Was Janie Overly Perfectionistic?

Though Janie gained mythic dimensions in my childhood imagination, I do not believe she was perfect or anything. She bore many resemblances to various bosses and others whom I’ve been forced through work or family to maintain relationships with. I’ve developed a general perspective that many of us in this early 21st century find ourselves dominated by individuals with a personality type that seems to find economic efficacy in our productivity-, image- and marketing-driven bureaucracies—the obsessive compulsive personality disorder.

Here’s a quick rundown from the bible of psychological diagnosis, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - Fourth Edition (DSM-IV).

Axis 1 includes clinical ( mental ) disorders used to report various disorders or conditions, as well as noting other conditions that may be a focus of clinical attention. Clinical disorders are identified into 14 categories, including anxiety disorders, childhood disorders, cognitive disorders, dissociative disorders, eating disorders, factitious disorders, impulse control disorders, mood disorders, psychotic disorders, sexual and gender identity disorders, sleep disorders, somatoform disorders, and substance-related disorders.

OCD ( Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) an anxiety disorder. OCD is characterized by uncontrollable intrusive thoughts and action that can only be alleviated by patterns of rigid and ceremonial behavior. Symptoms frequently cause considerable distress and interference with daily social or work activities. There may be a major preoccupation with the smallest of details in daily life. Obsessive ideas frequently involve contamination, dirt, diseases, germs, real / imagined trauma, or some type of frightening / unpleasant theme. People recognize their obsessive ideas do not make sense but are unable to stop them. These obsessive thoughts frequently lead to compulsive behaviors as the person try to prevent or change some dreaded event. They frequently repeat activities over and over again. ( E.g., washing hands, cleaning things up, checking locks )

Diagnostic criteria: see footnote 1.

Axis 2 includes personality disorders. . . . Personality is the qualities and traits of being a specific and unique individual. It is the enduring pattern of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, it is how we think, love, feel, make decisions and take actions. Personality is determined, in part, by out genetics and also, by out environment. It is the determining factor in how we live our lives. Individuals with Personality Disorders have more difficulty in every aspect of their lives. Their individual personality traits reflect ingrained, inflexible, and maladaptive patterns of behaviors that cause discomfort, distress and impair the individual's ability to function in the daily activities of living. [Axis 2 disorders rarely benefit from therapy or therapeutic drugs].

Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder is characterized by perfectionism and inflexibility. A person with a Obsessive-Compulsive Personality becomes preoccupied with uncontrollable patterns of thought and action. Symptoms may cause extreme distress and interfere with a person's occupational and social functioning. [Most people with OCPD do not consider their behavior to be a problem, but they often drive their associates and family crazy.]

Diagnostic criteria: see footnote 2.

Beyond DSM IV’s objective criteria, some psychologists have identified another dimension of the OC spectrum:

A Comparison of the Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Style and Disorder

















Click here to see this table in larger form.

Source: Handbook of Diagnosis and Treatment of DSM-IV Personality Disorders, by Len Sperry, M.D., Ph.D.

My memories of Janie Wilson are so fragmentary that any diagnosis is wild speculation:

Carolyn Cook was singing in her vibrato soprano voice and Miss Wilson abusively told her in front of three classes that her affected singing style was unacceptable.

A soft-spoken fourth-grade play actor was enunciating from the stage unacceptably and was abruptly jerked from the play and replaced with a loud-speaking boy (Don).

Janie’s seeming preoccupation with hands and fingers also is interesting. OCD spectrum disorders include “quirky” body movements such as snapping fingers, which may be a “habit” developed to release tension. Similarly, the person with OCD may habitually “pick” at different areas of the body, including picking scabs, pulling out hair (trichotillomania), picking at the tissue around nails, or pinching unruly children.

Aside from these speculations are these most obvious truths about Janie:

She was smart, articulate and confident during a time when it was better for a woman to be less smart, less articulate and less confident. She managed with authority but some disdain many ignorant Southern brats.

As Betty Friedan began her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique in Chapter One—The Problem That Has No Name
The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—“is this all?” [For more about Betty Friedan, click here.]

How much stranger was it to Miss Janie Wilson (9351 Alta Mira Dr.)?


Did she suffer more than did Mrs. Betty Williams, OU magna cum laude graduate (10161 Estacado Dr.),


or fashion conscious Mrs. Lewis Sifford (10138 San Lorenzo Dr.),



















or maternal mom Mrs. Ruth Roan (10120 Pinecrest Dr.)?


















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Footnotes

Footnote 1

Diagnostic Criteria For Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder OCD
A. Either obsessions or compulsions:
Obsessions as defined by (1), (2), (3), and (4):
1. recurrent and persistent thoughts, impulses, or images that are experienced, at some time during the disturbance, as intrusive and inappropriate and that cause marked anxiety or distress
2. the thoughts, impulses, or images are not simply excessive worries about real-life problems
3. the person attempts to ignore or suppress such thoughts, impulses, or images, or to neutralize them with some other thought or action
4. the person recognizes that the obsessional thoughts, impulses, or images are a product of his or her own mind (not imposed from without as in thought insertion)
Compulsions as defined by (1) and (2):
1. repetitive behaviors (e.g., hand washing, ordering, checking) or mental acts (e.g., praying, counting, repeating words silently) that the person feels driven to perform in response to an obsession, or according to rules that must be applied rigidly
2. the behaviors or mental acts are aimed at preventing or reducing distress or preventing some dreaded event or situation; however, these behaviors or mental acts either are not connected in a realistic way with what they are designed to neutralize or prevent or are clearly excessive

B. At some point during the course of the disorder, the person has recognized that the obsessions or compulsions are excessive or unreasonable. Note: This does not apply to children.
C. The obsessions or compulsions cause marked distress, are time consuming (take more than 1 hour a day), or significantly interfere with the person’s normal routine, occupational (or academic) functioning, or usual social activities or relationships.
D. If another Axis I disorder is present, the content of the obsessions or compulsions is not restricted to it (e.g, preoccupation with food in the presence of an Eating Disorder; hair pulling in the presence of Trichotillomania; concern with appearance in the presence of Body Dysmorphic Disorder; preoccupation with drugs in the presence of a Substance Use Disorder; preoccupation with having a serious illness in the presence of Hypochondriasis; preoccupation with sexual urges or fantasies in the presence of a Paraphilia; or guilty ruminations in the presence of Major Depressive Disorder).
E. The disturbance is not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g., a drug of abuse, a medication) or a general medical condition.

Footnote 2
Diagnostic Criteria of Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder OCPD
A pervasive pattern of preoccupation with orderliness, perfectionism, and mental and interpersonal control, at the expense of flexibility, openness, and efficiency, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by four (or more) of the following:
is preoccupied with details, rules, lists, order, organization, or schedules to the extent that the major point of the activity is lost
shows perfectionism that interferes with task completion (e.g., is unable to complete a project because his or her own overly strict standards are not met)
is excessively devoted to work and productivity to the exclusion of leisure activities and friendships (not accounted for by obvious economic necessity)
is overconscientious, scrupulous, and inflexible about matters of morality, ethics, or values (not accounted for by cultural or religious identification)
is unable to discard worn-out or worthless objects even when they have no sentimental value
is reluctant to delegate tasks or to work with others unless they submit to exactly his or her way of doing things
adopts a miserly spending style toward both self and others; money is viewed as something to be hoarded for future catastrophes
shows rigidity and stubbornness

A Reinhardt of the Mind Poetry Corner

The Paxil Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
By Jennifer Heinicke
A satire on the idea that poets’ anxiety, depression and early deaths might be prevented by doses of Paxil or Prozac and might lead to different forms of art.

Watch a multimedia version of the poem:
>Part 1
Part2

Read the poem as it was originally published:
http://www.postmodernvillage.com/eastwest/issue18/18b-0005.html

We Real Cool
By Gwendolyn Brooks
Watch a multimedia version of "We Real Cool"

Daddy
By Sylvia Plath
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Who was Daddy?

A Literary Anecdote

Poets in their Youth: A Memoir by Eileen Simpson. Reminscences about John Berryman, R.P. Blackmur, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, Jean Stafford and Others.

VII
Analysands All

Sometimes after the publication of Lord Weary’s Castle, and the appearance of Randall’s and John’s laudatory reviews of the book, Cal [Robert Lowell] called from New York to ask if he could bring Randall to Princeton. Come early, John said, to allow time for a good long talk before dinner. They appeared at our door in the early afternoon, Cal looking as sturdy as a woodsman beside a wan and willowy Randall. The previous evening they attended a cocktail party for Cyril Connolly at which everyone, Cal included, had overindulged—everyone except Randall, who, as usual, had drunk not a drop. It seemed hardly fair that the teetotaler should be the one to suffer from a hangover. From the canapés! Cal couldn’t imagine anything funnier.

Randall was not amused. He felt so ghastly he asked if he could lie down. I installed him on the couch in the living room with pillows and a comforter. He participated only listlessly in the conversation, and when dinner was ready said he couldn’t face food; he doubted that he would ever be able to eat again. With his pale face against the pillow, the comforter pulled up to his chin, he reminded me of a Mary Petty cartoon I’d cut from an old New Yorker that I’d found in a secondhand magazine store and pinned up over John’s desk, to rib him about the way he carried on when he was ill. In a Victorian bedroom, in a high bed, buried under a mound of covers, one sees the figure of a man. His head, with its peaked face, is framed by snowy white pillows. A doctor, looking grave, says, “You’re a very sick poet.”

Toward a Natural History of Reinhardt Boys

Long before first grade, we Reinhardt kids left our homeplaces and began exploring the outside world. My little world basically consisted of two or three streets—Eastwood, Pinecrest and Fuller. My family’s 945-sq. ft. house rested on a large, treeless lot of what my mom called “black gumbo” dirt. Fast growing mimosa trees were planted in the front yard and much parental elbow grease went into nurturing Bermuda and St. Augustine lawns, over what had once likely been a cow pasture or cotton field and before settlers a part of the Grand Prairies of North Texas. My parents’ battle was against the Johnson and nut grasses.



Colors, odors, moving things all captured my interest—ants, crickets, grasshoppers, doodlebugs, lizards, frogs, horny toads (soon to become extinct in North Texas), and most fearsome of all the preying mantis. Storm clouds, water running down street gutters, propping myself on the curb to hold my bike up, watching the garbage men work in the narrow allies, and the smell of honeysuckle (and its sweet drop of nectar) captured my attention. Like the toad, I moved through the hot days of August barefoot, my thick callused soles protecting me through grass, dirt, gravel, concrete hot enough to fry an egg, and melting road tar. I was yet to have a conception of the CO2 load that my later addiction to air conditioning would cause to our planet.

Neighborhood children, and especially the older kids, taught me the ropes, which mostly consisted of play. Our playing was overlain with play words, some of which I repeat below:

One potato, two potato,
Three potato, four,
Five potato, six potato,
Seven potato, more!
[Then the child would remove the fist on the word "more" and the game would begin again.]

continuing with an

Eenie, meenie, meinie, moe
Catch a n*gg*r by the toe
If he hollers make him pay
Fifty dollars everyday
My mother told me to choose the very best one,and you are not IT.

[I think the “not” was added if the leader wanted to switch who was IT at the last instant. It seems to me that older girls were always in charge of not only the counting out, but also the transmission of the oral childhood culture.]

[When I was very young, I remember the neighborhood kids using the above rhyme for one of the favorite neighborhood games--Kick the Can. http://www.gameskidsplay.net/Default.htm
This is an exciting combination of hide and seek and tag. One person closes their eyes and counts to some high number, while everyone else hides. Then, the person who counted (who has incidentally been guarding "the can") has to run around the neighborhood and find everybody. The tricky part is that once a person is found, they have a race, where the person who has just been found has to try to kick the can over before the counter tags them. When that game gets boring, there seems to always be those kids who will hide in a dumb, easy to discover place, with the intent of sprinting for the can if they're caught... it's a good game for building paranoia into your character.]

Xxx and Xxxx sitting in a tree,
K- I- S- S- I- N- G.
First comes love,Then comes marriage;
Here comes xxx with a baby carriage

[With a four leaf clover or a rose:]
She loves me, she loves me not

[With a four-fingered Chinese paper contraption we folded from our notebook paper or Indian Chief tablets:]
1,2,3,4 and folding out the edges, Boy, Girl, Nigger, Squirrel or pretty and ugly girls’ names.

Fatty, Fatty, two by four,
Couldn't get through the bathroom door,
So he did it on the floor,
Licked it up and did some more!

See ya later, alligator.
After while, crocodile.

Silence in the courtroom! The monkey wants to speak.
[Used to call order to allow someone to speak.]

Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.

Big talk, little action.

99 bottles of beer on the wall

Cow patty on a lonely road.

[To the tune of "On Top Of Old Smokey" ]
On top of spaghetti
All covered in cheese
I lost my poor meatball
When somebody sneezed

Whistle while you work
Hitler is a jerk
Mussolini bit his weenie
Now it doesn't work.

I'm Popeye The Sailor Man
I live in a garbage can
You’ll never get rich [I'm mixing this with "You're In the Army Now"]
By digging a ditch
I’m Popeye The Sailor Man

Twinkle twinkle little star,

Hello operator please give me #9

Ring-a-ring the rosey
A pocket full of posies
Ashes, ashes [I don't think we Texans could say Atishoo! Atishoo!]
We all fall down

Rock-a-bye baby, in the tree-top
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock;
When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall;
And down will come baby, cradle and all.

[From the Internet: I've seen these terms used by adults to categorize children's playground rhymes where the last remaining child is selected as the seacher for hide & go seek, or {saying the rhyme two times in succession} the last two children become the team captains:

choosing "it"
counting out rhymes
elimination rhymes

[Many of these are skipping rhymes.]

****Note that contrary to some books I have read, it seems to me that more often than not children want to be chosen as "it".BTW: when the two team captains are chosen, one at a time they chose members of their team by calling out the name of the remaining children. I believe that it still hurts to be the last child or one of the last child selected. When the children I meet with choose team captains, they use a choosing it rhyme like:

Eenie meenie minie mo
catch a tiger by the toe
if he hollers let him go
ee-nie meen-ie min-ie mo.

The children huddle close together in a semi-circle type formation. The child who selects the captains {because he or she raised his hand first and me or another adult picked him or her] stands in front of the other children. Each child in the semi-circle extends his or her right foot forward. On each word {or in the case of the last line, on each syllable} the "leader" points to each successive child's foot. The leader can not skip a child or add additional words or syllables. The child who the leader is pointing to on the word "mo" {pronounced "moh"} is out and the rhyme is repeated until there is only one child left. That child is "it" or [in the case of competitive games with two teams-one of the team captains].

The same "leader" then starts the rhyme again with the remaining children to pick the second team captain. However, when that game [such as relay races] is played, and the group has time to play that game again, the way we do it in my groups is that the two new captains are the two children who were picked last.I think doing this helps build those last picked children's self-esteem.]

At age 7 or 8, I accompanied my parents and neighbors Mr. and Mrs. Laird for a Friday night dinner out, I think to an Italian restaurant in the Lakewood area. The food was delicious and the beer flowed freely among the adults, my Dad an aficionado of Budweiser beer and Viceroy cigarettes. We drove home in the darkness of the night, I in the back seat sitting between my parents, and I offered to tell the group a joke. As the youngest of two, with a bully big brother and fairly soft spoken parents, I was not a particularly verbal child so my confidence to tell the joke was remarkable. Here’s the joke, reworded a bit from my childhood vocabulary:

A French man was seated in an airplane alongside a Negro man. The French man began a conversation by sniffing his right index finger from base to tip and saying “Cherie.” The Negro then began a sniff at the elbow and continued up the tip of his finger and said “Jezebel.”

My mother, always high strung in this type of intense social situation, let out her usual quick and high pitched wail of guffaw. Mrs. Laird followed with a deep laugh, joined by the two men, who also thought it funny, especially from the mouth of a child. I, of course, knew nothing about French or Negro male or female sexual organs, or sexual stereotypes, or anything else that I was saying. I did intuit that the joke was a subtle blend of racial and sexual putdown. Mrs. Laird asked me to tell another joke but I could not think of one. The next morning, my big brother got in trouble because obviously he or one of his friends was the source of the joke.

And so my learning began, in a culture dominated by Southern male prejudice and sexual imagination. As I grew older, I learned about other peculiarly American (and often American Jewish) male thought patterns about sex, that being the great American commercial enterprise and export product, male-oriented pornography.

"In his book about Marilyn Monroe, [Norman Mailer] wrote, 'Since sex is, after all, the most special form of human communication, and the technological society is built on expanding communication in much the way capitalism was built on the expansive properties of capital and money, the perspective is toward greater promiscuity.' If you are seeking an explanation for why pornography takes up most of the Internet, there it is. "
“Maestro of the Ego“
By Lee Siegel . New York Times
January 21, 2007

A Reinhardt of the Mind Poetry Corner

Here's a poetry lesson by Anne Sexton.

Her Kind

View photos of Sexton at

http://s194.photobucket.com/albums/z214/diocynic/Anne%20Sexton/



Sexton, in her red reading performance dress.

Here's an excerpt from memoirs of her daughter.

The teacher who had a most innovative discipline technique

We have heard about PE teacher Mrs. Keeling who, when children would not stop talking in her classroom, would order them to their knees and then noses to the stinky benches. And we have unconfirmed reports that she on occasion would, with children who continued to talk with their nose to the bench, sit on their heads. And we have another unconfirmed report that auditorium teacher Miss Wilson would pinch unruly children.

As I have thought about my various elementary teachers and their varied disciplinary techniques, I had a sort of epiphany of what must be the most innovative technique of disciplining an unruly child—making him blush (http://www.facialblush.com/).

I have mentioned in previous posts that I had many problems while in public schools and one of them was blushing. My seventh grade home room teacher Mrs. Willis was one of those stellar Texas women who taught us at Reinhardt. The day that I came into her classroom with my new Hardys shoes that had horseshoe taps that clicked so loudly that they disrupted classroom activity, what did she do? Did she send me to the principal’s office for licks? Did she take me to the hallway for a browbeating lecture? No, she called me to her desk and asked me to deliver a folded piece of paper to Miss Parks in her classroom at the end of the wing. And in the deadly silence of the classrooms and hallway, five or six classrooms listened to each of my tortured steps. As I reentered Mrs. Willis’s classroom, I blushed and also understood her correction and removed my taps from my shoes.

My biggest blush in her classroom came on a day when, according to her, I was pestering the boy who sat in a desk next to me, Kenny Williams. She said to the entire class, “Kenny, if Don was bothering me like he is bothering you, I think I would hit him on the head with something.” Kenny lifted the largest textbook he could find in his backpack and hit me as hard as he could on the top of my head. The popping sound blasted through the seventh grade wing and gave me a blush that might have been close to a childhood heart attack. Needless to say, I left Kenny alone after that.

A Retraction

I recently received a post from a reader that informed me that, “in her parts,” the Internet slang LMFAOL actually means “Laughing My Fat Ass Out Loud.” Said correspondent also confided that in the last three years or so, when she turned 55, the words fat and f*cking have begun rolling continuously around in her brain like marbles and frequently rolling off her tongue as well. She attributes this use of “the two ‘f’ words” with entering a freer, more “zestful” stage of her life. In addition she said she had mentally established an abbreviation pattern in her thinking—f1 for the fat and f2 for f*cking, which greatly helps economize her thinking and actually provides her with increased energy levels. She further suggested that I consider use of the f1 and f2 abbreviations in my blog, for instance, in a sentence composition such as “Most of the women at the party had f1 asses and most also wished that they had f2 asses but did not.”

I am no prude and do not have a problem with the message meaning underlying its semantic structure. However, I do object to the use of these crude acronyms. Lazy thinking leads to lazy writing, which is something I will not allow on herewith blog.

And further, compulsive use of these “f” words likely is caused not by newfound “zest” but due to a decline and impending shutdown of neural networks.

I obediently accept the correction that some in some parts might intend the term LMFAOL to refer to f1 and not f2 asses. (We can leave to future editors of the Merriam Webster dictionary to scientifically determine the widespreadness of this usage.)

However, I will not allow a debasement of this blog’s raison d'etre—to encourage clear and direct thinking, which is expressed in clear and direct writing.