Spring Break, Day 1

Starting at midnight-thirty this morning, I have:

• played on the computer for hours and hours. I've learned about balut from john patrick (something I wish desperately that I could un-see) and injera (which inspired my dish created for my Food Sharing Assignment next Tuesday) and seen incredible works of art like the one above (which looks like I feel right this second, a thousand things swirling around, individually odd, but collectively beautiful, so that you have to lie down to properly appreciate).
• spent many hours in bed. I stayed up til 4am, woke up at 11, and didn't truly get out of bed and shower until 2pm. What am I, like 15 or something?
• shaved my legs. This is more monumental than it sounds, since the last time I shaved my legs was at least a year ago, possibly more. I have resisted the urge many times, like the day before we practiced bathing in Skills lab, and before I got a pedicure. The urge to shave is always to avoid having to deal with someone else's discomfort or embarrassment on my behalf and I can get over that. But I bought skirts for summer, and cute sandals. shrug.
• shaved my head. It's been months, and I was really committed to the idea of growing it out long again. But yesterday the kid (who was the impetus for the grow-it-long again, because he said he couldn't remember me with long hair) said that it was cool with him, and now it's #4 guard on the sides and back, fingerlength on top and I can't stop rubbing my head again.
• bought 4 skeins of Cascade quattro for a prayer shawl for my friend. She was my mother-in-law, did I divorce her as well? She's my son's grandmother. She is inspiring and kind and sharp. She is often opaque. She has cancer in her bone marrow, that is apparently a recurrent form of the breast cancer that necessitated a double mastectomy ten years ago.
• dosed both cats with frontline, in hopes that the one that is allergic to fleas will stop eating himself on my bed. It is so hard to go to sleep with obsessive licking noises coming from the foot of the bed. Good night!

off to start my shawl and listen to john mayer.

Or search the internet and myriad knitting blogs for a pic of the exact shade of yarn I got today. blah. knitters are nuts.

It's a Big Big World

I was up till 4am reading at Obama's site, watching his YouTubes and typing a letter to him (which was embarrassingly autobiographical, and will need heavy editing before anyone but me and my cats see it). I finally got my copy of The Audacity of Hope from a long hold list at the library, and the library clerk told me that Obama is on her friends list on MySpace. How bizarre. It reminds me a bit of Clinton's sax playing on Saturday Night Live.

More than the intricacies of the internet, I'm a little shocked that politicians have time to write books. As I skim Audacity, I'm feeling grateful that this politician has written a book. It seems like a remedy for the sound bite. The idea of a sound bite offends me in part because I worry that someone (ie the politician) will think that I choose to get my information about a topic in that manner. I'd like the book, instead of the movie trailer. (Unless the trailer is for a two-hour documentary by Al Gore in which he sums up his life work thus far with heart-rending animation of floundering polar bears, in which case the movie will be an acceptable substitute, and the trailer a good teaser.)
An excerpt from The Audacity of Hope that caught me where I stood yesterday:

I understand the frustration of these activists. The ability of Republicans to repeatedly win on the basis of polarizing campaigns is indeed impressive. I recognize the dangers of subtlety and nuance in the face of the conservative movement's passionate intensity. And in my mind, at least, there are a host of Bush Administration policies that justify righteous indignation.
Ultimately, though, I believe any attempt by Democrats to pursue a more sharply partisan and ideological strategy misapprehends the moment we're in. I am convinced that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. For it's precisely the pursuit of ideological purity, the rigid orthodoxy and the sheer predictability of our current political debate, that keeps us from finding new ways to meet the challenges we face as a country. It's what keeps us locked in "either/or" thinking; the notion that we can have only big government or no government, the assumption that we must either tolerate forty-six million without health insurance or embrace "socialized medicine."
It is such doctrinaire thinking and stark partisanship that have turned Americans off of politics. This is not a problem for the right; a polarized electorate - or one that easily dismisses both parties because of the nasty dishonest tone of the debate - works perfectly well for those who seek to chip away at the very idea of government. After all, a cynical electorate is a self-centered electorate.

Typing this out made me read much more carefully! I hadn't seen how skillfully he enumerates the tactics of the Republican party, while ostensibly discussing the habits that thoughtful citizens should avoid. And on my first and second reading of this passage, I kept thinking of that study about how narcissistic college students these days are.
But on this reading, I'm struck by how he has captured the feeling that I have when I hear Cheney say things like "The American people won't tolerate a policy of retreat." Actually, that's exactly what I'd like to request, sir, and furthermore, it makes me feel hopeless, excluded, and insulted to hear my exact sentiments negated. Yes, I feel Cheney is still dangerous. He's certainly dangerous in a foreign policy sort of way, but he's also psychologically dangerous to Americans, when he reinforces ideas that are not held by the majority, with that nasty sneering tone that dares anyone to countermand him. It's bullying, and it makes me feel useless.

I've used up my blog time getting all these links (why can't research papers be written with links instead of those pesky citations!), and I haven't got time to wax poetic about political crushes. I need to think that one through anyway before I post it - it may be a bit heterocentric.

And I need to remember to add Suzette Haden Elgin's LJ to my links, as she is certainly one of my Favorites. Check out the entry on March 4th. Good stuff. She makes me want to make new words.

early morning dream

The kid and I were getting ready for work. He and I were both going to an elementary school to teach that day - the kid was subbing in one class and I had another class across the hall. We taught in the morning, and then around lunch we went to the gym for a training session. People were set up in pairs all around the edges of the gym, one "teacher" and one student. At one point, my kid had a meltdown because he couldn't get his student to do the exercise. Another teacher was yelling at him (my kid) and I came over, sat down and pulled him into my lap and told her to leave him alone. He cried for a minute and then got up and went back to the exercise (something with magnetic letters on a board).
There was a very disturbing part where I was trying to figure out to buy some cigarettes, and I went online and found a convenience store that sold them, and ordered some, but when I went to pick them up, I realized that I had actually ordered some porn, and everyone stared at me for bringing my kid with me to buy porn. I tried to explain, but the fact that I was only buying cigarettes seemed just as bad and we left. The guy behind the counter kept leering at us and it was all quite creepy.

The Reasons! The Reasons! The Reasons begin to fade

In my rush to get started on getting behind on my concurrent movie subscriptions, I ended up with Hitch twice. Will Smith would be my boyfriend if I was interested in having a boyfriend. Cliches? yes. Not enough nakedness? Of course. As feel-good as Pretty Woman was to me the first time? Indeed.

It also reminded me that for a couple years now, I've been aware of my pathetic music collection. I am not a person that buys CDs, because I can't afford them. I downloaded music for a while, but then felt like I didn't understand enough about the risks to keep doing it.

One ginormous Target shopping trip later, I have The Essential Earth Wind and Fire, Continuum by John Mayer (which I'm a little embarrassed by), and Licensed to Ill (which was my second cassette, Tiffany by Tiffany being the first). I'm psyched!

Of course, the kid walked into the bedroom and was all Mom, I turned off that music, I didn't like it.

All My Babies

Wow.

I arrived late to the screening of All My Births, and was graciously ushered in by the woman in charge. She said, I'm so glad you came, and you haven't missed the birth! The bit that I missed apparently set up the story of this rural midwife, practicing in Ga. in the 1950's. Part of the story (it's a scripted documentary, which is apparently pretty rare) was to follow one woman, who was actually a part of the community that Miss Mary served, and received good prenatal care. There was another woman who did not come for prenatal care, had had a history of stillborn premature babies and this character was portrayed by an actress.

The birth was incredible. The lead in was stunning. Long shots of Miss Mary scrubbing fingernails to elbows, and then still shots of her supplies laid out carefully around the bedroom on newspaper. She made this delicate little trash bag out of folded newspaper that she dropped her sterile gauze pads into after wiping the mother's vulva. Metal butter dishes filled with water and nailbrushes and more sterile gauze that had boiled on the wood stove. It was quiet, so quiet. There wasn't much moving around, either by Miss Mary or the laboring woman. The birth happens in real time on the film, from the crowning (which amazed me, because the head kept showing and then retreating, peeking out and then sliding back in, over and over!) to the delivery of the head, then shoulders, then slip the rest of the body, and there's a baby!

I cried as much about the tying of the cord as I did about the actual birth. Miss Mary said, "We're going to go on and cut you loose now, little one". I'm processing all the cardiovascular stuff we've been learning this week, about the rapid changes that occur as babies switch to breathing air from receiving the maternal oxygenated blood, and it had a much more emotional impact. Sometimes, learning the details of a process make it less real, more memorizable, more detached and clinical. To see this birth, and really understand what was happening within that child's heart while she's worked on him was astounding. I had to talk to myself about this very logically, because my first instinct was to think of the time in the birth canal like a code that would need to be called if it went on too long.

The sound was apparently all dubbed over, and that intrigued me. Was the filmmaker trying to make it easier to watch? Trying to emphasize that good births are quiet? Or trying to allow the visual to override the auditory? I was expecting more talking by Miss Mary, more chatter to calm the mother - but the chatter in my birthing room certainly didn't calm me, now that I think about it.

I had somehow gotten the impression that this film was intended as a cautionary tale, to show how backwards rural midwives were. And what the flyer that I picked up afterward said was that All My Births was intended to be a teaching tool for midwives of the time. The gracious woman from the Center for Documentary Studies said that the film has been deemed a work of art worthy of preservation into perpetuity, and seemed to think that a DVD might be available. Apparently, the filmmaker had made another film before this with a dry title like Contemporary Obstetrics Today that featured only white laboring women and clinicians. I'd be interested to see that, and see if they were hospital births, and how the two portrayals differed.

In other news, I think that my friend hung up on me today because I responded to her reports of nausea with a dissertation on borborygmi and the reflexive navel-clenching reflex.