bearing blog

A deliberate community... of "slow geeks."

How the Amish go about embracing new technology.

(h/t Instapundit)

Pants-wetting moments.

John Scalzi at Whatever is asking his readers to name the moments, watching movies, when they were laughing so hard they nearly lost control of their bodily functions.

The comments are a great trip down memory lane if you like funny movies.  I left a comment of my own regarding Dr. Strangelove.  (A less-highbrow movie that I remember had me nearly wetting my pants the first time I saw it was Office Space.    No movie before or since, I am sure, has made more effective use of gangsta rap in the soundtrack.)

I still haven't seen Little Miss Sunshine, and must make a mental note to rectify that.  There's Something About Mary, too.

Fashion forward.

One of my holiday traditions:  every time I stay at my in-laws' house, I spend a few hours catching up with my MIL's giant stack of back issues of Good Housekeeping and Family Circle.  Sure, I always leave with a vague sense of needing to buy more expensive moisturizer, but the escapism is worth it.

Here, I'll share my favorite article of this year's women's-mag binge, from the August 2008 issue of GH:  "Mommy Wears Prada."  Enjoy.

Positive eating.

Christy sent me this article a few days ago:

Instead of Eating to Diet, They're Eating To Enjoy

That doesn’t mean they’re giving up on health or even weight loss. Instead, consumers and nutritionists say they are seeing a shift toward “positive eating” — shunning deprivation diets and instead focusing on adding seasonal vegetables, nuts, berries and other healthful foods to their plates.

It's nice to see people focusing on what they should eat, rather than what they shouldn't eat.   That principle has helped me a lot over the past six months -- mainly, I added enormous amounts of vegetables to my plate and let them shove all the other stuff to the side.

Along the way, I read lots of different diet books, but also a number of books in the category "how to eat and live well."  Real Food by Nina Planck.  Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food.  The most recent one, which I thought would be kind of dumb but which turned out to be a fun little book to read, was French Women Don't Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano.  (It brought back some lovely memories, as I spent a college summer in Lyon.)

There is one big problem with all these books.  They make me crave expensive food.

Nina Planck's book had me dreaming of filling my cart with organic greens from the co-op, and lingering at the cheese counter at the good grocery store, you know, the one where they actually pay someone to put your groceries in a bag for you.  Michael Pollan's books -- well, ok, I've already drunk that Kool-Aid locally produced organic cider, my freezer is full of grass-fed beef that met its end in the glass-walled slaughterhouse of Cannon Falls, MN.  Guiliano's book had me wanting acacia honey stirred into my yogurt, and caviar and crème fraîche dabbed onto my boiled fingerling potatoes.

Not so good.  Well, I mean, it is good -- it's caviar and crème fraîche and POTATOES for crying out loud, how could it not be good?  But maybe not so good for me to be reading about.

Something I've learned:  You cannot eat all the good stuff there is in the world.  Certainly not all at once.  You must pick and choose.

Which puts the gummy bears I've been craving into some perspective.

Why does your little girl like to play "princess?"

Virginia Postrel at the very cool DeepGlamour.net wants you to find out.

Peggy Orenstein's 2006 NYT Magazine story is the most in-depth examination of the question (and the business) that I've found. It's a good read, but ultimately unsatisfying. Orenstein brings too many political preconceptions to the topic and, while she quotes her princess-loving daughter to good narrative effect, she offers almost no information about what girls who play princess themselves think it means to be a princess.

For my book research, I'd like to hear from the little princesses themselves. Ideally, I'd find some brilliant, scientifically rigorous research by a child psychologist. But I haven't so far. So, since preschoolers are not the easiest interview subjects, I'm enlisting adults who know little princesses (preferably those older and more articulate than Anna Margaret) to ask them for me--Why do you like to be a princess? What does it mean to be a princess?--and write down the answers. 

Because I think it's awesome that somebody actually wants to listen to children, rather than to grown-up pundits who assume they know what children think, I'm linking.  Go ask your little princess, tell Ms. Postrel, and pass it on.

This one goes out to Kim in Iowa for one reason.

It goes out to everybody else just 'cause it's awesome.  

John Williams is the man, although every time I hear one of his major themes I can't remember which movie it came from.  Or whether it was actually the Olympics.

(h/t Megan McArdle)

This post is really about media, family, and privacy, not politics.

It is way, way, way too early for me to be writing with any interest about the presidential election, so understand that my link to this post by Gateway Pundit is not because I think the information there is strongly relevant to who's-gonna-be-a-better-president.

I just think it's interesting that, after all this time and media attention, and especially after the increased attention that Senator Obama's candidacy has brought on the subject of racially blended families, that  this is the first time I have ever heard that Senator McCain and his wife have one daughter whom they adopted from Bangladesh in 1991.

According to the U.S. Department of State, last year Americans adopted more than 20,000 children from other countries; roughly four-fifths of those, from non-European countries.  Although the number has dropped recently, apparently driven by policies in China and Russia, the number has been around 20,000, plus or minus a few thousand, for the last several years.  That's a big increase from 1991; when the McCain family took in Bridget McCain, she was one of about 8,500 foreign children adopted by Americans.   There are roughly four million babies born in the U. S. per year, by the way.  

Mixed-race families -- whether made that way by ordinary marriage and childbearing, or by adoption -- are growing in number, and they are going to be of growing importance in our national struggle to make sense of race.  I think it's interesting that I'd never until now heard of Senator and Mrs. McCain's adopted daughter.  You'd think that it'd have made an interesting two-candidate story when paired with the well-publicized narrative of Senator Obama's parents and grandparents, but I've never seen any story that mentioned both candidates' blended families.

Association and community.

Darwin has a thought-provoking post about chosen and unchosen communities, and their relationship to things like insurance.

One of the things I found most interesting about Marglin's analysis was his distinction between "community" and "association". By his definition, community is not merely a place where one finds companionship, society and mutual aid, but also a group which one cannot leave without fairly serious cost. According to the old adage that you can chose your friends but you can't choose your family, community is much more along the lines of family than friends.

An association may seem to have nearly all the same benefits as community: companionship, society and mutual aid. But an association is a group which one joins based on some sort of identified commonality and which one may leave at any time with fairly little cost.

Marglin argues that many structures which used to be communities in the past have become associations. While people used to experience serious costs if they left their occupations or neighborhoods, society and societal expectations have changed to make these relatively painless moves. Similarly, people now church shop with relative ease, while in the past leaving a church was a nearly unthinkable move.

Boy, this distinction has really clarified something in my mind.   I have an acquaintance, a woman, another mother at home with small children, who says when you talk to her that she's very committed to finding a "community" or "tribe" of mutual support and friendship.  She has gone about it, though, in a way I've always characterized as community activism.  She is forever trying to found new mother's connections, attachment-parenting support groups, homeschooling support groups and the like.  It seems every year she's got some new support group running.  "What this woman needs isn't a support group," I was telling another mom the other day.  "She needs a FRIEND." 

She's mistaken "associations" (as defined above in Darwin's quote) for "community."

Even if you choose a community rather than having it chosen for you by birth or social class, the essence of community is risk.  Risk of becoming attached.  Risk of being hurt by being left. 

There's more in that post... read the whole thing. 

I laughed out loud when I got to the words "professional babyproofer."

"Some parents wonder whether having children will mean an end to their high-design dream."  From the NYT, who else?

Simcha deconstructs Thomas Kinkade.

Go Simcha!  Don't apologize.