"Imagine that, you know, you built a table. Maybe it came out a little bit crooked."

"Probably your wife or your neighbor would see it for what it is, you know? A shoddy piece of workmanship. But to you that table might seem really great, because you're the one who created it. It's the fruit of your labor. And that is really the idea behind the Ikea Effect."

Said Daniel Mochon, a Tulane University marketing professor.

I don't identify with that feeling. If I've done something myself, I'm particularly irritated by the flaws (and I'm more likely to know where they are). If someone I cared about had made it, I'd be more lenient.

Too much esteem for self-esteem.

Time to take it down a notch.

"If you can dream it, you can achieve it."

"Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude."

Etc. etc.

"MY FUTURE IS BRIGHT and never will it dim."

"I like to consider myself a rare breed. I'm very spontaneous and random… I'm determined and goal oriented. My destiny is laid on a solid gold brick pathway...."

Lower self-confidence might make you more successful.

Says this item in the Harvard Business Review.

1. Lower self-confidence makes you pay attention to negative feedback and be self-critical...

2. Lower self-confidence can motivate you to work harder and prepare more....

3. Lower self-confidence reduces the chances of coming across as arrogant or being deluded....

"TV can boost self-esteem of white boys... Self-esteem of white girls, black kids decreases with TV consumption."

Put that on your list of things a study said.

With the definition of self-esteem being an overall feeling of self-worth, Harrison told CNN, kids were asked reverse-coded questions such as, "Are there a lot of things about yourself you would like to change?"

Are you sure you didn't reverse-code some other character quality?

For white boys, "regardless of what show you're watching ... things in life are pretty good for you," [Nicole] Martins, an assistant professor of telecommunications at Indiana University Bloomington, said in a statement. "(White males) tend to be in positions of power; you have prestigious occupations, high education, glamorous houses, a beautiful wife, with very little portrayals of how hard you worked to get there."

And this unrealistic complacency benefits the white males, because... ? Because everything benefits white males?

"Talking about ourselves—whether in a personal conversation or through social media sites like Facebook and Twitter—triggers the same sensation of pleasure in the brain as food or money..."

A new study.

Generally, acts of self disclosure were accompanied by spurts of heightened activity in brain regions belonging to the meso-limbic dopamine system, which is associated with the sense of reward and satisfaction from food, money or sex.

Ah! I thought of a weight-loss epigram: Instead of eating: Tweeting.

I've got another: Don't be a hog: Blog.

A public school teacher told her students "Republicans are stupid."

What's the worst part of that?

The worst part about a teacher saying "Republicans are stupid" is...
	She should not take a partisan position in class.
	As a model of how to speak, she should never call anyone "stupid."
	She should model high-level critical thinking, not simplistic conclusions.
	She made it seem acceptable to impose a stereotype on a societal group.
	She disrespected persons of below-average intelligence, some of whom may be in the class.
	She made students feel cowed about expressing opinions, lest they be regarded as dumb.
	She should be teaching something substantive, not wasting class time on politics.
pollcode.com free polls

Men who take paternity leave without doing at least half of the baby care.

That would be nearly all of them, if we are to believe this study:

Only three of 109 male faculty members surveyed reported that they did half or more of the care, while 70 of 73 women reported doing at least half. On average, both men and women professors reported that the mother did more than half the work for all 25 of the child care tasks. This result holds even when the male professor's wife works full-time.

Was breastfeeding included as one of the tasks? That would skew results. Also, these were professors. Professors are comfortable taking leave time away from work.

The female professors also reported higher average enjoyment scores than males on 24 of the 25 child care tasks. (The sole exception was managing the division of labor for parenting tasks, which men disliked less than women.)

First of all, maybe those women are maintaining their self-esteem by getting into the frame of mind where they think about themselves as loving what they are doing. Also, that management-oriented man might be managing her moods, taking care of her, and that might not have been counted as one of the "child care tasks."

Interestingly, the report suggests that paternity leave be eliminated, because men are using it to further their careers, thereby creating greater inequity for women who actually take time off.

Well, you can't do that. That would be illegal sex discrimination. But let's assume you could do it. Does it make sense? Let's give this advantage only to women, because, in the great majority of the cases, women will use it for the "right" reason and men will, as men tend to do, find ways to take selfish advantage of the opportunity. That's horrible sterotyping, which is why it's illegal, but quite aside from that, I don't like incentivizing the female professors' failure to take advantage of time off from teaching to work on their scholarship. And I don't like giving up on the ongoing project of mothers and fathers working out childcare arrangements together. And it's none of the employer's business how a man and a woman structure their activities within the home.

"A lot of parents today are terrified that something they say to their children might make them 'feel bad.'"

"But, hey, if they've done something wrong, they should feel bad. Kids with a sense of responsibility, not entitlement, who know when to experience gratitude and humility, will be better at navigating the social shoals of college."

— Amy Chua.

"For a time, our culture celebrated the rebel and the outsider."

"The most miserable of my correspondents fit this mold. They were forever in revolt against the world and ended up sourly achieving little."

One of the conclusions made by David Brooks after reading the essays he solicited from readers over 70, assessing the successes and failures of their lives. (Oddly, the man who gave himself an "F" in everything seems to be the most interesting person.)

Person-based praise and process-based praise — are you praising your kids the best way?

"The parents who gave more process-praise had children who believe their intelligence and social qualities could be developed and they were more eager for challenges" — according to Stanford researcher Carol Dweck, quoted in this essay by Jenny Anderson.

I haven't delved through Dweck's study, but I wonder whether correlation is causation here. Maybe less intelligent parents are the ones who make "person-based" comments like "You're so smart!" and more intelligent parents figure out that it is better not to tell the child what he is but to talk about the specifics of the thing that he is attempting to do. If so, the difference in intelligence may be simply inborn. 

"God Bless America and the Anthem? And the fly-by? Could you militarize this event just a tad more?"

"And what in the name of the FSM was the point of giving us both Sam Elliott and Michael Douglas for the pregame Heroic Voiceover Brigade? And, Michael Douglas, how exactly do we link JFK's inaugural, MLK's Dream speech, the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima, Ali's KO of Liston in Lewiston, and this football game? A journey? More like a trip, actually. The pregame show was what Leni Riefenstahl would have done had she emigrated here as a child and gone to work for Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Price."

So wrote Charles P. Pierce about the Super Bowl intro, and I almost didn't post that because I had to check the Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Price reference  — is it "Mad Men"? yeah, sorry, I still don't want to watch it — not to mention the FSM reference — eh. It flicked my bloggable toggle switch and then came very close to toggling back. But I'm quoting it, really because I agree that they overdid it. Leni would have been much more insidiously subtle. But that's a good thing, right? You can defend against the ridiculously overdone. We can feel patriotic and festive in a mixed up clutter of history and pop culture, and then it's on to the football game.

The Pierce quote is embedded in this James Wolcott blog post. Wolcott is crankier than Pierce:

I had the pre-game on mute and every time I glanced up I wondered if we had declared war on Iraq or a hologram of Ronald Reagan was going to materialize on stage, raising a ruddy hand in blessing as Peggy Noonan ascended into heaven. The Super Bowl is bombastic enough without being a fanfare for World War III or IV, but who's counting? Or is it that the country requires this much self-affirmation now to reassure itself that it's still proud and virile? Maybe Stanley Fish can figure this out for us.

No link on the Stanley Fish reference, which is not something I can untangle with a Google search. I know who Stanley Fish is. I'm even in the middle of reading his new book, "How to Write a Sentence." (Check it out: I just wrote a sentence!) I'll assume Wolcott means to say something like: All those words and images require interpretation and Fish is the interpretation-meister.

But let's try to answer Wolcott's question: Does the country require this much self-affirmation now to reassure itself that it's still proud and virile?

I anticipate, instead of real answers, your snarky reframings of the question, asking whether Wolcott needs to reassure himself that he's still proud and virile. Indeed, I got the impression that his paragraph paralleled Pierce's, that he was envious of Pierce's writing prowess and trying to outmatch it. Ending with that limp Fish, he failed, which probably explains the flailing about "the county" and its imagined self-esteem problem. It's so problematic, raising the flag.

"I was kind of, really mad, sort of... I was trying to think back, 'What did I miss? What did I do wrong?'"

That's what Abhinav Venigalla thought when he fell 10 points short of a perfect score on the math SAT, which he took in 7th grade as part of a part of a Johns Hopkins University competition.

Factor that into your thinking about teaching kids self-esteem.

Did you know there was a serious author who was being ridiculed in Jack Handey's "Deep Thoughts"?

Yes. His name was Hugh Prather, and he published a book called "Notes to Myself" in 1970. It included things like:

¶“Another day to listen and love and walk and glory. I am here for another day. I think of those who aren’t.”

¶“My prayer is: I will be what I will be, I will do what I will do.”

¶“When I get to where I can enjoy just lying on the rug picking up lint balls, I will no longer be too ambitious.”

Later, he wrote “I Touch the Earth, the Earth Touches Me” and “Wipe Your Face, You Just Swallowed My Soul.” He "founded and ran a religion, the Dispensable Church."  Also, the Moosewood Restaurant (in Ithaca) was named after his dog, Moosewood.

He's dead now, at age 72.

And I love "Deep Thoughts"....

You might think that the favorite plant of the porcupine is the cactus, but it's thinking like that that has almost ruined this country.

Michelle Obama is out of synch with the fatshionistas.

Robin Givhan writes about the body acceptance movement. Most of her essay is about the desire for cutting-edge fashion in plus sizes. (She embarrasses the president of Lane Bryant for saying his customer is mainly concerned with comfort and "might be a year behind" on style.) Tucked away at the end is the part about Michelle Obama. The First Lady has been Givhan's prime subject these days (unfortunately), and it's surprising to find something critical of her in a Givhan column (even if it is given low prominence).  Let me highlight it:

What some currently see as the most distressing assault on their dignity is first lady Michelle Obama with her fight against childhood obesity.

"I'm really appalled at the first lady's campaign. I think it will do more harm than good," says Linda Bacon, author of "Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight." "I applaud her for some of the specific programs, but when it's done in the name of obesity, it's going to backfire on her."

Bacon was one of about a dozen researchers and authors who signed a letter to Obama voicing concern that her emphasis on weight was stigmatizing a population rather than dealing with the broader health issues. "I think it's great for kids to have a better connection to their food," Bacon says. 

Bacon. Great name. No seriously.

A grand and lustrous name. And if you thought a joke was in order, you should be ashamed of yourself... of your mind. Not your body, of course. Love your glorious, ample body.

Back to Linda Bacon:

But by focusing on weight, "you're teaching kids that they did something wrong to get the body they have."

The women do not dismiss decades of scientific research on obesity, but they are distrustful of the conclusions as well as the methodology. They know they exercise; they feel healthy. One young woman shared that she was a vegan and has always been a big girl. Mostly, however, they argue that everyone should eat better and move more -- not just the overweight. So why point a finger at fat people?

Givhan has the access to extract a response from Michelle Obama. The questions I'd ask: How can you talk about taking personal responsibility when what people hear is blame? If people are saying they feel good about themselves, do you really want to make them feel bad? Even those of us who don't favor inspiring self-esteem all the time want to know why you want to tear people down in the effort to get them to do something they'll probably never be able to do very well? But Michelle Obama is someone who's big on promoting self-esteem, so she's got a particularly difficult problem achieving coherence. You can't just be for everything that's good. Everyone must feel good and be virtuous. How does that work?

I assume Givhan will get back to us with the First Lady's response. Until then, let's speculate. I predict she'll go on about her garden and how delicious vegetables can be: If only these women would taste vegetables — really taste her most excellent vegetables — then they will love eating right and all the incoherence will melt away. You can love yourself, love your body, love all your food and eat right and be healthy — feel healthy and be healthy. Of course, that's emphatically not true, but one feels so pretty saying it. And that is what we want — to feel pretty.

ADDED:

"Meetings between great men don't always result in elevated colloquies; sometimes they tend towards the crudely basic."

For example:

When Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald met in Paris, at Le Dingo Bar on the rue Delambre in April 1925, Hemingway was disconcerted to be asked: "Did you have sex with your wife before you were married, Ernest?" They became friends, however. Their most intimate conversation (as reported by Hemingway) was also about wives. One evening, Scott Fitzgerald confessed to his friend that his wife, Zelda, had told him his penis was unusually small, and that he could never satisfy any woman. Hemingway said it was just typical of Zelda's undermining ways, but Scott wasn't reassured. So Hemingway asked him to come to the lavatory, where he inspected his friend's lance of manhood. Back in the bar, he explained:

"You're perfectly fine," I said. "You're okay. There's nothing wrong with you. You look at yourself from above and you look foreshortened. Go over to the Louvre and look at the people in the statues and then go home and look at yourself in the mirror in profile." Now there was an act of friendship between creative giants, if not an especially artistic conversation.

Oh, I think it's artistic as hell.

Teaching self-esteem and diversity.

From a review of "NurtureShock," by Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman:

[H]igh self-esteem doesn't improve grades, reduce anti-social behavior, deter alcohol drinking or do much of anything good for kids. In fact, telling kids how smart they are can be counterproductive. Many children who are convinced that they are little geniuses tend not to put much effort into their work. Others are troubled by the latent anxiety of adults who feel it necessary to praise them constantly.

... [A] lot of well-meaning adult nostrums—"we're all friends," "we're all equal"—pass right over the heads of young children. Attempts to increase racial sensitivity in older students can even lead to unintended consequences. One ­researcher found that "more diversity translates into more divisions between students." Another warns that too much discussion of past discrimination can make minority children over-reactive to perceived future slights. As for trying to increase emotional intelligence, the education fad of the 1990s, it doesn't seem to promote "pro-social values" either. It turns out that bullies use their considerable EQ, as it is called, to ­control their peers.

"Repeating positive self-statements may benefit certain people, such as individuals with high self-esteem, but backfire..."

"... for the very people who need them the most."

Are you surprised, losers? (Sorry, I was trying to help.)

"If you're going to try Brussels sprouts, you might be more likely to climb a mountain the next time you're on vacation."

Inane advice for women — from Laure Redmond, author of "Feel Good Naked." That book is from 2001 — a year when how to feel good naked was a pressing concern. Now Redmond is a "self-esteem coach." Hey, what do you do when you're a self-esteem coach who feels bad about herself for being a self-esteem coach?

IN THE COMMENTS: Who needs a self-esteem coach? We've got a self-esteem roach!

blogging cockroach types:

hi professor
if you re doing cuisine posts you know i just had
to say something altho i draw the line at the
mexican soup maker so does mom here at the
house who is french and can t stand mexican food
but dad and tommy like it so what to do
but i ve begged tommy not to tell anybody about
this story as it would be the end of the little
tolerance mom has left for mexican food
which she thinks lacks subtlety and that je ne sais quoi
i bet there were lots of je ne sais quois in that guy s soup
b t w tommy is the boy whose computer i use
in case you re new around here
anyway mom makes these killer brussels sprouts
something like barts recipe above but mom puts in
some tiny bits of canadian bacon or pork yum
i really like that mom usually spills some of the
sauce with the bacon bits ooh double yum
i haven t climbed any mountains as a result of
brussels sprouts but i have climbed the side
of the stove which makes a lot more sense
because who ever heard of spilled bacon bits
in butter beer sauce on the top of the matterhorn

as for naked women i was pretty used to those
in my last life which i think is why i am a cockroach
this time around plus not having those hormones
i almost spelled it whoremones
it s all just a memory that nowadays makes me wince
along with the chile verde dad dropped behind
the stove last week