Half Changed World

Surprising absolutely no one, John Edwards announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for President today.  I think he’s a good candidate, and I’m just thrilled that he’s talking about poverty and inequality as major issues in America today. 

It’s somewhat bizarre to realize that the guy who was the party’s nominee for Vice President the last time around is considered an underdog this time, and is positioning himself as the outsider.  But Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are so hogging the political spotlight that everyone else is left on the outside. That said, there’s over a year to go until the first primary, so a lot can happen between now and then.  (The NY Times pointed out earlier this week how early the announcements are happening this cycle; I think one of the effects of this is that it makes Bush seem like even more of a lame duck than he would otherwise.)

The conventional wisdom in recent years seems to be against competitive primary seasons, arguing that candidates do better when they don’t have to move away from the center, and can keep their money for the general election.  I’m not convinced by that.  It’s certainly true that the media will pay a lot more attention to a competitive race than to one that seems to be locked up. And I think a candidate gains stature by defeating people of stature and that passion reinforces itself rather than being a limited resource.

I’m honestly not sure who I’d vote for if the primary were today.  And for once it’s because there’s multiple (potential) candidates who I’d like to see President, not because I’m so depressed about the choices.  That’s a nice feeling.

I’ll be interested to see how all the candidates interact with the blogosphere over the next few years.  I think Edwards gets it, or at least has hired someone who does.  His website has a special section for bloggers with the lure for those who sign up of being featured on their blogroll.  And John and Elizabeth both made appearances on Kos today.

As seen at Raising WEG and Angry Pregnant Lawyer, the first lines from the first post in each month of the year:

• Back in November, Jody posted about a project that Forbes and Yahoo undertook to let you send an email to yourself in the future.
• Today’s book is Barack Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.
• I don’t have anything to add to Laura or Amanda‘s comments on Tierney’s column from Tuesday’s Times.
• I know, even I’m getting sick of hearing about mommy wars.
• As some of you guessed, the stuff going on that I couldn’t talk about is that I’m changing jobs.
• I learned via Shannon at Peter’s Cross Station that today is Blogging for LGBT Families Day.
• Via Becca at Not Quite Sure, I read Meghan O’Rourke’s commentary on Linda Hirshman’s book.
• Today’s book is a strange and compelling book, In The Little World (A True Story of Dwarfs, Love, and Trouble), by John Richardson. 
• In her comment on my post about my tri, Trishka wondered: "I don’t know how you manage to do all that you do — work full time, have two small children, volunteer, and to train for a triathlon on top of it."
• Well, I can’t say I had any epiphanies while I was gone, but I think I benefited from taking a step back.
• Please vote.
• Nearly two years ago, I wrote here about rumors that the Department of Labor was going to try to roll back the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) 

Last year at this time, things were looking pretty dark.  Intellectually, I knew that things would eventually brighten up, but emotionally I wasn’t buying it. 

A year later, I’m doing a lot better.  The Administration is still doing really stupid mean-spirited things about welfare, but at least I no longer need to defend them.  We’re stuck with Bush for another 2 years, but a Democratic Congress will limit the bad things he can do.  I think my current job is probably a better fit for me than the one I was rejected for last year.  And I’m just doing a better job of dealing with the world.

To all my readers, whatever holidays you are celebrating this week, I wish you a season filled with light and joy.

As Sandy noted, Elizabeth Marquardt posted an apology for assuming that the "dc mom" in my heading stood for "donor conception" mom rather than "[Washington], D.C." mom.  I was anxious to clear up her misunderstanding, not because I think that donor conception is a bad thing, but because I didn’t want anyone to attribute an inappropriate authority to my commenting on Katrina Clark’s essay. 

As futher evidence of how "the personal is political," I’d like to point to Mobian’s post about the FMLA.  She picked up on my FMLA post via the Carnival of Feminists, but then writes:

For LGBT employees, the issue may not be so much the “definition of an eligible employee,” but rather the “definition of a family member.” Employers are not obligated to give an employee FMLA leave for the birth of her child, if it is her same-sex partner carrying the child. Same goes for adoption if the state does not allow second-parent adoptions and it is the employee’s partner who is adopting. And if the employee’s partner is lying in the hospital dying of cancer? Too bad. Thankfully, many corporations are choosing to give LGBT employees leave that is equivalent to the federal rights, but many others still don’t.

I’m embarassed to admit that this issue hadn’t occurred to me when I wrote about FMLA, and I thank Mombian for pointing it out.

I’ve been reading some of the manifestos that Hugh MacLeod’s been collecting and one point jumped out at me from the Amiable Heretic:

"4. You’re only entitled to the opinions you’ve thought through. You can only do that if you use hard data. Opinions you adopt from others are other people’s opinions, not yours."

I agree, as long as "hard data" isn’t limited to statistics.  Real people, talking honestly about their own experiences, can be hard data too.

At the library tonight, I noticed on the new book shelf a new translation of C. P. Cavafy’s poetry (by Aliki Barnstone).  The only Cavafy poem I’ve read is Ithaka, so I brought the volume home.

I read Ithaka when I was 15 or 16.  The trip leader for my summer program gave it to me at the end of the trip, and I was incredibly flattered.  (I don’t remember her name.  The only person whose name I can remember from the trip is the really annoying girl who always wanted to be my buddy, probably because I was one of the only people in the group who wasn’t overtly mean to her.)  So the poem is inextricably linked for me to that summer.

Ithaka

As you set out on the journey to Ithaka,
wish that the way be long,
full of adventures, full of knowledge.
Don’t be afraid of Laistrygonians, the Cyclops.
angry Poseidon, you’ll never find them on your way
if your thought stays exalted, if a rare
emotion touches your spirit and body.
You won’t meet the Laistrygonians
and the Cyclops and wild Poseidon
if you don’t bear them along in your soul,
if your soul doesn’t raise them before you.

Wish that the way be long.
May there be many summer mornings
when with such pleasure, such joy
you enter ports seen for the first time;
may you stop in Phoenician emporia
to buy fine merchandise,
mother-of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and every kind of sensual perfume,
buy abundand sensual perfumes, as many as you can.
Travel to many Egyptian cities
to learn and learn from their scholars.

Always keep Ithaka in your mind.
Arriving there is your destination.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts many years,
andy you moor on the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained along the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the beautiful journey.
Without her you would not have set out on your way.
She has no more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka did not betray you.
With all your wisdom, all your experience,
you understand by now what Ithakas mean.

–C.P. Cavafy, translated by Aliki Barnstone

(No book review this week — I’m in the middle of several different things.)

The Washington Post ran a bunch of articles yesterday about different kinds of parent-child relationships in this era of assisted reproduction:

• Liza Mundy, who is apparently writing a book about assisted reproduction, writes an overview article, with the obligatory Mary Cheney references.
• Katrina Clark writes about having been conceived by anonymous sperm donation.  She also answered questions on line today.  She writes with passion and pain about having been stripped of the "right" to know who her father is.
• Mike Livingston writes about being a known sperm donor, or maybe occasional father to the child of a lesbian couple.

And, in a completely unrelated article, part of their Being a Black Man series, Neely Tucker writes about Tim Wagoner and how he is navigating what it means to be a father when he’s not married to the child’s mother.

It’s an interesting, provocative set of articles.  One of the points that Mundy makes is that until recently, sperm donation was mostly the province of married couples, as it was essentially the only option that doctors could offer to "treat" male-factor infertility.  Such donation was societally invisible and, in many cases, hidden even from the children.  These children may have been denied access to their genetic heritage, but had social fathers, so face different issues than Clark.

My one complaint is with Mundy’s blithe statement "There aren’t enough adoptable children in the United States to meet people’s desire for kids and family life."  Setting aside the blithe labelling of over 100,000 kids as "unadoptable," I think it’s wrong to suggest that the majority of people using reproductive technologies would choose to adopt if there were suddenly a huge number of healthy infants available for adoption.  What makes the use of donor eggs and sperm so fascinating is that some of the people who go that route are largely doing so because they want a genetic connection to at least one of the social parents, even as they minimize the social connection to one of the genetic parents.

Update:

1)  The comments made me realize that I hadn’t included enough modifiers in the last sentence — so I added the "some of" and took out the "largely."   I apologize if I offended with my carelessness.

2) Family Scholars blog is doing a round up of blog-reactions to the Clark essay, and included a link to this post.  Can anyone point me to something I wrote that makes Elizabeth Marquardt think that I’m a "donor insemination mom"?  The link may be getting a different assortment of commenters than usual.  It’s worth restating my policy that I don’t censor comments for opinions that I disagree with, but I reserve the right to delete comments that I think cross the line into personal attacks. 

We had our big almost-annual Hanukah party yesterday. (Almost annual because there have been a few years when we haven’t had the energy to make it happen.)  We wound up with a nice mix of people, none of whom knew each other — which I think actually makes for a better party than ones where some people know each other and others don’t know anyone but us.   At one point when the RSVPs were trickling in, I thought that no one Jewish but us was going to attend, but Jews wound up being about 1/3 of the attendees.

As always, I wound up wishing that I had more time to talk with everyone.  That’s true about throwing parties in general, but is even more true for our Hanukah parties, where one of us is pretty much always in the kitchen working on the latkes.  I just don’t think they taste as good made in advance and kept warm in the oven.

We made both standard latkes and the curried sweet potato ones from Jewish Cooking in America.  For my standard latkes, I grate both potatoes and onions in the food processor, and don’t even bother peeling the potatoes.  Instead of adding matzoh meal, I use instant mashed potatoes to soak up the extra liquid.  I tried making a batch on the griddle, but the insides weren’t getting as cooked as I think they should be, so we then reverted to the high-greese method.  (I may try Elswhere’s idea of parboiling the potatoes some time, which might make the griddle work better. (via Crunchy Granola) The sweet potato ones are really good, and also have the advantage that they’re not competing with the platonic ideal of latkes that you grew up with.

Tonight we went to our congregation’s Hanukah party, and had some amazing latkes.  The cooks said that their tricks are to a) squeeze out all the excess liquid through cheesecloth and b) separate the eggs and beat the whites until stiff before adding them back to the mixture.  My mother always squeezed out the liquid, which makes for lovely crispy latkes.  But it’s an awful lot of work for a crowd.

My boys are not the paragons of restraint that Phantom’s kids are, but they’re doing reasonably well.  When D started to pout over not getting to open ALL his presents on Friday night, we told him that he was making it hard for us to have a happy Hanukah, and he did a pretty impressive job of controlling his attitude.  And when N opened his present from my folks tonight, he told me that he’s always wanted a blue robe with clouds and moons.  (Yes, we’ve been reading A Pocket for Corduroy; how did you guess?)

I seem to have relaxed a good bit about the whole Christmas thing this year.  I’ve decided that I’m not allowed to complain about the public school teaching "Santa Claus is coming to town" in music class when I’ve shown the boys Miracle on 34th Street (the original, of course).  I’m more disturbed that the celebration of holidays around the world scheduled for this week includes "America, Israel, Mexico and Africa" as countries.  D got a reprimand for talking too much in class on Friday; he was trying to explain to his classmates that Santa Claus wasn’t going to come to our house for Hanukah.

I’m not quite as enthusiastic about Babble as RebelDad is.  Yes, I’m glad to see a parenting site that is making a serious outreach to dads.  But they seem to be trying a little too hard to be hip.  Earlier in the week, it seemed like every other post on their front page was gratuitously cursing or referring to sex toys.  Oooh how naughty.  It made me think about what Andi Buchanan wrote recently about "the escalation of cool" or how being a hipster parent can be as much of a confining role as being a saccharine mommy who just loves pastels.

I feel like the Babble people read that annoying SFChronicle article about how boring mommies are and want to show that parents can still drink, curse and wear black.  Er, yes, but so what?  Is that really still a radical concept?  And is it really that exciting?

I know I’ve linked to it before, but if you haven’t read Being Daddy’s Square: The Unhip Parent’s Manifesto, go check it out.  I agree with RebelDad that being a parent shouldn’t mean giving up everything else that’s important in your life (#4 on his list), but if you go into parenting expecting that your life isn’t going to change at all, you’re shortchanging your child AND yourself.

Maybe after Babble’s a bit more settled, the authors will stop defining themselves by what they’re not and start talking about who they are.  I’ll check back in a month or so.

In college, I took a class called Yiddish for German Speakers.  I wasn’t much of a German speaker, but it was a pet project of one of my favorite professors, and I thought I might be a linguistics major.  15 years later, my German is minimal, my Yiddish is even less, but it’s a good memory.

Today’s book, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods, by Michael Wex, could have been subtitled "The Yiddish That All The German In the World Won’t Help You With."  It’s an exploration of the idioms that don’t make sense even if you can translate every word unless you understand the culture that they’re coming from.  So you learn that the way to say "toilet paper" in Yiddish is "asher yotser papir" or "he who makes-paper" from the morning prayer that praises God for keeping open all the passages that belong open.  Wex also argues that "shmuk" has nothing to do with the standard German "Schmuck" (which means "jewelry"), but comes from "shtok" or "stick" via the Yiddish-Shmiddish construction.

I found the book generally interesting, and laugh out loud funny at times, although it got a little repetitive by the end.  I was also surprised by my reaction to Wex’s relishing explanations of the anti-Christian sentiment buried in some of the idioms. I found myself wondering if it was a mistake to talk about such things "in public."   Or, as another generation might have asked, "is it good for the Jews?"

If I have any substantive complaint about the book, it’s about the lack of any chronological perspective.  The only people who really speak Yiddish now — as opposed to studying it from books — are Orthodox Jews, mostly black hat Hassidim.  I have to think that the language they speak, and the idioms they use, are different from those used by mainstream Yiddish speakers a hundred years ago when there was such a thing as a Yiddish mainstream.

My office’s holiday party is Wednesday.  There’s a dessert competition.  We had to sign up last week with what we were going to make.  Of course, I forgot to look in my cookbooks to figure out what I wanted to make, so I signed up for the cake that I look at every time I open The Cake Bible, but never have made — the golden cage.

When I got home and looked at the recipe, I remembered why I’ve never made it.  It’s a golden genoise, frosted with apricot icing, and then covered with a caramel cage:

Nothing in making it was all that difficult (although it would be hard to make without a cooking thermometer), but it’s a lot of steps.  For the icing alone, you have to make the apricot puree, a creme anglais, and an italian merengue, and then blend it all together with a pound of butter.  The cage — which looks so impressive — is actually quite easy and fun.

Now for the real challenge — getting it into my office in one piece.