butterflylike network

My brother is visiting and yesterday I was walking around town with him when a woman I used to work with at the university walked by us. I was pushing Z in her stroller and looked straight at her and was about to say hello when she sort of looked at the stroller and rushed right by.

It’s the second time this happened with someone I used to work with at the university. Apparently, strollers make you invisible.

There’s the pointless embarrassment of a state governor calling a press conference to reveal he’s had something as commonplace as an affair. And the emails he’d exchanged with his Argentinian paramour (via 11D) made public, which almost made me feel sorry for them. Almost, but not quite.

I don’t know why Mark Sanford is at all special enough that his marital problems merit a press conference.

I don’t know what having an affair has to do with governing a state – except perhaps if you were elected because you’re one of a group of people who claim they want to strengthen marriage as part of their political platform. Even then I’m not sure that one thing really has to do with another.

But I do know that none of it will matter to anyone outside his family in the long run.

Two icons I grew up with died today: Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson.

They were both too young to leave us.

• Iran news and images via Twitter. Can’t look away. And it breaks my heart: I don’t see a way around more violence and bloodshed and pain.
• Z decided that bananas and blueberries are edible after all.
• There’s been a shift in her mentality of late: when she’s done eating and getting a little bored, she chucks things on the floor not just to signal that she’s done but on purpose to annoy me. You can totally see it in her face.
• We found a Hungarian playgroup so that she can hear other people speak Hungarian too, not just me, and most of the babies there were noticeably skinnier than the average American baby. Just like Z. Go figure.
• Z’s now really into the idea of walking but it’s all still rather tentative so if she has to get anywhere fast she’s just goes, eh fuck it, and drops to the floor and crawls for it.
• My birthday passed. It was mostly fun and I don’t feel older just more tired. On the one hand, A. threw me a birthday barbecue party, and lots of friends came, and it was so very lovely. I haven’t had a birthday party in very, very, very many years and it turns out they’re fun at any age! On the other (and much smaller) hand, he completely forgot the day of my actual birthday.
• Z likes chocolate cake and chocolate ice cream. Also avocadoes, especially when I make my special mix consisting of one avocado and two really fat teaspoonfuls of tehina. So yummy.
• Making food reminds me: I’ve started to use my iPhone as a timer while cooking. No idea why this didn’t occur to me right after I bought it, I’d have saved the price of one timer that is now broken due to the helpful ministrations of a now one-year-old child. She’s now after my iPhone, she hearts it so much it hurts but – no.
• Also? I like to keep the iPhone on silent, or rather: vibrate. Because when I leave it on the table and someone calls, it buzzes like a bug that’s been flipped on its back and I find that funny. I suppose that’s sort of mean on my part.
• And now I have to go back to reading the news again, on Twitter. I can’t help thinking of December 1989 – we were glued to the television then.

• I can’t take a feminist seriously if she takes a condescending tone towards traditionally female activities like crafting in order to make some otherwise valid points about the marketing practices of e-business sites (in this case: Etsy) (responses at Jezebel, Magickal Realism, 11D, etc.).
• In that article, Sara Mosle implies that an educated stay-at-home-mom’s non-work taking care of her family and home is really not worth as much as, say, a similarly educated corporate attorney’s paper-pushing (or, wait, perhaps I shouldn’t make unfair and exaggerated or even blatantly false blanket assumptions like that to make a point?):

the Etsy.com seller is often a married woman with (or about to have) young children, with a higher-than-average household income, and a good education. These should, in sum, be highly employable women. So, what are they doing, often pursuing hobbies, or working only part-time, on Etsy?

• So, I wanted to make a list of the things that, in my year-long experience as a very highly educated stay-at-home-mom I have not been paid to do. Off the top of my head, thus far I’ve been a professional caregiver, nurse, nutritionist, cook, psychiatrist, physical therapist, event planner, project manager, personal assistant, early childhood development expert, singer, professional photographer, and I assume eventually I’ll also play the role of schoolteacher. I work a full 168 hours per week because as a parent, I’m on duty even while sleeping: if baby wakes up whenever, at the very least I have to make a decision about whether or not I need to do something about it. Together with her father, of course – we are parents: our child is our responsibility, this is how it is, nothing wrong with it. The difference is that he also works outside the home and society puts an actual monetary value on that work. We are both only not working when we hire someone, for money, someone who is not our child’s mother, to do the things that I, as my child’s mother, do most of the time without ever getting paid a cent. Mosle seems to imply that there’s nothing wrong with this and fails to notice that doing so very nearly invalidates any other point she’s trying to make.
• What I always find funny is that I’ve fulfilled many of the job functions I list above above in various jobs I had. For example: I was a project manager, psychiatrist, web designer, marketing team, event planner, personal assistant rolled into one in a particular management position I once had and was paid pretty well for not much more than 40 hours a week and always being stressed out because no one’s life was ever improved by what I did, least of all mine.
• Right now, there are several people whose lives are better because of what I do, myself included.
• To imply that traditional women’s work, conducted in the home, is worth less than traditional men’s work outside the home is quite simply misogynist. And it does nothing to solve such very real problems as a childless woman being 100% more likely to be hired for the same job as an equally qualified woman who happens to be a mother (via Jezebel).

If medical bills underly 60% of bankruptcies, then how much of all debt, including outstanding debt that hasn’t yet crippled anyone, is due to medical expenses? The figure comes from a Harvard Law School/Harvard Medical School/Ohio University report (via HuffPo), which also found that

Nationally, a quarter of firms cancel coverage immediately when an employee suffers a disabling illness; another quarter do so within a year.

I’m simplifying but… basically, if you get seriously sick you have about a 50% chance of ending up with no health insurance coverage. I mean, your – by then probably former – employer *may* politely offer you COBRA coverage that you can pay for yourself (with your non-existent salary), at the rate of 110% of the monthly premium of your old coverage.

I can’t stop thinking something: the American health insurance industry is pretty much responsible for bringing down the world’s finances. If there weren’t so many bankruptcies due to healthcare expenses, there wouldn’t have been so many people unable to pay mortgages. There wouldn’t have been so many foreclosures. The world’s tremendously interconnected financial system wouldn’t be in quite as bad a shape and might have had a bit of breathing room in which to deal with some of its stupidest ideas of all time. Iceland would never have gone bankrupt. Rightwing extremism wouldn’t be as severe everywhere in the world.

(Then again, an unregulated industry so interconnected that the world’s governments are forced to hand them free money should anything go seriously wrong with their business has no incentive to fix itself so… We would probably be screwed anyway.)

But if American healthcare weren’t profit-motivated, we would see a lot of positive changes. Like routine doctor’s visits not requiring endless phone calls to get your very expensive insurance to pay for them. (This is something I spend lots of time on these days: endless phone calls to our mind-blowingly expensive insurance company because they keep trying not to pay for f*&#ing routine doctor’s visits. At this point, I’m pretty well convinced that the CEOs of health insurance companies ought to be convicted of crimes against humanity.)

Profit skews everything away from preventing people from getting sick because hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and even insurance companies can’t make money if people have no illnesses to cure, no reason to endure expensive procedures/tests/medications/interventions that then require more expensive procedures/tests/medications/interventions for the cascade of side effects they cause. I’m not saying ALL such things are unnecessary, just that a for-profit healthcare system will encourage providers to lead patients towards them because a lot more money is made that way than through the practice of long-term preventive care that would, you know, prevent patients from needing said expensive procedures/tests/medications/interventions.

Interventions don’t make you healthier and, for example, there are too many unnecessary c-sections performed that endanger the health of both mother and child. The U.S. is not actually such a great place for moms: it’s ranked 27th in the world on the latest Mother’s Index of the yearly State of the World’s Mother’s report. I think it’s fairly safe to lay part of the blame on a for-profit healthcare industry for this: many moms can’t afford health insurance at all, and too many of the ones that can have risky major surgery (like a c-section – even in cases when nature could do what it needs to) foisted upon them because the hospital makes more money that way than if nature is allowed to do what it needs to.

There are calls for government-run healthcare programs: perhaps a system like Medicare for all. It couldn’t be worse than what there is now. Except perhaps if it’s only one possible program among many: leaving the healthcare industry’s profit-motive intact, most especially that of the for-profit health insurance industry. And its CEO salaries: these 23 men together took home $14.9 billion in 2005. Imagine what you could do with just a part of that money, say 10% of each of their salaries:

10% of 14.9 billion is 1.4 billion. If basic insurance costs $8,000/year for a family then taking 10% from just these CEO salaries would insure 35,000 Americans a year for five years. That is a lot of people that can be helped just by 23 men. Looking at the companies as a whole that profit from health care, we can probably pay for every uninsured person in this country for decades to come. (CEO Compensation: Who Said Health Care is in a Financial Crisis?)

Imagine how much money would be freed up for other industries that actually produce something, if for-profit health insurance were scrapped. I know that last sentence is simplistic but I can’t help it. All this is just so, so, so very wrong.

So this morning an apparent gunman held Princeton University’s campus hostage. And by held hostage I mean caused campus security to put all staff, students, parents, etc. on lockdown, and scare the crap out of them with emergency phonecalls/emails.

This would not have been a big deal for me except for two minor facts. One, my friend, with whom we were walking around downtown Princeton, has a husband who works on campus, and two, since downtown Princeton is practically the university’s campus, we weren’t sure whether walking around downtown today was really advisable. To be on the safe side, we went to her house and started checking the web to find out what might be going on. (Incidentally, much baby cuteness ensued between Z and my friend’s nine-month-old. They gave each other kisses and hugs. Then fought over a pacifier. Need I say more?)

Looking for info on Princeton’s own web site: nothing. Nothing, that is, except for a non-committal and fairly well-hidden emergency notification (which now just explains the incident and gives you campus security tips like how to secure your laptop or be paranoid and report suspicious activities, like an apparent gunman).

Asking google: nothing.

But Twitter? Ah yes. A gunman on campus! A gunman on campus! Tweeted the tweeters. So okay, this wasn’t very informative either, until a few minutes later people started tweeting that the university has issued an all-clear, there is no gunman, just four kids with a toy gun. A green plastic toy gun. (A good thing that linked NBC news site includes some lovely pictures of fake soldiers in fake gas masks and fake buildings on fire on the same page as this news story. Might as well try to make fakeness into real news, right? Myself, I can’t help but be morbid. I think people kinda sorta hoped something might actually be happening in this sleepy college town. Not so anyone’s hurt or even inconvenienced, of course, but… well, you know how everyone likes to feel important. Or just be on the news. Didn’t quite work out, that! Instead we were all on Twitter.)

Kedves Zsuzsi!

Now that you are a year old, it seems only fair that you should get a letter from me. After all, you can almost read! (Ahem, turn the pages of books so fast that no one can see what’s on them.)

I can’t quite believe you’ve been around an entire set of 365 days: every day I look at you you still seem so shiny and new. And willful and loud too: there’s little you don’t want and you protest loudly and with large heartbroken tears whenever we might dare to say no. You have yet to figure out that our word ‘no’ isn’t a physical barrier. I think we might try to keep that knowledge from you for as long as we possibly can.

You’ve begun to work out how to walk, meticulously piecing together the details of how to balance your slim little body on nothing but two tiny feet. It doesn’t quite work yet but you can see it now, it’s almost here. And a couple of weeks ago you finally got hungry for real: it only took you what, a year? You’ve started eating enough that you gain more weight than a couple ounces a month (I don’t know for sure but you look and feel decidedly bigger than when we got to Detroit). You’ve put yourself on a balanced diet of avocadoes, chicken, and yoghurt. We think you eat avocadoes in the most amusing way possible, off tortilla chips: you have us dip the chip into the mashed-up avocado, suck the avocado off the chip then hand the chip back to us for another round. You hold everything you put in your mouth in the most elegant and dainty way possible, your fingers fanning out just so, not too much but noticeably, to display the dexterity of your little hands to full advantage.

One year. Until now I’ve been in the habit of measuring a year’s span from September to September, from the beginning of the school year through the end of summer vacation. I got in this habit because when I was a little girl, a school year often meant a new place, a new home, new school, new friends, new teachers, new excitement, and new fears.

You are not fearful.

But you are also not reckless. This week your father taught you how to go down stairs backwards, and since stairs are one of your favorite things in the world (after refrigerators and computers and iPhones and car keys and pacifiers and your teddy bear), this is important. Sometimes when you see a set of stairs a few feet away you turn around then and there and crawl backwards toward it for those last few feet, just to be safe. Sometimes you do a double take to check your progress and crawl a couple of small circles before you get there. Lucky, that: it gives your father and me the chance to sprint towards the stairs ahead of you, positioning ourselves so that if you decided to plunge down it headfirst instead, you’d only fall as far as our arms.

It blows my mind that we’ve kept you alive and safe an entire year.

Last Saturday we took you with us to explore Detroit’s abandoned Michigan Central Station. We snuck in through a hole in the wall of the tunnel that goes underneath it, walked through its majestic, broken main hall and up the stairs to the top floor. I showed you Canada from the windows, and you kept trying to point out where lamps should have been hanging from the ceiling but weren’t. You thought that was rather strange. We looked at the graffiti on the walls, the plants growing right up on the thirteenth floor, then finally snuck out again into the world where people still live, with everything we’d seen in that secret other world still in our minds. And in our cameras.

You see Zsuzsi, this is humanity: we make beautiful, great things then forget all about them until others come along who are able to see them as beautiful things again. We came to Detroit to do exactly that. Not everyone will understand this because it is a strange place and like everything strange, it can be scary. But fear is a dangerous thing to give in to. It’s better to try and look with fresh eyes because then you will see beauty everywhere, even in the unlikeliest places. Just like you do now, smiling to yourself every time something entices you to further exploration.

May you never lose your curiosity, little one.

On your birthday we had a party with German apple cake our friends made and a green terrier pinata from the supermarket in Mexicantown where we get your beloved avocadoes. Because, it turns out, Detroit is nothing if not international.

May you have many, many more happy birthdays.

Love, your mother

* Technically you’re one year and three days old because although your mother drafted this letter to you days ago, circumstances beyond her control prevented her from posting it on May 25, your birthday. But your mother hardly ever does anything on time. I suppose you’d better get used to that.

If those of us who grew up speaking another language can learn to pronounce others’ – to us – foreign names correctly, then isn’t it only common courtesy for them to do the same for us? I possess no special talent in this and refuse to assume that everyone else can’t do something I’m able to do. If I anglicized my name, wouldn’t I be implying that I think Americans who grew up speaking English are a bit stupid? And wouldn’t that be just really, really wrong? The world is so much bigger and the people in it so much smarter than you think, Mr. Krikorian. (Jezebel, ThinkProgress)

I’m pleased as punch about Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination.

Z got mended, of course. We did end up going to the doctor, who was great and whom I want to take home with me to New Jersey, then on the third day of her fever it all started to go down and by the fourth day, all we were left with was a lot of crabbiness on Z’s part. Which turned out to be nothing more than hunger. The girl finally got hungry! It only took a year, and the first real illness of her life, but who am I to argue. She’s been eating nonstop for the past week, and I swear she’s grown an inch.

We’ve been going all around Detroit since – to Belle Isle, where we hung out at the intersection of Loiter Way and Picnic Way.  No really: that’s where you have a real good view of both the conservatory (the cupola of which you see in the picture above, it’s really a gorgeous tropical greenhouse) and the carillon tower that just happened to be playing a lovely Japanese song.

And we’ve been to the Detroit Institute of Arts, where Z particularly liked Diego Rivera’s mural. At least, that’s how I interpreted her pointing in its direction whenever I tried to leave its general vicinity and screeching in a way that could curdle young kittens’ blood.

Speaking of kittens, that’s the newest word Z can recognize. She doesn’t say anything but she can, when she’s in the mood, point out kittens – along with dogs, ladybugs, lamps, trucks, herself in a mirror, her father… But only in Hungarian.