The Salt-Box

The 4-year-old showed a keen grasp of linguistics / poetic language this weekend:

The Little Man has been out of his mind with anticipation this weekend, and also from the heat.  As a result, he’s been spending some time in his room contemplating strategies for expressing his frustration.

Anyway, I was trying to explain that it’s ok to *be* mad or disappointed or frustrated, but that he needs to find less destructive ways of expressing it.  Don’t throw the toy, just say that you’re crabby.

He listened pretty carefully, even using some active listening skills he’s been practicing.  But, after about five minutes or so, he said: “Well, I’m not going to say that ‘I’m angry’ or ‘I’m frustrated.’  I’m going to say ‘You’re stupid’ or ‘I hate you’ instead.”  I asked him why, since those tend to land him in his room.

His answer: “When I say ’stupid’ or ‘hate,’ I don’t mean it.  But those words are more violent, and they help me get over being mad–they get it out.”  It’s like he produced a whole theory of cursing.  He’s never uttered an expletive, but I’m half-tempted to teach him a couple, just to depersonalize and diversify his anger-management strategies.

We don’t have a birth certificate for the Little Man. Obviously we are terrible parents, but the fact of the matter is, in Georgia you have to wait X number of weeks after the birth of your child to send off for a birth certificate, which then is delivered Y number of days/weeks later. Well, when the Little Man was born, X+Y = the date of our move to Connecticut. Then, once we got here, we never needed a birth certificate.

About 10 days ago, we found out that the Under-6 soccer league in our town is now open to 4 year olds. (The Little Man is big enough and athletic enough to play. Plus he was in Start Smart soccer last winter.) Signing up for rec sports requires a birth certificate. And the following fall will involve kindergarten. So, it’s time to get the paperwork in order.

At the Georgia Vital Records website, I was delighted to discover an online option for ordering the birth certificate. Just about the only thing I don’t order online these days is pizza. Plus, ordering online meant I could pay with a credit card, rather than having to get a money order or certified check, *and* they offered quicker delivery. Sounds great! The company providing these magical services is VitalChek–apparently they offer similar services in most states.

My friends, I’m here to tell you that VitalChek is a ripoff, and is no better than writing directly to the individual county’s vital records department. I still don’t have a copy of my kid’s birth certificate, and it doesn’t look like one will be coming soon. Here are some of the problems I’ve encountered:

• They can only process your application online if they can verify your identity using your address, a credit card number, and your social security number. Now, I am not off the grid. I’m a homeowner. I have student loan debt. I have credit cards. A reasonably motivated 8 year old, given my social security number, could figure out who I am, where I live, and who I’m related to. What an 8 year old could do, VitalChek cannot. They were “unable to verify my identity,” and required me to fax a copy of my driver’s license.
• VitalChek never confirms whether or not they’ve received a fax. I waited 2 business days (as requested by their site), and then started posting questions–it took more than a week before someone acknowledged that they’d received the fax. They still can’t process the request, though, because the driver’s license was only magnified to 150%, not 200%. Wouldn’t you want to contact somebody about an incomplete form? Especially if they’re paying for expedited service?
• Their website was clearly set up by someone who hates consumers. Even after my recent communications with customer service, if I click on order status, and supply the order status number from my form, the website says, “We could not locate a receipt for Order Number” X. That error message makes no sense–clearly they have a record of the order number; the problem is that the request is incomplete. Moreover, the error message has been unchanged since last week–i.e., their receipt of the fax hasn’t corresponded to an update of the message.
• Asking a question through their website is slightly confusing. It turns out you need to create an account in order to ask a question, but they don’t really tell you that. Also, after you submit your question, it looks as though your question’s been submitted, but there’s actually another click that’s required to dismiss their–completely unhelpful–FAQs.

I would recommend avoiding VitalChek if at all possible. (I also wonder why a single firm is allowed to monetize public records in this way. Surely, either government agencies should do this for themselves, and profit from the handling fee, or a little competition ought to be introduced. But allowing one private agency exclusive access to the market just seems stupid.)

Update 9.18.08: Comments are now off–this isn’t really a consumer-type site, and I’m not looking to host a conversation about this.  Perhaps try the Consumerist?

It can’t possibly be good that, while listening to Merlin Mann’s “Inbox Zero” talk, I responded to a blog comment w/in about a minute, caught up on some blog feeds, and since both my e-mail accounts are up and set to autocheck, read every e-mail that came across during those 45 minutes.

*Sigh.*  I really do need help.

From this morning’s Inside Higher Ed:

Policies that allow students to try out courses and drop them by a certain deadline are a time-honored way for colleges to encourage students to sign up for classes they’re not sure about or get out of ones they don’t like. But the policies are sometimes manipulated by students hunting for easy A’s or a sure-to-pass course in ways that can cause headaches for faculty and administrators.

Texas is attempting to stop the abuse (and diminish the costs it imposes on colleges and the state) while still allowing flexibility, with a new law that goes into effect this fall. For students beginning their studies at a Texas public college or university this year, the brief course “shopping period” at the start of a semester will be more important than it has ever been for the state’s undergraduates.

Regardless of how many institutions they attend, how many courses they enroll in or how many years they take classes, students entering Texas public institutions this fall and beyond will be limited to six courses dropped after the shopping period.

I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that there’d be riots if we tried this.  (Also, the administrators quoted in the article weren’t always clear about distinguishing “drops,” which usually never appear on a transcript, and “withdrawals,” which do.)

At the same time, it is startling to imagine a world in which the first week of class wasn’t spent tracking add/drops.  For example, you could actually teach content!

This week’s post at Bookslut is a treat: An interview with Jean-Paul Pecqueur, whose book of poems, The Case Against Happiness, came out in November.

What did happiness ever do to you? Why prosecute a case against it?

It eluded me for thirty-plus years. Simply put, for the majority of my life I did not know what happiness felt like. Then one day, I felt happy. I was living in Tucson at the time. Something lifted, dissipated, broke loose—and I was happy for the first time in my life. From this new perspective, I finally clearly saw the book of poems I had been working on. The title is reflexive. The book is a sort of testimony to living one’s life as if making the case against happiness. Unfortunately, having experienced happiness I also now know how fleeting the feeling can be. I’m not sure how it works for others, but for me it takes a lot of concentrated work to be happy.

As always, read the whole thing!

My review of Glean is in this month’s Bookslut:

Prior to Joshua Kryah’s first book of poems, Glean, only one poet in the language had thought to include both “purblind” and “unbloom” in a single work. But Kryah’s opening poem, “Called Back, Called Back,” invokes Hardy’s “Hap” (glancing too at “Channel Firing”) only to point up how starkly their interests diverge. “Hap” finds the universe’s indifference oddly unmanning, a sort of cosmic jujitsu that paradoxically short-circuits one’s ability to endure suffering. Kryah, however, pursues an alternate view: God’s apparent indifference is the ground of faith:

Acquit me, make me
purblind, unbloomed, a thing that,

when roused,
remains dormant, unused, none
among many.

Who opens a book of poems asking to be made unbloomed? Finding themselves caught “between almost and already,” Kryah’s poems mercilessly and lovingly work at a language that would be suitable to such an acquittal, that would be an avenue for redemption.

Read the whole thing!

For a review concurring in part, see Richard Jeffrey Newman at the Great American Pinup, also published yesterday.  (He loves the poems, but is less sympathetic to Kryah’s kenotic vision.)

My review of Theory of Orange is in this month’s Bookslut:

In characterizing Theory of Orange as comfort food, I’m not trying to be patronizing — rather, it strikes me that her basic method is to take a familiar conceit and dislocate it. The lead poem, for instance, “Recipe for Success,” borrows its rhetoric from those horrid cross-stitch patterns of bromides such as “Recipe for a Happy Home”: Take a pinch of X, a dash of Y, and so on. Simon’s poem shifts rapidly between different registers. There’s silliness: “Consider what a cape / might do for your aesthetic.” Familiar, yet secret, knowledge: “Pitch your voice two feathers louder / than the hush of meeting your girlfriend’s / older brother.” But then there’s the recognition of goads to ambition: “Dispose of any mementos / in your memento box to which / the associated memory does not evoke / instant boils.” Elsewhere, Simon draws on experiences that are instantly familiar to those of us who moved away from our parents’ homes to a big city apartment — for example, she recurs twice (in “Wolcott Avenue” and “Early Correspondence”) to the ability to control the heat for oneself.

Read the whole thing!