Belated Happy Birthday, mac!

And the security questions sound kind of interesting... now I sort of want to claim to have lost my own birth cert just so I can hear my own security questions.

Mine always ask how much I pay each month for my car payment, give me a list of streets and ask which one I've lived on, and then usually ask one or two things that I can't answer, like how much I pay per month on some loan I never got (there's always an answer choice of "I don't have a loan of this sort," or something.) Since I only have two things that have a set payment every month (car payments and student loan), those two always get asked. I assume that people with mortgages and other stuff would get more of a variety of questions.

I'm more interested in the "passport ASAP" part.

I need to get a new copy of my birth certificate. Mine was lost of in the mists of time, and when I needed a copy some time ago, Illinois made the copy on a thermal fax machine, which had pretty much disappeared elsewhere by that time. It's now a piece of gray paper with an embossed Illinois seal.

ha!

I had a conference out of the country (it has already occurred) and I discovered my lost documents about 4 weeks prior to my travel.

So I ended up driving to parts unknown to show up in person to apply for a passport. The levels of security at the Secretary of State's office are a trip.

I got a replacement passport in less than a week, via mail, recently, and my daughter's new passport took about 2 weeks (had to apply in person, but at local city office). Both were expedited, but no overnight mail.

That reminds me, I need to pick up a copy of my birth certificate just to add it to the family collection. When I picked up birth certs for the kids I went in person, but all I needed was a CA driver's license that proved I was the kids' mother.

Yeah, I need to do that stuff, too. Birth certificate, marriage certificate, ss card, new passport. I really should get on that.

I have no idea where my marriage license is. And I think I'm going to need it to to renew my driver's license, because they'll want my birth certificate with my maiden name and I'll need to prove why my name changed.

I feel a Damn the Patriarchy rant coming on.

A long article, but an utterly thorough take-down of the Tiger Mom Book: [link]

I also think Western ways of parenting are in trouble. The ideas that commonly guide parents today are actually debased and derivative versions of an ethos that has been reduced to clichés (e.g., “Be yourself”; “Do what you love”; “Live your own life”). Rather than simply attacking Chua and reaffirming Western ways of parenting, the task before us is to recover and articulate our own ethos.

At its best, the Western style of parenting aims to help children live authentically, that is, to take on the responsibility to decide for themselves what to do and how to live. My understanding of the world is inauthentic to the extent that I have simply inherited it from my parents or absorbed it from the people around me, without having made any responsible effort to measure it against my own experience. My discourse is inauthentic if I accept and repeat what others say without trying to understand through my own effort what it means or whether it is true.

"Authenticity" is one of the great bullshit standards.