A blog worth reading...
I couldn't agree more with the entire post.
Posted at 10:26 PM on May 31, 2005 | Comments (1)It looks like just a normal Friday...
And it is! But the weekend is not normal because it's the first weekend in a long long time that I don't have to work! Monday is a holiday, so I don't have to work then either! Lincoln will have to do some stuff from home, but unfortunately that's become the regular thing right now, so I'm not going to dwell on it. Anyway, I needed to share my excitement, because I want to believe this is the first weekend of a few wonderful months to come. Months, full of warm weather, outings with the bikes or to the beach, free weekends and finally... a trip to Austria (and Croatia)! It's been a year and a half since we've gone to Austria last and it will be over 3 years since we've been to Croatia. Years! I am having spontaneous visions of me on the beach or Veronika in a cute bathing suit or all of us downing gallons of really good ice cream in downtown Vienna. I. CAN'T. WAIT. I am addicted to refreshing this site (live webcam of a spot on the island Cres) every few hours and I just can't believe my luck!
Now the only little piece in this blissful puzzle is that I am to obtain plane tickets that will take me from JFK to VIE for under $1,000/person and it is not looking good. Oh, I will go this summer, nothing will stop me, the question is only how much financial pain will I be enduring. Every night I think what shameless robbery of poor little families who just want to go see their relatives and look cute in their Blue's Clues swim suits. There should be a clause - real tourists should pay, but real Europeans should not! At least not $1,000. Well, whatever, I had to whine a little. It's not like I didn't know what it would cost. I will just have to make it through this phase of price comparing and watching in terror as I refresh pages and all of a sudden the price was increased by several hundred dollars or all the waiting lists are closed or worse even, Austria will be closed! They will close the mountains and the sound of music! If I don't pay! See, that's how they get you. Wouldn't you shell out a three grand just so they don't close the Mozart and the Edelweiss?
Posted at 08:34 AM on May 27, 2005 | Comments (4)
Work and stuff
Kate in Madrid asked about work and how it fits into our life and if we are now who we thought we'd turn out and all that. Actually, I have no idea, really. I went to study something in college I thought I would enjoy and something I was good at: foreign languages. Then I finished college and still loved foreign languages but of the actual subject of my studies (translation) I had had enough. Luckily I got married at the same time and so the next thing to do was making money for me and my full-time-student husband and not so much a period of discernment about the ideal career. Since then I've had many jobs, some related to what I studied, some not, but it was still all just to make some money. And then! I had a baby and I wanted to raise her full-time and here I am, still not having started "a career" but working in a job with not as much market as "vocational" value.
Kate was mentioning the difference of attitude towards work between Spain and the US, the former seeing work as a very uncomfortable necessity and the latter as an obligation to fulfillment and success. Those are broad generalizations but there is some truth. There is a strong pressure in the American society to be better, to be perfect if possible. Having the right job, the one you loooove figures into that. There is a tendency to eliminate everything unpleasant from life (except exercise! do not stop exercising!) and work is totally unpleasant, so if you looove your job, you have that problem taken care of. Europeans might be lower expectations in that area, plus they don't have this constant American dreaming to do on a daily basis, so it's more common to admit you don't like your job and that's that.
It's all easier when you've always felt a keen interest in one particular thing and especially if it was an already clearly defined job (like doctor or teacher or hairdresser). If you don't, like me, that whole fulfillment+success element in your job selection is much harder. It's a question that comes and goes in my life... "should I be doing what I'm doing?" or "am I answering all my "calls" in life?" At times it's exasperating but I'm finding out that getting older (oldER, I'm not saying i'm old, obviously... sheesh!) helps in this regard. My perspective is slowly shifting and I'm becoming more free in my thinking. This whole childhaving experience really pushed me to the edge and I surprised myself with what I could survive. So now, I care less and less about what people would expect of me, or what people call "a career" or what in their eyes would make me successful. And let's face it, that's what all these questions come down to.
I don't believe there is only this one thing for a person to do in life. For some people that's how it turns out, they find one thing and they do amazing things in it and they don't change directions. For other people it's a lot of little things or a few big things and for others the description of their lives should not even include their "jobs", because their main merits are somewhere else entirely. I also have an issue with the mixing of what one has done and what one is. If you're working in some sort of high-powered business, that's what it will always become. What does your resume say, what have you done, where is the money? That in itself would not be a problem, because a company is there to build and create things and work experience is relevant, not the state of heart. Unfortunately though, I've hardly met any people in business, who didn't end up firmly believing that a lack of success in their job was directly connected to their value as a person. That's where all the misery starts in my opinion, whether you're employed or unemployed.
It's wonderful to feel fulfilled in your job, it's something to aspire to definitely, but how exactly you achieve that is really only up to the individual. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have to wake up whistling in the morning because every single minute of your working day makes you want to put on your apron and burst into "The hills are alive!!!". It does mean that you find meaning in it though.
Posted at 01:02 PM on May 25, 2005 | Comments (1)Muttertaaa!
Sunday was Mother's Day and I got the best gift! I am to go away for a weekend in the next three months. Leave husband and child and spend some time just for myself. I would say Lincoln is a great mind reader to know just what I wanted, but unfortunately I think it was so obvious, maybe from all the complaining and the whining and the screaming I was doing. Anyway it was a really good Mother's Day, even Veronika managed to say: "Happpysday!"
I am still very new at being the Mother in Mother's Day and as always I start wondering if I have arrived at a point, where I know what motherhood is like or who I am now that I am a mother. God, it's been almost two years and I'm still thinking about this. When I was pregnant with Veronika I was worried how motherhood would change me and when you look at that last question I'd have to say "Yes... in a way... for the time being." On a daily basis I struggle against seeing myself only as a mother and nothing else, because almost all my time is spent mothering, yet I am beginning to know for sure that I cannot live as a mother only. At the same time I savor the new relationships motherhood gives me. I enjoy all the feelings involved, I love the physical part of being a mother even though they are so overwhelming at times.
I am a walking contradiction my husband says, and he's right. I love the mother-person in me and I dream of more children, at the same time though I want nothing else than NOT be a mother for a day (or two, or seventeen!). I know it's a matter of balance and I'm working on it (Please send me a baby-sitter, thank you.), because as it turns out, one needs space and distance to take a realistic view of your own life. When I start feeling threatened by my own child I realize, now it's time to step back. It's time to take a break and contemplate my life a little, so I can see it and I can see all the aspects in their right proportions. Ah, all the mothers will say, time for contemplation? Rest? Take a break? Yeah, right! - Actually, yes. That's right. Don't give me that. That "Oh, I wish! But we all know it's NEVER going to happen!" - crap. Don't give me that because my head is full of it. I tell myself those exact things every day and surprisingly they just crush me and I become a bitter sad excuse of a person and not an enlightened martyr like the books said I would!
I love how motherhood sort of awakened in me. The child arrives and you just get going. It doesn't come naturally at first maybe, but slowly you sort of release all that natural knowledge. I thought of my own mother a lot, because obviously so many things I know because I learned them from her. It's not what she said so much as what she did and who she was. I learned how to nurture and I learned how to be comfortable and confident as a mother. And so even though she is not around most of the time, it's nice to feel my mother close in my relationship with my own daughter. It all feels familiar and it feels good to know that one day Veronika might become a mother and recognize me in her relationship with her children. This is not about pride on my part but more about a wish to stay united even in separation, and also the hope that all the "life" I've given up is not lost, but passed on.
Motherhood felt like a shock to me at first and reading my pregnancy posts I find it interesting how in a way I could feel it coming, yet was still completely oblivious. The good thing is that now I do see how I've grown as a person and feel that motherhood is an essential part of me. The challenge is still to combine the before and the after-me into a balanced One.
Posted at 02:25 PM on May 10, 2005 | Comments (1)Conversations at the library
Two young Brazilian boys come up to the counter and ask for library cards. They have just watched me talk to a Hispanic man.
Boy: Lady, do you speak Portuguese?
Me: No.
Boy: Do you speak Spanish?
Me: Yes.
Boy (looks at me suspiciously): But... but... you look so... completely... English!
***
Older man, maybe in his seventies comes up to counter to check out two language learning sets. One for Spanish, one for Portuguese. He wears 3 big pins on his jacket and duplicates on his hat. The pins say "Stop terrorism, dissolve the CIA!", "Invaders out of Irak!" and "Stop terrorism, dissolve the FBI!" I check out his books and hand him his card.
Old man: Eco la vita! - That's not Portuguese though!
Me: I know. It's Italian.
Old man: NO! It's French! "C'est la vie!" - That's Italian. "Eco la vita" is French.
Me (confused, wondering if he's messing with me): No, actually "C'est la vie" is French...
Old man: No, no! I have a complete list at home! "Eso es la vida!" THAT's German.
Me (inner linguist is getting pissed): That's Spanish actually...
Old man (DEAD serious): No. That's German. In Spanish it's "Das ist das Leben!"
Me (in German): "Das ist das Leben" is German, I know, because actually I speak German and I'm from Austria.
Old man (interrupting me): No, no, it's Spanish!
Me (nodding, trying not to giggle): Ok, you're right.
Old man (smiles triumphantly): Tsk tsk... so where in Austria are you from?
Me: Small town near Vienna.
Old man: I was in Austria once. In Klagenfurt. Beautiful town. But it was 1946 and we had been shipped there to free the place of fascists. When I got there though, I realized I was the fascist. I was very disappointed!
He leaves. I run off to the backroom to burst out laughing.
C'est la vie - as the Italians say.
I love my job.
Tomorrow I will write about Mother's Day but now please read about condoms!
Amy Welborn of "Open Book" links to one of those ah-so-original articles about how the pope lets millions die of AIDS because he won't allow condom use and a very interesting discussion ensues. Some of the best comments I give you here:
- Oh, for heaven's sake . . . as if people out fornicating have this atavistic scruple implanted by the Church NOT to use a condom, a scruple they rigorously obey even in the midst of their fornication.
"I'm going to hire a prostitute for her services, but I'd better not use a condom because the Church tells me I'll go to hell if I do." -
-Shouldn't an African solution to HIV manifest itself in African solutions? I hear Muslim polygamy helps combat AIDS transmission rates, why not encourage both polygamy and Islam? We could send Louis Farrakhan and Mohammed Ali over as goodwill ambassadors and sex educators!
Where are all the cultural relativists? Isn't condom distribution a form of cultural imperialism? -
- If women are being forced into sex with HIV- infected husbands out of fear of being left destitute, well, we've got a bigger problem here, don't we? -
-I just don't see the link to the church. I suppose the argument goes that the wife is a devout catholic who would use condoms in heartbeat once she got the green light form the pope. -
- But the Church isn't forbidding condom use because it doesn't like western-style promiscuity. The Church forbids condom use because it believes condom use in and of itself to be wrong. -
- I continue to find it amazing that the NY Times is upset that the Pope is a Catholic. (Maybe they were hoping for a write-in of Bishop Spong?) What also amazes me is the unexpressed racism that runs through the discussion of HIV/AIDS in Africa and Latin America. The premise is that all those brown and black people are completely at the mercy of their raging hormones - and we can't really ever expect them to behave otherwise. -
- To paraphrase the fish analogy: Give a person a condom and she/he's safe for the night. Teach people mutual respect and they're safe for life. I don't think the Catholic Church owes anyone an apology here. -
Posted at 09:35 PM on May 08, 2005He makes Bryant Gumbel look like...
I'm watching Kevin Hill (please forgive me, the choices are abysmal) and I guess the show is about this hot single lawyer (Taye Diggs) who has a small daughter and also he dates a lot or something. I don't really know, I'm too lazy to read up on it. The most ridiculous part of the show is not the 2nd-grade-level storylines or the reheated dialogues, but the scenes of Taye Diggs "raising" his toddler daughter. Apparently it always involves "Kevin" wearing clean, perfectly ironed designer suits, occasionally without a tie or jacket (you know, all parents really let themselves go) and taking her to a hairdresser or having her shake her diapered butt to some catchy R&B song. The little girl, obviously also always wears cute CLEAN outfits and makes very little noise. Well, wouldn't you know, that's exactly how things are over here at my house. Veronika miraculously disappears for hours at a time so I can get my hair and face ready and put on my fancy clothes and then shows up all dressed and combed and we bounce around to Jazzmatazz and then again she disappears until it's time for me to take her to some cool location where the two of us will be photographed for the cover of Perfect Parents magazine. Anyway, there is nothing more ridiculous than to watch Taye Diggs carry his on-screen daughter. The uneasiness and unfamiliarity between the two is so obvious you just want to save her from his klutzy hands.
And before you doze off, some other really awesome storylines:
Taye Diggs meets single hair stylist Toni Braxton from Harlem and she gets upset at him for not being black enough and takes him from a fancy Manhattan restaurant to a "real" place where they have greasy food and play Stevie Wonder. It looks like that really cures him and he repents of his white ways and returns to her salon claiming that he can still "relate" even though he "wears designer suits and has a few white friends". And at the end he recites a poem by Zora Neale Hurston in a hearing! I'm telling you, the dialogue is OSCAR material, not to mention the "ethnic sensitivity". Classic stuff.
But it gets deeper. Another story line follows a young woman who seeks anullment from the Catholic Church, because her husband concealed his real identity being in a witness protection program and all (it's a very real show, you know). She's so stubborn because she is so religious and she will want to get remarried in the church one day and we all know, there is no divorce when you're Catholic blabla. Turns out, the woman is having an affair already and is just seeking the anullment so she doesn't come off as an adulterer. There you have it. Catholics all have dark dirty secrets and black people cannot keep it real if they wear Ferragamo.
The best part? Next week Wayne Brady guest stars!
Posted at 08:37 PM on May 04, 2005 | Comments (7)