wolves come in the form of pretentious parents

i'll bet little red riding hood never had to deal with mean girls. or their even meaner parents. tho' perhaps wolves come in all kinds of guises. i heard tales yesterday of the awfulness of girls in the seventh grade and the even awfulerness (that's a word i just made up) of their parents. happily, my child was not involved, but i was still shocked.

tales of snotty parents who wouldn't let their daughter play with another girl at her house because she and her family live in a small apartment that wasn't fancy enough for the snotty parents. (i might add that i dropped off said child at her completely ordinary and not at all fancy-looking house yesterday and i wasn't impressed, nor could i see how an apartment, which is all of a block away from their house, was really that inferior.) i hope the child didn't report on our ramshackle, falling down farmhouse to her parents, or she'll never be allowed to come over here again. actually, that's not true, i hope she did report to them, as i'd love a little confrontation on this issue. pretentious gits.

and then there was another tale of a set of snotty parents who bought their child an iPhone 5 in an overtly-stated attempt to make her more popular. happily, it didn't seem to make any difference.

these are nice girls of the pæne pige sort - well, groomed, dressed in a normal, but not over-the-top or designer way. they go to riding and they have long, blunt-cut blonde hair. they appear to be nice girls.

both of these girls ride at the stable where we keep matilde now and at the lesson wednesday, i thought they were riding their own horses. turns out they weren't. neither of them has a horse and they were riding the lesson horses. so much for the pretentions of parents.

what are such parents teaching their children? elitism? snobbishness? in a small, podunk town full of ordinary middle class people? laughable. but i guess you can never underestimate how much people need their albanian. but if their children can't rest in who they are and feel secure, all the iPhone 5s in the world aren't going to help.

top chicken

there are times when i begin to feel decidedly hermit-like. for example, meetings, where everyone has such a need to be heard that it results in them talking on top of one another, interrupting and generally preening to show they're the top chicken make me want to beat a fast retreat.  it's just so distant from where i am and where i want to be.

i suppose positioning is simply a biological drive we can't turn off. we constantly assess where we're at in the hierarchy and work to position ourselves more advantageously. there was a time when i was in there with those crowing the loudest, but i don't want to be there anymore. i'm coming to the realization (probably a bit late, admittedly), that you don't have to be the one making the most noise to actually be the top chicken.

but those doing all that squawking really are annoying.

"mobning" in the blogosphere

this may look a little scary

but really it's a totally cool place.

danish has a great word--mobning. i've seen it translated as bullying, but to me, it's a bit more nuanced than that word is in english. it's a word that conveys the whole notion of holding someone outside of your group. intentionally. if you're the parent of a school-age child, you hear the word a lot. because danish schools (or at least the one our daughter attends) are very focused on it and on keeping it from happening, at least to a harmful, overt extent, since you can never really fully prevent it. because everyone needs their albanian. but even an albanian would like to belong.

small aside to explain the last statement: this is one of the earliest theories that husband and i came up with (way back when he was still someone else's husband). we were in the balkans and noticed that everyone there (well, everyone everywhere, really, if i think about it) had someone they looked down on to feel better about their group--the croats and the serbs had each other. and tho' it was never clear to me where the bosnians stood, they had some complex system of someone they looked down on. the bulgarians looked down on the macedonians. the macedonians looked down on the albanians. the albanians looked down on the...hmm. there wasn't really anyone--except maybe the roma and let's face it, everyone looks down on them, so sadly they don't really count. if you were a regular albanian, you looked down on those poor suckers in kosovo and vice versa. so we decided that albanian was the end of the line. and that everyone needs their albanian--someone to feel superior to.

now, back to the regularly scheduled post. i've been thinking about this because things have gotten a little nuts in the comments on some of the other blogs of late (most recently the blog camp blog last evening--and i can't even blame wine b/c i was drinking tea in my hotel room in oslo since the little tiny bottle of wine in my hotel minibar costs 185NOK ($28) and the two glasses i'd had six hours earlier in the lounge at the airport were no longer having any effect).

you see, we're all stark raving mad. and we found each other here in the blogosphere. and finding other mad people has clearly fed that madness. and i fear that some people (like whoever stopped following blog camp in the middle of the madness last night) found all this talk of corn and rocks and herman and to rad or not to rad (definitely the latter) (and which shall hereafter be referred to (on this blog at least) as the r-word which shall not be named) and pink and all that stuff to be a bit much.

but i'm here to say that we most definitely didn't mean it that way. and so you should ALL feel that you can jump into the fray at any time. like monique (hey, she's new!) did last night on the blog camp blog.  all of this madness might have looked like mobning, but it really sincerely wasn't meant that way. we want everyone to feel welcome in this particular vortex of madness. so please play along if you want to--jump right in and ask what all that silly talk is about if you don't understand. we're really quite harmless. we just like the calming effect of rocks and watching corn grow (not watching corn pop, that's totally not relaxing, or so i've heard) and IM conversations in the comment section. maybe it just makes our comment numbers look good, or maybe we're just a bit crazy. but either way, we're harmless and would love it if you joined in the fun. we're all albanians here. :-)

p.s. none of this comment madness really happened here on MPC, but i feel a bit responsible for it because i'm definitely one of the IM-convo commenters, so that's why i'm posting here. click the links above if you want to see firsthand what i'm talking about. :-)