Art Changes Lives

I'm sitting here listening to This American Life, and they said something I found wonderfully interesting: Arts programs are more effective at changing kids lives than any other type of program. This is because the arts involve a more complicated collaborative process. Art changes you.

The story they told was of a young girl with a violent family and a gang membership. A theater production changed her life. Years ago, I told my dentist I was studying literature and art in college. He said "I would love to study that stuff, but I'm not smart enough." Way to inspire confidence in your clients, dude, but I'm starting to think there's something to that. Even my scientist friends don't like the other scientists they meet.

World Carfree Network Year in Review

THE YEAR IN REVIEW >>
______________________________

April:
Paris, France, unveiled a plan for banning cars from its centre. By
2012, only residents would be allowed to drive into the city's
central four arrondissements. Essential journeys such as hospital
visits would be exempt, as would commercial and public service
vehicles like taxis, delivery vans and ambulances.

May:
Organic, carfree weddings are on the rise in North America, reports
The Telegraph, a New Hampshire newspaper.

August:
The City of London gave children aged under 16 free travel on
London's buses. The scheme will be extended next year to include
anyone under 18 who is a full-time student.

September:
Millions of people worldwide celebrated World Carfree Day by walking,
cycling, or taking public transport, and by organising public events
in support of carfree cities.

October:
For the first time in more than 20 years, more bicycles than cars
were sold in the United States over a 12-month period.

November:
Dhaka, Bangladesh backed off from its longstanding plan to ban
rickshaws and other non-motorised vehicles on eight important roads
in the capital city. Instead, the city will look at properly
licensing and regulating rickshaw traffic.

December:
In a survey conducted by the Munich Public Transport Authority, more
than 10% of respondents said that, during the last year, they sold
their car, or at their second vehicle if they owned more than one.
Some 60% of respondents said that they now ride public transport more
often. The reason: rising fuel prices and more frequent train
service.

ERTMS Website

An unexpected benefit of the Galileo program
ERTMS Website

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Navigating future for road charges

Relevant to my Congestion Charging topic:
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Navigating future for road charges

AlterNet: EnviroHealth: Car Trouble

AlterNet: EnviroHealth: Car Trouble

Favorite quote:
"The internet, he muses, could easily replace the automobile as humanity's dream of unlimited mobility."

Transportation Hierarchy

This issue is being discussed on one of my lists, and I thought it worth putting on the blog to keep track of it....

Transportation Alternatives: T.A. Magazine Article: The Green Transportation Hierarchy

--- Simon Baddeley wrote:
>
> In 1990 York Council (in UK) introduced a road user hierarchy to
> guide
> implementation of their transport policy. This gave priority to
> road users
> in the order:
>
> 1. Pedestrians
>
> 2. people with disabilities
>
> 3. cyclists
>
> 4. public transport passengers
>
> 5. commercial/business vehicles requiring access
>
> 6. coach-borne shoppers
>
> 7. coach-borne visitors
>
> 8. car-borne long stay commuters and visitors.
>
> The hierarchy also formed the underlying basis for promoting
> sustainability
> through the Local Plan and implementing the Transport Strategy's
> objectives
> in full.
>
> Specific initiatives within York which illustrate application of
> the road
> hierarchy include the Footstreet scheme in the city centre, Park
> and Ride,
> city cycle network, and area wide traffic calming schemes including
> 20 mph
> zones.
>
> http://www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/groups/dft_susttravel/documents/page/dft_susttravel_031509-08.hcsp
>
> Hope this helps.
>
> Best
>
> Simon

Me, the devout Jew

My sister Ilana has made an observation about American Jews. It’s that their anti-Christmas traditions eclipse actual Jewish celebrations. This became apparent this year since Hanukkah fell on Christmas Day. Alex, who lives in Dick and Kathleen (Ilana’s father and step mother)’s in-law unit, had plans for tonight to go out for Chinese and then to the movies. Ilana’s boyfriend David’s mother always cooks a duck, and they did that today too. I, on the other hand, traveled an hour each way on the BART during its slow Sunday schedule to have potato latkes with my Jewish family. However, I believe all 3 households lit candles and spoke Hebrew prayers.

I’m not Jewish, but I believe this makes me more devout than many of the real Jews I know. I’m certain this has inspired the Old Testament God has put a gold star by my name. (But He knows I’m culturally Protestant and spiritually Pagan Buddhist Agnostic.) I believe Ilana’s observation is more about people than Jews. Christmas traditions are about food; Hanukkah traditions are about ritual. You don’t have to make Jewish food to light the candles.

Hanukkah is about light in dark times. (Ilana says it’s about the Macabees overcoming their oppressors. Which is, of course, about light in dark times.) The birth of Jesus is the same thing: the growth of the day from its darkest point onward. Christmas trees are about celebrating nature when plants actually aren’t growing but will again soon, i.e. light in dark times. OK, I think I made my point.

My family has traditions too. My mother wraps up a whole bunch of gifts. We open them, and then we reject most of them. She takes home the rejected gifts and proceeds to give them to people more polite than we. My mother also likes to wrap up things that aren’t really gifts like a CD she borrowed from Ilana 2 years ago, my toys from childhood, or something my grandmother left me when she died. (The theory is that because she grew up with a disabled twin sister, she doesn’t feel that anything really belongs to her, and therefore nothing really belongs to anyone else either, especially her daughters.) This year I took home about 1/3 of the gifts from my mother, and Ilana rejected one of my gifts (but clearly she needs to have her brain checked).

To be perfectly honest, I don’t feel very Christmassy this year. I tried: I made about a thousand cookies and sent nearly 40 cards. (I received 3.) I thought it was lack of appropriate music, but I found that the songs annoyed me. I’ve got “Sex and the City” going as I write this, and Carrie just learned that Big is marrying Natasha. She storms out of their lunch, tripping on the stairs as she leaves the restaurant, and yells to the hostess, “These steps are very dangerous!” Well, that’s exactly what I would have done. My grandmother died, and Christmas is therefore barred from my soul.

How couples meet, a scientific study

Seven or 8 years ago, I was single again for the first time in a while. I asked myself: how do people meet other people they want to have LTRs with? At the time, I had had 4 LTRs(1) and met 2 at school, one at home, and one thru friends (since then, I met one at a bar). But I wasn't in school any more, so I was counting on my friends, and they can't always deliver. (2)

I decided to cast my net wider for this study: how do the people I know meet the people they want to be with? Presumably, of all sub-sets, I have the most in common with the people I know. I counted 16 happy couples married/together at least 1 year: about 1/3 had met thru each mechanism: school, public places (bars, clubs, walking the dog, whatever), and personal ads.

Last Sunday, it rained. Eric and I spent a marathon day on the couch reading and talking (which he claims is his favorite thing to do). I think something in the issue of the Economist he was reading brought up the subject: how do people meet? He made the argument that meeting thru personals (like we did) was unusual. So, I got out my phone (for the list of names of people I know) and counted how they met their SO.

I'm older now, and I've been to graduate school since my last study. The result came out significantly differently this time, but still included 16 couples. Nine (56%) had met at school, 3 each (19%), friends and personals, and 1 at a bar. I wish I had that list of names from my 1998 study for comparison: who is still together? Does that correlate with how they met?

It's been a couple days now, and I have thought of a few more people I know, who all met in public, bringing that mechanism up to rival friends and personals. But what I started to wonder was, if so many of my friends met their partners at school, how does that correlate with how I met them? For the sake of this measurement, I changed the parameters: people either met their partner or me at school or not, is it the same? I found that 75% of my friends (the original 16) met their partner the same way they met me (at school or not).

Endnotes:
(1) For the sake of the study, a LTR is defined as a relationship lasting one year or longer.
(2) In a way, I guess what I was really asking myself is, if I get all proactive and try to meet met men at bars and/or thru personals ads, am I likely to find what I am looking for? Where should I focus my energy?

Bicycle Production Remains Strong Worldwide

Eco-Economy Indicators: BICYCLES - Bicycle Production Remains Strong Worldwide: "London"

Feel guilty buying a Christmas tree? Then rent one.

San Francisco Department of the Environment

DAN GOODIN
Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO - It might just take a Christmas miracle to deck out these spindly branches with ornaments or arrange a pile of gifts around their slender, bare trunks, but they've all been snatched up, and it's hard to argue with success.
The trees, rented out by San Franciscans for $90 each during the holiday season, are designed to give residents an environmentally friendly alternative to traditional, firs and pines.
The fruitless olives, Brisbane boxes and others range from six to 12 feet and aren't quite Charlie Brown's sad sapling, but they're definitely not the full-bodied evergreens most Christmas revelers have grown accustomed to.
That's just fine by Stacy Collins Johnson, who said she rented a live primrose so her two children, ages 4 and 6, can help replant it in one of San Francisco's needy neighborhoods once the holidays have passed.
"I wasn't really sure how this would play out, having a nontraditional Christmas tree in our house," said Johnson, a 43-year-old stay-at-home mom. "I thought they'd be upset, and they love it. They named the tree Charlie Green."
Like other San Franciscans participating in the program, Johnson paid to have the tree, complete with pot and soil, delivered to her home. Her family will decorate it, celebrate Christmas, and then city officials will arrange to pick up the tree and plant it in a neighborhood in need of greenery.
As December rolls around each year, environmentally conscious residents of San Francisco are confronted with a choice: buy a real tree grown expressly to be chopped down and strung with lights or get an artificial one. Either option has its drawbacks. Environmentalists say growing real trees is a waste of valuable resources and discarding them often clogs local landfills; artificial trees often contain lead and other harmful chemicals and also usually end up in dumps.
"We call it the guilt-free option," said Mark Westlund, spokesman for the San Francisco Department of Environment, which decided to introduce the program earlier this year. "You don't have to worry about cutting down a living tree and you don't have to worry about buying a tree with petroleum materials."
San Francisco created the program with help from the nonprofit group Friends of the Urban Forest, which plants trees along the city's streets. Within a week of announcing the program, all 100 trees were claimed, Westlund said.
Delivery began last week, and will be picked up during the first week of January. Officials will handle any damaged trees on a case-by-case basis and use the experience to shape their future policy, Westlund said.
"I'm kind of an unrepentant tree hugger," said George Slack, who rented three trees for his cabinet shop. "There's something very nice about having a living piece of greenery in your living environment this time of year."
But not everyone who rents trees to be planted after Christmas fits that description, at least when it comes to those picking similar offerings elsewhere in the country.
"My customers aren't granola-eating, sandal-wearing type people," said John Fogel, owner of the Original Living Christmas Tree Company in Portland, Ore., which has rented Christmas trees for 14 years. "It's a practical thing they do around the holidays."

Just say "Yes!" or How a Failing Suburban Mall Became a Beloved Indoor Town Square

Project for Public Spaces (PPS) - Placemaking for Communities - How a Failing Suburban Mall Became a Beloved Indoor Town Square

A forward from my mother (Letter from Sharon Olds to Laura Bush)

Here is an open letter from the poet Sharon Olds to Laura Bush declining the invitation to read and speak at the National Book Critics Circle Award in Washington, DC. Sharon Olds is one of most widely read and critically acclaimed poets living in America today. Read to the end of the letter to experience her restrained, chilling eloquence.

Laura Bush
First Lady, The White House

Dear Mrs. Bush,

I am writing to let you know why I am not able to accept your kind invitation to give a presentation at the National Book Festival on September 24, or to attend your dinner at the Library of Congress or the breakfast at the White House.

In one way, it's a very appealing invitation. The idea of speaking at a festival attended by 85,000 people is inspiring! The possibility of finding new readers is exciting for a poet in personal terms, and in terms of the desire that poetry serve its constituents--all of us who need the pleasure, and the inner and outer news, it delivers.
And the concept of a community of readers and writers has long been dear to my heart. As a professor of creative writing in the graduate school of a major university, I have had the chance to be a part of some magnificent outreach writing workshops in which our students have become teachers. Over the years, they have taught in a variety of settings: a women's prison, several New York City public high schools, an oncology ward for children.
Our initial program, at a 900-bed state hospital for the severely physically challenged, has been running now for twenty years, creating along the way lasting friendships between young MFA candidates and their students--long-term residents at the hospital who, in their humor, courage and wisdom, become our teachers.
When you have witnessed someone nonspeaking and almost nonmoving spell out, with a toe, on a big plastic alphabet chart, letter by letter, his new poem, you have experienced, close up, the passion and essentialness of writing.
When you have held up a small cardboard alphabet card for a writer who is completely nonspeaking and nonmoving (except for the eyes), and pointed first to the A, then the B, then C, then D, until you get to the first letter of the first word of the first line of the poem she has been composing in her head all week, and she lifts her eyes when that letter is touched to say yes, you feel with a fresh immediacy the human drive for creation, self-_expression, accuracy, honesty and wit--and the importance of writing, which celebrates the value of each person's unique story and song.

So the prospect of a festival of books seemed wonderful to me. I thought of the opportunity to talk about how to start up an outreach program. I thought of the chance to sell some books, sign some books and meet some of the citizens of Washington, DC. I thought that I could try to find a way, even as your guest, with respect, to speak about my deep feeling that we should not have invaded Iraq, and to declare my belief that the wish to invade another culture and another country--with the resultant loss of life and limb for our brave soldiers, and for the noncombatants in their home terrain--did not come out of our democracy but was instead a decision made "at the top" and forced on the people by distorted language, and by untruths. I hoped to express the fear that we have begun to live in the shadows of tyranny and religious chauvinism--the opposites of the liberty, tolerance and diversity our nation aspires to.

I tried to see my way clear to attend the festival in order to bear witness--as an American who loves her country and its principles and its writing--against this undeclared and devastating war.

But I could not face the idea of breaking bread with you. I knew that if I sat down to eat with you, it would feel to me as if I were condoning what I see to be the wild, highhanded actions of the Bush Administration.
What kept coming to the fore of my mind was that I would be taking food from the hand of the First Lady who represents the Administration that unleashed this war and that wills its continuation, even to the extent of permitting "extraordinary rendition": flying people to other countries where they will be tortured for us.

So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.
Sincerely,
SHARON OLDS

Anti-Consumers Dig Through Trash For Food

Anti-Consumers Dig Through Trash For Food

This is awesome. Who wants to start fasting for the holidays?

Public transit trip planner via Google

Official Google Blog: Public transit via Google

TomPaine.com - The GOP's Roe Gamble

TomPaine.com - The GOP's Roe Gamble

Two things I thought really interesting in this article:
1) Political affiliation is usually determined by neighborhood. (Like land economics, where property value is determined by adjacent property value.) Here in the city, we have the progressive Mission and the conservative Marina (both urban). But this article posits that political affiliation can be predicted by land use type: progressive inner suburbs (low density) and conservative exurbs (very low density).
2) Every family wants their children to do better and not be bogged down with a teenage pregnancy. Position on abortion can be predicted by religion not political affiliation. So, the article says that formerly Republican families in the exurbs are going Democratic in order to protect their daughters' right to succeed. I have also noticed this issue divides my otherwise Republican cousins in exurban Cincinnati. While, at the same time, many of them ARE having babies very young; I think because of that, they see the appeal of choice.

EPA Socio-Economic Causes and Consequences...

November 16 was a big day for me. I got up early and went downtown to see what was going on at an EPA conference called “Socio-economic Causes and Consequences of Future Environmental Changes Workshop”. It was supposed to be about transportation and land use, but I couldn’t actually find any information on it online. If the title isn’t bad enough, I also couldn’t find information about the individual subjects to be discussed or how to register. The registration lady was no help either “just click the link,” she said, but the link only led to a page to register to be an virtual particpant. (It turned out the real purpose of the conference was for projects that received EPA funding to report back on their findings/progress.) Anyway…

The first session was on “Trends in Housing, Land Use, and Land Coverage Change”, which is code for Landis-style development models. One was of the southern Cumberland Plateau and the other Sonoma County. The speakers gave some context (or at least the first one did) and then led us step by step thru their modeling process. Wouldn’t it have been nice to see some pretty photos of these beautiful natural landscapes that may not exist for much longer? Here’s what I thought was interesting about what they said:
Gottfried, Cumberland Plateau
· Land moves over time to the most highly valued use.
· Locals don’t like pine trees – only outsiders are likely to choose a plot with pine trees on it – it’s naturally a hardwood area.
· 20% of areas managed for hardwoods have moved to other uses.
· People used to prefer to build their homes in grassy areas. Now, it turns out, they have a preference for treed areas.
· … and a preference against paved roads.
· The timber companies have been selling to local people, mostly for farm extensions.

Merenlender, Sonoma County
· In-stream salmon were the measure of water quality.
· Sonoma county is a landscape of estates.
· Low and very low density doesn’t require sewer systems; therefore cities can’t control it with their urban growth boundaries (UGB).

At this point, I snuck out to go home for a while and take care of some pesky business waiting for me there (health insurance, my email, etc.). The mid-morning sessions lacked titles and the early afternoon sessions were about aquaculture, I am sure a very interesting topic, but no one that I know anything about or will help me to know about. The session starting at 2:45 was about Land Use, Transportation and Air Quality. Sounds promising, right?

Steve Raney (Cities21) began with his report on transforming office parks into transit villages:
· The goal is to create a less auto-dominated suburb and reduce SOV trips to less than 50%
· Energy consumed by a typical suburb: 280; energy consumed by a typical urban apartment-dweller: 97 (not sure what the unit is here)
· Energy efficiency is not the issue, lifestyle change is.
· With 50 units per acre, 50% of trips are made without a car, instead people are peds, not public transit riders.
· Suburban office parks are the main cause of sprawl and congestion over the last 30 years.
· Shoup: parking lots are land banks.
· 70% of tech workers want to work in a vital, urban area.
· Change culture to make it cool to be green.
· Personal Rapid Transit (or is it Private) in the form of a pod monorail, electric, no waiting, no stops, runs 24/7, no drivers
o Made in Korea and Sweden
o Similar systems in MN, TX, and Dubai (which is easy bc they have no public review process)
o Propose Silicon Valley style product development
· If workers use transit, then employers need provide fewer parking spaces providing room worker housing on site and a source of real estate revenues
· Access
o First mile: between home and transit station
o Last mile: between destination station and office
· Carpooling is difficult socially to ask people to spend that much time with someone
· So, provide condos on-site for tech workers.
o Discounts to people who work nearby
o Low-income upward mobility – comes with job/job training
o Include grocery carts

Then a gentleman named Hobbs talked about power sector emissions, and I went for a cookie and to call my mom. I bought 2 cookies; I have no self control.

Waddell is studying how to integrate transportation, land use and air quality modeling, because of course they are inter-related. (On the other hand, I sometimes thing we need a whole other planet, a model, in order to assess the results of various scenarios.) Here’s what I wrote down: integrate lifestyle choices with modeling, and urban sim. Hey, I don’t know what it means, but I am sure that I’m a genius.

Back in Cervero’s Transportation and Land Use class at Berkeley, we all read the views of Susan Handy and how they differed from those of our professor. As usual, I figured it all out after the final (on which it was the essay component), but I believe the main point was the she is pro-unconstrained land use (ie, auto-subsidy) and our Lafayette-dwelling professor is pro-constrained, European-style, transit-node land use. Well, her research (on which she was not the lead researcher) was the least complete and is called “Regional Development, Population, Trend, and Technology Change Impacts on Future Air Pollution Emissions in the San Joaquin Valley.” (Someone has got to give these planning academics a lesson in titling.) Here are my notes:
· They did not take into account changes in mode split/choice and found that the “controlled” scenario (where sprawl is controlled and development is focused on the urban core) does not reduce vehicle miles traveled from the baseline much…
· “Uncontrolled congestion is more spread out.”
· I found her agenda clear and her science sloppy (as described earlier). However, the lack of real mode choice consideration is the problem with most transportation models.

I hung out downtown for a while longer and then headed to the TALC regional meeting. But I’ll tell you about that in a different post. That is, assuming I find the time.

Grace says:

http://melgibsonforgovernor.com/

I don't think it's fair game to note for political gain that the
Governator's father was a Nazi. For the same reason, I'd avoid
mentioning that Mel's own father's denies that the Holocaust
happened. But that Mel himself is a Holocaust denier, I think that
that's entirely appropriate to consider in a political context.

Word meanings

A few weeks back I heard a program on NPR about the origins of English words and how we can learn from them for every day life. I jotted down a few that I liked with the idea of doing a post on it, but then it got lost in the piles and never happened. I’m trying to clean up my desk (improve its feng shui and the like) as my life gears up. (It seems to take about 3 months to get back in the center of things, and I’m half way thru that.) So, here are the words, their meanings and some commentary:

Disappointed – literally means not chose. When you feel not chosen, ask yourself, are you choosing?
Adore – a gift, where you place your energy, speaking (what you speak of?)
Listen – to list or lean forward, a whole body experience
Patience – to suffer, the same root as passion; so, it means passionate expectation, trust in the universe that it will all work out.
Nice – ignorant, not investing

Mazda Recommends Employees Walk to Office - Yahoo! News

Mazda Recommends Employees Walk to Office - Yahoo! News

Boring laundry-list post about last weekend

I’ve been accused a lot lately of being… gasp… an Extrovert. This weekend, and my response to it, proves that I am not. Wednesday night I had a lovely reunion with my old housemates from Fairview Street. Thanksgiving, I was at Grampa Lizzie’s at noon, where my mother arrived 4 hours late because her husband was waiting for her at SFO and she was at Oakland (from Granny’s funeral), and he hadn’t call anyone of her friends or family within the last few days of being in the Bay Area. She had asked everyone to warn him. Or maybe it was just the last 36 hours. So, that was kind of upsetting. At dinner, I was thankful for life, the weather in California, and that we all have so many options. Yeah, I’m less thankful now (that it’s pouring rain).

Thus, I was 2 hours late to Laura’s, where there was a luscious, family-style Thanksgiving. I got there just after everyone had sat down anyway. They set up a table in the porch room where Charlie reminded me had once been a piñata on another infamous night celebrating Laura’s birthday. The laundry machines were covered with a tablecloth and used as a sideboard and the candlelight reflected off the glass. I bet we looked really cool from outside. Instead of giving thankful, each person drew someone’s name and we said what we liked about them. I drew Niki and said she was a good dancer, had a great sense of humor and a vibrant way of living her life. Elizabeth (Laura’s mom) said that I was smart and when things don’t go my way, I am always confident it’ll come out right in the end and then it does. I also made the best pecan pie ever in the universe.

Eric and I had a lovely, low-key day on Friday of eating leftovers, a leisurely walk around the neighborhood, and, as always, good conversation. Friday night, Eric was singing the Messiah in Cupertino, and I went to Sam and Jess’s for a mellow party.

Saturday, Alison and I went hiking in Marin County – some park in Ross, I forgot the name. Alison wanted to go there because, unlike the other parks in Marin, they allow dogs. Traffic was terrible (in Al and Jo’s Prius), and when we got to the park, we had to wait about 45 minutes for a parking place to open up. The people waiting in front of us were meeting a friend who arrived by herself and had already parked (why they couldn’t carpool even from nearby on-street parking meant, well, everyone had to wait that much longer), told us there was parking “like a mile” down the road. (When we checked, it was much further than a mile. The on-street parking is all marked “no parking Saturday, Sunday and holidays” because, of course, the people who live in the neighborhood don’t want to be inconvenienced by people who can’t afford to live there coming to enjoy it. The other thing I thought was interesting was the use of “like a mile”, which meant to them “too far to walk” but to us “very close”, but ultimately was “too far to walk”. Marinners are annoying.)

Anyway, it was beautiful. I took some nice pictures. And finally, it completely wore me out.

Sunday morning, I met DeAnne and Ryan at the Exploratorium. We had a coffee at the café and (Ryan) did the spiral color thingy. We asked him to show me his favorite displays, but he wasn’t interested. Instead, we took a walk along the beach at Crissy Field. Ryan played on the rocks and in the sand, and DeAnne and I talked.

The impetus for this visit was those Monterey Bay Aquarium tickets I ended up with. I sent out an email to a bunch of people I thought might want them. I was surprised by the number of replies. Alison pointed out that I expressed my politics with my choice of who to give them to; I chose the single, freelancing mom. And yeah, I bribe people to be friends with me.

I went home for 30 minutes between engagements, ate some delicious thanksgiving leftovers from Laura’s, and headed back out to meet Mitja (a friend from HS), Elysia, and Citrus at the Asian Art Musuem. I was collecting museum stickers that day. There was this really cute little guy there who carved Chinese character names into stone stamps (I have one, but I am not sure what it says exactly), and they got really excited about having one made for them. It takes about an hour to carve; so, we looked at the exhibition in the meantime. I was surprised at how small it was for the $10 entry fee. But I particularly like the Shivas with all those arms and, of course, the ones involving images of sex.

It was their last day in California, and Mitja needed a burrito. I was concerned about taking a 4 month old to an unsavory place like Cancun at 6th and Market, but they didn’t have a problem with it. Citrus is a perfect little angel. She’s also been sick. (They were at Children’s Hospital in Oakland for 5 hours the other day.) We had burritos, which a homeless lady helped us finish off, scooping the wet leftovers into a brown paper bag. I got to hold Citrus as we walked to their car. She drooled and wiped her runny nose in the cold onto my black scarf.

My friends here are all obsessed with “attachment parenting” where you keep the baby touching you as much as possible, breast feed, have the baby sleep in bed with you, etc.. I was surprised to learn that both these guys and my friend Kalyani in NYC don’t seem to be doing it. It doesn’t seem to be on their radar. I mean, it’s none of my business how other people raise their children. I am just a casual observer noticing that my east coast friends and my west coast friends parent in completely different ways.

I got home to realize that, while my phone was on silent, Tam had called wondering about our plans for the night. I called back to say that I needed some time, which ended up being longer than planned bc I fell asleep accidentally. Tam was going to India on Tuesday for a month and a wedding. But ultimately, we had a low-key visit involving hot water (bc it has gotten really cold). She sent me home with a grocery bag of leftovers (most of which I ate today; I was hungry! She, like me, hates to waste food).

I don’t regret a minute of it, but I slept for like a million years every night since then, and still didn’t have energy to do anything at all. I bought some things at the local stores, and partly bc of the rain and partly bc I am lazy, didn’t even make it to yoga. I did mop my kitchen and make some turkey soup from the carcass Laura kindly let me have. You know how I feel about making soup.

Go Ahead, Call In Sick -- It Prevents 'Presenteeism' - Los Angeles Times

Go Ahead, Call In Sick -- It Prevents 'Presenteeism' - Los Angeles Times

I used to go to work sick bc if you are going to feel crappy, you might as well be paid for it. They're saying that this article provides a good argument for having a functional telework program. The other thing that freaked me out about this article is the idea that everyone lives in fear that they're lose their job. So much so that they don't feel like they can even take care of themselves. I think everyone should be required to take their sick time even if they never get sick. People need time to themselves. I also think people should work when- and where-ever they want.