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Posts Tagged ‘NYTimes’

Busy Bee Birthdays

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on September 15, 2013| 3 Comments »

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Serenity in a mountain view

August and September are filled with birthdays in my family. The Bride and my sister Kay share back to back birthdays, I call us Virgo/Libra types (you can count me in later this month) – the Christmas party babies! Happy Birthday to them on this glorious weekend.

These two share more than a couple of dates on the calendar. Kay introduced the Bride to art in her New York City apartment. My sister studied at the Art Student’s League and she also helped to illustrate many medical books during her years working at Mt Sinai Hospital and producing graphic art for the Medical School. With sun pouring through her beautiful Upper East Side window overlooking a garden, the young Bride was given a pencil and a blank canvas along with the love and encouragement of her Aunt Kay.

Painting has been a common thread throughout both their lives. After a long high school day filled with too many AP classes, the Bride would settle into her art class and paint along with beautiful music.  My home is filled with drawings from those days. And Kay’s renditions of our farmhouse in the Berkshires, and our beautiful Welsh Corgis will always decorate our walls.

This meditative time, setting up the instruments of art, the pencils or delicate brushes and turpentine, the smells, the easel outdoors, the time alone to ponder and really see – to see their way into a subject – this bit of creation helped them deal with the everyday stress of school and work. It helped them to slow down.

The Bride sent me an article this week about being busy. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-trap/?_r=1&

Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work. They schedule in time with friends the way students with 4.0 G.P.A.’s  make sure to sign up for community service because it looks good on their college applications. I recently wrote a friend to ask if he wanted to do something this week, and he answered that he didn’t have a lot of time but if something was going on to let him know and maybe he could ditch work for a few hours. I wanted to clarify that my question had not been a preliminary heads-up to some future invitation; this was the invitation. But his busyness was like some vast churning noise through which he was shouting out at me, and I gave up trying to shout back over it.

The author, Tim Kreider, calls this addiction to busyness a kind of hedge against emptiness, an “existential reassurance.”  We impose it on ourselves and it makes us feel important. After all, if we’re always so busy, how can we ever take time off for self-awareness. He posits that you don’t hear people holding down two jobs with four kids complaining about being too busy, because they’re just plain exhausted. Interesting stuff, this monkey brain!

Surprisingly an old friend simultaneously posted an article about being a distracted parent, about always saying, “Hurry up!” to her child. And I could see how this attraction to being busy can get its start. The child who likes to dawdle, who stops to talk with strangers, who wants to engage with her environment soon learns to make a goal and stick to a time schedule. And if she or he doesn’t, they may be labeled “special” in school…instead of “artist.”

The Love Bug likes to stop for ice cream with her parents. Slowing down is something children can either help us to do, or we can teach them how to be anxious. We’re the adult in this equation, it’s our choice.  photo

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The Tyranny of Now

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 16, 2013| 5 Comments »

Yesterday was a busy day. It was also the second day of absolutely glorious weather, a day I’d rather have been enjoying outside instead of waiting in an endless waiting room.

While driving to said room, I was listening to an NPR author interview of Douglas Rushkoff who wrote Present Shock, the modern edition of future shock. He was talking about living in a digital age; about the constant pinging of tweets and Facebook messages that serve only to distance us from real time, face to face contact. We get a distorted feeling of connection; we are caught in an elusive virtual present. http://www.upworthy.com/loneliness-illustrated-so-beautifully-you-will-need-to-tell-someone?c=ufb1

The heroine in my current book is certainly not caught in her present. She’s a time traveler, sailing through the buildup to WWII, the 1980s and the flu epidemic of 1918. The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells is a wonderful ride for a summer read. The NYTimes calls it “Elegiac in tone,” full of intrigue brought on by an elusive doctor treating her for depression. Will Greta take a lover in this life? Will her philandering husband return to her in another? Is her twin brother really dead?

It seems Madonna has optioned the film rights to Andrew Sean Greer’s time traveling book!   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/31/madonna-the-impossible-lives-of-greta-wells_n_3683830.html

“I got a phone call last week. … I think it’s fine,” Greer said. ” … From a celebrity who read the book and loved it so much she called me up personally to talk to me about it. I thought it was going to be one of her assistants who was like, loved your book, she’s interested. Right. She didn’t read it. But oh no, no, no. She called me. She read it. She totally got it. There were a couple other people interested and they sort of all made a deal together, and she’s optioned the rights to it. We’ll see what happens. But it’s fun because it was Madonna.”

Yesterday, I was ready to complain about killing time in a doctor’s office. But my very own Dr MacDreamy saw me right away…so I had to switch my first few sentences above out of the present tense and into the past. And I awoke this morning to another glorious day, one day closer to a certain someone’s first birthday. If only we could slow time down just a little.

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Pretty Shameful

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , on April 18, 2013| 2 Comments »

What happens when Gabby Giffords writes an op-ed that says it better than anything else I may think of? My post this morning is short, because it’s never a good thing to write when you are mad. The Senate chose to give the American people the finger yesterday – claiming it’s criminals who need to be controlled, not guns. Well, guess what Senators, I’d like to suggest you look for another line of work. Because your actions yesterday were criminal, and the voters will retaliate when your seat comes up for re-election.

“I am asking every reasonable American to help me tell the truth about the cowardice these senators demonstrated. I am asking for mothers to stop these lawmakers at the grocery store and tell them: You’ve lost my vote. I am asking activists to unsubscribe from these senators’ e-mail lists and to stop giving them money. I’m asking citizens to go to their offices and say: You’ve disappointed me, and there will be consequences.” Gabby said this and more.

Democratic Senators Heitkamp, Pryor, Begich, and Baucus all voted to kill universal background checks. Shame on you. Granted we still would have needed a couple more Republicans to pass this common sense bill, and I have to think not all of them thought of the Sandy Hook parents as “props.” Here are all the Senators who voted against universal background checks, whose hands are in the pockets of the NRA.
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Want to help get Washington working again? http://represent.us

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The Power of Words

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , on April 14, 2013| 5 Comments »

Remember when cell phones and blue tooth technology were new? You’d see people walking down the street talking to themselves and wonder, what the heck? Then you’d see that little light in their ear and realize they were not actively hallucinating.

There is currently a cute little PSA on TV with a woman in a grocery store. She is also ostensibly talking to herself…until you notice the baby in her cart. She’s explaining how to pick out fruit, or just passing the time in language. Not baby talk, but really talking to her infant, as if she could understand her. Which is good, because they can.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/10/the-power-of-talking-to-your-baby/?src=me&ref=general According to this article, children who are raised in a poor or disadvantaged family are actually exposed to less language – fewer numbers of words – than other children before the age of 3. And it is this disparity, that can predict future school achievement or failure.

“The disparity was staggering. Children whose families were on welfare heard about 600 words per hour. Working-class children heard 1,200 words per hour, and children from professional families heard 2,100 words. By age 3, a poor child would have heard 30 million fewer words in his home environment than a child from a professional family. And the disparity mattered: the greater the number of words children heard from their parents or caregivers before they were 3, the higher their IQ and the better they did in school. TV talk not only didn’t help, it was detrimental.”

2,100 words per hour. Now I studied child psychology in college, I knew about the monkey studies, the importance of touch and bonding. I knew about Skinner and operant conditioning, to pick up your baby before they start crying, so they don’t learn to cry for attention all the time. To praise the behavior you want to continue, and ignore others or distract to avoid total tantrum meltdowns. It all seemed so simple. But no one had ever actually counted the words parents say, per hour, until now.

The lesson here is not just to increase the numbers of words you may say to your baby. Because I have a feeling, and it was not a part of this study so I’m going on instinct here, that distracted parenting may have the same effect as hearing 30 million fewer words. When I see a parent with their head in their lap, on their phone texting away, I see a baby who is adrift in the world. I see a toddler in a playground saying “Look at me,” and a parent giving a cursory nod before returning to their oh so important smart phone.

What you say, and not just the number of times you say it, matters – and it matters deeply. When people would compliment the toddler Bride on her appearance, I would always counter with “…and she’s so smart too.” Later, her Grandmother Ada would give her money for a report card that had the supposedly negative checks of “Raising your hand too much in class” or “Talking too much.” 

I will have to continue that tradition with the Love Bug. She is already saying “Mama” and “Nana.” And she is babbling up a storm. She is a lucky little lady to have very talkative parents. And also to have such a musical family. After all, I wonder how often babies are serenaded almost every night with live guitar music? Well, maybe Nashville babies?

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