Bah * Humbug

This post will be like a Madlib. Whereever I put an asterisk, you put the appropriate participle of f**k. I would just write it, but then I'd have to admit to taking the low road. This way, I can keep in sight of the high road.

This untethered rant comes to you courtesy of the Giant grocery store around the corner from my house. I went there for flour and dutch process cocoa, so I can complete the Great Baking Project of 2008. Flour was easy to find, and I looked carefully on the baking aisle for the cocoa, but there was none to be found. I checked the coffee, tea and cocoa aisle, just in case someone had put the baking cocoa over there, but no * luck. In the meantime, at least 6 store employees walked past me, but none of them could stop to answer my question, because they were too * busy talking to each other. Instead of wasting my time further, I went to customer service to ask for the cocoa. This is a pretty common baking item, mind you, and is chemically different from natural cocoa, so I can't just substitute one for the other. I stood in line waiting for the lottery junkies to conclude their business, and ask the clerk for the cocoa. "What?" she says, dully. *, I think to myself. I repeated it louder and slower (instantly transforming myself into some * version of a * tourist without a grasp of the local lingo), and she repeated it after me. "Oh, that will be either in aisle 6 or aisle 10." Well, I know it's not in 6, because I just spent 5 minutes examining every * box of flavored chemical cake mix and * esoteric flour variety and didn't find it. So I wander over to aisle 10 to look for the * cocoa and lose my tenuous grip on my * mind because aisle 10 is the * INTERNATIONAL FOOD AISLE. Apparently, Little Miss Clerk assumed that "Dutch process" means * foreign, because she sent me to international food to look for it. Is this where she sends people looking for French Roast Coffee, German Potato Salad, or Hawaian Punch? This is what happens when the * grocery store hires * sullen people who can't take the time to look for an item in an index so that they can render something * approaching customer service. *. While I'm being sent all over the durned store looking for this basic baking supply, I've picked up 10 things I didn't come in for, so I can have eggnog and taboule while typing this, thus earning what will no doubt be a * epic attack of dyspepsia. Also took a detour to the produce section to find out that there are no cranberries. What kind of store in America doesn't have cranberries 3 days before Christmas? *. *. Seriously.

Books I Shall Write

1. The Truth About Pregnancy: a comparison of what obstetricians around the world tell women to do, and how (un)connected these commandments are to science. Nonfiction.

2. Non-alcoholic Cocktails: a recipe collection for non-alcoholic drinks, for those who want something to drink besides water, soda, or caffeinated drinks. Nonfiction.

3. How to Pump Breast Milk with Dignity: including a chapter on how to muffle the incredibly loud sound of a breastpump while at work. Fairy Tale.

Glass House Broken, Resident Fails to Notice

When I'm sick, I get stupid (handy excuse, really).

I was at the gas station yesterday, having coasted in on the last fumes. Was standing idly, waiting for full to happen when I noticed the price of $2.15/gallon. Whoa, why does the gas cost so much! (Incredible, when 3 months ago I would have been gloating over that low price) Turns out that I had started to pump high octane instead of regular. So I stopped and attempted to restart with the cheaper fuel. At this point I had a little song and dance with my debit card and the pump, with some apparent silicon confusion over my double purchase. I finally had to go inside and (gasp) speak to an attendant to get the pump turned on. Let's not dwell on how long it took me to identify the pump number, since I haven't had to look for one since 1998.

Came back out, resumed my idle stance waiting for the tank to fill. Noted that the woman in front of me was cleaning her windshield, but had taken the squeegee closest to MY car. "Geez," I thought, "that woman is dumb. Why didn't she just take the one closest to her?" So I decide that I should clean my windshield, and stroll over to get the squeegee closest to HER car. Very slow and deliberate movements, so she can understand the extra steps that she'll never get back into her life. Cleaned my windshield, but not fast enough, because she finished first, and put her squeegee back into the bucket closest to me! What a maroon! How could she fail to notice my elaborate and graceful kabuki meant entirely to educate her? What kind of person takes the extra steps to put the squeegee back into the wrong place? How on earth did she start this ridiculousness in the first place?

I can only imagine that when she got home, she confessed all to the first person she spoke to: "Some bitch tried to start something with me at the gas station, but I decided not to engage, because she was clearly out of her mind."

I'm Sick, and You Should Care

The title says it all really. If I weren't a total baby when I get sick, then I wouldn't be compelled to foist this information upon you, but that would be a different universe, with different constants (a little reference to the Anthropomorphic Universe, which theory totally annoys me).

Anywho, this stupid virus descended upon me at least a week ago, and had taken a leisurely migration from the back of my throat down to my upper chest. This means I am now wracked with coughing spasms several times a day, and continuously at night. What's amusing about this is that I am now coughing so much that I am also tossing up my food. That's right, these coughs come in color. That Devil Baby sure was surprised last night when she threw up on me and I promptly returned the favor. Bet that stops her excessive spitting up. Now she knows if she throws up, I'm going to give her something to throw up about. Or something like that.

So anyway, I dragged my very sorry butt into work today, and have been coughing all over the office. This has not helped my popularity, but has raised my spirits at the thought of all the people who may shortly be joining me in my misery. How sick am I? I'm so sick that I have on my desk a jar of Indian Ayurvedic medicine, provided by the research scientist who works next door. He explained that this medicine was concocted in Bangalore, and is based on the theory of the four humours. This one targets phlegm, with which I am currently well provided (you could say I'm quite phlegmatic, if you wanted to be a giant dork). Did I laugh at him for buying medicine based on philosophies that were obsolete 300 years ago? No! I thanked him humbly and fully plan to take this Bangalore-produced, phlegm-reducing compound.

At least my coughs will taste like spice, instead of 5 day old mashed potatoes.

No Wine for You

Actually, there's plenty of wine for you, if you'd like a white or a red that compliments turkey. We had 10 adults and 6 bottles of wine for 2 days, which I thought would be terribly insufficient. With 4 bottles remaining, it looks like I was wrong. I have strong memories of merry family holidays where the adults got slightly tipsy and stayed up late every night talking and playing games. Well now that my kids are the only ones too young to drink, most of the rest of the crew has gotten too old! The worst part is that everyone can give a litany of pills and conditions that make wine drinking inadvisable, so they have not only gotten old, but they are falling apart, too :(

Still, even without the social lubricant, my highly opinionated and aggressive family managed to enjoy the dinner and the company without cross words: a miracle when all of us are absolute experts (!) about everything (it's them really, I'm very laid back and easy to get along with).

Where's the Balance?

We have my family coming in today for the holiday. This should be a simple, happy thing to look forward to, because I really enjoy all my relatives individually. But because I'm mildly neurotic and they are extremely neurotic, I've got a little tension going. Firstly, I'm low energy because of my 4th cold since Baby Devil was born 3 months ago; the house is even less tidy than usual. This is really saying something, and can't possibly go unnoticed by the Fam. The thing is that we have a slightly strange group dynamic sometimes, where we are all so busy trying to impress each other with our virtues (I keep my house really clean, I work extra hard at my job, I've got more degrees than I have fingers, I have more energy than you and I'm 60 years older), that we forget to just relax and enjoy each other. So I know that even though there may not be much said, at least two people are going to walk into my house and wonder how their virtues failed to come down to me.

The upside is that I have a haircut scheduled for this afternoon, so at least the unspoken criticism hanging in the air won't apply to my grooming, as it did for at least the first 25 years of my life (this may have been justified, as I went through extended periods of very low maintenance and a strange insistence on wearing clothing and shoes until the cloth wore thin and the soles disintegrated).

So why write about it? Because I'm going to take my hostessing duties seriously, and try to keep my guests happy and entertained. I have games (with all the pieces and directions!), I have snacks (sweet and salty, healthy and fatty. Remind me to mention the sweet and salty again*), newspapers, and a little list of current events that might be interesting to discuss without leading to acrimonious arguments. The piece de resistance of course, is Baby Devil, who will smile and spit alternately, thus allowing everyone to be charmed and to indulge in extended conversations about what I am doing to cause all the spitting. The current frontrunner over the phone is that she is probably allergic to breastmilk- convenient theory, given the general familial opposition to breastfeeding... Anyway, I'll even suffer that with a smile, as long as it helps everyone enjoy the holiday. This is a bit of a new venture for me, as most entertainment events in our house involve inviting people over, giving them a bit of food and as much wine as they want, and chatting about whatever occurs. I'm even going to try the major sacrifice of not cracking on my favorite little cousin (who's taller than me, damn her), no matter how easy she makes it. If she talks about going to the tanning salon, I will not laugh (hello, you're black!), if she complains about having no money, but has new tatoos and her fourth hair color since July, I will take a minute to remember how much I love this kid before I wisecrack. Plus, by restraining myself now and not laughing at her right away, I can save up any truly memorable bits to write about later.

So now off to the train station to begin the madness. The order of the day is to enjoy the people I love, without getting caught in the death spiral of mad family competition. No showing off the sharp wit (well, only a little bit), no snark, no secret longing to get back to the dissertation. This is going to be a slightly delicate walk, but I am filled with optimism.

*My grandmother (94) is the Queen of Sweet and Salty. She'll eat a meal and then say she has a taste for something sweet. Normal, right? After the sweet though, she'll have a taste for something salty. You know the next bit- it isn't long before she'll have a taste for something sweet. I remember a time when she could go through 3 or 4 iterations. Just a bite of each, but it would get funnier every time. Her pantry and refrigerator were filled with little snacks and sauces on either end of the spectrum, for when she got a "taste" for something.

**Anyone looking in my pantry might be able to find the same sort of pattern, without trying too hard.

Oh My

Haven't wanted to write about politics, for fear of jinxing things. Now that it looks like the election is decided, I'm overwhelmed. Are you? We could have 4 years of the most ordinary presidency (which could happen, all you left wingnuts out there), and I'll still think this is an amazing moment for us, one that I didn't think was very likely. I'm taking 5 minutes to taste the magic, so I don't forget how this feels.

Back to regular skepticism about politics and people tomorrow.

Twofer Thursday

Mooning about Brad Pitt reminds me of another favorite actor: Keanu Reeves. I think I might have a unique standard of what constitutes good acting because I rarely find anyone who agrees with me about Pitt or Reeves. My favorite movies from these two are those where the characters are sort of... blank. I think Keanu delivers this sort of performance so well that he achieves a Zen state, and I can see through him to the meaning of the whole story. There is no distracting involvement with the character, just lots of head space to think about the story being told and to develop deep thoughts about the themes. The Matrix is his masterpiece in this genre. Can the viewer become emotionally involved with Neo? No, the viewer cannot! Instead, on the surface you can appreciate the visual, but the remaining 99% of your brain can wrestle with the meaning of the matrix, and all the different philosophical ramifications. Pure bliss. A thinking person's movie.

Similarly for Maestro Pitt. He excels with the blank character that draws you deeper into the movie than you otherwise might go. His only real problem is fabulous good looks that tempt the viewer to stay on the surface of the movie. This can be a serious problem, as there is frequently insufficient surface tension to support sustained interest. It is only by going deeper that the reward can be obtained. A River Runs Through It is supposedly about the relationship between a father and his sons. In reality (or my reality, which is close enough for current purposes), it is a meditation piece on the beauty of nature, and the moral necessity of protecting our environment. To access this deeper truth, just stare at Le Pitt as the sun shines through his golden locks: deep contemplation will result in correspondingly deep thoughts. (Seriously. I defy you to try to actually follow the plot. You are obviously meant to be thinking, not listening.) (Legends of the Fall is for advanced masters of this technique. More beautiful, less plot coherence, requiring more discipline to achieve the zen state.)

You can have your method actors and whatnot. All I ask for is an actor who can give me the room to think during the movie and come to my own conclusions. And make up my own story, for that matter. That's way more than two hours of entertainment.

Guilty Pleasures

I'm finding that part of growing old for me is losing that sense that the bad things I do are actually bad. I mean, I'm so obsessed by my weight and unfitness that drinking a milkshake feels earthshakingly awful, but in reality, only a newspaper reporter with nothing better to do would act like a milkshake might cause the end of the world. So there are two things bothering me on this front:

1. The milkshake. I took Hunter to McD the other day, and I ordered a small pumpkin milkshake. Ordinarily, there is nothing at that place I will eat, but add a little flavor to a soy(lent-green) shake and I'm all over it. I saved it for lunch the next day and it was sweet. I figured it would be another year or so before I had another. But then I posted about it on Facebook, and my sweet Sweetness bought me another one! Which I also enjoyed with complete gusto. The "problem" is that I have this feeling of doom now, like I will gain 100 pounds and die of organ failure or something. This seems like an overreaction, right? I attribute this to all of the media stories about fat people ruining the world, and the immediate death that results from eating fast food.

2. I'm going out with friends tomorrow. We have planned for ourselves an exciting evening out without kids or husbands. Is there drinking? Dancing? Half-dressed boys trying not to look obviously gay while we wave dollar bills at them? Not so much. We are going out for dinner and a movie. The thing is that I'm really looking forward to it with as much excitement as I would have for gay dancing boys. Just a nice, suburban night featuring other adults and a movie that isn't for kids.

So here's the problem: I feel like our culture can distort both good and bad things until it is hard to tell which is which. I have overwhelming guilt about two milkshakes, when I shouldn't have thought about them at all once they were in my gullet, because I've been told over and over that only self-indulgent Fatty McMuffins are so sinful as to drink milkshakes. Second, I feel funny about looking forward to a pleasant evening because the plans aren't filled with drama and excitement. It's as if I'm comparing my fun times to some sort of celebrity meter, and because there is no space in my life for Brad Pitt and bright lights, I'm almost embarrassed that such a tame night could cause such anticipation.

Does anyone else ever have this sort of cognitive dissonance?

Anyway, my mid-October resolutions are to not ruin a guilty pleasure by over-indulging in the guilt part, and to enjoy to the full even the mildest, most ordinary social occasions, without worrying about insufficient glamour. And to make more room in my life for Brad Pitt.*


*For the Brad Pitt skeptics, I say only this: Legends of the Fall, A River Runs Through It, etc. Movies that are just as good without sound as with are true masterpieces.

Sarah Palin meets Fargo

Yah... Super..

Perspective

As I was walking from my Siberian parking lot to my office this morning, I was stewing on the day's injustices: creaky knees, infuriatingly painful heel spur, cut off by four different drivers on the road, stuck behind someone driving 30 mph on the bridge who sped up to 60 mph when I tried to pass him. The usual. As I creaked along thinking my grumpy thoughts, I saw ahead of me 3 nasty little coeds completely blocking the sidewalk. "What is wrong with these spoiled brats with their too short skirts and huge senses of entitlement? Why do they think they need to block this SIDEWALK with their inconsequential conversation about their boyfriends and their upcoming winter vacactions in St. Moritz?" As I came closer to them I started to power up my hairy eyeball, the one that can make a grown man cringe in fear and abject apology. Just as I was about to give them a good lasering, I heard the phrase "x-axis", and then I saw that they were all giving each other a hand gesture. Yes, it was the international sign for geek (right-hand), and they were proudly displaying 3 stiff fingers and rolling their wrists around. In that moment, I suddenly saw not 3 nasty little coeds, but instead a group of dedicated scholars discussing fundamental concepts in the lovely autumn sunshine. It was such a sudden shift in perspective that my grumpiness fell away and I glided away to my office with lighter feet. I suppose if I want to find some useless little kids to glare at, I should wander over to the other (liberal arts!) side of campus.

Their skirts were still way too short though. A couple semesters of vector calc, accompanied by weeks of pizza and beer, should take care of that problem.

Low-level Angst: DEFCON 2

Because I'm not ready for a full freak-out, but am definitely gearing up.

As we are living in interesting times, I am finding that very small things are assuming disproportionate weight. On Friday, I hurt myself. I was running up the stairs to help Hunter with his computer game, and I was already feeling low-level guilt for letting him play on the computer instead of trying to have a conversation or card game with him. Schuyler was downstairs, doing some low-level complaining about being hungry or gassy or something more existential- who knows? As I ran up the stairs, I tripped, and caught my foot in the hem of my pants, which is incredibly ironic since I had spent the entire day feeling a low-level embarrassment about the short length of these pants, and had just about decided I should never wear them again. The nail of my big toe, which has been incubating a big-time fungus infection for the last 10 months, caught in the hem of my pants and ripped most of the way off. This led to serious suppression of swearing (of which I am really proud) as I hopped over to the computer to help with the computer game. Then I hopped back to the linen closet to get a towel so the blood streaming from my toe wouldn't make a huge mess. Wrapped the whole thing up in a handkerchief that I cut into a bandage (because my stock of muslin petticoats seems to have run out), and went back down to deal with the baby and my suddenly less appetizing dinner (seafood, since the man is out of town).

So a ripped toenail is cringeworthy, but just a small thing, right? But I can't get over it. I went to the podiatrist yesterday to have the nail removed the rest of the way, and had to practice my best yoga breathing to not pass out. There is something deeply squicky about having my feet interfered with, even worse than my teeth. At the dentist, my second best yoga breathing is usually sufficient to keep me from trying to bite people (I usually think about being a wolf, and convince myself that the hygienist or dentist torturing me would taste too much of minty toothpaste to be worth the effort, and then I start wondering about the mechanics of running with 4 legs and a tail, which usually leads to further wonderings about wolf-food, and if they enjoy eating deerhide and such, or just eat what is available, and then the dental-prey leaning over me is generally finished, having kept their lives without knowing how close they were to experiencing a little Call of the Wild). But the podiatrist is probably 10 times worse. The most painful part was having my foot numbed, which may have involved a needle. I don't know for sure, because I was fully reclined at the time, having warned the doctor/victim that I was likely to pass out. He was quick and expeditious, wrapped me up in a huge bandage, and I was out of there.

I was ready to let all the angst go, and managed to proceed with routine (soccer practice, McD's for Hunter, liberal suburban guilt about the McD's, mild glee that Mom paid for it (a whole 5 bucks, score!)). Then while I'm sitting around imitating a milk truck, the dog walks into the room, moves to the back of her crate, and pukes up a huge pile of half-digested dog food. Staring at the huge pile of stinky vomitus while continuing to imitate the milk truck helped to ratchet the angst back up above mild. I started to hope that trusty Mom would take care of it, but I had 25 minutes to realize that allowing my aged parent with the two gimpy knees and recently repaired eyes to clean the mess would plunge me into a pit of guilt from which I might take hours to recover (yes, hours. I'm not that deep, emotionally). But this is where the toe comes back in, because climbing into the crate to swab up the mess was a bit awkward, what with the throbbing, the bandages, and my general fear of causing myself any further pain.

You'd never know I just had a baby, right? You should see me perform when I get paper cuts.

After all that, Mom and I and whinging baby settled down to watch Olberman (who had us screaming at the television) and all the business news we could find, which led us to conclude that our finances are going to hell, and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. Thus the Defcon 2 of angst: an accumulation of small things on top of a big thing I can't control left me feeling like a high-water wearing, mediocre parent with a hat made out of dog vomit. If only our politicians felt the same.

Beached Whale

The Smirking Chimp - "Gidget address[es] the Reichstag"

The scariest thing about Sarah Palin isn't how unqualified she is - it's what her candidacy says about America The Smirking Chimp

Trying to kill 8 hours in Gatwick airport, London, I picked up a copy of the latest Rolling Stone magazine not expecting to end up reading on of the most scathing commentaries on Sarah Palin I've seen anywhere. Written by Matt Taibbi, a political columnist for rolling stone, author of a couple of best selling books and serial guest on "The Daily Show". The piece from Rolling Stone magazine was just mosted on his blog http://www.smirkingchimp.com. Many reviewers have hailed him as the next Hunter S. Thompson and after reading this piece I think that is a fair comparison. His turn of phrase is witty, scathing and some might say more than a little cynical. e.g. - "Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she's the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV -and this country is going to eat her up, cheering her every step of the way"...

Check it out..

Crazy Talk

There is one more day of public comment allowed on the federal regulation that allows medical and pharmaceutical personnel to not dispense family planning services on the grounds of religious objection. Not content to continue the neverending skirmish over abortion, this regulation specifically covers sterilization also, meaning you could find yourself arguing with a doctor or nurse over getting your tubes tied or clipped (that means you're affected too, guys!). Time was, only the Catholic hospitals did this sort of nonsense, making women get permission from their husbands for all sorts of procedures, but that just meant that determined people could avoid Catholic hospitals. Now getting fixed could be like running a maze, starting with your GP, and continuing through every level until you get to the OR. Then heaven help you if a nurse decides she can't be part of such a sin mid-way through your procedure, and the Keystone Kops have to run around looking for a less sanctimonious person.

The bitterly funny part about this is that the fundies have overlooked some things, and deliberately slipped others in without thinking of the wider consequences. First off, the reg has been written loosely enough that contraceptives can easily be included. Thus, your doctor or pharmacist can easily refuse to prescribe, dispense, or even inform you about the pill, IUDs, etc. The horrible part here is that some medical professionals believe that the pill is equivalent to abortion by preventing implantation of fertilized eggs, when as far as I can tell from reading about it, the pill prevents ovulation, so no conception can occur at all. Have they read something different, or do they not bother to research at all before taking their stand? Also, there are a number of maladies that are treated with daily hormone therapy, aka, the pill. First among these is endometriosis, which is terribly painful and incurable. Do the people pushing this idea not know about the non-contraceptive uses of contraceptives, or do they just not care? Since only women are affected directly, is our health being trashed for the sake of other people's religious notions?

Secondly, how long until the protection of religious conscience extends beyond family planning? I can imagine doctors refusing to give blood transfusions, alcohol based medicines and medicines or medical supplies derived from animal products or proven with animal testing. I'm sure there are many more plausible examples you can think of based on religious grounds or moral convictions.

Anyway, if you think this sort of protection ought to be extended to conscientious objectors in medicine, then do nothing, and Good Luck to you in future. If you think this is a terrible idea, let the feds know by submitting a comment: consciencecomment@hhs.gov

If this thing goes through, I'm going to propose regulation that allows me to avoid equations in my engineering work, because they just confuse the measurements I get direct from G-d.

Filthy Lucre

So we seem to be in the middle of a financial scandal so juicy that the news reports read more like Hollywood tabloids than the Wall Street Journal. This stuff is so ripe that even the Wall Street Journal has been turned into a sensational scandal rag. The condemnation and shame are pretty tightly tied to politics at the moment, as somewhat impartial observers are noting that the lack of regulation on the part of government has enabled the current market meltdown. "Hurray!" the Democrats yell, as they sharpen their pitchforks. "We always knew those dirty Republicans were letting their fatcat friends do wrong. Now we are going to firmly affix blame with our freshly sharpened implements!" (Because even in the heat of the moment, they have rehearsed their comments.)

But here is a little question for you: during the last major financial fiasco, the Savings and Loan crisis of the 80s, to which party did the senators of the Keating Five belong? Here's a hint: McCain was the exception, not the rule.

Looks like the rest of us can't assume anything about which party is more likely to maintain strong (and honest) government oversight of the markets.

None of this is to contradict earlier comments that we should be less cynical about politicians and public servants. I just wanted to note that scoundrels come in all flavors, and it's downright dangerous to assume that your favored party is always squeaky clean and the opposition is always dirty.

Sciencedebate 2008

Sciencedebate 2008
One of my biggest concerns over the last 8 years has been the degradation of the value of science in policy development and political discourse in this country. Too often it seems legislation is passed without serious consideration or understanding of the underlying scientific of physical phenomena at work. In many cases, the present administration has censored or controlled government agency developed scientific research to further their political agendas.

For me this is a very important issue that has implications on every level of policy from climate change and environmental concerns to education and immigration policy yet somehow, amongst all the accusations of sexism, patriotism, experience and porcine cosmetics, the course of the current presidential campaign has managed to avoid any detailed discussion about the role science will play in the administrations of Senator's Obama or McCain.

Head to the Sciencedebate 2008 link above to read side-by-side answers to 14 enlighting questions from Senators' Obama and McCain specifically. Unfortunately, there is no way of telling which advisors wrote these pieces or advised the candidates on their answers but its interesting none-the-less.

In Praise of Elitism

Well, I'm back at work, plodding away at the helicopter, and I had to share a question that has been growing in strength all day: What is wrong with being one of the elite?

Specifically, it seems the national consensus has defined "elite" as educated (self or formally), knowledgeable, or intellectually curious. You may also be vulnerable to the "elite" tag if you earn an income that is significantly above the poverty line or if you appreciate nice things. If you know the difference between brie and bleu, ale and lager, latte and cappucino, and worse, care about the difference, you are elite. If you have the nerve to work hard to advance in your field, to earn a degree or certification, to get promotions, to get ahead for the benefit of yourself and your family, you are elite (By the way, somebody should have told me that I would automatically become one of the elite upon attaining my first degree. I could have quit this nonsense 13 years ago). And being elite, you are disqualified from participating in the national political dialog, or from being taken seriously if you speak up. Somehow, we are idealizing mediocrity, insisting that a politician has to be Just Folks to be considered sincere. This is utter insanity. The first part of the crazy happened long ago, when we lost our faith in the notion of public service and started to assume that every politician is selfish, deceptive and disconnected from the rest of us. The current part of the crazy is forcing politicians (who we have already condemned in crazy part 1) to pretend to be no better than anyone else. Our entire political system (probably most systems) is predicated on the notion that a person thinks they have something to contribute to the community, and can do it so much better than other people that they deserve the votes of other citizens. If you don't think you are better (or can do better), and aren't interested in giving your time to the effort, then you don't run for office. If no one runs for office, our society as we know it collapses, from town to county to state to nation.

Right now, we are in the final weeks of a presidential campaign, yet we seem to be stuck discussing the personal lives of the candidates, rather than their politics. I resisted writing about Gov. Palin because I had nothing nice to say about her personal life, and didn't know anything about her politics. Honestly, I don't want to know the details of a candidate's child-rearing practices, or their religious practices, or their commute to work, or their marital history. I want to know their thoughts on important public policies, foreign and domestic, how they would or wouldn't change our country's current stance, and how they envision the future. Where are they going to lead us, how do they expect us to contribute to the greater good, and what will we all get from it. Most of all, I want to believe that the person I am electing is intelligent and capable of navigating us through present difficulty and conflict toward a future as good as or better than now. (Insofar as possible. If the future must be worse than now, than I'd like the softest possible descent.) What I don't want is a leader who is better at pretending to be ordinary than at leading.

This is mostly our fault, not the politicians. The artificial "they" is reflecting what "we" want to hear. Instead of deriding each other for being elite, can we not acknowledge that success is a suitable reward for hard work? Education is not a liability, and knowledge of the world is not shameful. Being successful, educated and knowledgeable are not signs of elitism, snobbery, or classism, they are badges of honor.

I had something to say

I'm at a stage of sleep deprivation where the train of my thought will frequently skip the tracks, and I utterly forget what I was thinking about, what I wanted to say, who I wanted to share the thought with, everything. This has happened just now.

Instead of my no doubt important musings on the Democrats in Denver, or the shocking state of the roads in Annapolis, I'll relate a strange story about kid #1.

Now that he is a big kid and has a demanding demon-seed of a little sister, kid #1 has been tasked to clean his body and brush his teeth without supervision. So tonight after dinner, as the demon seed is wailing and the man has escaped outside to take out the trash (strange how such zeal for chores has taken over, when they are outside chores that are out of earshot of the seed), I asked him to get ready for bed. I'm usually pretty specific so steps don't get skipped, so the instructions go like this: go upstairs and take off your clothes, turn on the shower and get in, wash your body until it is clean, then dry off and put on your pajamas. But tonight I just told him to go take a shower and brush his teeth.

He went upstairs, and I managed to get the seed to quiet down so I could listen to what he was doing and watch Jim Lehrer at the same time. I heard water running, and assumed it was for teeth. Then I heard the shower and was sure all tasks were accomplished. He came back downstairs dressed for bed and assured me he had taken a shower when I asked him. At this point, a memory from childhood intruded. Time was, I hated to get clean. I would go when told and turn on the shower, but I wouldn't get in. Something about getting wet skeeved me out. My relatives eventually got hip to this (perhaps the stink? or the very dirty feet?), and would start touching my hair or asking really detailed questions about what I had done in the bathroom. Is your washcloth wet? Is your hair wet? Is the bar of soap wet? So in self-defense, I would wet the washcloth, run wet hands through my hair, and make sure some water touched the soap. It got to the point where my showers were supervised to make sure that the majority of my body actually came into contact with soap and water. The final evolution of this ridiculousness was the dry wash, when I would scrub my body with a wet washcloth and soap while standing at the sink, with the shower running so they could hear. That way I could answer all of their questions honestly, without having to submit to the horror of getting into the shower.

So of course tonight, when kid #1 assured me he was clean, some little warning bell in the back of my mind rang. Perhaps it was the shifty look in his eyes, or the disgusting crescents of dirt under every finger and toe nail, but I suspected he hadn't actually gotten into the shower. His hair was dry. His skin was dry. There was no fresh scent. I asked him again, and the kid had the temerity to tell me he had taken the shower. This is serious nerve. I had to explain to him that if his flesh is dry and dirty, and his washcloth and towel are bone dry, then the odds are that he didn't get into the shower. So for attempt number 2, I watched him get in and start scrubbing (with soap that I applied to the washcloth).

This is a very happy day for me. To all appearances, this child belongs to his father. My stamp doesn't appear in his face, except for tint. To find now that he may have inherited something from me after all is incredibly exciting. Maybe next I'll find him lost in a good book (every hour, every day), aggressively hogging the chocolate, or developing new stragems for keeping the change. I eagerly await developments tomorrow, when I'm hoping that he remembers to get the washcloth wet before coming downstairs to lie about getting clean. It would be entertaining if he thought up some new twists in this game.

What's in a Name

In keeping with a family tradition of gender ambiguous and uncommon names, we recently dubbed the new kid Schuyler Rosemary. This has been amusing in many ways, not least that her beloved Papa misspelled her name in one of his emails to friends and family, compounding the expected confusion over pronunciation.

There wasn't a lot of discussion over this one. He proposed it, I liked it, and we were done. It may be that the man put a lot of research and thought into it, but I suspect he just liked the sound and the nautical reference. The funny thing is that according to the Social Security database, the name Schuyler has not been in the top 1000 for females in this country, ever. That's great as far as avoiding a ubiquitous (this is where you are impressed at my ability to spell big words only a week after giving birth) (here is where you wonder if I should have used "an" instead of "a" in front of it) name. Turns out though, that it shows up regularly on the boys list: without even intending to, we may have graced our little spark with a little ambiguity.

So the point of this post, the whole raison d'etre as it were (more great vocab! The mind is not totally mushy), besides the need to sit and watch as someone tries to impress me with his prowess on www.hotwheels.com, is that there is a little history behind the name, and you can find it here. In one little package, we get American history, maritime history, hospitals, prisons, and to top it off, it means "scholar" in Dutch. Perfect.

Too Tired for Outrage

Mostly, that is. I've been told to get back to blogging, mostly by those who view me as an entertainment monkey, tirelessly grinding my organ (so to speak). However, childbirth has the unfortunate effect of draining my energy, and distorting my sense of time, so that I can happily gaze at the wall for two hours or more and feel fully occupied while doing so. I have noticed one thing in the first week of the new kid's life: feeding her is expensive.

I'm going natural at the moment, which is a bit of a high-wire act since nursing takes a lot of time I normally don't have, can be a little frustrating, and is generally perceived negatively by the viewing public. One wonders why that is, since I've heard for a lifetime that men (and some women) want nothing more than to see my naked chest. Now that I'm ready to let random strangers catch an occasional glimpse of my rather stupendous (at the moment) assets, no one is interested. Typical. Anyway, the point here is that I have found it surprisingly difficult to obtain the necessary accessories- mostly foundation garments* and shirts. My favored brands for normal lingerie don't even produce nursing wear, which is a bit of a statement, I think. Funny that they make the sexy little things for the young and the seriously structured intimidators for the gravity stricken, but the mother of the maiden/mother/crone trio has been kicked to the curb. So apart from the offensively ill-made products at the local maternity rip-off store, the only option is mail-order. The current tally for garments to contain my aforementioned stupendities is:

2 x $15, nightwear only, just good enough to keep me from hurting someone if I roll over in bed;
1 x $49, good enough to walk around in without looking freakish;
1x $50, intimidator, professionally fitted by a little old lady who took really unwarranted liberties.

That's $129 for a little bit of material. This is just the foundation, we aren't talking about auxiliary machinery, parts, bits and pieces. Then the current bill is inching toward $300. This is a lot of money to tap a free source of infant food.

I've been comparing this to the price of formula to convince myself that I am saving money. In the long term, I obviously will- formula costs about $1 per powdered ounce, and a kid can use more than 16 oz a day when they are at full strength. For now though, my costs equal 12 cans of formula, which would translate into a lot less time for me to sit around and watch the walls.

Good thing for this kid that I am just granola enough to grit my teeth and stick with this exercise. Eventually, my native thriftiness will come through and keep me going a while longer. At some point though, the health and wealth benefits line is going to intersect the line of my convenience and desire to graduate, and a certain little princess is going to come to earth in a bit of a powdery cloud.

*forgot the postscript: my mother is here helping with the baby, and I find myself incapable of using plain language when writing about my underwear on the internet, given that she would undoubtedly tell me to stop writing about such a thing in any terms, even the mealy mouthed ones I've used here.

**also, forgive the run-on sentence. Grammar has taken a vacay around here.

Thrifty

So this is yet another post that contains no deep thoughts, just a nagging question: does it matter what kind of clothes I put on my baby? I have boxes of blue and green and tan baby clothes that I've saved for seven years in the basement. I've been washing these things and inspecting them, and can't convince myself to give them away. I know in advance that I will have an annoying number of people congratulating me on my "boy", just because I'll be dressing her in the wrong colors, but these are perfectly good clothes! Everytime I consider buying all new, I think of ration cards and Victory Gardens, long lines for gas and our current "mental recession", and I become unable to discard these things.

Will you be one of the people mocking me for dressing a girl in blue, with puppy dog prints?

Standby for the name- I think most people will hate it, especially the spelling which is correct, rather than convenient. We might change our minds of course, when my little Predator emerges looking more like a Martha than an Agnes, for instance.

Also standby for more consequential questions and topics, such as the Ted Stevens indictment, the America's Cup legal nightmare, the juvenile justice system, illegal immigration, and more. For now, I'm just too fatigued. Plus, I haven't solidified my thoughts well enough to present them in a fashion that will convince all and sundry that I am utterly right, and ought to be thanked for sharing my pearls of wisdom.

S-List

All my complaints to the obstetrician have had a side effect: I've been officially labelled as a complainer. The chart they hand me to check-out with has a box labelled "complaint". I always assumed this was meant to describe the reason I was visiting the doctor. Apparently, it can also hold notes about the patient. Mine said, "Will not accept schedule for satillete c-section."

I wish it had also said, "Is annoyed by mis-spellings and doctors who don't listen."

Optical Illusion

I've come to notice that small changes can alter appearances in major ways. This is a truisim in spy fiction and on TV, but I usually laugh at the notion that a little hair dye can help a major fugitive escape notice. But then this week, we have the Serbian war criminal caught hiding out as a new age guru with the help of a long beard. This is an interesting example of hiding in plain sight. Comparing photographs side by side makes it clear that this is the same person, but I'm sure that none of the people who met this "guru" ever thought to look at the features behind the beard. Why would you?



The Tour de France offers many entertaining examples of this phenomenon, where a helmet and reflective sunglasses entirely change the impression of a face. Behold the mighty Schleck brothers:

Marble statues come to life, with perfectly chiseled features and the promise of extraordinary beauty when the helmets are removed.
But what happened? The removal of the helmet reduces young Andy from utterly captivating to entirely ordinary, demolishing idle thoughts of jetting to Paris for the capture of this rare specimen. (Yes, yes, 9 months pregnant, happily married, no money for tickets- butt out, these are my idle thoughts.) Wouldn't look twice at this fellow with the thin neck and possible overbite, but the only difference is the hat.

I have found this transformation happening more than once, where some random hero of the race looks like an amazingly beautiful person, then finishes the ride, takes off the glasses and helmet, and turns back into a pumpkin. So my question is: are some changes more likely to make you look much better than normal? Is there something about obscuring the hairline and eyes that can convey a sheen of glamour? Does it only work with strangers, or is it effective with very familiar faces? I'm sure I could find the answers to these questions with some research, but I prefer to ponder them in ignorance. Keep an eye out for me this weekend, as I swan around town in hat and large sunglasses, posing in front of shop windows as I try to determine if I look glamorous.

Twofer

This second post in one day is a rare event, but I had to share my triumph:
I convinced the obstetricians to reschedule the c-section for a later date! I've been working on this since April or May, with no success. I don't know if they became tired of dealing with me, if they have some predetermined threshold for complaints, beyond which they begin to listen, or if someone else delivered early, but they found a time for me on my actual due date, instead of a week early.

Standby for my mortification when the kid comes early.

Liberal Arts, Schmiberal Farts

I seem to think and talk a lot about articles I see in the Washington Post. This is because I use the paper as my primary news source, although not as the only or final source. So anyway, I have some thoughts about yet another piece from the Post, in this case from the Opinion section last Sunday.

One of the Metro section reporters wrote a long essay on being a black professional woman, attending an Ivy League college, how her education has affected the perception that other Americans have of her, and how her experience has been quite similar to Michelle Obama's (she thinks). This is the passage that caught my eye:

Some blacks have asked why I didn't go to Howard or another historically black college... In some instances, the choice between Harvard and Hampton can be seen as choosing to accept or reject your race. That can make an Ivy League acceptance letter seem more like a burden than a break.
But some of us still decide to go to "white" schools -- because it's a glittering line on a résumé, because we're compelled to try to own something that was once denied us, and because we hope that an Ivy League education may act as a kind of academic armor against misperceptions, assumptions and plain old bigotry. Like every other meritocrat, we're looking for an advantage, and we have particular reason to think that we may need one.

I found this immediately annoying, but had to think about why for some minutes. My usual antipathy toward this sort of thing is part of my annoyance, in that I don't understand and generally have contempt for people who define themselves by race or ethnicity. You are what you are, and you can no more "accept or reject your race" than you can your body or your soul. You've been issued one by the lottery of life, and you just get on with your life without making something so ineffable your primary focus. (Many simmering thoughts here about transgenders, but aside from noting that an operation can't change you from XX to XY, I'll leave it for another time.) However, the majority of the trouble is her list of reasons that a black person might choose to attend a white school:
1. prestige
2. barrier breaking
3. a launchpad past bigotry and assumptions of mediocrity.

Nowhere does this woman mention the primary reason that any scientist or engineer chooses a school: choice and quality of major. I feel really strongly about this, so strongly that I was angry for hours after I read the essay. I didn't choose a primarily white college for prestige or any other of her lame reasons. I chose my college because of the major that I wanted to study!
!!
!!!!

I didn't consider the demographics of the place until late in the admissions process, and then the only thing that occurred to me was that women composed less than 25% of the student body (a lot less). It wasn't until I started classes that I realized I was the only black person in the school, and I would become the first to graduate from the college. (I'll grant you that this college is where I learned that the stereotype of black people had us eating watermelon and fried chicken (thanks Bobby B. !), and that there was a certain unseemly interest in my sex life, but I forgive the second, given my own youthful indiscretions and that the same prurience extended to all the other women.)

The same consideration held for my first round of grad school, and was only slightly modified for the current go-round by geography. So it occurs to me that perhaps all the navel gazing the author indulges in is a consequence of her own field of study, that being Liberal Arts (faint horror). Maybe that tribe is predisposed to consider the culture of a school first, and the specific fields of study second. Perhaps that is logical, seeing as how an important part of what they do is think and talk and feel (stronger horror). My own people, those who think and talk and derive and leave the feelings for spare time (after drinking, gaming and sleeping), don't pick a college based on the type of people who might attend. This is a thought that just doesn't make any sense. I'm going/have gone to school to learn something specific, and so choose the school based on its ability to offer that knowledge. The race of the people teaching and learning is completely irrelevant.

So now I realize that my annoyance isn't just because this Journalism person has ignored the importance of major when choosing a college, but has presumed to speak for black professional women all over the country, and has been given a national soapbox to do so. I hate to think that any past, present or future colleague of mine might think that my choice of college was influenced primarily by the reasons she listed, or might think that my mind works like hers. I hope any that happened to read the essay understand the essential divide between her motivations (and those of her liberal arts brethren) and mine.

For most things, anyway. Did I mention I have a degree from MIT?

Je ne sais quoi

Deep in July, I am revelling in my favorite sporting event of the year, the Tour de France. I have tried and failed to explain my fascination before, all I can really say is that every year my interest grows with my knowledge. Despite the claims of the cynics, there is more to it than the spectacle of 180 fit men in spandex, muscles flexing in cadence (although that may be a small part of the show). It may be similar to my love of other non-team sports: I understand the fundamentals, I can do the activity myself with small effort, I understand how difficult it is to achieve excellence at the sport. This holds true for swimming, tennis, sailing, gardening (not a sport, but sometimes competitive). Anyway, we are at stage 12, and every night is 3 hours of TV watching bliss.

The only fly in my ointment, apart from a nagging guilt that I am watching so much TV when I spend the rest of the year not doing so, is the drug issue. Pro-cycling has public doping scandals with tedious frequency. The upside is that this only occurs because cycling authorities test athletes regularly and publish the results. The downside is that this testing regime has not yet dissuaded everyone from trying to dope. So we have yet another Tour where an entire team has withdrawn from the competition because their star has tested positive. Another rider was caught with chemicals and syringes in his hotel room, which is seriously blatant.

The difficulty I have with this is that I seem to be a cycling optimist: I find it very hard to believe that any rider could be so stupid as to use illegal drugs when they know they will be tested. The best riders, the ones who win points and stages, know that they will be tested immediately after the win, so doping would be stupid, illogical and nearly impossible to conceal; therefore, high profile riders who test positive during the Tour must be victims of inaccurate tests. Of course, this logic holds together only if the riders are intelligent (unproven) and know for sure that they will face regular testing that will detect whatever fancy stuff they want to use. When riders are caught, I can either believe my fantasy that the tests are bad, or that the riders are dumb, or that the riders really believe that their concoction will beat the tests. While it may be that options 2 and 3 are the most likely, I'm attracted to option 1 like a kid to cotton candy: insubstantial but delicious.

I may have to let go of my staunch belief in the integrity of cyclists (where did this belief come from? I truly don't know, and it doesn't extend to other sports- I'm talking to you, track and field and baseball), but I don't really want to. I want to keep the special feeling that I get in July, when I'm mesmerized by herculean efforts in the mountain stages, and enthralled with the mental discipline of the time trials. And I still believe in Floyd.

De Nile

I love that corny saying, "You must be Egyptian, because you are living in denial." It always makes me laugh, just like my trusty old Homer jokes (the blind greek poet)(What did Homer say about reading and writing? It's all Greek to me!)(What did Homer say about Australia? It's all reef to me!)(Seriously, laughing already). So anyway, I know I'm in denial, and now I think my advisor is too.

My particular problem is preparing for this new baby. No stroller, crib across town with a friend, no clue where the bassinet is, no bottles, a couple random packs of diapers of unknown size, no newborn clothes for girls (but a basement full of boy stuff, randomly stacked up), and no real sense of urgency. This is very different from the first time. I'm guessing that either things will come together now, or 3 years from now, no big. The only thing that really must get sorted out in the next 3 weeks or so is a name. I'm rather enjoying the zen of not speculating on names, but I can see that this peaceful feeling might flash over into irritation on day T+1, when the kid still doesn't have a name. Might have to harsh the household mellow and insist on some sort of conversation about this, but I think I'll wait until next week. Or the week after.

My advisor this morning was quite happy with my current results. If I produce one more set, slightly refined, then we can fix the date for my pre-defense. This is the moment I've been waiting for, but... I'm not sure I can pre-defend before this kid is born. Not because of the state of my work, but because of the state of my body. I have about 3 weeks until D-day, but I seem to use 75% of my available energy getting out of bed. I coast through the day on brain and will power alone, then use the remaining 25% getting home, feeding the existing kid, and falling into bed myself. So, the resources are somewhat limited. If it wasn't for the ice cream turbo charge, I might not be able to get into bed. Considering that the alien was in full escape mode this morning while I presented my slides, I think my advisor is deploying a bit of willful blindness. You'd have to be right, to tell a woman in her 9th month to prepare for a major presentation that will determine the success of her PhD, while she's just hoping to get through every day of work without any embarrassing amniotic incidents?

Hair Again

Believe it or not, I finally had my hair cut. It's been quite a while since the last one, in October of '06. Back in those days, we had to cut our own hair with a sharp rock... Anyway, it was all quite lovely, in that scalp-burning, chemical straightening way. I can't help but wonder though, why did it take 2.25 hours? That's really a long time to sit in a salon, sniffing the fumes, and listening to the local gossip. The hot topics were: the perfidy of my old salon in dumping me (was glad to tell that story to the listening patrons), the character of the owner of said salon (this from my stylist and another woman), the local illegal immigration scandal, and the murky dealings at the big, fancy condo place downtown. Seems like no one has any sympathy for the wife and kids of the entrepreneur whose business was raided (cold), and the big time finance group who bought into the condo development have pushed the developer and his wife out of some operations (bummer).

It's amazing what you can pick up about your community when you kill an afternoon in a hair salon. However, since the price of this gossip was about $60/hour, I'll just stick to the newspaper as my primary source of information.

Anyway, I'm wondering about the rate of return on this particular investment. So far at work, there have been zero comments and two weird looks. Sadly, these looks seem to say, "You look funny today. I wonder what's different about you?", rather than "Man, I am so lucky to work in an office with that hot head of hair!" That's the price I pay for working with engineers, I guess. The "upside" is that I could choose not to bathe for two weeks, and no one would notice that either. I didn't even get my usual kissy-faces from old guys driving past me on the highway. Very poor show.

Two more days until the start of the best three weeks of summer :)

The Third Thing

Thank goodness for radio, because I was just reminded of the third thing I wanted to mention: high-tech swimsuits. These are the latest thing in competitive swimming, and apparently give a speed advantage to the wearer. Newspapers are calling this high-tech doping, in a joking way. I don't really get why anyone is joking about it. If the suit offers a speed advantage over the natural talent of the swimmer, how does it differ from chemical doping? Considering that the things are ultra-thin, very hard to get into without tearing, and about $600 apiece, they aren't exactly available to all. Even worse, Speedo has a lock on the new technology, so swimmers or swim teams who are sponsored by another company cannot use the suit.

So, this bugs me not because I care about swimming, but because I care (intensely) about cycling, and am annoyed that my favorite riders have not been invited to the Tour de France this year because their teams have the "wrong attitude" toward doping. Both Contador (last year's champion) and Leipheimer (perennial contender) are members of Team Astana, which has had some embarrassing incidents in the past. However, the team was entirely revamped last year, and none of the current members have any doping controversies. Nevertheless, the French (maginot line) are refusing to budge, and these guys are being excluded because former members of their current team were disgraced in the past.

So the question for me is: why can swimmers use suits so advanced that the maker brags about the records they are collecting for the corporate brand, but cyclists (like my man Landis, poor little trooper) are kicked to the curb for allegedly using a possible performance enhancer like testosterone (which we all know they would have more of naturally, if only they didn't spend so much time on their bikes)? They aren't actually doping, if indeed they are doing anything at all (I believe you Floyd!), they are merely getting back to baseline.

Stayed tuned. The TDF starts July 5, and I'll be spending the last 3.5 weeks of this pregnancy hypnotized by a marginal sport in a foreign country, contended by riders I don't yet care about.

Random Miscellany

Since I'm feeling incoherent and disconnected this morning, I'd thought I'd post a random collection of interesting things that I've seen in the last day or so.

First, an interesting travel tip from Google. If you are flying or meeting someone's plane, you can check on the status of the flight by texting the flight number to 466453. I think they get their info from www.flightstat.com, so it should be good quality. This number is like a pseudo-411, so you could look up anything. Need the nearest Dairy Queen while driving through New Jersey? Ask Google with your cell phone, and they'll send you the address. Nice and neat.

Second, while you are doing all this flying or driving, you should make sure to stay hydrated. The best, or at least most expensive, way to do that is to invest in some concentrated water. Yes, it is finally here, the oldest joke of all: concentrated water. This little luxury good comes from Hawaii, and is desalinated ocean water. Apparently, this water is special because it comes from 3000 ft down, and is "pure." 2 oz. sells for $33.50, and you are supposed to mix it with regular water (so much for purity). For your money, you get "weight loss, stress reduction, skin tone, and digestion." I suggest you head to Dairy Queen instead, which will give you two out of four for 2 bucks. If you walk there, you might get the skin tone and weight loss too.

I had a third item, but I'm so incoherent and disconnected that it has gone clean out of my mind. Maybe some of that concentrated water would help.

Charity Begins at Home

I've been following an interesting story over in Montgomery County (the rich county in Maryland). It started with an article in the Post about an estate purchased by the county which included a large house and some acres of land. The locals were told that the land would be used to extend an adjacent park. Then the county council proposed that the house should be used as a shelter for large homeless families. Outrage ensued. Details came out gradually, and it became known that a specific family was being considered for the house. There were 14 children and one parent. The usual ugliness was said and written, but it was hard not to sympathize a little with the locals. Who wants 14 kids living next to them, poor, perhaps unruly? Without doubt, having a county-owned homeless shelter next door can only hurt the property value. So they fussed enough that the county decided not to use the house for the homeless. Let's not forget that this was a house already purchased by the county, and sitting empty...

The remaining details became clear today. The single parent is a former corrections officer who adopted her sister's 10 children. She had 4 of her own with her husband, and when her sister died of cervical cancer, she was determined to keep the family together. At some expense, she adopted the 10 nieces and nephews. Her husband divorced her, she lost her job and house, and because she adopted the kids, their father (fathers?) can not be held responsible for child support. She works at night as a security guard, which makes it easier for friends and family to help out. At this point, her guardian angel stepped in, and she has been given a new house by Extreme Makeover.

So I'm thinking that I'm glad she has a happy ending (well, beginning really), and that this is not a very controversial story. Woman does her duty to her family at some hardship to herself, and gets help from her community to enable her to do so. Yay. But there seems to be a certain amount of ill-feeling about this that I don't quite get.

1. Complaints about the size of the house (4800 sq. ft): anonymous internet goblins commenting on this story have noted that it is not fair that this family of 15 should be given such a large home, when so many normal families in the country are struggling to maintain their 1500 sq. ft houses. I don't think it is a virtue to envy someone else's good fortune, or to want to limit the amount of good just because other people are having trouble too. Besides that, a "normal" family of four (just guessing) would have 375 sq. ft per person, while this clan has been given 320. Considering how much space is always wasted in hallways, odd bathroom corners and foyers (ie, that space that you can stand around in, but not do anything useful with), I imagine that the actual space they have to lay their heads and store their clothes is not over-generous. I could easily live in 4800 sq. ft with my family of 4, and not feel particularly overwhelmed with space. Adding 10 more people would force me to run away.

1b. Muttering about the ability of homeless people to maintain a large house: this sort of complaint has not been diffused by the information that the parent has a long history of respectable employment and home ownership. Apparently, it is quite difficult for people to believe that bad things can happen to good people.

2. The family is taking tax money from the good citizens of the county: this is true. The county is paying taxes and utilities for the house as long as the family qualifies. There is a rumor that the county also holds the mortgage, so the family didn't actually get a free house, just a free place to live. This still doesn't bother me, because at the very least the 10 orphans would have been supported entirely by the county in any case, at far greater expense. Because they are adopted, their mother does not receive foster care payments for these kids. They do receive medical benefits. (I'm not sure about this mortgage business, because EM: Home asked the builder to donate the house and build it in a week. I hope it doesn't fall down.)

3. People shouldn't have 10 children if they can support them: Well, of course not. However, this seems irrelevant to me. The woman who had 10 children and didn't provide for them is dead. Witholding community support at this point does not punish her for her irresponsibility. It might be said that the aunt shouldn't have adopted the 10 if she couldn't afford them, but how many people could afford to help that many relatives? If the kids had been separated and sent to different foster homes, the cost to the county would have been more. This way, they are together, with a relative who cares enough about them to suffer on their behalf. Anyone who can learn from a situation like that, will.

So anyway, I find the whole thing simultaneously uplifting and depressing. I'm glad that self-sacrifice and family devotion still exist, but it's sad that some people went to great effort to keep these 15 people from getting help, and then many others had nothing better to do than to offer insult and blame. That's a lot of negative energy.

Social Theory

So, one of the lovely things about my tribe (Engineers, as opposed to my adopted tribe. You know who you are) is the willingness to have an opinion and take a stand on topics we know little about. We tend to be highly educated people, and some of us seem to think that having mastered the trick of getting educated, we can thus be masters of any topic in which we take an interest. For some, the interest is benign, and related to our direct skill set. Carpentry, mechanics, rail roads (real and hobby), etc. Others of us range farther afield...

Which brings me to my latest great theory about society and culture. I think that to the extent that something is wrong with our (US> east coast> mid-atlantic) (the previous just emphasizes that I know my sample is limited) culture, the problem is our unwillingness to judge each other. This may seem counter-intuitive, given our general ability to dislike each other for trivial reasons (see previous post), but bear with me. For this forum, here is my first piece of evidence, an article from The Washington Post on June 23: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/22/AR2008062202205.html?hpid=topnews

To summarize, people in the DC region have been stealing public land for private use. These are usually homeowners whose properties abut a public park. Sometimes the theft is unintentional, as when a previous owner sited a fence improperly, but the crime can also be blatant, like the guy who put his invisible dog fence deep into a public park. His justification is that his two dogs keep the deer away, which protects everyone from ticks. To my eye, this guy is just a thief. No shades of gray, no excuses. The reporter who wrote the article, the park service employees, and neighbors interviewed for the article all carefully avoided the "thief" word, instead dancing around with various euphemisms.

I say that we are all at fault when our fellow citizens commit obvious wrongs and we fail to call them out on it. What are we afraid of? How far does tolerance extend, and what harm are we doing to our communities when we don't set limits? Sadly, I see the obvious problem with this call to arms. We humans can be very bad at picking issues of importance, and even worse at moderating the punishment to fit the crime. Used to be that fornication could get you run out of town, and interracial marriage could land you in jail. Those are some community standards that I'm glad have become obsolete. But I still feel that we are in danger of going too far with our laissez-faire attitudes. We should speak up when our neighbors steal public land, or leave their spouse and kids without a dime or a clue, or pull their kids out of school and never let them out of the house again (ref. Bonita Jacks in DC). Some things are so wrong that we shouldn't let them become ok.

The difficult work here is figuring out sets of community standards that work for people of any religion or none, new immigrants or natives, young or old, that don't chafe too much against any particular group. What if some religions and cultural practices can't be accommodated? That might be a pill we have to swallow, but we should start talking about it in a rational way, instead of making rules piecemeal to address individual cases. That's a whole different rant though.

ps. Holy Mackerel, a completely relevant piece of tangential evidence: http://www.slate.com/id/2193872/ . This is one of those topics that never bothers me unless my kid is around, but clearly I haven't thought about it enough.

Race Relations

What, you say? Two posts in two days? Well, like any new project, I expect to have great enthusiasm for this for another week, then will drop it like last year's perfume. It just so happens that I am moved to write about something so pivotal to our society, so central to our image of ourselves, that not writing would be a breach of civic duty. The topic is race. The context...

wait for it...

you won't believe the importance...

is hair.

Wait, don't feel let down! I swear that hair is relevant to this important societal issue. I may have to contract the bounds of the discussion though, and clarify that I really want to reflect on race relations in Annapolis Maryland.

This has come up because after 20 months without a haircut, and after a thoughtful gift certificate from my husband, I decided to return to the hair salon. I stopped getting my hair cut because I was busy. I also take slight subversive pride in my low maintenance lifestyle: no more than 5 minutes for makeup, outsize efforts to buy clothes that don't require ironing, out of bed and out the front door in 20 minutes or less if I have to. So anyway, what with one thing or another, no hair cuts. Finally this spring, I started to believe that the burgeoning belly required some balance, perhaps provided by a coiffed head of hair. Four months after coming to this decision, I called to make an appointment. Now despite being generally low maintenance, and truly enjoying the engineering hat I usually wear, I occasionally find my inner girl, and she was rarin' to go. A week has been spent in quiet reverie over the new hairstyle. Would I go for a Jennifer Aniston: simple, yet glamourous? No, more like an Angelina Jolie: voluminous, luxurious, the kind of hair that clearly walks around with a Brad Pitt next to it. A pixie cut, like all those cute models with their supershort hair? Perhaps not so good for balancing the burgeoning belly (and the permanently burgeoned derriere). So, the Angelina it was. Then I got a call yesterday afternoon (while having my eyes dilated): "it's the salon, we have to cancel your appointment." In one second my little fantasy of luxurious locks waving about my face, eyes mysterious behind large glam sunglasses, lost some air. So what is it, sick hairdresser, no power, schedule conflict? No friends, it's not any of that. "We have to cancel because none of our stylists can work with your hair. We don't have anyone who does relaxers anymore."

So let's pause a beat and consider the general devastation: 20 months of buildup, a week of unmoored fantasizing, and the salon that I've visited (infrequently, but faithfully) for 5 years can't do my hair. The appointment had originally been a two-parter: one person for the perm, and my "regular" for the cut and style. So I asked if I could still get the cut and style. Nope, apparently it was decided that my hair couldn't be cut without the relaxer. The appointment is cancelled, the dream is over, the whole thing is called off. They did refer me to the salon next door though, where the woman who used to do my perms now works. I got ditched by a hair salon because my hair isn't relaxed, and they don't employ anyone who can handle it. To put this more plainly:

It is 2008 in the United States of America, and my salon "Doesn't Do Black Hair."

The last time this happened to me (oh, yes, it's happened before) was in 1997, when I first moved to this segregated enclave. I just picked a salon out of the phone book and went. They at least didn't want to admit their shortcomings, and after giving my a fairly bad cut and blow dry, admitted that they didn't usually (ever) do black hair. For a girl from the Tidewater, this was a bit of a mystery. We might have to blame it on my expatriate upbringing, or more likely on the extreme social weirdness of Annapolis, but for some reason I didn't know until 1997 that salons could be segregated. In good old Newport News, they taught me all about the intricacies of prejudice (black, white, yellow and brown), but there are so many types of people there that you'd have to work pretty hard to find a salon that refused your business for having the wrong hair texture.
So after moving to Annapolis, I went through a small odyssey, looking for someone to do my hair. Given my infrequent impulse to have anything done at all, this took years. For a while I had a woman in a "black" shop, and she was pretty good. The main problem with her was the whole barbershop experience, where a cut and style could take 3.5 hours. My inner girl just isn't strong enough to get me through that more than a couple times. I have things to do, structures to analyze, and I can't sit in a chair reading mindless fluff and fending off gossipy questions about my personal life for an entire afternoon. Then I found a lovely place just around up the street from the house. The proprietor was awesome, she would agree to any experiment with the hair, she wasn't too expensive, and I started getting my hair done all the time. Then within a year, she was gone. Shop closed, no forwarding address. So I finally washed up, battered and broken, at the salon in Eastport. They had diverse stylists and clientele, and I was set. (Ha, ha, small girl type hair dressing pun there.) All set until yesterday, when I got the boot. Rather than take my money, they sent me chasing after a former employee.

So that's it, my profound thought for today about race relations in Annapolis. I know I didn't actually write about race that much, about the explicit and implicit discrimination that is part of the social scene in Annapolis, but I think I prefer to let you do that sort of hard work for yourselves. Let's just say that when I get my hair done next month, with the former employee of my former salon, I won't walk out with the Angelina hair waving behind me. The expression on my face isn't going to imply that I have temporarily mislaid the Brad Pitt accessory, but obviously, given the fabulous hair, it must be around somewhere. Instead, I'm going to ask for an Oprah, and my expression will say something like, "I'm so fab and successful that no one would dream of declining my business. This hair adorns the head of a woman that will take your 1950s style discrimination and shove it down your cringing throat. Now out of my way, I've got code to write and a helicopter to design."

Anxiety

You might think that anxiety would be the last thing motivating this blog, since it's lain fallow since last fall. However that may be, anxiety is playing a big role in this week of our lives. Let's look at the schedule, shall we?
Saturday: leave Newport News and drive to Annapolis in time for the kid's piano lesson. Lesson can not be skipped because of imminent recital. Nightmare on Friday that we blew the lesson off and the teacher gave us an angry and humiliating scold, then refused to teach the kid ever again.

Sunday: Father's Day, also known as "The Day I Never Know What to do With, Since the Husband Would Probably Like Nothing More than Two Cold Beers and 14 Hours of Sleep." Sadly, I'm incapable of doing nothing, so I jittered around until hitting on the idea of Go-Karts and Mini-Golf. This was lots of fun for the boys (hurray). The smallest dark note introduced by the waiter at lunch who could not leave us alone. I felt compelled to be nice to this old dude, even though he spoke to us every three minutes. I kept having to scrub spinach out of my teeth in between bites, so I could talk to this person I didn't want to talk to. Aggravating to be interrupted so much, and even more annoying to get a hate on against such a nice old guy.

Monday: Recital rehearsal in the strangest church ever. Actually, first a checkup at the useless doctor, aka the obstetrician. They confirmed for me that I have a bladder, a pulse, and a weight. See you next month! Then run across town to the weird church. The recital is in a Baptist Funhouse, featuring gymnasium and food court. Call me traditional, but I think it is weird for a church to have a food court. The implication seems to be that you will spend so much time there that you will have to buy several meals. Also, it seems mildly blasphemous. Should you be thinking about pizza and burgers in a house of worship? Even worse, should someone be overcharging you for junkfood, in the name of G-d? Anyway, on to dinner with Whit, who is shortly off to England. Important date, because I'm losing my closest s-i-l to the Land of Poms. Naturally, had nothing to say, and spent most of the evening waiting for dinner, then wondering why I had to order the spiciest damn thing on the menu. The peanut did not approve.

Tuesday: Must get something done at work. Have to keep the primary goal, eg, graduation, in mind. Started the day with a meeting and never recovered. Did manage to get the advisor and mentor on the same page as to what I should be doing. This may save a little time, as I was badly trying to tapdance between the two, and getting little of consequence done. I could feel this was leading to another one of those lectures about staying focused and thinking like a scholar (as opposed to the doofus I play in regular life), so it was good to head that one off at the pass. As the husband said, it was time for me to be the chief, and them to be the indians. So to speak. On to the real business of the day: lunch. The spiciest leftovers in the world. A word to the wise: a heaping portion of cucumbers and yogurt on top of tongue searing thai beef is not the way to make the pregnant stomach happy for more than 20 minutes. Spent remainder of afternoon trying to concentrate on work, instead of the burning pit in my torso. Then drove across town like a maniac to get the kid, feed the kid, dress the kid, and get the kid to the recital. Happily, it went really well! Finally, a big bright spot in the week. And by the time the concert was over, so was my stomach ache:) Just in time for take-out chinese at 10 pm, accompanied by requests for a second dinner from the kid, and (entirely unreasonable) demands from the mother, via telephone, that the kid get a bath before bed. Sorry mom, not happening tonight. Good thing he swims every day in camp.

Wednesday: The husband gets a shot in his spine for the never-ending and inexplicable back pain. The day really starts with the tree people who are removing 4 huge trees from our lot that are variously diseased, hollow, or just punk-ass. Major buyer's remorse there, except it's better to have them gone than to wake up to one in the bedroom one fine day. So the kid's at camp, the husband's passed out in bed, the yard is oddly sunny, the bank account is empty, and I have to run to the eye doctor for an annual checkup that hasn't happened for at least 3 years. Here's hoping they won't notice the abysmally unclean state of the contacts, and won't tell me I'm even blinder than I was 3 years ago. Then drive home with dilated eyes, get a kid, hopefully the right one, from camp, and maybe, possibly, get some work done today!

Like I said, anxiety can be a great motivator. Let's see if I make this appointment on time...