06.27.08
plans
First, thank you for the be well wishes. I am still not well, but defintely on the case. I actually think I gave stress more credit than it should have gotten – there is definitely something funky going on in my body right now. Maybe it was triggered by stress, but I don’t think eliminiting stress is going to equal elimination of pain.
I had all these grand plans for my summer, from household stuff to research based stuff. So far, I have completed nothing. Ever since the quarter ended, I’ve been feeling lousy, but July 4th is almost here and I feel so under-accomplished. Some of my plans included:
- organizing the children’s clothing
- rearranging my office space
- cooking several vegan meals a week
- starting an exercise plan
- taking the children to some fun thing once a week
- completing my research interviews
- potty training the 2-year-old
- weaning the baby
- getting to my yoga center a few times
- sending a paper off to journals
These were my short term goals. I also started a list of longer-term goals, including 1-year, 5-year, and 10-year. I guess goals are just that – goals, not must-dos, but it sucks when you really want to be productive and your body is just not allowing it.
06.16.08
daddy’s day thoughts
I tried very hard yesterday to give my husband a good Father’s day. I bought him gifts and cards, we went out to breakfast, to the farmer’s market, and just spent the day together doing some things that he wanted to do. I did these things because he deserved it, as he is a great father and our children are too young to tell him themselves, but I must admit that I also did it so that he could see an example of how to treat someone on a special day as if you really appreciated them (Mother’s Day didn’t go as I expected). The point being the ever-cliched “do unto others as you would have others do unto you” lesson of showing someone how you expect to be treated, a behavioral lesson of sorts.
So as I read this article this morning, and this post about it, it got me thinking: How does a man learn to be a father? My husband has a great role model – his father is a very successful man who is married to my husband’s mother, so was a daily, persistent figure in my husband’s life. Therefore it is not so strange that my husband is a good father – he has a great model to build upon.
But what about those men who father children but do not have the benefit of a father-figure model upon which to build? I appreciate idea that at some point in transitioning to adulthood, one must take control – and therefore responsibility – of one’s own life. We all, as adults, have control over our behavior, and certainly do know right from wrong. I have never heard of a man who fathered a child, but neglects to raise them, say that he didn’t know that his behavior was wrong. But knowing something is wrong, and having the power/tools/knowledge/etc. to behave differently are two different things.
So I’m annoyed at the democratic nominee this morning, not for pointing out the truth – daddies need to step up and be fathers to their children – but for committing the sin of omission. See, the problem is not just that men are not doing right by their kids, but that those same men probably grew up without fathers, and those men probably grew up without fathers, and you have several generations of men growing up without fathers. And to put this solely on the backs of these brothers is disingenuous at best, as the legacy of slavery was to have boys grow up without fathers, rendering them to perpetually be “boys” in the eyes of the white public. The white slave masters certainly did not consider themselves to be male role models for young black boys, so by selling fathers and separating families, from where is the role of “father” to be learned?
So when the democratic nominee says
“They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.”
without acknowledging that the state is keeping black men in a perpetual state of boyhood, now not through slavery, but through mass incarceration, lack of quality jobs, and education that do boys (esp. those of color) a disservice, it makes me angry at what I think the nominee knows is a showing of historical dishonesty. Take the words from his “race speech“:
Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.
Legalized discrimination – where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.
A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.
I realize that being honest all the time will not get one elected in this country. But I expected better from the democratic nominee. I feel so grateful that my son has the role model of his father upon which to build when he becomes a father himself. While I continue to unequivocally support the democratic nominee, at least for today, I’ll be drinking at lot less of the kool-aid.
06.13.08
addendum, correction, ignorance on my part
In the previous post, I wrote about vegetarianism as a way to reduce cruelty against other living beings, animals and people alike. The people I referred to are those who are hungry across the world, in part due to the amount of grains fed to animals that could otherwise be fed to people. What I had not thought of, however, were the conditions under which people harvest vegetables and fruits, which are the staples of my diet. BFP writes a post about her memories of her father as a fruit and vegetable picker, and asks these questions:
Is a vegan lifestyle really a “cruelty free” lifestyle? Why is it so easy to prioritize cruelty inflicted on animals over cruelty inflicted on brown people? Why can people list a whole litany of wrongs committed against animals by the food industry–but at the same time those people “never really thought” about what happens to the workers?
Should I consider these things while contemplating veganism? Should I mourn them?
Can I bring myself to say with a straight face that I no longer eat meat because I care about ending violence against animals? Can I say to the workers, to myself, that even animals are more important to me than they are, than I am? Can I continue my own people’s erasure? Can I continue mine?
How do I make eating vegan/vegetarian a political choice about liberation without making the sacrifice one set of beings make with their bodies more important than another set of beings
One can never be sure, I guess, the plight of the people or animals in the food industry. I thought I was doing well by shopping for produce at the local farmers market, naively believing that “organic” and “local” farmers are treating people right. In some cases, they do state that their produce is pesticide-free, which addresses some of the concerns in BFP post. But even without the pesticides, how are the people treated?
* My best friend and I laugh at the story of my father riding our asses in the fields. We thought it would be easy and fun work–but my father road our asses into the ground with work. If we played or laughed too hard or got too caught up in our talking, we heard the mantra “We’re here to work, we’re here to work, we’re not here to mess around, get busy!”
* We laugh because we understand that The Mantra is our version of the “parental quirk” that other kids are horrified that their parents don’t hide–farting in front of friends, wearing hair rollers to drop kids off at school, etc. My old school Mexican father thought he was instilling values–instead he was just horrifying me and scaring the shit out of my best friend.
* But both of us as adults have expressed thankfulness for the experience–thankfulness that at 11 years old we had somebody driving us like full grown adults. Thankfulness that we had experienced what it was like to be “Mexican.”
But now I know that believing is not enough. I think this is part of the reasons people grow their own vegetables and fruits. While I don’t have the time to do that, I will make more of an effort to inquire about the lives of the people picking these vegetables and fruits that I self-admittedly felt so good about buying. And if I don’t like what I hear, I’ll be moving on. Because I do care more about people than animals. If it came down to it, I’d choose a person over an animal any day of the week.
h/t Anomie
06.12.08
herbivore
I’m often asked why I am a vegetarian – is it for health reasons, moral reasons, or both? For me, it is both, and very difficult to separate one from the other. A principle of yoga is ahimsa, or non-violence/non-harming/non-injurious. Along with the concept of karma, and the adage “you are what you eat,” I think the violence that is inflicted upon modern animals who are raised for food is directly ingested into the body. In that way, health concerns and moral concerns are one – I don’t want the bodily karma of violence.
But after listening to this debate on “World Have Your Say” and reading these articles, another moral reason has popped up. Another principle in yoga is aparigraha, or non-hoarding. Basically it means to not take more than you need, resisting a lifestyle of excess in favor of one of necessity. I don’t need meat to survive. I feel much better when I don’t eat meat. So if I were to eat meat, I’d be taking more than I need. So my vegetarianism is also an attempt to not be greedy – leaving things that I could take but choose not to in the spirit of leaving more for others.
In this way, I believe that vegetarianism is one of the things I can do to end world hunger, at least in principle. People all over the world are dying from hunger. Hunger. As a mother, it is something I cannot bear to think of – a child going to bed hungry. The debate on WHYS generally does not argue against the idea that vegetarianism is the way to go, on a global level, except for the woman who makes the point about exploding animal populations. The argument against it is largely practical, in that people just won’t do it. In the West, it’s like a right to be able to eat meat. In developing countries, eating meat is a luxury, a sign of prosperity that people will not want to give up after only having it for a short while.
But something like 16 pounds of grains are used to produce 1 pound of meat. In that way, grains that could be used to feed people are being used to feed animals which are then being used to feed people in rich parts of the world, like the United States. I have no delusions that people will give up meat completely; I attest that it’s a difficult thing to totally change your diet. But eating meat just a little less – like giving it up one or two days a week – could feed hundreds of people. Of course, the causation has to work just so – decreased demand for meat in the West leads to decreased production of meat leads to increased grains for people. And I’m not sure that vegetarianism does anything about the rising cost of all foods. Grains will still be expensive. It’s clearly not a one-fits-all solution. Just a small piece. (And I can’t even start talking about biofuels – that’s another issue all together that is probably larger than the issue of eating meat.)
This summer, my family is embarking on a vegetarian experiment. I’ve been a vegetarian for several years, although I find it very difficult to maintain during pregnancy. And I know it’s not for everyone – during pregnancy, I have such a craving for meat that I think it’s something my body needs, so I eat it. My husband and kids don’t eat meat that often, so I think this experiment will work. If it ever appears that there are negative health consequences, like weight loss in my kids, I’ll stop. But for now, I pledge to cook or otherwise make available a healthy, vegetarian dinner every night this summer. This won’t totally clear the meat from my son’s diet – he goes to a family day care and it may be too much to ask her to not serve him meat, esp. if I am not totally committed to it yet. But at home, this is a meat-free zone.
06.05.08
perfectly fine
I’m almost done, but not quite. My first year in a PhD program is almost complete. One more paper is due Monday, and while it’s quite a bear, there is solace in knowing that once it’s handed in, it’s done. And then I’ll be completely done three days after being almost done. Which of course is not completely done as I need to re-run my ASA paper analysis, and then get started on collecting my data for my second year paper as well as read everything about my topic.
The paper I am working on now, in order to be quasi-done, was a choice of two options. The first option was to write your own paper, building upon earlier exercises in statistical methods. The second, the one I chose, was to replicate an existing article from a major journal that used the methods we learned and had publicly available data. It was by far the most difficult choice.
Why did I chose it? I keep asking myself the same thing, because I think it was a mistake. Our professor told us that by replicating we would learn more, but honestly, what I heard was that replicating was the harder choice so if you did it and did it well it would look more impressive. So despite the fact that I should be focusing on work that’s important to me, I chose to replicate an article on a topic that is not particularly important to me and that is super complicated. Am I learning about how to do what these authors did? Yes. Is it going to be particular helpful to me several years down the line when I may actually use these methods since I am using interview data for my master’s paper? No. Because by then, I won’t remember.
But I have no choice now but to continue plodding along, giving it my best effort for the next three days. But it’s taught me a lesson that one of my mentors stressed to me just yesterday. That lesson is to learn the difference between perfect and perfectly fine. It’s a lesson that I have really be trying to learn for a long time, and I think that a small part of my ego, which has been holding the lesson back, has been eroded, making a space for the lesson to finally sink in. It’s a lesson that I’ve really been learning this entire year, while doing what many people have said they can’t believe I am doing, grad school with two very small children. But I have to admit to myself that it’s been done by being perfectly fine because perfect is something I just cannot and will not ever be.
Truth be told, perfectly fine got me awarded a prestigious fellowship that frees me from the having-to-work-for-my-keep cycle. I haven’t told many people because I feel guilty for it, because I haven’t been perfect and felt like I could have done so much more so why did they choose me when I know other people have also been busting their ass.
