There’s no place like home

We’re in the process of relocating and spent the beginning of July packing (check), the middle of July moving (check), and the rest of July in-between homes--living with Big A’s mom and storing a bunch of stuff at my cousin Ninni’s apartment while she‘s away in India.

In the meantime I’ve seen the place I hope we can move into Aug 1. I fell in love with the house on Davis Street even before I walked in through the door because out front in the shady, vine-sheltered garden, there was a cast iron birdbath trimmed with the--umm--excremental satisfaction of many birds.

You totally know this is going to be on Oprah… or Jerry Springer

My feminist friends have been teeth-gnashing, hand-wringing, and dabbling in all kinds of Freudian self-psychoanalyses since Rebecca Walker’s article, about her mother Alice Walker, broke in UK’s Daily Mail:

Now keep in mind that The Daily Mail is a very conservative turkey and it might make better sense why Rebecca W’s article seems backlash-y, undermine-y, and badly researched. I feel no insecurity that the Walker acrimony exposes the non monolithic aspects of feminism to non feminist scrutiny and criticism. And i doubt if it’s a third-wave feminist against the second-wave kind of thing as Phyllis Chesler makes it appear in her Salon.com article. It just seems to be a rather cheerless reality that the children of artists and leaders often appear to be disturbed/damaged and alienated (see: Gandhi, M.K; Marx, Karl, or even Blyton, Enid etc.).

While I’m not an outright fan of Alice Walker’s, I have to say that Rebecca W’s work appears to be lacking in nuance. I remember Rebecca Walker’s 1990’s sex-positive essay “Lusting for Freedom” as appealing, but in this here article, she alleges that her mother pushed her towards early sexual experimentation. So, umm—all I can see is how an opportunity to form a strong historical and theoretical center for her resentment has been wasted.

Still there is a lot of psychic pain here. And I can identify with the feeling of disappointing your feminist mother by marrying, having kids. Much as my mom adores her grandkids, it made her anxious knowing that i would no longer be able to put my ambitions first. And sometimes, she’ll still look at me all i-told-you-so and quote Sanskrit: Vivaham vidya nashanam (marriage exterminates scholarship).

So, so far, no solutions--just sentiment :). And oh, Blue pointed me to Rebecca Walker’s blog, which has a very different voice from the article in question. I skimmed; i kinda liked.

How a family of four turned veg(etari)an

I have always loved food. Even more than the eating of it, I love the process of making something that nourishes the ones I love. I love the way it looks, feels, tastes. I love the enthusiastic “click” sounds my baby makes as she nurses, I love Big A’s post-prandial cough, li’l A’s too infrequent scraping of an empty plate, I love hearing my sister say she lost ten pounds she wanted to lose, I love the pediatrician slotting my babies above the 90^th percentile on the growth chart. I love making big, healthy colorful presentations of food, I like taking pictures of it; my collection of cook books almost rivals my collection of South Asian fiction (and I’m paid to work on only one of those).

Somewhere around the time I acquired a household to run, meals became about (an animal) protein volumized by sides of veggies, grains, and beans. This wasn’t the way I ate growing up, although, I’d grown up in a meat-eating household and even at my most anorexic, I’d still happily eat a little bowl of my mother’s chicken kurma (hold the rice) once a week. It was safe to say I thought of meat as necessary to a well balanced meal and that I enjoyed it. As recently as last year, when Chai embarked upon a month-long vegan challenge—I found it frighteningly austere and extreme. I thought I could never do without sushi, without a cup of morning milk, without a nibble of cheese now and then.

I thought that even if I made the shift, I would crave animal products. I did make the shift about four months ago. Can’t say I’ve craved any kind of meat.

I don’t intend to be a vegan vigilante, so skip this paragraph if you don’t want to give up animal derived products. All I had to do was read about factory farmed animals. That’s it. Even as I read that hens cluck to their unhatched chicks to teach them different calls, I knew my scrambled eggs were, in a manner of speaking, toast.

I’ve continued to cook meat for the family since then—it seemed like the caring, Buddhist thing to do. But Big A has been unhappy about the unfairness of the situation and yesterday we decided that he and the babies would join me. I’m glad; lately I’ve had doubts about the health benefits of meat/milk/eggs and have felt that I’m putting unhealthy, unhappy products into my children’s vulnerable bodies. So for now we’re keeping a bag of microwaveable chicken nuggets for Li’l A because that’s the only food he really pines for and otherwise eating more veggies, whole grains, and beans. The babies and Big A will still use eggs and a minimum of cow’s milk. I’m looking forward to the rest of the summer—our farm share has the exciting job of fully filling our bellies.

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"This is not a food baby, alright?"

Just to say that we finally watched Juno. After all the hype and the Oscars and the buzz and the Fox Searchlight release. And it was good. And giggly.

I won’t give anything away. Can‘t. There are no surprises--nothing happens at the end that hasn’t already been established right at the beginning. Nothing happens that you don’t think is the absolute best thing that could happen given the circumstances. But by the end of the movie you’ve let yourself debate so many options and viabilities that you’re damp from tears and the effort of choice. Choice is tough. Not just reproductive choice--any choice at all…

The female actors--best choices. Ellen Page is preternaturally gamine and self-assured despite the prosthetic pregnancy. And I enjoyed watching yuppie dunderheads jockeying for her approval--not just in the way dunderheads always seem to be courting the approval of those younger (= hipper) than themselves, but because it allowed Jennifer Garner‘s interpretation of “sterility” to scale additional semantic and existential planes.

After the non surprising end, Big A and I surprisingly discussed a topic we rarely discuss: Abortions. We partially disagree about nuance, although i have the feeling Big A is increasingly drifting towards me. From as far back as he can remember, Big A has been pro-choice. Or at least that’s what his google-able student profile on Medical Students for Choice indicates. From as far as I can remember, while I’ve assumed a woman’s right to an abortion, I’ve also always disagreed with the PSAs and billboards in India, where I grew up, promoting it as a method of family planning.

This is where I get to sound reactionary and backward--there is something miraculous about conception, about pregnancy, something utterly, incredibly, phenomenal about new life. I know that as a feminist and a liberal, ideology prompts me to say, “clump of cells” or “the fetus,” or "the embryo" instead of the more emotionally loaded word “the baby.” But you do know that whatever you call it, and however inconvenient, it is the enigmatic start of life and will soon recognizably become a baby, right? A baby. And then a person and then a whole new world of limitless possibility. And while I would never, ever wish for a de-legalization of abortion or third-party sanction or biblical-style punishment pregnancies, I do wish for aggressively promoted, infallible, inexpensive birth control systems. I’m going to do exactly as my mother did and assure my (putative) daughters that should they get pregnant by accident, I will arrange and accompany them to an abortion. But I would want them to be conscious that it is a solemn decision, not a rite of passage.

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THE CAN CAN

That sweatshirt my son had

when he was a year old

that said,

“Future President of the United States of America,”

that tee-shirt my daughter has now

that says, “Future President (of the USA)”

they were always funny

because

the chests so slogan-

emblazoned

were so

insignificant

over hearts so

insensible

of the race

beyond

themselves,

beyond me.

Blatant slant,

sartorial snark

about them being

small.

Children.

Not about them

being the children of an immigrant

the child of a single mother

about being a female child

and now it never will

because: they can.

they can can.

Can

Can

Can.

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Surprise Birthday (list)

Since he’s growing up (see birthday ref. above) and getting too cool for Spidey toys and stuff his family assiduously picks out of specially ordered catalogues, Li’l A gave me a handwritten list of stuff he wanted for his birthday. It gave me a case of the “awww-s” because it was so simple and innocent: Can we walk along the abandoned railroad and picnic there? Can I download some songs I heard on guitar hero? Can we order Terminator on Netflix? And then this:

Can I have my own laptop? Mac, please.

The precision of his punctuation still kills me :).

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In Defense of Sex and the Twitty

Friday:
Saw a movie about four splendid women, shared their sense of sisterhood, their adventures, their struggles with adulthood. Peeked into their shopping, their acquisition of property, mates, and a place in the world. It wasn’t called Sex and the City, it was called Little Women.

***

This morning:
Me (mock embarrassed): OK, you can’t tell anyone this. Promise you won’t! I’m going to go see the The Sex and the City movie. If you tell anyone I’ll… I’ll

Big A (mock exasperated): Relax, Pups. I won’t tell any one. You think I want anyone to know that you went to see it?

***

About the movie:
What happened to the original writers? What happened to the two-puns-a-minute rule? How did those women get so old so fast? Remember all the trite but really useful terminolgy that SATC used to churn out? ## The only thing close to that nifty shorthand in the movie was “emotional cutter.”

After the movie:
It reminded me of that that lonely first year in the US when I watched a couple of episodes alone, of those homesick years in Oxford when I had to book the common-room at college to watch the show with J and S and W on Channel Four.

It reminded me that pre-SATC I’d never really had girlfriends. My sister was my best gal pal and the rest of my friends were guys. SATC made being girlfriends seem fun and important. (Not girlfriend—that part I seemed to have a natural prolific knack for—the part about having female friends.)

And it was a nod to my time in New York City. A city in which I had the Chrysler Building dissected for me by SP, in which I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and back in the snow on my first real date with Big A, in which a self-assured sisterhood gives you a secret-handshake smile when you pull off a witty outfit. A city that comes close to being like India without being in India.

What I resent:
All the unnecessary noise about SATC’s product placements, its materialistic triteness, its lack of an intellectual component, its caricatured commodified milieu, and its narrative deficiencies. It’s not like you're pointing out anything new. Anything we don't already know. Yes, its excess mocks our imminent recession—and perhaps that’s exactly what is so fun about it. It is a female world—an empty, unlikely, twitty, unrealistic world, yes—but if women want to watch it, let ‘em. It’s their minds, their wallets, their time. It’s not as if the summer’s cache of multi-million-dollar dick flicks are intellectually intense, eschew product placement, or yield narrative gold. So stop preaching and prescribing propah female behavior and cultural taste. A world where cosmopolitans are contemptible but “a martini; shaken not stirred” is an epicurean touchstone just doesn’t make sense. Equal opportunity mind-farting twittiness, yo! Seriously, come on now.

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## Eg. Modelizers: men who only date models

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