MotherPie

King Corn & Dying Farms...

2008-05-14T03:00:00-06:00

Our farms are no longer living. My trip through Texas and Oklahoma, in retrospect, took me through the heart of our cultural and social changes. I've sone several major cross-country roadtrips across the heartland over the past 10 years going from East Coast to New Mexico. What used to be our lifeways have radically altered, like the old farms crumpling and overtaken by monoculture and agribusiness and all human life absent from the picture. Funny thing, isn't it, how your expectations of things never include all the twists and paths. Now I'm on the road of realizing and ranting that we are at a critical point, beyond the theoretical and into the actual. Our tomorrow is suddenly, scarily, today. We can no longer be passive if things are to change. As a mom with a conscience, I must act. I hope you find ways to do so, too.

Legislation has deliberately reduced the number of farms producing food and increased the size of those that remained in business; this farm in north Texas I passed in April says it all, doesn't it? Yesterday's ways are crumbling away under the crushing policies of modern agribusiness. Dow, Monsanto and other large corporations that feed off the current sick agricultural system need to be challenged. Can or will Congress back track and remove the kind of legislation that deliberately puts the small farmer out of business and subsidizes/supports the petroleum based agribusiness? Subsidies to farmers to not produce crops must be removed. Social disruptions and chaos --like rice riots in Haiti and bread shortages in Egypt -- will not stop. Starving people will immigrate to seek sustenance. Our farm policies (like dumping cheap corn in Mexico) send farmers/people who can't compete to cross into our country.

Today figures are out showing food prices up 0.9%, the highest monthly increase in 18 years. Jill also has a post on food prices and how maybe stocking up on food is a better investment (via the WSJ).Food inflation is running at 4.5% a year, with food prices already rising much faster than the returns you are likely to get from keeping your money in a bank or money-market fund. Prices will rise a lot faster now with oil topping $120/barrel. "The latest data show cereal prices rising by more than 8% a year. Both flour and rice are up more than 13%. Milk, cheese, bananas and even peanut butter: They're all up by more than 10%. Eggs have rocketed up 30% in a year. Ground beef prices are up 4.8% and chicken by 5.4%," Jill notes.

NYTimes has a graph on consumer spending. We spend 15% on food and beverages with the largest chunk being spent on fast food and full-service restaurant meals. An article this week in the NYTimes writes: If financially pinched Americans opt for the cheapest (and the least healthful) foods rather than cook their own, the food industry will continue to reach for the lowest common denominator.

But it is possible to nudge the revolution along — for instance, by changing how we measure the value of food. If we stop calculating the cost per quantity and begin considering the cost per nutrient value, the demand for higher-quality food would rise.

King Corn is a 20-minute film produced by two recent college grads who are concerned about the drastic changes in the last 20 years in agriculture. They discover where America's food comes from when they plant a single acre of corn and follow it from the seed to the dinner plate. With the help of government subsidies, genetically modified seeds, and powerful herbicides, America's most-subsidized crop becomes the staple of its cheapest - and most troubling - foods. It is just out on YouTube and worth the watch.

I'm concerned. Are you?

As They Say in Texas: Oil is King...

2008-05-13T03:00:00-06:00

Maybe people other places are suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous economies, but in some places it is all about the oil (over $121/barrel), or natural gas. Pronounced by old-timers like my dad and uncle, who grew up in the business: awl and gas.

Fort Worth, Texas, part of the D/FW Metroplex, our nation's fourth-largest metro area, is a new boom town, sitting on top of the Barnett Shale natural gas field.

The current issue of Fortune has this by editor-at-large Peter Elkind, a native of Fort Worth:

"Once-struggling oilmen and big landowners are suddenly flush with gas money, while thousands of average homeowners are now collecting modest monthly royalty checks. According to an industry-funded study, an estimated 84,000 jobs have been created throughout the region by the drilling boom. "It's created a new wealth in our city," declares Fort Worth Mayor Mike Moncrief. "It's inoculated our economy. We find ourselves being an island in a sea of recession around us."

Houston was booming. Dallas is flush and growing. Oklahoma City is like a boom town all over again, Borger, Texas has new motels to accommodate the business coming in to refine all the sandy shale oil being drilled in Canada and Fort Worth is raking it in in royalties with cranes and developments going up all over the place.

Raising Cattle...

2008-05-12T03:00:00-06:00

In Texas I passed this grassless small cattle feed lot on my spring road trip. Believe me, this was so much less stinky than the huge feedlots west of Amarillo where the cattle can hardly move as they are fattened for market. They are fed corn, a substance not natural to them, and most get antibiotics (70% of antibiotics are used on animals) because their health suffers in non-natural surroundings and under such stress.

The U.S. livestock industry—a large and vital part of agriculture in this country—has been undergoing a drastic change over the past several decades. Huge CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) have become the predominant method of raising livestock and every year taxpayers shell out between $7.1 billion and $8.2 billion to subsidize or clean up after our nation’s 9,900 confined animal feeding operations, according to a new report, and these factory operations spew odor and flies (and leak manure and smell to high heaven of ammonia), have reduced rural property values by an estimated astronomical total of $26 billion.(links and information for these CAFO stats and facts via the Ethicurian). Plus,the USDA’s current system of grading is set up so that the more fat marbling, the higher the grading — which shuts out grass-fed meat, writes the Ethicurian in another post. We try to get grass-fed meat from small local producers and it has less fat and is more healthy for you -- something I learned from the cattle ranchers bringing their meat to the local farmer's market and direct-to-consumer venues here in Santa Fe.

We had cattle, hormone-free, antibiotic free, ranging on our non-fertilized ranch in Texas in the 1990s, before we sold the place and moved to Atlanta, but the meat couldn't be marketed other than to friends and family because it didn't pass through federal meat inspection and it was too small for middle-men to mess with. Mass production (better profits) is what gets most meat to market. I promise you our way was the healthiest way to eat meat. Those cows were happy cows and it was friend-to-friend meat marketing, outside of normal channels, that made this healthy meat available. The guy who ran the cattle for free on our land could hardly survive and he turned to all-natural because he felt his wife, dying of cancer, was worth his struggle as he believed agriculture with chemical spraying was the wrong way to go. We concurred and supported the process. The way we worked with this cattle producer is not how agribusiness is done these days.

We can act to help change policy. Please go to Ethicurian's post and do more than try to chew the right thing and read more and click their links to be an activist in this area. It is important that we not sit back and let these unhealthy trends persist.

Someday You'll Know...

2008-05-11T03:00:00-06:00

Mother drove the car and checked her face in the rearview mirror. She smiled. "You have to be careful to have your face lines be happy lines," she said. "Someday you'll know."

Mother put her car into reverse in the driveway at her parents' home and watched her parents walk across their porch. "They look suddenly old to me," she said to me in the seat beside her. "Someday you'll suddenly think that of me, and you'll know what I mean," she said. I watch her vitality, energy and strength from her exercise routine and wonder what defines old? Will I know?

Mother was exasperated with me, the stubborn teenager that I was. "You'll never know the patience it takes," she said. "Someday you'll know."

Don't you miss me, I asked my mom, when I went away to college. "It is good to see you launched," she said. "Someday you'll know."

As I drove out from my mother's house, she said how much she appreciated this extended one-on-one time with me now that my own children are out of the house, and said she savors every moment with me. "Someday you'll know," she said.

Once, I don't remember when, she said that I wouldn't understand until I became a mother myself. "Someday you'll know."

Someday is today. Happy Mother's Day!!!

Obama Winning by Graphic Iconic Iterations...

2008-05-10T03:00:00-06:00

Obama is visually viral. When driving to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, I passed this iteration of the Obama poster, left, painted on the side of a building. I'm just now getting to post this as I work through things after being gone from Santa Fe for days and days. While I was in Texas, the tv had the pope on everywhere that day I spotted Obama painted on the yellow bricks and a parody of the pope, right, in the style of Shepard Fairey's now famous Obama Poster was circulating.

Looking at political communications, visually, in with media studies this week, the visuals that stand out among the loud blabbering on cable and in the blogosphere during this pivotal and perhaps most decisive political week are most indicative of all.

I've pulled these Obama Poster parody iterations to show how the fight was playing out with reiterations of Fairey's graphic. The poster in print has gone viral, as I knew it would when I wrote Political Art and the Power of Visual Images.

One of my favorite recent political quotes early on in the week (just so we're not totally visual) is by James Carville, commenting on Hillary and Obama: "If she gave one of her cajones to him, they'd both have two." ha.ha. Seriously, I am highly entertained by the visuals by artists and photographers rather than the comments of the punditry. Soundbites and snippets are what we're about, socially and culturally.

The visuals tell the story so I will give you the two oppositional favorites of mine from this week with the leading Hillary graphic on 5/8 from The Drudge Report, right, which ran just above a headline, "No Way" juxtaposed with this week's Time magazine, just out, with the relaxed smiling Obama with the huge headlline, "And The Winner* Is..."

Back in September 07, I thought Hillary had the edge, as I wrote in Hillary Pop Iconic: Leading by Visual Image.

The tide shifted w/ the Obama poster. If you look at graphic imagery as produced, reiterated and shared online, Obama's fans are winning creatively. This shift occurred in early April. I found the Mamas for Obama graphic for sale on a t-shirt you can buy on Zazzle.com. Me, I'm just following the art and media for political communications interests and digging deep on issues in order to make up my mind.

On another media note, Webby Awards have been announced and CyberJournalist reports results (and, no surprise, WashingtonPost is sliding online, and my once very online with it local paper, The Santa Fe New Mexican, is falling way behind w/ online trends):

*Multiple winners such as: NYTimes.com (8); The Onion (7); National Geographic (4); FactCheck.org (3); BBC (3); TESPN.com (3); and CondeNet (3).

* 27 sites won both a Webby Award and a People’s Voice Award including: Huffington Post (Blog-Political), PostSecret (Blog-Cultural), FT.com Alphaville (Blog-Business), National Geographic (Magazine), NYTimes.com (Newspaper), FactCheck.org (Politics).

Political Marketing to Women: Bill Clinton's Personal Appeal...

2008-05-09T15:00:00-06:00

Junk mail and spam and all that noise and clutter. It is hard for marketers to get through to women with the political message.

Oh my. I've just written a huge rant. I just hate it when I get so verbose and go on and on and on. Is this what happens when women get to be my age? So, I'm putting my verbosious (rhymes with halitosis) rant on the flip. If you care.

Getting an email from an ex-president (subject: Bill Clinton (my thought: you know, that guy who everyone agrees has charisma, regardless of your political persuasion) aroused my curiosity so instead of click-direct-to-junk mail, I opened it: "Dear _____(my name)" the personalized (?) email started. The last paragraph:

"I wish I could talk to every last person who has worked so hard for Hillary to thank you for everything you've done for her. You mean so much to both of us. She's still in this thing because of your hard work and your indomitable spirit." Signed: Bill Clinton

In the old, old old days, if this had been something printed, I might have taken my thumb, spit on it and smeared the signature to see if it was real. Before I knew about signature machines, I would test to see if it was printed or hand-signed. All I've done for any campaign is analyze the communications and media. (But. A President's signature. ON AN EMAIL???? DOES THIS MAKE IT "PERSONAL"???? OH COME ON. and then there is the BIG contribute button. She's putting their own money in at this point anyway...isn't that a sign of a sinking ship?)

Ex-President Bush Senior stayed out of his son's race. I find that dignified. Ex-President Clinton, to me, is demeaned by this pandering for more power. Do you read this the same way? How are you impacted by political emails? Do you read those from friends, like the ones about Obama's religion, or direct appeals? Or are you swayed by any? The theory is that "influential others" -- like friends you like and admire, or community leaders you know personally, or bible study leaders, carry more influence and weight in your decision making (or now, bloggers). I'm just curious about how we've moved from Dean's bottom-up grass roots (nipped by the Dean Scream) to now. The youth of today see through the bluster and they aren't tripped up by marketing tricks. Yet we can only take in so much. 2004 was the pinnacle of micro-marketing, of niche marketing. What is working and what isn't in political communications? What will pull the next gen into civic involvement? I listen to everyone's arguments. I guess I'm the typical female in this campaign. But somehow, this week is the Dean Scream.

How to market to moms? That is Advertising Age's lead article today. Of course, it is in terms of Mother's Day and consumer purchasing when it writes:

...mothers are the chief purchasing officers, or CPOs, of their households, making almost all of the spending decisions. From computers to cars, from airlines to appliances, from home improvement to high-definition TVs, women -- the majority of whom are moms -- make 85% of all household purchase decisions in the U.S. ....In a way, they do; 84% of women over 40 have kids -- ergo, they are mothers. But the real driver of women's spending power kicks in when they are less involved with their kids...

If candidates are sold like products (starting in the '60s - read The Selling of the President), then does this apply? One point the article makes is that moms with teenagers don't blog about it. I can tell you that is the truth. We moms of older kids need diversions from the hard, hard, hard exhausting task of turning our little adorable ones into the adults they need to be. So in terms of socialization and culture, we need to channel this intensity elsewhere. Food budgets and gas prices and college tuitions.... Isn't politics a relief???? It is an arm's length entertainment.

Meanwhile, back at the (political communications) ranch: The NYT's military analyst story was ignored and the polygamy story dominated the media, according to a Project for Excellence in Journalism study reported in the Columbia Journalism Review. Two stories on the important piece were in the 1,300 stories in 48 different news outlets. My major for my journalism degree was public relations so I've followed this story that received no attention and found it interesting, especially with this administration that has been called down repeatedly in the past for propaganda. Go look at PRWatch.org to see what they say on this and how too much information will overwhelm the media. But hey. Let's get to back campaign races that excite us. Who is the winner? The horserace story is THE STORY. I walked into the room where my husband had the cable on, sound off. Has she quit yet, I ask. We're primed for winners and losers. We're a nation that sees things in war framing, primed for fights to the finish. The battle is hot, we're down to the wire on one side.

My reaction to Bill's (yes, we are on first-name basis! Aren't we? By his personalization ploy?) email: delete. And that big red CONTRIBUTE button at the bottom. What was my reaction? delete, delete. delete. It made me want to spend fifteen minutes and blog this post. Life, death and legacy. Gasping last breaths are heard, but will the major media really write about it or go there? Power does have its pull. So do spouses and moms. What communications make an impact? What cultural message will resonate?

My mother forwards to me an email yesterday quoting the WSJ article on Cindy McCain (which I saw the same article in USA Today the week I went to visit her two weeks ago - great pr push by McCain's campaign). The "personal email" she received (subject: Cindy McCain) had this closing line by the "friend":

I'm surprised the media is so quiet about her attributes. She sounds more capable than Hillary or Obama. We would really get two for the price of one. A person with business and international experience. John did work for the firm for awhile when he left the Navy. She, however, has the real business experience. Very interesting. (signed) Pat

What pulls you in, makes you want to spread the message and influence others? What messages and from whom do you pay attention to and forward? I've written about how this campaign is about connecting. What does this mean when we are bowling alone, so to speak, when we have less intimate friends than we used to, when our sense of community has fragmented?

I'm just AnotherMother of kids growing into adults and I'd much rather write about this than how my kids spend their own money on items with logos. barf. I'm pushing publish and I should probably just not write about politics. There's too much out there already.

Our World of Agribusiness...

2008-05-09T03:00:00-06:00

This abandoned farmhouse house on the High Texas Plains touches a sad cord and I share this memento from my trip through the area this spring. I want to paint Andrew Wyeth's yearning girl in the foreground to give it deeper meaning, an idea that speaks of what we face, what we've done with our present, what hopes we have for our future. There is more here than just emptiness and neglect. It represents our monoculture, our separation from land and connectedness. Every bit of land is plowed for... corn? Probably. Now I've posted below my surreal parody of Wyeth's Christina's World. I'll call it Christina's (PostModern) World. There. I feel better already. Not.

What was once there, really? A circle of intertwined life in co-existence. Not now.

We've lost our total connection to the land and in doing so, we're losing our knowledge of life, growth and sustenance and in the process, we're losing ourselves and our future.

Now living in McMansions with ugly pastic playtoys in empty fertilized yards with high fences, eating corn-fed feedlot beef with tomatoes grown in Brazil, strawberries in winter, sipping Chilean wine, dining on Asian rice, spending 10 calories of fossil fuel for every calorie we consume, and bemoaning food price increases with farmers paid not to raise crops, we wonder how we got here and how to change it.

Perhaps we need to think about planting our own gardens, growing some of our own food and making our gardening a sustaining venture. Food shipped around the world has extremely environmental costs, the subject of a NYTimes article. Michael Pollan's books sit next to my bed, both half read. His recent article in the NYTimes, Why Bother, suggests we act in hopes our actions become viral. Victory gardens once supplied 40% of the food in WWII. Since then, we've lost our hold on our own dirt and its potential in our cycle of life.

Ramble: Eating & Living Differently...

2008-05-08T03:00:00-06:00

Rambling about food and gardens and health and getting past the industrialization of our food, there are a couple of things to highlight as I amble here. We need a new kind of home economics. When my husband retired, one of our Texas friends who ranches lands very near the Mexican border, said, "just gitchew a tractor and go ride the land." They come with UV filtered windows, sound systems and the idea is you can ride the land in your own little world. I think maybe I should have put my children in our garden more and toted them to structured activities less. I want to think of more native and natural things, rather than isolation and try to overcome succumbing to our culture/consumerism/society. So here are my thoughts for today's ramble:

American Indians believe in making decisions based on projecting the consequences out seven generations. If we conducted ourselves with the idea of perpetuity for our actions, we might be more responsible for ourselves, our children and our world.
The use of native and drought-resistent plants as a substitute for grass will be a major design trend of 2008. One big trend in landscaping: letting lawns go to moss and according to the NYTimes article, "Moss, which grows fast and hugs the ground, prevents soil erosion. Its density repels weeds. Deer do not snack on it. It can be walked on. Even when it looks dead, a splash of water can restore it to emerald health within minutes. It doesn’t need fertilizer (lacking a root system, it takes nutrients from water and air). All it needs, in fact, are shade, moisture — though not large amounts of water — and what most gardeners would regard as poor-quality soil."
Integrated gardening: Susie J has a post on planting combinations together, like planting chives around roses to keep the roses from getting diseases. These are things we used to know and those who work to do this and share it might help us virally change our ways. Let's hope. Now our society is doing only monculture. The typical calorie of food energy in your diet requires about 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce. Can you imagine growing some of your own food?
More on non-monocultural gardening: Miss Cellania was working in her garden - literally and as a topic for her blog, and she had a link on native american trios... why a "Three Sisters Garden" works -- three plant partners benefit each other. "Beans, like other legumes, have bacteria living on their roots that help them absorb nitrogen from the air and convert it to a form that plants can use. (Corn, which requires a lot of nitrogen to grow, benefits most.) The large, prickly squash leaves shade the soil, preventing weed growth, and deter animal pests. The three sisters also complement each other nutritionally.
Perhaps if we got into our gardens more we'd benefit from the Vitamin D. Jill has a link about the importance of Vitamin D and scientists who say it could prevent diseases including cancer, and thwart autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, rhematoid arthritis and juvenile diabetes. She writes: "In the wake of emerging positive results, the National Cancer Institute gathered scientists to review the nutrient's ability to reduce cancer risk, particularly of the breast, colon, prostate and lung. And last fall, the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality issued an evidence-based review of Vitamin D that found it to be key for bone health at all ages, including in the prevention of falls in the elderly." Also included is this: "There are a lot of benefits to Vitamin D that have surfaced in the last 20 years," notes Hector DeLuca, a University of Wisconsin biochemist who has been a pioneer in Vitamin D research. My mother, grandfather, my children and myself I felt have always benefited from sun at non-intense hours of the day but with light skin and seven years of lifeguarding, I'm so careful about skin damage and I, myself, take supplements. Jill (or the article she quotes from) suggests that the next time you go to the doctor, get your vitamin D level checked. You may be surprised to learn that you too are deficient as are most adults in the U.S.
Learning how to return to simplicity and learn a different kind of home economics is a trend. NYTimes has an article of one woman conducting classes to moms in the grocery aisles.Sandi has a link to this video of a young woman who is reaching out to teach healthy cooking to teens. These things are new things and maybe high prices, driven up by oil going over $123/barrel this week (can you even believe????), will make us start changing our choices.

Most important: Years ago I was introduced to the work of ethno-botanist Gary Paul Nabhan and I'm a supremely wild fan of his work and writings and have read most all of what he has written. When I saw him in Houston at his niece's wedding, he told me about the old orchards at Bishop's Lodge here in Santa Fe and their threatened status (being yanked up for modern landscape - lifeless waterfalls and such). This week at Ethicurian I came across an article on Nabhan - Gary Nabhan Wants You To Go Native for Sole Food and the latest book he's edited, Renewing America's Food Traditions. "Nabhan, a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient who spoke this week in Lawrence, Kansas, thinks we are at a critical moment where both knowledge of native foodstuffs and losses of those species are high. He and others assert that taking advantage of those foods would address numerous ills, from the reliance of petroleum-based agriculture to the explosion of diabetes among Americans, particularly those of color, to loss of cultural identities."

Not much edible can I grow in the High Desert yard we have in Santa Fe, but I can try to propagate cactus. Later I'll share with you (when I can dig it out) a recipe for prickley pear cactus that Gary Paul Nabhan gave me when he visited our home in Houston back in the mid-1990s.

Thinking, Eating, Living Cheers!

Ramble: Tech and Typing...

2008-05-07T03:00:00-06:00

Texting is what I've had to do mainly when on the road since I've not been able to have much computer access. My rambles have been on highways and backroads, towns and cities with my digital camera being my biggest toy along the way. It has been a strong reminder of then versus now...

The world wide web is 15 years old. Can you imagine any other invention that has changed our world as much as this one has? Tim Berners-Lee, inventer of the web, says, "The future is always in the past and for the web particularly. In a hundred years, 15 years will seem to be just the infancy of the web..." Tim O'Reilly says, "It's the most profound change since the advent of literacy. And it's bigger than the industrial revolution."

Hunt and Peck? Those are the big texters! In 6th grade my class undertook an experiment, giving up study hall for a year in order to master typing fundamentals on IBM Selectrics. The ability to write faster, to be able to write at the speed of thinking, was supposed to enhance our creativity in English. I think it did, but it was the use of the correcting tab that made it easy for me. Regardless, working at a keyboard ever since, you'd think I'd have an advantage in typing speed. Nooooooo. How fast do you type? Go see how you do at this online test.

Look at that Google and Apple stock. (Hurray). Apple's new iPhone comes out in June, scheduled to sell for $199 and I bet that this will be the edge needed to pull in BlackBerry users. I'll make my switch then. Apple posts more than $1 billion in profit; Mac sales are booming, up 51%. Steve Jobs invented the PC in 1977 and one expert wonders if the iPhone will be the end of the internet.

I've captured our crumbling world in photos and will be posting those once I get them sorted out at home...
Roadway Ramblin' Cheers!

Ramble: Top Influential Lists and Time Out...

2008-05-06T03:00:00-06:00

Taking time out from Santa Fe routines to ramble around has been good for the soul. Soon I'll be back into routines and will ramble through my digital images once I get caught up and catch up on blog reads.

Time's top 100 most influential list, is just out (this is a good way to keep on top of our culture's ideas and trends). Jeff Han, inventor of the multi-touch screen (if you watch CNN election coverage, you've seen it and it is the new hot thing) is my only mention. I think his ideas are behind Apple's touch screen innovations. The best way to flip through the people is this list (it saves you time). Seeing who touts who is as interesting as the people and the ideas they represent. For example, Michael Bloomberg writes the article on Titan Jamie Dimon and Michelle Obama writes the one on Oprah.

UK's Telegraph has a list of the Top 50 Most Influential U.S. Pundits.Karl Rove, Chris Matthews, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, John Harris and Jim Vandehei, Matt Drudge, Tim Russert, David Brooks, Mark Halperin, Stephen Colbert, Bill O'Reilly, Keith Olberman, Chuck Todd and Bill Maher round out the top 15.

Foreign Policy's list of Top 100 Public Intellectuals is out. The majority are from Europe and the U.S. with most being in the field of politics and I don't see any duplications on the Time list. Ones I've read recently, some for media and communication theories, are mostly theorists: Noam Chomsky, Umberto Eco, Jared Diamond, Malcom Gladwell, Jurgen Habermas, Steven Pinker, Robert Putnam, and V.S. Ramachandran.

U.K. Times list of Top 100 movies: Casablanca #1 and There Will Be Blood is #2. With crude topping $120/barrel yesterday and going over $121/barrel today, guess I need to see There Will Be Blood for a reference to the oil booms. My cousin, a Texas oil and gas producer, said he didn't like how that movie disparaged his business.

Cognitive Surplus: This idea is from another thinker and is worth a read. I've had little time to keep up with news, media and blogs while on the road, but did come across the stats for our television consumption. Can you believe that we watch an average of 8 hours per person a day? Clay Shirky's (author/thinker involved w/ an NYU venture) speech on Gin, Television and Social Surplus talks about the concept of cognitive surplus -- the idea of what happens when we become active and engage versus being passively numbed. During the Industrial Revolution in England, people got snockered on gin, numbing themselves during that huge social shift. As technology hit us with mass communications and the information revolution, we numbed ourselves with television. Now, with the media being about pull rather than push (think about how the fact is that more people read blogs than newspapers), and people can share, produce and interact with content, the cognitive surplus left over from the numbing effect will be huge, if people become actively engaged. What would happen if the average amount of tv watching went down by just one hour/day? I take some cognitive surplus to blog and I'm taking some to figure out how to be more sustainable (those posts are coming up in the next week or so).

Girls and young women are now the most prolific web users and that is true in our family, looking at three generations.

Road Cheers!

What Would You Do? Read the Diaries?

2008-05-05T03:00:00-06:00

Writing is remembering, but who needs to know?

As I get into the car to pull out of her driveway, my mother leans in and tells me that her lifelong collection of diary writings has her ventings and that my Dad says he'll burn them if she goes first.

She might have been a prolific blogger. But some things aren't meant for the eyes of others... or are they?

What would you do with your mom's diaries if they fell into your hands?

Publish?

I'm not sure if I want to read things I don't want to know. She leans in and tells me that all she writes is not tidy. She says this with a glint in her eye as her mouth turns up in a smile.

My door slams, my car goes into reverse, my life moves forward yet again. I drive away from my past to my present.

Place as Defining Self...

2008-05-04T03:00:00-06:00

Who are we, really, and what makes us and defines us? Place, past, present? Ideas, outlook, relationships? Experience, genes? As I travel about New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, I think of how many places I have lived (a lot), while also having spent 18 years in the same place my parents now still live and where my mother grew up, even though that place was still Indian Territory when her grandparents and great-grandparents came there. Place and roots to me are major ways of defining oneself. I am driving through places where my present is all twined up in my past. My memories escape into my present, unabidden (?), just bubbling up in my moment. Life used to be like that when I lived in the place I grew up, for almost ten years while married. I'd pass a park and remember times past spent playing. I'd encounter a person, place or thing that took my present back, unexpectedly. When you move to new places, it is always the present moving into the future with little interruption in the present of the past. At least that is what I've found.

These two self-portraits, posted in different years of blogging as I moved to new places I'd never lived (NYC, left, and Santa Fe, right), are references as I move through places that have helped establish self-definition and my ideas of the world beyond this little place of the present, wherever that is. Now. When in NYC I was a student - of media studies, urban culture and space; when in Atlanta I was intrigued with the curiosities of southern culture and I found myself being a hostess and gardener and exhausted with teens in a place few came to visit and in a way, lost myself as I dug in dirt and planted; in Santa Fe I find myself reconnecting to myself with motherhood minimized with empty nest and a husband on sabbatical.

In NYC the culture of walking on the street, seeing it, as my daughter termed it, as dancing to the rhythm of crowds and the timing of lights, a quadrille of sorts, on a grid system. Vastly different from navigating the self to places around Houston or Atlanta street traffic, the former on the grid or eight-lanes, the latter on old pig and horse trails! Noting other cultural things specific to NYC and navigating the sense of self within it makes the self malleable when places don't have personal roots and are new to the self. In Atlanta, the self is determined by the first question ever asked: So, wuzzzz your Daddy do?. In Houston, the self is what you do or plan to do, a meritocracy as NYC is, although the latter wants to determine quickly how much you are paid to do what you do.

What makes us and defines our present? People, places, things... routines or traditions, any and all.

My Mom is So Green...

2008-05-03T03:00:00-06:00

She composts. She rinses out her baggies. She saves bread crusts and feeds the ducks at the pond. She puts banana peels, coffee grounds and even dog hair in her garden. She still knows how good laundry smells when dried on a line. She, born to parents who lived through the Depression, born in a time when things were war rationed, knows how to be thrifty and economical. My mom is so green; so way way way ahead of her time. She never believed in a throw-away culture.

We should all take lessons from our elders in these times.

I tell my mom we can ebay her stuff. I tell my mom we can sort out her house -- me, the Queen of Moving, can toss, toss, toss. She cleans out a drawer or shelf or closet every day. Today it takes her 45 minutes to do one shelf in the bathroom. She sends me home with Dramamine she no longer needs for a grandchild on trips, and three jars of body cream she won't use. It is easier to put it in my bag than to argue with her about how I don't need them.

My mother, the fair lady of recycling, is recycled herself in our stories of her. I return to her a painting that has gone from my 6 or 7 homes to my daughter's and now back to her. Up it goes on her living room wall, right where it once graced the wall, 25 years or more ago. What goes around...

update: found this site for green living tips. One, using cloth napkins, is a habit I picked up from mother.

Travelling About: It's a Gas...

2008-05-02T03:00:00-06:00

Driving around the old stomping grounds with unbridled time is something I've missed since moving to Atlanta then NYC (or really, since having children and being a corporate wife) and what a gas, gas, gas it is. Who says empty nest is boring? Press the pedal to the metal and...hello world again.

When you have real friends, time can pass and you can pick up where you last left off. What a blessing. We lingered over long breakfasts, and dinners at hole-in-the-walls and spiffy haute places in Houston and could have stayed forever, catching up with friends. Houston real estate has more than tripled in home prices in some areas since we purchased homes there. We witnessed a little girl, all grown up, standing before a female minister to say "I do". Her mom looks the same, just the same, and found her dress (of all places?) in Santa Fe. And I found my mother-of-the-bride dress in NYC on Madison, fearful I wouldn't find one in Santa Fe after we left Manhattan. My husband flies out of Dallas and S.W. Airlines has an unplanned landing in Lubbock due to engine failure while I drive on. and on. and on.

My uncle talks like my Dad and walks like my cousin and looks like my grandfather and still lives in his same house in that little tiny Texas town I last visited over 12 years ago. My aunt can still joke and wore her diamond necklace and gold earrings and ladybug pin, even with the drag of Alzheimers. One cousin's son remembered me after 15 years -- half of his life. Another relative shows me her law office and her grandmother's (my great-grandmother's) law school diploma/bar certificate hanging beside her husband's and other family heirlooms. My mother's first cousin tells me tales of his endeavors with more enthusiasm than I've ever heard from him and I wonder how years pass fast with geographical distance separating these ties.

My childhood friends and acquaintances fill me in on all that has happened. Oklahoma still doesn't have good grocery stores, Texas blue laws are still in effect, The Daily Oklahoman has a front-page story on coon hunting (just sayin' - and you wonder why people make fun of Oklahoma?) and the talk is about the name of the new basketball team coming to town ("surely not the Okie Dokies" one man on a treadmill at the YMCA says next to me). The owners get a $60 million tax break for bringing the Seattle Sonics to the city. Helps when the old boys can get stuff done so taxpayers pay, right? I note my parents are top ranked weight lifters according to the March reports from the weight machines. Pretty good for 70-somethings. They go to two funerals a day sometimes. My mother doesn't break a sweat on the eliptical. I've toted a case of wine to my mother for mother's day -- delivered to New Mexico from Napa Valley and lugged all over Texas before I bring it to her, all because of Oklahoma's prohibition-era laws on liquor, still on the books, that preclude delivery of wine. This is why, Dad says, that Whole Foods won't come to town (still, he's trying, and tells me Tulsa has one so soon they might). Dad tells me of conversations with Tulsa's mayor, a college friend, who I say might be governor some day or go even higher.

I watch American Idol with my husband's god daughter. What a moment to savor. Her comments clue me in moment by moment -- I'd be totally clueless otherwise. I watch Rev. Wright's speeches that my mother pulls up on tv and marvel at her reaction. I tell my Dad to be careful with his categories -- that just as Obama, half-white, half-black, is known as black, Dad, a lapel-flag wearing Republican, might be known as a grumpy old white man.

I drive by my great-grandmother's house with my childhood best lasting friend who shows me where her mother grew up. This fabric of relationships, born from growing up in the same place as my great-grandparents, all close together, makes me sad for what my children don't have, with all the moves and such. My mother appreciates me smelling like fish --staying past my three-day limit of the last 28 years (you know, guests and fish stink after three days). My mother tapes her tv shows so she speeds through commercials watching Dr. Phil and his special on the polygamy affairs in Texas while she does her back exercises at 8:00 a.m. and I try to deal with email on the road on her computer. She turns the tv so I can see it in the mirror. The YMCA doesn't show Dr. Phil and Oprah on the exercise tv's she tells me, because they've gotten too racy. Meanwhile, the Texas governor ignores the polygamist story and Houston Mayor Mark White throws his hat in the ring for governor and Kay Bailey Hutchison is too old to be McCain's vp so she's running for Texas governor, too. I talk to an Oklahoman about New Orleans culture (her newly married daughter is there), equating learning how to maneuver the culture of Mardi Gras is similar to that of learning cultural affairs elsewhere. Shoot, I had to tell my daughter who moved to Dallas that you have to say in conversations: How 'bout them Cowboys.

Life is just a gas. I wish Oklahoma had a better national reputation and it makes me sad for it. I cringed when Rhea published the link to IF Celebrities Moved to Oklahoma. The fatness of the population was much discussed whilst I was there (the Mayor of Oklahoma City has a diet challenge out) and I noted when I moved from there the one mile in the Edmond suburb where I lived had the highest density of fast food places in the nation at that time. My friend says: Well, when a fast food burger is cheaper than what you can pay to make it yourself, what do you expect?

And the new oil and gas boom is playing out all over. Houston and DFW are humming along with Oklahoma City and cranes are everywhere. The Dallas/Ft.Worth Metro area has surpassed Houston so it is now NYC, L.A., Chicago, D/FW then Houston for the ranking. And I've lived in three of the five and am now back to small towns (Santa Fe is the smallest yet!). The increase in the price of steel is impacting oil and gas producers. My Dad tells me more than once the price he paid for Chesapeake stock way back when, now that it us up, up, up. The expansion of Chesapeake's campus and Devon Energy's announcement of hiring Hines to develop a new downtown skyscraper in Oklahoma City is the talk of the town. TCU in Fort Worth is getting over $9 million a month in oil/gas royalties. One Texas friend sends me this pic of gas prices. LOL. right. Those high gas prices, a real killer for this road trip.

Turning Pages: Mother's Reads...

2008-05-01T03:00:00-06:00

Motherhood by example: As a bibliophile, my earliest memories are of books and reading with my mother, going to the library weekly and always having a book in hand. Visiting my mother, we traded our current reads. I left Julie Andrew's biography, Home, with her after I finished and she sent me off with Vikas Swarup's Q & A, a gift to her from our relative. I'll read it and pass it back. Swarup's book is the best one I've picked up in recent memory and I'm half-way through. It has been critically acclaimed, is an international bestseller being translated into 32 languages, was shortlisted for the Best First Book by the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and won South Africa’s Exclusive Books Boeke Prize 2006, as well as the Prix Grand Public at the 2007 Paris Book Fair.

Remember my new test for literature is the last line of the book. Swarup's Q & A's last line: "I won't need it (my lucky coin) anymore. Because luck comes from within."

Books my mother has read in 2008:

January

1. Isabel and the Miracle Baby – Emily Smith Pearce
2. Diamonds in the Shadow – Caroline B. Cooney
3. Good Dog, Stay – Anna Quindlen
4. Escape – Carolyn Jessop
5. Undaunted Courage – Stephen Ambrose (CD)
6. Playing for Pizza – John Grisham
7. Miss Manner’s complete book of dog etiquette – Charlotte Reed
8. Wild Fire – Nelson DeMille (CD)
9. Atonement – Ian McEwan (CD)
10. The Pillars of the Earth – Ken Follett (CD)
11. T is for Trespass – Sue Grafton (CD)
12. A Brief History of Time – Stephen Hawking (Video)
13. Unholy Alliance – David Horowitz
14. Voices from the Heartland – by Carolyn Ann Taylor et al
15. Night Fall – Nelson DeMille (CD)
16. Day of Reckoning – Patrick Buchanan

February
17. World without End – Ken Follett (CD)
18. Don’t Never Shoot Short – Kent Frates
19. The Charm School – Nelson DeMille (CD)
20. Real Change – Newt Gingrich
21. Home to Holly Springs – Jan Karon (CD)
22. I Saw the Lord – Anne Graham Lotz
23. People of the Book – Geraldine Brooks
24. Eye of the Needle – Ken Follett
25. The Septembers of Shiraz – Dalia Sofer
26. Twilight at Monticello – Alan Pell Crawford
27. Christ the Lord – Road to Cana – Anne Rice
MARCH
28. Basic Black - Cathie Black (CD)
29. Their Eyes were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston (CD)
30. Double Cross – James Patterson (CD)
31. Cash Flow Planning – Dave Ramsey (Cassette)
32. Plum Lucky – Janet Evanovich (CD)
33. The Darkest Evening of the Year – Dean Koontz (CD)
34. A New Earth – Eckhart Tolle
35. The Firm (The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor) Penny Junor
36. The Audacity of Hope – Barack Obama
37. My Enemy’s Cradle – Sara Young
38. Women and Money – Suzie Orman (CD)
39. The Appeal – John Grisham (CD)
40. No Country for Old Men – Cormac McCarthy (CD)
41. Stop Whining, Start Living – Dr. Laura Schlessinger
42. Reclaiming Conservatism – Mickey Edwards
43. 7th Heaven – James Patterson (CD)

APRIL
44. The Invention of Everything Else – Samantha Hunt
45. Strangers in Death – Nora Roberts (CD)
46. Team of Rivals – Doris Kearns Goodwin (CD – 36)
47. Trudy’s Promise – Marcia Preston
48. The Birth House – Ami McKay
49. Morning on Horseback – David McCullough
50. The Shack – William P. Young
51. Change of Heart – Jodi Picoult (CD-12)
52. Amazing Grace – Kathleen Norris

Blooming in My Mother's Garden...

2008-04-30T03:00:00-06:00

Purple iris that can probably trace their heritage to my great-grandmother's garden or before that (and yellow, and multi-colored). Roses by the doorstep. Pansies in full bloom, still standing. Daisies in one corner.

These are the flowers that are blooming in her beds. Her car smells of mulch. Her doorstep holds the fragrances of roses. Her garden makes her house so happy.

I found the best of spring at the home of my youth and the landscape of my past. Oklahoma is a sweet green at the moment.

Besides the art of nature, the art of the Oklahoma City Arts festival is a joy to share. My favorite artist exhibiting? Oklahoma treasure Bert Seabourn.

No Burial Without Permission...

2008-04-29T03:00:00-06:00

Just so you'll know, you have to have permission. Found in Carrollton, Texas on an old cemetery fence. I'm looking for spring and the fake flowers on the graves, plastic, they were, don't count in my quest.

An American Trilogy...

2008-04-28T05:00:00-06:00

Looking out of the hotel window in Houston, Texas, I caught this threesome. It seemed so American to me, a church steeple between the American flag and Transco Tower. So without further words to expound on this imagery, I'm off to shop at the Galleria, just across the street.

Motherhood: A State of Always...

2008-04-27T10:54:41-06:00

A is for Always, because that is what motherhood makes you. Always changed, Always a mom.

Twenty five years ago I held my firstborn child in my arms, discovered what unshakable bonds motherhood creates and wondered, about six weeks later, when "things would return to normal."

Just as quick as I wondered that thought, I realized that the State of Normal had changed. Motherhood creates a new normal, a new forever state of being. Just like I wondered what this child would look like, what this child would be like, I remain amazed, always amazed, how she has grown up.

A is for always, the state that motherhood creates. Always entwined, always there, always, always and forever, a mother.

Literature's Best Last Lines...

2008-04-26T03:00:00-06:00

After my new book club in Santa Fe discussed the decline of literature and how 10,000 Suns was a good story, but not good literature, I decided to start my own personal litmus test for literature.

Here are some of my favorite last lines from classic literature:

"....After all, tomorrow is another day." -- Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (1936)

This is not the scene I dreamed of. Like much else nowadays I leave it feeling stupid, like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere. --J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)

Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision. -- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.--F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you? --Ralph Ellison,Invisible Man (1952)

Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is. --Russell Banks, Continental Drift (1985)

...you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953; trans. Samuel Beckett)

In your rocking-chair, by your window dreaming, shall you long, alone. In your rocking-chair, by your window, shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel. --Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900)

But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before. --Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

`It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.' --Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities(1859)

Are there any questions? --Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1986)

It was a fine cry--loud and long--but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow. --Toni Morrison, Sula (1973)

(For more, see Kottke.org's list of the 100 Best Last Lines from Novels.)

Now I'm keeping track of the last lines from the books I'm reading.

From Junot Diaz's Pulitzer Prize Winner, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, (2007) "He wrote: So this is what everybody's always talking about! Diablo! If only I'd known. The beauty! The beauty!"

Political endings? If the Iraq War was Literature, Petraeus might have the best last line: "Tell me how this ends."