fear of a bored planet?

I just read a post over at another blog about this thing called Swinx. At first glance, it looks cool - a robot who entertains kids interactively. But what it boils down to someone preventing kids from getting bored. There are such devices for adults too. What's with the hatred and fear of boredom? Learning to entertain yourself is a powerfully important lesson for life. Being a bored is also incredibly useful - what happens when you run out of things you can or want to do? where does your mind go? what does it tackle? ultimately, it tells you what makes you happy.

model NSB: includes entertain-self feature

Growing up, I didn't have a tv. In the hours and hours of unstructured after school play, I got bored only very rarely. We did a lot of imaginative play with our neighbors. One of my favorite things was when Christine would tell us all about an episode from the A-team (often totally made up), and we'd re-enact it. Or we'd cast ourselves in the roles from Grease (not sure why I was the male romantic lead and not my brother and um, also not sure why my face was painted blue with a yellow lightning strike down the center). We built dirt cities for our matchbox cars (called The Carplace), we built forts, we climbed fences, and we generally had a great time. We had to do a lot of learning about how to interact with each other, how to make up a game that would work for 4 different kids with 4 different interests and abilities. We even learned some commerce, by pooling our money to buy 4 big thick plywood boards for advanced fort-making. One thing we never ever did was have an adult dictate for us what we were going to do, let alone a robot. Sure, at parties that happened, and we did play boardgames. But bottomline: on a daily basis, we had to chance to get bored and we worked it out. We got unbored.

But stuff like that swinxs is really different. If it just kept score or served as a timer, cool. that can be creative. But it doesn't. It turns kids (and adults) into participants in a script, not writers, editors and, in some cases, proof-readers of The Play. I say: that shit SUCKS. I wanted to have the chance to do all the things. I wanted to say what was allowed and not in my universe. I want Nunzio and all his little compatriots to have that chance too. I don't want their lives to be scripted by anyone. certainly not a robot made by a company that makes way-too-expensive strollers.

approaching warp speed, prepare the drives!

Nunzio is now 17 months old. s e v e n t e e n of them months. It's nutty. The days are just barreling by, like a toddler with two pull toys with different length strings. It's like standing close to the railroad tracks when a freight train goes by - you can hear the whap! whap! whap! of the boxcar-days. and feel the compressed air roll by. I guess the days go by fast because Nunzio is changing a lot and the days are really filled. It makes me want to sit down and weep, because these days are not ones that I want to whip past! Actually, there were none I'd like to have had whip past yet, in my 34 years.
I thought about that, how the older you get the faster the days seem to disappear behind you. I guess it's because once you hit a certain point, your rate of change slows down. So things that used to take a long time, don't take as long anymore, relatively speaking. And as you get older and older, your rate of change must become glacial. Imagine how fast a day would be for a great grandma, living under the same roof with all her descendants! You'd be changing so immensely slowly compared to that little baby, you'd blink and there babyhood would be over. And what if it's a multiplicative effect??
I'd love to find a way to slow down, at least without speeding up. Meditation seems to slow you down even more. Coffee is like an on-ramp to moving faster, but the level of control isn't good enough. Anyone have any secrets?

global burden

Too long ago, my brand new Jolie Holland cd jammed our subaru's cd player. Sometime after that, I started listening to NPR on the way too and from Nunzio's daycare. Yeah, I hit KALX often, but NPR around 9am & 5pm is often better. What I've noticed is that I've opened myself up to a lot more sorrow and sadness. In the space of a week, I probably hear about the circumstances of 50 deaths, at least 10% of which are children. I hear about dire conflict between states and peoples, horrible stories of extremely prejudicial race relations, and all sorts of depressing and hopeless situations. And on none of these situations can I make an impact. Yet, I hear them, I am affected by them, and I carry the stories with me for the rest of my life. Sounds melodramatic, but many of the stories I hear cannot be forgotten.

Something is wrong with this. Yes, something is wrong with all the strife and war and injustice on the planet. no question there. but something is wrong with my brain and soul trying to hold all of this sorrow and hopelessness. My species evolved in much much smaller circles. Circles where it was myth to hear of more than 1000 people dying at once. Circles where the losses came regularly, but not multiple times a day. There was a break from it. In our world of global news, there is no break. no respite. no moment to breathe and celebrate. It is an unflinching march of depressing news from NPR and most other news outlets. It's hard to take, and I'm guessing actually, impossible to take. So what does one do? Are our everyday lives illuminated by knowing about the struggle of others? Do I appreciate my child more for every child who's life is reported as lost? Can I even comprehend the "news" a true events happening to other human beings? I'm really not sure. I keep listening, but I have yet to really understand what I'm getting out of it.

fresno, not just a boring suburb.

I was in Fresno over the last two days. Most people think of Fresno as an icky place. I would generally agree, it ain't my cup of tea. It's an enormous suburbia without a City to go with it. It does have some very very pretty neighborhoods with beautiful old houses. There are even large 1 acre lots in the middle of the city, with mini orchards and plenty of room for chickens. Assuming your neighbor wouldn't mind a few missing decorative cabbages. Fresno always reminded me of my suburban upbringing, but with all the gross parts in high relief. I'd never really thought about the social context outside of the suburbanity of it all.

Today as I was driving around west Fresno, picking my pine needles and singing along to Bill Monroe, I saw I sign that made me tearful. It was a church announcement board, and it said, "Free Groceries this Sunday!" West Fresno is generally poor, and this drove it home. Free groceries? well, crap, that's pretty much as poor as you can get without being homeless. A few minutes later I was picking some needles next to one of those cinderblock privacy walls. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a Dish Network dish attached to one of the "storage sheds" on the other side of the wall. I turned and realized that, oh fuck, that isn't a storage shed, it's a really tiny, old, crammed in trailer in a cramped trailer park. The remaining time in Fresno was pretty depressing. All I could see was the poverty. When I came home tonight to my warm, spacious, pookie-filled apartment, I felt like I was being swallowed up in the lap of luxury.

several notes to self

in no particular order...note to self,

1. if you take off the baby's poo-filled diaper and leave it where he can plant his foot in it, he will.
2. no matter how tasty the ceviche was yesterday, it's probably a bad idea to eat the leftovers today.
3. if you devoted yourself to a clean & neat house, you'd have to give something else up. maybe surfing the internet, but maybe sewing. hard to predict. better not to go there at all.
4. sometimes the foods that are really really good for you are actually the more expensive foods! go figure, but don't get too hung up.
5. occam's razor is often true. badumdum.
6. the baby is really not a baby anymore. just sayin'.
   

and last, remember the great quote you saw on the internets about how where you spend your time and expend your energy is where you express your love.

I'd give it a....

have you noticed that you can rate everything? If I have blogged about this before, I hope you've forgotten also. I just find it astounding the extent to which I can add my wee (not screaming, unlike some Nunzio's who will remain anon.) voice to the clamor. On amazon, for example, I can rate something, rate someone else's written rating/review, and even comment on someone's written rating/review. It's...amazing. You can rate your dinner, your massage, your haircut, your mortgage broker, and probably, your partner online. At first it seemed useful, but limited. Now it seems ridiculous.

ugh. Nunzio is giving "going to sleep" zero out of 9million stars tonight. with 9million being putting on his own diaper & PJs and levitating into the crib. I guess I have to go snorgle him again, it's been long enough.

sigh, where did all the love go?

I do actually remember bits of the books I read. Not all of them, but lots! I may even have posted this before, but I think about the Left Hand of Darkless a lot. Specifically, I think about the central issue of asking questions to get the answer you want. When I got pregnant 2 years ago and started to have vague worries about what my body would be like post-all-this-babyness, I knew it would be like the questions in LHofD. In other words, I could predict the result, but it would still somehow be drastically different than I expected.
My body is smaller than where it started 2 years ago. Smaller. And, unpredictably, I am not happy about this. You would think, in this culture where skin & bones is sexy that I would like it. No way. When I was measured for bras last week, I was disappointed that my rib cage is the smallest it's been since who knows when. It's because I have no back muscles! I am a weakling!
This has been on my mind a lot in the last couple of weeks, since Dan & I have started a new evening schedule. He goes out to taiji MWF, and I have the option of going out TTh & a third time over the weekend. Historically, I have hated working out in the evening, preferring to read or socialize. But my body is soft and that just feels wrong. I just looked up and saw that the pool is usually open on thursday nights until 9pm.....I can't work on my tan, but I could work on getting back some beautiful hulking muscles.