raw, organic veggies

Most days as a stay at home pop, I try to do something grand for a meal. Meal-time after all is the most visually and viscerally obvious aspect of what a stay at home parent does and so it is my opportunity to express myself.

Often however- when I try to do a grand thing it doesn't work out because it isn't 'art for art's sake'- it is more art for the glory of the artist if you will. The intuition doesn't get involved.

Other days however, I don't seem to aspire very high at all but rather scratch an itch of curiosity or inspiration and the experiment is an effortless, addictive success. On such occasions I feel so gratified that I have fallen into the habit of capturing a photo - it is so easy to do so these days after all.

This large veggie dip platter marks one such occasion. As my boys were studying in the afternoon I prepared a snack large enough to last until dinner so that my wife could enjoy it as well and we could have a second whack at it after dinner.

I doctored up some home-made Caesar dressing with some extra olive oil and less base (recipes usually call for egg substitute or mayo - I use soft tofu) so that the dressing is sort of more oily and fragrant. I arranged carrots, cauliflower and celery (leaves on- makes it look nice- besides I have come to really like clean fresh celery greens since living in China where they think that is the best part of the celery anyway).



So it is an ultra-simple and common platter- but a few adjustments, the fact that most everything is organic and the dressing is a tweaked home-made infinitely superior ceasar dressing made this an attractive and addicting hit. Oh, and we preceded it an hour earlier with another innovation I came up with a couple of days ago- fill a glass with chunks of seedless watermelon, then pour blended seedless watermelon and ice (the result is essentially chilled watermelon juice) into the glass up to the brim. You wind up with chilled watermelon chunks dripping with juice which you wash down with more juice.

It's sort of the ideal way to drive a steak through the heart of a debilitating summer- watermelon craving.

Latest advancement in eco-friendly domestic living

Kinetic, solar and wind-powered washing and drying with the following features:

• silent operation
• solar and wind powered
• you actually burn calories using it.
• a less expensive alternative over time.
  

So, the advancement is - as you have by now surmised from the photograph: washing fabric napkins (by hand most times since you will have to wash them more frequently than your normal laundry cycle will allow) and hanging them out to dry in place of most uses of disposable paper towels and napkins. We chose to get 100% cotton for the absorbent qualities, texture and because we can compost them along with our vegetable waste at end of life. They get dry surprisingly quickly and are less trouble to wash then you might think.

If you detect sarcasm in the title you were correct. However, it is the latest advancement for our family in the sense that the change took place recently and it is an advancement in the sense that our family is interested in finding ways to live more economically and ecologically and - where possible to do both things simultaneously. So it advances our family gradually along it's chosen trajectory towards a couple of it's it's goals. We do think that these kinds of changes taken together over time do point towards a better and brighter future although ironically we find that many such changes represent a slow walk backward through time, technology and infrastructure. The thing is- what happens as disposables are replaced with things that require maintenance in the home is that it may become more aesthetically pleasing. There is something about cloth napkins that is more memorable and attractive than paper. Consider- when you go to a higher end restaurant they tend to refrain from disposable napkins and kitchen ware of any kind which is disposable. They seem to do this for aesthetic reasons. This suggests there may be something 'trashy' about disposable living. There are some things that ancient people did which are superior to the way we do things. We are trying to find a balance in a rational footing in worlds modern and antique.

The Truth about Tiger Dads

Before we begin let me clarify- despite the comparison evoked by the title of this post - I am no "Tiger-Dad", nor would I want to be. Yet I think comparing myself to the Tiger-Mom is instructive. I do in fact have some things in common with her but take the comparison as an exaggeration for I admit freely that that is what it is.

To give you some background, my wife Sunray and I are fairly strict with our two boys by American standards. Part of this has to do with the fact Sunray is Chinese. I have been a stay at home dad now for about a year- having willingly quit my job so that we could take better care of our children now that - as we saw it- we could just afford to do so.

We have our boys study around three hours per day and that includes weekends and holidays and school breaks more often than not. Some holidays and such we find ourselves in a time pinch and actually don't do the studying, but as often we work extra hard during such times since after all, there will also be time to play and there is no regular school work to contend with. Occasionally we do have a break from study for a day here and there for no special reason though this is rare.

In any case, for a while there we sort of got ourselves pegged as mean parents. My oldest son Ethan said meaningfully "I'm not taking care of you when you get old", to which I actually responded with a good laugh - confident that there was ample time between now and then for him to change his tune. Perhaps I should also have the humility to be resigned to my fate if - for my efforts and intentions which I vainly frame as being good - I somehow miss the boat. I hope to be the sort of old parent my son will cherish in my sunset years- but that is a topic for another blog post- assuming I am still posting in forty years.

Outsiders sometimes see us as overly strict. Some see us as admirable. It may be hard for folks to be on the fence when they witness our parenting style. On the one hand, my sons can read a good amount of Chinese if you consider they only started in earnest a year ago. They can play piano pretty well if you realise they have been at that for two years only. But then when they get home from school- they have very little play time. Perhaps an hour in all and these days it seems they get to bed around nine-thirty or ten because they just can't get finished before then.

So day before yesterday I had my oldest (Ethan- remember?) read the six page article in Time Magazine about the current meme known as "Tiger Mom". The article is called "The Truth about Tiger Moms"

After he read it I asked him what he thought about it. He was totally silent for a moment and his eyes got kind of big. In that instant I am not sure what was going on in his head but I suspect he might have been wondering whether it would be advisable to be frank with his impression or whether there were political considerations to be reviewed first. Perhaps he was partially just formalising some ideas.

Well, I walked around doing some house work and absently said to the air "It's no big deal Ethan, I am just looking for your honest first impressions. I'm just curious what you thought- right or wrong- it's your own view."

Well he said some things that rather surprised me. I wish I had a better memory for it but essentially I can recall him indicating that: unexpectedly - he thought she was actually a pretty loving mother and wanted her kids to be happy later on in life - and (he pointed out earnestly) they actually were happier.

Well- he was a whole lot kinder to her than I had been in my first and even in my final gentler views of this lady. I was very surprised by all of this even though I had been hoping to hear some small appreciation for her and would have taken it as a sign of maturity. I said to him "did the article sort of help you figure out that your mom and dad are not the meanest, strictest parents on earth?". "Yes" he said with some emphasis and we discussed various other aspects of the article and related themes.

Mind you - the article included a lot of things that I see as being fairly ugly. Here is one excerpt concerning a card that young Lulu made for her mother's birthday:

"I don't want this" Chua announced, adding that she expected to receive a drawing that Lulu had "put some thought and effort into." throwing the card back at her daughter, she told her, "I deserve better than this. So I reject this."

Ethan had read that part and other parts- he had read the whole article. And I am sure without asking that he found it ugly as well. What amazes me is that that those were not the parts he chose to speak with me about when I asked for his opinion. I believe we have a cogent understanding with one-another- we understand the article in much the same way and do see the bad. Yet what he wanted to discuss was the surprising good and the insights he gleaned from those things. At ten years old-this shows a lot of maturity and restraint. My old age started to look brighter to my imagination. I could hope that I had at eighty years old not lost my children to estrangement but that we had by then over our lives suffered together and managed to suffer FOR one-another and that at the end- we were bound as we had been at the beginning. Of course this is all in my mind. I have a lot of time to make many mistakes raising him and there is no doubt I will make them. What I am hopeful of is that we will recover from them and that our affection and loyalty will survive with strength.

So then yesterday- we sort of took inventory of his various school assignments and projects. Well, he showed how he had conscientiously attended to many things big and small in his back-pack which contained the artefacts and catalogue of his school life. He forgot one item though- a needful paper related to a quiz that he has the next day (that's today). "Of course you forgot it" I grumbled. He instantly shut his mouth and caste his gaze downward. I took notice and reproached myself.

"Ethan I am sorry for saying 'Of course' when you made a mistake- you do a very good job and I know it is hard for you to remember everything. I am frustrated with the brain I gave you because I struggled with the same organisational issues you do and so I am scolding myself when I get upset with you on memory lapses".

Still looking down with a silent tear racing to the ground he says "I wrote down so many things and prepared a lot but sometimes I couldn't remember one important thing that I should have remembered. I don't know why I can't get it right."

Well- I could have cried too at that point but the man in me restrained the spirit out of habit.

I reassured him and embraced him and told him what a good boy he was and how excellent and un-complaining he was as a student and as my son. This praise was not over-board- but accurately aimed. I believe that in the past couple of months especially he has joined me in my effort to raise him up well and to high standards and no-longer fights against me but cleaves to my lead with appreciation and tenacity even when it is very difficult to do so which it frequently, necessarily is. It reminds me of the perhaps cliché moment in the Karate kid movies and similar - where the student with final heart and strain, understands and accepts the mind of the master at long last and the plot of the movie turns around and you see 'master and student' united in thought and effort. At that point you get like a montage with training footage and such before a climactic tournament is won by the karate kid.

Last night and this morning- I couldn't stop thinking about Ethan. I kept seeing his face at the moment when I said "of course". I kept seeing his tear let go as if released by my changed mood of kindness towards him when I spoke.

He mentioned yesterday that he'd love some bacon this morning and so I got up early, got the boys up a little early too - and (pretty far out of character) I not only treated them to a continental breakfast with eggs, English muffins and bacon before school- but I let them play video games - a luxury reserved for Saturday mornings and as reward privileges. I don't think we have ever done video games in on a school-morning but some times the Tiger dad is soft for the cubs.

Virtuous Fruit

I've long been fascinated by food.
Modern man lives with terrible paradoxes with regard to food. For one thing, we need to understand that while 'dirty food' can kill you, sterile food can weaken you. Did you notice that the ecoli scares last year mostly or all involved organics(in two of the cases it was spinach)? This is no coincidence. You see, organic foods are grown with non-chemical fertilizers. By definition this means that substantially we are talking about excrement products as part of the composting process of the fertilizer. The good news is one can actually develop some immunity to ecoli and other so-called 'pathogens'. Otherwise there would be no special concern about Americans drinking water or dealing with ice-cubes or Popsicle from Mexico, China or Africa. Further, consider that much of the time what kills an individual named in an ecoli mortality statistic is not the ecoli it's self only but a number of other factors surrounding it:

• the person may be accustomed to pasteurized and sterilized foods (thus, little immunity)
• the person may be part of the new trend in the US towards 'organics' and thus- sinse previously they may rarely have ever been seriously sickened by food, they were exposed too quickly to food with biological contaminants (non-pasteurized foods).
• The person may have compromised immune systems ironically due to exo-genetic effects of chemical pesticides.
• The person may have too little bacterial and viral diversity in their own blood for some of the reasons already mentioned to metabolize and defend against certain biological pathogens and toxic pathogenic bi-products such as the chemicals released by ecoli.
  

In the United States, politics is in the air we breath and in the food we eat. Understand that lobbyists for industrial food industry are some of the most powerful economic and political agents in our democratic body today. With their help, we have managed to cause meats and processed foods of any sort; and by way of triangulation- especially such things as frozen pizzas or fast food: to be made the least expensive products to be found- not-withstanding that they are in fact (by the same triangulation) the most expensive in terms of land-use, labor and natural resource expenditure. Thus it is more expensive to prepare a simple salad at home with vegetables- more especially if it is organic than it is to visit McDonald or Captain Ds in many cases. Further, for all the nutritive and qualitative differences we may site which are theoretical concerning food choice the reality of such a decision is more problematic. If we are dealing with non-organic produce, it may be argued that the long term effects of eating say - peaches instead of Cheese-burgers may be hard to differentiate. The question you are left with is something like this: Do you want a high risk of cancer, birth defects and a variety of other long term chemical toxin related maladies, or would you prefer instead to deal with obesity and the risk of heart-attack due to exposure to too much meat protein, fat and residual livestock hormones?

Now, when I lived in China, the food I ate there was mainly organic (this is all changing rapidly by the way) and overwhelmingly vegetables and fruits which were ripe when they were harvested and were extremely fresh by our standards- for no better reason than that the food available to me had most often little or no recourse to modern methods of ripening delay and triggering (in warehouse environments), food preservation or scientifically advanced means of cultivation (pesticides, hormones, artificial fertilizers, herbicides, or genetic modification). Some interesting notes about that. These foods were not labeled "organic" or "vine-ripened" or "non-GMO(genetically modified organisms), or "local". They were neither FDA or otherwise, certified or branded as boutique yuppie items, nor were they expensive.

Not only was the flavor and nutrition superior but the distinction was so marked that I as an American was astonished to eat watermelons for example which had so very little white portion to the rind on them that it seemed un-natural to me. Was this a normal watermelon, or are the watermelons in the states "normal"? By comparison- the best watermelons in the US seem paradoxically under-ripe and near rotten all at once. I'm not sure if you can understand my meaning. You know that quality in a melon in which the rind has a lot of that flavorless (or worse, bitter) white rind that extends an inch or so to the center of the fruit? In many cases, the whole melon tastes somewhat like a bitter rind, even where the center has at least something resembling the red color it is known for? On the other end of the scale we all know about melons which are over ripe and loose their fibrous structure, turning into a muddy textured flavorless mush towards the center. American melons quite frequently are characterized prominently by both qualities- that is to say they are both under-ripe and over-ripe. They are both, too young and too old. This is because they were picked too soon and - having been picked and stored, were stored too long- they were never mature. They are the fruit equivalent of human decrepitude diseases in which a ten year old is still short and playful but near death from osteo and organ decrepitude.

Americans don't realize- at least I didn't that a watermelon should perhaps be under-ripe if the farmer is careless, or over-ripe if it sat too long in market but never both. Further, compared to every edible Chinese melon I have ever encountered, every American counterpart if it was edible at all, had by far and away- substantially more of both characteristics at it's most edible point. You'd have to see and eat a Chinese melon to understand how this can be and to know that I am not exaggerating. Chinese melons are - if eaten at the proper time, characterized by hardly any white rind at all and a virtuous, consistent red extending nearly to the very edge of the green outer skin, and throughout with a beautiful, saturated, sweet flavor with a texture both gushing with fluid and firmly fibrous. The peaches, bananas, apples, and tomatoes there - well I could describe their superiority to the very best American fruits similarly. In short- they tasted like food is supposed to taste the way you always hope and expect it too before you are invariably disappointed.

We blame ourselves and our children when we cannot cultivate a love of fruits and vegetables. The truth is though- most of us have not eaten a decent piece of fruit in so long we genuinely lack any notion of what these things actually taste like (when they are even mediocre by old-world standards). I ADORE fruits and vegetables- but all you fruit and vegetable haters out there- the fruit and vegetables you don't like- I don't like them either.

Fear-not (sarcasm alert), our industries have prepared for us many fortified, re-sweetened, re-flavored fruits and vegetables in processed forms - often dried, in cans, or natured into beef products. Further, they will lobby hard to ensure that such products are always the least expensive option for us. And if we become sick due to nutritional or toxic properties, well- we have a treatment for every illness known to man- not a cure perhaps, but a treatment at least. And if the treatments are expensive? We have insurances to rescue us from that. (there's a whole in my bucket, dear Liza dear Liza..)
Personally though, I can't help but be nostalgic for a world with fewer solutions, optimizations, modernizations and enhancements. Sorry, the melons just tasted better before we solved so many problems, and so many problems our solutions caused.

A Memorial Tribute to Sun Zi Xian

My Father-in-law died a year ago (10/11/07) and I thought it appropriate to remember him with a message at this time.

I wrote the following comment in my journal circa 1998 after taking this photograph at his request.

"Lao Ba ('ole dad') scarcely lifts his head from his ancient world filled with the knowledge of a long life, memories of a lost wife and the echo and shadows of the billion black characters he silently painted over the years. Beneath his wife's stunning black and white portrait lay an inscription which he brushed: 'Life is fleeting but virtue is immortal.' "

This bare, elegant image of him
beside the wife he honored with such a soft and certain brush has directed my consciousness and focused my spirit over the years.

I never met my mother-in-law. I dreamed of her only once, soon before my father-in-law was to pass from this world. She was waiting for me to bring a message from my father-in-law which turned out to bear a passage written by Abdul-Baha himself mysteriously purposed outside of time for her eyes.

For me it is no small disappointment to watch such a distinguished generation of Chinese as he was a member of, symbolically receding into the horizon of it's evening. It is a daily and a serious reminder for me- to do my part in distinguishing my own generation by illumined conduct; and lofty, courageous sentiment and vocation throughout life.

---

Here some photos of my father-in-law and mother-in-law:

A Vote is cast for Obama by my wife Sunray Crofts

Yeah yeah big deal right? Well this one is unique for a few reasons. Here's a list:

• At no other time in her life could she have voted for America's president. She is eligible to vote because she is now an American citizen.
• In China, when she was a Chinese citizen she could not have voted either for China's leadership. It's the first time in her life she will have been able to vote for her country's leader.
• A few months ago (a little too early in retrospect) we bought the pictured educational placemat for our children's mealtime study. Notice anything missing? Yeah- me too: any faces of someone who isn't male and or white..(click photo to enlarge)

So we figure if Obama wins, it could be an historic memory to have a picture to show our grand-children of Sunray casting her first vote ever for the first minority president in American history. Go wife!!

All trying hard not to squint in the bright sunlight getting ready to go to the poling booth (Ethan trying perhaps a touch too hard).

Sunray and kids (Eli about to die of boredom apparently) in line to vote at Brentood Public Library.

Talking to Poling Assistant.

They told me just before I snapped it that I wasn't allowed, so I took the photo before the camera had a chance to focus.

Feeling Good

I felt strongly compelled to write a post today as a sort of a song review, as if I were in the business of writing reviews, as if I had any part of the requisite education for such, and as if anybody reads my blog. Anyway- compulsion is not a half bad reason to write a thing.

The song is "Feeling Good" by Nina Simone. Now- I'm not a fan-boy. I don't love all her stuff. I like about half of it- but this song reminds me of how often I feel manipulated on an emotional level by the arts. It reminds me of this because it is a song which embodies the opposite of that effect on me- discovering and releasing within me some of the purest and most authentic moods and emotions.

Rather than trying to force me to think or feel - this song rather tells me about something, exposes me to it and finally draws that thing out of me unexpectedly.

Without delving into technical art, I'll just say it is a recording second to none displaying instrumental taste and a vocal art which I can scarcely imagine could be equaled even by the singer herself a second time.

The subject is a variety of exultant joy which is as vulnerable and tremblingly difficult to achieve as it is indomitable and defining; and it's opposite- the implied sorrow from which this joy is propelled and has heroicly escaped. It is the joy of a freed prisoner, a found child, a restored faith, or a reunited lover. A listener need not know the circumstances or antecedents of this joy to appreciate the song- they only need to understand something about deep joy and deep sorrow- yes, deep sorrow, this song's faintly gestured but important and unmistakable undercurrent.