J takes to the bottle

So... a few weeks ago, my mother S arrived to spend a few months with us as L goes back to work. This has invovled a bit of re-training for everyone involved. While J was fed first from bottle and was taking it eagerly as late as early November, he apparently got a bit rusty feeding only from breast. S, of course, hasn't taken care of a baby in nearly forty years, and I'm informed that my temperament was a bit different from J's. But they both seem to be getting the hang of it. J was a bit unhappy at first without L around most of the day, but after a couple good bottle feeds today, we hope he's over the worst of it. However, J has often shown us the danger of making statements like this. Baby and mother-in-law logistics aside, L is enjoying being back at work, so I guess that part didn't involve too much re-training. And of course I'm relieved to have the help with J so I can pursue the job hunt. If I'm ever successful, that's really going to involve recalling some old habits.

And in a non-sequiter, was Jim Webb great last night or what?

J at the Christmas party

Although J had been more fussy than usual during the day yesterday, when we took him over to a neighbor's Christmas party, he was wide awake and happy. I carried him in a bjorn carrier facing outwards, so he could enjoy looking around and meeting people. He was so excited, kicking and waving his arms, that he threw up a little, but after that he was fine. He loved all the attention, shamelessly making eye contact and smiling at everyone who cooed at him, for the whole two hours we were there. At this point at least, he is far more sociable than his parents. After all that excitement, he slept soundly for five hours.

J's first real mushroom hunt

A couple times earlier, we went to places where we thought there might be mushrooms, but no luck. On Tuesday, we went up in the East Bay hills to one of our favorite chanterelle spots, but there was only one old chanterelle. We found several oldish Boletus truncatus before J made us go back to the car to change his diaper. I went back out by myself while L fed J in the car, and found a decent batch of Amanita calyptrata (or lanei, depending on who you believe), which was nice since I had found only one or two of this delicious mushroom in the last couple seasons.

Today, we went to another East Bay hills spot where I found a very nice bloom of A. calyptrata a few years ago. There were a nice bunch waiting for me there, so, more tonight. Also, from a stump we passed by, I plucked a beautiful cluster of Armillaria mellea, honey mushrooms.

My vision, which has been pretty good, is finally deteriorating somewhat. I reflected on the hunt today that I looked forward to J becoming a new sharper pair of eyes on the mushroom hunts.

Dancing with the babe

This is, not so surprisingly, the first time in my life that I've said, "Hey, baby!", to a literal baby. So now the calmer of all those groovy dancefloor moves are now being used to soothe J to sleep. For a soundtrack, I like streaming audio from SomaFM, especially the Spacestation or Cliqhop channels, or KFJC (depending on show). L seems partial to baroque, though, and to my surprise the Musical Offering actually worked quite well. J himself, as far as I can tell, doesn't care much about the music itself, just the motion it inspires.

More on the unity of religions

I came across a pretty nice quote by Cheri Huber in SFGate's Finding My Religion column:

Through seeing the [spiritual] transformation that's possible in my life I grew to love all spiritual practices and religions.

[Question:] All of them?

Yes, because at their heart, at their core is the same desire to be one with that which animates us, that which gives us life.

This is pretty much what I have seen as well, in a vision I had in the desert at Burning Man 2003. (No, I was completely sober!) Meeting a woman who had been in the hospital for leukemia for the previous two years made me intensely aware of how incredibly fleeting life is but how lucky we are for it, and I had to ride out to the open playa to be with all that this brought up. I saw a giant sun, and there was only this giant sun, on which were little "solar flares" that instantaneously winked in and out of existence. Even though these "flares" vanished before I could mentally "turn to look at them," I knew that they were all the possible charactistics with which you might describe someone, good, bad, indifferent, in all extremes and everything in between. I saw that the whole ranges of human behavior were only manifestations of this one sun, the "source" or "reality" behind everything. At the time I thought of it as "just the fact of being alive" or "just wanting things to be better", but it is clearly the same thing to which Ms. Huber refers, the "thing" beside which there is nothing else. All religions are, and can only be, intimations of this one truth in some form or other. More mundanely, all human activity can be seen as largely inchoate grasping toward this source, trying to acquire and control it without realizing that we are it.

Moving up in the world

By about 12 feet, that is. We're all moving to the flat upstairs from where we used to live. Overall, this is promising in terms of getting more sunlight, but for now there are the disruptions of not having easy phone and internet access, and having all our stuff in places where we're not exactly sure where it is or how to make use of it. I'll send out an email with our new address and phone number when we get it, but, in the meantime, the old ones will work for us.

J Moves Onward (Backward?)

Okay, just to let you non-parents know the kind of things you're reduced to when dealing with a newborn, J pooped. Especially since we'd been used to his pooping three or more times a day when fresh out of the oven, we were growing alarmed by his not pooping for 2.5 days or so, even though the books warned that rate of pooping would decrease over time. However, now, he just let out the biggest, goopiest poop I've ever seen from him. The thing is, I'd love to have a shirt or pair of pants that cooked-pumpkiny color of brownish orange (dyed, not stained).

Escape to Portland

When we received the announcement from an Oregon winery I like a lot for their harvest celebration last Saturday, L, tired of being in the house with me and J so much, suggested we go. I shrugged and said, "Okay." We took Amtrak's Coast Starlight up to Portland, stayed a few days there, and took the train back. The first night we had to stay in a regular hotel, but the next days we stayed at the Hosteling International hostel in NW Portland. It was new and superb, highly recommended.

Saturday, we drove out to the winery in Carlton. The countryside gets rural quickly, and is quite lovely, with gently rolling hills of fields, orchards, farm buildings. We had a great time at the tasting, with the proprietor / winemaker's wife holding J for a while, indulging ourselves in buying a half case on futures of their best 2005 wine. Scott is very enthusiastic about this wine (and about the 2005 vintage in general), calling it his "favorite wine he's made," and with good reason. It's delicate, subtle, and complex, but with plenty of strength and tannin to hold it together for a long time. When I described to the other winemaker (Kelly) that the wine was being to reticent for me to tell what it had to offer, she suggested that I put my hand over the top of the glass and shake it up and down to aerate it. It would never have occurred to me to be so violent, but it did work very well to open up the wine. Getting home was more problematic, as J would be put into the carseat only to start wailing a mile or two later. We'd pull off and think we had him settled down only to repeat the scene. But we eventually made it home just fine.

Sunday, we walked several blocks to a very lovely classical Chinese garden, recognizing along the way, an elegant urban park that had been a setting in an otherwise terrible movie.

The train rides were fun and pleasant. Or at least I had fun figuring out how to work the bunk beds in the cramped rooms, and sleeping in them for a few hours at a stretch. J liked the train a lot. As people pointed out to us, all we had to do to rock him was just to hold him. He liked the scenery going by, even if he likely couldn't actually focus that far away.

But we've been back for a few days, and are working on moving all our stuff to the flat upstairs. (Mail will always still reach us at our present address.)

Social Weekend

After keeping pretty much to ourselves since J was born, we saw lots of friends this weekend. At one point, we had three other adults, none related to us, in our living room. Three weeks ago, we'd never have guessed it could happen. It all worked out great. Thanks, everyone who came over! (and, thanks, of course, to J, who's a great sport about all this)

I do not like Blue Bottle Coffee

for a couple reasons. First, they seem to focus on making an ever-so-smooth-and-subtle blend, while I seem to prefer a more idiosyncratic coffee with particular characteristics that jump out at you. Maybe I should try some of their single-origin coffees..? Except that the one time I tried their Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, it was terrible. The beans were of irregular size and misshapen. My father, who grows coffee in Kona, Hawaii, said, "It looks like our 'number three' - our trash," and the coffee had the strong flavor of artichoke stem.

The other thing I don't like is that they often don't roast their coffee as dark as I seem to prefer. This leaves a light-caramel flavor which I find a bit simple and cheap. I recently got their Bella Donovan, a Mocha-Java type blend which they call one of their darker roasts, and, because of this issue, I tried gently roasting it more in a small skillet. This improved it considerably to my taste.

Oh well, I'll just have to get to Cole Coffee in Oakland when I can. Someone recommended Sweet Maria's, also in Oakland, so maybe it bears investigation.

Escape from the bedroom

A couple days ago, L, J, and I with trepidation made our first venture forth since we brought J home nine days before that. (He's two weeks old today, and doing great.) We went across the Bay to run a couple errands and indulge ourselves: cakes at Crixa, fresh fruit from the Bowl, ribs from Flint's. J handled all this very well although, of course, much of our timing was on his schedule - stopping when he needed to eat, moving when he slept. We were worried he might have a meltdown on the bridge, when there wouldn't be much we could do for him stuck in his car seat, but everything was fine. I'm really looking forward to taking him on mushroom hunts this fall. The rain so far was only 1/3 inch, but maybe that will be enough for some Agaricus augustus to spring up.

The whole GOP meltdown

At least I hope that's what it is. As pretty much everyone is pointing out, there's the National Intelligence Estimate which says that Iraq has set the US back on the "War on Terror", there are the "revelations" in Woodward's new book, and finally, there's the Foley scandal dragging down Speaker Hastert and associated other Republican House leadership. On one hand, all this couldn't happen to more deserving people, but, on the other, I'm dismayed that it's the Foley scandal which is really threatening to turn the House and maybe the Senate to Democrats in the midterm elections in a month. Okay, sure, Foley's behavior and the Republican leadership's covering it up is reprehensible, and I agree that it perfectly highlights how the "party of values" really only cares about power and money and not actually principles and governing. However, what about the real disasters of the Bush admin: invasion of Iraq, loss of New Orleans, Abrahamof / DeLay money laundering, gutting environmental and labor law, regressive tax policy and enforcement, Medicare "reform", inaction on global warming, creating and then doing everything it can to lose the "Global War on Terror"... really the list could go on for pages (no pun intended) -- basically caring about nothing except funneling money to people who are already very wealthy and who will recycle some of that money into the Republican Party coffers. Really, while I'm glad that the Foley scandal dramatizes these character qualities for the public at large, is this really what it takes???

The biggest mystery to me, still, is what took people so long. Why wasn't it evident from day one (or before, as it was to Paul Krugman) that telling the truth is the exception for the Bush admin? Or, if the political class and journalists knew, why didn't they care about the obvious ideological blindness and incompetency of this crew?

My thoughts often return to a former co-worker with whom I carpooled for a while. I tried to tell him before the invasion of Iraq that there were no "Weapons of Mass Destruction" (in quotes because this rubric includes chem and bio weapons as well as nuclear, for no reason that I can understand) in Iraq (thanks, Scott Ritter), that there was no Iraq / Al Qaeda connection (thanks, Czech head of intel and other sources), that the Aluminum tubes were for missiles and not centrifuges (thanks, Oak Ridge National Lab), etc. I tried to tell him I. F. Stone's (not that I know much about him) saying that "All you really have to understand is two words: 'Governments lie.'." I was so obnoxious that he left the carpool, but to no avail. He'd keep saying things like "I think they believe they're doing what's best for the country." And this is someone who self-identified as liberal, who read the Washington Post and the Economist (maybe, you say, that's the problem). I keep wondering what he thinks now, four years later, when all this and more is now conventional wisdom (except for approximately a third of the country!). Does he wish he'd paid more attention to the news, or does he dismiss as coincidence the things I told him then? Does he even remember what I, admittedly rather incoherently, tried to tell him at the time, or does he still go around with his head in the sand, doing nothing and hoping for the best?

Anyway, I hope the Democrats can do something useful when they're back in power, but, judging how they've handled things the last six years, I'm not that optimistic about them, either. I guess I have to take the uncertain success of Democrats over the certain failures of Republicans. I am heartened, though, by things like this.

newest addition

L delivered our son J (name inspired by the street on which we live) on Sept 24th, early morning. They arrived home the following Wednesday night, a week ago. He's regained his birth weight plus a little more, and is a real delight. He's about the most adorable thing we've ever seen. I figure we'd better enjoy the time now while he's cute and innocent and it's pretty easy to satisfy his needs. In some sense of propriety or something, we were hoping he'd arrive after our first wedding anniversary, which was a couple days ago, but we've no complaints.

Religions and the current world

Karen Armstrong gets it. Read the whole thing. Will update with second part when it's posted.

Part II

analysis article

In what looks like it will be a continuing attempt to more widely dissiminate articles which contain analysis not often seen in mainstream US media, here is an article in the London Review of Books by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. They are political science professors of international relations in the "realist" tradition, which interprets the actions of nations through the lens of self-interest, discounting moral or cooperative influences. Readers here may recall that Mearsheimer's book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics has had a great influence on me.

The Israel Lobby by John Mearscheimer and Stephen Walt in the London Review of Books.

This is based on a longer report, links to which are at the bottom of what is already a rather lengthy article. A summary of the summary can be found here.

recently seen quotes

"Power is the capacity not to have to learn." -Karl Deutsch

"Desires achieved increase thirst like salt water." -bumper sticker

Movies

L and I have been going on what, for us, is quite the movie marathon. It started with Hero, which I thought would be just escapist fun for me. But L, who has generally put the kibosh on Asian martial arts movies, actually loved it, too. Then, last weekend: we rented My Neighbor Totoro and Tampopo, the latter a movie we both fondly remembered but hadn't seen in a long time. In addition, we actually went to two movies in theaters. We finally saw Syriana and, again to my surprise, L liked it a lot. (I want to see it again on video.) Then, at a friend's invitation, we went to see Street Fight at the Roxie. Again L liked it. And we got to go to the Mission, an area we make it out to all too infrequently considering how much we like it and how accessible it is.

Iraq as VietNam

Okay, so this is lazy blogging. I'm simply linking to an article by Lt. Gen. William E. Odom titled Iraq Through the Prism of VietNam, with no extra commentary from me. I'm doing this just because I think it's the kind of analysis and perspective which should be read more widely. However, I can't think of anyone in particular to whom I could usefully forward the link: anyone who'd care would probably already believe stuff like this and anyone who wouldn't care, well, probably still wouldn't. Posting it just allows me to vent a little bit of the frustration I felt pre-April, 2003, when I was reading pieces making similar points and was unable to change anyone's mind. Thanks. (Link to this article via Josh Marshall's blog, although unfortunately I have to count Josh as one of those who didn't see such things at the time.)

(untitled)

Two Friends

A certain person came to the Friend's door
and knocked.

"Who's there?"

"It's me."

The Friend answered, "Go away. There's no place
for raw meat at this table."

The individual went wandering for a year.
Nothing but the fire of separation
can change hypocrisy and ego. The person returned
completely cooked,
walked up and down in front of the Friend's house,
gently knocked.

"Who is it?"

"You."

"Please come in, my self,
there's no place in this house for two."

-Rumi, Barks trans. (excerpt)

Not Cynical, Exactly

In the personals ad that L answered, I asked something about how my meditation practice might inform an understanding of international relations. Could an understanding of human nature gleaned from meditation be applied to an area in which nations generally behave in rather naked self-interest? I was, at the time, slightly hopeful that I might gain some insight which could be applied for the betterment of the world. However, instead of my being able to use my meditation practice, my practice has "converted" me.

First, having looked more at the grasping nature of the "small self" with which we do most everything, I no longer think there's such a large dichotomy between interpersonal relationships and international ones. Pretty much, we do what we like and avoid what we don't like, and we get as much of what we like as we can without provoking negative consequences we don't like. (BTW, I thought the movie Kids made this kind of statement very well.) A lot of those negative consequences are those put in place by our society, enforced by general agreement and, at last resort, by violence. Nations, although more complex, don't seem to be fundamentally different. They're all angling for what gets them advantage relative to other nations and will do anything possible as long as the negative consequences aren't too bad. The "societal punishments" around for nations aren't as effective as those around for you and me, and thus nations often behave much worse than you or I do.

Second and related, I used to think of those with power as corrupted by that power, and that these people should by fought by those not in power. Now, however, I'm less sure that the powerless are so virtuous. For example, President Carter's calls for energy efficiency didn't make him very popular. If there were an informed, popular vote about, say, increasing vehicle fuel efficiency standards, would Americans really vote to give up their SUV's? Even with the effects of global warming becoming more clear, would they have done so without the high gas prices of late? I'm a little doubtful. It's not that I no longer think that those in power need to be challenged, but I'm more of the opinion that humans in general have a hard time doing what they (might) know they should. I'm still hopeful, though, that decisions can be optimized under these limitations through good information and inclusive discussions, if those can be brought about. (I'm still supporting Clean Money.)

I write this all with an additional sense of frustration because I'm a bit stuck in my meditation practice. I don't really understand what's going on, but what it appears to be is this. I could continue to expand my awareness beyond my "small self", but this larger awareness appears very threatening. It feels like I'd have to give up all the things I dearly love, such as wine. (I think this is where the motif of wrathful gods originates.) This fear has interrupted my practices a few times now, no matter from how many angles I rationally argue to myself what I need to do.