How the Boston Bombings Reminded Me to Be A Skeptical Media Consumer

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I found out about the Boston Marathon bombings while I was at work. I read the New York Times during my downtime. Generally nothing noteworthy happens, but this time something did. An explosion at the Boston Marathon. Who bombs the Boston Marathon?! I thought to myself, rather shocked. I kept hitting “refresh” on the Boston Globe, wanting to know more. It is an awful crime.

After I went to bed last Thursday, my husband stayed awake and finished his work. It was very early in the morning when he joined me, admitting that he was following news in Boston surrounding the pursuit of the suspects. Huh? Oh, they found them? I’ll read about it in the morning.

Over my breakfast, I read the news and it said that the suspects were of Chechen origin. Chechen?! 

I was dumbfounded.

—–

In summer 2008, I received a scholarship from the US State Department to learn Russian in Russia. It was all-expenses paid immersion program; I effectively won the lottery. The State Department felt it was wisest to send us to cities that were considered more “provincial”, knowing that residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg recognize foreigners easily and often spoke English. The point of the program was to spend eight weeks speaking only Russian. I spent that summer with about twenty other Americans in Asktrakhan, in south west Russia, being mistaken for a horrendously socially awkward Russian until my accent gave me away as foreign.

A week after I left Astrakhan, Georgia and Russia went to war after Georgia invaded South Ossetia and the territories claimed independence. It was part of a longer dispute regarding the sovereignty of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. It was one piece nationalism, one piece power and control. Russia is huge, and as far as I am aware Astrakhan was never directly affected by this war. If you are curious, your family sleeps sounder when you are not in a foreign country which is at war. My parents, and their friends, looked at a map, saw how close Astrakhan was to the Caucuses, and breathed a sigh of relief that I was sitting at their kitchen table reading The Post Standard’s comics.

Violence has been common in that territory. In addition to South Ossetia and Abkhazia, there are the issues regarding Chechen nationalism and Russia’s grip on the country. The Beslan hostage crisis was fresh in my memory despite its incidence was four years prior. My Russian professor regularly lamented the botched handling of the Dubrovka Theatre hostage crisis, where the Russian militsia killed hostages in an attempt to disable the hostage takers. It is a long standing dispute, and it was always over there, in the Caucuses, far away from home. The violence was a reminder of a easily forgotten form of American privilege- we live in a mostly peaceful place.

Five years later, my first reaction after reading the ethnic origin of the Boston suspects was disbelief. The second was, “Oh my god. Not here too.” My third was confusion: the United States and Russia are not exactly close, trusting friends. There is no reason for Chechen nationalists to alienate the United States – those weary of your enemies are potential friends. The US has been critical of human rights abuses in Russia, and Russia has been critical of anything it can be of in the United States. When Russia tries to say, “Look, this ethnic group is dangerous, let us enact some more repressive rules,” this attack would provide fuel to the fire and hand Russia a potentially powerful ally it did not previously have. Chechen terrorism in the United States just does not make sense, unless you are the sort of person who believes that Muslims like killing people.

When I was in Russia, I stayed with a family that was half ethnic Russian and half ethnic Tatar (a minority which tends to be Muslim). That was not unusual among the host families, and we were told by our teachers that Astrakhan was unusually diverse. Remember: Russia is a multi-ethnic society. While around 80% of citizens in the Russian Federation are ethnic Russians, there are over 160 other ethnicities of migrants and indigenous peoples. Astrakhan was located not far from the Caspian Sea, from Kazakhstan, and the Caucuses. It seemed all the marshrudka drivers (think Econoline sort of vans operating on bus routes) were from the Caucuses. In Russia, the most common faith is Orthodox Christianity and the second is Islam. With that said, it appeared that most people observed their faiths with a fervor you’d expect from the average American Methodist – a part of their lives, but one piece of many. Muslim women didn’t usually wear hijabs, considering it old fashioned. My host family’s observed neither the Christian nor Muslim side of their heritage. This was familiar to me, as the lack of zealotry and enthusiasm resonated with my experience with interfaith families and general practices of religiosity at home. This is to say, if someone suddenly became religious, it is easy to see where that would be weird. It is also to say that formerly Soviet citizens seem to have many stories of moving from place to place.

—-

In the next few days after the Boston bombings, I found myself with the unusual experience of having first hand experience with some of the points that were being tossed around the media.

Some of it was pretty trivial. I have actually visited the birth city of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Elista, if the Russian wikipedia is accurate about the location (which borrowed from a Kyrgyz press release). It’s a city known for having the largest Buddhist temple in Europe.

When NPR described “Jahar” as a “nickname” for Dzhokhar, I shook my head. No, that’s not a nickname, that’s his name. It is actually a closer English spelling of how “Джохар” sounds. ”Дж”, transliterated into “Dzh” is the closest thing you get to a “J” sound in the Cyrillic alphabet, and “х” is more of a hard “h”, like in Hanukkah, which is transliterated into “Kh”. The emphasis is on the second syllable. The Cyrillic alphabet bulldozed over whatever ethnicity the first name is from (Internet suggests it’s the Hindi Johar?), and then the Cyrillic to English transliteration was just as awkward.

Something similar happens with my surname. I have two visas from the Russian Federation, and my surname is spelled differently on both of them, despite the fact the Russian Embassy had my passport and the first visa when issuing the second. They determined the spelling. My surname has a “c” with a “k” sound.  On one visa it is a “k”, and on the other visa it’s “c”,  which is the Russian “s”. Sometimes the Roman “c” is transliterated into “ц”, which is the “Ts” sound. There are three different ways to transcribe my surname, if you are a person who is unfamiliar with how it’s spoken. My visas were applied for with the same passport, information, etc.

It is with that background that I heard others criticize the FBI for what appears to be a lack of clairvoyance.  Senator Graham claimed the FBI failed to note a trip the elder brother took to Russia because one of a misspelling of his name on the Aeroflot manifest. As I said… that would be easy to do. The US government clearly knows exactly when I have left and returned – I have an RFID chip in my passport and heck, they paid for my trip the second time around. Does the Russian FSB? Who knows.

I flew on Aeroflot once, from St. Petersburg to Moscow and then I took a connection to Volgograd in 2008. Aeroflot is the legacy airline of the former Soviet Union, and the Russian government is a majority owner. My memory is not filled with recollections of competence. The aged planes seemed to have more duct-tape than one would find preferable and they failed to transfer our entire group’s luggage from the St. Petersburg leg to the Volgograd leg. Oops. That they would misspell a name does not surprise me.

Russia suggested Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a threat and holding what they considered extremist views. Let’s have a chat about what can constitute “extreme views” in Russia. It can mean a variety of political dissent. Russia sent two women to prison for two years for the crime of cussing about Putin in a nearly empty church. When they say someone is a threat, and don’t elaborate, does that mean that they are a dissident journalist or someone who had the gall to protest against Putin? Heaven forbid you try to run for office against the ruling party. Think about that the next time you criticize President Obama or former President Bush, or when you write about your anti-capitalist tendencies. Russia does not protect freedom of expression as it is protected in America. Now Russia has disclosed that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was discussing jihad with his mother, but without knowing that prior, what was the FBI to do?

Turns out the younger brother had a Vkontakte account. (So do I.) What’s not mentioned is that his wall hadn’t been touched since March 2012, and it doesn’t seem like a particularly active account, at least not prior to gaining infamy. Anyone can post on the walls of folks in VK. Some of the articles’ description, like how the younger brother valued “career and money”, do not acknowledge that it was an option chosen from a drop-down menu of generic orientations. Other options include “Family and children” or “art and beauty”. This article states that his last post was from “19 March”, leaving the reader to believe it was a month ago, when on VK it says “19 March 2012. Come on. VK suggests he logged in the night before he was captured, but what does that really mean? I logged into my account last week.

It was weird. Generally I do not have much familiarity with some facet of the world being discussed in the media, and almost never more than the journalists reporting on it. It seemed like the nuance and context went out the window in a quick and dirty attempt to fill air time.

———

I share this experience for the reminder it gave me: be a skeptical consumer of the media. Be a little cynical of all of the media, even NPR, even the outlets that you generally trust with the perspectives that land most comfortably on your eyes and ears. They probably are not quite getting the entire picture.

When do you cease to be a “young adult”?

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At the Super Bowl, some of us were having conversations about what constitutes becoming “middle age”. It was mostly folks from my church’s Young Adult group in attendance. My husband and I were on the young end of the age distribution curve, which ranged from 23 to 36, median age was probably about 31 or so. To answer the question of middle age, people tossed potential life events around, things like houses and careers. I was mostly quiet. At 26, you hope you’re pretty far from “middle age,” as least for the sake of your longevity. One fellow, who is 36, said to me, “It’s when you have kids.” I raised my eyebrow and said, “I’m a full decade younger than you.” He replied, “Touche.”

————

The UUA’s age boundaries for “young adult” are 18-35. It never seemed like an adequate meter to me. The phase of life metric being used above makes more sense: age as a state of mind. The problem with generalizing over chronological years is that it’s a brush painted over a very uneven surface. The paint pools in some places and barely touches others.  What does the average 19 year old have in common with the average 34 year old?

I presume the goal was to catch a phase of life which roughly correlates with the ages, perhaps the “Quarter-life Crisis”, or the seeking and uncertainty that comes with transitioning into adulthood and coping with what Erik Erikson calls “Isolation versus Intimacy”. Effectively, you are trying to figure out what you want to do in an with your life, and with whom. This article describes the quarter life crisis in five stages:

“Phase 1 – A feeling of being trapped by your life choices. Feeling as though you are living your life on autopilot.

Phase 2 – A rising sense of “I’ve got to get out” and the feeling that you can change your life.

Phase 3 – Quitting the job or relationship or whatever else is making you feel trapped and embarking on a “time out” period where you try out new experiences to find out who you want to be.

Phase 4 – Rebuilding your life.

Phase 5 – Developing new commitments more attuned to your interests and aspirations.”

I read that and laughed, “Hey, I did that.” You’ll fine me somewhere in step five, with my exit from graduate school, new(ish) job at a non-profit provider of housing to the homeless and the unexpected, if pleasantly surprising, conception of my soon-to-be-born daughter. In any case, you would think that once that existential question is figured out, crisis over, right? Whip out your pen and cross it off the list, you’re done. Sell your angst on Craigslist and pack up the Uhaul: It’s time to move into that new-found certainty.

Nope!

My life is still uncertain in so many ways. I just stopped tightening my grip on everything and gave up on trying to control the outcome of every facet of my life. My thoughts are considerably less existential, and I spent much of my energy concerned about meeting the needs of my family. In that way, I resolved one of my personal searches for meaning in life and resigned myself to the fact that I will make the world better using only the imperfect methods I am capable of. Oh, and I need to raise a child whose needs her mother and father to have their act together. Which means I need to have my act together.

———–

I am now 27. Using UUA guidelines, I have eight years before I age into what the UUA would consider a full, unqualified adult. Now, the “Young Adult” designation and programming was created to stem the really high attrition rate of those who are born UU. It is often called the “bridge to nowhere”, that youth are “bridged” into the adult community but spent most of their time in the faith community isolated from it. They age from the youth programming and cons to find an alien community on the other side which poorly resembles the experience offered to children and teenagers. As far as I can tell, youth programming teaches kids to go question their faith (which is not a bad thing) and go out into the world with the mental and intellectual resources that the youth no longer require it. To boot, the isolation and frequent transition into college means the social ties that keep people in a group are severed or perhaps did not exist.

The Young Adult groups and programming are there to create social networks and a place to belong for those who age out of youth programming and experiencing transitions. It is meant as a place of welcome any other person in the age range who can relate to the members of the YA group. It is also meant as a pass through experience, or else there’d be no upper bound of age. (What do you call a YA group with no upper age boundary? Church.) You’re there, you relate, you have companionship and  then when life and time changes you move on. In my church that has sometimes meant to different phases of life, different roles at the church, different parts of the world, etc.

It occurred to me recently that if I were to start attending another church, I do not see myself getting involved in another young adult group. If the church lacked one, I would not feel inspired to start one up. This is not commentary about young adult groups. They are fine, and serve their purpose well. It is not a complaint that the YA groups would not be meeting my needs as a soon-to-be parent. It is more of a comment that I have changed, and seek different ways to be a part of a community.

I feel like I have phased out of the part of life where affinity group discussions about various figure-it-out topics are magnetic. I do not have the answers, yet I am less drawn to the conversations. I belong in the community at church, have friends in Seattle, and do not feel tied to a niche. My current involvement in the Young Adult Group at my church (which, honestly, has been pretty minimal in the last six months) has been purely out of affection for the people who are in the group. They are my friends. Heck, two gals from church threw me a wonderful baby shower, in addition to the fantastic one my mother threw me. I go to church in hopes of seeing my friends, in addition to the sermon and spiritual centering that I get from church. To be honest, often the people are the stronger draw.

If I were to attend a new church, I think I would be seeking something else, and I would be more concerned with whether a community was family-friendly and fond of small children. While I am in Seattle, I will be integrating my new phase of life into my current congregational community. If I were to go elsewhere, I would be seeking a congregational community that fits my phase of life.

Certainly this logic is not unique to me… Or is it?

At what point does one cease being a “young adult”? Relying on the 18-35 age range is as ineffective as trying to pin a number on “middle age”. Have you felt as though you were no longer a “young adult”? What inspired the change? I am really curious and would be glad if you could share.

 

“Aren’t you excited?”

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I am in my ninth month of pregnancy. This means that theoretically, my daughter will be born rather soon. I get more than a couple questions about if I am excited and anticipating how close her arrival is.

This month feels to me more like my last month or two in New York State: I better go enjoy all the things and spend time with all the people because I had no sense of when I would be back, if ever. I knew a phase of my life was about to close and I was grasping it really hard, hesitant to let it fade as it needed to. The day was going to come anyway, when Will and I would start driving on I-90 to the other coast. I made a project of savoring the days in between as much as I could.

Leaving the un-parent life feels similar in that regard. (I dislike the term “child-free”. Do you live in society? Yes? Then you’re not “child-free,” you are just not a parent yourself.) Yes, the ship sailed on a carefree life before I noticed it had left port, as my pregnancy was a surprise. Suddenly expecting meant the end of excessive amounts of coffee, late nights with friends (because I am too tired for that), riding my motorcycle, and glasses of wine. Growing my daughter has not meant the end of spur of the moment errands, spontaneous trips to the grocery store with little-to-no forethought, trips to the library with only a purse, or any activity which does not require a strategy for child-care first. Sure, they say fetuses can hear you, but I doubt my daughter understands any of the colorful things leaving my mouth while she’s gestating. The list continues, including things like, “time for cooking,” “concentration,” and “sleep.”

I am happy that our daughter will be here, I am looking forward to it, in the same way that I was glad to be moving to Seattle. I was also anxious, worried, and uncertain about the outcomes. Clairvoyance is not a strong suit of mine and I had no sense of what would await me at the other side of I-90 almost three years ago. It is the same thing with becoming a parent. It is my expectation that becoming a new parent will overwhelm me with surprises that I cannot prepare myself for. I cannot imagine what my world will be like with a child. The right things are in our possession, Will and I have worked out the monetary logistics to death, we have a sense of how we will get to the hospital and tomorrow we will be touring it. My looking forward to the future is not preventing me from savoring the present.

I write this, as I wonder if I am the only person who felt that way prior to their first child’s birth?

April 15, 2013

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Today is April 15, 2013.

This morning, in a quiet moment at work, I read an op-ed published via translator and lawyer of one of the Guantanamo prisoners. The base opened in January, 2002. I was a girl then, a teenager. I remember hearing about the opening of the base and having a sick feeling regarding all of these reactions adults seemed to be having towards September 11, 2001. I was still young enough that everything which happens seems somewhat normal, because I was still of the age where normal is being learned. At the same time, I was afraid that the values I was taught at even younger were going to be defied. I felt powerless. That the base is still opened is a searing broken promise of the Obama campaign, one that I feel powerless to do anything about because any constructive power of my vote was watered down by a lack of political will or bravery to close the camp. Sure, there were third party candidates, but you did not think they’d actually win, did you? At the end of the day, I prefer the spineless to those who have courage to explicitly prefer the policies which I do not. My heart cracks every time a mention of Guantanamo gets on my radar, a sense of how could I let this exist? It is quickly followed by, “What can you do so it does not, which you have not done already?”

I write, I talk, I protest and it seems for naught. The policy makers do as they will. I studied sociology and the hierarchy of society for years. It seems clear that I am not powerful enough to make the changes.

Before going to work, I discovered that today was the Boston marathon. An acquaintance from high school posted about finishing it on Facebook. He has been running as long as we’ve been acquainted. As far as I am concerned, it is a quaint quality. See, I don’t run. Well, I will sprint in some narrow and specific cases, like I am about to miss a bus. In Seattle, I have close friends who run half marathons and I stare at them perplexedly, like, “You find that fun?” Of course, never mind the distances I am willing and enjoy taking my bicycle. Marathons are one of those things – I barely notice them. They are usually off my radar.

Well, yeah, about that Boston marathon. Yikes. It’s crazy, especially if you live in a country where bombs in public places are rare. Deaths are generally always tragic, and there is a cruel irony to an act which maims those celebrating the potential of their bodies. An American in America does not expect bombs to go off in the street, nor should they, nor should anyone. Pick pocketed? Sure. Sexual violence? Yeah, especially if you’re a woman. Bombs? Never. We really don’t need more novel types of violence to fear. I suppose you expect and are desensitized to that violence when it happens in Israel or Afghanistan, or to someone who is a member of the military, or in the context of a war fought elsewhere. I mean, our country is at war, you know. It is still terrible.

At the same time, walking outside and living life invites the risk that Something Bad Will Happen, that needless suffering will be imposed upon you or that you will exposed to it. It’s the banal tragedy of the world. It seems we can never do enough or anything to cease the banal tragedies from occurring.

Today is April 15. It is one month until my daughter’s due date.

When I was younger, – and not much younger, mind you, I hoped to be on the track to occupy one of those positions in this highly hierarchical society where my decisions had the power to make the world better. Of course, people like me are often attracted to the problems sitting at the bottom of society, like poverty. That is generally not the place from which you procure your ability to contribute to broad, sweeping changes. If you’re Jesus, you might find that position effective, but alas the changes he called for are works in progress, if not otherwise ignored. The people whose ideas are discussed and implemented are part of an elite. I am not there. I left one path which I presumed would permit me to be closer to that.

The other night my husband and I discussed all of the ways our lives have deviated from what we expected. So far the only accurate predictions are our enduring marriage and cat adoption. Even the details on those are different than the expected experience. Neither of us expected to ever live on the West Coast, for instance. Some of the deviations are felt as a lost sense of possibility. I quit graduate school. We’re surrounded by natural beauty that we rarely venture out to for what ultimately are fiscal reasons. We both expected to be a bit wealthier. I expected that I would be a lifelong vegetarian. Giving that up was an admission that I cannot live purely, and perhaps that it is not in my nature to do so. Giving that up was also part of a process in which I let go of a dream that it was possible to be and exist without violence.

Some of the surprises came in the form of opportunities. Maui. It’s a beautiful place. Had some good friends not invited us, we never would have thought to go. Will and I have a motorcycle. Apparently we did not realize what a satisfying challenge that would be. We do not have a car. Will and I both grew up in areas which lacked public transit, and this way of living was foreign to us. Turns out, it can be kind of awesome. I never expected my name to float to the top of the Seattle P-Patch wait list, and uh… Gentleman, BEHOLD!

10 by 10 foot plot with some nascent strawberry plants, a few chard plants, and a metric ton of kale.

P-Patch, of the modest variety. Picture taken 4/14/13 by me using my phone.

We have this fantastic group of wonderful people that we have the privilege of calling friends in every place we have lived. Seriously, we are so blessed. Oh, did I mention that I am pregnant? Surprise!

Our daughter is joining us in all of this unpredictability. I mourn that she’s not entering a better place. That is the regret of the lapsed activist, eh? Looking around and seeing the unfinished projects and goals unmet, and realize that it affects the new unborn person you already love.

One month. I hope Guantanamo is closed by the time she’s cognizant enough to be aware of it. I hope that these bombings are a quaint relic of her childhood. I hope the world is that better place I am hoping to make it. If not, I hope she has the coping skills to thrive anyway.

35 weeks

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It surprises how much time I can pass, and pleasure I experience, simply paying attention to my daughter moving inside of me. My abdomen contorts and twists and I can feel her moving her limbs. It is a very physical experience. I do not over-think it, I just am, and she just is, and time passes and I am very happy.

Easter

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Today was absolutely gorgeous. The temperatures were in the sixties, and there was not a cloud in the sky. It was the sort of day where a late bus was tolerated with endless patience, because it meant unplanned moments outside. It was the sort of the day that I struggle with in the evening, worried that I did not adequately commemorate its pleasantness by maximizing my time outside. This is a hold-over from 24 years in Syracuse and Buffalo, where good days are infrequent enough that you must take advantage of them, or wait the weeks before another glorious day may come.

Picture of a landscape. The trees look black against a dark blue sky that has orange radiating from the horizon, which is marked by mountains. Pink wispy clouds are brushed over the right side of he picture.

From My Balcony, just after sunset.

Tomorrow is Easter. I feel very unprepared. If I were back in New York, I would likely be going to my uncle’s house to see him and my aunt, another aunt, my cousin, and my grandmother. It would be a family holiday, and it would feel appropriate. In Seattle, it snuck up on me and I forgot to make plans. Do I go to church? Do I spend time in my neglected P-Patch (plot in a community garden)? If one celebration were not enough, the prediction of gorgeous weather also pushes me to discern some plans for the day. Next year my habit of passively forgetting holidays may be challenged by having my daughter. She’ll be closing in on one year old next Easter.

I follow many people of faith on twitter, and it is lighting up with commentary about Jesus and the miracle of his resurrection. So you’ve all figured out that I am Unitarian Universalist. I suspect the resurrection is more metaphor than history. If there is a God, I suspect he’d be beyond the human need for fantastic stories. The part of Easter worth celebrating, to me, is not so much that God will return to save the world. It is that Jesus was around to spread teachings of compassion and love and that they’ve stuck.

Well, they have sort of stuck. Turns out that these ideas are as hard to institutionalize as they can be hard to live. Turns out you can do a lot of terrible things with the refrain, “God says so.” Lots of different sects of Christianity interpret the teachings of Jesus in many ways, some focusing on the very human practices of exclusion. If there is a God, wouldn’t it be sufficiently divine to be beyond our pettiness? I digress.

So tomorrow is Easter, and I am still not sure how or if to celebrate. I end up as agnostic about the holiday as I am about God.

Social Commentary (Not an Entry for the Kids)

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OK, so this article is really effing creepy. I do not recommend reading it, my summary will be sufficient for you to be knowledgeable and sleep at night at the same time.

The long story short is that a man picks up a prostitute from Aurora Avenue North.  Seattleites will recognize has a reputation for prostitution. He offers her $100 for some bondage play. She’s a drug user and wants the money, but had the where-with-all to text the guy’s license plate to an ex-boyfriend. Man takes her to his house and tortures her for eight hours. (That is the reason you do not want to read the Seattle Times article – it is graphic. I linked it to cite my sources.) He threatens to kill her. She tells this man about the text. He must have realized he was not going to get away with it, lets her go, gives her extra money asking her not to go to the police. Well, she and the ex-boyfriend report him to the police. Courtesy of that text, law enforcement has the man’s license plate  number, and thus also has his address courtesy of the Washington Department of Licensing. Police go there and find everything to corroborate story the prostitute told. The local police, as this man lived in Tacoma, was sufficiently concerned that they sent cadaver dogs on the property fearing that he may have done this to others and killed them. He is arrested, eventually pleads guilty, and the plea bargain was that he’d serve 10 years.

It is a really creepy case.

Well, the judge decided to sentence outside the plea agreement. She sentenced him to more than twelve years in prison, which was the maximum that she could. She commented to the defendant,

“You know, Mr. Hauff, if you had done what you did to this woman to a dog, I can tell you this community would be outraged.”

You know…

I cannot be certain that the judge meant this as a jab at how badly our society recognizes the inherent worth and dignity of women who sell their bodies. I am not sure if she meant it to be a comment about the tacit acceptance, through a lack of outrage, of violence against prostitutes. The judge’s comment pretty much acknowledges that there is a category of human beings, women at that, who are ranked lower than an animal in our society’s hierarchy of concern.

Dare I say it, but she’s right. What he did was wrong. The relative quiet regarding this godforsaken creepy case, and regarding violence against women generally speaking, is also wrong. The fact that when there are loud voices regarding violence against women, it’s often not terribly sympathetic, is also wrong. That’s another blog post in my draft folder. She is also right that animal abuse cases of similar sadism receive a heck of a lot more press coverage and outrage from the community.

I am not certain if the judge, Mary Yu, meant her quote to be a piece of social commentary.  I appreciate that she said it, in any case.

Moving On, Or How I Gave Away My Bicycle

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Yesterday I let go of an era. Yes, that is a really melodramatic way to speak of removing a bicycle from my possession. This occasion feels appropriate for wine, cigars, and excessive bouts of nostalgia. My pregnancy permits indulging only the last of the three. Let me eulogize on my now former bicycle, for my Firenze GL 5000 and I have parted ways.

blurrybike

Taken with my iPhone in a poorly lit basement while I stood in the empty storage locker. Please pardon the blurriness.

Ah, that bike.

It was a $35 investment from the Buffalo Craiglist in 2008. I was replacing a bicycle given to me by my mother which was stolen. The Firenze was a steel tanker to replace a sleek aluminum bicycle. One day, I rode her Raleigh to the University Station Metro stop and locked it up. I was taking the subway down to the farmer’s market in downtown Buffalo. It was autumn, and I filled my backpack with heavy autumn vegetables, like potatoes, squash, etc.

I walked out of the Metro station to discover my bicycle was no longer there.  Want to know a begrudging walk home? If it was not enough to have the bicycle stolen, I ended up having to walk three miles with forty pounds of vegetables. Thieves! I reported it stolen, but that was a fruitless endeavor. I never saw that bicycle again.

At the time, Will and I were engaged but not married. We lived together in an apartment in Snyder, a first ring suburb of Buffalo. He had a vehicle which I used like it was mine, but really my bicycle was the primary way I transported my self around the area. For a couple weeks, I made do without a bicycle. The apartment was within walking distance of the University at Buffalo, where I was pursuing a master’s degree, a post office, our bank and somewhat walking distance of a grocery store if I was feeling ambitious. It kind of worked.

The main issue was that walking takes much more time, and so I decided it was time to get another road bicycle. There was a fellow in Hamburg, NY selling a GL Firenze 5000 for $35. The frame seemed small enough to fit me. In retrospect, I cannot help but wonder if it was stolen too. If it was, well… I guess there is not too much I can do about it now. We put it in the backseat of the van, and it was thus mine. I then invested in a U-lock.

The story that I read about my bicycle model is that it was given away with the purchase of a car-stereo in San Francisco circa the 1970s. It was not worth much money as a collector’s item or as a bicycle that was reputed to be very good. It was sufficient. The steel frame made it tank like, the steel wheels often went out of true, and the cotter pin holding the pedal to the crank wore down easily. None of those problems were particularly expensive (though I’d put off fixing them for fear that they were). Bicycling circa 2008-2010 was becoming very popular in Buffalo, and while lots of people had fancier bicycles which would be the target of thieves, I had my bicycle which looked old and worn next to them.

I loved that bike.

That bike took me on a lot of adventures and to a fair amount of trouble. There was the time I went to Our Lady of Victory in Lackawana. Then there was the time I went with Cayden on the Critical Mass bicycle ride of what turned out to be debauchery, which we both felt prudent to leave early. That decision was affirmed when the naked dude rolled down the sand dune and the drunk guy started launching poorly-aimed fireworks. There was the time it blew a flat in the middle of Wyoming County, the day I forgot my cellphone. That was the first and only time that I hitchhiked. There was the other time I was biking to a volunteer gig for a friend’s group and my cellphone fell out of my pocket onto Main Street in Buffalo, getting run over by a car. There were the times I used to meet up with that homeless guy that I’ll never speak to again. The time that I met up with my friend who lived in the Nickel City Co-op. He is now married to a gal he met there. I remember rides through the East Side of Buffalo and to the Central Terminal or to the waterfront in late summer. I remember heading to my friends who lived on Minnesota Avenue, to Amy’s Place, and to the Unitarian Universalist Church of Amherst. I was the only person who biked to services.

That’s just two years with it. Then we moved to Seattle. Oh, how humbling my first biking experience was in Seattle, where despite scores of miles undertaken in a single Western New York bound, I was far too weak to make it up the first hill I rode. Eventually I’d get the technique and muscle mass to do it, and I would downshift gears for the first time in my life.

My relationship with the Firenze became more akin to a utilitarian, companionate marriage in Seattle. Instead of being the instrument of exploring the world, it became the sidekick to life’s more mundane tasks: going to school, to places of work, and acquiring groceries. It was not without its fun moments too: I would toss it onto buses and ride to friends’ homes, and sometimes I took it to church. It was how I made it to a South Lake Union park to hang out on the lawn with friends on a beautiful sunny afternoon, where we sprawled out on blankets and read. Two of those friends no longer live in Seattle – one departed for Washington, DC and the other to San Francisco. It was my escort to Gasworks to marvel at one of the prettiest sunsets in Seattle while watching kids fly kites against an orange sky. I rode it with my husband through the Ballard locks to Discovery Park.

One Saturday I decided to try a bike path to see where it led me (in my days before a smart phone) and found myself biking on the I-90 bridge. It was surreal. I felt like I could not go fast enough, between the cars speeding in the lane next to me, and the swift wind over Lake Washington. The view of Mount Rainier that day was crisp and beautiful. I will never forget that trip.

Our relationship was not meant to last forever. One of the deferred maintenance issues were the signs of ever increasingly worn bearings in the crank. It’s an old bike – they just don’t manufacture replacement parts. I took it to a shop and asked them how it’d get repaired, and the cost of the replacement was high. It would never be exactly the same. The repair would require tools that I did not have, and which were expensive to acquire. Paying for repairs was not a small chunk of change. The steel wheels were increasingly coming out of true. Wear and tear was showing up in other ways. Will pointed out that the bicycle was starting to hit that horizon where the bicycle ceases to be inexpensive to maintain. Like an old jalopy of a car, you fix one thing, and something else breaks. At the time I was looking to fix it, I knew I was quitting graduate school and would be without income for an indeterminate amount of time. (This time ended up being only a month, but how was I to know?) So for half the cost of repairs, I  bought a Specialized Rock Hopper with hybrid tires from a well-regarded graduate student acquaintance in the sociology department. He is only two inches taller than me, and so his bike fit perfectly. It was a smoother ride. It was a heavier bicycle, and it did not go as fast, but that was OK. I noticed I fatigued quickly on it, but in retrospect, I think I know why: I was pregnant.

The question remained: Now what? What do I do with the Firenze? I was hesitant to sell it courtesy of the economic reasons for replacing it, though most of my reticence really stemmed from emotional attachment. It was the cause and souvenir of so many of my adventures.

A good friend of mine posted a picture of a red road bicycle on Facebook, a Specialized one. She asked that if anyone saw it out and about, to let her know. That bicycle belonged to her sister, or at least it did prior to it being stolen. She said that her sister does not have a car, and losing the bike was a big deal. Hey, that story sounds familiar. So I sent my friend an email telling her that I would keep my eyes open. I know how frustrating it is when someone steals your bicycle. Oh, and by the way, I might be able to help her. I described my Firenze to her and offered it to her sister gratis. Her sister graciously accepted it. It did not fit her quite as well: turns out that this sister is significantly taller than both my friend and I, but it worked. How fitting that my post-theft bicycle would serve the same purpose for someone else. With this conclusion, I was happy to give it away.

A bicycle is a tool. It is inanimate and subject to the control of the operator. Despite the complete inability to have a relationship with a non-sentient thing, I felt somewhat attached to the bicycle and wanted to depart on good terms. It stayed in the back of our basement storage for six months because I did not yet see the fitting opportunity to let it go. It was as though it was a symbol of the adventure of the last five years, and also of a section of my life that has closed, and how do you let go of that? The answer here was through opportunistic kindness. It felt like it was meant to be.

It seems so silly to wax poetic and reminisce of an object, but there you have it. Have you ever struggled to let go of something inanimate?

To Have, Or Not To Have, Kids

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Obviously my decision is made. I still pay attention to debates and discussions for a couple reasons. One: It’s interesting. The reasons people give illuminate their values and world perspectives. Two: I live in the second most child-free city (per capita) in the United States. A recent column by Sharon Pian Chan notes that deciding to be child-free in Seattle is normal, if uncommon for American culture at large. If you are wondering about what living in a city with few children looks like, I have found it resembles this:

  • There are some public restrooms without changing tables in cafes and restaurants, even places that ensure their single-stall bathrooms are gender neutral for political reasons but forgot to make them kid-friendly. A women’s restroom at the zoo also  did not have a changing table.
  • I live in a neighborhood comprised primarily of single-family homes. When I go for walks, the streets and yards are empty. When I get on the bus, there are generally no children on it, despite the fact the routes have a high enough capacity to justify running 60-foot articulated buses which can carry around seventy passengers.
  • When I go to the pocket parks, I am more likely to see young adults playing with their dogs than I am to see parents playing with their children. These parks are surrounded by single-family homes.
  • Parenting supplies like (usually expensive!) bottles and nipples are regularly on clearance at the grocery store next to my apartment. I almost never see kids in that store either.
  • There are few shops which sell baby supplies in my part of Northwestern Seattle. There are probably a dozen pet-supply shops.
  • The most recent car-sharing company to land in Seattle exclusively uses two-seat vehicles.
  • When I went to my first OB/GYN appointment for my pregnancy, the doctor treated me like some wayward teenager. Mind you, I am nearly 27. The doctor flipped through my chart, asking patronizing and flippant questions about my job, before she stopped. She furrowed her brow, looked back through a couple pages, then exclaimed, “OH. You’re married!” as though she realized her condescension was a mistake. She buried her face in the charts and so could not see my raised eyebrows of, “Oh, really?” The other women in the waiting room were at least half, if not a full, decade older than me.
  • I go days and weeks without seeing another pregnant woman.

So I am observing this conversation after making one choice in a place where most people made the opposite. Part of the reason to listen in on the conversation is to get where other folks are coming from, and where their values lay.

It’s a conversation that, unsurprisingly, quickly becomes defensive (at least on the internet). There is no undoing the choice once your kids are in the world.  Admitting that you regret it comes with a higher-than average stigma, because it is declaring that you wish another human being did not exist… a human being who happens to be your child. Yikes. That is a view point that is unlikely to receive much support, and one which will invite great stigma. Like hazing into a fraternity, there is an effect for justification of effort whenever the sunk costs are very high.

For those who do not have children, I suspect the defensiveness arises from the nature of a choice of inaction. For instance, if you choose not to get a tattoo, you are not precluded from getting one later. There may be people who see the world in two camps: those with tattoos, and those who do not yet have tattoos. A similar view of having children could lead the child-free to fatigue of their presumed rhetorical position, or their future willingness to change their mind, and defensiveness results.

Speaking of rhetoric, I’ve noticed that everyone is considered selfish for whatever choice they make. Parents are selfish for creating children, and non-parents are selfish for choosing to spend their efforts and resources on their selves. This seems more to be commentary on the stigma of being selfish rather than what constitutes the practice of selfishness.

Of course, the people who argue vehemently in either direction are probably those who are most insecure with the choice they made. If you’re 100% certain you want children, other people not having kids does not threaten the validity of your decision. If you’re 100% certain that you do not want children, other people having kids does not effect your reasoning beyond that their lives may become a bit more incompatible with yours, being that they have greater responsibilities.

Reasons I’ve been exposed to which suggest having children:

  • Children add meaning to life
  • Having children is part of the human experience
  • Desire to have relationship with kids
  • Desire to have an ancestral line (kids, grandkids, etc)
  • Positive experiences with one’s family of origin
  • “Felt right,” “sense of completeness,” and other squishier, emotional reasons
  • Spouse wanted to and the individual was ambivalent
  • Sometimes folks cite benefits that really can only be ad-hoc rationalizations due to the inability of most to predict the future: parenting making one more patient, compassionate, mature, etc
  • Liking the world of children – whim, toys, etc
  • Fondness for children as a subset of the population
  • Optimism about future

Reasons I often read or hear for not having children:

  • Do not like children: the work they take, children’s immaturity, etc
  • Uninterested in taking on the care-giving and responsibility required of parents
  • See work and family as an intractable conflict and would prefer to have a successful career over a family. This tends to be something women state, as becoming a mother compromises your ability to economically provide for aforementioned family courtesy of wage disparities, stigma on mothers in the workplace, etc. Men do not have that struggle in the same degree.
  • Prefer to spend resources on other activities rather than supporting a dependent
  • Do not believe they have enough resources to raise a family
  • Negative experiences with one’s family of origin
  • Timing: when one found an intimate relationship of permanence, they felt they were past a good part of life, for them, to have children.
  • Value other things more than children: career success, freedom, money, etc (A variant of this is that one can have a fulfilling life without children)
  • Reference to the world being overpopulated
  • Reference to living with a smaller ecological footprint

Honestly, I feel like the last two are more about showing liberal street-cred than being thought-out arguments. Hear me out: Yes, the existence of people impacts and likely hurts the environment. Taken to its logical conclusions,  the most ethical thing one could do for the planet is not to exist at all. The folks who say this do not seem to have an issue with their own life on Earth. Surely we’re not advocating that others should not exist, right? The other reasons, in my opinion, make a great deal of sense and reflect different locations of values and goals.

Not that the reasons people have children stand up to the rigors of a cost-benefit analysis either. As Bryan Caplan writes in Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, it is presumed that a cost-benefit analysis will always end in “don’t have kids”. (He argues that it is because parenting has become needlessly intensive, but that is another topic.) They do cost money  in rents for a larger space, more food, more clothes, child-care, additional health insurance, diapers, toys, educational expenses, and opportunity cost. If wealth is your goal, children are pretty much a terrible idea. People thus tend to cite emotional reasons for having children. There’s nothing wrong with that either.

The differing reasons come down to differing ways of determining meaning in life. Marx argued that one derived meaning and fully realized their humanity through their labor, and this idea likely resonates with those in the pro-career camp (and to those who are full-time caretakers). The logic behind having children or not reflects fundamental differences in values and goals. I am not saying whether any are better or worse, just that they are different.

I think this may reflect my education and social location, but I have to admit being confused when people refer to having children as a decision of inertia. I have seen this mentioned in some of the child-free discussions, that people have children because they do not have a reason not to. It seems to me that there are more reasons flying about not to have kids than to have them. I related to the ideas that Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote in a Valentine’s Day The Atlantic column, “Don’t rule out having children because you want to have a career”. There are lots of messages, especially aimed at educated women, to work on a career first, become financially stable, then find a partner and then have kids. This is part of the reason you see an uptick in the age of first marriage.

Work and family are both greedy institutions in that they demand and consume a large portion of life. They differ in the meanings ascribed to them. One does not garner as great prestige from having a family as they do from having a career. I mention this as our society tends to conflate worth and wealth.  Having a family, especially if you are female, threatens your ability to accumulate wealth, and I could understand if one felt that it threatened their value too. Having children is something that most people can physically do, but one’s career is somehow more unique. The implicit comment when one chooses a career over a family is that they have something better to do. That is a loud statement about the social value of a family. Many other (similarly-educated, based in Seattle) millennials I talk to would like to eventually have a family, but their jobs come first.

I am also finding that having children and having a career can be surprisingly economically mutually exclusive. Let us pretend the only reason one works is for money, and ignore the existential angst over careers and work. Infant child care in Seattle is sufficiently expensive that it meets or exceeds the take-home salary of my white-collar office job. People rarely discuss that, perhaps because they are embarrassed that they do not make more than child care costs. A great deal of the reason to have a good career, for me, is so that you can support a family. Kids aren’t cheap. This structural and common struggle of working and child-rearing seems particularly tragic when a two-income household is the one best suited to confront an expensive cost of living. It’s even worse if one is wondering about the generational perpetuation of income inequality.

I worry about the social consequences of an economic structure that is most profitable for those whose only needs and wants to support are their own, and penalizes those who take on the task of caring for another person. That is something that does not come up as often in discussions of the motherhood wage penalty: mothers have a particular use and need for money that non-parenting women and men do not. Granted, general American attitudes towards work and wealth tend to neglect that monetary acquisition has purposes beyond its own sake.

It is an overall positive thing for women’s ability to self-determine their lives that having children is becoming accepted as a choice, not an obligation. Men do not face the same pressures; that is why I am singling out women. There is a risk: in the context of an individualist culture, the rhetoric of choice is sometimes used to divorce oneself from responsibility for others’ decision-making. You see this in calls to cut social services. I worry this will mean that the need of society to take care of its collective kids will get downplayed as the population ages and fewer people have children. Time will tell. I hope that children remain perceived an obligatory part of society, while they need not be an obligatory part of one’s individual family.

Ultimately, deciding to have children or not is a very personal decision of which the only people qualified to know if it is the right one are those who would be the potential parents themselves. It is best for kids that the only people who have them are those who want them.

Why did I chose to have children? I want the experience of having a family of my own, and I felt as though I had come to a point where I’m better at loving unconditionally than I was in my younger days. The timing felt right in my gut. I want to raise and get to know kids, but I do not have expectations about the type of people I hope they’ll be beyond the usual law-abiding, people of integrity thing. I have positive associations with child-rearing, likely because my own parents are the sort of people who obviously loved raising kids, despite the challenges. I do not feel like I am missing out on anything fun that I will need to sacrifice. I trust myself and my husband to navigate the economic parts of the world well enough to make things work. My marriage is solid. My husband shows all signs of being a good father, and great long term companion. Yeah, I am not looking forward to dirty diapers and sleeplessness, to figuring out discipline or to the countless mistakes I’ll probably make. No one has perfect parents, and my daughter won’t either. That’s OK. She will have to learn to be OK with it too. I dread the inevitably uncomfortable solutions to the puzzle of the need for child-care and the need to for income to support said child. Will and I have ideas, plans, and schemes. We’ll see what happens.

I am looking forward to showing a few new people the wonderful world we live in, introducing them to the wonderful family they belong to, and living life. I am looking forward to watching a couple people grow, and getting to know them as they do. I am looking forward to sharing these challenges and joys with Will. It is an experience I wish to have. In a few months (GULP!), I will have it. I am not ready. That’s OK.

Then this blog will likely be even less frequently updated than it already is. :)

Did you choose to have or not have children? What informed your choice?