A New Year

So, I know that I promised that I would catch up and return to regular posting nearly three months ago and that hasn't happened, but this time I promise.  For real.

To catch up on the past few months: 

LJB's new day care/preschool is wonderful.  His teachers are great, the staff is very well educated and knows how to handle him, and best of all he has shown so much progress since starting!  LJB has begun some parallel play with his friends at school.  His play skills are still incredibly immature, but at least he has some play skills at this point.  I couldn't even say that  6 months ago!  One of the 75,246,890,122 things that keep me up at night is wondering if/when he will ever be able to have a best friend.  If LJB will ever be able to form a relationship like I have been so blessed to have with my best friend (Shout out to my homegirl!  Love you, Rheedie!).  Even further than that, I wonder if he will ever be able to connect with someone and fall in love.  These are things that are in that huge pile of unknowns that, to be entirely honest, freak me out, but time will tell and I just have to wait and see.

Back to catching up...

We love our new house.  When we left Lexington, I had lived there for 7 years and Mr B had lived there for about 13 years.  It was home for us.  We left so many people and places that we loved and it was a hard move.  Ever since then, NKY just hasn't felt quite like home...until we moved.  Our new house is not fancy.  It's not huge and new and HGTV worthy.  It's actually pretty cluttered and the pale pink tiles in the bathroom could use some serious updating, but you know what...I love it.  It feels so homey.  LJB loves it too.  We've managed, with the help of his therapists, to turn the entire place into a sensory heaven.  If he feels the need to escape, LJB has dark quiet places all his own.  If he needs some sensory input, he can dive in the ball pit, flop down on the bean bags, or slide down the stairs on his rear end.  This is the stuff my kiddo lives for, and that makes me a happy mama! 

Our Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays were wonderful!  We have so much to be thankful for...even when circumstances seem pretty crappy.  I'm resolving to remember that more in the new year.  We spent Turkey Day with Grandma B who even watched LJB for a few hours so we could go catch a movie on Black Friday.  What a treat! 

Grandma B came back to stay with us for Christmas Eve/Christmas Day.  Santa brought a trampoline that LJB loves and a bunch of other goodies he hasn't really dug into yet -- he's pacing himself, ya know...  We drove to Western Kentucky to spend a rather eventful weekend with Gramma and Grandaddy and a houseful of sisters, brothers, in laws, cousins, aunts, uncles, and friends close enough to be family.  It was truly a great time. 

I was a nervous wreck about how LJB would react to a strange, unpredictable, loud environment, but he adapted.  He had a blast playing with his cousins.  He actually played with them!  I couldn't have been more proud of my little dude.

Even though we have been mega-stressed, I realize we have been tremendously blessed.  I have a kiddo who amazes me every single day.  He has this uncanny ability to make everyone around him smile.  I watched this weekend as my parents and my sisters grinned from ear to ear just because he was there.  Sometimes I feel like Mr B and I are the only ones that get to see the funny, loving, sweet, clever little guy who loves Mickey Mouse, gives great snuggles, and likes to pretend to whisper secrets in your ear.  He is usually just so out of sorts when we are around other people or away from home.  This weekend was different.  This weekend they all saw it.  My boy was the star of the show.  He chased cousins, waved hi and bye, blew kisses, threw balls, played cars.  We all had a blast!

2012 was hard.  There was joy interspersed with some of the saddest days of my life. I'm looking forward to a fresh start in the new year.

Bring it on 2013.  I'm ready.  And for anyone who wants to follow along, here are a few of my resolutions:

1.  The obligatory lose weight/get healthy resolution.  This time, for real.
2.  More focus on my husband/marriage.  For the past 6 months, every ounce of energy I have has been poured into LJB.  Though he is certainly still the focus, Mr B and I need to get a sitter and get out more.  Our marriage is coming back into the forefront in 2013.
3.  More consistent blogging.  I love this.  I love to chronicle our goings-on on the world wide web.  Even if no one reads, I need to write it.
4.  Potty training.  Many of you know that we use cloth diapers.  Best. Decision. Ever.  I love them.  When we are traveling and use disposables, I can't wait to get back home and get some fluff on the little dude's booty.  That being said, I am tired of the laundry.  So, before the end of 2013, I resolve to give potty training my best shot.

There you have it.  Have a very Happy New Year!

Greening Our Cities

The following letter concerning climate change is a kind of thought experiment put in to action.  The thought experiment is this: Is there a discernible starting point for an idea that makes its way into public discourse, and can that idea come straight from the bottom of the power hierarchy, by a person with no connections, no political experience, and no expertise?  How do popular sentiments exist (for example the idea of "universal health care") and where do they come from?  Can one individual make use of social media and more traditional forms of communication to start and spread a specific governmental policy initiative? In a nutshell, the letter says that curbing the impact of global warming is a project suited for the federal goverment, and one part of that project could be mandating that all American cities become functionally sustainable.  I am curious to see how this idea is replicated and/or altered as it meanders its way through the hands and minds of other Americans.  Over the course of the next few months, I will be mailing a copy of this letter to every member of Congress, various offices within the executive branch, environmental lobbying groups, think tanks, and political pundits.  All of this effort may amount to nothing, or it could blossom into something big.  We shall see...

Please read and comment on this post and pass the idea or the link to this blog along to others!

Greening Our Cities:

      An Open Letter to Public Officials

From

A Concerned Citizen

To any and all concerned with the long-term sustainability of human existence on planet Earth:

I am writing this letter to try and communicate to elected leaders, policy makers, and environmental advocates that there is a real need for a large-scale policy initiative on the part of the federal government to stem the tide of carbon emissions and reverse the trends in global warming and adverse climate change.

While most of us can acknowledge that in the long term there are surely dire outcomes awaiting the course of humanity should it remain on its current heading—that being the wholesale exploitation of fossil fuel resources in the name of industrial growth—nevertheless, the rhetoric of elected officials does not engage the problem.   Even market-friendly legislation like cap-and-trade cannot find traction to make its way into law. Special interest groups on the behalf of the fossil fuel energy lobby to keep short-term considerations front and center, and with good reason—continuing to profit from fossil fuel extraction means jobs for millions of people.  Still, the legacy we are leaving our children and grandchildren is dire indeed. I feel there is a gut-level sentiment held by a majority of Americans that the time to act is now, and that the scale of the vision must be awesome.  We need ideas that combine the technical precision, energy, and impact of some of America’s greatest achievements—an aggregation of Rural Electrification, the Federal Highway Project, and the Moon Race—but laid out on a scale and a timeline far exceeding any endeavor that has come before.  The 21^st Century should be known as the century humanity saved itself from itself. 

Here is what I offer as a policy:

The Federal Government mandates that all U.S. cities be functionally sustainable by 2075.

The obvious first question is what the term “functionally sustainable” means for a city.  The idea is to bring a city’s total carbon footprint to near-zero, and one major way to accomplish that goal is the total conversion of the city’s residential and commercial spaces to renewable energy sources.  Buildings would be adapted to renewable energy programs piecemeal, and as each one came to a net-neutral energy position it could then place excess energy back on the grid, which could then be used by other facilities.  These programs would occur in conjunction with the building of wind farms, solar stations, and other renewable energy projects. Natural gas and micro-nuclear power plants could serve to bridge some of the gap in energy consumption as well as create job markets.  The aggregate effect for the long term would be to completely offset the traditional coal-fired energy grid that currently supplies energy to much of the nation’s cities. 

The next question one may ask is, why cities?  My proposal attempts to merge two opposing viewpoints.  One the one hand, there are those among the environmental movement who identify the term “civilization” as signifying urbanization and the growth of cities.  Since places of high population density are fundamentally extractive in nature as opposed to productive—meaning cities cannot survive without pulling in resources produced or manufactured elsewhere (agricultural products being most crucial)—some environmentalists see cities as the ultimate locus of our destruction, the graveyard of the human species.

One the other hand, there are those who think about the increasing human population and conclude that stacked housing, mixed-use edifices, and mass transit are the means to solving crises of privation and inequality by maximizing efficiency.  They also view the opposing side as succumbing to bucolic daydreams of pastoral serenity, espousing an agrarian ideal no longer practical or even desirable given our current way of life.

Thus my proposal calls upon the power and resources of the federal government to find a workable compromise between these two ideologies. 

Here’s one possible way to execute the mandate:

The President announces that as part of his budget proposal for the coming year 10 billion dollars will be allocated to one medium-sized city (100,000-500,000 people) for the purposes of converting the entirety of that city and its inhabitants to a sustainable way of life.  Every city of the appropriate size will have an opportunity to submit in-depth proposals as to how they would allocate the federal grant.  A blue ribbon panel comprising climatologists, environmentalists, urban planners, architects, and other related experts will select the winning city (yes, a contest of sorts).  This city will be the test case.  The city will devise its own bureaucratic apparatus to administer the funds, but all expenditures will be independently audited and open for review to ensure fiscal accountability.

Phase two of the proposal: An assessment will take place at a specific time (say two years) from the issuing of the grant to determine what policies and initiatives are effective and what aren’t.  This assessment will provide the general outline for how subsequent federal money will be allocated to other cities.  That money will be increased to 100 billion dollars per year, effectively bringing online 10 additional cities each year to begin the process of sustainable conversion. 

(The dollar amounts and implementation procedures are my starting points for a conversation.  They would need to be adjusted or discarded as needed by those working inside the political system.)

Here are some additional ideas that could be folded into the policy:

·  Developing localized, community-sponsored agricultural initiatives that set a specific threshold of agricultural production within the city (via community gardens and other means) and the surrounding countryside (say a 100-mile radius) equating to a specific calorie-to-inhabitant ratio (for example 2,000 food calories produced locally each day during the growing season for each city resident).

·  Promoting green-sector jobs by setting part of the grant money aside to hire recent college graduates with degrees in related fields; also, the creation of numerous internship positions that would be staffed by college students and would count for course credit to a degree.

· Creating urban training centers, perhaps as extensions of area universities, which would provide education free of charge to low-income or unemployed people in fields vital to urban sustainability.

To conclude, my great hope with such a proposal is not to see it enacted as stated but as intended, and the intent here is simple: It is time for Americans to act en masse to change the course of humanity and set it on a different path.  The instrument of change that can rise to the scope of the challenge that now faces us can only be the federal government, simply because of the revenue it commands and the laws it can make and enforce.  It is time for real leadership and an honest commitment to sustainable strategies that will ensure the survival of this country and of the human species.

Thank you very much for reading this letter and passing the idea along.

Sincerely,

Joshua Bush

Battles Won

Thanks to Mr.B for providing our last blog entry.  By the way, I married him for his brains.  Truly that is one of the many things I love about him.  Though sometimes I get so frustrated and I beg him just to watch something and be entertained…don’t analyze it.  I understand now though that it is just how his brain works.  He is a thinker, and he makes me think more, and that’s a good thing.

Anyway, a little update on us…we ran into some serious childcare problems at the end of the summer, but like crises often do, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise.  LJB is enrolled in an inclusive daycare not too far from our new house.  The first week of drop offs at day care left us both crying for most of the morning, but now he seems to enjoy it.  He walks in, takes his breakfast bar to the little kiddo-sized table and waves “bye-bye” when Mr. B drops him off.  Yep, I make Dad do the dirty work.  It proved too traumatic (for both LJB and me) for me to do the drop off. 

Saturday marked the beginning of my favorite time of year.  To celebrate, the first day of fall, Mr. B and I spent about thirty minutes of nap-time collecting acorns from our front yard.  I had already gathered some fallen limbs.  The acorns and limbs have now been turned into our new fall centerpieces. 

I also turned off the air this weekend, opened the windows, and let the cooler fall breeze run through the house.  It was great!  Then I made pumpkin bread and caramel popcorn.  Fall has fallen…you know, like spring has sprung.  Whatever, I tried.  Mr. B is the comedian of this duo, too.

We went to pick up our CSA farm share this weekend and I ran across a booth of gourds and pumpkins.  I picked out 10 small gourds and piled them into LJBs stroller while he waited (far more patiently than usual, I might add).  He was so excited.  He loved to feel the texture of the smooth ones, the bumpy ones, the long stems.  Then he started to really enjoy them.  He picked up each gourd and rubbed it on his face, took a big sniff and then declared, “yum!” or “yuck!”  I’m not sure what the qualifiers for smelling yummy or yucky were, they all smelled the same to me.  Then he shared imaginary bites of each gourd with Mr. B and myself.  I was amazed.  This is a sign of more progress.  Not only was he pretending , something autistic kids don’t readily do, but he was initiating play with us.  Don’t get me wrong, we still have such a long way to go and the autism battle hasn’t been won, but there are small battles being won daily.

I really thought about something this weekend.  We all have battles to fight.  From the moment you become a parent, those battles change.  I have a pity party every so often about how unfair it is that I have a child with special needs, how unfair it is that LJB requires so much work, but then, something comes along to put it all back into perspective.  Those parents with the easy kids, the ones who never act up, they have battles too, I promise.  They may not even know what battles are coming their way, but we are all fighting on one united front to raise our children to become good people, to give back more than they take, and to live up to their greatest potential.  This is the battle all parents have in common.

It has been nearly one year since my very first childhood friend lost a battle.  My dear friend had struggled with the demons of addiction since we were in high school.  One of the sermons delivered at his funeral last November talked about all the battles he had won along the way.  It’s so easy to focus on the battles left to fight and the battles that we have lost, but we should narrow our focus to the battles won.  This weekend, there is going to be an Out of the Darkness Suicide Prevention walk held in Bowling Green, KY.  There will be a team walking in honor of my dear friend Ryan’s memory and all the battles he won.  If you’d like to donate, follow this {link} and donate to my friend Teah’s team in memory of Ryan.  Your donation will help to make a difference in the battle for many!

There will be pictures to coordinate with this week’s post at a later date.  Since moving, I’ve been unable to unearth my computer cable for my camera…

The Circle of Life and the Undead

This is my second entry in an ongoing discussion of Disney animated films.

The Lion King is essentially the following kind of story: The Social Order Must Be Maintained No Matter What.  The Disney canon contains numerous instances in which out-of-bounds social relations must be terminated so that the proper social order is reestablished:  Mowgli the man-cub must leave the jungle and be with humans.  A fox and a hound must not be friends because they are destined to be in mortal combat with one another.

The Lion King is the apotheosis of such a conservative social vision.  Its dramatic structure unfolds like so: a king and his queen have given birth to a son who will be rightful heir to the kingdom; the kingdom is harmonious politically, and the natural world rewards this harmony by bestowing a bounty of fertile fields and forests and glorious sunshine; when the king is assassinated and the rightful heir flees in exile, the usurping ruler reigns with the help of outsiders to the kingdom, hired thugs who plunder the bounty of the land for their own enjoyment; nature rebels at this usurpation and the kingdom soon turns to ash and dust; finally, when the rightful heir returns to vanquish the despot and assume the throne, harmony between king and subjects reasserts itself, and as if by magic the natural environment transforms into a fecund place once more.  Balance to the social order, and thus the natural order, is restored.

Roland Barthes, the French literary critic, said that in studying cultural representations he resented seeing “Nature and History confused at every turn”.  By this he meant that the deeply contextualized and transient ideas and values of human beings are given to a propagandistic model of “transcendence”, as if they were somehow natural and therefore immutable processes not unlike gravity or other laws of the universe.  By this token, the very historical phenomenon of autocratic rule is parlayed into the “divine right of kings”, in which God himself had somehow reached down and touched the brow of latter-day Solomons and Davids.  Likewise, we Americans feel imbued with a spirit for liberty as if the land itself catalyzes our desire for self-governance, our entrepreneurial spirit, etc.  We call this American Exceptionalism, and everyone from Sarah Palin to Mitt Romney to even Barack Obama invokes the term or its central thesis again and again.

But critical to any “transcendent” idea about the social order is the hidden axiom that a social order speaks its opposite.  If you are for something, you must be against something else.  So what are we against in The Lion King?  It isn’t merely Scar, the evil brother of the slain Mustafa, whom we loathe.  While the surface narrative plays out a struggle for righteous retribution—Simba vanquishing Scar as Hamlet does Claudius to avenge the killing of the father—the underlying dramatic structure suggests that the social pariahs of the kingdom, the jackals, are the real objects of audience hatred. The jackals are personas non grata of the lion kingdom, on the margins of the “natural”; they exist somehow in a permanent state of imbalance.  We might call them tropes of dissonance embodied in physical form.  Or, to employ the critical cliché, they are the “Other”.  As “others”, the jackals can never be inscribed within the dominant social order. So when Scar assumes his reign, he gives the kingdom over to the jackals, and nature then begins its rebellion against these scavenger dogs by drying out, closing up, fossilizing itself.  In effect then, the lion kingdom Mustafa reigns over and Simba inherits is defined in exclusionary terms.  What must be kept out of it, for the good of all and the health of the natural world, is not Scar, but the jackals.

  If this idea of a social order being defined in xenophobic terms sounds familiar, that’s because real-world analogues abound (Nazi Germany, the British Empire, Manifest Destiny and Aboriginal Genocide, et al.). As far as fiction goes, perhaps the ultimate analogue is Bram Stoker’s Dracula.While no one considers Stoker a great writer, his genius lies in the character of Dracula itself, a creature that fuses together Nature and History into an unstable persona that gets to the core of Barthes’ critique.  Dracula speaks of the lasting paranoid fantasies society projects onto marginalized people, most typically immigrant populations.  Dracula is in essence a divided soul, a self in self-rebellion.  To put it another way, Dracula embodies in total not only Scar, but the jackals and even nature itself.  He is of royal blood (Scar), yet of an Eastern race (the jackals) unknown and distrusted by the West, and his physical presence is nature turned upside down, hence his aversion to sunlight and his appetite for human blood to avoid withering away.  He is immortal yet seemingly emaciated and bordering on death.  Dracula’s story begins in the East, but it is when he “invades” the West to suck the blood of the English innocent that the social order is potentially thrown into chaos; only when he is vanquished does the threat of the “other” recede.  But what has been vanquished is a cruel reflection of humanity itself, not some distinct “other”.  The gun barrel of xenophobia cannot help but be turned around to face those standing behind it.  Dracula thus deconstructs an image of racial/ethnic antipathy as a form of self-hatred.

The Nature-History confusion that Dracula represents is carried into The Lion King without the same sense of complication.  It is of an ilk closer to what Barthes would consider jingoistic propaganda.  Imagine the same storyline of The Lion King played out in human terms: an idealized country is taken over by an unclean, amoral group of people and the country and its rightful inhabitants lapse into anomie and entropy.  The machinery of industry comes to a standstill and the crops fail.  People are soon starving and in despair.  But with the immergence of a rightful, ennobled leader the country finds its way out of the darkness and prospers once more.

Doesn’t this sound like a script every dictator or totalitarian regime has employed at some point or another?  Round up all the undesirables, the infiltrators, the agents provocateur, dispense of them, and then swear eternal allegiance to the indomitable leader who speaks for all, because it is he who brings peace and honor.  Even those who might be philosophically opposed to the leader’s ideology swear allegiance because of his “natural” predestination to proffer the good for the country, the homeland, the Fatherland, Deutschland.  (So, in movie terms, this is why the zebras and other natural prey for the lions submit to the lion king’s rule and bow their heads in supplication.).

To boil it down, the political component of xenophobia is fascism.

I don’t mean to state that The Lion King is explicitly fascist; rather that it carries a covert message with fascist implications.  So too does the Lord of the Rings, the Dirty Harry movies, and many popular entertainments.  The literary critic in me swears its own allegiance, that to Barthes’ camp, and is reluctant to allow consideration of the “nature” side of the nature/history dichotomy.  But something about these cultural expressions does continue to enthrall us down through the generations.  Do we yearn to be led?  Does fealty to the powerful override the democratic desires we profess?  Do human beings possess a fascistic soul?  Am I a closeted Hobbesian?  Perhaps, as Curtis White has argued, we simply exist in a “culture of death” that is constantly reinforcing itself, a postmodern simulacra detached from the any notion of the real.  At least stating it that way gives me some sense of hope that democratic values aren’t somehow unnatural.

Let me close with a thought experiment: Would you be quite so apt to let your children watch The Lion King if the character of Mustafa wasn’t quite so honorable, the jackals and Scar instituted a different form of governance that allowed all of the subject species a voice and a share of power, and Simba was more like Napoleon or some exiled general, thirsty to re-impose his will upon the kingdom?

How come?

Playin' Catch Up

I think I am due for a catch up post.  Maybe after you read just how much has happened in the last three weeks, you will understand why I haven’t had time to post as often as I would have liked to….
First Mr B went to Lexington to visit some friends for a weekend after his birthday.  He had a great time with the Loose Baggy Monster.  In case you didn’t know, I married a rock star.  They’re pretty good.  You should check out the monster {here} or {here}.

The Loose Baggy Monster: Mr B on lead guitar and vocals, Luke (LJB's BFF) on bass and back up vocals, Tall Paul on guitar, and Kick Stand on the drums

After a weekend as a single mommy, I was waiting for Mr B to get home.   Our little poodle, Frodo, used to climb up on the arm of the couch and do the happiest little jig when we would get home.  His whole body would shake – he was so happy to see us, he just couldn’t control himself.  Occasionally this would result in an accident on the rug, but it was nice to know he missed us, even if we were only gone for 5 minutes out to the mailbox.  I felt the same way when I heard Mr B’s key turning in the lock after he had been home for the weekend – minus the accident on the rug.  : )

Frodo: post happy dance and in dire need of a haircut

We’ve also been working hard with LJB’s therapists over the past few weeks.  Tantrums have been greatly reduced.  I can only count 3 tantrums in the past 3 weeks that went beyond the normal I’m-2-years-old-and-you-have-the-nerve-to-tell-me-no tantrums.  As parents of a kiddo on the spectrum, a lot of therapy is more for us than for LJB.  Mr B and I have learned how to calm him, how to better communicate with him, how to better understand what he needs.  It’s been great for us.  We both felt so distant and not connected to this little creature carrying our DNA.  We have also become more proficient in our sign language skills.  All three of us.  LJB regularly signs more, eat, help, and open.  He is also using the words – really using them for their intended meaning.  Pretty cool.

The crib.  Notice the couch cushion for extra pressure.  BTW, Mr B picked out this sleeping ensemble. ;)

Of all the behavior troubles we’ve had, LJB had always been a great sleeper.  From the time he was about 4 months old, we put him in his crib awake and within 15 minutes and no crying, he would drift of to sleep.  It was amazing.  He usually spent the hour before bedtime screaming his head off, but at least I knew that when it was over he would sleep like a champ.  Last Wednesday this all changed.  Mr B and I were getting ready and hadn’t heard a peep from LJB’s room.  About 7:30, he came running into our room.  I looked over at Mr B. 
“Did you get him out of bed?”
“Nope.”
“Lennon, how did you get out of your bed?”
LJB squats down to the floor.  “Bounce.”
Then he took me to his room and showed me exactly how he bounced out of his crib. 

Refusing to admit defeat, we battled the rest of last week trying to get him to sleep in his crib.  Before we could get out of his room and close the door, he would bounce out again.  On Friday, we converted his crib to the toddler bed.  I spent Friday night sleeping in the toddler bed with our little dude.  On Saturday, I slept most of the night in his floor.  Sunday night, no one slept at all.  Then suddenly, on Monday, I guess he had enough (I sure know I had!) and at bedtime he voluntarily climbed into his bed.  He came out of his room about 3 times, but eventually stayed and slept all night.  Tuesday night, he got in bed and only came out once. I am proud to report that for the past 2 nights, he has gone to bed and not come out a single time and slept all night.  I feel like super-mommy!!!  The secret we learned was to give him all the sensory input his little heart desires before putting him in the bed.  This basically means Netflix streaming Blue’s Clues and a full body massage for at least an hour leading up to bedtime.  I wish someone would give me an hour-long massage before bed…

So, that’s what we’ve been up to.  Not to mention our regular full-time jobs, 4 hours of therapy each week, finding new childcare for the school year (more to come on that one), and trying to find a little time to have fun and do some thrifting/crafting/reading/etc.

As much as I’d like to tell you I will be back on my thrice weekly blogging schedule, I’m afraid I may not be able to make that promise.  We are moving at the end of the month.  LJB’s Gramma is coming to spend the last week of August with us to help get the new house ready, pack, and move.  I hate the physical labor part of moving, but the rest of it is kind of fun.  I like re-organizing and decorating.   We also have a follow-up intensive level evaluation for LJB on the 28th.  I am hoping for more answers from the eval and I’m anxious to have a more objective picture of his progress.  And finally, we start September with pre-school.  Whew!  All of that to say, I may be MIA for a bit longer, but Mr B and I will check in as often as we can and then I PROMISE to be back on the regular schedule after we get moved and settled in.

Goodbye to Gore

Gore Vidal has gone with the wind.  The world woke up a little worse.  I admit to reading only one of his novels, the scandalous and deeply troubling book for a teenaged boy called Myra Breckenridge.  To even tell you what the novel is about constitutes a mortal sin.  He wrote lots of bigger, heavier books—in both senses of the word—like Burr and Lincoln.  But I read about Mr./Ms. Breckenridge instead, feeling deeply strange and conspiratorial, like I was cracking the secret code of adulthood perversion at the ripe age of fourteen. It would be much later before I discovered that this purveyor of smut was a great public intellectual/sometime actor, the senator running against hyper-conservative Bob Roberts, the highbrow professor of With Honors (remember that one all you Joe Pesci or Brendan Fraser fans?).

Vidal was a great essayist, perhaps one of the finest ever in the English language.  He famously sparred with William F. Buckley on live television in 1968, Vidal accusing Buckley of being a “crypto-Nazi” and Buckley retorting that Vidal was a “queer” and a low-rent pornographer (for the aforementioned Myra).  Ah, the good old days.  Vidal notoriously interviewed and sympathized with Timothy McVey, the terrorist behind the Oklahoma City bombing.  He was an adamant conspiracy theorist about the murder of JFK.  He spoke in a very droll, sardonic manner, with perfect diction and an f-you attitude to anyone who’s views didn’t truck with his own.  He lived abroad and smited the United States with all the power his pen could offer.  People on the right loathed him and people on the left at times did not like him much better.

He was a great man indeed.  And with his passing, and Buckley’s, and Howard Zinn, and with Chomsky not long for the big sleep, this country is losing a generation of public intellectuals that it may not be able to replace.  The 24 hour news media, and Twitter, and the Blogosphere, have warped our entire sensibility towards public intellectualism.  Everything is a sound bite, a slogan, a platitude, a talking point.  Intellect in miniature, haikus of big subjects like “freedom” and the “free market”.  Decent commentary shows like the early morning weekend shows on MSNBC get labeled “nerdville”, too wonky for their own good.  The public largely tunes out, retreating to its “intellectual ghettos” as Chris Hedges dubs them.  Give us Rush, give us HuffPo, give us the Drudge Report, give us the damned NFL, just please for the love of all that’s holy don’t give us anything that might turn the worm.  Ideology is indeed the mother’s milk of contemporary politics.  We suffer tinnitis from the reverberations inside the echo chamber we occupy. 

This must be why it is not a national outrage that the very night Obama was inaugurated key Republicans in the House and Senate held a cabal where they pledged to do nothing but ensure a one-term presidency.  Smack dab in the middle the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky senator, my senator, was playing Oz.  Halleluiah for the new Republican Party, the Scorched-Earth Party, the Nero Party.  Whatever you do, keep on fiddlin’…

Vidal was making similar criticisms up until the day he died, but who was still listening? He was a relic of a time before I was even born.  And in this season of contempt for Americans writ large—I mean can you believe some of the presidential ads?—we need such relics more than ever, folks with real honest to goodness intellectual credentials who can speak truth to power.  And we need a real media platform to put them on. What we don’t need are a million blogs like this one, a blip in the din of white noise circulating through our beloved World Wide Web.  We need Titans, people who can recite Latin and understand Hegel and don’t whore themselves out to lobbying firms or charge six-figures for a speaking engagement at the MGM Grand convention center.

You will be missed Mr. Vidal, even by people who don’t care that you’re gone, or ever were.  We need you snobbish, elitist SOBs more than ever, because we are drowning in the mean season of presidential politics, and there’s no one on board to throw a rope.

A eulogy from Peter Scheer:  “I don’t feel sad for Gore Vidal today. He lived to 86 and he had the kind of life people ask Santa Claus for. It was not without hardship, loss or suffering, but he leaves behind great works and a million smiles. If anything, I feel sad for my country, which lost one of its truest patriots.”

Selah.

Ah-mazing

You know what's amazing?  Being part of a team.  I've learned more than ever these past few months how important it is to have a teammate.  Mr B and I make a good team.  He is on his a-game when I need a break.  I can step in and take over when he has had enough.  He is patient when I am at my wit's end.  I can interpret Lennon-ese when he can't understand the grunts and gestures and cadence of LJB's own language.  Teamwork is pretty amazing.

Mr B is a picture saboteur.  Every. single. picture.

We celebrated Mr B's birthday last Saturday with a date.  An honest-to-goodness-babysitter-dinner-and-a-movie date.  So what if we had to sneak our cheeseburgers into the theater in my purse to fit it all in our allotted babysitter budget for the month?  It still was a date.  We laughed and stole a few smooches in the theater and had birthday deep dish cookie pie for dessert.  It was a pretty amazing day, until the meltdown began.

These meltdowns are nothing you could ever imagine until you experience one.  I am daily amazed by my kiddo.  LJB is a pretty amazing little fella.  It is also pretty amazing how he can go from sweet, funny, little boy to full-fledged demon spawn in a matter of seconds.  I enjoy his other amazing attributes a little bit more : )

I've just realized that I have lots of pictures of LJB crying.  Not sure what this says about us.

We had an amazing therapy breakthrough this week.  LJB has learned that he can request and item (food, drink, toy) and we will give it to him.  Seems simple, right?  I'm not talking, "May I please have some more juice?" kind of request.  I mean the simple act of gesturing for an object or pointing at a picture to have his daily needs met.  Until now, when his cup was empty and he was thirsty, LJB would occasionally walk into the kitchen with his empty cup.  Sometimes, he would grab my hand and get me to follow him.  Most of the time however, he would just give up when he finally realized that there was nothing left in the cup and move on, or he would just start screaming without any indication for Mr B and I as to what he was crying about.  His new ability to request isn't full-proof.  We sometimes get the screaming with no known reason, but he has learned that a request is a powerful thing - and that's amazing.

Those baby blues are pretty amazing, too!

You know what else is amazing?  This same kid who couldn't request more juice can count to 10.  He recognizes shapes and letters and colors at 5-6 year old level.  This is the gift of autism.  It's also a way for us to glimpse at the future.  To know that he has a brain.  A powerful brain that thinks great thoughts.  A brain that can likely already outwit his mama.  I can't wait to see what ah-mazing things this little dude is going to do!

Book Club: Sarah's Key

Hey fellow readers!  This is the first entry of our Book Club.  Leanna's choice to kick off the club was Sarah's Key by Tatiana De Rosnay.

 

 Joshua:

As I read this novel I kept thinking about the twists and turns feminism has taken.  What came to my mind during Julia's decision to keep her baby at the abortion clinic was how similar in sentiment that scene was to Juno.  In both instances, the audience is asked to identify with strong female characters, one a 40-something journalist, the other a brash and witty high school student, who in a sense affirm their female empowerment through a commitment to motherhood (or quasi-motherhood, as Juno gives up her baby but retains a relationship to the child). 

          

Another observation: I imagine that when the author set down to write this story, after doing her research of the Jewish roundup in Paris and the deportation of thousands of men, women and children to the death camps, she began by working her way backwards from the ending.  That ending, of course, is that the protagonist's child will bear the same name as the Jewish child Sarah Staryzinski, who's horrific story we see unfold in the early chapters of the novel.  In making the decision to link names child to child, the author creates a subtext that suggests that humankind's collective guilt over the Holocaust can only be overcome if another "holocaust", abortion, is ended.  Perhaps it wasn’t the intent of the author to make such a comparison, but Julia’s pregnancy saga made it kind of unavoidable, at least for me.

I think the story would have been stronger if it had developed in a less formulaic way.  The negative parallelism between present and past, one child who is killed and another who is saved (or the parallelism between Sarah and Julia herself), is contrived to be highly engaging on an emotional level.  But I found that neat and tidy mirror-imaging kind of disruptive to the seriousness of the events; in the last few pages I kept waiting for the reveal of the name in much the same way as one reading a murder mystery.  The historical events described here may have been better served by a narrative structure more open ended, in which the reader is made to contend with his or her own morality a little bit.  Telling the story more through the eyes of Bertrand's family, who moved into the Staryzinski apartment and in a real sense benefited from the round up of Jews in Paris, may have been one way to accomplish that.

That is my two cents.  What say you, dear wife?

Leanna:

 

I like your summary, but I find it interesting how differently we saw this book and how differently we perceived the author's motivations.  We certainly agree that the book was written to not merely tug at the heart strings, but to rip that sucker out of your chest like something directly from the Temple of Doom.  [You know I'm not a big Indiana Jones fan and I sure as heck am not taking the time to fact check myself, so I hope I got the right movie, if not, just go with it anyway.]  The whole sub-plot about Sarah's pregnancy and the pressure from her philandering husband to end it really didn't evoke much emotion from me.  When the author takes us down the road of a possible miscarriage, quite frankly I didn't really care what happened to the baby.  Writing that makes me feel kind of heartless.  I love babies and all, but it just didn't do it for me.  That said, when Julia was in the hospital and Bertrand had rushed to her side, I was hoping for their relationship to survive.  Though he was a little rough around the edges, I don't think that Bertrand was the jerk that I think the author wanted us to perceive him as.  If he was supposed to be the villain, it didn't work for me.  I didn't hate him.  As a matter of fact, I kind of felt sorry for him.  I could imagine what it would feel like to have your life flipped upside down by an unexpected pregnancy.

 

As for the Nazis and the French police involved in the round up, I do hate them.  Of course I hate the Nazis.  I hate that women and children were murdered at the hands of the government they trusted to protect them.  I was far more wrapped up in the historical story line.  The author very successfully kept me hoping, no matter how irrational that hope was, that Sarah's little brother was going to be alive inside that apartment when Sarah and her adoptive parents arrived.  The image of her finding his dead, decaying body starts the waterworks for me.  There is something so sad about that little innocent victim who will never be memorialized.  His name will never be listed in a book of Holocaust victims.  However, maybe, thanks to his sister, he was allowed to perish while still innocent, naive.  He didn't witness the horrors she saw and he wasn't burdened with the demons she couldn't shake.  So perhaps, Sarah did successfully save her brother.

 

So dear husband, there you have it.  That's my side of the story.  :)

UP NEXT FOR THE BOOK CLUB :  Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty

From the Boomtown Rats to John Maynard Keynes

 


"I don't like Mondays."  The immortal words of Bob Geldof ring in all of our ears whether we've actually heard the song or not, or even if we know it but don't pay attention to the actual lyrics (a teenager goes berserk and then blames his actions on the day of the week).  Regardless of Mr. Geldof and the Boomtown Rats, no one likes Mondays and haven't for quite some time.  It's the day when everything important is due and the day that everything put off the previous Friday has its reckoning.  It's the day you play catch-up to keep from getting even further behind.  And you do this while sleep deprived because that catnap you took on Sunday afternoon turned into a three hour siesta and you subsequently found yourself watching House Hunters International or the latest Zumba infomercial at one in the morning.

This particular Monday got me thinking: Do we really need Mondays?  I mean, we may technically need the day so we don't lose 52 days on the calendar--can you imagine Christmas coming back around two months sooner?  "The horror!  The horror!" as Marlon Brando would say.  But we don't actually need the day to be a work day, do we?  So I thought I'd blog  about how the workweek itself was structured and where it came from.  Although there is some dispute about the origins in their totality, much of what we consider to be commonplace business practices--the 40 hour work week and the weekend--are courtesy of a century or more of labor struggle right up until the 1930s.  I seem to recall from a class I had in college that at one point in the nation's history a 4-day workweek was seriously considered.  Such a thing exists now in some municipalities, but purely for budgetary reasons, kind of like the furloughs that states have been rolling out for public employees.  The rest of us still slog through the 5-day variety, if we're lucky.

So how come, in the light of day of technological progress and the ease of living such wonderment touts as its raison d'etre (or at least it did in all those 1950s TV commercials), do we still work as many or more of our waking hours in a week as not?   Shouldn't the technological awesomeness of advanced civilizations such as ours have by now downgraded the need to ritualistically show up some place we'd rather not be and perform routinized tasks for longer than we would care?  Much to the point, workplace studies show the average American to be working far longer in an average week than he or she did 30 years ago.  At such a rate, the weekend itself might be a thing of the past by century's end (truly a horror).

An article published in the Guardian a few years ago provided a history lesson and analysis of a long dormant idea, and one positively insane to us 21st century folk: the 15 hour work week.  (What?!)  Apparently, John Maynard Keynes, the imminent economist and bane of the libertarian right, theorized in the waning moments before the Great Depression that mankind’s natural course would lead to such a superfluity of work that society itself would restructure to provide for maximal leisure time.  Coincidentally, I think Marx prognosticated a similar notion decades earlier. 

So why has this not happened? The article hypothesizes one reason may be, “that many of us actually enjoy work, despite what we say to pollsters and to each other. To be sure, work can be boring, repetitive or exhausting, but it is also an arena where people get pleasure out of their achievements and enjoy mixing with other people.”  How about no, Scott.  Even if work is a good place to chat and mingle, the mere absence of alcohol or sporting events means that most of us would much rather be doing our socializing in different environs.  The article also offers a second hypothesis: “Robert Frank's explanation is that Keynes failed to spot the importance of context. We consume more because technical progress has vastly improved the quality of goods on offer, and as we get richer we want the luxury car…”  There is always a better mouse trap to build and own, etc, etc, ad infinitum. So, in essence, we are all highly self-conscious mice, or perhaps their grotesque cousins, trying to keep pace with the pack, wanting more and more and working desperately to get it.

That’s a likely scenario for some.  But as Richard Wolff and other left economists have pointed out, Americans are essentially working harder just to try and keep their standard of living the same, not to raise it.  Real wage earnings and purchasing power have stagnated or decreased since the 1970s.  While the rich kept getting richer, the middle class found itself treading water and sinking fast.  We took on credit cards and second mortgages, leveraging ourselves to death, and the end result was a credit bubble that exploded in everyone’s face four short years ago. 

It may sound positively anti-American, but I don’t want to work this hard, or this much.  (As I wrote that, I heard my own father rolling over in his grave.)  And the ghosts of our Puritan ancestors may strike me down for my "work ethic" apostasy, but I’d rather spend time with my family than sitting behind a computer screen pretending to be nice to people and feigning concern about their problems.  For those of you who genuinely love your job and are thrilled to get out of bed each morning—even Monday morning—I wish you joy and peace.  I really do.  So, in the spirit of goodwill, I bestow all of my Mondays from now on to you.  Go forth and prosper.  Meanwhile, I’ll be kicking back with a cold one watching Zumba.

...at least on Saturdays and Sundays I will be, by gosh.

Bob Geldof, above, performing his latest wonder: Levitating Africa.

Flaming Flower Pots

I was at home from work this morning with LJB.  He had his first Occupational Therapy session and it was really great.  I really like his OT and her style.  We sat in the floor and played and played.  LJB eyed us curiously.  He doesn’t play with his toys.  He might hold on to a ball or matchbox car and he will watch his train circle around the track for ages, but he doesn’t really play with them.  He takes blocks and stacks them as high as he can reach, stands back to marvel at his work, then walks away. Satisfied. 

Today we spent a good while teaching him that it is fun to knock the blocks down and then rebuild them.  He caught on after a few times, but he was still looking at us and the new tower of blocks, not entirely sure why we would build them just to knock them down again.  I love watching his wheels turn.

By saying that LJB doesn’t play with his toys, I am not in any way saying that he doesn’t play.  It’s just a little unconventional  : )  One of his favorite games is fetch.  Not with the dog.  With Mommy.  He has me very well trained. 

Sometimes, fetch goes over our 3^rd floor balcony.  He loves to throw stuff over the balcony and then stare at it on the ground.  He usually comes to get me and Mr B and asks us to stare at his latest feat.  Often he wants me to hold him so that he can lean over the edge of the balcony and stretch as far as I will let him from 3 stories up and stare at whatever he tossed overboard.  Mr B refuses this.   Sometimes I do it just to watch the queasiness sweep over Mr B’s face, the whole time hanging on to my kiddo with a vice grip.

Step 1: Gather suitable objects for throwing.

Step 2: Wind up and let 'er rip.

Step 3: Admire the carnage below.







In the evening once LJB goes to bed, Mr B or I will go downstairs, around to the back of the building and pick up the latest free fall victims, just so they can be tossed out again tomorrow.  Secretly, I like this routine.  I like to watch him stare down below and I like to try to figure out what he is thinking about.  Sometimes I would swear that he is trying to use telekinesis to retrieve his toys.  Sometimes when the ball and water gun that he threw over yesterday are happily waiting on the couch for him when he wakes up in the morning, he is convinced that he has. 

At noon today I left the world of a 2 year old, put the blocks away, and joined the adult world.  I came into work to 7 new voicemails.  One of them has me perplexed.  An adult living in a 4^th floor condo in a busy metropolitan area tossed a flower pot over the back of their balcony onto a public sidewalk.  As if that wasn’t enough, the flower pot was engulfed in flames as it hurled towards the street below.  There was a walking tour of the city preparing to leave as the flaming flower pot hit the ground.  The condo inhabitant stared down at his latest feat in a pile of charred potting soil.  I realized the adult world and the 2 year old world may not be that different after all.

Flaming flower pots. This may be my new favorite expletive replacement ; )

Leanna

Is It Hot Enough For Ya?

In light of the latest heat wave to blanket this country of ours, I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on the wonder that is air conditioning.

First off, I’m old enough to remember when certain stores operated seasonally or kept different hours to avoid weather extremes.  The Dairy Queen located in the next town over was closed all winter.  Some local retailers would close up shop by one or two in the afternoon in the summertime because they didn’t have A/C.  I remember walking into stores like Ben Franklin’s and the noise from the floor fans was so loud that you could barely hold a conversation without yelling.  I’d go clogging with my grandmother out at the livestock auction barn (don’t ask) and all the dancers would be sweating like pigs in their poodle skirts and bolo ties.  I can see in my mind that little bead of sweat that would collect on my grandmother’s upper lip and her permed hair all matted down around the temples of her forehead.  It was hotter than three kinds of hell in that place, everybody waving cardboard hand fans and cackling like magpies.  Looking back, I guess nobody seemed to mind the stifling heat all that much.

But most vividly, I remember the old farmhouse I grew up in.  My bedroom was upstairs, and to make matters worse, one of my windows was painted shut, which made a good cross-breeze impossible.  Every summer my bedroom window had a box fan in it, the oscillating fan on my dresser blew nonstop, and eventually I inherited a wind machine that sat on the floor vibrating like a jet turbine; I’d usually sleep with my head at the foot of the bed for maximum air velocity.  Let’s just say it was warm up there.  And to this day I can’t really sleep well without hearing the whirring of fan blades.

When it was just too hot for me to be in my room my parents would let me unfold a sleeping bag on the floor of their bedroom.  My dad worked shift work at the aluminum factory and because he slept during the day sometimes they bought an A/C unit for their bedroom window.  Some days we’d hang out in that room all day, playing cards on top of the bedspread and eating ice cream.

It’s hard to imagine a life without A/C now.  I’d hate to be trying to raise a child in a house or apartment without it, yet I know many folks still do.  My mom still lives in West Virginia, where close to 90% of the entire state lost power over a week ago and most still don’t have it back.  I feel for them and the misery they must be experiencing.  And yet, not so long ago, this was just the way people lived all the time.  They figured out all sorts of exotic ways to stay cool, or try to at least.  In the South, people just didn’t work as hard or as long during the summer months.  And now, with global climate change upon us, we might not be long for feeling that heat more intensely than ever, and maybe overwhelming our energy resources in the process.  China, India, and other hot spots in the developing world are situating themselves in the synthetic wonderment of A/C.  Once people get a taste of coolness, it’s hard to go back.

I was reading a blog today about the air conditioning and its history.  Someone named Stan Cox has actually written a book about the invention and development of A/C and its effects on modern life.  It’s called Losing Our Cool.  The guy who effectively invented A/C was a man named Thomas Midgley.  He also, coincidentally, was the first to suggest refining gasoline with lead.  Here’s a little bit from Cox’s book:

The breakthrough CFC refrigerant, Freon, was invented in 1930 by chemist Thomas Midgley, working for General Motors' Frigidaire division. Midgley earlier had found that the problem of car engine knocking could be solved by adding lead, which wound up causing serious air pollution and health problems. On the strength of his two momentous discoveries, Midgley was credited by historian J.R. McNeill as having "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in earth history.”

So, on this ever-warming planet, and during our latest heat wave, we should give thanks to Mr. Midgely…I guess, for keeping us cool.  Cool with ramifications we can’t yet fathom.

Now leaded gasoline, there’s something that takes me back…

50 Cent and a Crafty Saturday

Last week, 50 Cent posted some pretty ignorant and inflammatory tweets.  If you haven’t heard the story, some guy was giving 50 grief on twitter and 50 responded, “i just saw your picture fool you look autistic.”  Then he went to further say that he didn’t want any “special ed kids” on his timeline.  As you can imagine this has started quite the firestorm in the autism community.  Holly Robinson-Pete very eloquently responded to 50’s tweets on her HollyRod Foundation website {here}.  

All this made me wonder what 50 Cent (and society as a whole) thinks autism looks like and I’m not the only one.  Some other mothers created a flash blog {here} to answer this question.

  

This is what autism looks like in our house:

Saturday morning bed head

Playing on the monkey bars

Loving the doggy

Sharing with Daddy

Being silly with Mommy

Playing with cousins

At our house autism looks pretty darn cute.  Now don't get me wrong there is a far less cute side that involves 2 hour tantrums, a never ending battle to just try and understand my child's needs, juggling a full-time job outside the home with doctor's appointments, therapy sessions, and all the normal mommy stuff.  But all-in-all Lennon is a remarkable kiddo with many more abilities than disabilities.  Not that I was planning on it any way, but I won't be buying any 50 Cent on iTunes. Ever.

I took out all my 50 Cent frustration on a craft project yesterday afternoon.

I have this lamp that I love, but its kind of an awkward height.  Its really too tall to be a table lamp, but too short to be a floor lamp.

It has sat awkwardly in the corner of my great room by the dining table for almost 2 years and I finally found a solution.  I found a black pressed board corner desk at a garage sale yesterday morning for $5.  I bought 2 cans of slate gray spray paint to paint the body and top of the desk.

 

 I took the cardboard back off and cut fabric to cover it.

I had planned to staple the fabric on, but when I couldn’t find the stapler, I subbed my trusty hot glue gun.

Ta-da!

Give me a 2 hour afternoon naptime, 2 cans of spray paint, some scrap fabric, and a hot glue gun and I can turn my frown upside down ☺ .  Oh yeah, and 50 Cent is an ignorant jerk.

Leanna