Pedestrian

“A woman can’t marry a woman”

May 17, 2010 · 6 Comments

Lucy's Kindergarten Class

This morning 5 1/2 year old Lucy told me about a kid in her class who told her last week that a woman can’t marry a woman.  Just as she did in preschool and daycare, she said that she told her friend that’s not true because her mommy and momma are married and she was at their wedding and that she knows marriage is between two adults, a woman and a woman, or a woman and a man, or a man and a man.  She said that her friend told her that her parents’ marriage is not legal, and, this morning, she said, “I know you’re married, and it is legal, right?”

I simply said yes, your parents are legally married.  Otherwise, I would’ve answered her with all of the complications that involve lack of equal rights for our family.  Sure, it’s legal here in California, a handful of other states, and a short list of countries.  No, it’s not legal according to our country’s federal government, a long list of other states, and a long list of other countries.

The first time, that I know of, that she ever responded to the question of why she doesn’t have a dad, or the challenge of “a woman can’t marry a woman,” was when she was a toddler in daycare and one of her friends asked her why she doesn’t have a dad.  She was barely 2 years old, if that, and she told her friend “I have a mommy, momma, and wanda, and you have a mommy, daddy, and dog, and you are missing a momma and a wanda and I am missing a daddy and a dog, so everyone’s missing something.”

Sometime last fall or winter, when Moya and I were in Lucy’s classroom, one of her classmates asked us if we were sisters or cousins.  We said, no, we’re married to each other, we aren’t sisters or cousins.  The kid responded with surprise, “no way! Two women can get married?!”  We shrugged and said yes and left it at that.  The kid seemed happy to know it was a possibility.

I’m glad that Lucy’s figured out on her own to stand up for herself and answer questions about her family as though she’s simply reporting on the weather and I hope she always feels that confident about her family.

→ 6 CommentsCategories: civil rights · kindergarten · marriage
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Nutty Seafoam Frosting

May 8, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Beat 2 egg whites until stiff, add 1 c. brown sugar and beat until well blended. Spread on cake batter, sprinkle with 1/2 c. chopped nuts. Bake.

found in my grandma's 1943 joy of cooking

I happened on this recipe card this morning when looking for a recipe for blondies and it fascinated me because it’s basically a meringue put on top of raw cake batter and then baked with the cake. It was stuck in between pages with yellow cake recipes and that’s my favorite cake.

I love seeing my grandma’s handwriting.  I miss getting a letters from her.  When she was alive she mailed a letter to me every 2-4 weeks.  We sent letters back and forth to each other for 20 years.

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Subway Music and a Funeral

May 6, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Listening to Natalia Paruz in the subway

Last Thursday (April 29) I went on a Subway Music Tour with the energetic fabulous entertaining interesting artist/illustrator Zina Saunders as a part of the Gel conference (on of my favorite conferences).  The Gel conference is basically a 2day summer camp for adults, only it’s in spring.  This year it was a combination of technology, design, community, social consciousness, military, religion, art, music, politics, robots,  inspiration, joy, whimsy, and some friends I hadn’t seen since last year’s Gel conference.

The conference is just 2 days, with choices of activities on the first day (this year I chose the music tour, and last year I went on an underground tunnel tour in Brooklyn) and an intriguing day of live music and presentations on the second day.

Everyone we talked with who plays in the subway mentioned that it’s a good place to rehearse/practice and, hopefully, make money too, though some of the musicians commented on how much they are ignored by all of the people who walk by.  The Ebony Hillbillies performed at the conference on the second day of the conference and said that they use their subway performance times as rehearsal time/space.

Natalia Paruz

Natalia Paruz was studying to be a dancer when she was in an accident that stopped her dance career.  She saw someone playing the musical saw when she was in Austria and asked how to learn to play it.  She was told to buy a saw at a hardware store and figure it out.  She figured it out!  She straps an iPod to her leg which plays backup music through an amp and a speaker while she plays her saw.  Often people think she’s singing and she has to show them that it’s the saw, not her voice.

One of the musicians we chatted with and listened to was Luke Ryan at grand central station.  He pointed to all of the people who walked by without looking at him and diagnosed and identified and stereotyped them and then mused about the commonalities and correlations between people who listen or stop or talk with subway musicians and those who don’t.  Can Hunch figure out what inspires or motivates someone to listen or stop or talk or give money to a subway musician?  Luke mentioned that he’d like to gather together the 30 or so people who pay attention to him every day and have a banquet — figuring that if they could all sit at a table together, he’d easily figure out what they all have in common. That’d be a fantastic dinner party!

While I was on the plane, flying to NYC for this conference, I received an email that my grandma (my dad’s mom) had died.  Within the next day the funeral had been set for Sunday.  I had plans for Saturday and Sunday in NYC with friends.  By Friday I had decided I’d change my plans, change my plane ticket, buy a new plane ticket, reserve a rental car, and go to my grandma’s funeral.

I hadn’t seen her in a long time (I wasn’t as close to her as I was to my other grandma who died last year).  We exchanged cards and photos at Christmas every year.  She was always kind and gentle.  She made a sock monkey for me as a child that I still have and that my 5 1/2 year old daughter now claims as her own.  She spent almost all of her adult life as a mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and finally, before she died, a great-great-grandmother.  I loved the huge family gatherings with my dad’s family when I was a kid, with so many cousins and aunts and uncles and chaos and noise and diversity.

Me in tux/ruffles

So I flew home to San Francisco on Saturday (instead of Sunday).  My wife had tickets for the NCLR party that night and left a ticket for me on the counter.  I changed into a tux and a ruffly shirt (in solidarity with Constance McMillen and Ceara Sturgis who were at the party and had suffered discrimination at their high schools due to wearing or wanting to wear a tux).  I checked my wild einstein-curly hair in a mirror and went to find Moya at the party.

My siblings and their spouses and kids

The next morning I put on a black suit and went back to the airport to fly to Portland, Oregon, get a rental car, and drive to the church for the funeral.  All of my aunts and uncles and cousins were there, but my parents weren’t there.  My younger brother read a letter from my dad recanting some sweet stories about my grandma (my dad’s mom).  When my dad was a child, my grandma made him 3 shirts all from the same fabric, so people thought he was always wearing the same shirt, not 3 different shirts that were exactly the same.  After the funeral at the church, there was a drive to a cemetary to bury my grandma, and then a drive back to the church for a meal with everyone.  While sitting at a table with all of my siblings, with relatives and other people stopping by to chat with us, I remembered Luke Ryan’s comment that he’d like to have a banquet table for the 30+ people who stop by every day.  Those 30+ people might not have as much in common as he hopes, or they might.  In a large room in a church with most of my relatives, who I rarely see, I realized we all have our humanity in common, and that’s enough to treat people with graciousness even if they’re nervous around me or ignore me for whatever reason.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: art · only goodness · storytelling
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What’s on my iPad

May 6, 2010 · 4 Comments

A bunch of news apps: SkyGrid, BBC News, AP News, NY Times Editors‘ Choice, NPR, Thomson Reuters News Pro, plus a bookmark on my “Home Screen” to Google Reader (which opens in Safari – I’m not super fond of the Google Reader interface but I’m used to it and I like it better than Bloglines, which I used to use for feeds)

Both iBooks and Amazon Kindle because most books aren’t available in every e-reading app.  I like reading books via the kindle app on iPhone/iPad and the iBooks app on iPad — particularly for books I don’t want to own in paper form because I just want to read them, not own the physical book. When standing and riding on public transportation, I can hold on to a pole with one hand, and hold onto iPhone and read a kindle book with the other hand.  I can’t do that with the iPad, it’s too big to hold onto and change pages with one hand.

Twitterrific is the only Twitter iPad app that doesn’t completely annoy me.  I tried the others and hated them because it feels like they don’t make good use of the space available. I wish there was a way to turn off the chirp in Twitterific.  They’ve said they’re working on it.  For now the only way to turn the chirp off is to manually mute  the whole system volume.  I also use Twittelator on iPhone, Twidroid on my Droid, and Twhirl on the Mac.

The WordPress app is okay.  I’d give it a C+ because it doesn’t give me access to all the usual tools and controls over my wordpress blog.  I can’t, for example, change the content in a widget.  I have to go to Safari and login to wordpress.com and then fumble my way through.

WolframAlpha is a fun timesink though it, in general, frustrates me, because it’s hard to find the actual source for any information.

Similarly, The Elements, which takes up a ton of space (almost 2 GB), is a gorgeous way to procrastinate and kill time and remember the beauty of Chemistry (one of my favorite subjects in college).

Numbers and Pages and Keynote have turned out to be super useful for me when I’d like to work on a document on the iPad that I generally keep on a thumbdrive or on one of the computers I use.  I use iWork.com to transfer docs back and forth between iPad and any Mac that I use.  I usually use Word and Excel for docs, but have started using Pages and Numbers more when I know I’ll want to access the docs from iPad.

GoDocs to more easily manage my Google Docs.

I’ve been thinking that I should try using Dropbox instead of the combination of GoDocs, iWork.com, and a thumbdrive.

Evernote because I adore Evernote and hope it never goes away because I’d lose all the bits of fleeting thoughts and random lists that I hold there. I use the Evernote Mac Client app as well as the web site and the iPhone and iPod and Droid Evernote apps. I love the cloud and hope it doesn’t disappear.

I wish that the Epicurious app on iPad and iPhone would sync with the Epicurious web site and keep track of the recipes I have saved or favorited.  Instead, I have saved/favorited recipes on iPhone, iPad, and web site, all in separate lists. There’s no sync’ing in the cloud for Epicurious.  This app works well in landscape mode but is a total mess in portrait mode.  In landscape mode, the ingredients list and recipe instructions display side by side.  In portrait mode, the ingredients list is a dropdown, accessed by tapping on “Ingredients” button, and then the list of ingredients overlays and  covers up the instructions, totally frustrating me if I’m trying to follow instructions and refer to ingredients at the same time.

I’ve tried out the BigOven Lite app but, on startup and while searching, it has photos that move slowly in the background and that makes me feel dizzy.  I can’t concentrate on typing a search term with a moving photo.

I have WeatherBug installed and use it from time to time, but not very often, on the iPad.  I use it daily on my Droid.

Videos for all my iTunes store downloads (plenty!) and Netflix for on-demand viewing. We have Roku in our house and it’s useful to have our Netflix instant queue available on the TV and on the iPad.

For my 5 1/2 year old daughter, who is convinced that the iPad is hers, MagicSketch and TiltHD and Word Magic and Toy Story book and Alice in Wonderland (which she LOVES) and iFOTOFLO (she can type in the word puppy and see endless photos of puppies).

I’ve been trying out Brushes though I’m not even a decent artist or illustrator.  One a recent plane flight where I was feeling all sorts of extreme emotions, I used pogo stylus with Brushes to vent all sorts of stuff in drawings.  It felt good.

When I feel unbalanced, the iPhone app iHandy Level looks fine at 2x on the iPad and provides nonsensical readjustment.

Similarly, Smule Magic Piano, is great fun – particularly for playing a duet with someone else somewhere else in the world.

I use Digits and Calculator XL for calculating.  My daughter likes to play with Digits.

And, finally, there are some apps on my iPad that I haven’t yet used: ABC Player, Shazam, IMDb, and Catan (I’ve been meaning to find time to play this but I rarely have time for games).

→ 4 CommentsCategories: data only
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