing it in a good cause?

I don't care that the answer he gave wasn't a strict falsehood. It wasn't an answer to the question that was asked -- but the speaker wanted very much for his listener to believe that it was. Sorry, but if that's honesty, I'm a triple-chocolate brownie.

What bothered me most about the whole conversation with Gail is that she praised me for my "integrity" in turning away this advertiser. The thing is, I don't know if saying "EEEWWWWWW!!" and pushing something away is integrity. Or, as I put it to my husband later that evening, I didn't think I deserved much credit for saying that I wouldn't put my stamp of approval on something I was repulsed by.

"Not for the kind of money he was offering, no," my husband said. "But let's say he decided to up his offer."

"Not enough money in the world," I said.

He loves playing devil's advocate. "Even if it was enough that you could lower the price of the magazine to nothing?" he asked. "And you told your subscribers, 'Hey, listen, this guy's financing the magazine now, and we only have to take one ad from him...'"

I decided that:

a. It would have to be at least $750,000;

b. I'd have to contact every subscriber or purchaser of the magazine, in advance, and ask if it was okay, explaining every detail of the transaction, and if even one person didn't like it, the deal was off;

c. Assuming that even after all that the deal went through, copies purchased by new subscribers would have to be accompanied by a warning sticker; and

d. The advertiser would have to be informed of all of this.

But even then it wouldn't be okay, I realized. The magazine's in paper form. Strangers could see it and not know the story of the ad.

"Besides," I concluded, bringing the conversation back to the planet we were all born on, "if I could ever really be tempted by any amount of money, all I'd have to do was remember that picture of the Holocaust victims. I'm not going to be one more person exploiting them."

My husband has some experience with Holocaust imagery, because of some work he did several years ago as part of a magazine assignment. When I briefly described the PAC picture in question, he knew exactly which one it was.

"That's the one Elie Wiesel sued PETA for using," he said. "And he won. He's in it, so he can have some say over how it's used."

Oh.

Whoa.

I've contacted the Elie Wiesel Foundation about the fact that this company is using this picture in such a context. I asked them if they could let me know what they think and if anything comes of it. I haven't heard back from them yet, but I feel better already.

In the meantime, I hope that PAC and everyone of their ilk knows that their money's no good here.
 
P.S. In the interest of your not having to take my word for it about the company I've been talking about, here's a link to their site:

http://www.pacworks.com/

Let me know if you think I've been quoting them out of context. And don't worry about going to check them out -- they don't make money from visitors, only from purchasers.

Charlton Heston Isn't Dead; or, Why I'm Not Sleeping Nights

This entry really ought to be titled "Where Have I Been?" I don't even have the nerve to look at the date on the previous posting. Suffice it to say, I've missed me, too.

What have I been up to?

Let’s see. You don't want to hear about the pinkeye incident. I don’t even want to think about it. Suffice it to say, it’s one of those things, like head lice and bullying, that I really hoped I wouldn’t have to deal with since we homeschool; and, like so many of us, I was living in a happy delusional realm of my own creation until cruel Reality came barging in with bloodshot gaze and itchy optics.

And?

Oh -- you probably already heard something about the recent legal threats to homeschooling in California, where I live. Said threats took a serious bite out of what I laughingly (okay, weepingly) call my spare time. (I hope you're willing to hear more about California, politics, and homeschooling, btw, since I'm writing a pretty hefty article about it -- everything from how secular homeschoolers suddenly became a precious commodity on this coast to why I may have to buy a pair of pants that isn't made of denim.)

What else?

If you're an American, you, too, already survived that whole Six Holidays In One Week thing we had back in March: the beginning of Daylight Saving Time (if you're a fan, you're in the wrong place unless you enjoy making innocent editors scream), St. Patrick's Day (which, in our house, means making a green cardboard castle and festooning it with little rubber snakes the night before; in the morning, the snakes are gone and St. P. has left candy potatoes, and no, I'm not kidding), the vernal equinox (if you don't know what an equinox is, you have ten minutes to go look it up before I call the Homeschool Police and have you kicked out of the club), Purim (which I only celebrate if, as happened this year, my gorgeous brilliant shiksa-girlfriend-who-married-Jewish invites me over for a dinner that her equally amazing eleven-year-old daughter cooks from scratch), Bach's birthday (a.k.a. Good Friday, at least this year), and Cadbury Egg Day (a.k.a. Easter Sunday).

None of which has to do with Charlton Heston or sleeping, but I just thought I'd mention it.

Oh -- and I got the second issue of the magazine out, as you may have noticed and even read.

I think that the second issue of SHM was, in its own way, even more significant than the first. Because, really, the second issue is solid evidence that the magazine truly exists. I mean, the first one was important, but let's face it -- it could have been a lark. Or a fluke. Or the place where I ran out of money, patience, ideas, inspiration, time, and/or energy.

The second issue says that I witnessed all that insanity and stayed up all those nights and wrote all those checks and watched all that hair fade from red to bleah -- and was willing to do it all over again.

I'm currently reading, writing, and editing for the third issue. Which brings me, finally, to the stupid heading on this much-belated posting.

First -- okay, if you're reading this, you're probably a homeschooler. Or a parent. Or a human being. Maybe even two or three of those. And so you know how it is with health stuff. You're right in the middle of a big project, and something goes a little wrong with the corporeal part of your mind-body problem. But it's not lethal, and so you bargain with it. "I'll go to the [health practitioner of your choice -- I'm not judging, unless you buy that online homeopathic medicine where all you have to do is place your order and then put a glass of water next to the computer, in which case, no offense, but you're insane and should give me all your money] just as soon as this is all over. I promise. If you'll just give me until the end of this [week, month, retrograde of Mercury -- again, not judging], I'll be a good [boy, girl, other] and get everything that's ever been wrong with me taken care of. I swear. Just don't kill me or give me more pain than a reasonable over the counter medication can take the edge off for a little while more. Please."

Well, that's the state I found myself in. The magazine was just going to the printer and a tooth that's been giving me trouble started really acting up. I will not go into my famous rant about how evil insurance companies are, except to briefly mention that the reason this tooth hadn't been taken care of before is that first we didn't have any insurance or money, because my husband had been laid off; then we had dental insurance but it had that waiting period built in where you can't get any major work done until you're on the plan for x number of months, 'cause you know how people are about the dentist's office -- they love it so much, they'll go all the time if someone doesn't stop them; then our dental insurance finally kicked in, but they kept refusing to pay for stuff because my husband's last name is different from mine so they insisted we weren't actually married and they weren't about to pay for some shameless hussy's dental work. At which point I gave up and just decided to buy a pair of pliers and carry them around and ask my nearest friend for a bit of a pull the next time I had any trouble in the teeth department.

But I got a pretty bad pain a few weeks ago, and we'd changed insurance companies again, and my husband swore they wouldn't be evil jerks like the last time. Which I still don't believe, but I got too uncomfortable to argue. So my husband found a dentist nearby us and made the appointment (yes, your own Mad Editor really won't go to pretty much any medical establishment unless someone else dials and talks first), and I limped in to their office, clutching my bottle of Motrin.

You'd think that dealing with all the magazine stuff -- subscribers, writers, advertisers (okay, not too overwhelmingly many of those), printers, post offices -- you'd think that at this point, I'd have learned to suffer a certain amount of paperwork and bureaucracy with a certain amount of patience. You'd think wrong. I am, if anything, less patient than ever with this kind of nonsense, if it doesn't even have the excuse of being associated with the work I love. If I'm in a dentist's office, I'm in pain, dad gum it. I want help. I don't feel like answering three pages of stupid questions.

And these questions cared. Or at least they pretended to. Which, if anything, ticked me off more. Because I knew they didn't really want to know if I'd had "a negative experience" with a dentist in the past. They just wanted extra credit for asking.

But it was their office and their rules and they weren't going to let me sit down in that horrifying chair until I filled out everything just right. So I answered.

After the question about whether or not I had any fears about this dentist's appointment, I circled "yes." When they asked what it was, exactly, I was afraid of, I wrote, in my neatest handwriting, "pain, pain, death, pain." When pressed about previous horrifying dental incidents, I replied, "pain, pain, condescension, pain." I mean, they weren't going to read the danged thing anyway, so I might as well enjoy myself a little.

Except they did read it. The dentist came in to the torture chamber they'd led me to, and I saw that the newspapers had all been wrong. Charlton Heston is not dead; he's my dentist. Really. Okay, that's not what he calls himself, but this is him, I swear. He doesn't just look like him; this guy even sounds like him. It's uncanny. I wanted to ask him to say the thing about how I should take my hands off him, seeing as how I was a damned dirty ape. Maybe next time.

He did, however, say in a tone of rich amusement that he'd read my form and had duly noted my concern about death and pain. He also asked what exactly it was I edited. (He really had read the form.) When I gave him the name of the magazine, he actually wrote it down. It was kind of sweet, if a little ludicrous. The guy has to be in his sixties, for crying out corn. And he's Charlton Heston. Which makes him Moses, Michelangelo, and Ben Hur, last I checked. I don't think he's looking for secular anything.

But anyway. He tortured me, as was his legal right and duty, and then sent me to some specialist who tortured me some more, only with slightly different equipment. I love how you tell a dentist that you're in pain, and he'll rush to get you an appointment with someone who can help you be in even more pain. Plus they don't even give you drugs. At least they don't give me drugs. Seriously, they didn't even offer. I guess they figure as a writer I'm already doing all that drinking.

But it isn't the tortured remnants of what used to be my jaw that's keeping me up nights. I'm very, very tired right now, though, so more about that next time. Which will be soon. I promise. For now, I'm alive and reasonably well, and so's the magazine -- and I really appreciate all the people to whom that's good news.

Thoughts after a day spent stuffing envelopes

Just got an "inspirational message" from the woman who owns the site where I do my chocolate writing. One of the editor/writers there just moved on to greener pastures. She makes more from her freelance writing in a month than I've ever made in a year of doing pretty much anything.

It's not the money. I like being broke. It's very freeing. It's the one thing no one can take away from me.

No, what sinks me is the fact that what I'm doing now with SHM is the first job I've ever had that a high school student couldn't do just as well as I could, if not better. I've worked behind the counter and I've nannied and I've done back-breaking, heart-breaking work with multiply-handicapped children. That's it. That's pretty pathetic, when you think about how I used to ace those IQ tests.

As hard as I try to remind myself that the world's idea of success has never been my own, still sometimes it's hard not to feel like a loser.

But then I think about the freedoms I have, and the traps I haven't let myself fall into, be they material or spiritual. And I realize that I'm not failing; I'm refusing to succeed on anyone's terms but my own.

And looking at where it's led me, I think that's not such a bad philosophy after all.