Book Review - F*ck Feelings

Despite its provocative title, F*ck Feelings is a common sense, if somewhat contrarian self-help book written by Dr. Michael Bennett and his daughter Sarah (pseudonyms, we are told, and about which more later).

F*ck Feelings’s central conceit is that life is hard and a struggle to be managed, not a problem to be solved. The authors cast a skeptical eye that therapy can provide complete answers, but rather, should offer its patients coping skills and techniques to address their underlying issues – be those dicey familial relationships, difficulties at work, broken hearts, or just plain old capital “A” assholes we all have to deal with in our everyday lives. The book moves at a steady clip through a variety of topics while illustrating challenges through scenarios described by patients. I found some of these too pat – the women dating guys who deal drugs or the parents whose children refuse to leave the roost; however, they were useful in acting as a jumping off point for the authors to, as they put it, hope for but cannot have, what we can legitimately expect, and how to use move forward knowing this information.

If most self-help gurus pitch people on a better tomorrow if they simply change their habits or meditate or convince themselves of their own badassery, learn how to love themselves, or unclutter their homes, Dr. Bennett and Ms. Bennett encourage you to trim your sails and accept that life will deal you many harsh blows, often for no good reason and that self-improvement is certainly a goal one should aspire to, even if the benefits are temporary while the underlying problems are permanent. This is sound advice and whether it requires tip toeing around a toxic co-worker or objectively analyzing the behavior of a friend when you are in need, sweeping aside the magical unicorn thinking in favor of making emotion-free decisions about your course of action is refreshing (in the former, avoid engaging if at all possible, in the latter, cutting bait if it is clear the person is not capable of being there for you).

And if this sounds limiting to some, I found it realistic. The authors honor the fact that some people simply struggle more than others and encourage readers to reward (and applaud) themselves for getting through days or weeks of depressive fog even it means simply showing up to life and doing the bare minimum to get through the day. For others who cannot reconcile with difficult parents, get spouses to take co-ownership of their marriages, or seem to get through to a jerky boss, the authors encourage realism – people will not change simply because you want them to and pointing out a boss’s failings is likely to lead to defensiveness, not support. In other words, instead of tilting at these windmills, F*ck Feelings encourages the tactical retreat and the power of keeping your mouth shut.

My one complaint has to do with authors’ use of pseudonyms. While I understand the interest in confidentiality, the inability to verify is troubling. Of course, one assumes Simon & Schuster vetted the authors Bennett before signing them to a contract, but still, the reader’s inability to make their own judgment is a small black mark on an otherwise enjoyable read.

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Shocking, Vulgar, and Indisuptably True

So said Tucker Carlson, who related a story about Donald Trump. Way back when, Tucker insulted Trump’s hair and Trump left a message for Carlson to the effect of “you may have better hair than me, but I get more pussy than you.” Shocking. Vulgar. Indisputably True (per Carlson).

 

While I agree with none of Carlson’s politics, his pithy summation of Trump’s ability to zero in on someone and level them with a withering insult is what has dispatched each and every one of his competitors during this election cycle. George W. Bush may have had a false cowboy’s swagger, but Trump is an unabashed, in your face, New York bully. Jeb Bush? Low Energy. Ted Cruz? Born in Canada. Hillary Clinton? No lectures about women from someone married to Bill Clinton. Fox News? You need me more than I need you. No one can question the results. Bush went from front-runner to after thought. Cruz has been on a downward trajectory ever since he started tangling with Trump. Bill Clinton’s favorability ratings have sunk and his presence on the campaign trail is very low key. Fox News was left scrambling when Trump pulled out of their most recent debate and was left with egg on its face.  

 

Trump’s criticisms are shocking to the political class and can be vulgar (I am not so sure about the indisputably true part), but in the same way Simon Cowell became a massive celebrity when American Idol first aired because he was rude and cutting in his insults (which usually contained a grain of truth), Trump zeroes in on a flaw and defines the person by it. He is unafraid of the blowback and, if anything, relishes it. He has taken the political playbook everyone is supposed to follow and ignored it. In the balance, he has given voice to a disaffected group in our country who only wish they could, to borrow from a dated 1970s cliché, tell their boss to take this job and shove it.

 

Love him or hate him, he unleashes his opinions without mercy and generates strong opinions. In Howard Stern’s 1997 movie Private Parts there is a scene between two executives at WNBC, the radio station Stern worked at in the mid-1980s. The two had commissioned a survey to understand Stern’s popularity and found that the people that hated Stern listened to the show twice as long as the people who loved him. The reason was the same for both groups - they wanted to hear what he would say next. Trump has mastered that same formula, and every thought piece that insults him, every media outlet that tries to mock him, and every rival who attempts to dethrone him, has no idea what to do about it.   

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I might be a little bit addicted

My sewing machines are sadly neglected while I've been knitting.

This colourful item is a shawl I made for a friend's birthday. She had been dropping extremely broad hints ever since clapping eyes on my version. It was a quick knit. And you can't go wrong with Kauni rainbow yarn.

And I've been machine knitting too. I made another zipped cardigan, this one for my husband. It's the same as the one I made for my son except for the colour.

This side view shows the ribbed detail rather well.

Again, I'm quite proud of the finishing on the collar.











And I've just started a hand knitting project - a cabled cardigan for myself. The pattern is challenging as it's knitted top down with all shaping built in by increases, and the back panel requires cabling on every single row. I should be absolutely comfortable with cabling without a cable needle by the end of this project. The photo shows the back. No points for finding my mistake.



My final knitting news is that I acquired yet another knitting machine - a standard gauge Singer with ribber and punchcard mechanism, which excites me excessively. I spent some quality time cleaning and oiling it on the weekend, and then I put it through some of its paces.

Fair Isle

The two samples above are knitted with the same card and technique - the crazy mosaic is the knit side when knitted in two colours and the white sample is the purl side in (obviously) one colour only. Both are tuck knitting.



These two samples are also made with the same card but different knitting techniques. To the left is slip knitting and to the right is fair isle.














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Book Review - Dreamland

Americans really love drugs. If it can be quaffed, huffed, snorted, smoked, swallowed, inhaled, or injected, chances are we have figured out how to use it to get us high. We are, after all, the country that has extracted a buzz from bath salts, Redi Whip, Robitussin, lighter fluid, and aerosol cans before even rolling a single joint, measuring out a line of cocaine, or dropping one piece of LSD-soaked blotter paper on our tongues.

Today, the scourge of opiate addiction is in the spotlight and a clear line has been drawn between the overprescribing of prescription pain medications, heroin use, and a skyrocketing number of overdoses across the country. That story is told with great eloquence by Sam Quinones, whose recently published book Dreamland is an invaluable source for people who want to understand how this phenomenon happened. Quinones’s story is, in many ways, quintessentially American. A primary focus of the book is the Mexican town of Xalisco, Nayarit, home to hard scrabble farmers who show that most cherished of American traits – the entrepreneurial spirit - to devise a new method of delivering heroin to the U.S. that owed more to McDonald’s than the Mafia. From this remote part of Mexico, these men set up shop in small and mid-sized cities, avoided violent crime, paid salaried drivers to deliver their dope, and followed-up with their customers to ensure loyalty and satisfaction. That the drivers were expendable – if arrested, they rarely carried a meaningful amount of drugs and never had weapons, so they were simply deported, to be replaced before they made it home – did not use the product, and delivered like Domino’s Pizza, generated massive profits for these drug traffickers while, for a time, flying under the radar screen of law enforcement.

Meanwhile, a revolution in the way doctors interacted with and treated patients created a massive potential customer base for the Xalisco Boys. Based largely on a one paragraph letter in a medical journal published in 1980 that claimed a mere 1% addiction rate among patients prescribed pain killers and to a lesser extent the move toward managed care, which deemphasized doctors taking time to work with patients in favor of a more factory line approach, pain management shifted from a holistic approach of exercise, weight loss, and lifestyle changes to one dominated by the prescription pad. Where once doctors limited the use of Percocet, Vicodin, and OxyContin, they began doling out these highly addictive medications like candy. Oxy became a particularly pernicious choice because its effect mimicked heroin so closely. When patients could no longer afford the drug, the Xalisco black tar heroin slid in as a replacement. That the drug, cheap, reliable, and potent, was basically delivered to your door step removed much of the risk – of being arrested or victimized – that typically affects drug users.  

Mix it all together, and you get an epidemic that hit communities at all rungs of the income ladder while lurking largely in the shadows as more well-to-do families shunned publicizing their loved one’s struggles because of the stigma associated with heroin addiction. What was once a drug associated with dirty needles, seedy motels, and lost jazz legends had migrated into the suburban McMansions of upper middle class America.

Quinones does an excellent job tracing these two narratives as they inexorably converge to a single point. His chapters are brief, usually no more than a few pages, as he ping pongs between the sugarcane fields of Mexico to decimated cities like Portsmouth, Ohio, hard by the Kentucky border and a sort of “patient zero” of economic decline that morphed into a hub of pill mills (doctor’s offices where any ache or pain was treated with hard core opiates) that begat junkies who burgled and bartered for the black tar heroin that became a substitute for pharmaceutical opiates when the authorities shut down these rogue operations.

The human toll is devastating. As the dual tracks of prescription drug abuse and heroin addiction converge in cities across the country, the destruction of millions of families fall in their wake. Even as law enforcement gets wise to the Xalisco tactics, their victories are short-lived, if not pyrrhic. Cells are quickly reformed and even as dealers and drivers are shipped back to Mexico or locked away in prison, the wave of black tar continues largely unabated. Threaded through this catastrophe is the impact of deindustrialization in rural parts of Appalachia, where the unemployed seek out disability diagnoses to collect Medicaid which in turn allows them to receive the opiates they use or sell and, on the other side of the spectrum, the easy access to addictive pain pills provided to wealthy suburbanites who can easily afford their addiction even after they cross the line to heroin.

The book offers a few grace notes. There are the addicts who get treatment and kick their habit, the researchers, doctors, and government bureaucrats who try to raise the alarm on overprescribing, and the law enforcement officers doing what they can to fight this often invisible foe. In their stories you see the humanity beneath the darkness, the unheralded attempts to help that go on behind the scenes, and the small victories that can accumulate over time. Indeed, the clear shift in how opiate addiction is treated by law enforcement speaks volumes about how policy can change. Instead of the harsh penal consequences of three strikes laws and mandatory minimum sentences that defined the “war on drugs” in the 1980s and 1990s, the focus is now on treating addiction, arming police officers with Narcan to revive those who overdose, and encouraging families to speak out when loved ones succumb to their inner demons. That so many lives have been destroyed  to get to that point is a story that Quinones tells beautifully.

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Do Not Waste Your Vote On Bernie Sanders

I was born in 1970. I have no recollection of Watergate or Jerry Ford taking a tumble down the stairs as he alit from Air Force One. My earliest political memories are of Jimmy Carter hosting the Camp David summit and American hostages being held in Iran. But from before I was a teenager until I was old enough to (legally) drink, Republicans inhabited the White House. It was an awful time for Democrats - Dukakis in a tank and Mondale losing 49 states. As someone born smack dab in the middle of Nixon’s first term, a Democrat had been in the White House for a mere four years of my life until January 20, 1993.

 

I worked for Bill Clinton in 1992. I was in Little Rock on election night and the sheer euphoria of a Democrat finallywinning back the White House is a feeling I still remember. But for Democrats born in 1975 or 1980 or beyond, their relationship to our party’s hold on the Presidency is far different. It is taken for granted that a Democrat can be President. If you are 35 years old, you probably have vague memories of George H.W. Bush, but otherwise, you have lived through four terms of Democratic Presidents with the utter failure of W in between.

 

In other words, you do not really appreciate what it was like to lose five of six Presidential elections or how hard Democrats had to work to elect a President in your lifetime. So maybe you do not think it is a bad decision to support Bernie Sanders because the causes he believes are ones you do too. You might also believe that a Sanders win would mean a tidal wave of progressive votes that would sweep massive Democratic majorities into both houses of Congress, thus resulting in passage of every pet policy you hold dear – Medicare for All, drastic cuts to the Department of Defense, a minimum wage increase, huge tax increases on the wealthy – and on and on.

 

But such a belief is pure fantasy. Putting aside the gerrymandered Congressional districts that make it all but impossible to flip the House (and thus, smothering any dream you might have of getting a President Sanders agenda through Congress) and the fact that Democrats would have to carry 14 Senate races to gain a filibuster-proof majority (another impossibility), two of the biggest landslide Republican victories in history occurred when Democrats nominated so-called “liberal” candidates – George McGovern in 1972 and Walter Mondale in 1984. Each lost all but one state in the nation (and two other landslides, Reagan in 1980 and Bush 41 in 1988 were almost as bad).

 

Why hand Republicans a gift like a peacenik who will be portrayed as wanting to crush our economy under massive tax increases? Democrats have assiduously cultivated the so-called “Blue Wall” (18 states plus the District of Columbia) since 1992, winning what now equal 242 electoral votes in six straight elections. This formula is based on moderation, not revolution. The suburban soccer moms of Montgomery County (Pa.), bellwether voters of Macomb County (Mi.) and the once rock ribbed Republican conclave of Orange County (Ca.) that are now reliably Democratic are not looking to burn down the system and are not going to entrust the nuclear codes to a 74 year old socialist from Vermont.

 

And to older voters, you should know better. To me, this has the vague feeling of 2000, when just enough people voted for Ralph Nader thinking there was no difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush to nudge the election in the latter’s favor (and do not just look at Florida and its contested vote. Check out New Hampshire, which Gore lost by 1.2% with Nader getting 3.7% of the vote. It’s the only time between 1992 and 2012 that the Democrats lost New Hampshire and would have given Gore the White House regardless of Florida).

 

Bernie may inhabit the fever dreams of ultra-lefties like the editorial board of The Nation, but the same true believers who thought the country would rally to George McGovern (he got 38% of the vote) are fooling themselves if they think Bernie Sanders has any chance of being elected President. Younger voters, who came of age under Obama can be excused for thinking that someone of Sanders’s political leanings could win a national election, but older voters should appreciate the risk of entrusting our party’s nomination to someone who is not even a Democrat and whose defeat would signal not just risks to things like the Affordable Care Act, but any chance of “flipping” the Supreme Court for decades to come. This election is far too important to throw away your vote on a gadfly from Vermont who has zero chance of ever being elected President.

 

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Obamacare Is Working ... Pass It On

Ever since Barack Obama made universal health insurance a defining feature of his first term in office, the Republican Party has engaged in a relentless campaign to destroy what we now refer to as “Obamacare.” During the bill’s movement through Congress, they threw up every legislative obstacle, ginned up protests and rowdy town halls, and attempted to sow fear with ominous warnings of death panels and government bureaucrats coming to pull the plug on granny. Once the law passed, immediate legal challenges cropped up attempting to stop implementation of the law, questioning its constitutionality, and otherwise gumming up the arteries of the legal system in a Hail Mary attempt to stop millions of people from gaining health insurance. Just this week, Congress held its 62^nd vote to repeal Obamacare, finally getting its symbolic victory so that the President can stamp “VETO” when it lands in his inbox. 

It was an odd and discomfiting experience, what with the fact that the law was modeled on an idea originally proposed by the Heritage Foundation and promised to hand health insurers millions of new customers all while maintaining our inefficient, privately-run system for health care delivery in the country. Regardless, weeks and weeks of coverage were provided on everything from a glitchy website to supposed insurance death sprials to claims that the new law would destroy jobs. All reported breathlessly by a media more than happy to ape Republican talking points without ever digging into their veracity. Of course, none of these things occurred, not that you would have noticed because the media had already moved on without bothering to issue corrections. Chuck Todd demanded an apology from President Obama when healthcare.gov was not working, but never proferred a mea culpa of his own once the program was up and running smoothly, helping millions find health insurance.

Comes now an editorial in the Washington Post that examines the three-legged stool of measuring Obamacare’s success: enrollment, cost control, and employment. On all three scores, the Affordable Care Act has delivered – big time. 

Enrollment: Before the Affordable Care Act passed, an estimated 18.5 percent of the adult population in America under the age of 65 was without health insurance. In 2015, that number dropped to 10.5 percent, a reduction of about 45 percent. As the editorial notes, that percentage would be even lower if all 50 states, instead of just 30, had expanded Medicaid coverage under the ACA. It is worth noting that if all 50 states had expanded Medicaid, the roughly 9 percent of American adults under 65 without health insurance is in line with pre-ACA estimates provided by the Congressional Budget Office. 

Cost Control: Here we have two points to consider. The first is whether the ACA did anything to rein in insurance rates that used to go up considerably year-to-year; the second is what impact the Medicare cost control measures included in the ACA did to reduce costs in that program. On both counts, the ACA has succeeded. Prior to Obamacare’s passage, it was estimated that health care expenditure rates would increase by 5.5 percent in 2013 and 7 percent in 2018. In reality, expenditures only increased 3.6 percent in 2013 and are now only estimated to go up by 5.3 percent in 2018 – huge cost savings. Similarly, the rise in premium rates and medical costs since the passage of the ACA have been well below what they were in the decade prior to its passage and the actual costs are lower than what were estimated by the CBO when the law passed. 

On the Medicare front, the cost savings should make any green eyeshade deficit hawk swoon. In 2009, the CBO expected the government to spend $723 billion on Medicare in 2015. The actual amount? $634 billion - $90 billion less than predicted. Extrapolate those savings out over a decade and you have “saved” almost $1 trillion. Not too shabby. 

So, the Affordable Care Act has cut the number of uninsured by nearly half, cost less than predicted, and saved Medicare tens of billions of dollars. But what about jobs? Republicans kept telling us that Obamacare would be a jobs killer. Not so. The past two years have been gang busters for employment. The jobless rate is now at just 5% and the economy has created millions of new, mostly full-time jobs in the process. 

That the good news is largely unreported is unsurprising. Humdrum stories of government functioning as intended (and even a little better) are not nearly as interesting as whatever insult Donald Trump has lobbed at an opponent today, but to the people who have benefitted from the Affordable Care Act, I suspect this is, as Vice President Biden said, a big fucking deal.

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It's a new year, and there is a new dress

Best of a bad lot on a dark January evening

My Burda sheath dress project got temporarily side-lined by Christmas present projects. And by a little mishap that deflated my enthusiasm for it. I was merrily sewing along making great progress towards the end of November when I discovered a hole (yes, a HOLE) in the fabric of the skirt, right at centre front. And above the level of the hem (although luckily near the hemline).

Good God, how did I miss this when I was cutting out the dress? Good God, how was I going to recover?

Mend - inside

Mend - outside

Luckily, the fabric is very thick and very dimensional (it is a double wool crepe, so technically two layers of crepe that are attached to each other, but not extremely firmly), I could easily harvest lots of self-fabric thread for mending, and the hole was worse on the wrong side than the right side (although there were cut threads on the right side too). I did my best invisible weaving imitation. And then I put the mostly-constructed dress into time-out to stew over its sins and let the magic closet do its work with that little mend (out of sight = out of mind). It has mostly worked I think.

Onward. This fabric is magic. It is thick and dimensional and my triple-stitch topstitching looks pretty fabulous on it, if I do say so myself. Further, because it's crepey, it has a lot of give and the dress is super comfortable although quite fitted. And then, because it's wool, it is nice and warm even though it's sleeveless.

Bodice lining is poly tie fabric

I think Burda wanted me to line it to the edge, but I made little facings (which I sewed to the lining and then treated as part of the lining) to prevent the lining from showing at the neck and arm openings. This made the edges fairly thick - I kept it all nice and flat by allowing about 1/8" for turn of cloth at the armhole above the diagonal seams on both front and back.

The relatively thick facings made for a bumpy shoulder area. I retro-fixed this by cutting a little padding out of fusible fleece which I slipped between the layers and fused to the lining side.

The seaming details are really lovely even though they might be mostly invisible to the casual observer. The seams line up very nicely with the darts at the waist and with each other at the side.

As usual these days, The Sewing Lawyer's stash came up with all the needed bits including the interesting lining, invisible zipper, thread and emergency fusible fleece. The fabric for this dress was purchased at Fishman's Fabrics in Chicago when I was there in 2012, along with the fabric for this suit. So they coordinate, right? Well yes, the jacket does look pretty good with the dress.

But to my surprise, another jacket in my closet looks even better with it. I made this jacket in April, 2007, long before this blog got started, and it's what The Sewing Lawyer will be wearing with the dress on the first working day of 2016.

Happy New Year from:

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