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Flying Stella

Oscar Wish List

While we didn't get to see ALL the Oscar nominated films for 2009, we still managed to see most of them thanks to babysitters and piratebay. Overall, it seems 2009 was more on par with 2007, with one great picture and lots of good ones. Even still, I loved going to the movies this year. I love previewing the movies before they come out, reading the reviews...the popcorn and soda, the crowds, and the conversations with Kari on the walk home.

My favorite film this year was Inglourious Basterds and it will certainly go down as one of the best made films I've ever seen. The first twenty minutes of that film simply took my breath away and the performances of Melanie Laurent and Christoph Waltz were some of the best of the year.

And what can be said of Avatar...oh Mr. Cameron, you can certainly make a damn fun movie to watch. The sci-fi picture may just be the only movie I've ever wanted to see twice in the same day. I elbowed Kari and friends at least every few minutes - I just couldn't believe the spectacle before my eyes. Beautiful.

My favorites of the year, even if some of them weren't nominated:

**I didn't see The Messenger, which I have a sneaking suspicion might have cracked into a category or two.**

     Best Picture:

The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
District 9
Avatar
Zombieland
The Road
Fantastic Mr Fox

     Best Actor (lead/support):

Sharlto Copley, District 9
Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart
Tobey Maguire, Brothers
Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds
Viggo Mortensen, The Road
Nicolas Cage, Bad Lieutenant
Michael Stuhlbarg, A Serious Man

     Best Actress (lead/support):

Gabourey Sidibe, Precious
Mo'Nique, Precious
Vera Farmiga, Up In The Air
Melanie Laurent, Inglourious Basterds
Diane Krueger, Inglourious Basterds
Zoe Saldana, Avatar

     Best Director:

Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker
James Cameron, Avatar
Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds
Lee Daniels, Precious
Neil Blomkamp, District 9

     Best Writing (original/adapted):

Geoffrey Fletcher, Precious
Wes Anderson & Noah Baumbach, Fantastic Mr. Fox
Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds
David Benioff, Brothers
Joel & Ethan Coen, A Serious Man

SO, WHAT DO YOU THINK?? :)

Nonrequired Reading: 013: Generation A

Serge gave me the let's-play-ball stare. "Look, Julien, you're twenty-two and your frontal lobe is incomplete. And part of having a frontal lobe still in development is the sense that you have right to scorn everything around you, but all you really are is a biological cliche. Your brain has a few more years to go, so for the time being, you're this judgement robot and everything you think and feel is the product of incomplete cortical hookups and hormone-driven whims. So don't try to pull any sort of superiority trip on me, because at the moment, what you consider to be your personality is, to me, an unwanted and boring obstacle in the way of finding out what we need to know."

-- Douglas Coupland, Generation A, 45

A Hole In the Playground

The One Year Old

$1680.88

This is the amount of money we dropped on Stella in her first year. This includes every last dollar spent for diapers, sippy cups, formula, bike helmet, multiple car seats, two pack n' plays, furniture....a portable DVD player for the car (I NEVER thought I would buy that), etc, ETC. I'm not sure if this amount is greater or less than the average kid. If it seems like a small amount, I'd like to thank Craigslist and our family and friend hand me downs.

The most notable stat from my obsessive number crunching is that more than half the total amount came in the last three months alone, which means in the case of Stella, her age determines the amount we spend on her. UH-OH.

One Year In

Most days it seems normal, natural even, that I am carting her around and changing her diapers and chasing her around the house and rocking her to sleep.

But from time to time, in no certain pattern, she still catches me off guard. Those take-your-breath-away moments when I look at her and remember again that she is my girl and I am her Daddy. I AM HER DADDY. I sit back in a daze, shake my head in disbelief and feel a blast of gratitude and awe at this reality. SHE. IS. MY. DAUGHTER.

And her survival depends entirely on us. Which makes me wonder, how the hell did we figure all of this out? And how did she possibly manage to get to where she is now?

Sure, there were many phone calls with friends and MANY google searches to help us along the way, but I had no idea how much our instincts would matter more than books and advice. Especially Kari's. She seemed to always know what was wrong, what to do, when to stop, when to start, when to panic and when to relax. It always worked like clockwork when we would have a Stella problem...we'd search the web, gather the stories, trade suggestions, scratch our heads at what Stella needed (as opposed to what another four month old who hadn't pooped in a week needed) and feel hopeless and then, suddenly, Kari would go with her gut and all would be right.

Perhaps what still astonishes me more than anything is how much my emotions are intricately tied to her happiness. When her days are easy, when she is happy and healthy and pooping regularly and not teething, my days are as good as they have ever been in my whole life. And I literally mean this. When she has one of those blissful days, I feel in the clouds, as deliriously happy as any of the adventures I've experienced. And when she has a hard day, the clouds of the good day part and I come tumbling down, falling as low as I ever have. What is the most shocking is that these days could come one right after the other. I know this is probably true of most first time parents in the first year, but I still can't believe how hopelessly depressed I am after she has one of those fussy mornings followed by a lunch disaster where she refuses to eat, followed by a rash that keeps getting bigger and forces her to scream every time we change her, followed by a night of flexing her independent I'm-not-going-to-sleep-no-matter-what wails. And this is all after feeling as happy as ever the night before when she cuddled and kissed me and went straight to sleep.



It feels like ages ago that we were a family of two. The days when packing for a weekend trip to Big Bear Lake took a few minutes, when seeing two movies a week was normal, when dinner out lasted as long as we wanted it too. The days of sitting around dreaming of what our little Stella would look like. Those days do not seem like yesterday and this year, despite what we were told, did not go by quickly.

I can't wait for year two.

Stella's First Year In Photo Booth

Stella's evolution through Photo Booth...volume would help. :)




Happy 1st birthday kiddo...

Nonrequired Reading: 012: Shop Class As Soul Craft

The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, who has no real effect in the world. But craftsmanship must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.

-- Matthew Crawford, Shop Class As Soulcraft

_________________________

While at times tedious and extremely heady, Crawford's work moved and challenged me to rethink "knowledge work" vs. "manual work" or white collar vs blue collar. He makes a strong case for manual labor, runs through it's history and weaves his own story as a motorcycle mechanic into the book. I wouldn't necessarily recommend the book, which I doubt I would have made it through if I wasn't listening to it in the car, but I would highly recommend his essay that preceded the book. You can check it out here and it's definitely worth thirty minutes of your time.

A Week Without Meat

Since finishing Eating Animals a few weeks ago, our meat intake has gone down drastically. Though I didn't know it, my infrequent meat questioning over the years had placed me at the precipice of vegetarianism and it seems Foer's book has pushed me over the edge.

I certainly didn't intend to become an almost vegetarian in 2010, but now when it comes to eating animals, I no longer care for it. The mental leap it now takes for me to eat meat simply trumps whatever wonderful taste it may provide. (Someday, it would be nice to have that sort of resolution when it comes to my Coke, Andes Mints and Ben and Jerry's intake.)

Last week we decided to go without meat entirely, which provided a new level of thought regarding our food (ESPECIALLY since I don't eat cheese either).

For breakfast, Stella and I had our usual feast of four hard boiled eggs and yoghurt. For lunch, I munched on rice, beans, avocado sandwiches, oranges and chips and salsa. Dinner was the tricky part, but we managed to score a few great ideas. One is my sister Jamie's AMAZING curried lentils, which we scarfed down over the course of a couple of days. Kari also managed to find a vegetarian Caribbean curry that was quite tasty, despite a what-the-hell recipe.

In the end, a meatless week felt like a healthy week. We primarily traded meat for fruits and beans, and the healthier we ate, the less junk food we consumed as well.


- For when we do eat chicken, I think I have found a nice alternative to the factory farmed raised poultry. It's not quite as good as knowing a local farmer, but it's close, especially for us California kids. It's called Mary's Chicken and it can be found at Whole Foods (at least the one in Pasadena). You can check out their website for the details and even watch a video from the farm. We have definitely gone with Mary a few times since going almost veg a few weeks ago.

Milestones and Then Some

In the same week our Element flipped to six digits, Stella rode in her bike seat for the first time. From wearing an uncomfortable helmet to zipping down Lake Avenue in cool morning temperatures, she seemed to handle the new experience like a pro. I knew the ride was going well when I turned around to see her feet crossed, her go to position when she's relaxed.







She seems older these days, just a few weeks before her first birthday. It's not just that she's climbing everything or playing hide and go seek or drinking whole milk or any other number of new things that seem to come in rapid succession. Her eyes seem different...the way she peers around corners or stares into us as if channeling a deeper level of understanding. She interacts with us differently. She gets her feelings hurt. Her personality is a whole lot of personality.

She's beginning to feel like a toddler.

DIY Infant Kitchen

We hope to build her a more authentic wooden kitchen when she is bit older, but for now, this $5 cardboard box kitchen will suffice. :)




Materials:

- Cardboard box (free)
- Black matte board (free...we had leftovers)
- Tackle paper ($2)
- Coathanger turned into nobs ($1)
- Showerhead turned into faucet ($1)
- Bowl turned into sink ($1)

Eating Animals

[disclaimer: I know. It's loooonnng. I think I'm making up for several months of pictures without much written material. Think of all the time I've saved you (the seven of you who read this blog) by only posting pictures...now it will even out.]

Should I consume less meat? Should I only eat meat from reliable sources? Should I stop eating animals altogether?

These are just some of the questions spinning a tangled web through my mind after finishing Jonathon Safron Foyer's wonderful book Eating Animals. His research is thorough (he committed three years to the project), balanced (he used the most conservative statistics available) and about as unradical as a book about factory farms can get.

It wasn't just this book, or these past few weeks reading it, that got me thinking about my meat intake. This internal dispute has been going on since 2005 when I stumbled upon a copy of Fast Food Nation, and continued through the years with Michael Pollan and the recent documentary Food, Inc. And finally, I seem poised to take some sort of leap into a mysterious and foggy eat-less-meat place, a position that I couldn't even begin to imagine the implications. What do I order out? What happens when we eat at a friends place? If I decide to eat some meat, where do I get it from?

This book, along with myriad other sources, has challenged me on several fronts. Probably what eats at me the most in regard to eating animals is the entire food process that takes place from the animal's birth to slaughter to transport to my mouth. And since 80-99% of the meat we eat comes from a factory farm, it only makes matters worse. The amount of research and interviews and videotapes of the gross and inhumane treatment of animals that happens in factory farms is staggering (think workers abusing animals in the cruelest ways possible). And even when the animals aren't being abused by their caretakers, their very existence is a short and cruel means to an end (think battery cages and disease and famine). One example Foer gives is that of a pregnant sow (and this is only half of it):

"Consider the life of a pregnant sow. Her incredible fertility is the source of her particular hell. While a cow will give birth to only a single calf at a time, the modern factory sow will birth, nurse, and raise an average of nearly nine piglets. She will invariably be kept pregnant as much as possible, which will prove to be the majority of her life...After her piglets are weaned (14 days instead of the normal 14 weeks), a hormone injection makes the sow rapidly "cycle" so that she will be ready to be artificially inseminated again in only three weeks.

Four out of five times a sow will spend the sixteen weeks of her pregnancy confined in a "gestation crate" so small that she will be not be able to turn around. Her bone density will decrease because of the lack of movement. She will be given no bedding and often will develop quarter-sized, blackened, pus-filled sores from chafing in the crate.

To avoid excessive weight gain and to further reduce feed costs, the crated sow will be feed restricted and often hungry."

And when you think about the way we have CREATED these animals through genetic engineering (vs. animal husbandry), the meat we eat doesn't even seem like real food. Through great feats of science, we have engineered chickens, for example, to grow so rapidly that they are slaughtered after 42 days of life. They are so fat they can't fly and often can barely walk by the time slaughter day arrives. And the only way they can even survive those 42 miserable days (sometimes even 39 days) are because we have laced them with hormones and antibiotics. The hormones and chemicals keeping them alive are also coming into my body, which doesn't sit very well. And the kicker for me on this front is that we don't even know the physical implications all this meat eating is having on our bodies because factory farming is such a new trend. And the same goes for pork and beef and even fish, believe it or not.

Then there are the slaughterhouses. And the greedy factory farm owners who have literally put hundreds of thousands of family farms out of business (or hired them and paid them barely enough to get by). And the reports coming out now that livestock contribute more to global warming than anything else (think massive piles of shit that seep into our rivers and lakes and release toxins into our air -- a typical cattle feedlot produces 344 million pounds of manure annually).

Of course, it's not all bad news from Foer or any of the other factory farm critics. There are farmers out there who still care for their animals and feed them real food and let them roam freely and find more humane slaughterhouses. And more and more people are asking these questions and shifting away from eating factory farmed meat, or any meat at all.

I read and studied and watched because I'm curious. I care about these issues because I eat meat almost every single day and I pretty much cover every common animal during the week. If I care about where I shop and where I get my fruits and vegetables and where I eat out at, it only makes sense that I would care about the meat I eat.

I'm one of many who simply wanted to know where this meat is coming from and how it's processed along the way. What I have found haunts me enough to make some changes. I'm not exactly sure what these changes will look like, but I'm ready to find out. Step one is to find local sources of meat from farms that raise animals in an ethical and humane way, where the animals are hormone and antibiotic free. Step two is to stop eating meat from restaurants, unless I know where it's coming from. Step twelve will be to raise some chickens of my own for eggs, but that might take a few months. :)

More of this journey to come...

Stella the Eleven Month Old