Have you heard of it? If you haven’t, go ahead and take a look at it, I’ll be waiting right here for you. Did you look at it? Did you think ‘what the hell does this do?’ or ‘why would people waste their precious time on this?’. Welcome to the club. Actually, no, I’m not in that club. I’m in the club that has glommed onto the service like a barnacle on a whale. More than year ago I read about twitter on a microsite run by the venerable Andre Torrez. (I don’t know him, but I’ve found his site to be a nice source of dependable good links. So good that it lives on my bloglines reader.) I didn’t really get it, but I signed up for the service. Days or weeks later, I goaded my brother and fellow organic mutant into signing up and if you go back far enough in the timeline you’ll see we fooled around with it intermittently, but it didn’t really ’stick’ at first.

Weeks or months later one or another of Rick’s compadres at the bank signed up and started tweeting (yup, that’s what we call it, but the official terminology is ‘twittering’. (I say Blech on that term)). Suddenly, there was more to read and more connection and more direct messaging and more friending and following…o, wait lost myself for a moment, I just remembered you might be wondering ‘what the heck?’. Suffice it to say that until you sign up for the service, there’s not a lot to get. To someone without an account the twitter homepage looks pretty stale. If you use the search bar and look up people you know or people whose blogs you read, you find individual feeds. This is one aspect of twitter. Right now I’ll encourage you to sign up for an account, add me as a friend, and start searching for people you know IRL or thru their words and/or pictures on the web. Just trust me on this, okay? It won’t take very much time and there’s no need to wait for an invite. Did you? Okay, now when you return to the twitter homepage, it looks different, right? Congratulations! You’ve entered the twitterverse!

The magic thing about twitter is the ability to check in with your tweeps on a daily (or more often) basis. There are a few people I’d recommend following if you have a certain sense of humor i.e. Merlin Mann, Joshua Green Allen, Jenny Holzer and there are more, but the great thing is that you can customize your feed to reflect your interests. The best way to do this is to use the utilities like Summize or Tweetscan to search for key words that reflect your interest or even your location. I follow a few fellow twitterers who have nothing more in common with me than they happen to live in the same region. Sometimes they recommend something local that plants a seed that doesn’t bear fruit until many moons later. Feel free to follow and unfollow as need be. Some people are very polite and forward about this. I am more stealthy as that is my style, so feel free to try whatever works for you.

There are more than a few utilities to round out the twitter experience. Try them out as you are wont. I am used to a pretty bare bones experience. Until a few weeks ago, I tweeted from either my browser (my twitter.com homepage) or occasionally from my phone. Now that I have added Twitterfox to my Firefox, twitter lives in my browser. My tweets have seen an uptick and my use of the site is far more enjoyable as I don’t have to be on twitter to read people’s tweets. Twitter has suffered some instability from its raging popularity so there are a few pages to deal with twitter outages. You also need to use twitter a fair amount to notice the problems. Fortunately, those outages have been fewer and farther between.

Once you’ve used twitter for a few months, you may want to read further. I think that twitter will be fun for those who often think in one liners or those who have blogged in the past, but found it too cumbersome. I myself enjoy the bits of humor and insight that flit past my sight on the hours that I might be logged into the matrix. At this point twitter doesn’t have an income stream, so there are no ads or stupid flash things jumping at you trying to get your attention. For being ‘web 2.0′ company, things are very basic.

Thanks to @claynewton and @nothatwasyou who definitely make twitter more fun with their stream of wit and links and observations. I hope that you’ve found this informative and that we’ll see your tweets real soon.

In the Spring of  ‘96 I was freshly out of long term relationship that had been dying a slow long death, but had been over in reality for many years.  In that relationship I had altered myself to make someone else ‘happy’, slowly coming to the realization that you cannot make anyone else happy for we are each responsible for our own happiness.  It is not something you can give to someone else.  In the aftermath of that I decided that I would never change myself for someone else.  I would be myself and love myself and say my peace and if I ended up alone, so what? I’d rather love myself than have someone ‘love’ me under false pretenses.  So began a new manifestation of myself and I decided to grasp life and live on my terms.

I dated a few guys who bored me almost immediately in their shallow pursuit of pleasure.  I met a few guys who piqued my interest, but nothing that made me feel like ‘dang, I wanna read the paper every morning with this one!’. I met one fellow who I thought was very good-looking and to whom I could talk about everything, but he moved to LA.  The Sun God festival was coming up and I invited him down to join me.  The morning of Sun God he called to tell me he’d been in a car accident and wouldn’t be coming down.  Something rang false and I immediately knew he ‘wasn’t that into me’ to borrow a phrase, but in my new found journey from caterpillar to butterfly I decided to not stay in and mourn my lost plans. Instead I grabbed a girl from work who I knew casually and said ‘let’s go to Sun God’ and we went.

We got to the pub and ordered some beer and slices of pizza and headed out to the patio only to discover there was no open seating at all.  There was nothing worse than being banished to the inside of the pub, so we stood there for a moment to see if someone might magically vacate a seat for us. Yeah, right, on the afternoon of the festival everyone was there to stay.  Off in the corner I noticed a table where everyone was standing and so I asked my friend, ‘Should we ask them if we can borrow their chairs for a minute?’ and she said, ‘I’ll follow you.’ So I walzted up and said, ‘hey do you mind if we sit in your chairs til you need ‘em?’  They quickly acquiesced. Now I was not hitting on them as I never even really looked at them.  It just seemed convenient.

My acquaintance and I had never really hung out one on one, so we started talking and eating, talking and drinking, immersed in our own little social sphere. Meanwhile, the sun started setting and the guys whose table we had borrowed started snagging chairs and joining us at the table. At one point we are all seated and introductions were procured. They went around the table introducing themselves. When Wade introduced himself and I looked into his eyes as he said his name, time stopped. There was something that snagged my soul. He seemed familiar and yet I wanted and needed to know him.  I was not drunk as I’d only had two drinks over many hours, so you skeptics can eliminate that suspicion. I was smitten. Over the evening, we flirted and finagled our way closer to one another, later dancing under the stars to whatever band was playing that year.

That summer was the quintessential summer romance, but as the summer progressed we could tell there was something deeper blooming.  We have worked hard on this relationship, both challenging ourselves to grow more generous, more accepting, more reasonable, more loving. Times have been tough and wonderful, but more than anything I want to experience it with him.  The years fly by and every moment encompasses the universe. It is grand.  I look forward to twelve more years and twelve more and twelve more and on and on until I draw my last breath. Fittingly, today we bought a new bed. The journey has been a wonderful adventure as we write next to one another while the wee one coos and squeals behind us.  I love you, my friend!

All right, well is there anything else that I missed? Anything that you’re working on?
Working on life.

Working on life.
Yeah, working on life.

Are you happy right now?
I don’t wanna be happy.

Why not?
’Cause when you happy you get locked in sleep. You get sleepy happy. I always wanna be on point. I always wanna be aware.

Right, ’cause when you’re happy you think you’re safe and you don’t…
Yeah, you get sleepy happy.

For some this would be torture. For me it is a joy. One of the things that has reformed my thinking about what is necessary for gracious living is the Apartment Therapy website. I have been reading the website for years and over time my notion of what constitutes a home has changed. I think we all have an idea in our minds about what we think our home should look like, a certain number of bedrooms and bathrooms, a square footage that will allow us to pursue dreams and hobbies, a Platonic ideal against which all things are measured. In addition we have ideas of ’safety’ and neighbors and if we have kids we think of school districts. Probably many of our preferences are shaped by our childhoods and formative experiences. In fact with over half of the world existing on less than $1 a day, many of these concerns are just learned notions of what exactly a ‘home‘ is. Apartment Therapy questions our notions — our American, developed world notions — of what one needs to create a home. I have let go of some of my biases and embraced our current situation.

Another factor in my release of the notion ‘bigger is better’ is the long running column, Shelter by Toni Schlesinger, in the Village Voice. In one of her earlier columns she documents a family who share 500 square-foot apartment. At the time Wade & I were living in a 425 square-foot duplex near the beach. I remember looking around the space, which I had only gotten to work comfortably after many iterations of furniture moving and stuff organizing, and thinking, ‘ZOMG, could Wade & I raise a child here?’ I never found out the answer to that particular question, but here in CasaWeX, I am pursuing the factual actual question ‘can 2 adults and 2 kids share less than 1,000 square-feet and enjoy it’. One of the reasons that Wade & I have always embraced this house is that everything is very close together. One can be cooking in the kitchen and the other geeking on the computer and a conversation can be held at reasonable volume. We like being close to one another. But when two kids (and all their stuff) are added to the mix can it be made to work? The answer to that question remains to be seen, but suffice it to say so far, so good.

Aside from these two failures, I am doing some things well - using my To Do list efficiently (although it is awfully long right about now), keeping my In Box near zero, and generally keeping the main things in order. Still, the list is longer than I want it to be because I have a serious Internet addiction, focused mainly on political and automotive blogs and news sites. Need to scale that back. Plus I have been digging in my iTunes crates, and let’s face, that shit takes time.

Next, I am in the midst of rationalizing my financial relationships. Ergo, I will be shutting down one of my bank accounts and two savings accounts, and consolidating with Schwab. There I get a high-interest checking account, plus free usage of any ATM in the US and Schwab covers the fees. Phat, no? But that also entails numerous transfers and account info updates for auto-debits.

Lastly, I am in the final stages of cutting my ties to the evil Comcast. It has been a tedious, painful process. But considering my gnawing disgust with their “customer service” it is an easy decision. This means that I will soon be off cable internets, back to DSL. Fractionally slower, perhaps, but together with phone service this move cuts that bill over $100 a month (including canceled cable), not a trivial sum. See? I am trying to be a responsible person over here.

It ain’t easy.

The morning of her birth I woke in the wee hours with noticeable labor pains. I didn’t mention it to any one in the hopes that the labor would subside and that the baby would come closer to the EDD (estimated due date). I had read of many women who experienced ‘false labor’ and I secretly hoped to be one of those. O, denial, she is not a river in Egypt! Wade left for work and Lucas and I started our day, going through the quotidian practices that make a day: washing, breakfast, cleaning, playing, dressing, &c. Around half past 10, I felt the pains increase in intensity and duration and realized that things might not go according to my plan and since we had been so focused on finishing the kids’ room there was nothing washed or ready for the new baby, not one bodysuit or footed sleeper, so I called Wade and alerted him to my situation. He came right home.

For the next few hours I paced the house while Wade washed laundry, organized, cleaned and otherwise prepared for our return home after a few days in the hospital. Nonno came to get Lucas so that we could prepare with little distraction. Last time we endured a long hospital stay pre-delivery and we had determined that I would do most of my laboring at home this time or so we hoped. We tracked contractions through the afternoon while we prepared for the inevitable. Toward five o’clock in the afternoon I contacted the midwife to tell her of our situation. She invited us to come on in. Around that time I finally acknowledged to myself the reality that I would be bringing home a little one sometime soon and that my enormous pregnant belly would be history sooner rather than later. There were some pictures to take before heading to the hospital.

As the evening deepened, the intensity of my contractions strengthened. They stopped me in my tracks. At one point I found myself on the sofa, sitting in tailor’s pose entranced by my socks. At this point we decided to head in to the birth center. On the ride there, the contractions started coming closer together, but when we arrived at the hospital I insisted that I was fine to walk from the parking structure rather than leave the car in the loading zone. That was a struggle. The contractions started coming every minute or so and I would find myself crouching on the ground while my glasses filled with tears. We finally made it up to the birth center where a very sweet Labor & Delivery nurse asked if we were the ones for whom she was waiting. She took one look at me and sat me down in a rocking chair and explained to us why I was experiencing so much pain. She showed me how to breath through each contraction. She seemed to have a mind-meld with Wade and for the next hour he gently guided me each time I forgot to breathe. The midwife checked me and determined that I could stay as active labor had begun and she thought that the baby would be arriving sooner rather than later. They shuffled me off to the shower where I labored under a strong stream of soothing hot water with Wade’s encouragement coming softly from the side.

Eventually I tired of the water as I started feeling cold and agitated. Wade helped me from the shower back to our room where a huge tub of warm water waited. As my labor had advanced significantly, they eventually allowed me into the tub where my labor started with a vengeance. A woman’s labor is the transformation of her body from a closed container to an open vessel. This transformation can take days or minutes. The faster the transformation, the rougher the ride. The 45 minutes I spent in that tub were some of the most physically and mentally challenging minutes of my experience. They were primal. They were raw. They were overpowering and completely human. They took me completely out of myself and were transforming. At the end, I felt the so-called ring of fire, which is aptly named, and was helped out of the tub to the bed where less than 20 minutes later we welcomed Quinn, our daughter.

Each birth is special, but this one was especially special. I learned so much from the entire experience from beginning to end. A few days later we brought her home to the midst of our project and yet everything was perfect. We had the most important things: a healthy family and each other. For a few weeks, we all shared the same bedroom. During the night I would wake to hear the sounds of three sleeping beauties and I felt content. It ended up being a special treat to be able to look out from my cozy spot to see and hear each one. The one whose curious eyes started us along this inevitable path. The one whose glorious laugh fills my days. The one whose dreamy sighs have added such sweetness to the new year.

• In The First 10 minutes: 10 teaspoons of sugar hit your system. (100% of your recommended daily intake.) You don’t immediately vomit from the overwhelming sweetness because phosphoric acid cuts the flavor allowing you to keep it down.
• 20 minutes: Your blood sugar spikes, causing an insulin burst. Your liver responds to this by turning any sugar it can get its hands on into fat. (There’s plenty of that at this particular moment)
• 40 minutes: Caffeine absorption is complete. Your pupils dilate, your blood pressure rises, as a response your livers dumps more sugar into your bloodstream. The adenosine receptors in your brain are now blocked preventing drowsiness.
• 45 minutes: Your body ups your dopamine production stimulating the pleasure centers of your brain. This is physically the same way heroin works, by the way.
• >60 minutes: The phosphoric acid binds calcium, magnesium and zinc in your lower intestine, providing a further boost in metabolism. This is compounded by high doses of sugar and artificial sweeteners also increasing the urinary excretion of calcium.
• >60 Minutes: The caffeine’s diuretic properties come into play. (It makes you have to pee.) It is now assured that you’ll evacuate the bonded calcium, magnesium and zinc that was headed to your bones as well as sodium, electrolyte and water.
• >60 minutes: As the rave inside of you dies down you’ll start to have a sugar crash. You may become irritable and/or sluggish. You’ve also now, literally, pissed away all the water that was in the Coke. But not before infusing it with valuable nutrients your body could have used for things like even having the ability to hydrate your system or build strong bones and teeth.

So there you have it, an avalanche of destruction in a single can. Imagine drinking this day after day, week after week. Stick to water, real juice from fresh squeezed fruit, and tea without sweetener.

From Healthbolt, via Martin Luther

This time of year is always very hard for me. There is a turning in, a desire to evaluate according to my own standards, a pressure to conform in spite of the part of me that questions and taunts ‘authority’, a disconnect from tradition and expressions of culture at large. I resist - a resistor with low tolerance.

I have a lot of questions but few answers and to distract myself I focus on the concrete - a list of thing to do, a list that requires continuous editing and striking and adjustment. Will my life make sense when my house makes sense, when I lose those final pounds of ‘baby-weight’ and pre-baby weight, when I figure out what I want to do ‘when I grow up’? I dunno.

But the list expands and contracts in fits and spurts. & the only thing I am sure of is my own uncertainty.

As far as enjoying this time, we are in a flurry of activity getting CasaWeX into tip-top shape to accommodate another resident. Our house is small and we love it that way plus we live so close to Mom and Dad. We are energized by our proximity to one another, so moving is not really an option. Instead we have to make our casita more efficient. Within the next two weeks we are having some work done to the house to make the children’s room more of the hub of the house. Guess who is coordinating all the contractors? That’s right. Moi. I am not one of those super-outgoing personalities, but I have managed to bring forth my getting-things-done spirit and have arranged the work. My hope is to have the room ready to go at least a month before the due date. Here we go.

So in this land of natural coolness, fog, and pristine water, I get really annoyed when I see people drinking out of disposable water bottles. I cannot avoid pondering the selfish and thoughtless waste of resources that that overpriced container of shitty water represents. From the oil used to make the bottle, for the fuel used by the shipping company to drive the full bottles from some bottling plant -  one heated and cooled with fossil fuel - to the likelihood that that bottle will end up either in a landfill or as part of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, to the very likely possibility that the water in said bottle contains more contaminants than your local water faucet, it all just reeks of waste and boorishness.

Of course, just a couple of years ago I, too, was frequently consuming water from a plastic bottle. And of course there are occasions when it really is a good way to get yourself water. But for the corporate shindigs, or the college student or working mother who grabs one from the fridge, I have no patience. Need to carry water with you? How about a reusable container?

It is true that each individual act of conservation by not using disposable plastic water bottles is in itself trivial. But with $10 billion spent on it yearly in the US alone, we need every single one of those trivial acts.

I know that drinking water out of 60-year-old water pipes can seem like an unhealthy prospect. But for those of us who care about our health, doesn’t it make more sense to by a good quality water filter for your home than to add to global warming, just for a glass of tasty water?

Since San Diego tap water comes from a variety of sources, a number of additives are used to counteract the contaminants founds in the water even after treatment. One of these — I think chloramines — leave a stale, chemical taste in the water (something I did not miss when I visited SF a few weeks ago). Kiosks with filters that are hooked up to municipal water pipes seem to eliminate most of this flavor, rendering the water mostly palatable. The little filter we keep in the refrigerator works for most beverages like tea, soup, or, well, actually nothing. I start gritting my teeth if I have to drink it plain. The fact of the matter is that I’d like to have some type of appliance at home that I can use to filter tap water to make it as enjoyable as I perceive our old brand of bottled water to be.

My requirements are simple. Something that will fit on the counter, something that does not require batteries or electricity, something that will take our slightly dodgy local water and turn it into something cleaner with a lighter flavor. Oh. My. Dorsh. I though I would google a few filters, read some comparison sheets, and blimbo-bango make a decision and buy a new little filter. The filter industry is widely variable and the people who buy them and sell them rely on all sorts of hyperbole to push their product. In addition, I found a subculture of message boards focused on a ‘back to the land’ movement, based on a widespread belief that society as we know it is on the verge of an imminent breakdown. I’m not going to provide any links because I am trying to forget some of the stuff I read. It’s out there and relatively easy to find.

We are still functioning under our stopgap measure: going to the local water kiosk and filling our plastic bottles with reverse osmosified water. We’ve tried this many times or the last several years. Every time thus far this system breaks down after a few months due to memory laspses, exhaustion, and lack of dedication. I am still unclear as to which filter I will eventually buy as my old standbys have failed me in this effort. The appliance I’m looking for is a niche product, something between a whole house filter and a little pitcher filter. In the meantime, I am reading up on filters, learning the lingo, and trying to stay far away from the cultural rabbit hole.

*a quote that does not inspire confidence from the 2006 Annual Water Quality Report

Just some tracks I’ve been listening to lately…

In ninth grade, I had a friend named Erin (Rick was friends with her younger brother, Dana). I’d known Erin for a few years in junior high, but right before our freshman year Erin and her family moved about a block away from our house near Leigh High School. One day I was walking home from school with Erin in my cheerleading uniform and instead of heading straight home I went home with Erin. We were cautioned to never do anything unbecoming of cheerleader while in uniform under threat of being kicked off the squad (some girls did some very risque things, however, since they weren’t in uniform none off them were ever relieved of their positions). Once at Erin’s home, we listened to music and ate some snacks. At some point Erin offered me a cigarette as she had been smoking for a while, stealing smokes from her mother. Dressed in my cheer uniform, I hesitated, but then not wanting to be a square I said sure. Since Erin was still hiding her smoking from her mom, we went outside in front of the garage to have a smoke. I was nervous about breaking a taboo and also afraid of being caught smoking — even though we had a smoking section at school for the students. That cigarette made me so sick and dizzy that I couldn’t even finish it, but still there was something seductive about the ritual of inhaling.

I never have been a ’smoker’ even though I have occasionally enjoyed a bidi, a cheroot, or a nargile. So I don’t think that the root of the problem is smoking in and off itself. I think that the problem is our gluttonous society wherein a person smokes a pack or two or three a day. If a person smoke two packs a day that is forty cigarettes per day. Assuming 16 hours of wakefulness and 2.5 cigarettes per hour at approximately 7 minutes per cigarette smoked, over 17 minutes per hour are given over to the smoking habit. Sure you can smoke and make breakfast at the same time, but ew, gross, ashes & eggs do not the best menu make. And what to do with the refuse of a habit that takes up almost 1/3 of your waking time? Is anyone gonna walk around with 40 butts in their pocket? A few years ago I was acquainted with a person of European extraction who smoked. I was surprised when I accidentally discovered xir habit. This person never stank of old astray or spewed smoke tinged breath in my face. I tried to give hir a hard time about hir habit and xie defended hirself saying, ‘I smoke 3-4 cigarettes a day. One after lunch, one or two in the afternoon or evening and one before bed. I run and am active, so give me a break. It is just a past time and I don’t over indulge like you Americans.’ I learned that in many European countries, smoking is not a competitive sport (although I am sure there are individuals who over indulge there). It is more of a pleasant way to end a meal or to sit and contemplate the passing of the day. Just as one drink does not make one an alcoholic, one smoke does not make one an extreme smoker.

So while I despise the visual clutter and environmental pollution as much as the next person, I think that unless smokers start taking responsibility for their habit i.e. not throwing their butts into the roadway or people’s yards, smoking far away from children, not smoking near doorways or places where their smoke impinges on other’s ability to breath, local governments will enact more and more laws restricting smokers and their ability to smoke wherever they damn please. Instead of complaining and whining they need to band together to show the world that in spite of their addiction, they can be considerate, conscientious, and clean. Bwahhhahhha! Who am I kidding? The vast majority of those who indulge in this lethal past time are never gonna do this. So government will keep extracting extra dollars from smokers and continue limiting their habit and time will keep on ticking into the future.