Happy New Year to you all. We just got back from Mexico (more on that later) to a big pile of mail with lots of Christmas cards and gifts in it. Thank you all for your generosity and for thinking of the San Francisco branch of the Thomas and Sumin family. I hope your 2010 is excellent. And now, more of the amazing Lyra as she turns 9 months and 1 day old.
Chris just hooked us up with tickets for Muse and Silver Sun Pickups in April. They're both playing in Oakland. I'm very, very excited about this since SSP are basically my favorite group at the moment. I know I sound like a 15 year old girl talking about the latest heart throb but I'm OK with it - they're that good! And Muse are pretty good live by all accounts: a little overblown and pretentious but that's acceptable in a rock band in ways that would be plain foolish for, say, a software engineer.
So roll on April. Can hardly wait. And thanks, Chris, for getting this organized. Who knows...we may even pay you back for the tickets if the show lives up to expectations
I'm cleaning out a bunch of receipts on my desk today so that I can get reimbursed for business trips. Mixed in with all of the car rentals, hotel summaries, and cab chits were these two receipts. Unlike many of the business items--Applebees in suburban D.C., anyone?!--these absolutely summarize my trip to Lola and Urban's wedding in Stockholm to perfection. 72 hours of absolute open ended fun and games in the capital, punctuated by the odd 20 minutes of calm. Seeing this made me smile and remember how much fun I had with a great group of people. And it also reminded me of gaining entry to the most exclusive night club in Sweden with Rick by using Masha's name. Either there's a very rich and shady character known to the doormen as "Maria Gennadyevna Sumina", or expensive hourly entertainment by the same name. Either way, we were on top of the world for about three hours after using the magic Russian name to get in. Turns out it was a pretty low key but hip young crowd. But the cool kids graciously permitted a couple of old geezers to hang. What a wonderful town and country.
I saw an article in the New York Times today about immigrants: Census Finds Increase in Foreign-born Workers. The thing that really caught my eye was the large percentage of U.S. residents who are foreign-born. That is, not just people who call themselves immigrants, but who were actually born outside the U.S.
Nearly one in six American workers is foreign-born, the highest proportion since the 1920s, according to a census analysis released Monday.
The article continues to talk about specific states where the numbers are even more surprising:
In 2007, immigrants accounted for more than one in four workers in California (35 percent), New York (27 percent), New Jersey (26 percent), and Nevada (25 percent).
Doesn’t that just blow your mind? Over one quarter of the people earning a wage in California were born somewhere other than the U.S. Wow. The Census has also remarked that second generation immigrants, i.e., little Lyra Sofia Thomas, are overwhelmingly more driven to succeed than their parents, as seen in higher levels of educational attainment and income. That means Lyra will get a Ph.D. and earn enough to keep Masha and I in the style to which we’ve become accustomed once we are too old to work. I am so looking forward to retirement now that the U.S. Census Bureau has confirmed that my child-related retirement plan is going to happen (with a 26 percent level of confidence...I knew there had to be a catch).
Charlene just sent this link to a movie that is coming out next year. It looks like an absolute riot. Masha said ‘we watch all these nature shows with cute little baby animals but we never really watch kids like that’. Well I guess now we can.
I try not to go on ad nauseum about any of my crackpot ideas, especially if they are related to the enormously sensitive issue of how to raise a child. God knows we scored a 2 out of 10 last week while trying to have a nice dinner in Tucson: Lyra reduced us to quivering wrecks over the course of about 60 minutes. Poor little bugger was just so tired and since she can’t talk yet she used her wails of frustration instead. Let alone how to get them to crawl “on schedule”, how to expose them to all the right cultural influences from an early age, and what to feed them. So of course the purpose of this little diatribe is to share one of my ideas: milk is good for babies.
There, I said it. Take that you parenting magazines and overly opinionated Noe Valley mothers! I'm super happy that Lyra has grown up with real milk from her Mama; it appears to have given her everything she needed until she discovered pureed sweet potatoes. We were recently at a friend’s house in Tucson and ran out of the good stuff—breast milk, that is—so Lyra got her first taste of formula. She appeared to really enjoy it and it satisfied her hunger to the tune of a long and deep night’s sleep. It really got me thinking about the stuff we put in to our bodies, and I picked up a copy of Michael Pollan’s book In Defence of Food when at the book store after this little episode because I had heard it goes in to this topic in some detail. If you aren’t familiar with Pollan he is also the author of the wildly popular The Omnivore’s Dilema which apparently does for the food industry what Rachael Carson did for pesticides in The Silent Spring.
I'm on a plane right now as a write this and finally got around to starting In Defence of Food. Within the first few pages I'm already very interested in what Pollan has to say. The catch phrase “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly vegetables” kind of covers it, but then he starts to explain that “Eat food” really is a comment on the fact that much of what is in our grocery stores these days is not really food at all but engineered food like products
. Enter milk. Here's where Pollan starts to describe how Nutritionism misses the mark:
Another potentially serious weakness of nutritionist ideology is that, focused so relentlessly as it is on the nutrients it can measure, it has trouble discerning qualitative distinctions among foods. So fish, beef, and chicken through the nutritionist’s lens become mere delivery systems for varying quantities of different fats and proteins and whatever other nutrients happen to be on their scope. Milk through this lens is reduced to a suspension of protein, lactose, fats, and calcium in wanter, when it is entirely possible that the benefits, or for that matter the hazards, of drinking milk owe to entirely other factors...or relationships between factors...that have been overlooked. Milk remains a food of humbling complexity, to judge by the long, sorry saga of efforts to simulate it. [emphasis added] The entire history of baby formula has been the history of one overlooked nutrient after another...and still to this day babies fed on the most
nutritionally completeformula fail to do as well as babies fed human milk. Even more than margarine, infant formula stands as the ultimate test product of nutritionism and a fair index of its hubris.
Obviously there are many, many good reasons to use formula to feed a baby—inability to produce enough milk, allergic reactions to lactose, a busy mother’s work schedule—and I’m not nearly so naive to believe that formula is an evil forced on us by the ‘industrial food complex’. But it really does make me believe more firmly that we eat pretty well at the Thomas household. It turns out that the milk Lyra has grown up with so far and the excellent food that Masha cooks at home from simple ingredients like butter, peppers, olive oil, chicken thighs with the fatty skin still on them, and the ever present kartoshka, is the real thing: Food.
Diatribe over. If you somehow misinterpreted my thought here I'll make it easy for you. We eat food. Not too much. Plenty of potatoes and probably more meat than we should. And good old fashioned mother’s milk.
I'm randomly flipped on a sound on the iPod. I forgot how good R.E.M.'s Green album is. It's probably an indication of my musical selection that the random mix on the playlist has their Untitled song followed by Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) by Nancy Sinatra, then Trust Me by Jesus Jones. Masha just reminded me that I once said ‘I'm culturally confused’. I think it is still true, and I like it
In the "not another baby video" category, here is Lyra celebrating her 8th month on the planet. The smile is amazing :-)
Not the seven hills of Rome, or The Hills Have Eyes, or just plain The Hills. No, this is because when I'm driving around San Francisco I can never remember the name of any of the hills beyond the three I stare at all day: Twin Peaks, Bernal Heights, and Potrero Hill. So here is a nice map showing the various and sundry high elevation points in San Francisco (click on it for the hi-res version). The ridiculously steep hill that I know most intimately is not marked, but is known as "the block of Duncan between Sanchez and Noe". Now that's a steep freaking hill.
My sister, Autumn, got her website up an running and is now officially open for perusal and business on the Internet. She took the long road to fine art by first studying art history, and is now making a living in London as a working artist. It's a pretty ballsy move—if that isn't just the most inappropriate turn of phrase to apply to fine art—to create art after having studied it in so much depth. In my own professional life I equate it to trying to write a search engine after having used Google for a few years. In other words it's a tall order. Luckily for Autumn she has the chops to pull it off. Here's a beautiful new piece called Expression of a Beach:
© Autumn Christie
And here is one of my favorites. A quick glance at this piece shows a quirky and whimsical edge, but read the text on this enamel toilet bowl more closely and you'll see the dark side:
© Autumn Christie
fat fat fat fat fat
stop eating!!!
stop breathing stop living
why don't I look like these women?
no one will have sex with me
no one will love me
I want to die...
So if you're in London in January head over to Hang Ups in St. John's Wood for a ganders. And bring your cheque books you rascals! This is family we're talking about.
And BTW - on a purely professional note I have to say that the web design is pleasing to the eye. A quick ganders at the HTML source reveals a couple of dodgy practices like using a table for layout, but I'm in a forgiving mood and the result is well worth it.
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