Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category

Running

Saturday, April 2nd, 2005

I’m signed up for the Cherry Blossom 10 miler tomorrow morning; unless it’s pouring rain when my alarm goes off, I’m going to run it.  I’m undertrained, but I’ll set my watch for a 4 minute run — 1 minute walk cycle, and I should be able to finish it.

As a child, and through college, I was about as unathletic as you could get.  I walked a lot, as do most New Yorkers, but it was a major accomplishment for me to run a mile for gym in high school.  (The next year, I managed to sign up for ballroom dancing as my gym class.)

But in 1996, I took up running, and within a few months I got it into my head that I wanted to run a marathon.   Much to my surprise, I turned out to be not bad at distance running.  I ran 3 marathons between 1997 and 1999, finishing 2 of them in under 4 hours.

I haven’t run very much since I got pregnant with D.  I read all these books about how it’s perfectly safe to run while pregnant.  I think I even read that Joan Samuelson ran 5 miles the day before she gave birth.  But it turned out that running while pregnant was really uncomfortable for me, so I didn’t.  And since the boys were born, I haven’t been willing to carve out the time to do serious training.

Unfortunately, I seem to be really bad at running in moderation.  For my health, 30-40 minutes four times a week would be great.  But without the incentive of a target race, and the structure of a training schedule, it’s just too easy for me to blow off runs when the weather isn’t perfect, or I’m tired, or busy. 

At packet pickup today, I found myself eyeing the race brochures for the fall marathons.  I’d really like to take a shot at qualifying for Boston someday.  But I don’t know how I’d fit it into my life.  It’s not just the time that the actual runs take; it’s the idea of trying to keep up with the boys all day after having done a long run in the morning.

A new chapter

Thursday, March 31st, 2005

D and I are reading James and the Giant Peach.  It’s his first chapter book.

Well, actually, I read Charlotte’s Web to him when he was an infant, and a captive audience.  But I haven’t been able to get him interested in a chapter book.  I’ve tried both Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, but they both take a while to get moving, and the chapters are a bit longer than his attention span.  (I am boggled when I read Catherine Newman’s essays about reading the Little House books to her 5-year old.)

James is about perfect.  The chapters are only a page or two, and each of them ends on a cliffhanger.  D keeps asking me "what happens?" and I tell him we’ll have to read the next chapter to find out.  He doesn’t seem too traumatized by the parents getting eaten by a rhino, although he doesn’t understand why the Aunts are so mean to poor little James. It’s great fun.

Growing up in the big city

Monday, March 28th, 2005

The NYTimes ran a bunch of letters in response to the article about childless cities.  One of them wrote:

"As someone who lived in San Francisco with two small boys, I think I know why there are few children in that city: It just isn’t a great place to be a kid.

My oldest son couldn’t learn to ride his bike on the hilly and congested streets. We didn’t have a backyard. And our neighborhood was barren on Halloween. (We drove to a friend’s suburban neighborhood to trick-or-treat)."

I grew up in the heart of Greenwich Village.  It was an amazing place to be on Halloween (the parade was over the top even then, and a 30 story apartment building is heaven for trick-or-treating), but overall it wasn’t a great place to be a small child (or to be the parent of a small child).  It’s true that someone always had to be with me if I wanted to go out to play, and I didn’t learn to ride a bike until I was an adult.

But it was a terrific place to be a teenager, because you could get anywhere without a car.  I started taking the subway to school in 7th grade.  I totally took for granted a diversity of people, of languages, of foods, of experiences.   Firefighters and drag queens were equally likely to be waiting on line in front of me at the supermarket.  And yet it was also a real community, where the butcher would have my parents’ order out for me without my saying my name.

One summer at camp, a kid made fun of me because I called McDonald’s "McDonald’s" rather than "Micky D’s" or "the Golden Arches."  I thought he was an idiot.  McDonald’s just wasn’t important enough in my life to warrant a nickname. Instead, I could make a passionate argument for why the Ray’s across the street from Jefferson Market library was the only one worth going to (inch-thick layers of toppings) and could go out to dinner in Chinatown with my Chinese-American boyfriend’s family without totally humiliating myself.

I have nothing against backyards.  I enjoy puttering around trying to grow tomatoes in our postage stamp of a backyard, and am sometimes envious of my friends who have yards big enough for swingsets or impromptu t-ball games.  But to say that San Francisco or New York is a bad place to be a kid because you won’t have a backyard displays an awfully limited view of childhood.

Helmets and class

Friday, March 25th, 2005

Last weekend, we bought D a bicycle with training wheels and a bell and a fierce looking bee painted on it.  He couldn’t be more pleased with it.  Of course, we have him wearing a helmet — we even made him wear one with his tricycle.

Hugo Schwyzer wrote last month about adults riding bikes on the sidewalk in his neighborhood:

"I’ve never seen any of these young men wearing helmets.  I have no doubt that they can’t afford them."

D doesn’t seem to have noticed yet that almost none of the big kids in the neighborhood wear helmets when they ride bikes.  I’m not looking forward to the arguments we’re likely to have when he does.

The kids I see riding their bikes are mostly African-American; many of them live in a nearby subsidized housing project. I’m not sure how much the issue is that their parents can’t afford helmets, how much it’s that they’re less inclined to believe they can protect their children from all of the world’s ills.  I don’t want to make D think that his friends’ parents love their children less than we love him — but I also don’t want him to think that wearing a helmet is negotiable. 

Purim

Thursday, March 24th, 2005

One nice thing about D attending a Jewish preschool is that they totally ignore most of the secular and Christian holidays.  So we didn’t have to run around making valentines for all of his classmates last month, and this month he’s not bringing home Easter baskets or talking about Easter eggs.  Instead, they’ve been making hamentaschen and singing Purim songs.  I’m particularly fond of "Harma Harma Haman" sung to the tune of "Little Bunny Foo Foo."

But the Purim story isn’t exactly the easiest thing in the world to explain to a 4-year-old.  He likes being Haman and saying "bow down to me" and I get to be "the Jewish People" and say "NO!" and then we both laugh.  But last night he was thinking about all the characters, and he couldn’t quite figure out why there were two Queens in the story.  I simply said that Vashti is the queen at the beginning of the story, and Esther is the queen later on, and left it at that. 

I think I’m going to get away with it this year.  But at some point, he’s going to notice that Vashti gets the kibosh for refusing to dance in front of all of the King’s friends.  And while saying "NO!" works out ok for Esther and Mordechai and "the Jewish People," it doesn’t turn out so well for poor Vashti.  (I guess I’ve always been a fan of the underdog; I used to dress up as Vashti for Purim when I was just a bit older than D.)

future selves

Sunday, March 20th, 2005

A few months back, I wrote about how I didn’t think I would ever have gone down the path of assisted reproduction.  Many people responded that I shouldn’t be so confident that I know how I would deal with the situation; several said that they wouldn’t have imagined in advance that they would make the choices that they eventually did.

I’ve been thinking about that conversation this weekend, and its implications for advance directives. Rivka at Respectful of Otters has a long and thoughtful post up about Terri Schiavo.  One particular comment she made about one of the 17 affidavits jumped out at me:

Dr. Eytan would seemingly reject any pre-injury statement about the conditions in which a person would prefer to refuse medical treatment, "because we are all in the process of changing." In the greatest unintentional irony of the entire stack of affidavits, she remarks that "Ms. Schiavo is not the same person as she was when she made her alleged remarks about not wanting to live in a certain condition." By this logic, she would apparently argue to invalidate any Living Will or advance directive.

I have a living will, in which I spell out how I’d like to be treated in the event that I was no longer able to make these decisions.  I’ve given copies to my parents and my husband, as well as registered with the US living will registry.  Even though I tried to be specific, I know that the most important part is who I designated to make decisions for me (my husband), because it’s just not possible to lay out every contingency in a document.

We allow people to bind their future selves in all sorts of ways — by marrying, by having children, by signing contracts to deliver goods and services.  But there are limits — at least in the US, you can’t sell yourself into slavery. 

Planting seeds

Saturday, March 19th, 2005

Today, for the first time this year, it felt like spring here in the DC suburbs.

We live in a townhouse, and have a tiny little backyard, just big enough to hang our hammock when the weather gets warm.  I plant tomatoes each year, even though there’s not really enough sunlight for them to thrive.  This morning D. found a packet of carrot seeds I had bought last year, so we planted those.  I repotted our houseplants too, giving them fresh dirt, and apologizing to them for forgetting to water them on a regular basis.

I plant seeds pretty much the same way I write to Congress — because I believe in the process, without expecting too much in the way of a harvest.

We’ll see how everything does.

Charles Schwab

Wednesday, March 16th, 2005

I’m thinking of moving my money away from Charles Schwab, due to their support of the Alliance for Worker Retirement Security, which in spite of its Orwellian name is a group that lobbies for Social Security privatization.  Can anyone recommend a brokerage firm that has low fees, decent service, and isn’t involved with any such groups?

Matthew Yglesias argues that the withdrawal of the Financial Services Forum from a related lobbying group is "probably the most important Social Security development of the day."  Unions have been putting a lot of pressure on these firms — by organizing pickets and letter writing campaigns, but also by threatening to pull their pension accounts.

Working with the master’s tools

Monday, March 14th, 2005

Last week, I wrote about the Senate Finance Committee’s welfare bill.  Both of the comments that readers posted said, basically, that they don’t think this Congress or this President can do anything right.

These comments made me think about the ways in which I’ve been affected by spending the past 4 years working for this Administration.   The biggest impact is that I can’t demonize the other side as much as I might once have.  There certainly are Republicans who think all receipt of government benefits is inherently evil and who are willing to sacrifice a generation or two in order to "send a message."  But I also know Republicans who sincerely believe that it’s an abdication of responsibility to let people struggle by on meager welfare benefits.

And while I’ve had some pretty discouraging moments lately, my absolute low point in government service was during the Clinton Administration.  I discovered that the fact that the President himself said, in front of reporters "welfare reform shouldn’t mean you have to drop out of college" didn’t mean that HHS was going to do a darn thing to make that true.  Because Bruce Reed thought that doing anything to promote education would make the Administration look "weak on work."

Bother, said Pooh

Monday, March 7th, 2005

So I had a PTA meeting tonight.  (Yes, I’m the PTA secretary even though my kids aren’t school age.  Some of it is that I’m a compulsive joiner; some of it is that it looked like there might not be a PTA this year if some of the preschool parents didn’t help out.  And I figured it would help me decide whether I wanted to send my kids there.)

The bombshell of the evening was that the principal’s husband has taken a job in Florida, and she may or may not be coming back next year.  If not, the school will be having its fifth principal in six years.  I can’t imagine the teachers — especially those who followed her from her previous school — will be happy.  This could really be a blow to a school that was just getting on its feet.

We’ve got another year before we need to make our decision, but I’m feeling a lot less confident than I was on Saturday.