The People in my Neighborhood

I ride the bus with a couple every morning. The both appear to be in their fifties or sixties. The man is tall and reedy. He is mostly vacant when he enters the bus. He often leaves with a long string of spittle hanging from his lips. His wife (I assume) follows him. She looks healthier, but with a short cut afro. She looks as though the idea of thinking about her hair is more than she can take. And she helps her husband on the bus every day, and they get off at the same stop every day.

Today they had to lower the bus for her to get on (we have “kneeling” buses with hydrolics, so the bus can get closer to the curb, and thus be easier to enter).She walked up the aisle slowly. Her husband helping her along. They got off the bus slower, and I saw my fellow bus riders faces as we rode away. Every face was drawn. Had a look of concern. How will they get along if one of them gets sick?

While we may not know them they are our neighbors. They are part of our everyday routine. Their presence enriches our day, and if they weren’t on our bus anymore they would be sorely missed. This is what I don’t miss about commuting. I have no community with the drivers on the road. I may not know the people on the bus, but they are part of my day, and I part of theirs. And I think we’re all the better for it.

You’re Guilty (but you’re also the solution)

I was reading Kelli’s post on her new food blog. One thing that struck out at me is when she says:

I feel guilty when I read about people who do more than I do

But ultimately you can only do what you can do. I find there are so many people who especially when it comes to nutrition or the environment will have someone point out how much more they could be doing, and it just knocks the wind out of their sails and they stop doing anything at all. I feel like this has become a powerful tactic that originated in our political discourse and is now used constantly. We feel if we can knock out one pillar of a persons argument then there is no value to the entire argument, and they give up completely.

Recently a bunch of Global Warming deniers got very excited because they found a lot of errors in NASA’s climate change data. And those errors when corrected did change the overall picture a little bit. The problem is that a lot of people heard, “NASA’s made mistakes so there’s really no global warming”. Which wasn’t the case. It made a difference in overall severity, but not whether the problem existed in the first place. And I feel like our culture has become like that. Anyone trying to do good is a large inflatable balloon just waiting for someone to walk by with a pin.

And so I try to keep plugging along and not get discouraged. And I try to keep an open mind to change. There might not be global warming. It’s certainly possible. But that won’t change the fact that using reusable shopping bags is good whether there’s global warming, cooling, or we get invaded by green men from mars. And sometimes we get discouraged because we forget the bags. And sometimes we use disposable diapers with Stella. But you have to take the long view, and realize that every plastic bag taken is one less plastic bag, and every disposable diaper not used is one less disposable diaper. And just because we haven’t become saints, doesn’t mean we’re no good.

Links and Calories

You know, I’m always dismayed by the quality of my blog posts. With my plays I generally am quite happy with what I write, but I know my blog posts aren’t the most interesting thing on the planet, and that makes me think that perhaps I’m a bad writer.

But I take heart from Neil Gamin’s blog. He’s an exceptional writer, but he doesn’t write Oscar Wilde-esque posts. I’m envious of people who can do that. Who can write succinctly and wow you day after day with their humor, warmth and profundity (Dutch, I’m looking at you). Maybe being a good writer doesn’t mean that I have to be good at writing everything.

Comments

I think I might have gotten comments working so that you guys having problems can actual hit the submit button. Feel free to email me if it still doesn’t work.

Plastic Bags

So Julie’s already written an article on plastic bags, but I had no clue how bad they really were. Salon has a scary article on it. The Chronicle also has a good comic on this subject (I couldn’t find it online though), about the plastic vs. paper people duking it out.

I nearly had a melt down on Wednesday night, when the clerk insisted on putting our two items in a plastic bag even after I asked her not to. Julie and I had a nice little fight about this. I was having a bad day with the moving and stuff, but it still just gets to me. There are these tiny things we can do to improve the world, and it feels nearly impossible to make them happen. Julie did use the plastic bag for packing material though. And we’ll recycle them when we unpack. So I really shouldn’t have flipped out.

I guess I feel so passionately because it’s an issue in my life that I have control over. An issue that I can easily have a real impact. And there are so many other places where I’m fat and lazy and horribly detrimental to the environment. I feel so powerless when I can’t even have an impact with the small things I try to do.

Ok, so I lied

So, I said I wouldn’t talk much about the Baby Einstein thing, but this article brings up a much more disturbing comment:

…when you’re alone with your baby for hours on end, and especially when you haven’t been able to sleep more than three hours withing being woken up in months, sometimes you want to eat a meal or read the newspaper. You need something to occupy the baby, and a Baby Einstein video — which tends to make the babies smile and coo — is better than making them stare at the ceiling for twenty minutes.

I’ve read this sentiment before. First off let me say if you have a baby who is screaming for 2 hours and you’ve had no sleep and you put them in front of a Baby Einstein video – that I can understand. But, babies do not need to watch a Baby Einstein video rather than the ceiling. This is a disturbing trend I see mentioned more and more. The point of this study is that developmentally it is worse to put a kid in front of a Baby Einstein video than having them watch the ceilings. I don’t know what’s on the ceiling, but it fascinates them. Apparently babies learn a lot by doing what we would call “nothing”. I read an article in which a father basically created a TV schedule for his daughter, always turning on the TV for her at all meals. His reasoning was that he didn’t want her to be bored. Which is so frightening, because if there is anything a kid younger than 3 is never, it is bored. I mean, I’ve never tested this, but I have a feeling that Stella would play peek-a-boo with me for 7 or 8 hours straight. I’m the one who gets bored. She’ll keep exercising those brain cells forever. So let the kid stare at the ceiling. It’s good for ’em.

Random Wednesday

  • New Stella cuteness: She has started wandering around the house with her hands clasped behind her back. This is ridiculously cute, and you want to offer her a pipe to puff on. Well, I do. You might not if you are a responsible adult.
  • More studies on ADHD and TV watching. I think I’m going to be like Dutch and try not to editorialize on TV stuff. I don’t want to be the “I don’t watch TV” guy. But the stuff’s scary.

Our President is trying to kill us

I really think this latest move is starting to solidify something in my mind. Bush is not just a bad president. He’s not just incompetent. He really and truly wants to kill us. He wants to knock as many of us off as possible. Bush said he wants to “eliminate roadblocks” and “cut through paperwork” in rebuilding the collapsed I35 bridge. The only conclusion I can draw is that’s he’s not completely insane and that he is trying to kill us.

Body Image

So I was reading Kelli’s most recent post, and just really wanted to comment. Body image is a very interesting thing to me. Especially, since it’s so much about your brains chemistry. There are so many things that can influence it, and an outside source that can cause one kid to become wildly anorexic can have no impact on another.

I was always a good weight growing up. As a child I got fed a ridiculously balanced diet with almost no snacking or junk food (yes I’m one of the carob and sesame snack kids). Probably too good. When my Grandmother came to visit she’d buy us like $100 worth of junkfood and we’d binge for the entire time she visited. We got so sick. When I hit puberty in the Soviet Union there wasn’t a lot of protein, plus I had a fantastic case of Amoebic Dysentary so my body was not absorbing things particularly well, so I hit 6′ while weighing 120 pounds. I think my body’s been struggling to put on weight ever since then. I’ve had a metabolism that doesn’t quit. In high school I’d eat half a bag of oreos in one sitting. I’d often just eat an entire plate of pasta to “fill in the cracks”. I left high school 6’4″ and weighing somewhere between 130 and 140. My diet was not conducive to reliable weight measurement.

I didn’t actually start cooking until my first year of marriage to Julie. I got to the point where I couldn’t eat one more chicken breast, marinated in salad dressing and cooked on the George Foreman. My grandmother had recently started sending Julie a subscription to Gourmet magazine and so I started cooking recipes from that. I quickly moved towards being the only one who cooked in our house since I actually enjoyed it. Two years ago I realized that I was actually putting on weight. I had started to get rolls around my hips and a slight pot belly. Nothing particularly exciting, but for someone who has never been able to put on weight in their life it’s a pretty massive life change. So I started running. I initially said I was running so I could eat whatever I wanted. And I did. And it was fine. But eventually I realized that I was running these fantastic distances and I could eat 3500-4000 calories a day, but to what end? Why was I churning through this massive amount of food? And was I hurting Julie’s weight related goals just so I could be a glutton? So I started trying to cook better. We tried reduced portions for a while which worked, but made you feel like you were really working to eat healthy. Now Julie’s doing weight watchers (as am I by extension), and it’s been good to see that I should be eating about 2/3 more than her. Which is definitely not how we were doing things before.

I came in 3rd.

Wow, I came in 3rd in my age group in the Sunstroke 5k last night. Which feels pretty good. Until you notice that 1st and 2nd place came within 14 seconds of each other. And I was 6 minutes 9 seconds out of 2nd place. Yeah, I rock. 26:24 was the actual time if you’re interested. That’s over a minute worse than my last time.

I felt like I pulled a pretty good race out, though. I was feeling like I was hung over yesterday (which is always unfortunate when you didn’t do any drinking the night before). I was drinking water like crazy yesterday, but I couldn’t make the feeling go away. At about mile 2.5 I had to stop and walk because I was having that wonderful sensation of the lights going out. That’s definitely my favorite running sensation. I pulled through though. I followed a guy in, caught him, and would have passed him for the finish if the trail hadn’t been crowded. I’m not big into running people down. I did almost get run down by the guy who ended up winning overall last night. He took a turn really wide. Like, almost ran into the chain link fence I was running along wide. It was excessive. He could have cut the corner, I have no clue why he had to turn that wide. He was definitely running out of control. I also had to jump off the path to dodge a bunch of people taking up the entire track. Really rude. If you’re going to pass on the narrow parts of the course, you could at least have the courtesy to drop back if someone’s coming the other direction and not force them off the road. Ahh well. It was fun in any case.

Someday I’ll post about the fantastic-ness that was slapdash this year. And me going psychotic after being awake for 43 hours. But that day is not today.