I was in this position — quite literally — when I was pregnant. Phone calls are great as books, yarn, magazines, et cetera. In the four weeks I was on bedrest, I blew threw all my cell minutes AND ran up a landline bill of staggering proportions because talking to other people help keep me from going insane thinking about what could go wrong.

Be careful with DVDs and tapes and the like because some women cannot even leave the bed to change them. If the writer’s friend does not have cable, ordering digital cable for the duration would be good — I remember watching endless hours of ESPN and TNT/TBS reruns. Also, if the friend in question is like I was, she may have to lie on one side to promote bloodflow to the baby, which really limits your ability to do much reading of larger books. I remember trying to read the hardback version of Quicksilver and not being able to get into a comfortable position while on my side — so, paperbacks. Old favorites are good, again smaller-sized.

Computer games are good only if the friend has a laptop because sitting at the computer is not always allowed. I got 20 minutes a day of computer time because sitting up was not much better than standing. Nice comfy jammies, slippers, or a robe is very thoughtful, too, as she is probably not going to be getting dressed much unless it is for a doctor’s appointment. Something one of my pregnancy books recommended is seeing if any salons in your area would make a house call for a manicure/pedicure.

I ended up coming off bedrest after four weeks for about a week and had my baby two weeks early. He was fine and is thriving and as frustrating and annoying and scary as being on bedrest it was totally worth it. And I finally manage to read Quicksilver while on maternity leave after it came out in paperback. I hope some of this information helps your reader.

Nicole

Dear Quicksilver,

Thanks for the advice. Other readers also suggested gift certificates for a housecleaning service, or arranging for various chores/baby prep stuff to get done. TV and movies aren’t lying; it takes a village to build a crib.

You might also send some books on tape, or if she has an iPod, get her an iTunes gift certificate, and she (or her mate) can load up the Pod with spoken-word stuff.

Sars,

I recently became a reader of The New Yorker and love the magazine. I get a
little behind because they come every week and almost every article is
great, but that’s not why I am writing you.

A few articles I’ve noticed use umlauts over the repeated vowel in a word.
Here are two examples from the Oct. 17 issue:

“Instead of streamlining and ‘Less is more,’ we get knobby, collaged
‘appropriation’ of preëxisting [over second E] images, either photographic
or culled form the world’s vast archives of type fonts.” (p 172)

“During the war, Rockefeller had been the Roosevelt Administration’s
coördinator [over second O] of inter-American affairs.” (p 177)

And from the Oct. 31 issue:

“But Bush and Scowcroft also spoke expansively about the possibilities for
America in the Cold War world, about a New World Order built on benign but
resolute American leadership and multilateral coöperation [over second O].”
(p 54)

I get that they put the dots over the second doubled letter, but I would
argue that “cooperation” and “coordinator” are common enough that the dots
aren’t needed. Associated Press style (I’m a newspaper girl) uses a dash
between the prefix and the word if it is a repeated vowel (e.g. re-enact).
So, Sars, what gives?

Editor in Training

Dear Ed,

I didn’t really notice that until I got your letter, and then I was reading a recent issue on the train and spotted one over “preëxisting” that seemed extraneous, and now they’re just leaping out at me. Let’s see what Garner has to say on the subject…

Well, there’s a name for it, when you have two of the same vowels next to each other that are pronounced separately; it’s the opposite of a digraph, but of course now I can’t come up with the term (come on, coffee). Garner does note about “cooperate” that British English would be hyphenated, but that AmE doesn’t tend to bother hyphenating stuff like “coordinate” or “coworker.” This would seem to suggest that, if you’re going to punctuate words like that at all, a hyphen is marginally preferable, unle– A HA!

Found it, finally. Sometimes, Garner likes to make me work. Okay: the term is “diaeresis.” THANK you. I learned this in the “umlaut” entry, and was referred to “diacritical marks,” which noted:

The diaeresis sometimes appears in English over the second of two adjacent vowels to indicate that the vowel is treated as a second syllable (as in Chloë or, archaically, coöperate and naïve — but see below on the practice at The New Yorker).

Will do, Bryan. Skipping down the page, I came to a lengthy explanation of the practice at The New Yorker, which “has the notable idiosyncrasy of using diacritical marks that most publications have abandoned, especially the diaeresis in place of old-fashioned hyphens (or nothing at all). While most American dictionaries recommend cooperate, The New Yorker insists on coöperate[.]” Then he gives a bunch of examples, before concluding, “This house style is out of step with American usage generally.”

Short form: Unless you work at The New Yorker, don’t bother with ’em.

Hi Sars,

I’m having a dilemma with a friend and I hope that you can give me an outsider’s opinion. A little backstory: about a year ago, I decided to get rid of my elliptical machine, and I had a couple of options. I asked at a sporting goods resale store, and they told me I could sell it on consignment for $100 and that I would get $80 of that. My mother-in-law also said she might be interested in it, and I told her that I would sell it to her for $60 (she insisted she should pay for it, but I would have given it to her because she rocks so totally). She couldn’t take it right away because they were still building their house, but I was happy to keep it for her. So, about a month goes by and she decides that she doesn’t want it as much as she thought and she said I should go ahead and sell it. No problem, I’ve got the consignment as a back-up.

Enter my friend who says she is interested in buying one, and would be interested in buying mine, but that she wants to use it for a while first. I have known her for a while, and I know that she and her husband are cheap and moochy, which wouldn’t mean anything, except that my husband and I have had to write off smaller sums in the past and it made me leery of getting into a financial situation with them. I told her that I would rather sell it at the consignment shop because I hate selling things to friends. She persisted. I said no at least three times and finally I told her I would sell it to her for the price I could get from consignment. She and her husband picked it up that night.

Fast-forward to now. I haven’t seen the money and about ten months has passed. I had asked for the money about four months into it and she deftly changed the subject. I am terrible about asking for repayment of loans, so being the chicken I am, I sent her an email asking when she would be paying for the elliptical. She sent an email back to me which said “I’ll bring it back to you.” Now I’m pissed, and I email her back basically saying “WTF?” She said that she decided she wasn’t using it enough to buy it and that she would return it, which she did that weekend. I immediately called the consignment place and they said that they had a glut of them and that I could probably get $40-50 for it.

Now it’s two weeks later and I’m still really pissed. I don’t want to end our friendship, she stood up in my wedding for chrissakes, but I’m not getting over this! I may be acting childish and silly, but I really feel like she just used me and screwed me out of money and doesn’t give a shit. I feel like she was content to use the goddamn thing for ten months, and now that I ask for money, she decides that she doesn’t want it. I am really pissed at myself for allowing her to coerce me into something that I didn’t want to do, and I am pissed at her for not respecting the boundaries of our friendship. My internal monologue has become dialogue…one side telling me to stop being such a baby and just get over myself, and the other side calling her a cheap bitch and bringing up the dinners that we paid for because they conveniently forgot to get cash beforehand and the gifts that we were supposed to go in on, and I ended up paying for.

I’ve heard from a mutual friend that she is really sad about this, and yeah, I’m probably being mean and cold-hearted, but I also doubt that anything will change…so, what do I do? I have a long email sitting in my “drafts” box, which says everything I want to say, and I’ve toned it down a few times because it was really harsh, but I’m still waffling on sending it…I don’t really want to lose her as a friend, but I don’t think anything will be solved without me getting this off my chest. How do I say it nicely? Should I dump her as a friend, or should I work on this?

Thanks,
Who stamped ATM on my forehead? Oh yeah, it was me.

Dear Yeah, It Was,

You did this to yourself. You knew she has this tendency not to pay for shit, you knew that once you brought the machine over there she’d basically take possession and not pay you back — what do you want from her?

“I want her to be a grownup and pay for what she –” But she won’t! And you know she won’t! Like the man once sang, you can’t teach a pig to sing; it just makes him mad. Okay? She is not going to change — and if she were going to change, exactly how would she go about knowing that she needs to when you have apparently never called her out on her moochiness or given it any consequences?

Send a short, concise email telling her that you’re not happy that she didn’t honor the promise either to pay for the machine or return it. Then send an email to yourself that reads as follows: “1. I will not mix money and friendship without putting the terms in writing; 2. I will not let people take advantage of me repeatedly and then complain about it.”

…Look, I know people like this bug, and it’s not your fault she’s a cheapskate, but this could have been avoided, by you. When people do stuff that annoys you, tell them so, and don’t give them the opportunity to repeat the behavior in the future. Now go put the damn elliptical on Craigslist and get on with your day.

Dear Sars:

Three months ago, I had a breakdown and was hospitalized. The breakdown had a lot of contributing factors, including a strained living situation…and what’s happening at work.

I know that no office is perfect. However, my coworkers are condescending and inappropriate. Some of the comments are just unbelievable. For example, my boss (let’s call her MB) asked me one day, in front of the whole office, if I had a learning disability.

MB’s husband works there in another department, but he’s always in OUR office. He is an even bigger problem than MB. He thinks nothing of telling me that I “look like shit.” MB’s reaction? She laughed.

I’ve seen people try to circumvent MB’s meanness by going to her boss. The person was fired. I’ve also seen MB’s husband flirting with a girl, only later to see that hard-working girl fired — and MB cornered me and smugly told me that she, MB, had made that happen.

The plot thickens: One day MB’s husband was so rude to me that, in the heat of the moment, I asked him to please stop talking to me (while MB laughed and laughed). So after that, he made a huge show of ignoring me, and even went so far as to try to taunt me into talking. MB later cornered me and went into a rant about how “lower-level employees” can’t “snub one of the major players of this office and get away with it.”

The reasons I am considering returning to this job: the pay (very good for the work involved) and I enjoy the work itself. It’s just the people. And one of the reasons I am hesitating is the old expression about the devil you know being better than the one that you don’t.

Do I dare return to work there? Would that make me a masochist or would I just be a responsible adult, sucking it up to pay the bills?

Thanks, Sars.

Sincerely,
Thought High School Was Over

Dear It’s Never Over, Baby, You Just Get Paid To Show Up,

If the job gave you a nervous breakdown, no, you shouldn’t go back there. Why would you stay?

Because I can think of a number of reasons you might stay — you live in a very small town and this is the only job available in your field; you have a child or children to support — but even these are really, to my mind, not compelling enough reasons to stay in a job that literally drove you crazy.

I feel like I advocate quitting jobs a lot on The Vine, and I want to make it clear that I do understand the financial and family reasons and responsibilities that make people feel like they can’t leave a job. But you have to trust your instincts, and you have to feel like, in the long term, your sanity is worth more than the paycheck — that you will move, or make do, or find a better job somewhere, and it might pay less or make things a little Ramen-y at home for a while, but it will be worth it.

I don’t know how in the hell you can enjoy “the work itself” when your boss is the kind of person who uses “learning disability” as an insult; uses it on you; and conscripts her husband to pick on you. Come on, honey. I’d tell people I don’t like to quit that shit. Tell MB to fuck off, get your ass fired, snag yourself some unemployment, and find a new job where you aren’t treated like crap.

Hi Sars!

So I have a problem I never really thought I’d have. First, some background. I’m a college freshman, and I have two very close friends, Anne and Courtney (names changed), that I spend a lot of my time with. Everything was going fine, to the point of my friend Anne saying to me, “You know you’re the only person I can hang out with everyday and not get sick of at all.” And that was just about two weeks ago.

And that brings us to last night. I was invited over there for a get-together of about ten people, and after everyone else had either passed out or left, the three of us sat in Anne’s room just talking. Well, I started to doze off, but woke up when I heard my name mentioned. It became clear they thought I was asleep when they started talking shit about me for the better part of the next hour and a half. At first I thought about letting them know I was awake, but my curiosity got the better of me. They said some things that admittedly were true about some issues I do have, but most of it was misinformation, lies, and speculation. On top of that I learned that they don’t really enjoy being around me. To that I ask why would someone even make a statement like the one I listed above? To be fair, they did switch the conversation once and moved on to a mutual friend, then back to me.

After they finished, I waited a few minutes, then made an excuse to leave and go back to my apartment extremely early this morning. Sars, I went home and couldn’t even sleep. This really bothers me, I no longer trust them, and it takes me a lot to trust people anyway. So I’ve basically come up with several ways to handle this: 1) Act as if I didn’t hear anything, but try to work on the few valid points they made about me; 2) act like I didn’t hear anything and pretty much cut ties with them; 3) confront them and try to work it out (which I’m not sure is worth it since I don’t know if I’ll be able to trust them again); or 4) tell them what I heard and cut ties with them. So basically which of those should I do, or is there something else that I haven’t thought of? Please help!

Signed,
Light Sleeper

Dear Light,

I’d go with #3. Just mention that, you know, you heard them talking about you and you can’t pretend you didn’t.

What happens next, who knows, but a couple of things to think about here, and the first one, I’ve mentioned before — the friends you have in the first part of your freshman year don’t always last. You do this thing where you spend a bunch of time with people and you all think of each other as friends, but it was around this time of year when the women I thought of as my friends freshman year kind of turned on me in a similar way, and I felt like shit and really alone, but also kind of relieved because I hadn’t really liked them that much anyway, so I was freed up to make the real lasting friends I still hang out with in my thirties. Not that you can’t make “real friends” right away your first year, but — this kind of split is not uncommon.

The other thing you might want to think about is why you lay there, feigning sleep, for an hour and a half while they talked shit about you. That’s a little self-hating, in my opinion; you can’t un-know stuff like that, and I’d have “stretched and yawned” after like 30 seconds and gotten the hell out of Dodge. And now, one of your options — the first one listed, in fact — is to pretend you don’t know they slagged you for 90 minutes and work on your issues? When they’re so dumb that they trashed you in the same room? I mean — ladies, go out into the stairwell at least. It’s like they wanted to get caught. Yeah, sure, if they made some valid points that you already knew about, work on that stuff — for yourself, to be a happier person, not because two girls who don’t like you, and can’t be bothered to move into another room to gossip about you, think you should.

Your friends are…not really your friends. Tell them that, whatever other problems you’ve got, your hearing isn’t one of them and neither is your self-respect. Then join the radio station or something and hang out with people that actually like you.

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