This was on Julie’s blog too, but I thought I’d post it over here for people who don’t read her blog:
She was having so much fun dancing. She also seems to understand the concept of a set break, because she threw a fit when we took her away in between acts. She seemed to intrinsically know that there was more music coming up that we were taking her away from. Baby loves to dance!
The Unbearables are perilously close to making it into the second round for a potential ACL fest slot. Vote now! They rock! If you vote I’ll put a video of Stella dancing up here tomorrow!
http://acl.mp3.com/feature/soundandjury/?band=THE-UNBEARABLES
So, I’m all like IMing the J-dog and stuff, and she’s like – Ashley said that the Ikea catalog came free in the paper, and she didn’t tell us. And I’m all like, “oh no she didn’t!”, and j-dog’s like, “Yeah. Yeah she did.” And, I’m all like, “If that stinky uncreative bitch thinks she’s somehow going to out decorate us, just ’cause she got the ikea catalog early then she doesn’t know her HGTV from her DIY network. We are the conquerors of compressed particle board! The lords of Lack! The bards of Billy! We are the modern furniture masters!” And j-dog’s like, “Yeah.” Bring your best designs Ashley. We can take totally take your ass!
Ian’s radio station(a damn fine radio station btw, boy has taste in music) on last.fm turned me onto Jens Lekman. It kind of reminds me of a cross between Morrissey and Stephen Merritt with the questionable language skills of a Scandinavian. I especially like this song.
You Are The Light (by which I travel into this and that)
Also this one for reasons of my wifes name:
Speaking of Stephen Merritt. Did you hear he’s writing a musical based on Coraline?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.