Salem Witch Trials, Redux

I do all of my best thinking in the car or in the bathroom. This week, I was tooling around in the l’il Honda CR-V, listening to NPR and ruminating. I’m trying hard not to closely follow the Republican race to the primary, but with the Iowa Straw Poll just passed and Texas Governor Rick Perry overshadowing Michele Bachmann, I can’t help but compare people of his ilk to the accusers at the Salem Witch Trials.

What is up with people insisting that evolution is “a theory that’s out there”? I mean, really. Perhaps there are aspects of evolution that can be quibbled over, but homo sapiens sapiens didn’t just drop down out of the sky because of divine intervention. Yet creationists insist, are nearly rabid in their beliefs, that evolution is just a theory that should not be given more credence than intelligent design. Witches were accused and tried because of family rivalries, bad reputations, or being of a different ethnicity. They were accused of afflicting others with witchcraft or making an unlawful covenant with the Devil.

How these charges were proven, I don’t understand, based upon my bias toward modern-day methods. There was no scientific or careful examination of the facts. Torture was used as a matter of course to extract confessions from the accused.

What I’m saying about creationists like Rick Perry is that they don’t base their beliefs on facts. They succumb to the mass hysteria of bible-thumpers. What is so wrong with believing in evolution? Why do humans think that they as a species are somehow more important than any other living thing, that there is a god that makes them in his image? Wouldn’t there be a dog-god, a capybara-god, or a redwood-god, a dung-beetle-god, and so on?

On creating

One of my great loves in life is writing poetry. I came to it relatively recently or, rather, it called to me. I’ve never been an avid purveyor of poetry, but appreciate the art and craft of certain poets.

I love creating. Accent on the period. It’s elating, elevating, fascinating to make something out of nothing, or to make something out of raw materials. To shape it, mold it, stretch it, caress it, love it until it becomes something that is a part of you and yet not a part of you. It becomes part of the world.

One of these days I’ll post my poems.

Postscript: I put some of my poems online for a couple of days, then realized that if I ever wanted to submit them for poetry contests and the like I can’t have them online. So they’re no longer available to the public until after I’ve submitted them to places, if I ever get around to doing that.

A Few Funny Things About Ethan

Funny Item No. 1: We all went to Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides about a week or so ago. Ethan *loved* it. “It’s my favorite Pirates of the Caribbean movie!” he says. Wait until he finds out that they are going to make Pirates 5. Who knows if Johnny Depp will agree to be in this installment. Ugh.

What has kept me amused is his obsession with Barbossa’s pegleg. He is fascinated with the pegleg. You know, the one that when you take it off and remove the screw top, you can take a swig of rum. “Only pirates drink rum,” says Ethan. Pirates and other alcoholics.

Funny Item No. 2: Ethan gets up earlier during summer vacation and any weekend day than he does during a school year weekday. Absolutely true. He was up and at ‘em this morning, the first official non-school day of the summer vacation, at 6:30. Bothering us while we attempted to laze about in bed. Begging us to let him play Wii Sports Resort. We finally caved and went to the gym.

Funny Item No. 3: Ethan can charm almost any adult. He has a gift. It’s an amazing thing to watch, how he works a room full of people.

Funny Item No. 4: Ethan has incredible focus. It’s one of his superpowers. He can spend literally hours building Lego scenes. His latest favorite thing is building Pirates of the Caribbean scenes. I love his creativity and execution.

Funny Item No. 5: Ethan can still fall asleep on his dad’s tummy, as he did last night. Lately, he’s all about his dad, which seems to be par for the course in my life. Both of my boys are fully dedicated to their father, favoring him over me almost every time. Sigh. The trials and tribulations of being a mom.

Happy birthday, Nat

You know, it occurs to me that I never got around to writing a happy birthday message to Ethan on his 6th birthday in February. Life gets in the way. I have to remind myself constantly that details matter, that blindly cruising along is not really living.

Nat turns 15 today, 9:43 p.m. The labor to end all labors, except we mysteriously decided that we should have another nearly nine years later. Nat is a curious sort, obsessed with some typical teenage boy things like video games and manga and hanging out with his friends. And I think he’s starting to get interested in the opposite sex, though he keeps this on the down-low. You won’t see him fawning all over a girl–I’m not sure he ever will. I think he could use a few lessons from his dad and me in how to be good to a girl/woman so she’ll want to stay around.

If there is one thing I would want for Nat, that is to find the thing(s) that give him a raison d’être. Oh, I know the usual platitude–life is a journey and not a destination–but my deepest wish for him is to find a passion that drives him. Something to guide him. I worry that he lacks motivation and essentially eddies around, trolling for whatever passes by and catches his fancy. I suppose if he has a strong enough ethical and moral character, that’s not such a bad way to go through life. As long as he isn’t living with us when he’s 30.

I wish for Nat to experience passion, in whatever form. I want him to feel, to experience life to its fullest, to give as much of himself as he can, because I believe it’s in the giving that you truly receive. I would lay down my life for Nat, and I thank him every day in my heart for being my son.

Something for today

We’ve had a spate of hail, rain and semi-cold weather over the past couple of days here in SF. Rain makes me deliriously happy–I love the sound, the feeling, walking in the rain, running in the rain, sipping hot tea while watching the rain. My heart leaps into my throat when I’m taking a stroll, under the safety of my umbrella, in the rain. It’s primal, it’s nature at its most mundane and yet its finest, and I relish every second of rain. The only thing that tops a rainstorm is a thunderstorm. Now that’s awesome majesty.

So, in light of today’s fine weather (is it really dull to talk about weather such as we’ve had recently?), I am posting the following poem.

The Rain by Robert Creeley

All night the sound had   

come back again,

and again falls

this quiet, persistent rain.

 

What am I to myself

that must be remembered,   

insisted upon

so often? Is it

 

that never the ease,   

even the hardness,   

of rain falling

will have for me

 

something other than this,   

something not so insistent—

am I to be locked in this

final uneasiness.

 

Love, if you love me,   

lie next to me.

Be for me, like rain,   

the getting out

 

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-

lust of intentional indifference.

Be wet

with a decent happiness.

Monument of love

I am the luckiest woman on the planet. Brian conceived of and executed the most awesome present I could ever imagine. My own space. He calls it “shjed” and I call it “woman-cave”. It’s a little edifice in the backyard, where our playhouse used to be. Can I just say that I absolutely love it? For the first time, I used this space today. It was a perfect day, taking the boys and Vlad to meet Brian for lunch at Mel’s on Mission St. Then off to the Cartoon Art Museum, followed by a treat for Ethan, Nat and Vlad at Beard Papa’s.

When we got home, I moseyed over to the woman-cave. The exterior isn’t finished, the shelves aren’t yet installed (or bought) for the interior, the deck hasn’t been built, but it’s absolutely perfect. I have internet, my netbook and a new HD monitor, a printer, a heater, seating. Ethan and I hung out for a couple of hours together–he played for a while on his DSi while I surfed the ‘net, then drew Howl’s Moving Castle meets Hogwarts pix.

Have I said that I love this place? And Brian is the most awesome, amazing husband ever?

More perils of sugar

This news story may have passed most of us by: Pancreatic cancers use fructose, common in Western diet, to fuel growth, study finds. This study came from UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. High fructose corn syrup seems to be a prominent culprit. This is found in just about any processed food these days, except for the organic ones. And sodas.

Another statement in the article took me by surprise: "Although it is widely known that cancers use glucose, a simple sugar, to fuel their growth, this is the first time a link has been shown between fructose and cancer proliferation, said the study's senior author, Dr. Anthony Heaney, an associate professor of medicine and neurosurgery and a Jonsson Cancer Center researcher."

I didn't realize that cancers use glucose to fuel their growth. It would make sense, then, if you have cancer, to adjust your diet so it's largely protein and vegetables, with very little fruit and carbohydrate, if any.

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Street Food in SF

Creme Brulee Cart Man

There are only two Twitter feeds I receive to my cellphone. My sister and…the Creme Brulee Cart Man. I received a couple of tweets yesterday that today he'd be at Precita Park, which is my neighborhood, along with AdoboHobo and a number of other street food carts.

So today Ethan, Brian and I walked over the hill and down to Precita Park. I made a beeline for the CBCM, because I can't tell you how many tweets I've received that says he's sold out. He had four choices today, and I ordered one of each: Pina Colada, Mexican Chocolate, Vanilla Bean and Los Smores. The creme was smooth and pretty good (thought the vanilla bean could be more vanilla-y) but the brulee part needs to be thicker and more caramelized. He uses regular granulated sugar, which is not what he should be using. He should be using raw sugar or a coarser grain of sugar.

Bernal Hill entrance

The other carts had chai, different flavors of madeleines, a Laotian rice salad (tried this, was tasty–I'll probably try to make this myself), French tacos, gumbo, arroz caldo (Filipino dish), adobo, curry and Indonesian treats (not 100% sure on this one).

This San Francisco Street Food boom has really taken off. And it would not at all be possible without Twitter. You just can't pay for that kind of publicity–the time that it would take to create flyers, post and distribute them, advertise in the free sections of the newspapers, and so on. It really is an amazing offshoot of this Twitter revolution, and probably one of the more productive and ingenious uses of Twitter, IMHO. A real community is being built around these Street Food Carts, which essentially are mobile brick-and-mortar establishments.

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Blurry, middle-of-the-night ramblings

One thing about having chronic insomnia is that it gives me ample time to ponder. Years ago, when the insomnia first hit, I would lie awake in bed, thinking about nothing and everything and attempt to fall back asleep. Sometimes this worked, but not often. I soon learned that getting up and being productive in some way made much more sense for me, since my brain was so "on" that I couldn't possibly become restful enough to put myself back to sleep.

These days I succumb to the wakefulness and work on my writing. This involves extensive and copious research, a close relationship with dictionary.com and thesaurus.com, and the willingness to go with whatever I'm feeling that is causing the insomnia. Last Sunday night/early Monday morning I began writing a poem and will likely continue working on this poem in the wee hours of this morning. Creativity comes at strange times for me; I look forward to the day (soon!) when my modern shed is built and I can creep quietly out to my backyard refuge.

I'm also hoping that with a regular schedule and discipline, I'll be able to carve out time each day and drain enough of my creative energy to stave off the unsettling of my sleep. Unfortunately, I fear that my most inspired and dynamic times each day come in 12 hour cycles–the wee hours of the morning and the afternoons. This puts a damper on my marathon training. Come morning I am far too tired and filled with excuses as to why I can't possibly run.

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Love is a political act

I have always done some of my best reading in the bathroom. As a kid, if you couldn't find me anywhere else in the house, in the yard mowing the lawn, in the woods climbing trees and building forts, I was cloistered in the bathroom, scanning the pages of a book. These days, my Brown Alumni Monthly usually resides in the magazine basket in my bathroom, along with various manga and random design magazines.

Recently, I glanced through an old BAM (July/August 2009) and read the cover story article on Tricia Rose, a Brown professor of Africana studies. For whatever reason, I hadn't read this story upon receiving the magazine. At 43, I am suddenly interested in hip-hop and rap, mostly the kind that isn't misogynistic and degrading. Jay-Z is a genius. Ludacris's lyrics and resonant, laconic voice grab my attention. I'm no expert, not even close, but am beginning to see the intellectuality in hip-hop and rap.

But what struck me most is this phrase that Ms. Rose is quoted as saying, "Love is an incredibly political act."

And I so agree with that. It is a conscious choice, one that has the power to completely transform lives.

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