The truth is despite the hard work and juggling required to keep the different facets of the frantic life afloat, the "superwoman"... has one marvelous compensation. Being busy and being seen to be busy lets you off the hook. Buys you a way out of all aspects of your many roles you secretly despise ... like cleaning cupboards ... or entertaining your husband's business friends. When you combine wife, mother, career and all, each role become the perfect excuse for avoiding the worst aspects of the other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Cow and horse dung, as muck goes, are relatively agreeable. You can even become nostalgic about them. They smell of fermented grai...n, and on the far side of their smell there is hay and grass. Chicken shit is disagreeable and rasps the throat because of the quantity of ammonia. When you are cleaning out the henhouse, you're glad to go to the door and take a deep breath of fresh air. Pig and human excrement, however, smell the worst because men and pigs are carnivorous and their appetites are indiscriminate. The smell includes the sickeningly sweet one of decay. And on the far side of it is death.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A "snapshot" feature in USA Today listed the five greatest concerns parents and teachers had about children in the '50s: talking o...ut of turn, chewing gum in class, doing homework, stepping out of line, cleaning their rooms. Then it listed the five top concerns of parents today: drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, suicide and homicide, gang violence, anorexia and bulimia. We can also add AIDS, poverty, and homelessness. . . . Between my own childhood and the advent of my motherhood--one short generation--the culture had gone completely mad.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I could draw Bloom County with my nose and pay my cleaning lady to write it, and I'd bet I wouldn't lose 10% of my papers over the... next twenty years. Such is the nature of comic-strips. Once established, their half-life is usually more than nuclear waste.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
On starlight nights I used to pace up and down those long, cold streets, scowling at the little, sleeping houses on either side, w...ith their storm-windows and covered back porches. They were flimsy shelters, most of them poorly built of light wood, with spindle porch-posts horribly mutilated by the turning-lathe. Yet for all their frailness, how much jealousy and envy and unhappiness some of them managed to contain! The life that went on in them seemed to me made up of evasions and negations; shifts to save cooking, to save washing and cleaning, devices to propitiate the tongue of gossip. This guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny. People's speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed. Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most baby books also tend to romanticize the mother who stays at home, as if she really spends her entire day doing nothing but be...aming at the baby and whipping up educational toys from pieces of string, rather than balancing cooing time with laundry, cleaning, shopping and cooking.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To be a social success, do not act pathetic, arrogant, or bored. Do not discuss your unhappy childhood, your visit to the dentist,... the shortcomings of your cleaning woman, the state of your bowels, or your spouse's bad habits. You will be thought a paragon (or perhaps a monster) of good behavior.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Well designed, fully functional infant. Provides someone to live for as well as another mouth to feed. Produces cooing, gurgling a...nd other adorable sounds. May cause similar behavior in nearby adults. Cries when hungry, sleepy or just because. Hand Wash with warm water and mild soap, then pat dry with soft cloth and talc. Internal mechanisms are self-cleaning... Two Genders: Male. Female. Five Colors: White. Black. Yellow. Red. Camouflage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »