When this years-long primary gets on my nerves, I hit YouTube and see what the latest Obama viral video brings. I happen to love the goofy affection peeps with their iMovie or Final Cut Pro lavish on their home videos. These are like mix-tapes/tributes to the guy we’re all working to make the next president of the United States…small ways we entertain and inspire each other when the going seems too long, boring, or divisive.
What I love about this video, besides its lo-fi ’70s-esque psychedelic “rays” emanating from everywhere, is the flashes of LA I see in every other scene. Chungking Road in Chinatown, represent! Capitol Records building, Hollywood Boulevard, in tha house! Weird crossroads sculpture thingy at the corner of La Brea and Sunset, I love you! Even the shots of Beverly Hills are endearing in this context. (But only in this context.)
Or when I read about the children lost in the earthquake in China, my heart just broke open. Yesterday I heard this story on NPR while driving to the Unreliable Narrator’s school to pick him up and bring him home, and I wept all the way there. What was unbearably sad were the snatches of Mandarin spoken by the parents that I could understand before the translator’s voice, her own voice cracking from emotion, overlapped their words.
“…so cute (hen ke ai), about ten minutes before I left for work before the earthquake happened, he called out, Mama, don’t go away (bu yao zou le), he didn’t want me to go!”
Later: “Mama zao ni lai le” (Mama’s coming to find you!)
Other words are too hard to decipher through the parents sobs. The wails of grief transcend any language, but I am undone hearing searing expressions of sorrow in my mother tongue. The reporter tells us that the little boy was found in his grandfather’s arms with his grandmother crouched behind.
When I saw the Unreliable Narrator, he seemed surprised by how tightly I hugged him.
What gives?? I’m wearing Polarfleece and giving the bleak grey sky the evil eye right now, wondering why it feels like Seattle. If I wanted to live in Seattle, I’d be living there already. And if I were a person who wasn’t affected by Seasonal Affective Disorder, I’d be living there still. But the clouds and cold bring me down. Usually it’s sunny and hot by now, with a slight dip in temperatures and some clouds coming in later for “June gloom”, but right this moment it should be hot!
I’m still riding a bit of the bummer of our plumbing woes and feeling like the documentary is in a rut (through no fault of my editor or anyone but me, that is). However, the nice thing is that I was invited to participate in a panel at Blogher 2008, which I’ll be attending for the first time ever, so that’ll be fun.
But for now, my little boy and I are longing for long warm days so we can while away late afternoons at the park after the school day ends.
Steal this meme! We’re posting what we dream of for our kids, or the world, or both, then linking back to MOMocrats here. Let people know you participated with a comment there so they can take a look.
What I dream for the world is that we all eat a good meal, three times a day, with two small snacks. By good I mean nutritious and tasty. By all, I mean ALL. Every last person.
Being hungry is a primal worry. If anxiety had a sound, it would be the gurgle of stomach juices rumbling in an empty stomach. Every new mama has “Failure to Thrive” engraved on her heart as Fear About Your Infant #1. When a baby loses weight instead of gaining it. When you can see the ribs on a toddler. When a kid is peckish. Refuses to eat or has problems eating or gaining weight. When your mama looks at you and clucks, “You’re looking thin. Are you eating well?”, no matter how old you are. Invariably you’ll hear or perhaps you’ve said, “Here, have another helping.”
One is an Open Letter to Senator Clinton: Feminism is Not Academic, on Clinton’s hair-thin win over Obama in Indiana. The other is about how I love funny women and AbFab in particular. What does that have to do with politics or motherhood? Well, I think three out of the seven women I named were mothers, writers, and damn funny women. And I needed a good belly laugh after having my marshmallows toasted a tad for the Clinton post…by, you guessed it, Clinton supporters. But you know, it’s all good now. Because who the heck can say the words “President McCain” without throwing up a little?
Last Thursday was Taco Truck Day in LA, and we had fish tacos from our neighborhood place in a small gesture of solidarity. It wasn’t quite food on wheels, but we were all pretty tired and fish tacos from Best Fish were what we needed to cheer us up.
Through MOMocrats, I’ve met some of the most intelligent, fun, politically aware, sassy, and committed women I’ve ever known. I worship them. So far they haven’t run me off, though a few (the Clinton supporters) may have been sorely tempted.
To think I blogged years ago about feeling like there had to be other women like me, who felt that motherhood connected us more firmly to the world we live in and deepened our desire to make it a better place, instead of motherhood being something to be tolerated or minimized so we could go on much as we have before. Back then, I wondered where all those like-minded moms were. Now I know where to find them–there’s Momsrising, there’s MOMocrat Julie’s MomsSpeakUp, and about a zillion other places online where women with kids have a voice, community, and outlet for political action.
Anyway, MomsSpeakUp is featuring uninsured children in a series of posts. There’s nothing like a few specific examples of everyday kids and their families to make the need for insurance clear.
When you think of the tremendous good preventative care does for kids as they grow, when you realize that for every healthy kid who bops in to the pediatrician’s office twice a year, there are kids with complex, heartwrenching illnesses or disorders who require much more testing, treatment, and monitoring for them to be well… it’s easy to get worked up. But the Children’s Defense Fund has been working on this issue for decades. They have plenty of concrete suggestions for us all to help. And it’s time to use whatever leverage we can all muster this election year to get everyone, but especially kids, covered.
I mean really, what kind of a civilization are we otherwise?
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