If I got a chance to be a totally different person than myself, this is what I'd like to do.

http://what-if.xkcd.com/

Haircuts, glasses, and genetics

I wish I had an orchestra of my very own.

I guess this shouldn't have surprised me.

Ugh.

Cognitive exhaustion

One of the things that really bothers me about Mitt Romney (and George Bush, way back when) is that he clearly has absolutely no idea what it's like to be poor. He has never, ever, ever felt the kind of anxiety you feel when you have no safety net for your life. I liked this Wonkblog post about Romney's perspective on personal responsibility, which reminded me of my bus commute. I ride the bus with a lot of people who are much, much worse off than I am and one of the things I have learned from that experience is that yes, "the poor use up an enormous amount of their mental energy just getting by." It's insanely hard, being poor. The people on whom I eavesdrop on the bus have to do a tremendous amount of organizing, negotiation, and maneuvering, just to get through their days. 

I can see how easy it is to dismiss poor people as lazy, stupid, or irresponsible. I hear people on the bus talking all the time about bad situations they are in, or trying to solve, or trying to help somebody else solve, and they sound awful. Sometimes the situations they are navigating involve making terrible choices, like leaving your kids in the care of a person you don't trust at all, or taking up with a boyfriend who treats you like absolute shit. Those choices, though, often are the best one that they can make at the time, given their circumstances. The scary babysitter is free, which is all you can afford. The boyfriend comes with a place to live. I'm sure that many of these people, like many people everywhere, are stupid or lazy or irresponsible in some ways. But I recognize that they are under the crushing, unrelenting stress of trying to tiptoe (or sprint) across the wobbly, jury-rigged structure of their life every day without shaking something loose. Something shakes loose all the time - a babysitter gets arrested, a boyfriend leaves when rent is due, a job is lost, a car breaks down, a bus doesn't show up - and there's never anything left to try to shore up or improve that structure, because you're just trying not to be buried in the rubble. I think it's astonishing that anybody escapes poverty. I'm absolutely sure that if I was living like that, I would perform pretty badly. I doubt Mitt Romney would perform terribly well, either. I'm confident he wouldn't be rich now if he had been born poor.

Mitt and I have lived our lives in a cozy, safe place, where any entrepreneurial, "maker"-type risks we might take are cushioned by a net of family and social resources. It's easy to improve your life when it's already easy, and it's easy to believe that you are an impressive, success-worthy person when you can bring all your mental resources to bear on improving your life, instead of just surviving. I went to an East Coast boarding school, so I spent a lot of my adolescence in the company of people* like Mitt and George W., people for whom success came easily because of all the resources behind them. I don't think any of them realized that their success wasn't entirely, or sometimes at ALL, merit-based. (Lots of them went into finance, as it happens.) 

I don't think the country should have a president who can't even begin to imagine what it's like being poor, and who believes that if you're poor, it's because of your personal failure. 

* I'd like to note that my friends from high school are great people. I'm not talking about them, or the many other people at my high school who didn't take success or good fortune for granted. 

Sometimes, it all falls into place.

Sometimes I feel like my life is perfect. Tonight, Cook took Dutch to soccer, leaving me and Skipper at home from 5 to 7:30. In theory, I could have prepared a nice meal, eaten it with Skipper while having pleasant bonding conversation, and put her to bed before Cook and Dutch got home. In practice, I decided to give her a haircut, put her in front of the laptop, and let her watch TV while I cut. This wasn't a great decision, and set us up for a delayed dinnertime, but it was great. At the moment, I truly couldn't think of anything I'd rather be doing than hacking haphazardly at my kid's hair while she provided color commentary* for Danny McAskill movies.

Honestly, I was perfectly happy.

I had a lot of moments like that today. I moved wood chips around at Skipper's preschool for a while (working on fulfilling the "parent work hours" requirement), and enjoyed the vast and beautifully-managed garden filled with delightful things like amaranth, muskmelon, tomatillos, and some sort of "Andean tuber." I biked home with Skipper and a big package of toilet paper in the trailer, and it was sunny and beautiful, and Skipper was singing. I picked a lot of tomatoes. It was a nice day. I'm pretty lucky.

Anyway, this is Skipper's haircut. It's very lopsided - I love the left side (her left) so much that I can't bring myself to cut it shorter to match the terrible right side. She was watching "The Voice," which she thought was excruciatingly boring.

* "Wow! Mom, he's balancing on one wheel! Mom, I bet he had to practice a lot! Wow! I probably can't do that! Oh, he jumped!"

Soccer practice this week

New Glasses

First Day of Second Grade

First day of school!

Today was Duchess's first day of second grade. I feel pretty confident that she'll cruise through the year again; she had a few butterflies on the way there, but otherwise slipped right back into school like a comfortable sweater.She also had her first day of her after-school kung fu program (which, you may recall, picks her up at school and whisks her off to the studio for a snack/socializing break and then an hour of martial arts instruction), immediately followed by a 2-mile walk to soccer practice, an hour of soccer, and a 2-mile walk home. We're all waiting to see how her over-subscribed fall works out. For somebody like Duchess, constant physical and social activity might turn out to be kind of perfect. However, she's already concerned that she won't have enough lying-on-the-couch-and-reading-books time. (To make matters worse, I'm making her fill her Skipper-free hour every morning with piano practice, lunch preparation, and breakfast dishes.)* Apparently, her designated "book basket" at school, intended for her use during reading breaks,  has only picture books in it. Picture books! Oh, the humanity.**

*Breakfast dishes! I love this.
** I just looked this quote up (actually, first I asked Cook, who knew exactly where it came from, because he's like the internet but only for old things), and then I felt kind of bad jokingly comparing the Hindenburg disaster to my daughter's irritation at being deprived of chapter books. Then I thought "Eh, whatever" and I decided to leave it in. Because if you can't trivialize disasters by offhandedly comparing them to your petty personal life, that's just UN-AMERICAN!

Skipper started at a new preschool today, again. It seems good. I'm reserving judgment. But I will say that the outdoor space is gorgeous, the indoor space is nice, the administration is organized (possibly too much, though the last place took disorganization to an impressive extreme, which is part of the reason why we left), the teachers are nice, the curriculum seems solid...  Skipper's teachers are ALL adorable. I want to take them all home with us. Skipper cried when Cook left her there, of course, but when I picked her up, she was downright cheerful, and one of the adorable teachers told me she'd had a good day. She brought home some herbs from their enormous garden where they grow half their food. When I brought her home, she insisted on doing some stuff by herself that she normally wants help for. I figure that's a good sign. Right?

Tomorrow is Duchess's first day of school, and I have to go back to work after two weeks off (which I really don't want to do). It's a big week for all of us.