Monday, November 29, 2010

Finding the edges of things

Having never taken Psychology in college I am in the midst of listening to the podcast of Yale's Intro Psych course. It is expectedly fascinating and ripe for discussion. One theme that's come up twice now is the brain's excellent ability to pick out the edges of things. To distinguish between words even when there is no measurable gap between the last phoneme of one word and the first phoneme of the next. To separate a visual perception into distinct objects amid a jumble of colors, brightnesses, and depths that any landscape presents. In both cases, the brain can be fooled by clever psychologists, visual illusions being the best known.

This gets me thinking about great acuity in finding the edges of all sorts of other things besides spoken language and visual stimuli, and about how and when that edge finding ability can be confused. What is the edge between my emotional involvement in my marriage and my spouses? Where is the edge between the set of strangers who are members of "my tribe" (think Brooklyn or Somerville, not Kikuyu or Lao) and those who are not, one to be trusted the other to be feared? How do I instantly sort the dangers of modern life the street into real and figmentary? What's the edge of reasonable caution? What's the edge between frugality and wastefulness? Finding edges seems wrapped up in sorting, about putting some concept or stimulus in one category and its neighbor in another category. I have absorbed from many a popular science article or documentary that some huge proportion of my brain is devoted to visual processing. Can I, do I, tap into that to make distinctions in other categories of thought?

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: last of the granola
lunch: turkey noodle soup
dinner: Ezra's chickpeas with spinach and peppers

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Living on a wage

Santa Monica has a pretty typical living wage ordinance. Yay. All businesses receiving contracts from the city must provide a living wage of at least $11.50 (2004 dollars) to their staff. This vaguely controversial concept was put in place after a much more unique living wage ordinance was proposed, passed, and repealed in 2000-2002 that, for a brief time, required all major businesses in downtown Santa Monica, specifically the big hotels on and near the beach, to offer a living wage, and encouraged those businesses to offer health care as well. The hotels rebelled, and funded a $400,000 campaign to repeal via a referendum proposition, which passed, barely. This applies to the documented workforce only, of course.

I can't decide whether to be proud of my more-liberal-than-the-neighborhood city or saddened that the  business interests (boo hiss big business) succeeded at overturning the more expansive law. Certainly I wouldn't want to try to live on the $8.00/hour California minimum wage, not anywhere on the Westside, not anywhere in LA, not anywhere in the US, really. But $11.50 doesn't sound much better, either. Incremental wage increases can make a real difference in lifestyle, like the difference between renting a garage and sleeping on a cot and renting a room in a house with a bed. Other policy changes can make real differences too, like increased access to health clinics, schools, and parks. Those seem like slightly harder problems to solve, particularly for a small, compact, wealthy town like Santa Monica that is far too expensive to live in on $11.50 an hour.

Yesterday's run destination: I ran a 5K! 21:04 in the Santa Monica Turkey Trot

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: croissant quarters
lunch: turkey noodle soup
dinner: turkey pot pie and cheesy mashed potatoes

Easy solutions

Easy solution to shrinking your carbon footprint: fly less

Easy solution to balancing your household budget: move to a smaller place

Easy solution to eating a healthier diet: cook for yourself

Easy solution to keeping your house clean: Roomba?

Friday, November 26, 2010

Wonders around every corner

Uncharitably, Dorothy Parker described Los Angeles as "seventy-two suburbs in search of a city." Today's mini-adventure makes me think seventy-two little communities isn't necessarily such a bad thing. Just on the other side of the 405, a few blocks from the park with the fantastic accessible Aidan's Place playground, lies Little Persia. LA has a lot of Little [Country or City], including Little Ethiopia, Little Tokyo, Little Armenia, and even more -towns, (Chinatown, Filipino Town, Thai Town, etc.) by far the biggest of which is Koreatown, which is more a district than a consolidated ethnic enclave.

Little Persia has bookstores, restaurants, travel agencies, rug dealers, music lessons, video stores, health clinics, ice cream shops, saffron, Sadaf brand spices and chick peas and pickles and rose water, detailed flyers hung up all in Farsi except for the words "Bally's Hotel," Mercedes on the street, sunglasses as hairbands, "Salaam" as greeting, young people on cell phones, old people in the aisles, well lit storefronts and dim but inviting dining rooms behind partially drawn curtains, babies, people smiling at babies, chatter, and a matter of fact everyday bustle. We had the white rose ice cream, which was sticky and delicious, but declined to pour a shot of sour cherry syrup over it.

Yesterday's run destination: around the country club

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: cereal
lunch: hummus sandwich
dinner: Thanksgiving

Thursday, November 25, 2010

Once I won the Turkey Trot. Twice, really.

Once upon a time Maia and Jon decided to run in the Turkey Trot. They were friends and neighbors and teammates on the Cross Country team and also liked math and science class. Even though the standard Cross Country course, and the only races they had ever run were five kilometers and the Turkey Trot was ten kilometers, they thought if they went slowly and stuck together, they would make it. And they did. Up hills and down hills around the school and past Jon's house as the course went its way around the town. Upon finishing, in about an hour, and walking around a bit downtown, they plopped into the Community Center's multipurpose room seats to hear the top times and see who won the turkey. Jon was surprised, and pleased, to be called up to accept the trophy for the first place finish for the Men's under 15 age category. Maia was surprised, and pleased, to be called up to accept the trophy for the first place finish for the Women's under 15 age category. Then, when no second or third place winners were called, they figured it out.

The next year, the same thing happened, but with around 18 fewer minutes of running.

Yesterday's run destination: up the hill

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: cereal
lunch: lentils on pasta
dinner: pizza!

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Bullish on the future, today

Today I am bullish on the future, even the future of Los Angeles. I am not worried about water. There is plenty of water. Only one fifth of Southern California's water goes to domestic use, the rest goes to agriculture, and California agribusiness pays around 1/100th what residential customers think it's worth. LA doesn't have water problems. The Imperial Valley has water problems. I walked to the library today, past supermarkets and bus lines, parks and apartment buildings (and also past traffic and SUVs, McMansions and streets empty of pedestrians), and found my little city of Santa Monica to be planned, compact, exquisitely well cared for. Gasoline prices may rise with the rise of India and China, even without declining oil supplies, but Santa Monica will adjust, with its mix of businesses, dense residential living, constant draws like the beach and the weather and the proximity of LA. And there's light rail coming shortly, and a subway down the line. This corner of this sprawling metropolis will do just fine.

Yesterday's run destination: Berkeley and Olympic

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: salsa cheddar omlette
lunch: yet more potatoes
dinner: lentil soup

Monday, November 22, 2010

Bathtime is fun time

Miriam usually gets a bath in the evening, signaling the beginning of the bedtime process. She has a big bag of bath toys, the five small cups with lids, the two large cups, the five milk bottles, the watering can, turtle friend, whale-y, the two fish, and pink squirter. The bath gets quite full and when I'm interested in playing we have a bit of fun pouring water from one cup, lining all the animals up on the edge of the bath, and other games. Bath time's end, or at least the end of the playing phase of the bath, happens when Miriam stands up and starts gesturing towards the towels. Sometimes we do some actual washing afterwards, usually not.

Tonight was a little different. I didn't empty the toy bag into the tub but just pulled out one of the large cups. Miriam looked smaller than usual, even with her long legs stretched out. For 10 minutes she made her own fun. She splashed. She drew with beads of water on the side of the tub. She looked at the warping of the water as she moved her hands below. She knelt and crawled and put her mouth just above the surface of the water. She picked bits of lint from between her toes and tried to grasp them as they floated through the water. I watched, wordlessly, as she tried her regular quick and confident full hand grab, only to see the fluff float away. After a few tries she slowed down, switched to a pincer grip familiar from last year, and, to my mild surprise, grabbed the fluff. Then it was stuck on her finger, clearly a wrong place for it, and that started off another round of splashing.

Yesterday's run destination: Franklin and Pennsylvania

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: cereal
lunch: cheesy mashed potatoes
dinner: salami sandwich

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Running to stay still

Murry baby not quite hurt or in pain or needing much of anything but something and can't use her words or perhaps know what it is she wants drives daddy to distraction and helplessness of trying to help or entertain or calm because those murrs aren't crying but they aren't happy either.

Yesterday's menu:
Queasiness uber alles. Some juice and a bit of toast.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Communicating processes

One minor theme running through the field of science communication has been the challenges and really creative ways people come up with to understand processes. Biology particularly is full of them. Cells growing and dividing, DNA replicating, populations at every level increasing and decreasing. I remember learning about them in HS Bio through sequences of little illustrations, prose descriptions, and the occasional video that looked like a VHS version of a filmstrip.

These days, there are lots of options. Computer simulation videos, models you can move and manipulate, dance, role-playing games ("You have been selected against. Would you like to play again?"). They're not cheap, they're easy to do poorly, and the whole lesson can devolve into playing with the models rather than using them to understand the process at hand, but when it works, it leaves a great understanding of how the various parts of a system interact with each other and change over time.

Yesterday's run destination: around the country club

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: Cinnamon Toast Crunch
lunch: ice cream sandwich
dinner: week old lasagna, which may have made me sick

Monday, November 15, 2010

All I really want is a ball

For a year or two I got involved with MIT's Toy Product Design class, a mechanical engineering introduction to product design and development. There were great inspiring lectures, lovingly crafted and obsessively presented, with music, in-class activities, costumes, prizes, comic timing, and a good deal of information about how to brainstorm, alone and in groups, how to communicate ideas, refine them, to design useful not just possible objects, draw them, prototype them, and build them. I was a mentor to the undergraduate students and learning as I went. The students came up with lots and lots of fantastic ideas, some complicatedly impractical, and created great, if not universally playable, prototypes for each of the checkpoints that took the place of tests, midterms, and finals. They, we, were asked to be curious, creative, open to each other's ideas, to place themselves in the the shoes of the potential purchaser, both the kid looking for a fun toy and the parent who controls what toys will be purchased.

But as I move farther from the joyful we-can-invent-anything energy of that university setting and learn a bit more about how children actually play from some extensive firsthand experience, I think the whole exercise, while a great training in industrial design, is besides the point for what kids actually want. My inner child, informed by watching kids on the playground, in the nursery, at the beach, and in the church community, just wants a ball. I want a nice, big, solid, bouncy ball, to roll and sit on and bounce and throw and come up with little games to play with. If I can't have that, a cardboard box would be ok.

Yesterday's run destination: Janna's house

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: crepes
lunch: nosh around the leftovers
dinner: linguine and meatballs

Saturday, November 13, 2010

Farmers Market of the people

I've been trained on a 21st century New England farmers market model. A good market has 10 or 15 vendors selling fruits and vegetables, meat, bread, jams, eggs, maybe a few stalls with handicrafts. The food is local, dirty, as cheap as the supermarket and cheaper when different crops are at their peak. It is fresh, ripe, delicious. Signs are handcrafted. Staff are young and idealistic, sometimes dirty from farming. They got up early to pack and leave the farm to come to the market, 5 miles away, or 45. Some stalls are organic, or if not, the farmer can tell me what they do or do not use on the fields, why they are basically organic but haven't applied for the designation because their fields are small or oblong and too close to a non-organic operation next door or about something called Integrated Pest Management which sounds satisfyingly science-y and earthy. The foods change with the season, from peas through kale to tomatoes and squash. They inspire looking up and reinventing historic recipes, eating with the seasons, figuring out what exactly, if anything, can be done with kohlrabi.

Santa Monica isn't like that. The food looks great, tastes great, comes is great variety, subspecies of plums and citrus and cucumbers that I've never heard of before. But it is a business venture first and foremost. The staff under the tents are employees of the farm, and in most cases don't work on the farm. Some have never visited the farm. Farm in California tends to mean an agribusiness-scale operation, dozens or hundreds of acres, migrant labor, monied landholding interests, and always always irrigation with federally and state subsidized water. The staff have information about its location, and maybe its farming practices, but are more focused on the person next to me actually trying to buy something than chatting overly much. Some are young and cheerful and idealistic, at least until their next audition. Many are just working their job. The food is around the same price as the supermarket and there's a sinking feeling these are the same avocados as find their way into groceries across the country. Every week there are tomatoes, oranges, greens of all sorts, beans, celery, onions, pecans, peaches, sprouts, carrots, jujubes, dates, olives, persian, english, and japanese cucumbers, and tomatoes, lots and lots of varieties of tomatoes. There is a big Saturday market, and a big Wednesday market, and within a few miles there are markets on Thursdays and Sundays. The food comes from the far reaches of Los Angeles County, from Ventura, peaches from the desert and apples from San Diego. There is a minor scandal running through the LA Times about surreptitious reselling of commodity wholesale produce. The markets are packed, successful, profitable, filled with cheerful Santa Monicans seeing each other, passing by tourists goggling over the beauty of the food, generally ignoring the couple homeless beggars and buskers camped out in the central plaza of a market that spills out onto six blocks of traffic-free streets. Like so much of Southern California, it feels more transactional than relational, as if that's how people want it.

Yesterday's walk destination: Hillside Woods

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: spikey biscuits
lunch: bagel and lox
dinner: turkey and gravy, stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cranberry bread, green beans, salad, superb chocolate cookies, pie, fruit salad, ice cream, coffee

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Bumper sticker of the week

Becca and I joke around about putting a whiteboard bumper sticker on our car. Whenever a bumper sticker-type slogan pops into our heads, it would go on the car, but only until the next slogan. This started two cars ago but we never actually sullied our (not exactly ) pristine vehicles with anything more rambunctious than a Simmons College window decal. Early bumper sticker concepts stuck to established routes, along the lines of Visualize Whirled Peas or Soy Latina y Voto, but by this point we are baroque and self-referential in our selections of phrases from the print media and conversations that permeate home life here among the Bijurs. This week's bumper sticker: "You're either a cutie patootie or a big lame-o"

Yesterday's run destination: ?

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: granola with bananas
lunch: lentils and rice
dinner: ratatouille, chicken kebab, popovers, greens salad, lemon-ginger-basil fizz

Monday, November 8, 2010

Four favorite museum memories

For a year or two my mom brought me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art most Saturdays. Considering we spent a few dozen hours in the museum I came back to it as a teenager then an adult surprised at how much of the museum was new, never before seen. Those Saturday morning visits had a particular route: as fast as possible through Egypt to the Temple of Dendur, then upstairs and off to European Painting and Sculpture. I would always stand in front of the two Cot paintings, of the child couple on the swing and of them as teenagers running from a storm. I remember realizing at some point that their feet were in the wrong place, too close, and they were going to bump into each other on their next step.

When I was seven or so we went to the American Museum of Natural History and to the gems and minerals hall. Set into the edge of a raised carpeted area, with access from two or three levels for different sized people to access it was a polished touchable giant geode, flat across with deep colors and shine. I slid down it like a playground.

At Mass MOCA in farthest northeast rural Massachusetts Becca and I entered an installation of 1,000,000 pieces of paper, a vast hangar of a space in that repurposed post-industrial museum. Over the course of the exhibit, a few months, the paper steadily fell to form a snowy layer to shuffle through, lay down, make piles, throw paper fights. I liked it at the time, good among many good artworks seen that day, but Becca has remembered it to me every few months or years since then and each time it is mentioned it gets cooler and more important.

Yakima doesn't have much to recommend it. Its a rural county capitol, spread out too much to have much of a city center, crosscut with grain silos and railway spurs, uneasily increasingly hispanic. The Yakima Art Museum was a delightfully tiny and substantial institution. A little old lady took our money, then turned out to be the curator/director/proprietor's mother, helping out for the day. He brought us into collections storage when I told him I worked with Native American Art collections and showed us drawer after drawer of Paiute pottery and arrowheads. Then we wandered off back among the galleries and admired the stagecoaches and neon sign collection.

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: banana nutella crepes
lunch: leftover quesadilla
dinner: gourmet homemade hamburgers and Kenji's ersatz McDonalds fries

Sunday, November 7, 2010

The longer now

One of my favorite ideas (though one I don't do too much about except use as a guide for selecting reading material) is the concept of the Long Now, in part as espoused by the Long Now Foundation and its adherents. A long now viewpoint thinks in centuries or even millennia rather than months and years. I'm not quite up to working towards plans that have more than a millennium as their due date, as the foundation does, but I have been talking a bit in recent weeks about hundred year plans.

One of the founding myths of the Long Now is a story of New College, Oxford. When, sometime in the 20th century, the giant oak beams running across the New College dining hall, had rotted and needed to be replaced, no sufficient wood could at first be found. The Forester of the college, manager of the college's forests when asked if any appropriate trees were available, gladly volunteered up trees that had been planted when the college had been formed, in the 14th century. New oak seedlings were planted for the next time the roof needs to be replaced, a few hundred years from now. (of course, the story isn't quite as simple as that, but it's good enough for myth)

The biggest endeavor I can be a part of that will have a positive effect 100 years from now is the raising of responsible, able, happy children. In my own decisions and use of resources, choosing where and how to live, what to consume, what to work towards, I contribute to a society that leaves to the next generation a social fabric, environment, and knowledge of the universe, but the biggest impact is the creation and forming of the people who will inhabit that generation, and their interests and abilities to form the generation after them. That said, the decisions I (we?) make now, leave a built environment and a natural environment, that is of our own design, or at least responsibility. Which, when I think too much about it, makes moving to the semi-desert of Southern California seem a little irresponsible. When I try to imagine LA in 2100, I see more apocalypses, droughts, abandoned sagebrush dusty empty streets stretching out for hundreds of miles, than I did from quiet, wintry New England. Though I can think about the prayer/lecture I heard from Andy Lipkis of Treepeople at Rosh Hashanah and of the power and sustainability of the trees that covered the region (not in forest, but among the savannahs, in groves, and in the canyons) before development and about his line on how trees and people need about the same amount of water, so that where you have trees you can have people, and calm down a little about the fragility of civilization in this semidesert. It's not a desert. It's semi. Like lots of interesting, civilized places around the world.

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: donuts
lunch: burritos
dinner: grilled cheese and paired beers party

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Voting with children

Yesterday was the culmination of Miriam's first election season.It felt different from previous elections to me. There are so many changes in my life right now (new state, new city, new friends, new job, new parental status) that it is quite hard to tease out causes, but I think a big one is the little one playing with her legos over yonder.

I felt underinformed in a more substantial way that most previous elections, going back at least to voting in college when I had almost know idea of what was going on in local politics. I'm about 60% of the way to being a political junkie and feel pretty well informed on national issues and candidates (though ask me to name what Waxman, who happens to be my Congressional representative is known for and I would say "um...maybe financial reform?" and would be wrong, sez google, he's best known right now for a Climate Change bill) but I had next to know idea about who to vote for in the Santa Monica city council or school board races. I don't even really know what the issues to vote over are.

Having only been here a few months I can cut myself some slack for not being totally up on local issues, but I've also been here a few months and am a little surprised that I'm not totally up on local issues. Which I attribute to watching and worrying over and loving the ever so active bundle of joy who fills my days and my nights with her cries, giggles, and wanderings.

Yesterday's run destination: around the block

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: eli breakfast sandwich, omlettes
lunch: chicken and mashed potatoes
dinner: pasta salad

Monday, November 1, 2010

Plays well with others

I try not to find gender differences among babies and toddlers. I start with desiring non-gender specific clothing and haircuts. I try, when faced with a toddler who is obviously dressed as a boy or a girl, to picture them with their opposite gender, as a reminder that I unconsciously treat little boys and little girls differently. I am not read up on child psychology to know about real cognitive differences between male and female at, say, age 18 months, but I know enough about the science of gender differences to think of difference as merely the distance between the centerpoints of two normal distributions of traits, not as a guarantee that all girls are more [whatever] than all boys. I have deep expert knowledge of the psychology and physical abilities
of only an extremely small sample size of baby girls, and none of baby boys, and I am told by such unbiased sources as grandparents, friends of the family, and professional colleagues, that said baby girl is exceptional, which is to say non-representative of anyone but herself. So my broader observations of the reality or fiction-imposed-by-gendered-adults of gender differences among toddlers are a bit skewed.

Yesterday's run destination: trick or treat!

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: banana smoothie and cookies
lunch: souplantation
dinner: quesadillas