Tiny Mantras

I gave birth to the whole universe

2009-11-30T18:18:00.000-05:00

I decided to make up a bedtime story last night, choose-your-own adventure style.

Me: "Once upon a time, there was a boy named... Antonio or Declan?"

Declan: "Declan!"

Me: "This boy Declan grew up to become a... paleontologist or astronaut? Which should he be?"

Declan: "A paleontologist goes around looking for dinosaur bones and putting them back together to make, like, T-Rex."

Me: "True. So is that what you'd like to be? Or an astronaut?"

Declan: "I don't want to be those. I want to be something I want to be."

Me: "Like what?"

Declan: "Space."

Me: "Space? Like... all of space? The universe?"

Declan: "Yes. Space."

Me: "Uh... okay... Once upon a time there was a little boy named Declan who was actually all of space. He was as big as everything and expanded a lot while stars and galaxies and planets formed inside of him. He watched the Earth as it started to form, and people started to evolve..."

Declan: "I couldn't do that. Everybody knows that space doesn't have eyes. It can't watch anything. It just is. It's everywhere."

Me: "Uh... okay. One day he yawned, and 14 stars and 732 planets were sucked into his mouth."

Declan: "No. Only a black hole could do that."

Me: "Well if you were all of space and you yawned, wouldn't that be like a really big black hole?"

Declan: "Maybe. But space doesn't have a mouth. It doesn't have any kind of face."

Me: "Well what would you do if you were space, then?"

Declan: "Nothing. Just be."

Me: "Okay. Where would those stars and planets go if you yawned? What would space's stomach be like?"

Declan: "Maybe nowhere. Maybe another dimension. They would be spaghettified. We just don't know where they would go."

Me: "Okay. So maybe they would go into space's stomach! So... Declan, who was all of space was just hanging out, just being everywhere and expanding while the stars formed..."

Declan: "And the stars made people."

Me: "Okay. The stars made people on Earth..."

Declan: "Now say that mommy and daddy and Declan were born on Earth."

Me: "Mommy and daddy, who lived on Earth, decided to have a baby, and Declan, who was actually all of space...? Was born?"

Declan: "That's right."

Me: "Okay, so, mommy and daddy had a baby who was actually all of space, but they didn't know that, and he tried to tell them all about the universe."

Declan: "Babies can't talk."

Me: "No, but he tried. He said "ooo" and "da" and "thpppphhh" but they didn't start to understand until he learned to say words."

Declan: "Then he taught you about the universe. That's what you say. You didn't know about it until I was born. You didn't even know that after Pluto there was Eris and Ceres until I watched shows and told you."

Me: "And read books. That's true. So... Declan came along and learned to talk and started to teach everybody about space and the universe."

Declan: Nods.

Me: "And then a giant sea lion — bigger than anything, bigger than all of space — that was made out of happiness came along and swallowed the enormous Declan and everything in the universe, including everyone on Earth, became very peaceful and happy because it was very cozy in the sea lion's stomach."

Declan: "No!" (Laughing)

Me: "Why not? Sometimes scientists talk about our universe actually being a small part of something even bigger."

Declan: "Okay."

Me: "Phew. The end."

Fairy dust

2009-11-29T09:55:00.002-05:00

"Here mommy, let me put some of this on you," my boy says to me.

He rubs glitter into my collarbone like a salve.

"Now make a wish," he instructs me. "It will take 24 hours for it to start doing its work, right after my wishes start working. So... what is your wish?"

"I want my family to be happy and healthy," I tell him.

He wished for wormholes to form though the earth.

He'd really like it if it didn't take a whole three hours to get to his cousins' farm. Lately, he's been angling to see Disney World too.

If you happen to be secretly working on a space-time continuum-ripping transportation system, Large Hadron Collider, please make Columbus a decent hub, would you?

He keeps checking his tin full of fairy dust as though it is a science experiment. It has magical components like teeny tiny sea shells and sprigs of brightly colored fabric fibers.

I'm not allowed to hide it, he told me, although I'm not sure why I would.

He also wished for all good dreams to come true.

"Not the tornado ones."

Happy accidents

2009-11-28T10:50:00.010-05:00

Things got all Dada/Surreal here last night. We dipped rubber bands and cut up cloth and string into paint and dropped them onto paper to create "happy accident" paintings a la Marcel Duchamp.* We enjoyed lines and organic shapes for their random nature.

See how beautifully mine turned out?
My husband took a more smudgy/smacky ribbon approach:
Declan's was a really delightful and delicate study in red lines, until a rogue bingo marker came along and pummeled the "land of happy accidents" with meteors way beyond recognition.
Thorough, no? He needed a bath afterwards because the splatter gave him quite the butcher look.

No one joined me for surrealism, part two. But they have enjoyed looking at it today.

I seem to be fighting against the magnetic pull of the television a lot lately.

* I wish I could take credit for this idea myself, but I got it from Discovering Great Artists: Hands-On Art for Children in the Styles of the Great Masters.

The Great Interview Experiment

2009-11-18T09:36:00.005-05:00

Neil of Citizen of the Month has created the ultimate mixer for bloggers. By dropping a line into the busy comment section of his blog, dozens of us made a promise to interview one person and be interviewed by another, whoever that person may be.

I got some surprising and fun questions from the completely divine Princess of the Universe, whose diaries reflective and funny and worth your time to visit.

Meanwhile, I explored the archives and links over at wenchwire in order to learn all that I could about dk, or wench. She puts out her perspectives in short missives, digestible rants and extremely cool pictures of spaghetti squash jack-o-lanterns. An inspiring woman, fellow communicator and seeker, here are the words she gave me. Enjoy.

Q: Going through your archives, I find that you started your blog in 2006 as "a real-ease from my corporate tongue in cheek," "a work in progress" and "a rant forest," among other things. In these 3 years, has blogging served the purpose you expected it to? How has it surprised you?

A: You know I don't think I have ever revisited my reasons for blogging. Definitely it is a real-ease from my workaday paradigm which is quite static, formal and not creative at all. I can generally let my hair down and my fingers dance along the keys without too much worry. After going back and taking a look there doesn't appear to be as much ranting as I thought there would be, but that is also influenced by the fact that some coworkers and family members have since happened along. I try and stick to the anonymous and the "powers that be" in those particular cases.

I'm not really happy about my recent bloglessness - a lot of chaff there. Lots of twisty turny happenings in the nondigital life have been taking up my time. It surprises me that I feel guilty about that.

Q: You talk about recasting the word "wench" in a positive light. What is the mental image that you wish people would conjure when they heard it?

A: Wench is never a single image. It is an understanding that an independent woman is and can be many things at many different times. It's like a superfast slide show that ends with the current evocation of that woman at that time. Never less than a man, subject to her own honour code, capable of looking after herself while still enjoying the sharing of life through relationships.

Q; I gather that you make at least part of your living writing (as I do). What are some of the other ways (apart from blogging) that you've tried to break away from the conventions of your work?

A: I do some journaling off line with old fashioned paper and pen. It's a different flow and a fair bit more personal than what's available for public consumption. I've been working on some poetry and some character ideas for a novella perhaps. It will probably end up being a few short stories. I've been expanding my foundation of literature lately as well, new authours and subject matter, We are all works in progress.

Q: Is there a relationship between writing and wellness/spirituality for you?

A: Writing is a means to speak to myself, helps tap me on the shoulder when I'm slipping off my path. Often it's when I proof what I've written that I realize there are things bothering me that I'm not consciously aware of - or that I am once again purposefully deluding myself about. So yes, it definitely assists in balancing my mental health at the very least;)

Q: What should people who have never been to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan know about Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan?

A: Moose Jaw: Has a wonderful mineral spa - and underground tunnels dating back from Prohibition and the days of Al Capone. A fair chunk of the proscribed hooch was shipped from Canada. Once the tunnels were found, they gussied 'em up all purty like and additions continue, and made a wonderful little tour out of it all. A nice way to spend an afternoon.

Q: What else should we know about wench?

A: As for more about me - I'm 48 yet always 8 years old with the wonder an 8 year old has for all things new and the curiosity to enjoy change. And I am ecstatic about my 1st out of country vacation ever - Jamaica in January. Whoo hoo!

Carnival of Space #129

2009-11-15T19:26:00.008-05:00

Welcome to the 129th Carnival of Space!

(Note 11-17-09: Blogger had issues, so this site was down for a while today. Apologies for any inconvenience!)

I'm thrilled to have another opportunity to host this great showcase of space-related blog posts.

For those of you that are visiting Tiny Mantras for the first time, I'm a freelance writer and mother to a fanatical four-year-old astronomer. His interest in space has been unyielding for as long as he's been able to talk. Therefore, I spend a lot of time reading astronomy blogs to try and become more scientifically literate, as well as riding imaginary space elevators out to Proxima Centauri and other stars in search of exoplanets. And smoothing flour and cocoa powder in a large bin so my son can throw rocks in it and make craters. Or making special trips to Big Lots to buy a bright yellow bucket for a $1 so he can keep his pretend meteor collection safe. You get the idea.

For my regular readers, I hope you'll dig in here and learn something new about our universe. We're entering the final weeks of the International Year of Astronomy (IYA), so hurry up and get your Galileo on.

Speaking of IYA, the Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra X-Ray Observatory and Spitzer Space Telescope decided to honor it by combining their significant forces to create a stunning image of the core of our Milky Way galaxy. You can read more about it, find links to the image and plenty of additional info at the Chandra X-Ray Observatory blog, as well as at Dynamics of Cats.

Alan Boyle of MSNBC's Cosmic Log calls it Triple delight in the Milky Way, with this description: "NASA has blended three views of our home galaxy's turbulent core to produce a picture filled with scientifically significant snap, crackle and pop. And the deeper you go into the image, the more you learn."

Boyle also sends Marvelous view ... and a mystery: "Europe's Rosetta spacecraft is making its final flyby past Earth on its way to an asteroid and a comet - a close encounter that should yield beautiful pictures of our home planet, and perhaps the answer to a cosmic mystery as well."

If you're preparing to do some holiday shopping for the younger set, Emily Ladkawalla of The Planetary Society Blog has reviews of several space-themed books for young children.

Mang's Bat Page has a review of the National Geographic Backyard Guide to the Night Sky.

Nicole of One Astronomer's Noise improvised an astronomy lesson with a group of elementary school kids by becoming a mythical creature in Unicorns and Starry Nights.

In hopes of reaching a wider community, The Lunar and Planetary Institute is putting images on flickr. First up: planetary size comparisons, such as Mars' massive volcano Olympus Mons against the state of Wyoming, or Earth against Neptune's great dark spot.

Next Big Future looks at the details and implications of the 100 kilograms of water ice found in the plume of the LCross crater impact.

Ian Musgrave of Astroblog has a guide to observing the Leonid meteor shower.

collectSpace gives us the scoop on a contest that NASA is holding for past and present space program workers to design a patch that will mark the end of the space shuttle era.

Weird Warp contemplates what it would be like to Take an Asteroid to the Stars and Arrive in Second Place.

Centauri Dreams sends the two-part report on the Project Icarus starship symposium, which was recently held in London: Part I & Part II. (Project Icarus is a joint effort between the British Interplanetary Society and the Tau Zero Foundation to update the classic Project Daedalus starship study of the 1970s.)

"Variable star junkie" Mike Simonsen of Simostronomy talks about documenting UGZs, weeding out impostors and other goals of The Z CamPaign.

Ian O'Neill of Astroengine.com and Discovery News considers the possibility of tiny, man-made black holes.

Cheap Astronomy delivers part 2 of its Greenhouse Earth podcast.

Colony Worlds lets us know that Off World Colonies Will Have Organ Labs (But No Organ Donors).

Kentucky Space shipped a couple of space systems recently to NASA: "one destined from Wallops and a suborbital launch to test some hardware that will be used on our orbital craft, KySat-1, and the second, a Nanorack/Cubelab combination, destined for Marshall and a Shuttle launch to the ISS. The innovative Nanoracks and Cubelab platform dramatically lowers the cost to organizations wanting to do microgravity research on the station. We're very excited. In short, it was a great weekend and the team celebrated with an open house on the campus of the University of Kentucky."

And lastly, Alice of Alice's Astro Info provides an in-depth, spoilerific review of the apocalyptic, virtually science-free Hollywood disaster-thon, 2012.

If you're interested in perusing past carnivals or submitting to one in the future, visit Universe Today for details.

Construct your own narrative

2009-11-13T17:35:00.010-05:00

For the past several months, I've been helping my mother out with a family project. We've been going through scads of old, deteriorating photographs, scanning them and identifying faces. Apparently, members of every branch of my family were armed with a camera from the moment they first one became commercially available.

Then I found this group of seven pictures in one pack, along with negatives that tell me they were taken in exactly this order:

What does it mean? What's the story here?

A starry place to sleep

2009-11-09T10:34:00.005-05:00

I've been MIA lately. Last week, I nursed Dec's case of pink eye and my own sore throat/cold thing, which lingers. I've also been putting some of my old clips up on my web site about ex-neo-Nazis, urban planning and other things. Plus, I figure with NaBloPoMo, people have plenty to read.

I'm trying to get some work started, find some other work and get paid for work I've already done. All of this is harder in this economy than it used to be, and it was never completely easy. I apparently need a lawyer, or at least a big, scary, burly guy whose picture I can print on my invoices.

Meanwhile, the endless wallpaper-removing, carpet-removing, solar system-painting project known as trying to give my son a real room finally (mostly) ended a couple of weeks back. Here's what it looks like. My liege wants me to add a couple of galaxies, Betelgeuse (the star) and a black hole on another wall, but the novelty of hanging out under the makeshift canopy seems to be enough for the moment.
Happy Monday.
Hopefully, I'll return soon with an actual post!

A Gigantic, Happy Halloween

2009-10-31T08:57:00.000-04:00

Do you know where in the universe you might find this?
400 years ago, Galileo concluded that it was orbiting this:
And with that, humanity took a giant step toward the realization that Earth isn't the center of the universe.

We've had a full week of being Jupiter. At parties. Out trick-or-treating. At school. At Perkins Observatory. Sometimes with Europa-esque cracked-ocean face paint, but mostly without. He even won honorable mention for his costume at our neighborhood party last weekend. We thought about festooning his cheeks with volcanoes à la Io, but with all of this Halloweening, Declan has mostly told me "I feel like being just Jupiter today."

Although, in moments, Venus, Pluto and Neptune's moon Triton have monopolized his attention, he has loved Jupiter for more than half of his four-year-old life.

Meanwhile, I've been a little stunned to discover how alien the biggest planet in our solar system is to most adults. We would have had a much easier time with instant recognition if he'd wanted to be Saturn or Earth. I thought the extra big great red spot would be a good clue, but even the people who squealed about what a great idea it was for a kid to be Jupiter didn't know much about its features.

He did school more than one grown-up as he trick-or-treated (including me). He let them know that all of the other planets in the solar system could fit inside of his. He told me that when you entered his atmosphere, it would smell like rotten eggs, which I surely did not know.

Mostly, though, he just shrieked with joy, heralding each new piece of candy that he got (with the exception of the person who gave him after dinner mints). This was the view of him and his mouse partner in candy mooching that we had for 99 percent of beggar's night on Thursday:

Last night, when we went to Perkins Observatory, he was well appreciated. and he got to stand up in front of the crowd to help illustrate Jupiter's features before stealing a quick look at his giant self in the telescope. It was a perfect celebration of both Halloween and the International Year of Astronomy (which we didn't get to observe with the rest of the world last weekend due to rainy weather.)

This could be our last space-themed Halloween costume. Last year he was the solar system. The year before that, he simply wanted to be "space" (Phase I and II.) When we chatted about it last night, one of the astronomers noted that he seems to be getting smaller each Halloween. At this rate, he's could be Eros or Eris next year.

Declan has told me that he wants to be some scary stabby person next year, I think because he's mostly mild-mannered and would like to try being scary on for size. We'll see what interests and fears another year brings. But Jupiter will live in a chest full of dress-ups, alongside his NASA uniform, space helmet, Star Trek: TNG captain's uniform, and the shimmery capes and fabrics that take him on daily journeys to places no preschooler has gone before.

Wild things

2009-10-18T10:08:00.003-04:00

There's this strange, displaced, unsettled feeling that can creep around you when you grow up with divorced parents. Places that you are supposed to call home don't always feel like they are yours. You're more likely to have people closely entangled in your life that haven't been invested in you all along... people who didn't know you when you were tiny and squishy and so clearly emanating the glow of endless possibilities. Even if they love you, they're as likely to fear as understand you when you act crazy or angry or pained or restless. They are less likely to know how to muster compassion for the complicated business of acting like a child.

I'm not nostalgic for this childhood feeling, but I was nonetheless grateful to see it reflected on the screen of a movie theater on a Friday afternoon. I don't remember seeing it there before. The dissonant parts of my childhood were probably pretty different from those of Maurice Sendak, Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze, but the tone they were able to evoke was strikingly familiar to me, in a lovely yet menacing way.

We took Declan, and frankly, the stark joy, disappointment, warmth and anger in Max's home life at the beginning of the film was far more agitating to him than the land of the clomping, reckless, emotionally conflicted wild things. He laughed the most hysterically and showed the most fear in the first 15 minutes. He was worried that Max wouldn't return to his mother, so, to him, the ending was especially happy. I imagine that his response, and who he relates to the most in the film, is likely to change as he gets older.

There's been a ton of discussion in every form of media about whether or not this movie is really for kids. I get tired of hearing people make that judgment, because honestly, I think it depends on the kid, what he or she likes and is able to process. (Not to mention the fact that many things that are made "for kids" by adults prove to be unwatchable, so I'm not sure why critics feel so obligated to bother with that flawed measuring stick. A lot of the greatest kids' films I've seen appealed to adults as well.)

I can tell you, though, that Declan and I have had several great conversations about the movie and the intense emotions presented in it all weekend. We've talked about what's scary to him and what's scary to me. We've even talked about how and why a book can be so different from a movie, which opens a new and fabulous vista for our discussions about stories and art.

I'll leave the nitpicky criticism about the filmmaking and its relative artfulness up to better-equipped people.

I simply loved this movie because of what it moved me to remember and the rich moments on new emotional terrain that it has given me to explore with my kid.

------------

If you want a clinical blow-by-blow description of the potentially upsetting parts of almost any current movie including this one, Kids-In-Mind movie ratings are extremely helpful.

For more to chew on, visit Scott Mendelson of Huffington Post's review, which I feel is quite on-point, and Stephanie Zacherek of Salon's review, which isn't.

Self-portrait

2009-10-15T13:05:00.003-04:00

The art of not knowing everything

2009-10-14T10:36:00.014-04:00

I once worked with a woman who gave elaborate thespian phone performances. Not the nasty $2.99 per minute kind, but plenty that had the undertow of a more genuine nastiness.

She lived at the desk next door to me in our little room in newspaperland, so eavesdropping was essentially unavoidable unless I brought in headphones and blared L7's "Smell the Magic."

I overheard her cooing sympathies for various health ailments and workplace stressors, humble babydoll requests for interviews, breathless apologies for misprints and uproarious laughs at jokes that couldn't possibly have been that funny. But the minute the receiver hit the base, she would start swearing at the phone like a late-night cable comedian. She'd make colorful hand gestures at it, slam nearby file drawers with her foot, shake her head, yell at the ceiling like a thin, malevolent, female Charlie Brown.

If you threw a softball "what happened?" question her way during the episode, she'd gladly assail the character of her phone acquaintances (minor characters in her life, really) with ruthless assessments. They were incompetent morons at best, insane morons at worst. She was certain.

I was young and at first, I found her routine pretty funny. There's a sexy, star-chamber quality to cattiness and gossip, especially in the workplace. Moreso in the media workplace, where you high five each other when you manage to unearth the failings of powerful people in the world and lay them bare in print. You feel like an insider. You know stuff that it seems like you shouldn't. You feel smarter than other people. You find new, cleverer, wittier ways to call out what you perceive as stupid, inane or otherwise inferior. It's so easy to know everything when you're young.

But at some point, I realized that it wasn't funny. It might even be dangerous. Not because I am a great arbiter of morals, but because it became easy to see that this behavior was bound to come home to roost on my own rear end.

I saw the same people who had bitched together about someone else bitch separately about each other. When you're dancing in the middle of that kind of social quagmire, there's no question that you're going to be the bitched about person eventually. You will hurt people and get hurt. In the pernicious culture of the newsroom, I'm pretty sure I did my share of both.

I don't remember a light bulb moment, but I remember the desperate feeling that I needed to extract myself from toxic work socializing as best I could. I started nodding more. Listening more. Withholding judgment. I searched for metaphors that would properly reflect what I was hearing from the person about how they felt instead of joining their rigged jury. This kind of listening has actually come in handy in my writing life a lot since. And my spiritual life. And my mothering life.

Finding the words to celebrate or applaud things authentically, meaningfully is much harder than finding new, clever ways to bitch about things. Vengefulness is easier than compassion. Suspicion is easier than faith. (This is clearly part of the way that Buddhism appeals to my protestant work ethic.)

It is harder to celebrate and find joy in other people's children than it is to pick apart the alien ways that they might influence yours. It's definitely easier to judge other parents and children than it is see your own flaws. Playgrounds, like newsrooms, are breeding areas for cattiness. Yet, when I make a conscious effort to look for what to celebrate instead of what to criticize, I've discovered that finding joy makes everything easier. The older the kids get, the harder it looks, but it is easier. It's more fun. It's lighter. It's less isolating. It's worth the effort.

I make no claim that I've mastered these things. I decided early this year that aspirations are my gig, not hardened vows or easily fractured resolutions. I'm determined to remind myself of the mistakes I have made, or keep making. I'm determined to keep trying.

Swordfighting

2009-10-05T07:59:00.006-04:00

We went to a little boy's birthday party at a park this weekend. Every kid got a cool Styrofoam sword that made sounds and flashed red lights for showing up. Declan hid under my shirt before accepting the gift, but once it was cast into his hands, he took off and began battling with two other boys like a samurai.

They whacked the Styrofoam until the plastic straws that held the lights inside cracked and fell out, and the blades got noodly. They laughed and yelled and then the smallest of the three got whacked in the face. They all lowered their weapons and took a step backwards.

"That was too rough!" The boy yelled, rubbing his cheek.

"I'm sorry," the boy who landed the blow offered.

"Are you okay?" he and Declan chorused. "Do you still want to play?"

"I do. Just not so rough."

They agreed, and resumed fighting with a little less edge. Soon, Declan started dying on the field instead, then gave up the battle all together before deciding that he'd rather eat fruit salad and chat with some of these new, four-year-old friends.

Honestly, my son is better at conflict resolution than I am.

I learn so much by watching the way he is in the world.

It's my 500th post! Let's talk about death...

2009-09-25T16:47:00.000-04:00

"Why are these big rocks covering them?" he asked me, as though someone had put the gravestone there to hold my grandparents under the earth.

"They help you and I to find the place where their bodies are buried," I told him.

"Where are they? Have they turned to dust yet? Why can't I see them?"

My last grandmother died a year before Declan was born. My grandfather five years before that. He knows them from pictures and stories.

"They're buried six feet below here. Inside of a casket - a big wooden box with... pillows."

"But why can't I see them?"

"Most people don't like to be remembered the way they look when they're dead and turning into dust — they want to be remembered the way they looked when they were alive, like they look in the pictures we have."

When I went to a parent education session about sex, death and lying in early spring of this year, the teachers warned me that age 4 is when these issues come calling. Don't offer him a bunch of information about it, they suggested. But when the questions come, be honest and answer them. If you make stuff up because you don't want to worry or upset them, they'll eventually find out. Better to be with them through the hard feelings instead of thinking we need to protect them from them. Better to be compassionate and someone they can trust.

It took Dec all of a month after turning four before the questions began this summer. We had big tears before bedtime for two weeks in a row when the thought of my ill stepfather (Dec calls him grandfafa), dying left him breathless. And the questions... Does it hurt when you die? When will grandfafa die? Will I have to die when grandfafa dies?

For weeks, it continued to emerge at all hours. We'd be talking about kids at play camp in the car, then I'd hear his throat suddenly start to tighten and he'd ask me "why does everything have to die? I don't want anyone to die, I don't want things to change."

I was afraid that science was going to be our foil as the intransigence of these biological truths hit him. I was afraid of the day when his knowledge of black holes and colliding galaxies and dark matter began to merge with an understanding of mortality. How overwhelming to be four and have such a sense of the vastness and forces of space, which often make Earth's Mother Nature look as ferocious as a gnat.

For a few weeks, that fear felt justified. He was scared about the sun, because he knows it will expand in 4.6 billion years and likely incinerate the Earth, but it was hard to convince him what a long time from now that really is. He came up with complicated methods to save the earth from burning. I tried, gingerly, to explain that we, and no one that we now know will be here when that happens. He worried that the sun could become a black hole until a nice physics student told him it wasn't big enough to do that. And somewhere in that barrage of constant questions and explanations, he finally drew his own tear-filled conclusion that he will die, too.

But science has actually been our savior though this process. I took the box with my dog Samson's ashes from the china cabinet and let him examine them, tried to help him understand how much I loved my dog and that I knew it didn't hurt when he burned because he was dead. We've talked about all of the things that dust has helped create - planets, moons, dinosaurs, us. We talk about perennial and annual flowers and how things regenerate. Our cat brought us a dead mouse the other day and I buried it in the yard. For days afterwards he asked me, "is it turning to dust yet?"

We explained heaven and reincarnation as ideas that some people believe in. We told him that death is one of those things that no one understands for certain. He seems to find the greatest comfort in some of the scientific certainties about what happens to a body or a flower or a star, which I honestly didn't see coming.

He likes to die dramatically, repeatedly on the playground, preferably in slow motion. And we are still constantly addressing questions about what dies, how it dies, how long it takes it to die. I'm sure we'll be in this process for a long time. But I'm so much more hopeful and less afraid about his capacity to emotionally process these things now.

Last night we were talking about what he dreams his life might be like when he's older. Do you want to dance? Sell tomatoes? Be a dog doctor? Teach kids? Study the stars? Paint pictures?
(I try not to make a career in science a foregone conclusion. I want him to be comfortable choosing whatever he wants to be.)

Becoming a daddy keeps coming up first on his list.

"Someday, when I die, I'll be a grandfather, and then I will turn to dust," he told me. "It's all part of my journey to become part of everything in the universe."

Declan= MC2

A word about my husband

2009-09-17T05:38:00.006-04:00

I don't say much about my husband on this blog.

Sometimes, when he's angry with me, he'll tell me that what I say here makes it sound as though I'm raising our son alone. I'm certainly not. Declan is over the moon in love with his daddy. Dan has the patience to read all of the fine print in science books with him and the theatrical experience to make fiction exciting. They hit baseballs on our back deck and play Wizard of Oz in the park. They walk the dog and take out the garbage. When Dec misjudges one of leaps from the chair to the couch and whacks an elbow, Dan runs for the ice pack and applies it with the love and sympathy. He cooks. He cleans. He does all the stuff that certain people who perceive him as more of a rock and roll street icon would not imagine. Instead, I find that many imagine that he's not a sober person with a wife and a young child. At least that's what I gather from the expressions of several of the people who recognize him out in public, but not us, or his normal-looking lifestyle.

But he is a rock and roll street icon in our town, too. People stop and thank him for the music he brought into Columbus for so many years. There have always been rumors about him. Some of them are true. People like to ask about Nirvana or Buddy Guy or (insert band name here). We hear about shout-outs from touring acts when they play other places who miss being in his room.

When Little Brother's closed, I did a lot of writing here with his blessing, because it seemed like the best place to process what was happening. I still get visitors that come, page through everything within that tag and never return, because I'm not really who they're looking for. I'm okay with that.

Now that more than two years have passed since the club closed, he's finally succumbed to my needling (further suggested by all kinds of people) that he write down some of the experiences of that time. I hoped he would write down the stories he'll want his son to know when he's about 20 years old, and now he is, with a little bit of editing help from yours truly.

Please visit, subscribe or share as you see fit:

Little Brother Blogs.

P.S. If you know Dan, you likely know that the blogging platform is pretty much made for him. Like many local folks, my first memories of him are standing behind the bar at Stache's, wearing shorts even if it was freezing outside and regaling his happy hour regulars with stories. All the while he'd be answering phone calls from booking agents, bands and a public that often didn't comprehend the concept of what a smaller venue devoted to live original music was.

WTC

2009-09-11T10:46:00.014-04:00

This is me in all of my three-weeks-from-17, just-graduated glory, standing next to my brother on a commuter ferry that took us from central New Jersey to South Street Seaport, right in the shadow of the World Trade Center.

In the 1980s, we made most of our treks into New York with our dad. But on the occasion of my early departure from high school, we went back to visit a few childhood friends with mom.

Mom and I unearthed these pictures this summer. Andy and I look so damn serious, which probably has something to do with the fact that it's early in the morning on an overcast day and neither of us has discovered coffee yet.

I know we're anxious to get there because we were always anxious to get to Manhattan. At least I know that I was. I was always anxious to be in the thick of crowds and inconceivable buildings and art and celebrities walking around like ordinary people and giant fiberglass whales and taxi cabs and attitude and Fifth Avenue store windows and Broadway musicals.

It seems so much more mortal to me now. But my childhood and teenage memories of this city are the ones that I carry. I remember it this way. I remember this skyline. It was everything in the universe that I could imagine on one little island.

Does Brian Williams live in our world?

2009-09-10T10:38:00.009-04:00

The last few weeks of no camp and parental work scrambling and no preschool have led to far more television consumption in this house than I would like to admit. Combine that with the onset of four, which has meant a thousand questions about death and birth, and I've been dancing in between the real and fictional universe, trying to draw lines in the air that help make the distinction between the two a little clearer to Declan without diminishing the fun and beauty of fiction and fantasy.

Enter questions like:

"Will Santa Claus ever die?"

"Will I ever be trapped in a warp bubble?" (In a kid world where I keep meeting Star Wars kids, mine is Star Trek kid, which I've found to be far less common, possibly because it's easier to describe combat and war than it is to venture into "a warp bubble is a scientific theory, sweetie.")

We've spent a fair amount of time discussing the fact that cartoon characters come out of someone's imagination, even if they do regular-people type things. Then he sees commercials for things like Dora Live! where cartoon characters seem suddenly touchable. He gets really excited and yells "MOMMY, WE NEED TO GO SEE DORA LIVE! WE NEED TO SEE THE PLACE WHERE DORA EXISTS IN OUR WORLD! DORA! IS IN! OUR! WORLD!"

Sesame Street is one of those shows that I love most of all, but can be hard to explain because of the combo of real people and puppets. Brian Williams recently guest starred on Sesame Street and reported on all of the characters coming down with a case of "Mine-itis." A chicken kept stealing his microphone and yelling "MINE!" (As much as Dec loves science and documentaries that seem way beyond him, he also loves to get his little kid on.)

So last night, as I was explaining that the president was about to give a speech that was really important to mommy, Brian Williams appeared. Declan's brow furrowed. He grabbed my chin and turned my face to the screen.

"Mommy? Does Brian Williams live in our world?"

Thumbelina, Thumbelina, don't dream about a cow*

2009-09-09T08:58:00.007-04:00

I ran for 30 minutes straight for the first time yesterday in yucky pre-rain humidity.

I've discovered that once animals realize that you're not running after them, they find runners fascinating. A pair of deer scared the bejeezus out of me the other day on the trail, but once they had scampered about 25 feet outside the path, they stood there and stared at me. I said "hey dudes" and waved and still they stared. When last I saw them, they were still staring at me. When I run in my urban neighborhood, the squirrels do the exact same thing - they jump into a nearby tree and gawk. They fill their mouths with giant nuts and jump onto a tree and gawk. If Columbus' squirrels are among those who tweet, at least one of those "stares" was for me today.

I'm kind of amazed that I've been able to stick to this Couch to 5k program. I'm not reclaiming any former glory here, or even any former glorious body. I've never been remotely a jock - more of a sometimes walker, late-night dancer who attended a lot of summer day camps, one Outward Bound (repelling is fun!) and used to be able to put a basketball through a hoop without hitting the rim. When I was nine, I saw a coach about running on a regional team and he put me through my paces for a day, but the post-run rubdown positively creeped me out and I quit.

For Couch to 5K, I've followed the schedule to the letter. This is my approach to most things I try (as long as they seem reasonable to begin with) - I suspend disbelief and put my faith into the idea that all will work out as I've been told. Once I've done it for a while, or the intended duration, I make my own modifications. In this case, I have been amazed by how well I've been able to feel my progress every third run or so. This is my ninth and final week - three days of running for 30 minutes (or 5K). Who knew this was possible? Seriously!

I don't have a ton of weight loss to show for my efforts, but there has been some and most importantly, I feel entirely different. Like my determination to eat less meat and more local food, it feels like I'm making changes that I have a better shot at sustaining. I just read that sticking with running this long officially makes me a runner, but that I ought to hang here for 2-3 months so my bones and connective tissues have a chance to catch up with my new, stronger muscles. That works for me. I'm not dying to win marathons. I just want to be healthy.

Yesterday I watched Obama's speech to kids with my son. He was kind of excited that the president would talk to kids until he heard the president mention that he was there to talk to kids in Kindergarten through 12th grade. Having a year of preschool left, and several older friends and cousins makes you painfully aware that you aren't in Kindergarten yet. As I listened, Declan sat on the floor and flew a plastic policeman through the solar system. Sadly, this policeman died and had to be buried under the letter P. He was later resurrected, so perhaps there is a cult forming around him in an alternate dimension.

By the end of the speech Dec was meowing like a kitty (if we're connected on Facebook you may know this already). In fact, every time I have asked him what he thought of the speech since, he has meowed like a kitty. So, while I have found the accusation that Obama is trying to brainwash children into becoming liberal automatons utterly baseless, I now must face the possibility that he might be trying to turn them into cats.

Here are some of my favorite posts on the speech subject, by the way:

The Bad Astronomer hilariously points out how crazy is being mainstreamed.

Corporate Babysitter reminds us how many marketers have unfettered access to our children.

Charlotte-Anne Lucas posted a Wordle of the top 50 words used in the speech.

Lenore Skenazy of Free-Range Kids quells our paranoia once again, with humor.

And Emily wrote the president a note.

Peace out, kitties!

* Declan modified the lyrics Danny Kaye sang in the movie Hans Christian Anderson (which his dad was watching) because he had one of his recurring dreams in which he tries to get out of bed, but some bloviating bovine blows him back. It was a better post title than anything I could come up with, so there it is.

Things I find unforgivable

2009-09-04T09:55:00.000-04:00

A couple of years ago I was at a Fourth of July potluck outside of town. Some inebriated in-law of a cousin of a friend of the host showed up and, as I spooned tabbouleh onto my plate, began lecturing to several people around me that all people of Middle Eastern descent need to be deported from the U.S. He didn't stop there, insisting that those of us who didn't happen to believe that the country should bomb other parts of the world into the stone age were ignorant and sure to be slaughtered.

Now, I'm a person who, in my more adventurous reporting days, did things like take a handgun class with NRA members, and spent hours in personal conversations with Fundamentalist Christians - two groups that may as well have been Martians to me, ethically speaking. But those reporting exercises put me past knee-jerk disdain and into a place where I could sometimes locate some hard-won common ground. I've had mostly civil conversations with Republican relatives and friends, even if I sometimes walked away with my ears burning. I sought out extremely different opinions from my own when I began to interact with people online in 1997. I try my best to get angry with actions and policies, not people.

With a checked-shirt man advocating genocide and racism at an Independence Day picnic, standing feet away from my toddler son, I didn't keep my cool so well. I felt this anger rising from the pit of my stomach and I simply bellowed at him:

"PLEASE GET YOUR DISGUSTING HATRED AWAY FROM MY SON. NOW!" (I did say please.) He moved away a little, though not enough for me, and I took us as far away from him at the party as I physically could. Being tolerant of political difference, in my view, does not require me to be tolerant of a person advocating violence or fear.

Earlier this year, when we went to a public venue where we could look at stars and planets through telescopes, a woman started speaking heatedly to one of the resident scientists, who maintained a remarkably calm and polite demeanor.

"This world is going to end," she hissed at him. "Armageddon will be here soon and you'd better get yourself right with God before that happens."

She spoke of floods and earthquakes and hurricanes and rapture while standing maybe five feet from my almost four-year-old who I think deserves to have faith in the fact that the Earth has a future, no matter how tumultuous. He deserves to have his dreams of piloting spacecrafts unimpeded by some self-righteous person who had no thought in her head that the things she was yelling could frighten the crap out of a small child. Thankfully, he was so wrapped up in a computer that takes you through the universe that he didn't absorb it (now that he's truly four and dealing with mortality questions, he would). Luckily, the conversation stopped just as my husband asked her to quiet down because, you know, if you want to convince your children that this world is a goner and isn't worth participating in beyond stepping up to the next level, that's your faith and your business and God bless. Please don't make it mine.

This week, I took my son to the Health Care Reform Now rally because I am sick of this bizarre impasse our country has skidded into and sick of struggling with our current system. The first sign I see as we drive in is a swastika with Obama's name inside and I turn into Aunt Mildred and I stick out one finger and I tsk tsk tsk at the crowd. Shame on them. That sign, to me, is just a subverted way of advocating violence against our president wrapped in the guise of free speech. Because of the first amendment, you can make it and parade it through the public square. And because of the first amendment, I can say "shame on you" and "I think that's a subverted way of advocating violence against our president wrapped in the guise of free speech," and that's not me censoring you, that's me countering your opinion.

I'm sick of the media giving "balanced" time to groups of thirty versus a group of over 1,000. The fourth estate should be giving more time to those who are better equipped with research, facts or true stories about actual people instead of covering every political rift with less depth than they give the average football game. Seriously. I sat there and I listened to a story about a 17-year-old girl who can't get health care coverage because of her parents' medical conditions. I listened to promises that the public option is not negotiable, which I hope is true because my family is counting on that. But almost all of the coverage I found gave the 30 people outside the same amount of time or column space as the much larger group inside.

What are people thinking, anyway? I don't know anyone who hasn't had their health care insurance costs get jerked up and certain costs turned down arbitrarily for years - and unless we're independently wealthy, it's cost us way more than any of our taxes. Recently I had a lovely experience when a $500 bill showed up in my mailbox from a doctor's appointment I had about a year and a half ago. In one conversation with the insurance company way back when, I was told that nearly all adult preventative care had been dropped from our policy (take heed if you have OSU student health insurance, ladies, a pap smear or illness is all you're allowed), so a blood panel, and in fact, my whole appointment wasn't covered, even though it resulted in a referral to a surgeon and eventually, surgery. My doctor's office communicated that there was actually medical treatment for an illness on this visit, and suddenly, after all this time, the insurance company decided to pay an additional $15.00 (why even bother?) of the bill and pass the rest back to me. Now I have more arguing to do, or I have to pay a bill I really didn't expect or think that I should owe, which makes me feel sick.

So, stop telling me that the fact that I want universal health care makes me anti-American. The free market has zilch for health care choices. The ranks are closed - if you are an American like myself, who has been resolutely independent for most of my career, you are basically screwed by the current system. If you are like my husband, who has a preexisting eye condition and has also always worked for himself, screw you too! When people like us are lucky, maybe our local chamber of commerce will offer a plan with premiums less than the size of our mortgage payment or we can stick to catastrophic coverage.

We are all most free to work for big corporations that have little or no loyalty to employees in order to get insurance from corporations that have shown us their priorities - getting out of paying what you pay them to take care of is more important than anyone's actual health. That's.... freedom?

It seems to me to be as awful or worse than, say, taxation without representation. I have to pay corporations that I didn't elect and that I can't vote out of office. Corporations have more rights than me! The government won't make it more bureaucratic. It simply can't possibly get more bureaucratic than it already is.

Twinkle, twinkle

2009-08-26T10:44:00.011-04:00

The last couple of weeks have been rough. With camp long since over and another three weeks before the preschool year begins, there's been no consistent social diversion for my son. The adults of the household are grouchy, mostly because we have some work, but not enough, and projects that we thought were sure to pan out for us are currently stuck in the mud. I've been mired in that overwhelming, ultimate incompetent parent feeling. I'm so worried over providing both emotionally and materially that neither effort seems to be going all that well.

At this time last year, it became clear that Declan is as deeply social as he is intensely curious - or, at least that when he gets the opportunity to be social, it seems to offset some of his intensity. By the time we got him into his first classroom, I was desperate for him to have that new place to explore, new people to ask questions of, new things to become curious about. I spent entire days answering esoteric questions about space and anatomy. And I had to look up most of those answers because I don't know what's inside of a brain cell or what a neutron star is off the top of my head. I am one of two primary decoders for his universe, and while that's mostly a thing of beauty and honor, it can also be exhausting, especially since I can't afford not to work for a living as well as my work as a mom. When I was distracted or unable to answer those questions, it often made him mad. The opening of his social world made his demands on me less intense.

Last Saturday, we took him to COSI, where they had a special space day in celebration of the International Year of Astronomy. We lucked out and got a personal tour of an exhibit of deep space images taken by various telescopes from an OSU astronomy professor. Declan didn't hold back a thought about any image, 99 percent of which he could identify on sight, prefacing nearly every sentence with "scientists think" or "scientists believe..." His dad and I reminded him that our tour guide was, in fact, a scientist a couple of times, to which the patient and amiable scholar said "it's okay, your son is really quite a scientist himself." One of the young women who ran the day's demonstrations talked to him about eclipses and the life cycle of a star at length, asked to shake his hand and told him that she hoped he gets to do whatever he wants to in life and science.

On the same morning, he spent several minutes afraid of the live, fuzzy costumed character from Zula Patrol that he had especially hoped to see. He orbited him at a distance, worked up his courage, then suddenly ran to hug him and have his picture taken. He played happily in a litter box full of flour and cocoa, throwing rocks to get the idea of a meteor strike. (We now have a bin full of flour, cocoa and fling-worthy marbles at home.) Because above all else, he is four.

He hit me the other day because he was angry that I wouldn't let him have a third popsicle. Then we talked about things, made up and he told me about feelings he's had about classmates and new situations that he's never shared before. He loves to watch Calliou. He's obsessed over which stars are big enough to become black holes and whether they would impact our solar system. He does pratfalls around the house and asks me to film them so we can submit them to America's Funniest Videos.

This morning he snuggled me and bounced around the bed while his dad talked about letting me sleep a little while longer. Then Declan pressed the top of his forehead to mine, stroked my hair and face and sang all of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" in his sweetest and quietest voice before letting me be for a while.

One way to recycle a tire from NASA

2009-08-20T09:23:00.011-04:00

This is a tire that was used on the front landing gear of the Space Shuttle Endeavor on a 1994 mission. I saw at least seven or eight kids of multiple ages do some variation of this kind of play (at the Neil Armstrong Air and Space Museum in Wapakoneta).

What a cool way to get closer to space.

Things I did not know a month ago

2009-08-15T21:33:00.000-04:00

1. When a distant star shakes and shimmies ever so slightly (visible only through a high-powered telescope), that's a good indication that it has planets orbiting around it. The gravitational pull of big dudes like Jupiter and Saturn are most likely make their suns go a-quiver, which is why most of the exoplanets that astronomers have discovered are gas giants, not the bitty Earth-like places.

2. Even as the lone male dancer in a ballet class that wasn't about space, my son loved to dance. He wants to stay in ballet lessons. People have told me that there are good scholarships out there for boys. I need to find out if that's true.

3. It is possible to be winded by a sixty-second run one day, and find yourself running 20 minutes in a row without falling down dead five weeks later.

4. When your child begins to develop a real connection to visual art, it's a beautiful thing. Especially when that connection involves imitating a piece by saying "I QUIT!" loudly and doing a faceplant on the floor in the middle of a Downtown gallery.

5. Letting your only child hang out with a couple of families that have three kids is an awesome reminder that left to their own devices, kids can and will work a lot of stuff out without your help.

Geek love in real life

2009-08-11T09:13:00.000-04:00

I read Geek Love by Catherine Dunn when I was in my mid-20s — a novel rich with wicked and sympathetic details about a family of carnival geeks and the social pecking order of people who market physical differences or deformities as entertainment.

I had seen the sideshow tents on the midway of the Ohio State Fair since I was a little girl, but never ventured in. The first time I decided to pay the admission so I could be an armchair anthropologist at the so-called "freak show" - shortly after reading Dunn's novel in the mid-1990s - I found only sword-swallowers, characters with a few corny costumes and some poor optical illusions. I was told that "political correctness" (a term that I loathe) had driven the traditional sideshow characters into obscurity. Geek love had supposedly become something only seen through a Diane Arbus camera lens to the past, even as the value of "Outsider art" was skyrocketing.

So I was surprised when Declan and I were walking into the Midway hell portion of the fair last week and a carnival caller yelled out for us to watch "the fire-eating Pygmy King." Wasn't "Pygmy" a pejorative term? Was "king" supposed to mitigate that? And weren't these shows the domain of illusionists and heavily tattooed self-mutilators who like to shove hooks and nails into themselves now? (I cannot stand to watch those things, by the way.)

So we stood there in the walkway and watched the "Pygmy King" eat some fire and then guzzle a bottle of Pepto while the caller heralded the other "wonders" inside of the tent, like hirsute and two-headed women. It was an evening special - only $2 for the show. And if I hadn't had Declan with me, I would have gone right in.

Holy chopper, Batman!

2009-08-08T14:02:00.006-04:00

This is the face you get...When you're four years old and looking at this:
Note: We've never played with or watched any kind of Batman, but helicopters are definitely cool.

Scarecrow housewives of Franklin County

2009-08-06T12:31:00.008-04:00

No comment.

Last year, they had cartoon characters.

Goulash

2009-08-04T10:53:00.000-04:00

Declan is upstairs, singing along to an extended disco remix of Donna Summer's "I Will Live for Love" that someone has set to a video parade of stellar objects on YouTube. It's the sweetest thing, hearing him croon those words in his creaky little falsetto, declaring his affection for love, especially the love of pulsars and nebulas and globular clusters.

I've just finished a proposal for a copywriting gig because it's really about time for me to do more copywriting gigs. A few people have written me some truly lovely recommendations on LinkedIn which has forced a little perspective for me about what I know how to do versus what I actually do. Times are weird, but I've had some interest in my work that's surprised me, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that at least some of it pans out. I also need to return some favors.

And I'm still recovering from a weekend trip up to my brother's farm. It was overwhelmingly lovely, especially watching Dec connect with his cousins so deeply, spending so much time with them unsupervised. All three of his cousins seemed happy to turn their family room into every planet in the solar system to help propel him into hours and hours of play. Legos became the international space station, the television stayed tuned to the NASA channel and everyone was sucked into a black hole. They put a chair in front of the door and told the adults to keep out, so we did.

I'm thinking about this blog, about treating my professional web site more like a blog because as I unearth family photos at my mother's house, I've also unearthed several printed pieces of mine that she and my grandparents clipped from newspapers and magazines and tucked into folders for posterity. I'm reminded of the kinds of stories I've done, some adventures I've had and the context of the media industry at that time. Here I mostly write about motherhood with dashes of sprituality and politics and self-help, but I'm dealing with some issues that I feel too vulnerable to process in this space, so I'm working on essays instead.

I'm mad at the "Blue Dogs" about health care reform.

Every week, I find that I enjoy running a little more.

I'm resentful of marketing-driven editorial policies to the degree that writing straight-up marketing materials is beginning to feel more honest.

I feel invisible on the Internet lately, maybe just in the wake of BlogHer, where so many people clearly make their connections real. I'm feeling left out because I didn't get to go, but kind of annoyed by the lack of gravity in the subsequent discussions about swag and stuff. Everyone is so quiet and lurky, although my friend Linda very kindly recommended this blog last week. (She writes about the ins and outs of and rhymes and reasons for publishing a children's book at her blog, so check it out.)