Fussell's bugbears

In his "Boy Scout Handbook" essay, Paul Fussell expresses delight that the more recent editions of the handbook are free of references to constipation, which is no longer "the bugbear it was generations ago."

Let me tell you that this is quite the loss.

Over Thanksgiving, the entire my-parents family was ferociously excited about the 1911 Handbook's references to physical health of all sorts. It promises a few health rules for growing boys that I think we need to attend to right now:

My favorite are the rules for eating. Ignore diet books, folks, because I think this will pretty much set you straight. First, don't eat too much. Second, don't eat meat more than once a day. Third, "don't eat anything that you always taste for several hours after you have eaten it, even though you like it." As a vegetarian for something like 10 or 11 years now (yowza), I've managed to convert John to eating a lot of meat substitutes around our house, so I'm kind of delighted with the century-old advice to limit meat consumption. However, the third piece of advice is really the hilarious kicker for me. As you're going to see in a moment, the Handbook assumes these teenage farm boys have the digestions of elderly bankers. There's more refernece to heartburn, indigestion, and, yes, constipation in the next few pages than in an AARP bulletin.

I begin.

Our discussion of eating advises, correctly, that we ought to be aware of our limits (though the Handbook's particular calling out of cucumbers as a frequent source of digestive trouble gives me pause). We are further advised that most boys "eat too much of a mixed nature," combining foods like pickles, soda, hot dogs, and chocolate (their list, not mine) in a "riot of eating." We are not to eat when excited, angry, tired, worried, or studying, and must chew our food until it is "the thickness of pea soup." While that did successfully kill my appetite, I'd like to point out that it killed the appetite for the huge brownie I just ate, while being kind of tired and totally excited to be reading the handbook, y'all! Take that. Really. Failure to ignore these pieces of advice will lead to our two chief problems (like I said): indigestion and constipation.

Rather than paraphrase the constipation warnings, I'll give it to you straight: "Drink a cool, copious draught of water upon arising. Then take some body-bending exercises. Follow this with the sponge bath. Then, if possible, take a walk around the block before breakfast. After school, play some favorite game for at least an hour. In the absence of this, take a good hike of three or four miles or a longer bicycle ride. At least twice a week, if possible, enter a gymnasium class and make special emphasis of body-bending exercises." We also need to schedule a regular poop time, whether we need to or not, and to eat plenty of graham crackers.

The Handbook also warns against coffee and tea, deeming them stimulants which can cause your own organs to eat themselves (really) and which a growing boy should have nothing to do with. It has a little confusion w/r/t stimulants, though, classifying tobacco as a narcotic, which we also ought to avoid. (Points for effort on this one.)

I'm idly considering a few days eating like a boy scout (or like one ought to). Taking this too far, or taking it not far enough? We'll see.

PS: There is a full section in the Handbook about the importance of avoiding discharges of "sex fluid." I feel too awkward to address this. Do you want to learn about it? Try searching this phrase: "To yield means to sacrifice strength and power and manliness." Yeah. That's right.

Keeping tabs

First, apologies for a update delay -- a combination of chest ailments of all sorts (including the peculiar sternum inflammation costochondritis), plus grad school applications have kept me pretty busy for the past few days. I've been telling myself that writing inquiry letters and personal statements have been taking care of my business-letter-writing requirements (which, well, it probably does. For that matter, any ideas about how I prove to you lovely people that I totally know how to write a first-rate letter?).

Meanwhile, though, I've also been continuing to take care of monitoring my personal expenses in much greater detail than I have ever before. I sort of always thought this kind of thing (intense budgeting, specifically) would become automatic as I became an adult, but it never really has. I've managed my not-overdrawing-bank-accounts, etc. thanks largely to a great personal stinginess more than any kind of organization or anything.

I've been noticing two things, as I've been really monitoring my spending. First, and surprisingly, I haven't been cheaping out on things I actually require, or on things I really enjoy. Rather, I'm taking it easy on the impulse buys -- skipping nail polish (because I never wear it anyway) in the Duane Reade where I lost my house keys today, for example. I'm still buying what I need (or what I've planned in advance for -- a delicious raspberry jam French toast breakfast on Sunday, for example), but those things are more thought-through, and that makes me enjoy them even more.

This is probably a healthier way to live, in general -- eliminating the unnecessary -- and it's kind of in line with recent thoughts on fast fashion, as well. More than anything, I'm seeing this as one of the longer-lasting effects of my handbook project. 1911 farm boys were far from conspicuous consumers. Maybe we can learn something from them.

Humor me.

Just so you know, Huckleberry Finn was published in the US 125 years ago today. (This makes today its semi-semi-semi-millennial, as John has pointed out.) Therefore, in its honor, you should read Finn.

Math problem

I know, I know. I am not the mathematician in my household.

However, the business badge requires that I calculate how much money I'd need to invest, at 5% per year, to earn back my weekly allowance. Now, here's the situation: since I am a self-sufficient adult, I don't get an allowance (sadly). And even though you are nice people on the internet, I would prefer not to be 100% open about my paycheck and savings habits. So you'll have to bear with me for a moment.

Instead, I'm going to tell you how much I've spent this week on non-household expenses (since we will assume our 1911 Boy Scout was probably not running exciting errands like purchasing dishwashing soap or canned olives), and we'll assume that that's my "allowance." (I feel really uncomfortable with the allowance term, maybe moreso than I should, because talking about it makes me feel like my money is not my own. But I digress.)

This week:
$3.75 for hot chocolate with Wendy last week
$15 for Greek take-out (spanakopita, mostly) Friday night
$6 for a glass of wine on Saturday night (happy birthday, EFS!) (I know a scout is temperate. But a scout is also under 21.)
$3.50 for a coffee and chocolate croissant yesterday
For a grand total of $28.25, all of it spent on food. Go team.

Okay, if there are 52 weeks in a year, this means I'd need $1,469. Okay. First, allow me to catch my breath because that seems like an alarming amount of money. And I haven't even factored in the times I do things like, you know, buy a book. Or a postage stamp.

(Please note, by the way, that I am doing this calculation without benefit of the internet, just what I remember from high school math. Please note, also, that I am not asking John to check my work, because that seems like it would be cheating. If you find a mistake, though, feel free to make me feel like an idiot.)

I'll use the formula interest = principal * rate * time, with principal and interest switched around to give me the formula 1/P = (RT)/I. For the sake of simplicity, I'll take the inverse of each (is this the correct term? I have no idea!), giving me the final formula P = I/RT

I'm looking for the principal, so I can say P = $1469 (the amount of interest I'll need!)/(0.05). Notice that, since I'm only doing this over a single year, T = 1, so it drops out. I love that. (When I learned this in math class when I was a kid, it was like a magic trick.)

Simplify the whole shebang to come to the ultimate conclusion that, in order to earn out my allowance in interest, I'll need to invest $29,380 at 5% per year. If you can tell me where to put my money at 5%, I'll be pretty satisfied.

Yay!

Made with a box-cutter

Because I am tough but sweet (like "I want candy," but more "I want to eat my lunch right now and am currently drinking a slightly-too-large mug of kefir.")

Thanks to the lovely folks at kind over matter for the (slightly modified) pattern!

NYPL and 1941

To begin with, despite reports to the contrary from my GP back in December, I am the picture of health and unlikely to keel over any time soon. (I braved yesterday's not-so-snowpocalypse, headed out to a doctor's appointment, and learned that all is well. Later, I celebrated with a day full of eating, including a modified vegetarian carbonara for lunch, eggrolls and soup for dinner, and brownies for dinner. Go team Emily.)

Therefore, given my recent clean bill of health, I think I'm fully equipped to move on from mooning over waste disposal (though I'm going to keep trying to schedule my terrorist-watch-list-inducing interview, even though making too many phone calls asking to tour waste treatment and processing plants may begin to arouse some suspicions). However, in the meantime, barring future success in that department, I want to pull on your coat a little bit (hah! moments from now, this will be a joke!) about clothing.

So, I spent some time this weekend organizing my closet, and I noticed something. First, I noticed that I have a lot of very similar sweaters -- nearly all black, grey, or green, and nearly all either cabled or hooded. Second, I noticed that I'm kind of woefully unfashionable. Then, though, because I'm of a ruminative nature, and because I've been thinking about waste disposal, I started to wonder: what happens to all this clothing when we're done with it? And how much do we really need?

Recently, the NY Library blog had a feature on the same topic. While things have changed (do they even still make dickies?), I was struck by one thing: I have a damn lot of clothing.

If I were ten years younger and it were 1941, I would be a straight-up clotheshorse. I have more shoes than even the Imelda Marcos-y Vassar girl, who averaged ten pairs, and I may even beat the Smithie's even dozen sweaters. Sure, I have fewer evening dresses than the average Texas coed (7 1/2? Really?), but she also reported having an even seven boyfriends. So, you know.

Here's my thing: This list was for everyday wear. The low end of that means a wardrobe comprised of a dickey, a hat, three evening dresses, three skirts, three pairs of shoes, three and a half blouses, three day dresses, and three sweaters. (Plus one boyfriend.) I'm imagining arriving to work like that for the next little while -- cycling through a total of six tops and three dresses for the remainder of the year. How long until someone commented? Or would they? (Answer: Yes. Yes they would.)

There are a lot of articles, if you pay attention to those things, about the evils of "fast fashion," of H&M and Forever 21 providing cheap, disposable clothing that only winds up in a landfill within a year or two, and I usually scoff and figure, well, I'll ditch the fast fashion when the regular kind is cheaper. But is the solution really to go the 1941 way? How would it work -- switching to fewer, higher-quality items that you can wear into the ground? This is feeling very tempting right now. We'll see.

I know, and I've known for years, that the key environmental solution is to reduce consumption, not just to recycle (or bring to Goodwill, as the case may be). I think it may be time to introduce my principles to my closet.

*Notification: As of today, I'm officially beginning requirement 4 of the Business badge: "Keep a complete and actual account of personal receipts and expenditures for six months." Yeah, this is something I should do all the time, as an actual and competent adult, but I don't. So let me start. Today: $3.75 for coffee with Wendy after work.*

Paul Fussell got here first.

Despite never having met him, I'd like to induct Paul Fussell into my Handbook Book Club (doubling the member count to two).

See, while I've never met Mr. Fussell, we have a certain commonality of experience. Though he's been retired from teaching for some years, he's a former professor at Rutgers, where I went to grad school a few years back. I read two of his books (Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Class) when I was in my mid-teens, at exactly the right age to be vaguely scandalized but not entirely understand why. Class, especially, threw me, instilling a lifelong horror of the word "home" instead of "house," as well of as decorating with artificial plants. I'm only a little ashamed to admit this. Seriously, Class was a weirdly revelatory book -- a little troubling and making explicit some aspects of American culture I'm not entirely comfortable with. Regardless, it turns out that Mr. Fussell wrote another book of particular personal interest to me.

In 1983, when I was but a wee little thing, he published The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations," a series of essays on American and British culture, travel, and (most of all) his experience in World War 2. TBSHaOO is hard to track down these days -- I had to get it pulled out of storage at the Brooklyn library -- but worthwhile. See, he and I have a similar interest in the Handbook as a historical document, but rather than looking at the 1911 edition, he examines the 1979 version. This makes the whole concept doubly-cool. While the title essay is only six pages long (meaning that, in going to and from the library, I walked 1/3 mile for every page of this essay), it's a great view of another Handbook edition.

In some ways, the Handbook has hardly changed since the 1911 edition. "A complex sentence," Mr. Fussell observes, "is as rare as a reference to girls," and endless focus on self-improvement, care for nature, and wide-ranging practical knowledge remains. What I find most interesting, though, are the two complaints Mr. Fussell puts forth: the excessive use of the phrase "free world" and enthusiastic urging of religion, to the point of packing a Bible when camping -- but not a knife. This sent me back to the 1911 edition. Thanks to Project Gutenberg, I know for a fact that "free world" doesn't appear even once (take that, Mr. F!). The biblical references, though, are a little more tricky. See, the world of 1911 was a simpler one than the world of 1979, and pearhsp one, even, in which Lord B-P didn't feel as if he really needed to emphasize the importance of religion -- it was just obvious. The 1979 Handbook's increased focus on carrying a Bible, or on praying for guidance, is absent from the 1911 edition because we don't really need to be reminded. (It's worth noting here, as well, that I'm not idealizing the world of 1911, and I appreciate Mr. Fussell's remarks upon the inclusion of Harriet Tubman as an admirable American, and his observation that the later Handbook calls for "the prayer book of your faith," implying that Christianity is not a scouting requirement.)

As he tends to, Fussell brings George Orwell into the picture (he is also the subject of an essay in Thank God for the Atom Bomb, as well as four other essays in TBSHaOO), pulling the Handbook into a post-Watergate world ("A scout does not bomb and invade a neutral country, and then lie about it") that's still relevant, um, three years ago, but I feel a little funny about it. I'm hesitant, I think, to politicize the Handbook more than I have to -- and I'll offer up this photo of Nixon (as Vice-President) addressing a Boy Scout Jamboree to seal the deal. Honestly, though, despite my personal feelings on the subject (strong), and even despite my personal feelings on certain issues without scouting as a movement (irrelevant at the moment), I worry that taking this kind of approach might weaken the Handbook as a historical document. Of course, anything is a product of the time in which it was written, but I have my own doubts about this particular interpretation, as taken from this particular document at this particular point.

Ultimately, Mr. Fussell's essay delighted me with its recognition that the Handbook is more than an instruction book for teenage boys in neckerchiefs. His read of it -- a "[repository] of something like classical ethics, deriving from Aristotle and Cicero" is one of the truest going. And, therefore, Mr. Fussell? Welcome to the club.

meaner than a

It's hard to find a junkyard in Brooklyn.

Actually, no. It's not hard to find one at all. But it's hard to have a conversation with someone -- anyone! -- at one, I will tell you that. And you will believe me, because if you try for yourself you will be met with the same mysterious, scrap metal-y silence I encountered. (Unless you use some sort of deceptive measure, like asking for a crankshaft for a '87 Dodge Aries (though, of course, I celebrate the entire K-car catalog equally and with great delight).) So, anyway, in the past three days I have spoken to no fewer than eight different junkyards in the Brooklyn area, not counting those whose telephones have been disconnected (2). Out of personal (and professional? I guess?) courtesy, I'm not going to say which junkyards or where. Know why? Because they are positively Masonic in their unwillingness to have a telephone conversation. It's like I'm ringing up the Skull and Bones, Mossad, and the Illuminati, but with car parts.

You are wondering right now (quite correctly, mind you) what the hell I am doing trying to track down a junkyard. Ah! (I am telling you), it's for the badge. I am also reminding you that a scout "ought to have a command of polite language," so watch the "what the hell." Now. While I'm in the process of trying to set up a waste treatment plant tour that will probably a) never happen and b) get me put on some kind of government watch list, I decided to stop playing phone tag and start following another urban waste stream: rusted-out cars. This seemed like both a pretty interesting move, and a visually-striking one (I could get out to a junkyard, take the kind of urban-blight photos people love to put on blogs, that sort of thing). Here's the problem: I'm really, really honest. And when I called up junkyards, I explained my actual reason for wanting to stop by. I even varied the approach a little (sometimes I was writing a short, internet-based article, sometimes doing research for a blog), but still: nothing.

One guy told me, formally enough, that his employers don't allow him to grant interviews. A few hung up on me. The most talkative man I spoke to (though, actually, they were all men, except for one receptionist -- the junkyard world has a glass ceiling still, I guess?) told me, "I learned a long time ago not to talk to the press. It's just better for everyone that way. I like to keep my business in the business." (For honesty's sake, one guy told me he handles six cars a month, which equals out to a single truckload, but that he would give me that number, nothing more, and the contact info for another junkyard that might talk to me. Seriously, this was like working informants on The Wire.)

So help me out here: what's the story with junkyards and their secrets? Was there some kind of 1980s muckraking junkyard expose I know nothing about? Do junkyards hate me?

Javier the ibex

Yes, Javier isn't a Bronze Age kind of name.

Tough.

Also, I'm still debating the addition of his horns. See, I spent a lot of time today with Javi. He came to work with me. He toured lower Manhattan. And, eventually, he told me something. "Dude," he said, "I'm an ibex, no question. Nice city you have here. By the way, I'm so not sold on the horns."

Honestly, neither am I. I mounted them on his little ibex-head today, but they look, well, unnecessary. He may receive a smidge of paint instead and we'll be done with it. What do you think? (If I give him a metallic paint job, would he stand up to his actual-Cycladic cousin? Questionable. But still.)