After I read that article by Alfie Kohn everyone kept telling me about, I decided to read his book, Unconditional Parenting. I remembered his other article in the Times (Magazine?) in which he described how crippling it is for kids to hear that they’re smart, in particular a study comparing test scores of kids told they were either hardworking or smart. Hardworking smacked down smart. That article, like the more recent, brought me vividly back to childhood. Most of what he’s saying sounds so obvious to me and so in line with my experiences as a child, that I was surprised to read a page of uncomprehending comments beneath. I bought the book primarily in an attempt to figure out why what he’s saying (or what I’d read so far) seemed so evident to me. Or maybe that’s not quite right, I felt like it was a way of organizing a bunch of ideas that to me feel almost odd and a little exciting to extract and view as externally as theory. (Also, I don’t think I have some great insight lacking from the vast pool of commenters at the Times and I was puzzled by all the indignation until I realized that most adults don’t seem to remember what it was like to be a child. In addition, V reminds me of the difference between readers and indignant commenters. Oh, yes, of course.) The first part of the book nails it. He ties a fixation on discipline and rewards to a deep discomfort with the idea that any individual has a right to something he hasn’t earned. In other words, humanity is inherently corrupt, so every human matter on earth is, at bottom, an economic transaction. The baldness of that makes me recoil as I bet it does a lot of people who are uneasy about the colorful array of boxed parenting options, Froot Loop style Smart Choices®, but it explains everything. I think Kohn is saying not to be frightened of your child, to learn to know him in a way that will make a lot of disembodied childrearing advice beside the point. This should be familiar to anyone who has ever enjoyed the company of another human being. Then, of course, he has to go on to provide a lot of disembodied advice because how else could he fill up the second half of the book without scripts for over-explaining stuff to tantruming toddlers? (This reminds me a little of those volumes of tips for creating a compelling resume or land a man. Totally unconsidered is the possibility that you may not want to work for/shack up with someone who doesn’t find your sincerity valuable. I suspect that this is another instance in which you either get it or your don’t. You can’t fake a relationship.) I found the discussion of the various studies he includes to be pretty interesting, mainly because I love to visualize studies involving hordes of toddlers and their tutting mothers (on the THX 1137 set), but the appendix in which he discusses race and culture was really excellent. He politely dismantles the galling conclusions of the Physical Discipline among African American and European American Mothers study. Okay, I haven’t read the whole study, but I’d like to suggest to the authors that maybe physical discipline doesn’t bother African American kids because, as history teaches us, they probably only experience 3/5ths of the pain white kids do from being walluped. Just like African American children didn’t suffer from autism for a very long time and low income kids certainly still don’t have the imaginary allergies affluent kids with healthy diets and helicopter moms suffer from. (Interestingly, oppositional defiant disorder appears to often cause the same swollen eyelids, snot face, and crankiness as do imaginary food allergies in rich kids. So much creativity!)… That silence was me clicking away—reading, while everyone else is asleep. This is a bit of researching the rest cure a few months ago. Drapetomania! Dysaethesia Aethiopica! Science!

At first I was not writing because Aure got sick and then I got sick then he got sick again and then had a puff-up-eyes-swell-shut-and-itch allergic reaction then some more sickness and by that point I was keeling over with my own interesting array of ailments including aphasia⁰¹ and blacking out when standing up. Whew. I had nothing to say except an incoherent mumble about needing to go to bed. How on earth do people who work in an office manage the childhood illness thing? Daycare would never have accepted the poor hacking beast and it have would been downright evil to expose any babysitter with her own kids to this stuff, so one parent is just outa luck and work for eight weeks or so. Until this bout of plague, I don’t think I totally understood why so many people who like their jobs just give up and stay home entirely for a few years, but now I certainly do. Anyhow, once I don’t write for a while I can’t really remember how. The only cure is to start chatting and hope it gets easier. (chatchatchat, um) I’m determined to get some practice words in before we’re all felled by swine flu within three weeks. Sadly, however, exhaustion has trumped curiosity for a good month now, so although I must have been reading, I can’t really remember what and I’m pretty sure I haven’t thunk a thought in weeks. I know the reading was not work related because even coming at any of that sideways for a minute gives me a horrid glimpse of the mountain of things I need to do, ponder, design, or fix. It must have been a bit more escapist that that. Lemme think… I read The Good Soldier (This for the first time. Yikes!), Jane Eyre, Villette, An introduction or something by Charlotte Bronte in which she discusses Emily’s work, Liza of Lambeth (deservedly forgotten), all the Raymond Chandler insomnia books again, and several papers associating histamine sensitization with various infections. When I mentioned the latter to the allergist seeing Aure for the aforementioned puff up and itch incident, he responded with an oblique story about how “great” American mothers are, with their cr-razy questions and alarming capacity to research things. He asked me if I’d read about it on the internet. I am always caught off guard by that sort of thing. I did not respond Do you know who I am? as I would like to sometimes when people educate at me about how untrustworthy the internet is. (This is the only instance in which I will ever have, even in fantasy, the opportunity to make this demand. I am not otherwise anyone. I bellow at whomever is patronizing me, sometimes I snap my fingers in their face, toss the velvet rope aside, and march up to the counter to demand a double shot of Jack, as befits a longtime connoisseur of internet unreliability… Admittedly the scenario isn’t well fleshed out.) I just mentioned I’d found it on PubMed and he reassured me that makes it reliable. I muttered something about that not guaranteeing the methodologies any more than something printed in yellow caps on a black Geocities background of blinking stars, and he laughed politely. Setting aside the unconscious can of worms implicit in the prevalent discomfort with Mothers Knowing Things (also unpopular: Farmers Making Money and WIC Recipients Who Demand Healthy Food); it’s ridiculous to expect someone of my education and age, who can’t purchase a piece of minor electronics without researching it three weeks in advance, not to put at minimum, the same effort into my darling little shot at genetic immortality, whom I value at least as much as a slow cooker or a Pico projector.

~

Don’t go to school to learn about nutrition.

Ethan Zuckerman is a champ and everything he writes is worth reading, but I have been meaning to go back and reread his recent entry on Ai Weiwei, Censorship, and Sacred Facts.

And another study linking farming chemicals to Parkinson’s disease.

~

When we came home a few days ago, there was a white girl with a fat black backpack standing on the corner. She looked like an ordinary middle class girl who’d shown up to buy drugs or to interview the neighbors for a journalism school project.⁰² Except she was standing still on the corner in front of the bodega, just far enough from the bus stop for it to feel all wrong. Every now and then she’d look around or flop her highlighted blond hair back over her shoulder, but otherwise she stayed still. V thought I must be mistaken, but sure enough the next day she was there again and after that she started sitting next to the drug dealer over against the wall of the vacant lot. He’s recently moved there, under the shade of a low dense tree, across the street from the spot by the bodega he took over completely after the previous dealer was shot dead a few months ago. He now holds court (and this is not an exaggeration—he’s very open about what he’s doing and appears pleased to encourage the assumption that he murdered the previous tenant.) on a curious faux Victorian settee, the seat of which is upholstered in a pale patterned damask. (It does not look very comfortable.) Lookouts check in periodically, then slouch off in opposite directions. Women come and go. Some of them the same women who used to come into the building and proposition the men working here when we first started construction. There are three sisters who look enough alike that at first I wasn’t able to tell them apart. They all have heavy dark hair, sharp features, and blue black circles around their eyes. One has a tattoo tear on her cheek. All three are thin as runway models, and usually dressed in baggy t-shirts and pajama bottoms (yes, the ladies of the night shuffle around in pajamas) or men’s clothing. I saw one of them dragging a crying toddler a couple of years ago, but haven’t seen him since, even though she’s still around pretty consistently. There’s the woman who once told me, I’m going to do this until I die or I decide to stop. We make eye contact but she doesn’t appear to recognize me. She has sores on her face these days. There’s a girl I haven’t seen before getting in and out of cars. She looks pretty rough, like she’s been doing this a while, but her body doesn’t yet have the caved in look of the others.

A few weeks ago there was an influx of police in the neighborhood. A patrol person on every corner and more walking each block. It lasted a week or so. Instead of the dealer on the corner, there was a police standing in his place, slapping his night stick on his hand. There were two blue figures standing in the playground and another behind the school. There was a lot of loud silence, birds chirping, and a palpable sense of relaxation. The only people out were neighbors, people who actually live here. (The dealer and his posse don’t, nor do his customers, for the most part, live right on the block. Though, disturbingly, he seems to know a lot of the neighbors. I imagine the corner is desirable for its central location across from the housing project.) When the police left, the action on the corner sprang back with a new fury as if everyone had a lot of catching up to do.

When I was coming in again the day before yesterday, the girl with the backpack was sitting on the steps of the building next door. She has her head down and her hair was matted and tangled. When she looked up I saw her face was bruised and she had abrasions on both cheeks. She was wearing the same clothing as always. When the baby was inside I went back out for a minute. For a second I thought I’d demand her name and ask where her family is. I’d telephone her horrified suburban parents and break it to them gently. When they recovered, they’d come and take her home and nonjudgementally help her get clean and reenroll in college. Tough love or something. Maybe she’d write a story about her experience for This American Life.

The garlic of the world is so powerfully good right now, I have been going through at least a head per day (though admittedly they are of the teeny farmer’s market variety). I found some recipes in a book on Japanese pickle making that involve sticking lots and lots of cloves of garlic in miso and in honey (but not together), so I did that in hopes of having some decent garlic to eat in the winter. A few years ago I realized that at some point wintertime garlic became inedible—rubbery and sulfurous with a flavor like dirty pocket change. I just quit eating it out of season because it wasn’t worth it. Someone told me that nearly all the garlic on the market now is grown in China, and is bred for shipping rather than flavor. You can tell. If not by the flavor, by the post supper quease and morning after armpit stench of everyone at your feed trough the night before. The honey garlic is particularly pretty. I tasted it the other day, and while it was very good, I don’t think it’s ready yet. The honey is fizzy and fermented and golden and the outside of the garlic is soft and sweet as though it’s been cooked, but the inside is still a bit macho for eating straight. Speaking of macho (and quién es más), my mum used to make an evil brew in the winter called Fire Tonic or Super Tonic or something. It had hot peppers, ginger, garlic, an iron pentagram, and the still beating heart of a virgin steeped in cider vinegar. I seem to remember it being foully effective at curing colds, though my sisters and I never liked to risk the side effect of chest hair everyone goes gleefully on about. But now that I’m an old wife, maybe it’s time to start keeping something like that around.

I am starting to be a bit sensitive about my recipe free lifestyle but really people, you should all pipe down (a blop is an excellent unit of measurement) and just eat while you can because sometimes I make very fine things out of whatever’s in the house and unless the circumstances repeat themselves precisely, the meal’s a one off. This weekend it was a simple posole sort of soup out of a flavorful but very gristly lamb roast, oversize novelty corn, and an exceptionally fine guinea hen stock. (The Violet Hill people have sold me on guinea hen instead of chicken lately.) I didn’t have any cabbage and I don’t love lettuce in soup, so I served it with things from the garden—amaranth greens, chopped onion, tomato, lime (from my garden in the way the Mexican takeout from around the corner comes from my kitchen), and oregano. The immature aji amarillo from the garden didn’t provide much in the way of heat, but they were tasty… What else? Oh—a cold pureed soup made with the same stock base, avocado, lime, garlic, hot peppers, oil and herbs with lots of chopped tomato and some more olive oil on top. Very much like eating a bowl of avocado salsa. Good for supper with beer and a boiled egg, as are most things. And I sort of invented a dairy free ice cream to accommodate junior’s dairy allergy. Everything goes in the blender: a can of coconut milk (In my vast experience with coconut milk as a dairy substitute in the last two years, I can say that organic usually tastes a lot better), two egg yolks, a good quarter cup blop of ghee (Some people who are allergic to casein can eat ghee since the protein part of the butter is gone. The concentrated butter flavour gives a nice creamy complex dairy-ness and cancels our some of the coconut.), vanilla, a pinch of salt, honey to taste (start with a quarter cup and keep adding until it’s sweet enough. Every honey is different so it’s really impossible to give precise measurements when it comes to sweetness or wetness. Beware recipes that do. In this recipe honey is superior to sugar in that it’s adds a bit more of the kind of depth that dairy has.), and cocoa powder to taste. This ice cream will hold a lot of cocoa. You can get it really dark and intense without it starting to taste at all powdery. It shouldn’t taste obviously coconutty either. When it seems right, put it in the ice cream maker, etcetera, etcetera, until the eating part, when you eat it with gusto. Hey—that’s pretty close to a recipe!

And before I forget:

Category 4 cynicism at Slacktivist.

A bioengineered mouse tooth. (And the original article.)

The Internet mapping project.