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The Perfect Coffee Maker

I can't remember when I didn't make coffee using one of these little guys.  Those must have been dark days.  For those who have never used a moka coffee maker, they are cheap, simple to use, and make great coffee.

The only downside is they can't be left on the stove unattended.  I have to replace the little rubber gasket inside every so many months because I'll lose track of time and cook the gasket to death.  Every now and then, I'll leave the pot on the stove for so long I destroy the entire thing. 

As you can see, this blue guy has lost some hit points through inattentiveness.  I've had him for two years -- a record.  I'd like to replace him with a stainless steel version, but it's hard for me to spend the money when this one still works.  I'm waiting for my next inattentive spell.

The Beauty of Everyday Objects.

We all have certain functional items in our homes, like a perfect vegetable peeler, which we would keenly miss if lost.  Replacing them isn't easy.  Money isn't the issue since many of these items aren't expensive.  The problem is finding the exact replacement.  Due to some infernal law of the universe:  The more perfect the item, the less chance you have of ever finding one just like it again.  Even if you saw an aisle full of those things last week.  You are highly unlikely to ever, ever, ever find that exact vegetable peeler again.

Finding new items to replace our loved ones is like getting back into the dating game after 20 years of marriage.  You have to go through the whole process of getting to know someone, again.  Compromises have to be made, quirks learned before you can be comfortable with the new peeler.  It's a time of adjustment.  Try not to make comparisons, this just leads to "what ifs" and doubts.

Why do I love some of my inanimate objects?  They make my life easier.  They free up my time.  They work the first time, and they work with enviable ease and logic.  Sometimes, they are even beautiful in a utilitarian way.

I'm going to share some of my favorite functional items around the house: Here is a cloth bag I love.  I bought it at a Russian grocery store called Perekrostok.  It's both pretty and functional.  It's the perfect size for a run to the store.  I can hang it off my shoulder, and it stays!

A Life Lived Differently and Its Enemies

When young, I was greatly intrigued by the lives of children whose parents chose to live in unusual ways:

- Children who accompanied their scientist parents rather than attend school. What's not to love about growing up on a yacht?

- Children of missionaries who grew up in Africa, running wild with the natives, and doing school through mail-ordered texts.

- Children whose parents raised them on communes. Again, little formal schooling and lots of running around in nature.

- Children who were sent overseas to boarding schools.  Sounded like heaven to me, cavorting in the Alps.

- Children of diplomats who travelled the world.  Some children have all the luck.

- Parents who dragged their children around in an old RV in the search of good surfing and odd jobs. While this may not have suited every child, I highly suspect I'd have embraced it.  Surfing and no school....If I get a second life...

I love the idea of shaping life to suit oneself rather than conforming to society's norms. 

Many of us love the idea of a bohemian or unusual lifestyle.  NPR and the New York Times constantly highlight unusual people and jobs and lifestyles.  Children's television loves to use that sing-songy voice to slowly explain that not all children live in a brownstone town home in New York City like little Noah or Emily.  Some children actually live on ranches or in arctic villages and they are just as good as you and me.  Didn't have to convince child me of this!  They had it made!

I hold that, for some of us, this attraction to the uncommon is part of the reason we home school.  We don't see why we have to do things the way everybody else does.  Sending kids off to school while both parents commute to dull jobs where they complain to each other how stressed out they are doesn't hold much appeal to me.  If I can avoid living like this, I will.

Even if.  Even if every other person in America thinks we should all conform to one kind of life in order to create societal cohesion through shared experience.  Even if my peers think my children will be at a disadvantage because we have opted out of the college bound rat race.  Even if people who embrace just about any edgy lifestyle think home schooling goes too far. Thank God we live in a free society.

 

 

 

Home-Schoolers are too Cool

Unfortunately for those who hate the kind of people they imagine are homeschooling, the truth is quite different.  Home-schoolers come in all sorts of flavors, to include hippy, secular, progressive, and free-thinking.  And many of these iconoclasts are well educated and able to write.  And don't forget the lawyers.  Home-schooling is legal and mostly unregulated in all 50 states because of constant vigilance and judicial activism, not because we're a country which values educational choice.

Home-schooled students also do as well as or better than, depending on which set of figures you check out, traditionally schooled students.  So, if home-schoolers aren't all aesthetically unappealing bible thumpers, how can self-appointed, authoritarian types crush homeschooling's sexy non-conformity while pretending it's all in the name of diversity?  Why, charge sexy edgy homeschooling families with letting down the team! Call us privileged and selfish!

We're privileged because some one in the couple has to be making a selfishly large salary to allow the other one the luxury of staying home and lavishing huge amounts of effort on their spoilt children's education.  That's not fair for those who do not have that option or who prefer to put their money elsewhere.  In fairness, all of our children ought to meet on a level school yard.  Well, unless, of course, one can afford to live in a good school zone or pay for private school.  Let's not talk crazy here! 

We're selfish because we are not meeting our social obligations to be shining examples for all the less enlightened parents and students.  We're also stunting our children's ability to empathize with people from diverse socio-economic backgrounds by not having them mix it up in public schools.

Here are my counter arguments:

1) Homeschooling families are economically diverse.  Many of us make material and career sacrifices to keep one of us home.  The statistics bear this out.  Critics ought to let us know where they live and how much in property tax they pay, so we can determine whether they are being socially responsible citizens or not.

2) I don't care who you think I ought to know or who you think my children ought to mix with.  That's our call, not yours.  We all choose our social groups -- to include all the people who struggle to land a house in a good school zone.  Go after their commitment to a diverse schooling experience.  There are so many more of them.

3) I'm interested in the intellectual development of my children, not in hardening their class consciousness with cliches about the moral importance of sitting in the same room as other children assigned to be there based only on property taxes and location.  Feel free to pretend your children are better people simply by being in proximity of what you label "diversity".  Or that your children enrich the lives of others  because you consider yourself enlightened. 

 

Anti-Homeschooling Types, Part II

Homeschool critics deconstructed, part II

4) Tyranny of the Teachers' Guild:  This critic argues that only people with the proper teaching credentials should be allowed to educate children.  After all, knowledge only comes to those who take education courses in college. That's where teachers learn the secret handshake to unlock the subtle workings of the universe and how to pass it on.

5) School as Social Services:  Without daily interaction with outsiders in an institutional setting, how can we be sure children aren't being abused at home?  This critic fears that home-schoolers have too much freedom to abuse their children.  Not that they would, but without supervision they probably are. 

Perhaps, they suggest, we could at least regulate home-schooling, get an expert inside the home, to look around and make sure these children aren't being abused.  Why not?  Studies show abused children are most likely to be homeschooled...wait, no they don't. 

6) Born-Again Phobics: This anti-homeschooler doesn't like the idea of a child's education being left up to a crazy, born-again woman in a jean jumper maternity dress.  Bible reading, bread baking, home births -- these families are so strange.  And there is no greater danger to civilization than the insidious belief that the earth is only 6,000 years old. Burn the witches for their heresy!

Better these children attend school and be exposed to normal people with their correct embrace of a nihilistic, science-based agnosticism.  Only then will they be free to choose their own path, as long as it isn't homeschooling their children in some crazy religion!

 

I'll Miss You, Christopher Hitchens

I read Christopher Hitchens for years, starting sometime before his bitter and twisted hit piece on Mother Teresa.  You have to read it to believe it.  He had problems with religion...  But what had he ever done to make the world a better place?  What political office had he run for?  What business venture did he run on socialist principles?  He was a writer who didn't fully see the humanity of certain groups because his irrational loathing for them prevented him from really tackling these issues objectively. 

And while he loathed organized religion and politics for their hypocrisy and human failings, he gave his own socialist community immunity from his contempt.  He certainly recognized his community's failings, especially its unforgivable failure to denounce the evils of Soviet communism.  But he struggled to rationalize away their guilt.  And he  rationalized the actions and words of any artist or socialist in his circle, like Edward Said and Gore Vidal - both of whom held/hold repulsive opinions.  He held his community to a lower standard.

How to explain his contradictions?  He was loyal to the causes he embraced as a young man, and he had a vendetta against those he early on found vexing to his youthful ideas of personal freedom.  And he stood faithful to these two extreme positions his whole life, even after he no longer really believed in the viability of socialist dogma or in his friends' anti-American, anti-Western ideologies.  He never renounced socialism or his friends.  He just drifted away.

Another thing I noticed over the years, Hitchens made connections primarily with men.  He liked women, and married several, but all of his important relationships were with men.  Interesting. 

And I will miss him.  I was so saddened to learn he had cancer, as I would be if a friend was diagnosed.  He's one of those writers who wrote his personality into his work.  I felt like I knew him.  I had debates with him in my head.  I carried his arguments around with me for weeks until I had successfully either defeated him or incorporated his ideas.  And he wrote beautifully, unpredictably, not always with the greatest of logic, as passions often led his opinions, but with deep conviction.  And I will so much miss reading him.  Goodbye Hitchens.

 

 

A Few Quick Thoughts on the OWS

OWS participants are addicted to outrage; especially to the self-serving, self-righteous kind that assumes their demands should trump everything - tradition, culture, laws, reality.  It's a surplus of self-regard powered by an unrealistic assessment of one's importance married to emotions unchecked by practiced reasoning.  How else to explain the people's mike? Wake up!  You look ridiculous!  And it's incredibly inefficient!

This week it's the bankers and Wall Street, last week it was global warming and the Palestinian right of return.  Remember when it was our illegal war in Iraq before President Obama?  No?  But now student loans are coming due and someone must pay for our current economic woes.  Let's all agree that if Bush was still in office, this would be an Occupy the White House movement instead.  But as your team is in, you chose the bankers instead. 

I understand you were promised so much by so many admirers - parents, teachers, peers, yourself - only to find out you too have to make your way in an unsure world, like the rest of us.  And now you resent the college debts and the lack of prestigious jobs.  You wanted to profit from a system built by others that had so far favored your kind, and when you learned that it wasn't going to be so easy, you blame the system.  And now you demand we change the system to suit you, or else...and there is an "or else".  You have nothing to offer the world but the sturm und drang of your recycled slogans and arrogant demands. 

It's at the end of the you-are-so-special rainbow.  Go get it!

I think we can safely assume this shining star is unfettered with college debt.  She must be protesting some other debt, like of logic or something.

I talked to your parents.  You got the sentiment mixed up.  Guess what (or who) your parents really don't want...

 

 

More OWS Truth Placards

For a second there, I thought this was a scene from Syria...so brave.

The Perfect Weightlifting Blog

I'm having trouble finding good weightlifting blogs.  I've found a few I enjoy reading, and I ought to throw those up on my blog list, but they are often unsatisfactory.   Many fitness blogs are more about the ads than about fitness.  Or they are about finding clients for fitness trainers.  Or they are devoted to pictures of the writer in tiny bikinis looking for clients.  Or they are infrequently updated.  Or they are dogmatically devoted to a particular way of lifting weights that comes off as insulting.  Or the authors are too young and have too many adorable pictures of their cats and boy friends.  Maybe I'm too picky. 

Many women blogs on weightlifting also have a feminist slant that I don't enjoy.  I dislike wallowing in a miasma of testosterone resentment while reading the word "vagina" over and over.  For me, being a feminist is about not having to think about my sex every single second of my life.  And I hate the word "empowering."  And "partner."  Dated and stale.  I'm difficult to please, I admit it. 

All I want is a nice straight forward site about lifting weights from a woman's perspective exactly the way I'm imagining it in my mind; updated every day would be a plus.

 

I Could Rip Off Your Arm Workout Philosophy

I want to get really strong.  Why?  Who knows.  Just do.  Weightlifting also keeps me in much better shape than either aerobic exercise or yoga ever did.  Studies show how important weight bearing exercises are for women.  Muscles burn more calories.  An effective weightlifting program doesn't demand much time.  So why don't more women lift weights of some kind?  My thoughts:

Some women seem to be devoted to cultivating that engagingly brittle-boned and cute look over the "I could rip off your arm" look.  And while skinny arms and the inability to stand up straight may work for teenagers and supermodels, it's not an overall healthy look to pursue.  Talk about a failure of feminism!  Women are strong inside, but few really want to be strong outside.

Yes, yes, I know, women are out there getting in shape by the billions.  But many of them are exercising to be thin and small, motivated by an oddly compelling image of feminine frailty, whether they admit it or not.  Not all women, of course.  I know athletic women and women who lift weights, but they are the minority.  So many women have a fear of muscles and of appearing unfeminine, even at the risk of health problems like bone and muscle loss as one gets older.  I know, because I've been told so.  Muscles are not what they are after.  Which is a shame.

I fight this image with my daughters.  I encourage them to run as hard as they can, jump as far as they can, lift things, push things, pull up on things, and to never let the unhealthy images of women as mere clothes hangers influence them.  I want them to take pride in their strength and physical competence.

I prefer the "I could rip off your arm" look.  To get that, here are my goals:

Right now, my goal is to bench press my weight which is around 110lb.  My max one rep is 95lb.  I'm lifting 90lb regularly for my heaviest set.  I don't have goals for anything else right now, just to lift heavy and to failure.  I met my goal for pull ups, which was ten.  Now I'd like to do ten wide arm grip pull-ups.  But I mostly lift intuitively, trying to make myself sore the next day.  When I stop being sore, I change up my routine, which is why I've started doing dead lifts.  Those are hard.