At last!

I know who I'm voting for! I was on the fence, I really was. I was planning to do some research and decide in an informed way, since I haven't really investigated either candidate at all. But now I don't have to get informed! Not since I read THIS!!!!!!!!

Yup. Senator Clinton is supporting John McCain's Unbelievably Stupid Idea of a gas tax vacation. (I hate John McCain. That man is dumber than a box of rocks, and mean with it, too.)

So I am suddenly an Obama supporter. (Unless he decides to support the Unbelievably Stupid Idea, too, in which case I will have to throw my hat into the ring and run on a platform of Immediately Raise the Gas Tax to $4/Gallon!*)

Hip hip hooray! Yes we can! Etc!

* With rebates for poor people, of course! Do you think I'm heartless?

Doing the time warp again

Those kids are here. The ones from downstairs. The ones who are freakishly nice to Dutch. They're in my home, and they're being nice to Dutch and entertaining her while I fill out employment application forms online for the ENORMOUS corporation to which I am applying for a summer internship. I LOVE the 1950s! Parents have so much TIME in the 1950s!

Highlight of my day

I have gotten really fond of my spam folder. I love the titles of the emails - I don't know if they have to get more creative in an attempt to avoid filters or what, but I think they've gotten really innovative. For some reason, my google spam is way better than my yahoo spam. For example, here are some of my recent yahoo spam titles:

"Christian Singles"
"Product Ideas and Inventions Needed"

And HERE are some of my recent google spam titles:

"Enlarge your cucumber" (gardening spam!)
"Your invitation to World Blowjob Day" (Umm... thanks!)

Reply hazy, try again

Today Dutch went to a playdate for 3.5 hours, which meant that Cook and I spent that much time transporting her there and back (it's not that far away, but it's a two-bus trip, which makes for a lengthy ordeal on the leisurely Sunday bus schedules). Cook dropped her off; he jogged the 6-mile round-trip. (Dutch loves being pushed in the jog stroller. She acts like a queen in a sedan chair - I always half-expect to see her waving a fan and noshing on bonbons.) I picked her up; I walked the three miles there and then we bussed home.

My brisk walk there, unencumbered with bags or offspring, was the most exercise I've gotten in weeks. (I was swimming pretty often in the fall, but that takes WAY too much time.) I have never enjoyed anything like the alleged runners high that people are supposed to get when they exercise, but I do appreciate the weird mental jittery rut I get into. I can't follow any thoughts through, they just stutter along, and that's kind of nice. These are the questions I pondered on my walk, which took me along some busy streets and through some industrial neighborhoods:
1) Who will I vote for in the presidential primary?
2) When did Martha Stewart start selling wine?
3) What does the inside of this warehouse (labeled "Love Silks") look like?
4) Who will I vote for in the mayoral election?
5) Does my butt look as massive and jiggly as it feels?

The answers to these questions, at which I arrived after some research, can be found below, in no particular order. Match the correct answer to the question, and you'll win a gold star! (Figuratively. I have no gold stars.)

a) It is decidedly so (answer arrived at thanks to a large and reflective plateglass window).
b) Sam Adams.
c) Early this year.
d) No way of knowing.
e) Cannot predict now.

Also, I just want to point out that taking 30 extra pounds for a walk makes walking much less fun. Those of you who've never ranged out of a healthy weight for your height should know that being fat is not only corrosive to one's self-esteem and overall health; it is also very hard work. And then I retrieved Dutch, who acted limp and whiny all the way home, so I think I can make a strong argument that I had to carry 70 extra pounds for that leg of the trip. Phew.

The Lollipop Guild requests another story.

Yesterday I made a profound discovery that I'm sure many people have made before me. (Since maybe a hundred billion people have ever been born, probably 999,999,999,000 people have preceded me.) When your kid asks you to tell her a story, you DO NOT HAVE TO MAKE ONE UP. (And if, like me, you have no imagination whatsoever, and always tell stories about nice kids who brush their teeth very thoroughly and say please and thankyou in the course of their incredibly boring days, this is a very good discovery to make.) You can retell a story you remember dimly from your childhood, and your kid will listen raptly to your every word, and beg to hear the whole fumbling thing again.

If you happen to pick a story that at one point involved Judy Garland and the entire midget population of California, you may have difficulty recalling the plot, which is weird. This doesn't matter. Your kid thinks this is the most mindbogglingly fantastic story ever, even though you keep backtracking ("oh, and there were these shoes!") and the plot has some serious holes in it. Your kid doesn't care, because at least nobody brushes their teeth, and when the witch gets squished, nobody apologizes. Also, it's SCARY. This is thrilling.
You will never have to make up another boring story again. Congratulations!

(photo of amazing pumpkin from http://www.flickr.com/photos/digitalburn/283576582/)

Fat frogs

I just got back from a presentation by a developmental biologist at UCLA. He was talking about environmental "obesogens" - he accidentally discovered, while researching endocrine disruption, that organotins had an effect they hadn't been anticipating. Organotins are a group of toxicants used (among other things) as fungicides, marine pesticides, and as ingredients in PVC. PVC is ubiquitous - it makes up the pipes through which our water travels, the plastic wrap in which we wrap our food, and all kinds of other great stuff.

Anyway, here's an article about it. And here's an abstract of some of their research. A lot of his research went way over my head, but the gist is that these pollutants seem to turn stem cells into fat cells. They discovered it when they exposed some frogs to tributyl tin, and found that the intersex weirdness they were anticipating didn't happen. The frogs' testes didn't get really big or really small - they were just replaced with fat.

So then they got busy with some more experiments to try to figure out what was going on, and found that when mice are exposed to organotins while they are pregnant, the newborn mice have crazy amounts of fat in their bodies. The baby mice, allowed free access to exercise and food and whatever other thrills can be found in the life of a laboratory mouse, stay small for a while, and then they get super-fat. All it takes is prenatal exposure, and not very much of it.

And it turns out that human stem cells exposed to the stuff turn into fat cells. All of these experiments showed effects at levels that are well within the range of levels of organotins found in the average person.

Anyway, this all made me feel like lying down under the table and weeping. I know a lot more than your average organotin-riddled person about environmental toxics, and I thought I had kind of reached maximum depression levels on the topic. But I hadn't - I am exploring previously virgin fields of depression!

So much of the way we deal with societal problems is to blame the individual. Quit smoking, stop eating so much junk food, go out of your way to recycle, buy a more environmentally responsible car. But so much of our lives involve such a limited range of choices. We have crappy choices. If we could just look up from the individual responsibility paradigm and say "Yes, you do have a responsibility to make good choices. But it is the job of government, and of the whole society, to ensure that we actually have good choices to make." I'd like to be able to choose between a range of attractive AND responsible options, not between lots of crappy choices and a few difficult and less attractive responsible options.

But for now, while I'm waiting without much hope for government to address the issues of toxicants in the environment, I'd just like somebody to tell me how I can procure water (in the city) for my daughter that's not contaminated with stuff that screws with her hormones. I'd really like that.

I came home after all this and found Dutch in the bathtub (Cook was in character as Pierre, who has an atrocious French accent and runs the spa). She said "Mama, I'm a whale!"

Other things that keep me awake at night

So... got any pesticides in your garage? You might want to go check if they include any of the products listed in this article. The EPA is ordering a recall because they are illegal and unregistered. In fact, they "still are working to determine what's in the herbicides, how long they've been on the market, how widely they were distributed and how many brand names they were sold under."

Oops.

Our chemical policy paradigm is so topsy-turvy. I guess I should write something thoughtful about that. Later. In the meantime, you can read all about it yourself in this Harpers article! Enjoy!

life in the old girl yet?

I just read an article by Lynne Cox in the New Yorker about her swims in Greenland. She's what - fiftysomething? Late forties?

I also achieved a (relatively) spectacular feat of athleticism today - I did a cartwheel. I signed Dutch up for a tumbling class this summer, and I was trying to explain to her what she might do at the class. We cleared a BIG space in the living room, and I executed a perfectly serviceable cartwheel, for the first time in probably two decades. I'm proud of myself. But also pretty horrified by how daunting it was to contemplate, and how very very atrophied I am. I'm not THAT old, but Lynne Cox could kick my ass from here to Greenland.

Bulletins from the front

Dutch had a playdate today with her best friend from daycare. This involved a lot of squabbling (mostly on the part of Dutch, who has some painful and classic only-child aversion to sharing Her Stuff), interspersed with lots of hugging. We're excited because next weekend we get to send Dutch to Best Friend's house!
Dutch also wore dancing clothes a lot this weekend, and spent time marveling over How the Camera Works, which appears to have come close to blowing her tiny mind.

This is what spring looks like around here this year.

I lied.

I take it back. I'm not too busy to read and chortle over the blog of one of my many fantastic cousins. (I did do my GIS labs first, though, and bathe one cranky and stinky preschooler, so sheesh, give me a break, people.)

phew

Things are so hectic right now that I don't even have time to describe how very very very stressed I am, but I did want to post this beautiful conversation, courtesy of Dutch's wonderfully PC daycare which has devoted a big part of its curriculum to diversity:

Me (on the way home with Dutch and Cook, trying to answer one of Dutch's endless questions about people's motivations for their behavior): ...and everybody is different.
Dutch (thoughtfully): Everybody is the same, and everybody is different.

So true. And yet, as with so many of the things Dutch says... whaaaat?

The magic of the library

Today we had a parent-teacher conference (synopis: Dutch = nice kid, likes to boss everybody around and ask 90 billion questions a day), so Cook and I picked up Dutch together. As we were rounding her up, one of the (many many many) student teachers told us that she had been pretending with Dutch that they were horses, and Dutch had told her that she was a feral horse. The teacher thought this was charming and funny, which is probably due to the fact that she wasn't involved in any of the six thousand readings in our home last week of a horrible nonfiction children's book about horses... I mean, I guess I think it's charming and funny too, but I also know firsthand how many repetitions of a weird piece of information like that are required to produce that funny and charming quote. Not sure it's worth it. (Though don't get me wrong - there are plenty of books I'd be happy to read aloud six thousand times. Like Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh!)

Accidental community

A little bit of the 1950s has crept into our life. When the weather is nice on weekdays, we frequently arrive home to find our downstairs neighbors (aged 5 and 8) playing in the courtyard. Dutch plays with them while Cook and/or I are cooking dinner and doing other household chores. I feel like Mrs. Cleaver, hollering out the window for Dutch to come on home for dinner. Cook and I are a little taken aback by it, and not entirely clear on what protocol we should be following. We check on them frequently out the window, and the relevant downstairs parents do the same. Dutch is a pretty responsible and well-behaved kid, and these kids seem to be pretty decent. They're very nice to her, and the worst behavior I can pin on them is that they pick the flowers and sometimes yell more than I think considerate in a multi-unit courtyard.

So... it's good. It's wholesome! It's so unexpected. So very unmodern. Maybe it's because I have so much angst about the loss of community and the loss of childhood (though I'd like to say that my dad's stories of his semi-feral childhood are totally terrifying, and almost always start with a sentence like "so we used to run around in the sewer system...") that I really thought I'd have to work to establish some of those things for Dutch. I do usually have to make an effort, and sometimes a big effort, to apply my personal ethics to my life. But apparently sometimes I don't. Sometimes, without even trying, I get to to have my kid playing outside my window with other kids on a lovely spring evening, and I get to hear her say "Mom, I want to stay out! Do I haaaaaave to come in?"

Also, speaking of throwbacks. I am thrilled (and actually, I may have already posted about this, because I'm senile) by the density of our living situation. In our wing of the building there are 12 people living in four two-bedroom apartments, with an approximate TOTAL private living space of 2500 square feet, or just over 200 square feet per person. That's pretty amazing in this day and age - according to some random internet stats, the typical new house in America in 2003 had about 900 square feet per person.

That's my report from 1952. Sent to you by magical technology from the future!

70 degrees and sunny

I've really got nothing to say. But I figure I should post something.

Adjectives:
Dusty
Sweaty
Sunburnt
Tired
Happy

Nouns:
Dutch
Cook
Outside
Sunshine
Frisbee
Family
Bosco

Verbs:
Play
Run
Frolic
Cavort
Romp
Rest
Read

helping eachother calm down

This morning Dutch woke us up at 6:15, hollering. (We can hear her very well, as her bed, in spite of being across the hall and in her bedroom, is only about 15 feet away from our bed, due to the extreme compactness of her apartment.) She wanted me to come in to her room and pick her up. I told her in my best Kind Yet Firm Mom voice that she was more than welcome to come to our bed, but I was not getting up to pick her up. Once I had said that, of course, I couldn't back down, as that would be taking a big step down the slippery slope to Power Dynamic Hell. Fifteen minutes later, when she was still going strong with the screaming and sobbing and yelling and threatening and begging ("I can't walk! My legs don't work! This is making me very upset! I need you to help me calm down! Please come in and pick me up! My body wants me to cry!"), I was seriously regretting establishing that initial position, and Cook had given up on sleeping and gotten up to make coffee. When she finally came to our bed, she brought a book and seemed completely cheerful; once she'd given up on the struggle, she was fine.

Last night she got upset about something (I think because Cook had lifted her into her bed and she had wanted to DO IT HERSELF) and I actually sang for her the scraps I could remember from "My Favorite Things", and she really liked it. Though she then started to cry because it is so sad that sometimes people get bitten by dogs and stung by bees; sometimes you just can't win.

She really seems to feel these tempestuous emotions - she's experimenting with them, yes, but she also genuinely feels devastated by our failure to do what she wants us to do, or crushed by the prospect of bee stings. Her sadness and anger build up, and she doesn't have the ability, or often the will, to stop the buildup. I don't know how to move her along toward a place where she can bring herself back to stability. I think that being three just means living in a stormy world, kind of like being thirteen. She's kind of a big kid and kind of a baby, and all her calibrations are off.

Brains!

Where I work, the door between the office suite and the hall is a glass door with a handle, and it only opens one direction. When you go out, you have to push it open. This is very difficult to remember, for some mysterious neuronal reason, and all of us in the office have repeatedly attempted to pull it open, which makes an unpleasant banging/thumping noise and alerts everyone in the area that you have the shallowest learning curve in human history. For a long time there was a post-it note stuck to the door at eye level on the inside that read "Push." Eventually somebody added "for peace" below it (it's that kind of office).

Then somebody took the note off, and now I have no cue. The weird thing is that when I go through that door, I think of the note - I used to actually visualize it, but now I just think "push for peace". If I don't think of the note, I inevitably try to pull the door open. Brains are so strange.

Minkin Jinkins

Dutch is in love with Ella Jenkins. We have a few of her songs on various kids' music anthologies, and they've always been favorites, but the love affair really came to a head when we went on a road trip vacation over spring break. I checked a couple of Ella Jenkins CDs out of the library, and they proved really helpful in reducing whining and occupying the kid in the car. Now that we're home, Dutch requests the CDs and entertains herself by singing and dancing and following instructions through one or even two repetitions of a disc. The songs are kind of catchy, and most of them are not awful to listen to over...and over..... and over... and over... so Cook and I are okay with this obsession.

Dutch thinks Ella is talking to her alone when Ella says things like "who knows an animal from Africa?" and yesterday she informed me that Ella (whom Dutch familiarly calls Minkin Jinkins) wanted me to come and skip around the chair. I suggested that perhaps Ella was going to have to wait, since I urgently needed to research the transportation funding system in Iceland. (Speaking of which, I got an email back today from the skjalavörður of the Samgönguráðuneytinu!*) Apparently, Ella was okay with that.

Anyway, I mentioned this in Facebook (yes, I have a little interwebs problem), and got two comments from friends fondly remembering their childhood obsessions with Ella (one said "OMG, I love Ella Jenkins!"). I had no idea that 1) Ella was so freaking old and 2) that there's such a Minkins fanbase out there.

*Records Manager of the Ministry of Communications

So here's the deal:

I am taking too many classes and working too many hours. Hence, not so much blogging.

All I have to report right now is that I am not yet behind in my homework, and this weekend I am feeling dazzled by the discovery that it is possible to make cookies WITH PIECES OF SNICKERS CANDY IN THEM. My life looks different from these dizzying heights of butterfat glory.