I've become convinced recently that Americans are too concerned with return on investment. Besieged as we are by whether or not our houses are growing more valuable, we put in nice landscaping five minutes before we sell. We ask ourselves whether we'll take this job or that by how it will impact our resumes. In some instances, we are afraid to be seen walking an ugly dog.

And where does it really get us?

Maybe it's capitalism. Maybe it's our Judeo-Christian background, as a culture, and our relentless obsession with the principal of hard work. But really, who goes home after a long day of being nice to other people and thinks, shit, what a waste of a day? I really shouldn't have smiled at that old lady. I really shouldn't have waved to that school bus. I'm a reject of a human being.

The truth is that in these uncertain economic times (Beloved's most hated expression), almost nothing is a guaranteed win. Your life could become a bad Alannis Morisette song at any moment, what with the spoons when you really need a fork and all that. You could do everything right, jog every day and eat healthy, organic foods and still drop over dead at 35 whilst hiking to the top of Mount Everest on a clear autumnal morning with the earth shimmering beneath you.

Return on investment is a privileged person's way of measuring energy in versus energy out.

I'm finding as I get older that the only things that matter to my state of happiness are the ones that make other people's lives better. I'm no Mother Theresa and my income tax statements reflect that. I try, I do, but I'm often influenced in my giving by whether or not I think it will bring me something in the end, whether that something is a feel-good moment or a deduction or some form of social currency. Is it possible to do something nice just to do it? Really? I think so, but it's most commonly not the reason we do it, because we've all bought in to the concept of ROI.

The only thing that keeps me from feeling as though I've fallen into the American ROI abyss is my cat. Petunia, while a shelter cat (six points for altruism) is the worst cat ever. I mean, sure, she's nice to me, but Beloved can barely pick her up, she swats at the little angel except on the best of days and my niece E., who is two, says what Petunia says is "HISS." She's a bitch of a muted calico domestic shorthair, and there's really no good reason in the world to keep her. She has zero ROI.

This cat of mine I cling to because she's evidence that I don't do everything for a reason.

I have long railed against the idea of quarterly reporting and continuous financial gains. I think paying too much attention to short-term goals results in corner-cutting and -- let's face it -- unethical and inhumane behaviors. Yet I find myself measuring myself against short-term goals all the time, whether they be in months or in years.

Where did we get this idea of ROI, and why have we, as a culture, bought into it so? Because truly, the more you have, the more you stand to lose. I'm not trying to be Debbie Downer here, but it's true. So why not do things just because they are there, just because they are fun?

I'll tell you. It's because as long as everyone else is still subscribing to ROI, then you lose if you're just in it for the moment. We would all have to collectively decide to stop placing importance on income and social stature and agree to frolic in sunflower fields, and I have a feeling that as long as humans walk this earth, there will always be someone trying to convince you his sunflower field is way bigger and better and produces more seeds per acre than yours.

I haven't quite figured this problem of the human condition out yet. Perhaps another episode of LA Ink will help.

This morning, a friend alerted me to an article on NPR's Shots blog. The headline: To Curb Childhood Obesity, Experts Say Keep Fat Babies in Check.

It immediately pissed me off, of course. This formerly disordered eater worried incessantly about my fat baby girl. The girl people stopped me on the street to comment about. I've been watching with interest the comments on a post on BlogHer about fat talk around children. Some people are adamently opposed (as am I) and some people think it's our job as parents to limit kids' eating and make sure they don't gain too much weight.

My daughter has been "normal" weight since she was about two, and she's always been able to stop eating when she's full -- even if she's halfway through a chocolate shake. I've always praised her for stopping when she's full, but I've never stopped her from eating dessert. I don't want her to have a weird relationship with food. I just want her to eat when she's hungry, stop when she's full, and mix in some vegetables.

However, the NPR article was talking about babies and toddlers, and here are some of the tips they gave:

Cut down the time children spend watching TV or using the computer or cell phone.

We are talking about babies and toddlers. My baby was off the charts for her first full year, and I swear to you that she only used the computer or her cell phone for an hour a day.

Make sure kids are getting the right food portions for their age.

I monitored my daughter's milk intake like a hawk for that first six months. I don't care how hungry she was! I pulled that bottle or boob out of her mouth the second she hit her age-appropriate limit.

So parents and child care providers can do small kids a favor by not letting them get too big, even if that means turning off Nickelodeon.

I'm working on a post for BlogHer (I'll share a link here when it goes up) regarding an interview I recently did with a PPD/ED specialist at UNC. We got to talking about body types and how they impact eating disorder recovery. She told me some of her patients have had to eat thousands of calories a day to recover from anorexia. I gained weight very quickly just by returning to 1200 calories a day -- what would be considered dieting for most women. "I'm a very efficient food storer," I told her. "I would do well in a survival situation. I'm just not often in them."

We talked about how every body is different; every body processes food differently. And I am really sick of the media admonishing new mothers and bequeathing upon them personal responsibility for every aspect of their children's health. The degree of personal responsibility is getting ridiculous.

Yes, duh, parents shouldn't give their toddlers a straight Diet Coke, tequila and Spam diet. Yes, of course we should encourage our kids to get outside and play. But hello, world -- some kids are genetically hardwired to be a little bigger. Sometimes they slim down naturally with age, sometimes they don't. It may have everything to do with what they eat and! It may have nothing to do with what they eat. Weighing them and admonishing them and making a big deal about their weight when they are eating the same or less as the stick-skinny kid sitting next to them in the cafeteria is not helpful. In fact, it can be extremely harmful.

And. Telling a nervous new mother that she holds the keys to every aspect of her child's health -- that it is all her fault if the baby is fat -- is a great way to program a weight-watching, harping mother who will ultimately give her child a complex about food.

I really wish the media would take more responsibility for objective reporting when it comes to health news. In politics, we generally get two sides of the story. These health studies are so one-sided, so judgy. Yes, there is a childhood obesity problem in the U.S. -- I acknowledge that wholly. But I look around my racially diverse but economically homogenous neighborhood, and I don't see one obese child. Not one. I go to Midtown Kansas City, where it's racially diverse and economically diverse, and I see tons. In addition to genetics and diet, childhood obesity has a lot to do with economics -- whether kids have access to sports and camps that allow them to run and play, whether they have access to yards and bikes and streets safe to ride bikes on. Whether they have access to fruits and vegetables that don't come out of a very salty can. Whether they have something to do besides watch TV while mom and dad work.

Childhood obesity isn't necessarily something we can blame on personal responsibility of the parents. We, as a nation, owe kids safe streets and bikes and subsidized, exercise-and-fresh-air-oriented childcare and camps. We as a nation put everything on working parents -- we don't help out with childcare, we don't help out with healthy food, we don't help out with transportation to camps and sports for kids whose parents don't have cars or can't get off work to take them.

There are two sides to every story. One side of this story is personal responsibility of the parents to not let their toddlers exist on a steady diet of Ho-Hos. The other side of the story is access. We like to ignore that side, because it's a much harder thing to face. The media needs to start covering that side of the story, because until we acknowledge it, we won't do anything about it.

Today the little angel and I and two of our dear friends ventured down I-70 to Heins Farms, a working dairy farm about an hour outside Kansas City. They supply Roberts. We had a grand old time, extended NY subway version to follow, but please to enjoy this cow video for now.

Here's a link to all the cow pics and videos that I took while on the Heins farm.

And!

• Why Vampires Make Bad Boyfriends -- my review of Deborah Harkness' debut novel, A Discovery of Witches, for BlogHer Book Club
• Like Jane Austen? The folks at Penguin and BlogHer are giving away five sets of two awesome books: A Jane Austen Education and Jane Austen: The Complete Novels (yes, it's all of them in one book). Comment to win!
• There's still time to sign up for my author/blogger workshop this Saturday at The Writers Place. Hope to see you there!
• Tonight Jill Miller Zimon and EM Zamotti will be live blogging the Republican debate at BlogHer. You can feed your tweetstream into the live blog or just read Jill from the left and EM from the right. Should be entertaining, to say the least!

For weeks now, my sister has been emailing me news links and photos of the Missouri River escaping its banks upstream of my hometown in Iowa. Everyone back home just keeps saying it: The flood is coming. The flood is coming.

The road to home is starting to close. Parts of I-29 between Kansas City and Omaha will be shut down if necessary. The levees in Hamburg, Iowa were breached yesterday. Amtrack stopped the trains through Iowa yesterday.

It's not rain. It's earlier rain, and release rates from upstream dams. I asked Pa what it all meant, what caused it, and he started talking about the Army Corps of Engineers and planned releases from dams and cubic feet per second of water twice to three times the normal amount due to early rain and significantly higher snowmelt in Montana. None of it made much sense to me.

Here's how the Corps of Engineers explained cubic feet:

A cubic foot of water can be compared to the size of a basketball, Jacobson said. On Wednesday, the Missouri River was 21.8 feet at Boonville, half a foot above flood stage, and was flowing at 166,000 cubic feet per second. Imagine watching 166,000 basketballs fly by every second, as Jacobson explains it. The Corps' forecast doubles that by the middle of the month.

Farmers are going to lose entire crops. Insurance won't cover the entire loss, not by a long shot. Hamburg pretty much needs to move its entire town. Businesses shut down, houses under water.

Sometimes I wonder if it's better to get hit out of the clear blue sky, like with a tornado, or whether it's better to have weeks and months to plan, like this flood.

I'm glad my family was able to move some stored crops out of the way so perhaps those won't be lost. I'm glad people are able to evacuate. But there's also the psychological impact of knowing the water is coming and there's really nothing you can do about it. The cubic feet per second are just too great.

Here in Kansas City, Parkville is the community most affected by the river. They're planning to hold back the river with tarp and sandbags. We've always groused Kansas City doesn't make enough of its riverfront, but maybe in this case that's a good thing.

Warning, no warning: Loss is loss. Maybe knowing in advance doesn't mean a thing if you're going to lose it all, anyway.

I asked Pa if there was going to be a blame game, and he said there always is with these sorts of things, but I think this one may be just too many cubic feet of water per second. Too much rain. Too much snowmelt.

The weather is changing, and the days in which we benefited from living by the river may have floated away with yesterday's barges and canoes.

My friend AV blogs about sex. She's a sex blogger. SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX

It doesn't seem like a job for the faint of heart, and fortunately, she isn't. She mentioned to me once that her family had asked her to adopt a pseudonym for writing because her writing embarrassed them. This week, AV wrote about it on BlogHer.

She wrote:

And if one thing I write makes one person feel less isolated, then my mission is complete.

Know, too, that I don't write about these things because I think it's safe or because I live with my head in the clouds and think it's perfectly acceptable to do so, but because I know it's not safe and it's not acceptable in this or any other society. This isn't a popularity contest -- it's a call to arms. This is the resistance.

In telling my stories I am liberating others to do the same, whether privately with me in my inbox, or in their own lives.

She wrote this and a lot more on her Facebook wall, in response to family members telling her they were embarrassed by her actions, telling her they felt sorry for her parents.

Then her mom responded:

Having said all this -- what do we think about our daughter? Allow me to express with pride that my husband and I find ourselves extremely satisfied in how she shares her own experiences and thoughts. You think we should feel ashamed but we fail to find reason to do so. We raised a daughter who stands firmly on her beliefs and values despite strong opposition. There is no shame in that.

Writing and family -- it's always a tightrope that every writer walks, and maybe more so every blogger. In telling our own stories, it's very difficult to not share someone else's. But AV is only writing stories of her own experiences -- if anyone should be upset, it should be the other individuals who were in the room, not her family.

I've had disagreements with my family over whose stories were whose, over whether or not I curse too much or have unpopular politics. I've often wondered if I embarrass my family on a regular basis with my words.

I think -- at least in American culture -- someone who writes about sex, not pornography, not erotica, but the actual act of sex as a physical, emotional, spiritual or not experience -- is literally and figuratively getting naked in a way few other writers do. Parenting bloggers write about guilt and walls streaked with poop. Food writers describe burning things, falling souffles, embarrassing mistakes. The ability to feel and express sexual desire is almost caricatured in modern society -- it often feels like there is only porn or tantric soul rocking -- nothing in between, but it is in the between that the rest of us live. Are we loved? Do we love properly? Is there a properly? If we don't have sex often enough, are we undesirable? Is sex as important as we thought it was? Is it more important than we thought it was? What is sex past twenty, past thirty, past when you look hot doing it? What is sexiness after the body starts to decay? What is sexiness when you're young and not yet comfortable with yourself?

I don't write about sex, other than the How to Get a Happier Marriage posts I did for BlogHer last year. It's not something I'm comfortable blogging about. But I did write about it a little in my novel, and in doing so, I started asking myself all those questions above. Sex is more and less than what we think it is. Perhaps it's the most vulnerable we can be.

I think as a people we're afraid to talk about actual sex for all of these reasons. We're comfortable with hinting at it, commoditizing it, using it to sell beer, acting as though we get it all the time, pretending we don't need it or we live for it, but heaven forbid we ever talk about it as the inherent part of the human experience it actually is.

I was in the shower last night, getting ready for bed, when Beloved walked in. "You're not going to believe this," he said. "Osama bin Ladin is dead."

I peered through the fogged-up glass, watching the rivulets run down. I could barely see Beloved's face. He doesn't walk upstairs when I'm in going-to-bed mode to tell me just anything.

At first, my mind wanted to close it off like it was no big deal. It's been so fucking long that we've been hunting bin Ladin, through two presidents and a gamut of emotion for me and the rest of the American people.

I didn't know what I felt.

Part of it was anger in thinking with this guy dead, another guy will just pop up. (Or will he? We didn't actually get another Hitler.)

Part of it was relief that at least this particular asshole was out of commission.

Part of it was fear of retaliation, a desire to duck below the windows every time a car drives by.

And part of it was curiousity over what will happen to Osama bin Ladin's soul.

Mostly, I was tired. The news didn't make me jubilant, it made me feel exhausted. I knew the world could be a brutal place prior to September 11, 2001, but I didn't internalize it until then. Since then, so much has happened on U.S. soil, both natural and man-made -- Katrina, the BP oil spill, the recession -- it has often felt like one flight of bad news after another since that day -- really bad news, end-of-days kind of bad news.

I don't think I'm the only American who hung that stinking wreath of excrement around Osama bin Ladin's neck, let him represent all that was wrong with humanity.

Now he's gone, so perhaps I'll have to look harder into all that is wrong with the world -- and that makes me tired.

So I went to bed and I prayed for Osama bin Ladin's soul. I prayed he knew not what he did.

Yesterday, some kids told my daughter that Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny are all frauds. She asked the lunch lady, and the lunch lady told her that her sons still believed.

The little angel cried a little bit and decided she didn't want to play with those friends just then.

My husband told me this story after our girl went to bed. I asked him what he said. He had told her that people believe all kinds of different things, from religion to politics to bunnies. You can still like other people even if they didn't believe the same as you do. I thought this a brilliant response.

I personally can't stand the Easter Bunny because Easter is the most important Christian holiday -- there is no Passover Chick, and I don't see why we need a bunny. I've never really leaned on the bunny and would be relieved to just tell her it's us, man, it's us. We know you like chocolate.

So she still believes. For now.

When I graduated from high school, my parents took me to Target and bought me things I'd need for college. As the cart filled with the bare essentials -- towels, shampoo, shower caddy, sheets, toothpaste -- I remember being shocked at how much it cost to live alone. It hadn't dawned on me before then that I couldn't just take everything out of my parent's house -- that I would, in fact, have to duplicate these essentials to live on my own.

What happens when there are no parents? Or when the parents can't provide?

A friend of mine recently forwarded me information about Give What You Got, an organization that helps Kansas City kids who are in foster care, residential treatment facilities, transitional/independent living programs and in at-risk households with supplies they need to transition into whatever world they are emptying out into. It's graduation time, and if you want to help, it's very easy.

I get a lot of review items, and I'm sending a bunch of cookbooks over to help a graduate out. Others are donating money to buy a microwave or pots and pans -- things to help ease the transition from childhood to adulthood.

Congratulations, graduates. Safe travels.

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Read my review of The Kitchen Daughter by Jael McHenry at Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews!

Have I mentioned yet how much I love my new job?

OKAYILOVEMYNEWJOB.

Here's one reason why: I get to focus on issues that matter to women. On Friday, we found out that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is available at 8:30 a.m. Central (9:30 Eastern, 7:30 Mountain, 6:30 -- eek -- Pacific) (as in RIGHT NOW) to answer our questions about healthcare reform.

Over the weekend, we rushed to collect your questions for Sebelius, and after hearing us call out for questions on Twitter, Facebook and BlogHer, you responded.

And then D.C. became buried in a snowcalypse.

But the White House? They don't care about little things like snowstorms. Sec. Sebelius is still answering questions like the good Kansan she is. (Go, Kansas.) Listen to her healthcare reform live feed on BlogHer with BlogHer's Morra Aarons Mele now.

If BlogHer's stream doesn't work for you, you can also watch on the White House's Facebook page.