Superman Spankings: A no-spanking alternative for tantrums and stuff

We’ve hit the stage of this covid business where all of the cupboards and closets I carefully reorganized and Spring cleaned at the beginning of the quarantine now resemble a family minivan after a road trip (those of us with respectable vehicles of course never strew food wrappers, toys and mismatching shoes all over them...cough cough). 

A friend in a FB group asked what to do about young kids who are struggling with life right now and having tantrums. I meant to reply, but then I stepped in an abandoned peanut butter and jelly sandwich, got called to fish a small pebble out of a young child’s nostril and found that one of the year’s important school books mysteriously disappeared. 

We do superman spankings around here. (which is really confusing to people because there is no spanking involved, but I call them that because they accomplish the same purpose and the name makes my kids laugh). I discovered a long time ago that non-verbal boys don’t respond well to long talks about feelings and emotions. In fact, for some kids and personalities it may be more selfish than just giving them a spanking and being done with it. I went down a rabbit hole of child development research about why spanking works and how it developed. I came to the very intellectual and high-brow opinion that it’s proprioceptive and vestibular input that helps certain types of kids respond well to traditional discipline methods. (Did I word that ok?) That’s when I came up with “Superman Spankings”.  All of the proprioceptive, physical input needed to help reset and calm the brain, without the current social stigmas and trappings that I would love to really mull over and discuss with someone someday without triggering strong dichotomous opinions.  

Anyway, here’s a tutorial for “Superman Spankings”.

Step one: See child is having a meltdown. 

Step two: Ask said child if they would prefer to sit down and reason like diplomats or fly about the room with a superman spanking. (note: length of conversation and choices vary from child to child.)

Step three: If the answer is the latter, firmly grasp the child's forearms and swing in a circle until you a) risk losing the child to centrifugal force. b) risk falling over or getting motion sick.  (note: does not work on children who are almost as big or bigger than you.)

It doesn’t always work, but it’s a well loved tool. Sometimes it even works on an irrationally angry child (note: the stock picture above is deceptively peaceful looking… and also missing the beach nazi who would stop and tell you to keep walking).

Now if anyone can tell me the best way to remove objects stuffed up nostrils, I’ll be forever obliged.

The healing tank, 9 boys & a girl, and an overgrown playhouse

Tall pine trees, a sturdy three story house riddled by woodpeckers and the only thing that’s missing are all of my siblings saying goodnight like the Walton’s. My parent’s home is like a Star Wars’ healing bacta tank…although it maybe shouldn’t be since my dad broke his hip on a broken beam over the garage when I was eleven, and my sister Liz and I raised and schooled our younger siblings in the overgrown playhouse in the backyard while our parents worked at building a house from the ground up like Ma and Pa Ingalls. (I’m trying to see how many of my favorite childhood movies I can fit in.)

It’s currently inundated with a zoo of boys (and one adorable girl who gave me my first Disney makeover). When Jim and Kevin were college roommates, I don’t think either one off them pictured this one day.

Hallelujah, Pachelbel's Canon and upside down Myers Briggs

I know the new “it” personality structure is the Enneagram, but despite reading three different books on it, I’m still completely lost on the logic of it. It probably doesn’t help that told I’m a 4, 5, 6, 7 or 9 on a regular basis, which is fine with me because at least thank goodness no one is accusing me of being a 3 or 8 (I kid I kid). I sympathize with all of the people who hate personality tests and think they’re all pseudo science (especially if you read Jung…see insane quote below), but I still firmly believe that God designed humans with pattern recognition, and although human’s are infinitely complex, there are still discernible patterns. That said, the whole reason I was drawn to Myers Briggs is because it helps you understand other people. whereas Enneagram helps you understand yourself (which doesn’t need to be a higher priority for me than it already is…cough cough).

All that to say, my pattern recognition for the month is to notice that the old adage “Opposites Attract” might be due to the human need to have your friends having opposite freakouts from you. So when one of you is unbothered by something, they can hold up the other person until its time to switch. It’s a beautiful system. Thank God for new friends and old.

Every time my youngest hears “Hallelujah” or I play Pachelbel’s Canon, he bursts into tears he’s so moved by it… or he’s just sensitive to overtly manipulative chord progressions. I’m not sure which MB or EG that makes him, but I’m guessing an ISFP or 9 (help)? Conversely, I’m not sure which other Myers Briggs type it would be that loves watching the tears and so plays it at every possible opportunity.

I’m saving for the Jung therapist now.

The Great "How-To" On Reading Comprehension (or how to read when you have no time)

The TV is back on the wall. Shame.  But I avoided a useless ER trip, so Yay?   

I did fork out a fair chunk of change to be told my child is full of crap...literally full of crap, but hey, you win some, you lose some.  The TV rode in (magically transformed from dragon to knight on a white horse) to rescue Jim who had to work from home while I took the aforementioned kid to the Dr (with what I thought was appendicitis, but turned out to be an impacted colon). Thankfully it's nothing a bottle of magnesium and caution tape around the bathroom can't fix. 

I also added another boy to the brood for the week, which has worked out well (most notably it turned up the notch on hilarious conversations overheard and the amount of food consumed), but suffice it to say there isn't a lot of extra time for me to read the growing pile of books next to my bed.

Like any good (mostly) millennial worth her salt, I have read books on how to read books.  And my book stacks have baby book stacks.  So if your life is as crazy as mine and your Amazon and library lists are equally out of control, here is the cliff notes version of what some recent experts say and my own experience with their advice.

1. Books have grammar and not the punctuation kind. 

Thomas Foster talks about this in his "How To Read Literature Like A College Professor", but you also see it if you read blogs written by publishers, editors, and agents.  There is a grammar and structure to how the whole "written with words" world works (say that five times fast) and if you understand it, then your reading speed and comprehension automatically picks up speed because you can proverbially pick the cross-titch off the frame and look at the backside. It also sorta lets you see the motivations and humanity behind the author (for better or worse). I recommend reading the aforementioned book, as well as "Save the Cat" and any book on how to write non-fiction. 

My takeaway: Take a few books and really think about the structure and behind-the-scenes systems that go into making a book, and you'll find subsequent books are easier and faster to grasp. 

2. Speed reading may be pseudoscience, but it helps with the boring stuff. 

Tim Ferriss is the most recent hawker of speed reading, but he is by no means the first.  None of the methods truly work (for science or me) because they focus on the physiology of how your eyes and retina work. BUT I did find I could read super boring stuff a lot better without my eyes glazing over and my mind wandering. I do pause a lot as I think through things...especially difficult concepts or ones I'm unfamiliar with, so I don't think I'm the best candidate and a college student would find the theories more useful.  There's a nice summary of the basic speed reading strategies here.   

My takeaway: I think speed reading is a bit like being told spinach will make you strong like Popeye. It won't, but it's still good for you. The neuroscience peeps are undecided on speed reading, but I find it useful nonetheless. 

3. Write A Review and don't say "Love it" or "It Sucks". 

One of the best ways to transfer information from your short-term memory to your long-term memory is to be able to articulate to someone what you learned.  Even more important, doing something physiological and slow after you've done something mental and fast, is insanely beneficial for your brain and its ability to process, build connections, and operate smoothly.  Thus writing review accomplishes both of those things while also providing a good "reason" to do so (vs just writing it in a journal for the pure exercise of it).  In the book "Thinking Fast And Slow" Dr. Daniel Kahneman shows how our brains adapted to take in information a certain way and make instant judgments on it.  Slow thinking is harder, more meticulous and apparently more rational.  

My takeaway: Pick up a pen.  While fast reading and processing in this hectic age of information is a necessary and laudable skill, any way you can get yourself to also exercise and use "slow" thinking, will help concepts stick better and serve as a cautionary safety net.  

In case none of those are helpful, here are the honorable mentions (in no particular order):
Read lots of books at once
It's ok if some books take a few days and others take years
Figure out the central premise of each book by reading the contents and footnotes first
Realize that non-fiction can be more fictitious than fiction
Find books you think you'll disagree with, and read them anyway
 

And that's it, I'm off to disinfect the toilet and pay my library fines...we'll see if I actually remember any of this in a week. 

3 Things That Happened When We Put The TV In The Garage

Warning: You are entering a moderation-free zone.  Cultish rocks ahead. 

Jim and I took our giant flat screen TV off the wall, wrapped it in blankets and put it in the garage in a small space between the freezer and a tall tool rack.  I'm not sure how long it's going to hang out in its new real estate, but after a week of struggling to keep it off, and then a regression back to insanity, we put it out there out of pure frustration.  

This is how my morning usually goes.  Jamie and William are up before any rooster would even dream of deciding it's daylight. I turn on something like Little Einsteins in a half dead zombie walk and then go back to bed.  By the time I get up during the normal human zone of 6:00-6:30, the TV has already staked out its claim on my day.  And wrenching it back is like wrestling a dragon.  People like to think dragons don't exist anymore, but they do.  Mine go by names of "Netflix" and "Ipads" and "Minecraft".  

The problem with dragons is that they're not traditionally easy to kill right?  If it was a simple matter of hacking up your TV in the front driveway with a machete like some sort of post-modern Braveheart then we'd all do it in a heartbeat. Self-righteous parenting books, articles (and adults over the age of 50) make it sound so simple: Just limit your kid's screen time to NONE if you're a good parent, and 30 minutes a day if you're the weaker brethren. Fine. Wonderful.  But modern monasticism isn't a tenable strategy. Maybe the next Steve Jobs will have been raised on an organic goat farm with nothing but dragonflies and dandelions to keep them entertained, but this household makes up the peasant folk for sure. 

And so we're left battling the dragons in the pig pen because moderation is a thing worth fighting for (even if it means you constantly have to repair the fences in the North field too). Although with the TV dragon currently vanquished to the garage with a blanket over its head, and the rest of the little dragons hidden away in an underwear drawer, I must say it's been kind of nice.  Here are three "stop and smell the daisies" type of things I noticed today.  

The Whining Went Away 

Sure, the kids built a parkour course in the living room, I had to bathe the two youngest ones twice, and at one point in time, my living room was covered in cardboard and Elmer's glue. But no one told me they were bored, or tired, or cold, or hot or any of the other thousand little things that I thought were real things but now I'm wondering if they weren't just hind-brain justifications for wanting to watch TV. 

They Enjoyed School 

This one surprised me. Instead of falling apart at the drop of a hat when they didn't understand something, or moaning at the sheer magnitude of work their terrible mean mother makes them do, they actually did double the school today with nary a fuss. I think it was because there was no reason to get through it fast and when you're homeschooled, learning is easily mistaken for just hanging out and having fun with mom.  Kids aren't born hating chemistry or stories.  

They Talked More 

Maybe for some people, this would be a hard negative but in this Scandinavian-esque male household, I'm always thrilled when people decide to use real words instead of grunt or punch. There are those studies that show the more extroverted and talkative the mother is, the earlier her kids will learn to talk. This study clearly did not take into account my husband's strong stoic genes which apparently canceled out all of my talkative ones since I can rack up word counts with the best of them.  Today though, I not only heard a lot of sapient conversation going on, but the smallest one was talking too!  Winning! 

In conclusion...

I don't expect it to work so well tomorrow, but I enjoyed today anyway.  I think part of the reason there was such a stark difference was because the TV was physically gone.  It's hard to bargain for something that's tangibly missing. It helps I'm not strong or big enough to get it in from the garage if I wanted. Sometimes I get so stuck in the abstract world, that I forget something simple like not just saying we're going to watch less TV, but actually moving the solid object so you match the corporeal with the abstract.

 You know, slay the real dragon... but not with a real sword.  

When Life Gives You Capuchins...

If you haven't read Cialdini's Influence and Pre-suasion then do yourself a favor and go get yourself on the library waiting list.  

I was in the car today trying to find a station that at least pretends to play Christmas music, and I heard a Cox commercial that was trying to win a prize for worst radio commercial ever...  It wasn't well written, the voice actor kept stumbling over his words and mispronouncing stuff, and it felt super cliche.  

Except think about that for a minute, the biggest internet service provider what...couldn't hire a decent advertising team or reader?  Not likely.  The word "switch" was used so many times my brain started filling it in like a phone's auto corrector.  About halfway through the commercial I thought it might be fun to start counting the word "switch" and got up to eight before I got distracted by the sudden appearance of a shoe thrown from the back seat (maybe they didn't like the commercial either?).  

Repetition is effective...even really stupid repetition (clearly, since I remembered this one commercial). I know this from teaching CC... we all know this just from television commercials of food. But I've made it a point lately to try to pinpoint some of the more insidious repeat tracks in my life. 

Today's breakthrough: Making dinner. 

I always get really pissed off in the late afternoons.  I don't know if I think I deserve a break from all of the homeschooling, or if I finally give up and realize I'm not going to be able to accomplish everything the day required, or if I only have a patience gas tank of 12 gallons and I'm more of a gas guzzlin' truck kind of woman. 

I dropped off some books at the library that had been renewed so many times the kids had forgotten we didn't actually own them.  Robbie wanted to pick out some new books (Jehoshaphat have mercy) and somehow between me saying no to a Monster Truck DVD and yes to a dinosaur pop-up book I hear a woman say

"Oh sweetie...oh no....someone help...where is your mommy!?".  

As a parent who tries really hard to raise free range kids, I hear the where's-your-mommy thing a lot, but it's never a good sign to hear it in a library.  Sure enough, I turned around to see my youngest child had scaled a bookshelf and was perched on top like the Lion King looking mightily pleased with himself.  

Getting him down wasn't the hard part, we have a well practiced climbing-retrieval-protocol. Getting him down while trying to impress upon him the importance of library quietness was a bit more challenging.

So by the time I got to the "making dinner" portion of the day, I was already pretty willing to sell my particular little Capuchin to the zoo (this is the same child who escaped his brand new $100 sleep tent by ripping it open hulk style).  I normally spend my quality kitchen time trying to chop and hold Will back with one foot while I holler for someone to come get him.... or snatch him from the stove while I holler for someone to come re-get him... or try to keep him from ransacking the ketchup and chocolate syrup in the fridge while again hollering for someone to come get him.  

But this is not a post about how stressed out I am...there are already so dang many of those.  You can't throw a cyberspace rock without hitting a mommy blog telling some hilarious tale of woe. Plus all of the articles/memes about motherhood... all of the uber sciency studies about moms and depression/staying home/equal partners.  I guess I appreciate it in a way, but I'm also kind of over being validated. It's not helping.

If someone finds those observations and anecdotes helpful, I'm certainly not going to argue the science or legitimacy of them.  But I'm an easily influenced person and I caught myself falling into a frustrated cycle that just confirmed I had every right to be frustrated, which in turn made me more frustrated.  I'm sure any mother over the age of 50 is rolling their eyes at this whole run-down, and would tell me I need to set boundaries with discipline and things would get a lot easier for me. I'm sure they're right. Good point. But mostly what needed to change was my way of looking at it (and not in an obnoxious Pollyanna, glass-is-half-full kind of way, but a re-frame... or a rewiring of the repetition I was accustomed to telling myself).   

For my Nanowrimo novel, I've been eyeball deep in Medieval history and while mankind has forever had its fair share of attitude and despondency, it appears the majority of women in the Middle Ages were capable of chopping vegetables, stirring a pot, and keeping their offspring in check without assistance.  Soo.... I poured myself a glass of wine, whipped an apron on the Capuchin, and gave him a sink full of (non breakable) dishes to wash.  

Everyone lived happily ever after. Problem solved.  

...until he dumped a cupful of water on the floor and Robbie slipped and hit his head. 

But oh well, at least the wine was good. 

The 80/20 Beauty Rule

You know what sounds like a fabulous idea?  Taking economics and turning it into a (likely untrue) hypothesis about how to stay beautiful.  

“The Pareto principle (also known as the 80–20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity)[1] states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes”

If I had a nickel for every time I heard “...the 80/20 rule…” in a podcast, I would have enough money to buy myself a bottle of gel polish (or half a sheet of jamberry).   So it was only a matter of time before the light bulb went on and I realized what a gold mine this term was.  Mostly in validating...exonerating (?) my extremely complicated beauty regime.  //cough cough//

So here goes…

Your beauty products should work for you, not vice versa.  

If you’re spending 45 min doing your hair, but you live in a climate where it takes less than 3 hours before it looks worse than when you started… then the 80/20 rule is here to save your life (or at the very least give your more time in your day).  Currently, the trending beauty wisdom revolves around specific tips, but everyone is different, so the 80/20 rule is a system wide perspective vs a detailed one.  Pick the hairstyles, hair colors, makeup etc based on the intersection between your personal values and effectiveness.  Your body knows this even if you don’t, so listen to it.  Also, if you find yourself always skipping over a certain eyeshadow or mascara or lipstick, but you keep thinking you’ll still wear it?  Toss it or put it in a separate bag reserved for costume parties and small children.  You’ll have fun scrubbing off of the walls at some future point.

I ignored this to my detriment last week when I spent an obscene amount of time beating my hair into submission for a family portrait session...at the beach.   Poseidon in all his fury wrecked havoc on my wanna-be Repunzelness in less than five minutes.  ...it may have been a record breaking 30 seconds, but I was in denial.  

Which leads me to my next point.  

It’s ok to have long hair that you only wear down when the President comes to town.

 Maybe this is dumb, but it was an epiphany to me.  It’s ok to have long hair you wear up 80% of the time.  Historically/anthropologically etc this wasn’t so unusual (You wouldn’t want to get suckered into weaving gold or anything because you forgot to put your cap on), but these days it seems like you need to defend long hair otherwise the temptation and pressure to cut it off gleams like shiny green grass on the other side of the fence.  So in case you needed an excuse for keeping your hair long even if you normally keep it in a ponytail or messy bun: It’s just the magic 80/20 rule at work.   
 

Only abuse your body occasionally

I love high heels, feel comfortable in high heels and would wear them all of the time if I didn’t live barefoot 80% of the time (are you catching a theme?).  I've noticed though, that feet tend to take on the shape of whatever shoe you force it to live in.  They’re like an old married couple where they gradually look and act so much like each other, they start to resemble each other. So don’t wear the same shoes all of the time unless you like pointy shaped feet with bunions.  Mix it up, go barefoot or wear something something structurally healthy.  And then wear killer high fashion whenever you feel like it...make that 20% count.  You win. Your feet win. Everybody wins. The same goes with your skin.  It's hard to keep your skin happy when you're constantly slathering it with dozens of products containing everything from ground wart hog eyelashes to the dw off the newborn skin of an endangered Colombian newt.  So you end up with the same dilemma: use organic makeup that costs twice as much (and you're pretty sure is just campfire soot mixed up with coconut oil) or feel guilty for ruining the environment and polluting your body's biggest organ (your SKIN! in case you missed the memo).  But feel guilty and stress out no longer.  With the 80/20 rule, feel free to go minimal and satiating most of the time and pull out the polyjuice potion for the 20%.  Ensure your face lasts a good 30 years longer.  Make your 20% work for you.   

(The 80/20 rule is one of those things you see everywhere once you know about it, so feel free to enlighten me.   I'm sure there are many more shortcuts to add.)    

Maybe being a medieval peasant wouldn't be so bad...

We just recently switched to a once a month grocery shopping budget and I feel a bit like a 17th century sea captain stocking a giant barquentine.  Granted my chicken these days comes pre-neck-wrung and sometimes even precooked by Squire Costco, but the modern trade off means I don’t spend my days tearing my hair out getting enough food for my family, instead I tear my hair out trying to make sure they’re literate and well educated.    

For kicks and giggles I added up our monthly food consumption:

58 lbs of Grains

186 lbs of Dairy

63 lbs of Meat

83 lbs Vegetables

61 lbs Fruit

9 lbs Fat

Total- 460 lbs of food

Which came out to be 2.5 lbs of food per person in our family (per day). That seemed like a tremendous amount of food to me, but according to the national health statistics the average American eats 4.5 lbs of food per day. However since we aren’t wasting away I have to assume we make up the rest in eating abroad. Also, that number is the mean average for our family, some of us consume far less...or more than others (Jamie...cough...Jamie).  

According to the FOA, the world average is 4 lbs/day, which is why America is a bit on the hefty size.  It’s intuitively obvious that height averages increase when there’s a max amount of minerals and nutrients being absorbed...but interestingly if you go too far over onto the obesity side of the graph, average height starts dropping again.   A lot of research suggests this is not because fat makes you short, but that the high processed diet making you fat, also makes it difficult for your gut to absorb any minerals and nutrients from your food.  

In further randomness, the average prosperous peasant in the Middle Ages ate 2-3 lbs of bread a day, 8 oz of meat/dairy and 3 pints of beer.   

I fully endorse this being the next new diet craze after the Paleo one dies out...in fact I may be already on it.    

13 Years Of Marriage, Tips And Thank You

The old adage “show don’t tell” is true about more than just writing books. In the crumbling basilicas that constitute modern marriage, it feels a bit counter intuitive to husband-brag since it’s no indication of merit or happiness...and in fact tends to be evidence towards the opposite.  

But if there is one day of the year you’re allowed to be sappy, it’s your anniversary, right?  So here’s me putting it out there: Jim is my rock, the better half and if I’m the family’s entertainment, he’s the king smiling benevolently from the head table. I know they say not to get married as young as we did (19 and 22), and perhaps our pocketbooks would be a bit more lined if we had taken the more culturally normal route, but from the comfortable perch of my 30’s I can’t help but think we really lucked out.  

(Bwahahahahaha...ahem) 

I also hope we’re less than a quarter of the way through our total number of anniversaries, but since 13 is such a nice unpropitious number… here are my unconventional top tips.  Ask me again in 13 years and I’ll probably be advocating striped socks knit from horny goat weed, and marriage counseling from a Jedi.

1. Get your husband a motorcycle.  

On a scale between Pararescue Officer in Afghanistan and Midwestern Dental Hygienist, motorcycles are just enough over on the dangerous side to be provocative.  Every time Jim is more than ten minutes late, I’m sure he’s dead on the side of the road somewhere.  It makes for some very heartfelt homecomings in what could otherwise be your standard corporate guy coming home to his stressed out wife.  Plus, it doesn’t hurt to be swept off your feet every day by a bearded man wearing black leather and big boots.

2. Go to bed angry

I’m pretty sure the whole “Never Go To Bed Angry” marriage advice was made up by a vindictive woman as a way of tormenting worn out men.   By all means “don’t let the sun go down on your wrath” but take that to mean, “deal with thyself” instead of dredging up every little thing wrong with your marriage at 11 pm.   Take a chill pill, realize you may in fact be perpetuating the problem and deal with it the next day if it’s still bothering you in the morning.

3. Don’t go on dates

...Or “date” your spouse or have weekly “date nights” or whatever the new soup du jour is (unless it’s one of those pay by the hour motels which would be far more worthwhile for the parents of small lock picking experts). Jim would probably disagree with me on this one, as he’s a big fan of dragging me out of the house for some one on one time, and maybe he’s right...but honestly the best “dates” are mindset adjustments and you can be anywhere for those.  Be fun, be attractive. Live, laugh and tease.  If however you find yourself on a date in a semi comatose state of exhaustion, I like The Book Of Questions or Battle of the Sexes as a way to resist the urge to full phone zombie.  

Do those three things and I promise you’ll have a long and fortuitous marriage….no money back guarantee.  ;-)

As I sit here though and reminisce about what we were doing 13 years ago (me chasing coyotes at 6am, Jim sleeping in and eating omelettes), I realize I made a huge mistake.  At 19 I was too young and ignorant to realize what monumental amounts of work and effort go into weddings.  For awhile I went through a stage of thinking weddings with all the foppery and accoutrements were a bunch of materialistic ridiculousness, but I’ve come full circle.  It’s not only beautiful and timeless, it’s also a testament to the sheer magnitude of biological and sociological proof of the importance of marriage.  

So thank you to the people who spent hours moving chairs, setting up tables and navigating logistics, and to the friends and sisters who stayed up into the wee hours weaving hemp necklaces and folding programs. Gratefulness to the mothers who coordinated vast amounts of family and food, and to cousins who captured visions and turned water, shears and stems into creations of beauty.   It makes me catch my breath to think how much work, love, time and sacrifice went into this day 13 years ago, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed.  Truly. Thank you.  Hopefully I’ve returned the favor or will return the favor someday. :)  Cheers!

Maybe You Really Are An Extrovert

I hate making phone calls. I know I’m not alone in this, so maybe it’s a manifestation of my generation or gender, but I usually have to pull out some really underdeveloped list making skills and write down...with a giant purple crayon... on an actual scrap of paper that may or may not be a piece of junk mail:

CALL CHARTER SCHOOL

SCHEDULE DR. APPT

CALL YOUR SISTER

And then I don’t let myself do anything fun like wash the dishes or chip mold out of the toilet bowl until it’s done.   

So yesterday, I was on hold with the kid’s charter school after being transferred to four different people, and of course...of course as soon as I heard someone say, “Hello this is Sarah, how can I help you?” my four year old shoved a can of grapefruit La Croix onto my lap and said, “Open another beer for me please!” with a nice belch just in case the meaning wasn’t super clear for the nice ambassador of government education on the other side of the phone. She laughed as I fumbled over a desperate explanation and assurance it was sparkling water my nefarious offspring was referring to, but when I got off the phone I slid down my chair in a puddle of introvertedness.  

Of course if you’ve ever met me, introvert is probably not what you were thinking which begs the question. What is introversion and extroversion?  

Most people have heard Introvert/Extrovert commonly defined by the question “Where do you get your energy from?”. Extroverts get their energy from being around people, introverts get their energy from being alone, right?   

I disagree. (otherwise this blog entry would be very short, and where is the fun in that?)

I think it would be more accurate to say extroverts feed off of people-energy. (and apparently have completely different brain patterns) 

...but good luck getting them there in the first place...getting them to stay...or trying to talk to their cranky selves once you get them home.   My husband is a Ron Swanson type introvert, and as such he often drags me kicking and screaming to social gatherings where he throws me in the deep end like it’s a proverbial swimming pool and I have to sink or start talking to people.  Of course he stands over in the corner and surveys the masses while I partake in all of that amazing energy harvesting extroverts are supposed to be receiving.  But when we get home, guess who’s the drained one?  Mr. I-don’t-give-a-**** who feels exactly the same post party as pre party, or his convivial wife who has face planted on the sofa and is replaying every awkward thing she did or said that evening?  Mmmhmmm.  

(tangential note:I know we sound like loads of fun to invite places, but I swear we’re not as weird as I’m making us sound...it’s just the introverted part of me taking over the keyboard).  

A lot of introversion vs extroversion can be explained by an understanding of functions. An INFJ can appear pretty extroverted in public because of their overarching social intuitiveness. And an ENFP (like me) can feel introverted because of their secondary introverted feeling function. But for the sake of argument, let’s hypothesize a lot of other extroverted types feel like introverts these days thanks to social media.   I mean, think about it.  For hundreds of years extroverts have been living in small communities and plowing their field just like everyone else.  So the whole “get your energy from people” thing makes more sense when you’re milking Bessy at 4 a.m. and thinking about how amazing market day is going to be.   If it’s the 21st century though, it’s literally market day twenty-four seven and you’re probably extroverted up to your eyeballs before you even walk out the door.  Extroversion is like a starfish, and if all of the little suction cup thingies are already being filled by instagram, facebook, twitter, your blog subscriptions...drudge… huffpo...cnn etc then eventually you run out of things you can hang onto. Then when you read something called “10 signs you’re a misunderstood introvert” you suddenly realize you related to all of them a little too much!  

Depending on what scientific journal you read.  Extroverts account for anywhere between 50-74% of the population.  However if internet memes, articles and blogs are any indication, the percentage is more like 97% introvert 3% extrovert these days.  Everyone and their mother thinks they’re an introvert.  But statistics don’t lie (har har), so either a lot of people think they’re introverts when they’re really not, or the internet killed off enormous numbers of extroverts.

Not that it really matters in the end.   I personally hold two contradictory positions.  1) If they think they’re an introvert then there is some nugget of truthfulness there that suggests you should listen wisely.  2) If they act like an extrovert but think they’re an introvert, then there is some nugget of truthfulness there that suggests you listen wisely.  

And to all of my fellow inwardly-stressed-out extroverts.  I feel ya.