BraceLand

Note: this was drafted with the intention of posting it from the trip, but, well, that didn’t happen. So just pretend this was a live blog…

There’s one significant plus to having a nomadic boyfriend, and that’s that I have a really great excuse to visit some very cool places that I’d otherwise never see. In July, we spent a week in rural Eastern Portugal, just a few minutes from the Spanish border. I regret not blogging about our time there b/c it was magical and it’d be nice to have a record, but we were operating under a pretty strict “no internet” policy that week.

Come September, that whole offline thing is not really an option, so I figure I might as well make some notes about the place while we’re here and online!

I flew into Linz, Austria where David had just finished curating the Ars Electronica Symposium (very proud!). We spent three uneventful days there before heading down to Slovenia.

Our destination was Trenta, Slovenia which is in the middle of Triglav National Park. Google Maps, my new arch nemesis, told us it would take us just under four hours. Well, they must not have accounted for the fact that a Fiat Panda doesn’t do so well on the hairpin S-curve turns of the Vrsic Pass. Not to mention, road names/numbers are not helpful when they’re not marked as such. Luckily, there weren’t many options to take a wrong turn (unless you wanted to plunge to your death off the side of an Alpine peak) so we made it to the farm where we are staying (a “kemetija” or “tourist farm” as they call it here) and met our hosts, Stanka and Marko.

Pri Plajerju, the first farm of the trip

The farm is…pretty farmy. It’s a completely organic farm with all the food served here (we’re doing breakfast and dinner) either homemade (and when I say homemade, I mean bread made from hand-milled flour) or local. My friends at La Vida Locavore would be very proud. Our apartment is literally in the hay loft, which we think is funny. There’s a huge living/dining/kitchen area, and immaculate bathroom with a killer shower, and a gabled bedroom. The silence and darkness has been utterly blissful. We’ve also made friends with the resident donkey, who we lovingly call (b/c we can’t pronounce his Slovenian name) Mr. Donkey.

Mr. Donkey

Our first night here, we ate at the local restaurant, which was decorated with, among other weird kitchscy things, a stuffed beaver with some pretty scary teeth. Brings new meaning to the phrase “stuffed animal.” David had the deer goulash and I had the meat stew. Both were amazing. We traced a path home through the rain lit by David’s iPhone display (I promise I’ll never disparage the thing again) and tucked in for the night, only to be awakened every few hours by booming thunder echoing off the surrounding mountains. So much for that blissful silence, though somehow it’s more peaceful when it’s not your upstairs neighbors doing the booming.

Day two was a complete rainout, but it gave us a chance to see the WW I museum in Kobarid (more on that in a separate post). Stanka cooked us dinner at the farm, which consisted of zucchini soup, the first meatloaf I’ve had in 20 years, a zucchini cream thingamajig (UNBELIEVABLE) and buckwheat/rice pilaf. It was excellent. Because it was my birthday, Marko gave us a few swigs of the homemade cherry brandy (called “the red line” because it makes a direct line from your throat to your tummy).

"The Red Line" homemade cherry brandy

On day three, I woke up at 7am to find the sun shining brilliantly (yes!), so excited that our chances for a hike weren’t ruined. The Triglav Park is so well marked, with such a great diversity of paths. Luckily, we met some German friends who let us borrow their trail map. We decided on a 5-hour trip with ~1500 meters of elevation gain. It was all fun and games until that last climb to the peak. The trail was really rocky and I just had my running shoes. As we speak, my knees are letting me hear it. We crossed a bunch of waterfalls and had some spectacular views of the valley and Soca River. We ate cookies at the lake at the top before heading back down.

View from our Hike

Dinner tonight was prepared by the guys, Marko and Stanka’s cousin. Let’s just say it wasn’t up to the preparation of the night before (a whole pear on a plate as dessert?), though they were much more lenient with the wine. We also met a couple from Brooklyn who are here on their honeymoon and just came from the place we’re headed tomorrow.

After another fabulous breakfast, we’re off to the Karst region, just across the border from Italy. There will be spelunking and lots of winetasting to be done. More soon!

I recently received a note from a college friend, currently serving as a Captain in the Marines. He’s stationed in Afghanistan, and like most service people in war zones, he doesn’t exactly have tons of time to post status updates on Facebook or check in via email on a regular basis. So to keep in touch, he’s sent around a 28-page missive, complete with lots of photos, detailing his experience so far. (I, being the techno-illiterate that I am, couldn’t figure out how to get the pictures out of the word doc into my post or else I would have shared those too).

I found it utterly fascinating, especially with Dexter Filkins’ Forever War still rolling around in my head. Ironically, he’s had pretty good internet access lately so I’ve been emailing with him and he’s agreed to let me re-post some of his thoughts here, on condition that I don’t identify him or give away any identifying information.

Of the 28 pages, the parts I found most interesting were his personal thoughts on the war effort at large:

Afghanistan is a new arena for the preponderance of the Marines deployed with the MEB. There are an extraordinarily high number of combat veterans in our ranks who bring with them valuable experience, mostly from Iraq. It is apparent that, as a military force, we have greatly improved our ability to engage in counterinsurgency operations. The men and the leadership have a much better awareness now than they did in 2001 in Afghanistan or in Iraq in 2003 of the importance of having an understanding of the culture, language, history, and politics of the region. We have acknowledged and, for the most part, taken to heart the moral and practical imperative of protecting, and not alienating, the population as we work to route the enemy from the country and bring political and economic stability to this land and its people.

I am convinced that our work and presence here is important, for reasons ranging from fulfilling our obligations to the Afghan people after having abandoned them in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse and providing access to oil and gas reserves in Central Asia to ridding the country of religious extremists bent on exporting violence and protecting nuclear-armed Pakistan from Taliban take over. I am, however, uncertain of our overall objectives. The ones that have been stated are vague at best. What the US military and government hope to achieve here should be articulated in precise terms and we should be honest with our servicemen and women – with all of our citizens, in fact – about what the cost of our commitment and the duration of our stay here is likely to be.

The Marines here are happy and proud to serve. Most, if asked, would tell you that they feel indebted to our Nation and that they view their service as an obligation, a view they probably wish more people shared. They would also tell you that they are pleased to be out of Iraq and glad to be in a different environment with novel sights, new people, and the presence of a formidable foe willing to engage in more traditional forms of combat. What the Marines ask is that their guidance and orders be clear and consistent, their support on the home front be unwavering, and their time here – some of the best years of their lives – be spent in a worthwhile fashion. They desire to contribute to our efforts here in a significant, rational manner.

The thought that is sometimes expressed, usually in hushed tones and in private quarters, is that we have a solid understanding of what we should be doing on the tactical level, but our operational and strategic objectives have not been clearly outlined. The MEB is not doing anything disastrous, but we do not seem to be gaining any real traction either. Maybe it is too soon to expect significant forward movement. I also realize that at our relatively low level, we junior officers do not see everything that our senior leadership does and we are not privy to conversations between the general and his staff. I hope that the reasons behind what we are seeing – or not seeing – are that the force is new to the environment and, as such, is taking its time, developing an understanding of the region and working to ensure that a solid foundation has been laid before endeavoring to spread its influence and engage in more distributed, aggressive operations.

Another criticism is that the organization dedicates an inordinate amount of time, money, equipment, and personnel to tackling symptoms of problems when they could be focusing their efforts on the major, underlying issues. The counter IED fight is an example of this. In our efforts at defeating these devices and keeping our personnel safe as they travel, we sometimes loose sight of the basic questions at the root of matters: why are we seeing these devices and what can we do to alter the environment in such a way as to make them disappear?

I also really enjoyed his descriptions of the relationship between the Marines and other NATO forces:

I dined at the British mess hall where some fried potato product was served at every meal and curry was a staple. The food was actually quite good and it was entertaining to watch the mix of people, English, Irish, Scottish, Dutch, and Estonian, who wandered in and out of the facility. The British were friendly, the Dutch all seemed to speak surprisingly good English, and the Gurkas were always willing to barter for some US uniform item — one day, I even saw them exchange their signature knives for pairs of Oakley ballistic sunglasses. The British were fond of – and allowed to – wear shorts. The Danes wore very short shorts.

I was amused to discover that the British soldiers, like their American counterparts, have an affinity for port-a-john graffiti. On the British part of the camp, the Army vs. Marine Corps bathroom scrawl that characterized the walls of private places in Baghdad, Al Asad, and Fallujah was replaced by banter aimed at disparaging the US and Britain. There were plenty of comments about the 4^th of July and the perceived need for the US to bailout the UK in Helmand, as well as the occasional mention of the fact that our current allies managed to torch the White House and much of DC during the early part of the nineteenth century. It was also refreshing to see that, despite our difference and competition, the young British and American servicemen were able to find some common ground: their antipathy for the French. These feelings were made manifest shortly after the arrival of a small, French airborne contingent. After a while, more and more entries along the lines of “Q: What’s worse than a US Marine? A: A French Para” and “Why don’t you try to defend Paris for once?” started to appear and fewer anti-US or British remarks were made.

I guess I don’t really have much to add. We at home have been focused so much on the health care debate that not much attention has been paid to Afghanistan. (It seems like there’s always something to divert our attention from that country doesn’t it?) My own feelings about our renewed commitment to the military campaign there are ambivalent. I’m not sure there’s much we can do, and I’m not sure anymore what the purpose is. Is it to prevent the creation of a safe haven for terrorists plotting attacks against us? Well, aren’t they already doing that in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia? Is it to fulfill a commitment to a population that we’ve abandoned in the past? If so, I’m not sure a military incursion is the best solution to that problem. On the other hand, I have some sense that we have an obligation to at least give the mission a fair shot. It got shortchanged once we decided to engage in the folly that was Iraq. Who knows what could have been if due attention was paid to Afghanistan in 2002 onwards? It’s probably too late to try and turn back the clock and make up for lost time, but I guess I feel like we can’t really pull out until we’ve done what we can.

In any event, I hope he knows that I’m (we’re) praying that he makes it home safe, so we can keep up with him on Facebook like normal people are supposed to do.

While my African and Caribbean friends were gloating about Usain Bolt’s win in the 100 meters at the World Championships for Track & Field, another controversy was building off the track.  An 18-year old South African, Caster Semenya, won the women’s 800 meters, blowing away the field.  The problem, for many people, is that they don’t think she’s a woman.  By looking at her, and taking her extraordinary speed into account, I can’t say I blame the skeptics:

Caster Semenya

So now they’re testing her gender.  For anyone who’s read Middlesex, this raises some interesting questions.  How exactly do you test someone’s gender?  If you find that someone has some male genetic components, does that mean they’re a man?  And then what does THAT mean?  In everyday life, ironically, these issues might not be such a big deal.  When it comes to sports, especially sports in which men and women compete in the same, yet segregated, events, it’s a little more complicated.

This article from the NYT does a good job of outlining why this testing is so complex.  I’m going out on a limb here and guessing that she has both male and female genetic characteristics.  What does this mean for her future competition?  Would she be banned from both men’s and women’s events?  How isn’t that discriminatory?  And furthermore, aren’t all world-class athletes genetically gifted or extraordinary in some way?  If someone has a gene that gives them better lung capacity, shouldn’t they be banned for having an unfair advantage?

It’s been determined that Semenya wasn’t doping.  She was raised as a  girl.  It seems profoundly unfair to me to treat her as if she cheated.  On the other hand, if she’s determined to be more male than female (again, lord knows how they’re going to figure that out, or what standard they’re going to use), it seems profoundly unfair to the other women who are running to let her compete.  The results will take weeks to come in.  I’ll be interested to see how the IAAF handles this one.

Yesterday, I finally got down to see the Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Even though it was a complete mob scene, I’m glad I made it, and not just because it was ungodly hot out and the MFA is nicely air conditioned.

Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese were the premier painters in Venice during the Renaissance. Titian and Tintoretto hated each other (and Tintoretto seemed to be quite the asshole), and Veronese, who was a few years younger, sided with Titian whom he considered a mentor. The rivalry seemed to motivate all three painters as they competed for patrons and referred to each other’s works.

The paintings in the exhibit were grouped by theme which gave the viewer a sense of how the three artists played off each other. It was a much more interesting way to view the exhibit than it would have been if they were grouped by artist or chronologically.

Check out Tintoretto’s version of The Baptism of Christ:

Baptism of Christ, Tintoretto

And now Veronese’s:

I left thinking Veronese was my favorite–his use of color, and his attention to the human form were more my style than Titian or Tintoretto–but Tintoretto, tortured genius that he was, had some breathtaking works.

Besides being so visually pleasing, it was a crazy trip through the Renaissance era.  Isn’t it so crazy that people paid massive amounts of money to have people paint pictures of them?  It seems like everyone did it.  Can you imagine anything tackier nowadays than to enter someone’s house only to find a 12-foot tall painting of them?  And yet, without that patronage, these artists never would have flourished and museums wouldn’t be able to charge $25 to see their works.  Anyway, I would highly recommend everyone go see it, but it ends today.

Yesterday, one of my favorite Berkman fellows, Aaron Shaw (we share a love of North Oakland), gave a brilliant talk at the Berkman Luncheon Series on the research he’s doing on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Since you can watch the video yourself (and I highly recommend that you do) I won’t spend too much time repeating it, but from what I gathered Aaron is basically trying to see if it’s possible to use Mechanical Turk as a survey platform for academic (or other?) research. Intrinsic in his research is a study of how Mechanical Turk itself works and what issues this new labor market raises. (Apologies to Aaron if I totally butchered his project).

For me, the most interesting part of the talk/Q&A revolved around these various issues. Namely:

*Are there any implications for labor policy here? When you’re paying someone 2 cents for 5 minutes of work, that’s a steep devaluation of people’s time. If sites like AMT take off and become a real labor force, will we see government getting involved? Legislation/law suits? Labor organizing?

*How does this differ from volunteer work? I’ve heard from a lot of people who work on various crowdsourced projects that most people would rather work for free and see themselves as volunteering their time to a cause than get paid less than market value for their skills, which is insulting. There’s something about inserting money into the equation, even if the difference is only a penny, that changes the motivation. I know people have done a lot of thinking and writing about this and I’m just really ignorant to it (Wikinomics and whatnot), but I find that dynamic really interesting. I was curious to know whether there are any examples of sites that “pay” people in some non-monetary but still tangible form. Like rewards points or something similar. Aaron didn’t know of any, but I wonder how that would change the dynamic? You’re still getting paid for your labor, it’s not an altruistic act, but is there something about taking the actual cash payment out of the equation that makes a difference in motivations?

*What’s the impact of disassociating a task from the project? This one was covered mostly in an off-the-record meeting of the Berkman Fellows directly after the lunch, so there isn’t much on the video. Jonathan Zittrain attended that meeting and pushed back with a much less rosy view of distributed labor. His critiques centered around what happens when a task is broken down into such small pieces that all meaning is lost. The laborer has no view into what he or she is building or contributing to? What impact does that have? He pondered the spectrum of that impact from the loss of craftsmanship to the potential for bad guys to engage a mass labor market to help build towards some nefarious cause (ie: having people circle all the hospitals in a satellite photo in order to identify bomb targets). The discussion touched on potential barriers to bad guys, like putting more of an onus (normative or legal) on sites like AMT to police their job requesters.

I’d say that JZ’s fears are probably several years, if not decades, out. At this point, AMT is a really small site and it’d have to get much bigger and competitors would have to join the game for the threats to become really relevant. And who knows what can happen in the meantime? As for the uneasiness of the devaluation of workers’ time and what this means for the labor market, I find it hard to get too worked up on that front. All of these people are joining AMT voluntarily, and, as one luncheon guest pointed out, they’re probably performing tasks while they’re at work making a real wage. If they’re offended at the going rate, they don’t have to participate. i do think it’s fascinating to think about how this might change labor markets or be reflected in union organizing, but I’m skeptical that these sites will get big enough to make a difference in the real market. In the end, as afraid as we are of robots taking over the world, I really don’t think there’s any replacement for human labor. There are only so many projects you can break down into miniscule tasks; it doesn’t seem to me that AMT is going to save us from our desk jobs any time soon.

UPDATE: Please Note: This talk incorporates research-in-progress from the Berkman Center’s Online Cooperation Research in collaboration with Daniel Chen and John Horton. After the event was over, Aaron realized that he neglected to explicitly acknowledge Chen and Horton’s invaluable role in the project during the presentation. Aaron feels terrible about this and sincerely apologizes. He also hopes that you’ll visit their websites (links above) and read at least one of their papers. Daniel and John’s contributions to the field of experimental research on online labor markets include (a) recognizing that AMT could serve as a venue for experimental studies; (b) conducting the earliest labor market experiments on AMT; (c) solving a bunch of difficult problems so that they could make valid causal inference based on the results of these experiments.

This is one of those books that sits with you long after you’ve finished it.

The Forever War, by Dexter Filkins, the renowned war correspondent from the New York Times, was a fascinating read chronicling the author’s time spent in Afghanistan before and after 9/11/2001, and his three plus years in Iraq after war was declared in March, 2003. Since the book is more memoir/diary than reportage, it’s a bit hard to keep the timeline straight, but Filkins gives us pieces of the conflict in peaks and valleys, from the time Saddam falls to the Sunni Awakening (and all of the ugliness between).

As I was working through it I vacillated between whether it was an astonishingly beautiful and insightful account of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars or an astonishing work of ego. While there’s no doubt that there’s ego at play here (what war correspondent doesn’t have an obnoxiously large ego?), it really is such a stunning read that I was able to forgive the arrogance.

Besides, Filkins has earned the right to some ego. He’s spent much of the last decade (and more) reporting from some of the shittiest hell holes on earth, and is a remarkable writer to boot. The moment I decided to forgive him comes about halfway through the book. He’s gone out with his photographer and a group of marines in order to get a picture of a insurgent who’d been killed a couple days previous in a battle. The body lies at the top of a mosque minaret. One of the marines, Billy Miller, stepped forward to lead the way up the treacherous stair case. As you can probably see coming, Miller is shot and killed by another insurgent who has found himself (has he been their since the battle? did he come to retrieve his dead comrade and happen to be there at the wrong time?) at the top of the minaret.

Ashley [the photographer] was still seated on the stoop, helmet crooked, mumbling to himself like a child. My fault.

Miller appeared. Two marines had pulled him out, Goggin one of them, choking and coughing. Black lung, they called it later. Miller was on his back; he’d come out head first. His face was opened in a large V, split like meat, fish maybe, with the two sides jiggling.

‘Please tell me he’s not dead,’ Ash said. ‘Please tell me.’

‘He’s dead,’ I said.

I felt it then. Darting, out of reach. You go into these places and they are overrated, they are not nearly as dangerous as people say. Keep your head, keep the gunfire in front of you. You get close and come out unscathed every time, your face as youthful and as untroubled as before. The life of the reporter: always someone else’s pain. A woman in an Iraqi hospital cradles her son newly blinded, and a single tear rolls down her cheek. The cheek is so dry and the tear moves so slowly that you focus on it for a while, the tear traveling across a wide desert plain. Your photographer needed a corpse for the newspaper, so you and a bunch of marines went out to get one. Then suddenly it’s there, the warm liquid on your face, the death you’ve always avoided, smiling back at you like it knew all along. Your fault.

Filkins has dedicated the book to Billy Miller, “who went first.”

Filkins doesn’t come right out and say it, but they’re looking for that picture of the dead insurgent because someone has made a decision that it’ll sell more newspapers. The New York Times, admirably, spent a lot of money on their Baghdad bureau but it’s hard to forget that they were complicit in starting this war in the first place. With this at the back of my head, and as I was reveling in Filkins beautiful prose, I started thinking about the need for funded news outlets in places like this. On one hand, Filkins wouldn’t have the access or resources that he did without the support of the Times. On the other, the Times helped get us in this mess in the first place, partly because they made editorial decisions to remain “neutral” which meant shelving any personal doubts they may have had and focusing on the bottom line instead of the story. I kept wondering: if Filkins had written his stories for the paper as he wrote this book, what influence would it have had? He won numerous awards for his reporting from Fallujah, but those articles don’t deliver the feeling of this war to you the way that this book does. There’s a chapter about a raid on a Ramadi hospital that the Americans thought was being used by the insurgents. The Americans are also using this raid as a training mission for Iraqi troops. As Filkins tells it, the Iraqi troops didn’t show up until the raid was over (the troops discovered a bag of cell phones and a bunch of elderly patients), and when they did come they made a big show of busting down doors to empty rooms, then taking a nap in the deserted hallways. The Americans let them sleep while they finished up. The next day, there was a press release from American forces which said “early this morning Iraqi Security Forces, with support from Coalition forces, began searching a hospital in northern Ramadi, which was being used as a center for insurgent activity. This Iraqi Army-led operation will deny the insurgents use of the Saddam Hospital.” This little tidbit doesn’t seem to have made it into the Times because Filkins didn’t make it back to the bureau until a few days later. One wonders, if Filkins had written like he writes in this book (ie: if he was allowed to blog instead of succumbing to the constraints of NY Times edited “journalism”) what difference it could have made.

It’s hard following a war from the comfort of Cambridge (ironically, where Filkins now calls home when he’s in the states; he’s currently reporting from Afghanistan in the lead up to that country’s August elections). There’s only so much you can read or watch that will give you any idea what’s going on. The scale is just too big. Too much death, too much pain, too much destruction, too ugly. Filkins, simply by telling his story, saying what he saw and felt, has brought the war to a micro level that allows us to have some sense of what we’ve signed up for–willingly or unwillingly. He talks about his evening runs (to which I can relate) and what happens at the checkpoints set up along his route (to which I cannot). It’s his descriptions of the inanities of life going on in this war zone, the profiles of the individuals he met along the way, that bring the human cost into focus. Despite his ego, there’s a sense of humility that breaks through in his writing style. His writing seems to be both an apology and an act of catharsis. As much a peek into these post-9/11 conflicts this book is an attempt at personal healing. This war has clearly scarred Filkins (at one point after he returns to the States he says he’s unable to speak to anyone who hasn’t been to Iraq about anything at all), yet he keeps going back for more. Selfishly, I look forward to receiving has future dispatches from the front lines.

I’ve struggled mightily to articulate, to myself and others, why I insist on being Catholic.  It’s very hard to reconcile the peace I feel in the church with my deep disappointment in the leadership.  This essay, by Michelle Madigan, reveals far better than I can just about what I feel and why I choose to stay a part of the church.  In short:

It is through practice that I have come to believe that if there is indeed a God presiding over the End of Days, the particulars, the language and myth, various sects employ as means for understanding and revering God will wash away moot in the flood of some unified, unifying light. Practicing provides pockets of peace, soothes me when I am terrified, enhances my appreciation of the created world, helps me to shape who I am into the woman I wish to become. When I’m lucky, practice ushers me toward glints of transcendence.

I’ve just spent the last 48 hours watching waaayy more children’s television than I ever wanted to watch. Dora the Exlporer, Go Diego Go, Little Bill, Pinky Dinky Doo, The Backyardigans, you name it. All of these shows seem to be 100 times more advanced than the stuff I watched as a kid (Inspector Gadget, Sesame Street, Square One). Or maybe it’s just that I don’t have the right perspective anymore.

Anyway, two of these shows are particularly whacked out. I watch them and think, “what in God’s name must these writers be on to come up with this shit?” The first one is Spongebob Squarepants. Everyone knows him. There was even a (utterly fantastic) essay on Spongebob in the Atlantic a couple months ago.

The other one, which you probably haven’t heard of, is called Yo Gabba Gabba. This show is positively psychotropic: the host, a black guy named DJ Lance Rock, is dressed in orange fur and white sunglasses; the dancing live-action characters are “Muno (the red cyclops), Foofa (the pink flower bubble), Brobee (a little green monster), Toodee (the blue cat-dragon) and Plex (the magic yellow robot)”–no word yet on which of them is gay; in addition,”among the varied animation sequences during the show is Super Martian Robot Girl, designed by indie cartoonists Evan Dorkin and Sarah Dyer.”

In other words, stuff you’d expect some hipster stoners to be watching on a random Tuesday at 2:14AM. Well, my two-year old niece (despite the afro, not really a hipster) happens to be OBSESSED with it. I’m not really sure what to make of this other than that after 3 hours of constant running around I’m more than happy that someone other than me can hold her undivided attention for a few minutes so I can brush my teeth and grab some coffee. There’s another part of me, the part that wrote this post on Geoffrey Canada’s Children’s Zone, that feels really bad about plopping an impressionable mind in front of a channel that claims to be “preschool on television.” But, if there’s anything I’ve learned this weekend, it’s that it’s really easy to rail against this stuff when you don’t have kids (or a nanny), and spending 12 uninterrupted hours with a toddler requires some breaks if you’re not to become in need of psychotropic drugs yourself. I remember one horrifying epiphany when I was babysitting over Christmas. I looked at the clock, realized I’d been up for the equivalent of an entire work day with an 18-month old without any adult conversation, and it wasn’t even lunch time yet. It dawned on me: some people do this every. single. day (even weekends!), and sometimes they do it WITH MORE THAN ONE KID!!! It was almost enough to send me veering into a ditch. As much as I love my niece, the only thing that keeps me sane on these trips is that I know I can go home. I’m always so much more appreciative of my own life when I leave here.

Consequently, I have a weird mixture of awe, respect and pity for my sister. There’s a weird paradox to being a mom: either you work during the day and are utterly exhausted, guilty for not spending time with your kid, guilty for not doing enough housework, but able to have conversations with adults every day, or you’re a stay-at-home mom, able to take your time getting ready in the morning but spending 75% of your time conversating with people whose brains are only 25% developed.

If I didn’t have enough ambivalence about marriage, there’s this whole kid thing to throw on top of things. If it’s not clear to anyone who hasn’t been a parent before, let me tell you as someone who’s traveled over to the dark side and lived to tell about it: it’s not fun, be ready to give up your life, sleep, and brain. For the life of me, I’m not sure why people do this twice. On the other hand, there are times when Grace says my name (she calls me “Cogky”) that absolutely melts me, and I think “maybe I could do this one day.” Well, we’ll see.

I spent a long time drafting that last post, and I’m still not really happy with it, probably because I haven’t really decided how I feel about the issue.  But when did that ever stop me from having an opinion!

Anyway, my view sharpened a little bit after I read this interview with Mark Sanford who, for those who don’t know, is the governor of South Carolina and has been carrying on an affair with an Argentinian woman for the last few months.  In the interview, the married Sanford says that his mistress is his “soul mate” and calls their affair a “forbidden love story” but that he’s trying to reconcile with his wife because, well, he’s married to her.

I feel really strongly that people shouldn’t give up on marriage too easily.  I think a lot of divorces could be avoided (and a lot of people could learn a lot about life and happiness) if people were willing to put in the hard work that makes a marriage work.  But when someone admits that they’ve met someone who is their SOUL MATE but that they’re staying with their wife because of the sanctity of marriage, I’ve got to believe we’ve completely lost the plot and need to start from scratch.

Let me be clear, I’m not sure that having a successful marriage is necessarily about being with your soul mate (maybe partly because I don’t believe in soul mates), but I am pretty sure that your marriage is doomed if you have a soul mate AND IT’S NOT YOUR SPOUSE.

I’m not really sure I have a conclusion (yet).  I think I’m just really disheartened that this is what we’ve come to–on one hand discounting marriage altogether (I have friends who have), on the other forcing yourself into a miserable arrangement and foregoing all chance of happiness, just to honor some long-lost commitment.
Sigh.

“At our very first meeting, Juliet Schwarz turned to Rachel and asked if she loved me and, if yes, what it was about me that she loved. (…)

“’Love,’” Rachel desperately replied, “is such an omnibus word.”

Here was an irony of our continental separation (undertaken, remember, in the hope of clarification): it had made things less clear than ever. By and large, we separators succeeded only in separating our feelings from any meaning we could give them. That was my experience, if you want to talk about experience. I had no way of knowing if what I felt, brooding in New York City, was love’s abstract or love’s miserable leftover. The idea of love was itself separated by meaning. Love? Rachel had gotten it right. Love was an omnibus thronged by a rabble.

And yet we again climbed aboard, she and I.

Netherland, Joseph O,Neill

I’ve been puzzling over marriage a lot lately.

I’m very proud resident of the first state to legalize gay marriage, and so have been watching the recent marriage debates with a strong interest, not because I’m gay (not that there’s anything wrong with that) but because I really believe in the institution of marriage. Or I thought I did. Or I believe in a different institution than the one people are fighting over. But I really love weddings and have been doing my fair share of participating in planning/prepping for friends’ weddings this summer.

Anyway, it’s led me to rethink a lot of what I thought I was sure about. I’m heartened to see people fighting for what I think is their civil right to marry who they want (my own parents’ marriage would have been illegal at one point) but looking at all the ugliness in this debate, I gotta say, I’m feeling pretty cynical about the institution I thought I believed in wholeheartedly.

The Christian right spends a lot of time talking about the redefinition of marriage, but from where I sit it seems to me that they’re the ones with their priorities out of whack. Since when did marriage and family become about intolerance, judgment and exclusion? (Wait, maybe don’t answer that). In addition, I feel like the right (along with the wedding industrial complex) has played a big part in setting up this unrealistic, Leave it to Beaver, unattainable fairy tale standard for what marriage should be. It’s no wonder so many people get divorced if their measure for failure is that they didn’t live up to a fantasy.

For their part, a lot of my friends on the left seem happy to throw the whole thing out, baby and bath water, so I can’t say I’m really in their camp on this one either. Sure, it’s not perfect, it’s an inherently sexist arrangement, blah blah, but there is something to be said for two committed parents raising their kids in stable, secure households, working through their issues together as a family no matter what the dysfunction.

I guess I’m feeling like there’s nothing left to hold on to—seems like these days it’s either Ward and June or anything goes. If those are my options, what’s the point?

In the face of this discouragement I happened to recently read two works of fiction (ironically) that I thought depicted the beautifully flawed, human side of marriage that comes from two imperfect people making a lifelong commitment to each other. How on earth could that possibly be easy? Zadie Smith (“On Beauty”) and Joseph O’Neill (“Netherland”) have written, gorgeous unvarnished stories about marriages that have at the core of them deep love, commitment and hope. In other words, they’re nothing like the fairy tale marriages that the pro-marriage crew is trying to cram down our throats.

The recent commentary about Netherland has focused on the fact that President Obama seems to be reading it, and so, therefore, devotes a ton of attention to the political themes of the story (post-9/11 NYC, the immigrant experience in 21^st century America). For my part, I thought the politics were secondary to the relationship themes, tools used to tell the story of their marriage. Hans and his wife live through 9/11, and the stress of the experience serves to highlight tensions they’re already experiencing. In the wreckage of his marriage, Hans finds refuge on the cricket fields of Staten Island with West Indian and South Asian immigrants to get as far away from his upper-class banker’s life in Manhattan and seek comfort in the familiarity of the game he played as a kid.

Two of my best friends are getting married this summer. I’ll be spending a good chunk of my summer planning with and feting them. In the midst of it all, I’m hoping they don’t fall victim to the unattainable fairy tale expectations society is trying to foist upon them. I hope when the going gets tough their first instinct isn’t to bail. I hope they don’t become ashamed because things aren’t as blissful as they’ve been told they’ll be. I hope they can find beauty in the struggle. Now that I think about it, maybe they’ll be getting some books as their wedding gifts.