Please don't make me drive

I would choose a bike over a car any day; any weather. Here’s why:

Yesterday I decided to drive to a new yoga class that I was going to attend. Although the studio was only 3 miles away, I decided to drive for a couple of reasons. First, it was cold and rainy. This is not usually a big deterrent however, I am trying desperately to avoid the flu that all my college students, and now children, have. Moreover, the yoga class was in a heated room, so biking home all sweaty in the cold dark night, also seemed like a bad idea. Second, I had to drive a little further before the class to pick up my share from the Community Supported Agriculture group to which I belong. And as I have tweeted before, the worst part about riding a bike is that you don’t have a trunk. I was a little afraid that walking into a new studio with loads of chard, kale, eggs, beats, and potatoes seemed a little obnoxious.

Therefore I drove. Ugghh… I had to pay for parking—not so bad considering it was only 75 cent. The Ugghh part comes from the return home after class. I live on a one-way street with parking on both sides of the street. Parking during the day is easy to find. Parking after 6pm is difficult, even more difficult when it is the first week of the month and you have to avoid parking on certain sides of the street for street-sweeping days.

I drove around and around looking for parking for over 45 minutes. This “looking” included trying several spots that didn’t fit; or maybe could have worked if a line of 15 cars weren’t behind me honking their horns. AND, I am a good parallel parker. Finally after the frustrating realization that a 10 minute commute home from class had now turned into a 1 HOUR commute home, I decided I was going to make this last spot work. It was around 3 blocks from my house and just about enough space between a BMW and a Cadillac. Luckily there was no traffic, and no observers. I probably spent another 15 minutes going back and forth, back and forth, until my Toyota minivan (as if the car is not teased enough) is wedged in bumper to bumper.

At this point I decide it is a bad idea to leave my car bumper to bumper and that I might come back in the morning with my tires slashed. However, I am also extremely anxious that it has taken me 1 ½ hours to get home and I have students waiting for me to email out study guides that have yet to be created. I also think it could take me another 45 minutes to get out of this spot.

I trudge home slinging vegetables, eggs and a yoga mat in so precarious of positions that I know I am undoing any benefits of the previous yoga class.

And the misery doesn’t end here. I was so karma-ically worried about a rude park job that I woke up 3 times with bad dreams in the middle of the night and could not fall back asleep because of the stress of parking my car. Finally my husband had to tell me to go to sleep, it was just a car.

So today, I had to go back to this same studio. I rode my bike. It took me 12 minutes to get there. It took me 16 minutes to get home. I was singing and happy when I walked in the door. I am looking forward to sleeping well tonight with good karma back on my side.

P.S. My minivan tires were not slashed, and thankfully one car had moved so I could get out. Where did I drive it? Across to the other side of the street to avoid street sweeping days.

FB is only weird to us

I have heard many people say, “It’s so weird, I am friends and talking with people from high school I never would have.” The problem with this statement is that people over 25 – 30 generally think this is weird. They find it weird that an old high school friend has contacted them and they don’t remember their maiden name or who they were. They find it weird that someone they despised in high school is now asking to be their friend. They ponder questions and big newspapers write articles on philosophical mind-blowers like, “To Friend your parents or not friend your parents.”

What is funny about all of this is not the answer to any of these social questions; but the lack of foresight on the slice of a generation to whom this matters. We think it is a huge change in social connections that people now show up at a high school reunion and instead of asking what have you been doing the past year, say, “I saw your pics on FB from the family trip to Wallabee.”
But here is my point. We think this is weird. No one else ever will.

We think this is weird, because we are the last generation (or generations) that will remember what it was like before social networking. From today forward, people will always be connected; and despite the older generations fear of the younger generation having few privacy morals; they will probably have more than we do. In high school, they will already have their FB friend list; to expand it in the future would be asinine. Future generations will use phrases like, “You weren’t my FB friend in HS; why would you be my FB friend now?”

Conversely, those over 30 see these things as major questions, “do I friend this friend from high school? If so, than I might have to friend so and so…” Or do I friend a work associate? My boss? My ex-boyfriend? “ Yet, most of these answers will be decided by younger generations by the time they are 11.

So many of us mistakenly think these are new awkward social questions for generations to come. However, it is only an issue for us. For our generation. We are special. No generation before us has wondered about these questions; and no generation after us will either.

More I would nevers

Princess vs. Guns

I do not have daughters. I have many friends with daughters, but none of my own. I often hear parents of daughters struggle with the princess dilemma—do we introduce our girls to princesses? Can we keep them from seeing them? Is it okay to let them watch Disney movies with Princesses? Should we allow them to buy princess toys? clothes? backpacks. The arguments usually go on and on supporting the good and bad sides of princess exposure. The conversations almost always end with a sigh, “Well that’s all my daughter is interested in and there is nothing I can do about it.” And so the story goes, and many girls go on to love, admire and fantasize about the world of royalty.

As a scholar of gender roles, feminism, self-development, these discussions interest me greatly, but I always walk away thinking, “You’ve got it so easy.” Most parents of boys have this same conundrum, only the desired object does not come from a fairy tale of such, but rather Star Wars. Our taboo topic is guns. Much like little girls are enthralled with princesses, little boys are fascinated with guns. Parents of boys debate the gun issue as fiercely as parents of girls debate the princess issue.

Yet there is a grave difference between the princess battle and the gun battle. When parents give in to their daughter’s princess obsession, she may offend a few radical feminists and Disney-is-the-devil-type folks, but typically most people understand. However, when parents of boys give in to their son’s gun obsession, it is met with verbal protest from friends, family and strangers. As a mom of boys who play with toy guns, I have been asked to hide the guns when other kids come over and told to keep all guns and light-sabers at home if they visit other friends at their homes. I am guessing most parents of girls have not been told to leave their princess backpack at home or told to hide the princess castle before friends come over.

Just last week, I was at the park observing my kids play with another boy and his hovering mother. They were playing lions with her and having a good time until my 2 and 4 year old took out their finger-guns and started firing away. She gave me a sharp look from across the playground and said, “I will not continue to play with them if they do that again.” I wanted to say, “What if they waved their magic wand and turned you into a frog? Would that be better?” Instead, I just told them that some people don’t like guns so we don’t play guns around those people.

And yes, I have had in depth discussions with my boys as to why people do not like guns, and that guns are hurtful, powerful and dangerous. And yes, my boys cry when hunters kill Bambi, but they still like guns. My four year old came close to rationalizing it once when he said, “Mommy, I didn’t know they did anything, I just thought they made loud noises.”

I could spend the rest of the blog debating whether or not you should let you sons play with toy guns, much like some parents spend their time debating whether their girls should be exposed to princesses. But that is not the point of the blog. The point of the blog is that when both debates end and most parents end up at the same place, “Well there’s not much we can do, because that’s all they are interested in,” the public backlash falls heavier on parents of kids who choose to play with guns.

So when parents fret over whether their girls will get the wrong idea of self-esteem or women’s roles by an obsession with princesses, I am secretly envious. Society is a lot nicer to a little girl who wears a tutu, than a boy who packs a pistol.

I would never...

More things I thought I would never let my children do...ride around on battery operated machinery. Lucky for my boys, someone else who thought that, followed through with their intentions and handed us their hand-me-down.

Garbage removal and the freedoms it affords me

One thing that is truly under-valued in our society—garbage removal. I missed one week of setting out the trash and I spent the whole next week stacking bags of trash in our garage, cursing the smell every time I went in the garage to get my bike. My husband wanted to throw it in the neighbors’ dumpsters, but I try to maintain good relations with the neighbors in case I am ever caught in the alley cross-fire of some scuttle, they may come to my rescue.

As my garbage was piling up and stinking it up, I began to ponder…what did people used to do with garbage? I know one of my friends in Denver said that before the city of Denver had organized trash removal, many people would bury their trash in their backyard (like their own mini-landfill). She said that to this day, she continues to find strange odds and ends creeping up out of her backyard--spoons, frames, candy wrappers. A woman named Katie Kelly wrote a book about the history and future of garbage in 1973 that looks tempting to order used for $2.85. Probably no one could really throw out a book that 's titled Garbage, without at least flinching a little first.

I also began to wonder if the city didn’t come by once a week and pick up my bags of trash, how much time would I spend on my own trash removal? It seemed like it might be kind of time consuming, like I might not have as much time to sit around and blog or update twitter. Hmmm…so garbage removal is to blame for our self-centered-do-nothing-masturbation-of-me culture…

I also wondered, if I were responsible for my own trash removal, how much “greener” I may be. I think I’d be re-using every plastic cottage cheese container smelling it up in my garage for color-crayon storage, makeup bins, jewelry boxes…I’d also be cursing all those individually packaged products out there…come on now, does individually wrapping each prune really increase sales? Do people really think, “oh, goody, now I can stick a prune in my pocket!”?

Anyway, I spent yesterday afternoon neatly piling all the garbage bags around the one garbage can, with hopes and anticipation that the next morning was--yes indeed--GARBAGE DAY! And when I woke up, it brought more joy than Christmas morning to go outside and see that it was all gone. All 7 tall kitchen bags and one can stuffed full of 7 more! It was amazing…like a miracle. And then I spent my whole morning doing yoga—because I could.

"Stop looking at me this could be you"

said the guy on the ground. This was the scene when I arrived on campus. The students said he'd been this way for at least an hour and a half. Yesterday on campus Metro police were
searching the modular units for burglar suspect... I guess this is what they mean by urban campus?