Blessings and Curses

My relationship with China has often been a volatile one. One day I am perfectly content to be here, and the next I hate it and can't take it anymore. When the pollution is so bad I can smell it indoors, I want to leave. When skies are blue with wispy clouds and I can see the mountains in the distance, I'm pretty happy about my 30th floor apartment. When Chinese people don't demonstrate what I deem to be the minimal amount of courtesy, it's hard not to take it personally and make sweeping generalizations about their bad character. When I spend the day eating and talking with Chinese friends, I can't imagine leaving. When the Chinese government makes it very difficult to access the New York Times (to which I have a paid subscription), I want to scream. When I don't access Facebook quite so often because it's blocked, I realize that sometimes ignorance is bliss. Sadly, I logged on to Facebook this morning and got a reminder of why, regardless of my relationship with China, I'm definitely still not ready to go back home.

I know that politics are often contentious. I know that people hold strong views because they care about something. I know that it's hard to listen to something you think is absolutely, objectively wrong, and not get riled up about it. But, I have to say I was shocked and seriously disappointed by some of the things I read. Nothing was directed at me, individually. Nobody was calling me names, at least not directly. But so much of what was said was name-calling and devoid, as far as I could tell, of any attempt to communicate ideas or persuade. Believe me, I've been there. I've been so angry and frustrated that I didn't see the point in arguing to support my ideas. It's significantly easier to say that someone is just not intelligent enough, or doesn't have enough experience to understand. (A lot of my arguments with Dan end up with me throwing in the towel because he's got a bit more mental stamina than me. And while I may not call him names, I do accuse him of not listening or not trying to understand.) 

So I get it. The people who disagree with you are idiots and un-American. But let's get past that for just a few minutes, because I would like to understand my family and friends who don't share the same views as me.

Here is what I want from our country:

• equal opportunities (i.e. good public education for all)
• clean air, water, and food for everybody
• efficient emergency services
• care for those who cannot care for themselves (in whatever form this may take)
• help getting back on their feet for people who need it (training, job placement, etc.)
• fewer prisons
• less war
• respect for personal choices (any rational person, who can breath and exist on their own should be able to make choices about their own life, body, etc. without the involvement of the government or anyone else, so long as those choices do not interfere with the physical existence of any other autonomous person)
• respect for life (any person born into any circumstances gets the support they need to develop into a productive member of society)
• respect for ideas and dialogue (that we can disagree with a person's ideas without discounting the person, that someday our conversations may have greater "Yes, and" mentality, that we can truly listen and consider ideas that aren't our own without feeling attacked and defensive)

With all of these things, I still won't be rich, and I may not be able to afford my dream kitchen, but I will feel safe, and I will be happy knowing that, as privileged as I am, other people are still able to have a reasonable standard of living.

What is it that you want from our great country? Explain and justify (as I would tell my students), please. 

Macbeth, the Game.

I know it's been exactly a week since my last post. There have been several occasions when I thought, "I could blog about that." But, I'm a little low on emotional energy right now. Dan's doing some cover work, which means that neither of us is at home resting. There are two tired and stressed people trying to take care of two energetic young girls. Needless to say, it's not conducive to blogging.

I'm also working on a really, really big project. I have a group of pretty apathetic 9th graders this year, and my next unit is about Macbeth. Apathy and Shakespeare don't really get along and, quite frankly, I just want to light a fire under them. So, I came up with a solution, a very complicated and time-consuming one. I've made my entire unit into a game. Everything about class will either earn them points or badges and I've gotten feedback from several game fanatics in order to get it as close to something they might play as possible. Now, I know that gaming in the classroom is nothing new, but it isn't really about the novelty. I really, really, really want to engage these kids.

If they don't get into it, or just plain hate it, I will probably have a breakdown. Or, maybe I'll just make them read the entire play silently and give them a test. Ha! Then we'll see who likes my game. If nothing else, they'll get better and better at faking it!

Immense, Not Infinite, Love

I love you this much. 

How much? 

This much! 

I have some pretty big loves in my life. I love them immensely. I think about them most of my day. But it is an odd thing to try to quantify love. When I was younger, I was convinced that loving one more person didn't mean you loved the others less, but it does, in fact. Olivia came along and Dan used to say that he felt like he was getting a smaller "piece of the pie" so to speak. And I would get annoyed with him for suggesting that I only had so much love to give and not enough of it was going his way. But I get it now.

From the perspective of the person loving, the love feels infinite because it is everything we have, but from the perspective of the person being loved it's pretty easy to see the deficiencies. As it turns out, I can't really think about all of the people that I love all of the time. So, what happens?

I had a professor who once said, "You fall in love with the people around you." In my experience that's often true, but the same rule applies to love in general. The people closest to you, either physically or mentally, are the ones that get more of your love. And, in sort of the same way that one language is always dominant at any given time, the love never disappears, but it is more or less strong depending on who's closest.

Writing this makes me wonder if our finite mind power is why the heart was chosen as a symbol of love. But I digress. The entire point of this blog entry, aside from pretending that people want to read what I have to say, was to assure Dan that there is hope, because SOMEDAY our children will leave the house. And, if we have to, we can move far far away from them so that you can have the bigger piece of pie for once!

Painting a Pretty Picture

I had a meeting with Olivia's teacher this afternoon. We compared notes about her behavior at home and school in the hopes that we might find a common strategy to combat her whining ways. And, as someone who never whines, ahem, it is something I am anxious to nip in the bud.

When I arrived at her classroom, however, Olivia was still there. The nanny was on her way but Olivia, after seeing me, wasn't too interested in going home with the nanny. She wanted me to come paint with her. So, I promised her that we'd paint together at home. You can imagine the pretty pictures we usually paint; Olivia has an appreciation for crabs at the moment. But, tonight turned into something a little different. 

Mid-way through our painting session, after squirting half a container of green finger paint on our white walls, Olivia decided that it felt quite nice to paint her skin too. And, though she's a bit young for make-up, I enjoyed her artistic adventure.

I Doublethink Not

1984 is one of those novels that sticks with you. And, given that I use the book with students, I've reread it, perhaps too many times. Don't get me wrong; I appreciate and even like the novel. I think it conveys an important message and I can sympathize with Orwell's pessimistic tendencies. But I find that I, like so many other people, would often rather live life like Parsons, rather than Winston. And, I don't like to face the fact that I do this. It's easy, reading the novel, to criticize the masses who act like sheep and readily embrace contradictory ideas because it makes their life easier. It's much more difficult to accept that the same criticism could and should be applied to myself. So, I'm not going to focus on myself. I'm going to focus on other people who are even better at the game than I am.

A couple of nights ago I was talking with Dan about politics, generally a depressing topic for me, and I started thinking about what I consider to be a double plus good capability for doublethink among the far right. Nothing exemplifies it better for me than a clip from The Daily Show where several republicans claim, without batting an eye, that the government should be less involved in people's lives and people should have the right to choose what they believe, but abortion is wrong and should be illegal. Two plus two is apparently five.

Here now, I actually feel the need to explain that in spite of an embryo/fetus's parasitic status, I am a sucker for all things small and needy and find it hard to imagine a circumstance where I would have an abortion. That said, it is my body and, dare I say it, my parasite.

So, maybe I'm exaggerating just a little. If I really thought a fetus was a parasite I would probably be happy to get rid of it as quickly as I would worms, for example. But it does lead to my point (I'm getting there, I promise).

Most people agree that it is wrong to kill other people and some would say it's even wrong to kill yourself. But the discord arises when we have to decide what constitutes a person.

I realize that for the purposes of law and religion, the strictest definition is often the most desirable because it leaves the least amount of room for legal and moral ambiguity. However, maintaining such a definition is not always the most compassionate thing to do. Compassion, in my opinion, is more important than law or religion, and it's a shame it isn't inherent in both.

A fetus of 12 or even 18 weeks cannot, to my knowledge, survive outside the womb. So we might, therefore, make the analogy to decisions about life support - consideration is often given to the potential future a person might have and the cost of the support that would give them that opportunity. With respect to a fetus, potential future cannot be guaranteed. I would even argue that, given the right wing propensity for cutting social support systems to the ground, a fetus's potential (for productivity, happiness, etc.) may be significantly reduced in some cases. The cost of maintaining a fetus, and later a child, is enormously high when you factor in the physical and emotional impact of bearing a child, and the financial cost of adequate pre and post-natal care. Needless to say, we haven't even got to the cost of feeding, sheltering and clothing the child once it is born! But here I must come back to my point. Decisions to end any life are not black and white, but it is easier and more comforting to see them that way. Because they are not black and white, they are extraordinarily complex and difficult decisions to make and live with.

In an ideal world, there would be no need for the decisions to take someone off life support or have an abortion, but there would also be no war, no rape, and no hunger. It seems absolutely inhumane to force someone to carry and bring a child into the world and then leave that child to fend for itself. If people oppose abortion because they truly believe that every life is valuable, then they need to put their money where their mouth is and cherish and support that life until it ends naturally.

The Day Before Monday

My dad always said that while he was a teacher he always dreaded Sunday night. I don't think it has as much to do with being a teacher as it does with having a good life outside of work, but I get it. Especially painful is the Sunday night after a great holiday. I actually like work, more than most people probably, but I'm not immune to the grief that follows when something wonderful ends.

As a rule, we do as little as possible when we stay in Beijing for a holiday, and this time was no different. Here you might wonder, then, what will I write about? Well, just because we didn't do much, doesn't mean our week was uneventful. You would have had to forget that we have two young kids if you thought that!

But, it was the really mundane things that made our holiday. Today, like most of the other days this past week, we had a few friends over to eat. We ate chocolate crepes, eggs, bacon, cheese, and fruit (not all together, of course) and chatted about current events and future plans. We gawked at the window washers perched precariously on the edge of the building opposite ours. And, we pet the dog.

By request we had a lovely mutt named Borges join us for breakfast and Olivia couldn't have been happier if we'd given her a big bar of chocolate. Actually, she got some chocolate too, so she pretty much hit the jackpot this morning.

And now it's mid-afternoon. Sunday evening is very close. Oddly, today I have none of my usual Sunday anxiety. I haven't planned the meals for the week, done the grocery shopping, or finished all of my grading, but I'm just to relaxed to stress about it. As a matter of fact, I'm so relaxed that I might just take a nap with Olivia. I just can't imagine life can get any better than this!

A Holiday Within A Holiday

Even knowing that certain words are not capitalized in titles, I couldn't stop myself from capitalizing each word in the title of this post. Sometimes following conventions just looks bad. And, just now, it bothered me how unsymmetrical it looked written properly. Hopefully my grammatical double standard won't come back to bite me.

But I digress. This holiday (the mid-autumn/National Day holidays) has been pretty spectacular. The weather has been perfect - cool, sunny and relatively low pollution levels (funny that now pollution levels are very much a part of the weather for me). We've done something, generally getting together with friends, every day. And, yesterday, after going to my friend Jinbo's house, Olivia stayed to spend the night!

I have to admit I was nervous. I'm not sure why I was unnerved, since Jinbo is one of my best friends and I trust her absolutely. I can only assume it was one of those, "My baby is growing up!" moments.

We had gone to her house earlier in the day to have lunch and go to the Purple Bamboo Park, a ten minute walk away. During the day, Jinbo and Majie (her husband) offered to keep her overnight several times. By the time Dan and I left at 5:30, we were ready to take them up on their offer. It was really strange going home without her, but I'm sure Katherine enjoyed having our full attention, for once.

We put Katherine to bed and watched 4 or 5 episodes of Borgias (we never watch anything anymore!). It was really nice to have an evening entirely to ourselves in our house. Needless to say, we slept really well, and had a more relaxing morning than usual.

The nicest part of the whole thing, though, was when she came back. She was in a great mood, and after not seeing her for about 20 hours (not that I was counting), I had really started to miss her! Katherine was pretty excited too.

It's amazing how each phase of growth seems better than the last. It doesn't seem possible.

2 Years Later...

It goes without saying, that I've kept busy. Baby number one just started school and is currently seriously confused by her first vacation: "Can I go to school, mommy?" Baby number two has begun walking, dancing, and climbing in ernest. We're still in Beijing.

I did commit to a year when we first came here, right? I guess that's what happens when life is good. It gets hard to imagine living anywhere else. Hard to imagine how, if I don't even have time to keep a blog now, I might have time for anything else anywhere else! Let's just see how long I can maintain my current industrious attitude before I take a three-year break.

I do wonder, though, why I don't persist. Is it because I can't keep it brief? If I'm sitting at my computer, writing, I could be spending time with the girls or doing some work. Or, maybe, it's because my life is too good. Writers are supposed to be tortured, right? I refuse to admit it might be laziness, because I am not a lazy person. Perhaps it is perfectionism gone wrong-avoiding the task because it might not be perfect when I'm done with it.

Regardless of the reason, I'm willing to give it another go. There's plenty to write about, even on the blandest of days; having children does that. So, here we go again.