Such is my love/hate relationship with Dan Brown.  The author of The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, and a few others.

I’ve been reading Dan Brown’s novels since I was in high school.  I own three of his books, actually.  His earlier work had a fun way of interspersing interesting facts with the story, so I always felt like I walked away from the book having learned something (I also felt this way when I was on my Tom Clancy kick awhile back).

I finished his new book, The Lost Symbol, this weekend and I have to say…I’m disappointed.  The story was a ton of fun, and I learned a lot about Washington D.C. and the Freemasons, but he should have stopped writing that book about 30 pages before he did.

The story wraps up, and then he goes on for another 30 pages with his personal religious views and how the established religious authorities have got it all wrong.  He quotes the Bible numerous times, but only ridiculously out of context, and the whole thing ends up just being really obnoxious.

I know a lot of Christians rose up in outrage over the things Dan Brown wrote about in The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons.  To be honest, I was never one of them because I didn’t really know enough at the time to know whether or not I should be outraged.  I just enjoyed the stories.

Either I know more now, or he’s getting increasingly ham-handed with his attempts to stir controversy, but the ending of The Lost Symbol just annoyed me.  It’s fine if he doesn’t agree with Christianity, or want to be a Christian.  I’m not about to brow-beat anyone for disagreeing with me.

But, he takes it too far when he quotes the Bible out of context so egregiously that I wonder if he even understands what he’s doing.  For him to try to put Jesus on a par with Buddha or Mohammad is laughable because Jesus left no room for Himself to be anything other than the Son of God.  He’s either the Messiah or He’s a lunatic, but there’s no way He was just some wise dude who left us a good example like so many other wise dudes.

Dan Brown is just so silly when he says the religious establishment has gotten the teachings of the Bible all wrong by asserting that their way is the only way to get to Heaven.  When Jesus says in John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the father except through me” He isn’t being coy.  He’s laying it out on the table, and there’s really no way to misunderstand that.

So this may be the end of the line for me.  If Dan Brown wants to write stories, I will read them.  If he’s going to keep getting up on increasingly larger soap boxes in an attempt to convince me that we are all gods, well, no thank you very much.  This mere human isn’t buying what he’s selling.

Well, there’s nothing for it but to just rip the Band-Aid off, so here goes: I am referring to letting your baby cry it out.

First, I’ll start with some back story.  Since he was about 1.5 weeks old, he’s always been a fantastic nighttime sleeper (I credit the miraculous swing for that).  Daytime sleeping, however?  Not his cup of tea.

Difficult to get him to sleep in the first place (despite heavy eyes and fussing, he’d always assure me a nap wasn’t necessary), and he’d inevitably wake up every 15-30 minutes, and take another 20 minutes of shushing, rocking, swaying, bouncing, and walking around to get him back down.

What should have been a three hour nap (he’s always needed a one hour nap in the morning, and a three hour nap in the afternoon, I’m so lucky!) would stretch into five hours of exhausting soothing on my part, exhausted wailing on his part.  Wes would come home and find me with a sore back and frayed nerves.

He wasn’t getting much rest (how can you get any good sleep when you’re awake every 30 minutes?) and I was starting to feel like I was going to lose it.  I dreaded every afternoon nap, especially when I started to feel like he was just manipulating me.  I’d walk into his room when I heard him screaming, and the minute he saw my face he’d stop screaming and give me big, goofy smiles.

That was when I decided to do some research.  I started asking a bunch of moms I know what they would do, and the answer was nearly unanimous: Let him cry it out.

Now, crying it out has such a bad reputation on the Internet.  This post, which I read while I was researching crying it out, was particularly condemning.  For every article or post I saw that warned against the method, however, I saw hundreds of other posts from parents saying that with a loving approach it was great.

I weighed the pros and cons, and decided to try it for a week, starting when he was four months old and using the original Ferber method, not just locking Aidan in a room and letting him cry for as long as it took.  When I knew Aidan was tired, I would make sure his diaper was fresh, make sure his belly was full, and then rock and cuddle him until he was nearly asleep.

Then, I put him in his crib, tucked him in with his blanket, and closed the door.  He’d immediately start crying, so I went in after one minute and shushed and held his hands, then left the room again.  He’d start crying again, so I went in after two minutes.  Wash, rinse, repeat at increasing one minute intervals until he was asleep.

After about a week of this, he started putting himself to sleep, and self-soothing himself back to sleep during his daytime naps.  He stopped waking up every 15-30 minutes, and waking up from his naps happier and better rested.  The amount of time he spent crying before each nap decreased, to the point we’re at today, where he grumbles for about a minute before falling right to sleep.

I’m certain that crying it out isn’t best for every parent and baby, but I just thought I’d throw this out so that if you want to try it you won’t feel like your child will become a sociopath because of it.  I asked a bunch of moms, and of the ones who did it, none of their kids seemed to me to be less secure, less empathetic, or more aloof.

So there we go.  Let the tomato throwing commence.

So far, whether or not a college education is valuable appears to be largely determined by how much debt you incur during the course of your studies.  One rule of thumb I found particularly helpful was the following:

If your annual income your first year out of school is not greater than or at the very least equal to the total amount of your student loans, your degree probably isn’t worth it.

So, if Aidan wants to go to university to study Russian literature, I’ll probably discourage the notion.  He can read all the Tolstoy and Dostoevsky he wants in his spare time without garnering thousands of dollars in debt for the privilege.

I heard from a lot of people who didn’t take on any debt while in college, and they all said they enjoyed college and found the experience very valuable.  Truthfully?  If I hadn’t had to work so much while in school and hadn’t graduated in so much debt, I probably would have enjoyed it a lot more too.

The people I talked to who graduated in debt, however, were a lot less glowing in their reviews of the experience.  One person cracked me up with her suggestion that we stand on the side of a freeway offramp with a sign that read, “I graduated with a liberal arts degree.  Any bit helps!”

As for the idea that a college degree is the new high school degree, I’m starting to wonder if that’s an idea propagated by college admissions departments.  I’ve just met and talked to so many people who are successful and never finished college, the argument doesn’t seem to hold water.

It stands to reason that if you interview well, network your tail off, and do your job well, you stand as much of a chance of getting hired as anyone who graduated college.  How else can you explain a college drop-out who makes $80,000 a year doing Web design existing in the same city as the college graduate earning $35,000 a year doing data entry?

The gist of the conclusion I’ve drawn from this discussion is that if someone else is footing the bill for your college education, study whatever you want and enjoy yourself.  If you’re signing your life away in exchange for college credits, though, you’d better make sure you’re majoring in something that’ll pay well.  Or, just get really used to the idea of using half your monthly income every month to pay for your student loans.

In exchange for my student loans, the payments of which eat up a substantial amount of our monthly income, I have a degree in psychology from a respected institution.  And self respect and blah blah blah.

What I have to wonder is, what is really the value of that degree?  I know not everyone goes the whole graduate-get-a-job-get-married-have-beautiful-babies-stay-home-with-beautiful-babies route, so maybe this isn’t applicable to anyone but me, but I am curious: Was my college degree worth the tens of thousands of dollars I paid for it?

Wes and I were discussing this the other day and are at a bit of an impasse.  He went to college but didn’t graduate.  He started off studying music composition, left school to pursue an internship, started working full time, and never went back.  Then, when his sales career took a nosedive thanks to the economy, he went to a trade school, got the proper certifications, and now he makes way more than I ever will.

His education took him less than a year, cost a quarter as much as mine did, and he makes more than twice as much per year as I’ve ever made his first year out of school.

Obviously, Wes is not everybody (because he’s awesome), but if this kind of thing is possible, is it even worth it to get a four year degree if you’re paying for it yourself?

I suppose you could say that my degree enabled me to get a job out of college, and that if I hadn’t gotten that job, I never would have hated my job, started blogging, and then switched to blogging as a career.  I have to wonder, however, if I wouldn’t have found blogging some other way.  You certainly don’t need a degree to be a successful blogger.

The reason this is on my mind is, having one parent who graduated college and another parent who didn’t presents an odd example to our kids.  I mean, can I reasonably make a case that it’s important to graduate from college when I’m no longer sold on the value of a college education myself?

(This is obviously not an applicable discussion when applied to careers that require advanced degrees, such as doctors, therapists, lawyers, brain scientists, etc.)

My degree was fun to earn, and I learned a lot, but I can’t honestly say that college prepared me for the working world any more than any of the jobs I held during school.  I can tell you how to correctly cite an academic article in an APA style paper, but I have never used that skill outside a classroom.

What do you think?  Am I just jaded by huge student loan payments, or are college degrees worth it?

This discussion is continued in part 2, which you can read here.

(Hold on a minute.  Doesn’t that just sound so adult?  Like something we do all the time?  Because we are down with buying in bulk and totally blasé about the whole thing now?  In reality, this was our fourth trip.  The first three trips we took together after getting our membership were spent having Wes show me around and having me try to cope with doing math and deal with impatient crowds simultaneously)

…and we happened to be there at the same time as Sig Hansen of Deadliest Catch fame.  Sig’s a minor celebrity in Seattle, because that happens to be where he lives when he’s not motoring across the Bering Sea in search of crab.  I hear tell he’s even raised the flag at a few Seahawks games.

Wes and I recently started watching Deadliest Catch and like it pretty well.  Before I’d seen the show, I’d had no idea how they were going to stretch a bunch of guys going fishing into a whole show, but I think they do a good job.  The show’s worth watching if for no other reason than that’s the only place you’re ever likely to see weather like that.

Anyway, Wes and I complete our shopping and, while we’re rolling our 2,000 lb shopping cart full of good bargains out the door, Wes asks if I can handle the cart so he can dash over to snap a picture of Sig.  I acquiesce and stand outside waiting for Wes to return.

Now, I fully admit to thinking it’s interesting to see someone from TV live and in the flesh.  I do not, however, think that all celebrities are created equal.  I mean, I’m sure Sig’s an interesting guy with some fun stories, but do I want to make it a point to walk up to him and shower him with my adulation and thanks?  No, I do not.

Why?  Because the guy’s just doing his job, man.  He’s not saving lives (unless you count bringing his crew inside during storms), he’s catching crab.  Would I go out for drinks with the guy?  Absolutely.  Would I stand in line for hours to get his autograph so I can say I’ve met him in person?  Nope.

There are, however, some celebrities I would love to meet in person.  Above all I’d love to take them out to dinner so I can ask them questions and enjoy their company, but shoot, I’d even settle for a lowly photo op with them.  Here’s my list:

• Jennifer Lancaster.  I would take this woman out for drinks in a heartbeat.  A perfect day would be spent taking her dogs for a walk together, watching trashy television, then eating too much food and drinking too much wine before watching the Big Lebowski.
• Matthew Bellamy.  I would pay good money to listen to him play piano live, and then come out for drinks and a rousing discussion about space exploration and revolution.  Ideally, I’d be fantastically rich and he’d come play piano for me in my parlor, after which a butler would serve us drinks on the veranda while he showed Wes a few cool new guitar tricks.

Maybe it’s because I’m tired, or maybe I just lack imagination, but I can’t think of anyone else I’d seriously love to meet in person.  What about you?  Who would you love to meet?  Maybe I can crib from your list…

Our Netflix queue was getting a bit bare, so I started adding movies I knew we enjoyed to it to ensure that we wouldn’t run out of quality entertainment.  Some of the movies I added:

• Love Actually
• Memoirs of a Geisha
• The Proposal
• Mr. & Mrs. Smith
• The Day After Tomorrow
• 2012
• Gamer

Now, Wes considers the top four movies on that list to be chick flicks, even though Mr. & Mrs. Smith is most definitely not a chick flick because it has guns in it.  When the fourth so-called chick flick arrived, Wes started getting ever-so-slightly annoyed.  After all, he is not a chick, and can be relied upon to consistently ruin a perfectly good cry by making sarcastic jokes during emotionally charged scenes.

Then, the two disaster movies arrived.  I love The Day After Tomorrow, while Wes merely thinks it’s tolerable. He chafes at thinly veiled environmental propaganda.  2012, we both agreed, was a phenomenal waste of time.  I love me a good disaster movie, but it has to be at least somewhat plausible or I just plain stop caring.

The last movie to arrive before Wes completely lost all faith in my Netflix queue ordering abilities was Gamer.  I do not recommend this movie.  I’d read the synopsis and thought it sounded interesting, but we made it about a quarter through the movie before turning it off in disgust.  It is a foul film, and deeply unsettling, and not worthy of anyone’s time.

That last movie was the nail in my movie-picking coffin.  Now I’m consigned to watching Miami Vice (the show, not the movie {a show I couldn’t be less interested in watching}), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (vapid, annoying, campy, though Wes assures me the second season is better than the first), and JAG (I already know it won’t be as good as NCIS, so why bother?).

Marriage means sharing the Netflix queue, even if it means watching things you have no interest in.  Le sigh.  The chick flick marathon was good while it lasted…

Fuzzy and soft and WORTH ITS WEIGHT IN GOLD.

I’ve been a parent for almost three weeks and it’s abundantly clear I’m not an expert.  In fact, it seems to me that parenting, at least at first, is more like alchemy than science.  You follow your instincts, try strange things someone’s aunt’s chiropractor once told her worked wonders, and keep trudging on through the dirty diapers and sleepless nights just hoping that this next thing you will work.  That this will be It.  It being, of course, The Thing Your Child Loves That Helps Him/Her Sleep.

So far, we know a few things about our little Aidan boy.  One of those things is that he loves being held.  By everyone.  The boy has yet to start fussing after being held by a stranger (except on one notable occasion when he was hungry).  He loves being held so much, in fact, that for the first two and a half weeks of his life he would only fall asleep if he was being held against a warm body.

He’d eventually fall deep enough asleep that we could transfer him to his bassinet, but this was always a tricky proposition because if he wasn’t deep enough asleep he’d scream like an ever-loving banshee about two minutes later (approximately right when my head hit the pillow).  There was one night in particular when he refused to be put down from midnight to 5 in the morning, and I fell asleep holding him and very nearly dropped him.

This is right about when I told Wes something needed to be done.  The baby was getting plenty of sleep, but it was getting dangerous for me to keep trying to hold him all night.

Enter the swing.  The beautiful swing.  The transcendent, made-of-rainbows-and-unicorn-dreams swing.  It’s the Fisher Price My Little Lamb Cradle Swing (no, I’m in no way getting compensated to rave about this thing) and it is the reason I’m sitting here calmly blogging as opposed to rocking back and forth in the corner licking the decals off the walls of the nursery.

I feed Aidan, burp him, cuddle with him for just a while (he’s delicious, you’d cuddle with him at 4 AM too) and then I tuck him into his swing and let it rock him to sleep.  It’s fuzzy and cozy, so there’s not a rude transition from warm mommy to cold swing.  It’s given me two decent nights of sleep so far, and I feel like three quarters of a million bucks.

Even if there were a handbook on how to be a new parent, it probably wouldn’t apply to you and your baby anyway.  Alchemy, I say.  Wandering around the house with your fussy baby in the middle of the night, rocking, patting, swaying, turning on faucets, waving around fuzzy stuffed animals and hoping against hope that something, anything will work, then celebrating like crazy when you find that one thing that at the one moment in time makes your baby happy.

1. All pregnant women are rich, and therefore do not mind paying twice as much for their jeans.
2. When you get pregnant, you magically shrink/grow and no longer require such frippery as sizes that come long/short.
3. Pregnant women are not interested in looking attractive, and would, in fact, prefer their pants to gape as much as possible in unflattering places such as the hips and thighs.
4. The only people who sell their maternity jeans to consignment stores are tiny.  Tall and/or larger women like to hoard their clothes.
5. Pregnant women will get desperate to buy your crap once they get large enough, so never offer to sell your stuff on sale.  It shows weakness.  They’ll come knocking once their pants are biting into their rapidly ballooning mid-sections.

As you can see, it was a very informative weekend wherein I may or may not have found myself frustrated to the point of tooth-gnashing by the expensive and limited nature of maternity jeans.

What, if anything, have you learned from going shopping?

• Wes and I saw “Inglourious Basterds” on Friday.  I enjoyed it fairly well, but it was definitely a Quentin Tarantino flick.  Not that that’s a bad thing, but it’s starting to feel a little rote to me.  Wes reminded me in the car on the way home (we discuss every movie we see ad nauseum on the way home) that there were several scenes in the movie that were particularly artful, and I do agree.  It would just be neat to see Quentin plumb the depths of his creativity instead of pacing the rut he’s created for himself.
• Consignment stores are awesome!  It’s completely hit-or-miss, meaning there’s by far no guarantee that when you stop by to shop you’ll find something that will work, but when you find something that’s perfect?  It’s like the skies open up and the sun itself beams down upon your face.  I found another $5 pair of jeans at a consignment event yesterday.  With finds like this, it’s small wonder I balk at the prospect of paying $30 for jeans, no?
• Is it just me, or has “Grey’s Anatomy” gone completely off the rails?  Wes and I started last year’s season last night (he watches it to humor me, but in no way has he ever enjoyed it) and I could have sworn I was watching a high-budget soap opera.  I mean, the main character (Meredith) has always been whiny and self-involved, but it appears her malaise has spread to the whole cast.  Even well-developed characters are behaving like complete morons and the plot points have all the authenticity of a fat-free, sugar-free chocolate bar.
• The new Muse album, “The Resistance”, was a hugely pleasant surprise for me.  I’ve been a rabid fan of the band for years, but I have to admit their last album, “Black Holes and Revelations”, alarmed me a bit.  It was just so synth-heavy, I yearned for that raw, virtuoso sound they had when you could clearly tell there were three men playing a variety of instruments during songs.  With “The Resistance” though?  It’s a really cool new direction that shows that the band has grown and developed (there’s a freaking symphony on this album!) but hasn’t lost sight of what they’re really good at (rocking out and making it sound really good).
• My grandfather mailed me a book of my Russian great-grandmother’s hand-written recipes two weeks ago and Wes and I tried out our very first one over the weekend.  We made pelmeni (tiny meat-filled dumplings, you boil them and then eat them with sour cream) from scratch and oh my gosh it was a lot of work.  It took us three hours to make them and it’s extremely likely that, unless I have at least three more people helping me, I won’t be making them again soon.  Yes they were delicious, but you can also buy them pre-made and frozen and they taste just as delicious and only take about ten minutes to make.

To read on, click on the “More” link below.

I mean, as always the acting was superb (especially Hugh Laurie), the writing was spot-on, and each episode was interesting.  It’s a great show, and I love it to little bits.  I think what they did to Lisa Cuddy at the beginning was mean, when her baby was taken away from her by the idiot birth mother who decided last-minute to keep her.  I know they did it to set up an emotional moment wherein she and House could make out, but it still seemed unnecessarily cruel.

Even with this, though, the season was great.  Until we got to what happened to Kutner.  What the heck happened there?  I know Kal Penn, the actor who played Kutner, left the show in order to work for the White House, but I have no idea what the writers were thinking when they wrote that story line.  Wes and I threw around some ideas as to what they might have been hoping to accomplish and nothing we came up with made sense.

Obviously they were writing him out of the show, but what a depressing and upsetting way to do it.  I mean, why suicide?  Out of nowhere?  Were they trying to spread awareness about suicide?  If they were, they did a horrible job with it.  Not only did they show that suicide is totally random and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it because you’ll never see it coming, but they never provided a reason for why he did it and we as viewers never got to know him well enough to enable us to make sense of his actions either.

The only awareness I gained from that episode about suicide is that it’s extraordinarily upsetting and that the writers employed it as a cheap storytelling device to add drama.  As a viewer, I feel maligned.  If they had provided us with a reason, or clues, anything, really, to cushion the blow it would have been different  But they didn’t.  They exploited our feelings to gain ratings and that is a very low blow indeed.

Then to top it off, they make it look like House gets clean and that he and Cuddy finally get together, which makes my girly self go all melty and happy, and then they take that away from us too.  It just feels like the writers are very vindictive this season and are taking it out on the viewers.  We have to watch Cuddy struggle with motherhood, Kutner kill himself without warning, his colleagues struggle with loss, and House lose his grip on reality.

When we clicked off the TV last night, it was the first time I haven’t felt sad that a season of House was over in a long time.  I hope this is just the nadir in the broader story arc that is the House series, but only next season will let us know if this is the case.

Those of you who watched season five, what did you think?