Free time is for napping

Writing that last post, I was reminded of conversations C and I have had about vacations - what to do with free time, where to go, whether to go with people. It turns out that we're both reflexively pretty hermit-like: given time off, we'll stay home and lie around, or go to the beach and lie around, or (if we're feeling ambitious) go to Maui and lie around on the beach. When we get to choose what to do with our time, we tend to pick "not having responsibilities" over "trying new things". We both also get frustrated in about 5 minutes with crowds, obvious tourists, and people being clueless in public (though I repeat myself), so trips that are go-to good ideas for some people (Disney, Vegas, Mazatlan) are not even on the bottom of our list.

We know plenty of people who are Action Vacationers, who spend their free time climbing mountains or kayaking the San Juans or skiing every weekend*, who (I assume) would be appalled to go on vacation with us because we'd want to waste all that time doing nothing (while we'd be resentful of being dragged all over instead of taking a break; what do you think is the point of vacation, anyway?).

I don't have a point to make here: this is pretty obviously a matter of personality, and there isn't One True Way to go on vacation. We Lazy Vacationers should all band together so we can lie around with no pressure or guilt, and then maybe go get lunch. Who's interested?

*It's really obvious where I'm from, isn't it? Good thing I'm only semi-pseudonymous.

Whirlwind weekend

I know that plenty of people spend their weekends in constant motion, because they've been cooped up all week in a cubicle and there's so much fun stuff to do, or because they have two kids in three sports and life is just a constant soc-vol-swim-ball minivan roadshow, or because they have ambitious DIY plans for their house or yard. Plenty of people, sure, but not me. Pre-kid, I spent as much weekend time as possible with a huge Sunday newspaper and a pot of coffee.

Lately we've been trying to get out on the weekends (Nice weather! Local cities to explore! Not giving L couch-potato habits!), and we're falling into the typical German pattern. Grocery shopping on Saturday (stores are closed on Sundays), some time for going out Saturday morning, but Sunday is the main day for doing weekend things. This last weekend we finally got out to the outdoor swimming pool by L's kindergarten, which we've been meaning to do since last summer, and had a great time. There were a lot of other people there, but there was space for everyone. The pool is big, and split up to make room for serious lap swimmers, loungers, and splashing kids, and there is a huge lawn for people to lie around on. We did a little of everything - splashing, showing L some swimming basics, lying around watching the clouds - and immediately started planning to go back.

World Cup madness

It's the World Cup! Did you know? C and I sort of paid attention to it when we lived in Santa Cruz, mostly because we had friends from countries where the football is important. We'd go over to someone's house late at night, or to 99 Bottles (owned by a futbol fan) to watch games, but we didn't have that much invested. The US doesn't always qualify, the tournament is usually held far away, and we didn't grow up in a strong culture of soccer fandom. The US also doesn't often compete as a single entity in international sports events - there's the Olympics, but the World Cup isn't treated like a big deal, the Tour de France is more about the individuals than their national affiliations, and we're not even invited to Eurovision.

People here in HD are psyched, though. Every game in the tournament is on the public TV station, there are public viewings of Germany's games in parks and stadiums all over the country, and even in our sedate little suburby neighborhood there are flags on cars, hanging from windows, and temporarily tattooed on our kid (courtesy of a big kid at kindergarten).

I've been watching a lot of the games, and I feel like I'm not watching the way people here do. I want everyone to win! I'd be excited if the US team kept doing well (hey, I'm even wearing red, white and blue because of the game this afternoon), but mostly I want to see good teams play well, wherever they're from. This is in sharp contrast to how I would watch the World Series, by the way - growing up in Seattle, there are definitely teams I couldn't ever support (coughYankeescough). I'm going to take this "happy whatever happens" attitude about the World Cup as an unexpected advantage of being from a place where soccer success isn't a big part of my identity.

So I'm trying this thing

I like Shapely Prose. A lot. The three people who were writing there when I first started reading (Kate, Sweet Machine and Fillyjonk) had a big influence in my "your problem with me is *your* problem" version of self-esteem. The essays they wrote said what they meant, they drew out connections between past and present, society and self, and they said, so clearly that it may as well have been on the banner at the top of the page, "there is nothing wrong with you." I hear a lot of societal messages about the necessity of fixing what's wrong with you, making yourself better, and the terrible vanity of being happy as you are. Vain, and don't forget selfish! Don't you know people can see you? And you look like that? When you take these messages as truth, they're motivations to keep playing the game, looking for approval that you're never going to find.

It reminds me of Sarah Vowell's take on Puritans in The Wordy Shipmates, that their sincere belief that you could never tell if you were on God's good side kept them all looking over their shoulders, never able to relax, miserable in the knowledge that they were probably damned. There's no rest for people in search of external approval, especially from the incorporeal.

I've wandered a bit from where I started out meaning to go in this post, which is this: Shapely Prose has added and lost writers over the past few years, and right now Kate is the only one writing there (in addition to writing here and here), and I've developed a bad habit. I check for new articles all the time. Even though I'm pretty sure essays like this take time and revision, even though it's apparently taken me two months to write this bit of fanmail. So not only am I an inconsistent blogger, I'm a hypocrite too! Enjoy the irony here: what makes sense to me as a response is self-improvement on two fronts. I'll try to write something here when I'm mentally complaining that there isn't something new over there.

Not the typical kids & food post

Last weekend was Easter, which (since we're not what you'd call religious people) involved egg dyeing, egg finding, stashing a basket of candy in Liam's room while he was sleeping, letting him eat jellybeans at breakfast, and gardening. It's Wednesday night, and we've still got most of a chocolate bunny and a couple of chocolate eggs in the kitchen cabinet. Heck, we've still got halloween candy in the kitchen cabinet. Are we stingy with sugar? Sort of, but we (C and I) are also kind of forgetful, and Liam seems to have picked up the out of sight-out of mind gene. He doesn't ask for candy or sugar much, in my perception, and we've been letting him have easter-basket candy when he asks (as long as he isn't tired or otherwise unlikely to handle a sugar rush well).

The philosophy we've been aiming for in general is that of course we have sweets sometimes, but it's not a big deal. This is just one part of an overall philosophy that's at least a little informed by Ellyn Satter, where we aim for intuitive eating, an acceptance and enjoyment of variety, and nutrition (integrated over every day or two). There's some conflict with Liam's kindergarten's philosophy, which has a very black-and-white "healthy"/"not healthy" food classification, while I have no interest in endorsing cultural messages about food and morality.

Of course he'll change as he gets older, and who knows whether he'll broaden his tastes, or how many all-cheese or no-veg phases he'll go through, but for now we're all about emphasizing what we like about food, the pleasure of cooking for oneself and for friends, and the good it can do for your body. We'll just have to see whether he winds up with as many forgotten things hiding in the back of the pantry as I tend to have.

Both sides, now

I've been thinking about the health-care reform bill (hey, I may live Over Here, but I'm still American), and I've got really conflicted feelings about it. On the one hand, insurance-industry reform, enforced by regulators with real power, will save so much pain, so much money, so many lives. On the other hand, a single-payer public-option system could be much easier for the patients to navigate, less expensive when people have preventative care instead of problems compounded by neglect - but that also has to be run by people who believe it can work, and it will be terrible the minute someone with a "government small enough you could drown it in a bathtub" philosophy is in charge.

On the other other hand, watching the party I vote for get totally played by one person who apparently never read the platform, listening to the serious and thoughtful discussions about whether their female constituents' rights matter, do their votes really count anyway, why are they so wrapped up in irrelevant women's issues - I'm disgusted that they are the best I can realistically do for representatives in government.

I was happy to hear that a change to the student-loan structure was also part of the health-care reform bill; though the two don't directly connect in my mind, I've seen enough multi-part bills to know that sometimes this is how it gets done. Making federal student loans direct loans from the government, and putting the interest on them (money that had been no-risk profit for banks) into the Pell grant program sound like a great idea to me. I would like it even better if I knew that the amount of grant and loan money available to students was at least as much as it had been before the previous President started de-funding the programs. I heard an interesting spin on the combination of the two bills on an episode of Rachel Maddow from last week: a member of Congress said that health-care costs and college costs are things that middle-class people really worry about, and he thought it made good sense to address them both at the same time. I think he's got a point, though my quick agreement with him has me feeling a little melancholy. Mostly I'm reminded of a line of Joni Mitchell's, and it's making me feel old:

Caught in the middle, Carol, we're middle class, we're middle-aged...

I knew we should have stayed vegetarian!

I was putting Liam to bed tonight (which involves reading a book or two, then turning off the light and holding his hand until he's asleep or at least mellow enough not to mind my leaving, and sometimes singing Beatles songs), and he had a very unexpected response to a Dr. Seuss book.

He's funny about bedtime books: obsessively in love with whichever books are newest, and downright insulted if we try to read one that's not on the current favorites list. Surprisingly, though, he let C read "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish" to him this afternoon, even though it is not new. He wanted to read it again at bedtime, and when I got to the page with

I do not like this one so well.
All he does is yell, yell, yell!
I will not have this one about.
When he comes in, I put him out!

he said, very matter-of-factly, "when he comes in my house, I will punch him." I demurred, and said that really, you just have to put him outside so you don't have to hear the yelling, and he upped the ante: "I will make him dead."
"What? No."
"With fire. I will cook him and eat him."
"What? Okay, time to turn the page."

And he was happy and attentive for the rest of the book, and didn't seem to want to cook or eat any of the rest of the characters, but wow, I wasn't expecting that. He's been talking about superheroes and punching for months now (thanks, big kids at school!), and about punching ghosts and monsters, and hey, if it makes him feel better at bedtime, I can go along with it.

He started with the subject of death a few weeks ago, and we're completely improvising: it's something that happens to everyone, but nobody he knows will be dying anytime soon; it's sad to have someone you love be gone, but that's why it's important to love them and have fun with them now while they're alive; hey, look at that bird over there! I hadn't expected him to put food into that context, and it's pressing all my guilty quasi-vegetarian buttons.