the recovery of virtue

After many months of what appeared to be politics as usual, President Obama managed to give me hope again with his speech on Wednesday night. (And I can only hope that his rhetoric is matched with substance—integrity is after all often defined as coherence between the internal and external).

I was especially moved to hear him quote Ted Kennedy towards the end of his speech:

[Ted Kennedy] repeated the truth that health care is decisive for our future prosperity, but he also reminded me that "it concerns more than material things." "What we face," he wrote, "is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country."

…

That large-heartedness - that concern and regard for the plight of others - is not a partisan feeling. It is not a Republican or a Democratic feeling. It, too, is part of the American character. Our ability to stand in other people's shoes. A recognition that we are all in this together; that when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand. A belief that in this country, hard work and responsibility should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play; and an acknowledgement that sometimes government has to step in to help deliver on that promise.
…

And they knew that when any government measure, no matter how carefully crafted or beneficial, is subject to scorn; when any efforts to help people in need are attacked as un-American; when facts and reason are thrown overboard and only timidity passes for wisdom, and we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other over the things that truly matter - that at that point we don't merely lose our capacity to solve big challenges. We lose something essential about ourselves.

Habits of the Heart (Bellah et al.) noted back in 1985, the loss of the notion of civic virtue and warned of its potential consequences. Obama’s speech suggests that we recover the value of virtue and character in our national discourse. While the concept of virtue may not give us clear answers about the size and role of government in our technologically complex society, it can atleast be a guiding principle in how we frame our public debate about how this country should be governed.

From Habits of the Heart:

We spoke of the belief of Madison and the other founders that our form of government was dependent on the existence of virtue among the people. It was such virtue that they expected to resolve the tension between private interest and public good. Without civic virtue, they thought, the republic would decline into factional chaos and virtue, and probably end in authoritarian rule. Half a century later, this idea was reiterated in Tocqueville’s argument about the importance of mores – the “habits of the heart” – of Americans.

…
As the twentieth century has progressed, that understanding, so important through most of our history, has begun to slip from our grasp. As we unthinkingly use the oxymoron “private citizen”, the very meaning of citizenship escapes us. And with Ronald Reagan’s assertion that “we the people” are a “special interest group”, our concern for the economy being the only thing that holds us together, we have reached a kind of end of the line. The citizen has been swallowed up by the economic man.

Yet this kind of economic liberalism is not ultimately liberating, for, as became quite clear with the final two visions of the public good described, when economics is the main model for our common life, we are more and more tempted to put ourselves in the hands of the manager and the expert. If society is shattered into as many special interests as there are individuals, then, as Tocqueville foresaw, there is only the schoolmaster state left to take care of us and keep us from one another’s throats.*


* I realize this quote may suggest that one-payer government-run healthcare system would be the perfect example of putting ourselves in the hands of the manager and expert and handing the disciplinary ruler over to the schoolmaster state (you know with the death panels and all). I am not inclined to read the passage in that way, especially not in the context of the book, but I will leave it up to you ponder.

the slippery slope

Improved technology and more goods and services have raised the standards for what is acceptable in our culture. While there is more to choose from, we also have more to live up to. The introduction of indoor plumbing, electricity and household appliances into our homes have only pressured us to maintain higher levels of cleanliness. While wrinkles were once an accepted symptom of aging, we are now pre-occupied with anti-wrinkle creams and Botox treatments. The greater variety and availability of clothing has only raised expectations for our appearances (It’s not terribly acceptable to wear the same thing every day, unless you’re my husband. He somehow manages to get away with it).

The odd thing about the constancy of (housework) hours is that it coincided with a technological revolution in the household. When the early studies were done, American homes had little sophisticated equipment. Many were not yet wired for gas and electricity. They did not have automatic washers and dryers or refrigerators. Some homes even lacked indoor plumbing, so that every drop of water that entered the house had to be carried in by hand and then carried out again.

By 1950, the amount of capital equipment in the home had risen dramatically. Major technological systems, such as indoor plumbing, electricity, and gas, had been installed virtually everywhere. At the same time, many labor-saving appliances also came into vogue- automatic washing machines and dryers, electric irons, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators and freezers, garbage disposals. By the 1990s, we had added dishwashers, microwaves and trash compactors. Each of these innovations had the potential to save countless hours of labor. Yet none of them dead. In terms of reducing time spent on domestic work, all this expensive labor-saving technology was an abject failure.
…
Laundry provides the best example of how technology failed to reduce labor time... Laundry that had previously been sent out began to stay home. At the same, standards of cleanliness went up… In the (colonial) days, washing would be done once a month at most and, in many families, much less—perhaps four times per year. Nearly everyone wore dirty clothes nearly all the time. Slowly, the frequency of washing rose… Standards have crept up for nearly everything that housewives do—laundry, cooking, care of children, shopping, care of the sick, cleaning…

One 1920s housewife realized: Because we housewives of today have the tools to reach it, we dig every day after dust that grandmother left to a spring cataclysm. If few of us have nine children for a weekly bath, we have two or three for daily immersion. If our consciences don’t prick over vacant pie shelves or empty cookie jars, they do over meals in which a vitamin may be omitted or a calorie lacking.

But we were not always like this. Contemporary standards of housecleaning are a modern invention, like the vacuum cleaners and furniture polishes that make them possible. (The culture of cleanliness) was delayed because it was expensive. The labor of colonial women was far too valuable to be spent creating spic-and-span…

~ Juliet Schor in The Overworked American

Likewise, more freedom around what parts of our body we can display has resulted in more concern for how those parts of our body appear.

By the 1920s, both fashion and film encouraged a massive “unveiling” of the female body, which meant that certain body parts-such as arms and legs- were bared and displayed in ways they never had before. This new freedom to display the body was accompanied, however, by demanding beauty and literary regimens that involved money as well as self-discipline. Beginning in the 1920s, women’s legs and underarms had to be smooth and free of body hair; the torso had to be svelte; and the breasts were supposed to be small and firm. What American women did not realize at the time was that their stunning new freedom actually implied the need for greater internal control of the body, an imperative that would intensify and become even more powerful by the end of the twentieth century… cultural pressures have accumulated, making American girls today, at the close of the twentieth century, more anxious than ever about the size and shape of their bodies, as well as particular body parts.

~ Joan Jacobs Brumberg in The Body Project

No doubt we have made progress since the early twentieth century. And while most of these accomplishments have materially improved our quality of life, we continue to expect more. Improved technology designed to make life more convenient has not given us more leisure and rest time. And more freedom to choose what we wear and how we appear, may have only increased anxiety and worry.


* Somehow I feel a bit better that my apartment is not Real Simple-worthy. There are piles of books and papers stacked up in the corners collecting dust. Our bathtub is developing a ring of soap and scum residue and I believe our sink is building a lovely layer of grime. Yes, I would like my home to be cleaner, but I’m just too damn lazy to do it myself or to nag my husband to do it. But now I can say something elitist like I’m intentionally being counter-cultural and protesting the absurd standards of hygiene in our society… or tell everyone that I’m saving the environment. But don’t we often discover that our practical decisions end up being political? We didn’t buy a car, because we’re cheap. We line-dry our clothing, because there was no room in our apartment for a dryer. We try to reduce our meat consumption, because I don’t like cooking meat…
** Did you see this study that asked households to rank appliances as luxury or necessity? Fascinating!

fashion victim

Before World War I, girls rarely mentioned their bodies (in their diaries) in terms of strategies for self-improvement or struggles for personal identity. Becoming a better person meant paying less attention to the self, giving more assistance to others, and putting more effort into instructive reading or lessons at school. When girls in the nineteenth century thought about ways to improve themselves, they almost always focused on their internal character and how it was reflected in outward behaviour.

In 1892, the personal agenda of an adolescent diarist read: “Resolved, not to talk about myself or feelings. To think before speaking. To work seriously. To be self restrained in conversation and actions. Not to let my thoughts wander. To be dignified. Interest myself more in others.”

A century later, in the 1990s, American girls think very differently. In a New Year’s resolution written in 1982, a girl wrote: “I will try to make myself better in any way I possibly can with the help of my budget and baby-sitting money. I will lose weight, get new lenses, already got new haircut, good makeup, new clothes and accessories.” This concise declaration clearly captures how girls feel about themselves in the contemporary world. Like many adults in American society, girls today are concerned with the shape and appearance of their bodies as a primary expression of their individual identity.

~ Joan Jacobs Brumberg in The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls

Not to suggest that life was better back in the nineteenth century, but merely to point out that we really do follow the fashions of our time. And when it appears that we have the greatest abundance of choice, we are often less free than we think we are.

imagining china

If cities have gods, then so must nations. With the 24 hour NBC coverage of the Olympic Games, I can’t help but think what mythical being presides over the vast land of China? What is the spirit that guides this imagined community?*

Let me caveat all this by saying that I make this sketch of China from my very biased and limited viewpoint, amalgamated from my own impressions of the country, conversations with upper middle-class Chinese family and friends and perhaps a few taxi drivers and shop owners, and my reading of American media, which seems quick to pounce on China's weaknesses. Nevertheless, this is my opinion of China, a country for which I still feel a strange affinity for, perhaps indicated by my slightly inability to fully cheer for the American nearly all blond women’s gymnastics team.** The faces of the Chinese women’s gymnastics teams strike me both as familiar and foreign, reminding me of my elusive birthplace that I have only visited as a tourist.

On the surface, China’s deity stands proud. It has come a long way since the devastating mass famines of the 1950s or the social upheavals (the closing down of schools, the relocation to the countryside) of the Cultural Revolution. My parents left China in the mid-eighties. At that time, few families possessed any common household appliances that marked America’s successful 50s: microwave, refrigerator, television set, washing machine etc… However, when my parents returned in 1993 and 1994, they were amazed to find that nearly all their relatives owned them. They remarked that there was little they had that the Chinese did not (aside from having two children!). In little more than a decade or so, many, my extended family included, have risen out of poverty and have decent middle class lives, no longer living cramped six people to a room with no running water.

And visually, China’s cities reflect this economic success-- the impressive glowing skylines, the rapidly expanding network of highways, the sleek shopping centers and lively nightlife. As a result of both this and the continued nationalistic propaganda (if I’m not mistaken, elementary school textbooks still include numerous flattering portraits of Mao ZeDong and other key revolutionary heroes), many feel proud of what China has been able to accomplish from so little.

But China’s pride may also prove to be its downfall. Pursuing some unrealistic vision of modernization, China has been demolishing historic slum-like inner city neighborhoods and replacing them with sleek high rises and shopping malls. While America tries to lower automobile usage, China promotes it, restricting bicycle usage on certain streets. Its rapid industrialization has also filled the skies up with smog. Some may have profited from the economic development, but many remain left behind, supplying the labor for the sweatshop factories and filling in the informal economy.

Its nationalistic pride also suggests hidden insecurity. Though China lavishly demonstrates to the world its success and power, it also seems to yearn for praise and acceptance. Its previous attempts at manufacturing and coordinating a utopian society have failed. Communism in China was a disaster that killed millions. Previous state-down attempts at controlling the population with the one-child policy have created a new set of problems, with the increased pressure on only children to support their parents, and the outnumbering of males to females.

Perhaps China is so quick to curb criticism and repress free speech because it needs to continue to sustain its own myth. Exiled Chinese author Ma Jian, as cited in this article, comments that in China, there is "inflated pride; the fusion of years of nationalistic propaganda, with the economic powerhouse China has become, has created a feeling that it's now the centre of the world, and that foreigners come to them with begging hands." However, "the root of this desire to put on a great show stems from the authorities' own loss of faith in themselves. And they also realize that, despite the great rise in nationalism, the people don't believe in this empty ideology either."

And so China’s shiny, proud exterior façade (like the recently erected walls designed to hide Beijing slums) conceals an interior disillusionment and insecurity. While Chinese Olympic athletes who win gold take home glory and wealth, what happens to the 249,550 (with injured bodies and insufficient education) who do not?*** What other bodies are lost in the spectacle of those chiseled, carved and engineered Olympic bodies?

The state already disappointed the people with the collapse of the communist dream. Along with that, many promises, including health care, state pensions, welfare, jobs, justice, and equality, have been broken. Individual well-being is always curtailed for some purported collective good and elusive nationalistic glory. (Service and sacrifice for the nation is always enforced, rarely voluntary). While China celebrates hosting the Olympic games, factory owners are forced to close up shop, slum-dwellers suddenly find walls surrounding their neighborhoods, and students are told to stay away from Beijing during this time. When China was awarded the privilege (not the right) of hosting the Olympic games, it was partly for the hope of improving the human rights situation in the country. But many have commented that the situation has only worsened.

The Chinese people may rhetorically display plenty of nationalist pride in their imagined community, but their actions suggest otherwise. A spirit of practicality dominates the real China. From my aunt who questioned me on why I did not take a job with a higher salary, to a Chinese Chinatown bus companion who kept insisting that I must do business with China because I spoke both Chinese and English and could become very wealthy, it all comes down to money and security for oneself, and one’s family.

Students spend their childhoods and adolescence confined to classrooms and study halls, preparing for their college entrance exams. Other families make huge personal sacrifices in order to send their children abroad. Factory workers choose to work long, grueling hours in order to provide better for their families. Individuals rarely make true financial sacrifices for the sake of their nation. Over one billion people scramble to try to make ends meet, and improve their standard of living, perhaps without any thought as to whether or not they are serving or bettering their country.

And so perhaps China really is just an imagined community—a story , a fable, a myth, a distant deity to whom one pays homage, but certainly not a god who will come to one’s rescue, no matter how desperate the prayer.****



* The term “imagined communities” comes from Benedict Anderson’s definition of nations. He describes nations as imagined "is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion".
** Okay, I wrote that before the gymnastics all-around. I’ll admit it-- by the end, I was cheering for Nastia Liukins. After all I am a newly minted U.S. citizen! And if I don’t cheer for the US, what country can I cheer for? I can’t quite cheer for China, and Canada’s performance at this Olympics has been rather disappointing. “You have to be ambitious to win the Olympics,” says my mother, “The Canadians! They’re too laid-back!”. I also asked my mother which country she was cheering for more—US or China? She said it was tough, but the US more.
*** I’m averse to China’s state training of athletes where children as young as 3 can be taken from their families. But then I wonder about how sports often work in America—Children aren’t forced to train by the state, and yet only those who can afford the classes, the practice and the coaching make it to the top. I could spin it and say that atleast China gives children and families who have never had an opportunity a chance for Olympic Success. But once again, I must wonder about all those athletes who didn’t quite make it to the top but still had to subject themselves to the years of grueling training, injuries and separation from family. The New York Times article also suggests that even former medalists don’t always fare too well after the Olympics and the glory has faded.
**** I am cognizant of China’s demonstration (both government and individual) of care and compassion after the SiChuan earthquake, so I’m not saying that the government will not assist people at all. Once again, I am speaking of in general terms, so naturally exceptions exist.

sex and women's rights

two terms not to be confused with one another

I’m a little late on writing about the Sex and the City Movie. Part of me enjoyed the TV show because it was funny and part of me secretly envied the wardrobes of those four women, but whatever other part of me that remained resented the show for the way that it represented the supposedly ideal life of a female:

At least, you could argue, Miranda has a job, as a lawyer. But the film pays it zero attention, and the other women expect her to drop it and fly to Mexico without demur. (And she does.) Worse still is the sneering cut as the scene shifts from Carrie, carefree and childless in the New York Public Library, to the face of Miranda’s young son, smeared with spaghetti sauce. In short, to anyone facing the quandaries of being a working mother, the movie sends a vicious memo: Don’t be a mother. And don’t work. Is this really where we have ended up—with this superannuated fantasy posing as a slice of modern life? On TV, “Sex and the City” was never as insulting as “Desperate Housewives,” which strikes me as catastrophically retrograde, but, almost sixty years after “All About Eve,” which also featured four major female roles, there is a deep sadness in the sight of Carrie and friends defining themselves not as Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Celeste Holm, and Thelma Ritter did—by their talents, their hats, and the swordplay of their wits—but purely by their ability to snare and keep a man. Believe me, ladies, we’re not worth it. It’s true that Samantha finally disposes of one paramour, but only with a view to landing another, and her parting shot is a beauty: “I love you, but I love me more.” I have a terrible feeling that “Sex and the City” expects us not to disapprove of that line, or even to laugh at it, but to exclaim in unison, “You go, girl.” I walked into the theatre hoping for a nice evening and came out as a hard-line Marxist, my head a whirl of closets, delusions, and blunt-clawed cattiness. All the film lacks is a subtitle: “The Lying, the Bitch, and the Wardrobe.”

~ From the New Yorker

If this is the epitome of role models for my generation of females, then I am quite saddened. Sex and the City is occasionally lauded for promoting sexual liberation and freedom for women. These days, it seems that female liberation is only about sexual liberation and reproductive rights.*

And if Sex and the City represents this, then this female liberation seems rather intent on turning all us women into selfish, men-obsessed, materialist girls, comfortably living out an extended childhood.

Has female liberation also lost sight of the actual critical issues of our society? To cite from the article from my previous post:

… elsewhere, thousands of honor killings and millions of female circumcisions transpire yearly. In Saudi Arabia, feminism is not second-guessing the remarks of a college president, but simply wanting to drive a car; on the West Bank, it is not being murdered when dating someone your father and brothers don’t like; in the Sudan, it is avoiding genital mutilation; in Iran, it is escaping stoning when accused of adultery…





* If you use the words “rights” and “freedom” to defend any issue, you will certainly sound justified in your reasoning.

bicycle safety announcement

My apologies for interrupting this blog's regular programming, but I believe this is an important public safety announcement:

Please check the street for cars AND bikes (and pedestrians for that matter), before you open your car doors:

The former general counsel of Comcast Corp. was killed yesterday as he bicycled down Main Street in Moorestown, police said.

Stanley Wang, 67, of the 500 block of Sentinel Road, was traveling east on Main Street around 12:20 p.m. when the driver of a parked Dodge Dakota pick-up truck opened his door. Wang struck the door and was knocked him from his bike into the street.

Wang was then struck by a passing Chevrolet Cavalier driven by Kellie Gifford, 19, of the 100 block of Winthrop Avenue.

Wang, the former general counsel of Comcast, was taken to Kennedy Memorial Hospital - Cherry Hill, where he was pronounced dead at 1:08 p.m.

Police are not releasing the name of the driver of the pick-up truck.

The accident remains under investigation. Anyone with information is asked to call Sgt. Randy Pugh at 856-914-3045.

~ From the Philadelphia Inquirer

Also, please don't honk at bike (or pass it too closely) that's somewhat in the center of the road. The bike is considered a vehicle and has a right to be there. It's also probably in the center of the road because it's trying to avoid potholes or car doors being flung open.

You can also consider doing the test.

the disappearance of time

The sprawl of highways, the hub and spoke of airplane trajectories, combined with the electronic network of telecommunications are monuments to our domination of space.

As we have dominated space, we have also rushed along. Consultants break the day at dawn to catch their next plane. Soccer mums shuttle their children back and forth from practices and playdates with her soup in a can in the cupholder of her SUV. A graduate student types away in the dim light of the library. Late at night, a corporate vice president frets over revenue and expense figures of his division, on which his compensation depends.

And it’s good news to hear that GDP per capita has gone up, because that means that our standard of living has improved.

In technical civilization, we expend time to gain space. To enhance our power in the world of space is our main objective… To gain control of the world of space is certainly one of our tasks. The danger begins when in gaining power in the realm of space we forfeit all aspirations in the realm of time. There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern.

We like to live as though time does not exist, as though the ticking bomb of our mortality has been silenced. We live as though we can take all the things that we’ve acquired in our time here on earth with us when we die:

… to have more does not mean to be more. The power we attain in the world of space terminates abruptly at the border of time. But time is the heart of existence.

Most of us seem to labor for the sake of things of space. As a result we suffer from a deeply rooted dread of time and stand aghast when compelled to look into its face… Is joy of possessions an antidote to the terror of time which grows to be a dread of inevitable death? Things, when magnified, are forgeries of happiness, they are a threat to our very lives; we are more harassed than supported by the Frankensteins of spatial things.

Bertrand Russell writes that time is "an unimportant and superficial characteristic of reality… A certain emancipation from slavery to time is essential to philosophical thought… to realize the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom."

But perhaps we have failed to enter the city of wisdom because we’ve forgotten about the importance time, and have only focused on space (Perhaps because we can control space, while time eludes us). And thus much of our labor is in vain, and we spend much of our time chasing forgeries of happiness.

~

Time and space are interrelated. To overlook either of them is to be partially blind. What we plead against is man's unconditional surrender to space, his enslavement to things. We must not forget that it is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is a moment that lends significance to things.



* Unless otherwise noted, all italicized text is from Jewish writer Abraham Heschel’s book The Sabbath

less meaty issues

The wedding is over. The honeymoon is over. And I find myself readjusting to a new rhythm of life, perhaps more traditionally known as practicing my “wife skills”.

Since indoctrination by Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma and realizing that forever eating Trader Joe’s freezer, or food carts/take-out, or salad and baked fish, was neither sustainable nor satisfying, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to eat well and cook well, especially in light of the fact that I’m now cooking for a little family of two.*

I’ve been both appreciating and thinking critically about the way I ate growing up.** Plenty of stir-fried green vegetables, hearty soups, white rice, tofu and a little bit of meat. Most Chinese cooking use vegetables and tofu as the central elements—and meat serves more as a flavoring ingredient. Yet somehow in this country, Chinese food has been reduced to a plate full of deep fried chicken served on white rice. And while my favorite meals will probably always be the ones my mother cooks, I’m learning to venture nutritiously and flavorfully beyond oil and salt, and a bit of soy sauce and sugar.

In any case, I was pleasantly surprised a little while ago to see a NY Times article highlighting the fact that we eat way more meat than we need to. Thinking about the nutrition of my childhood, and what makes my body actually feel good after I eat, I completely agree with this.

Furthermore, of late, I’ve been feeling that meat/seafood-centered cooking can be downright boring. There is much more to be experienced in the land of culinary than a huge chunk of chicken smothered in sauce, with a side of potatoes and steamed vegetables. It’s been quite fun to discover the different flavours obtained by blending different spices, vegetables, beans and tofu. I don’t think I will ever actually become vegetarian, but I really appreciate the richness of cuisine without meat.

So here begins a new daily delight with the tangible (and edible)! There is something very enjoyable and meditative about eating food that you have carefully prepared (though having someone else to share the food with is integral to that enjoyment).

~

Yet as much as domestic matters and managing an apartment can easily and comfortably occupy my mind for days on end, there’s a deep itching inside me to pursue something more. And yet I don’t want to end up chasing after personal glory and societal acclaim, which I can sense is a desire in me. As C.S. Lewis noted in the Screwtape Letters—when we think we are finding our place in the world, the world is actually finding its place in us. Let’s hope that if given an option, I would choose to be unnoticed and humble rather than praised and proud.



* Clarification: I only cook half of the time. My dearly beloved husband has been wonderfully egalitarian about chores :)
** It’s amazing how much the food habits of our childhood impact the way we want and expect to eat today. This was clearly evidenced and experienced upon my drooling reaction to trying cream cheese and bagels for the first time in middle school to my disappointment and perplex with why people didn’t share their dishes in restaurants.

of gold dust and cleavage

I didn’t think I would be posting on makeup again, but I stumbled upon this:

I know there are people reading this essay who will say that makeup is absurd, and I won’t quarrel with them. All esthetic activity is on some level absurd. By the same token, philosophers have argued since the dawn of time that there is an essential human need to engage in ostensibly useless and purely esthetic activity. Applying makeup is a small act of artistry, performed every morning and touched up throughout the day. It’s the same old canvas, to be sure, but it offers itself anew again and again. All art involves repetition with variations. Besides, the sameness of the face is belied by the fact that it contains a mutating consciousness, that it shifts in its relationship to the world, that it ages.

The return of youth that makeup promises is not really bought seriously by most women. We know that makeup is a frail stop-gap measure, a lame palliative. We don’t need Hamlet to tell us that we can “paint an inch thick, [but] to this favor [we] we must come” — we know it every time we look at ourselves in the mirror. We don’t expect it to stop us from aging, only to gussy us up a bit in the face of time’s relentless sickle.

One of the most poignant and wondrous spectacles I know is seeing a very old woman insist on having someone put on her makeup. It’s something I’ve seen numerous times in hospitals and nursing homes. I did it for my own mother before she died. Even as she knew she was close to death, she still wasn’t prepared to give up on art and succumb to nature. I loved that determination in her and cling to it in myself. If we are, as Shakespeare said, “this quintessence of dust,” let it at least be gold-flecked and luminous.

~ Paula Marantz Cohen, All Made Up

While Cohen tends to ignore the corporate behemoth that moves and shakes the cosmetic industry, she writes eloquently and thoroughly about the “art” of makeup. She writes about makeup as it were an act of play, of interaction with your face as a canvas, and not so much as a coverup, a crutch upon which we rely, a sign of a society where appearances are so often valued more than substance.

Meanwhile, this other article reviews a book that provides a slightly different perspective:

“Show me a woman with a good three inches of cleavage on display, and I’ll show you a woman who, rightly or wrongly, has little faith in her powers of conversation.”

~ Hadley Freeman in book The Meaning of Sunglasses: And a Guide to Almost All Things Fashionable

While we may like to believe that clothing and makeup is all about self-expression and art, more often than not, it’s a matter of hiding parts of body we’re ashamed of, or of impressing the opposite (or the same) sex, and of a comfortable escape of deeper pains that afflict us.

the heart of the wise is in the house of mourning*

What is lost in an instant-fix society where there exists a pill to remedy every little discomfort there is to be had...

But does the American addiction to happiness make any sense, especially in light of the poverty, ecological disaster and war that now haunt the globe, daily annihilating hundreds if not thousands? Isn't it, in fact, a recipe for delusion?

And aren't we merely trying to slice away what is most probably an essential part of our hearts, that part that can reconcile us to facts, no matter how harsh, and that also can inspire us to imagine new and more creative ways to engage with the world? Bereft of this integral element of our selves, we settle for a status quo. We yearn for comfort at any cost. We covet a good night's sleep. We trade fortitude for blandness.

~ From The Miracle of Melancholia by Eric G. Wilson

*Ecclesiastes 7:2-4 ~ It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart. Sorrow is better than laughter: for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.

skin deep

I don’t know if this entry is going to be of any interest to anyone—it’s essentially disjointed ramblings on makeup and the cosmetics industry. This has been on my mind since I’ve been spending the last two weeks roaming around trying to figure out what I will be wearing on my face on my wedding day. Because I haven’t really bothered with makeup recently—my usual grooming routine consists of deodorant, sunscreen, and lip balm or lip gloss—this has been quite a confusing and involved process.

My mother was not a makeup wearer so my initial forays into the world of cosmetics was guided by the mighty and trusted writers of Seventeen and YM magazine and my preteen insecurities, and provided adequate adornment for my not-so-great middle school years. Orangeish Cover Girl Foundation. Drugstore lipstick on the teeth (and uneven lip colouring—actually I still can’t get my lipstick to look even). Bonnebell Concealer that was too light for me. I don’t think I ever learned how to apply anything properly except eyeshadow and powder.

I used makeup more frequently in college, when I found foundations that actually matched my skin, because I went to more expensive stores where they actually let you try it. It was somewhat addictive—the subtle way that your face seemed to immediately brighten whenever you put the stuff on. However, I eventually reduced my makeup usage upon hearing that it wasn’t very good for your skin (It was pretty much reserved for when I wanted to impress certain ::cough:: people). Ironically enough, that came primarily as a result of Douglas Cosmetics Sales Associate telling me that “You don’t really need makeup! This stuff is bad for your skin anyways”.

Part of my avoidance of cosmetics stems from feeling like we have too much of a “pill society”.* In today’s mass customization consumer society, we’re always looking for a simple fix for all our problems. Wrinkles? Try buying anti-wrinkle cream. Want your eyes to be whiter? Try buying Visine. Want longer eyelashes? Try using a lengthening mascara.

Moreover, many beauty treatments seem to prompt an endless cycle of further purchases: You buy gel to style your hair—resulting in the need for clarifying shampoos to get the gunk out; You use a hairdryer to give it volume—you need to apply hair damage-treating conditioner to repair the heat damage. In fact, some women have been experiencing hair loss as a result of all the treatments they’ve put their hair through. Exfoliating face washes can irritate the skin, causing them to produce more oil, potentially leading to acne, or the need for powder, which may in turn clog the skin, producing the need for concealer…).

~

My recent experimentation in wedding makeup has made me less wary of make-up. The results have been fairly positive—eyeliner apparently makes my eyes appear huge, and though I can’t seem to tell the difference, mascara makes it look as though I actually have eyelashes. Part of me is tempted to undergo this beauty routine daily, but at what cost? I don’t want to end up being one of those people that can’t leave the house without makeup because they think they look terrible without it.

Do I look prettier with makeup because society has trained our eyes to see in certain ways? If I feel more attractive or more beautiful with painted colours on my face, am I participating and feeding into an industry that fuels women’s insecurities about their looks?

Make-up can make someone look really great, but when I look at myself more closely—it just seems all very bizarre to me—the painting of eyelashes, the eye lining, the blush. Call it my paranoia of cancer in this fabricated chemical world, but I feel uneasy with all this stuff on my face.

In the end, my approach to cosmetic beauty is much like my approach to taking exams: The best thing you can do is to sleep well, drink water, eat healthy and exercise. All else is smoke and mirrors. (Perhaps we can say, it’s what goes into your body that counts, not what you put over it).

~

I’ve been anxious, because I still have yet to figure out the “perfect makeup” for my wedding day, but I’m sick and tired of running around and trying products and returning them. Culture tells me that a bride must look absolutely perfect on her wedding day. My skin must be flawless. My makeup must be impeccable. But it’s time I stop believing in and stop fretting over the superficial elements of a wedding ceremony and concern myself with its transcendent meaning.

~

A few resources I’ve stumbled up on in my makeup adventures:

Cosmetic Database ~ rates different types of cosmetics depending on the content of the chemicals Makeup Alley ~ user reviews of pretty much every makeup product out there
Beauty Brains ~ two scientists provide some useful analysis and information on how makeup works; criticized for being little hokey/biased but there’s some useful information
Beauty Industry Who Owns What ~ Most makeup brands are owned by the same companies. Here’s a listing.


* Here’s a little humorous stab at our “pill society” from my brother's website

"progress is a comfortable disease"

Excerpts from Thomas Lynch’s review of the book “Swimming in a Sea of Death” by David Rieff, written in tribute to his mother Susan Sontag who died of cancer:

Swimming in a Sea of Death" is Rieff's brief record of how high priests of the body and blood sort -- whether oncologists or monsignors -- must so often disappoint. And how they disappointed his mother. In the end, neither science nor medicine, reason nor raw intellect, "avidity" for life nor her lifelong sense that hers was a special case -- nothing could undo her death. Susan Sontag "died as she had lived: unreconciled to mortality." And there is the sadness at the heart of Rieff's testimony: that mothers die, as fathers do, regardless of what they or their children believe or disbelieve. It is our humanity that makes us mortal, not our creeds or their antitheses.

All of us swim in the one sea all our lives, trying to stay afloat as best we can, clinging to such lifelines and preservers as we might draw about us: reason and science, faith and religious practice, art and music and imagination. And in the end, we all go "down, down, down" as Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote, "into the darkness," although she did not approve and was not resigned. Some lie back, float calmly and then succumb, while others flail about furiously and go under all the same. Some work quietly through Elisabeth Kübler-Ross' tidy, too hopeful stages; others "rage, rage" as Dylan Thomas told his father to. But all get to the "dying of the light." Some see death as a transition while others see it as extinction. Sontag studied in this latter school and tutored her only son in its grim lessons. What is clear from his book -- an expansion of an essay that first appeared in the New York Times Magazine a year after her 2004 death -- is that while she battled cancer, she waged war on mortality. That we get sick was acceptable to her. That we die was not. Pain, suffering, the awful losses her disease exacted, were all endurable so long as her consciousness remained animate

~

pity this busy monster, manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
--- electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go

~ e. e. cummings

why retire?

Alternatively: “Retirement” is a damaging societal construction that designates the elderly as unproductive, unimportant and expendable outcasts of society.

Retirement also suggests that the ultimate goal of life rests in some form of leisure and withdrawal from meaningful activity. Play cards, collect seashells, watch soap operas, until you get enough diseases that you either die or cannot function anymore.

Alternatively: Why withdraw from life?

Alternatively: Our society does not value the elderly. They were once considered the repository of wisdom and often consulted for their guidance – now we are suspicious of the old and traditional, because they can’t possibly be as sophisticated and knowledgeable as ourselves, because we have you know, all this new knowledge and technology and international cultural exchange and all. And plus, they’re old. Their brains must not work as well. Despite the fact that vintage and recycled clothing have definitely grown trendy, it still seems like the old will never be the new new.

Alternatively: Why retire? I know plenty of people who are well over their 65 years, but are still active, contributing members of society, that debatably have done more than I would on a two-year Peace Corps stint:

• Wilson Goode, who may not have been the best of all mayors for Philadelphia, earned a Doctorate of Ministry at age 62, and then started working as the director of Amachi, a nonprofit established to help children with incarcerated parents. I had the privilege of meeting him recently, and he’s nearly seventy, but still actively involved.
• Gay Brasher ~ My former speech and debate coach from high school. While I was in high school, there was constant talk of her retirement. However, many many years later, not only has she not retired, but she’s also continued to coach the high school team to top ranks nationally, and started middle school speech and debate clubs.
• Jim Di Raddo ~ The new temporary supply pastor at our church is slightly over 75, but still is running up stairs, full of fire and passion, and wisdom.

Activity, rather than rest, is helpful and restorative to aging body:

The brain, like every other part of the body, changes with age, and those changes can impede clear thinking and memory. Yet many older people seem to remain sharp as a tack well into their 80s and beyond. Although their pace may have slowed, they continue to work, travel, attend plays and concerts, play cards and board games, study foreign languages, design buildings, work with computers, write books, do puzzles, knit or perform other mentally challenging tasks that can befuddle people much younger.

But when these sharp old folks die, autopsy studies often reveal extensive brain abnormalities like those in patients with Alzheimer’s… Later studies indicated that up to two-thirds of people with autopsy findings of Alzheimer’s disease were cognitively intact when they died.
…
In 2001, Dr. Scarmeas published a long-term study of cognitively healthy elderly New Yorkers. On average, those who pursued the most leisure activities of an intellectual or social nature had a 38 percent lower risk of developing dementia. The more activities, the lower the risk.
…
Long-term studies in other countries, including Sweden and China, have also found that continued social interactions helped protect against dementia. The more extensive an older person’s social network, the better the brain is likely to work, the research suggests. Especially helpful are productive or mentally stimulating activities pursued with other people, like community gardening, taking classes, volunteering or participating in a play-reading group.
…
Perhaps the most direct route to a fit mind is through a fit body.*

~ Mental Reserves Keep Brains Agile by Jane Brody

Why resign ourselves to collecting seashells and yachts and other meaningless trivialities when there’s plenty do when we are old? If we believe that the world doesn’t matter anymore once we’re 65, then it’s likely that the world will believe that we don’t matter much either, except for perhaps, retirement home sellers and other entrepreneurs pursuing commercially promising opportunities.



*Just a side note as another reason to bike! (Or walk!) Wow I just walked from 2nd and Market to 30th street today. phew!

here's to biking

Though my poor dear fiancé now currently suffers from a lip laceration and chipped tooth, general cosmetic unpleasantness, and medical bills, his mother is still recovering from brain damage inflicted by a rear SUV collision in Feburary.

So I wonder why do people think SUV’s are safer than cars? Look at these statistics (these are odds of dying if you’re in a crash):

Odds of Death vs. Injury in Crashes by Vehicle
Vehicle	Deaths	Injuries	Odds
Bus	17	17,000	1 in 1000
Car, Station Wagon	21,969	2,378,000	1 in 108
Pickup, SUV, Van	10,224	768,000	1 in 75
Bicycle	813	58,000	1 in 71
Large Truck	717	31,000	1 in 43
Motorcycle, Motorbike	2,106	54,000	1 in 26
On Foot	5,307	77,000	1 in 15
Data From NHTSA Traffic Safety Facts 1997

~ From Is Cycling Dangerous? on Ken Kifer’s Bike Pages

My apologies to those I know who are SUV drivers, but they only offer the illusion of safety!* Not only are they gas guzzlers, but they endanger both who ride within it and others who are on the road. So if you really must buy a car, in the case that a car sharing program or public transportation is unavailable, please atleast invest in something sensible that doesn’t take up three quarters of the road.

But please do consider riding a bike! I am by no means one of those crazy super intense bike-obsessed people like my fiancé (I don’t eagerly find myself commenting on Bike Snob though I do read it…..). To be honest, I prefer the comfort of a car where I’m not as exposed to the wind and other various unpleasant elements.** In fact, it’s usually a struggle to make myself ride my bike to work, but when I do, the moment I start peddling, I’m usually glad I did. So in the interests of sustainability, exercise and the practicality of getting places fast without a car, here’s to biking!


For those of you who are a little wary of navigating the roads on two wheels, it does take a bit of adjustment. When I bought my bike in June, I had not biked regularly since childhood, much less done any city riding. It was scary to bike on city roads at first. I went slowly (well, I still go slowly) and started making mental notes of all potentially dangerous hazards (cars, car doors, pedestrians, and trolley tracks) and situations (two-way unprotected left turns because cars turning left don't notice that you have the right of way, getting squished between a row of automobiles because cars don't notice you, right turning cars that don’t notice you…). It took me until the end of July (and the loss of my subway pass) before I attempted to ride to work, and probably until the end of September or October before I started enjoying the ride. Even now, it’s still stressful for me to bike at night, but I’ve found myself in close-call situations far less often than when I began.

And in the spirit of my previous blog entry and at the risk of sounding really tacky, it is good to experience the physicality of riding a bike. Instead of the climate controlled metal shell of a car where the outside world can sometimes seem simulacral, when you ride a bike, the rest of the world feels real. You feel directly connected with the ground, with your environment and with your movement as you pedal and steer. You might be able to fly around in the air in Second Life and see magnificent aerial shots on your monitor, but you certainly won't be able to feel the wind on your cheeks or the gentle increase of your heart rate as you do when you cycle around the city.


*Okay, to be fair, there’s always evidence to support both sides of the argument. In a brief google search, I found a few articles claiming that SUV’s are safer than cars:

• Some government pdf study
• IIHS and NHTSA Agree: SUV’s Safer Than Cars
• An article based on the SUV Owners of America

Here’s stuff saying that SUVs are less safe:

• Some links from Detnews, carcarscars.blogs.com and cnn.com about a Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia study that shows children are no safer in SUVs than cars.
• Myths and Realities about SUVS
• SUVs: Live And Let Die

** … as long as I’m not driving!
*** If you don’t own a bike, consider investing in a good one. Be prepared to spend several hundred dollars on a decent used bike, and up to a thousand for a new one. If you’re in Philly, check out Firehouse Bikes for a good quality used bike or Trophy Bikes for something new that’s pricier. There are also some neat nonprofits relating to biking: Neighbourhood Bike Works and Spokesperson.
**** My brother has built a website with comics about bears sometimes.

why less is more

The four horsemen of my apocalypse are called Efficiency, Convenience, Profitability, and Security, and in their names, crimes against poetry, pleasure, sociability, and the very largeness of the world are daily, hourly, constantly carried out.
…
This is most manifest in the life of the suburban commuter who weekly spends a dozen or more hours on the road between the putative dream house and the workplace, caught in the gridlock of tens of thousands likewise trying to move from the residential-warehousing periphery to the economically productive inner rings. Space is quantifiable and we are constantly taught to covet it (though leisure is advertised too—mostly as vacation packages). You can own those two thousand square feet including two-car garage, and it is literally real, the real in real estate. But to have this space you give up time, the time that you might be spending with the kids who are housed in the image of domestic tranquility but not actually particularly well nurtured by their absentee parents, or time spent immersed in community life or making things with your own hands or doing nothing at all—a lost art. You give up time, and you often give up the far more than two thousand square feet that you don’t own but get to enjoy when you live in, say, a rented apartment in a neighborhood full of amenities nobody advertised to you, because you don’t have to buy the public pool or playground that your kids don’t need to be driven to. The language of real-estate ownership is loud, clear, and drilled into us daily; the language of public life and leisure time is rarer and more complex.
…
Ultimately, I believe that slowness is an act of resistance, not because slowness is a good in itself but because of all that it makes room for, the things that don’t get measured and can’t be bought.

~ excerpts from the article Finding Time by Rebecca Solnit

While we are working really hard to increase profits and grow our GDP—attempting to make an image of white picket fence life real—we sometimes never figure out what a good standard of living truly is (it’s easy to waste our life away in a life that isn’t really life).

I quit a high-paying, high-flying job almost six months ago. A job that put me on the fast track for that suburban dream of comfort and security. A job that promised much, but arguably delivered little.

Due to this unnaturally warm spell in October, the weather has greatly resembled what it was like when I first moved back to Philadelphia in May. The shade of green of the trees in Rittenhouse, the mostly full park benches, the gentle sunlight, the music from the street performers. The sensory details have been ushering back my memories of how free it felt to make that change of pace.

Though I now eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches instead of pricey Mediterranean cuisine for lunch (and cannot eat out very often), though I now have to stay in hostels for my honeymoon instead of 5-star hotels, though I now must take the Chinatown bus to travel, instead of Amtrak, I wouldn’t go back. Not even if you paid me :)

~

Some other excerpts from the same article (on the subject of walking, instead of driving):

The problem is partly one of language. The language of commerce has been engineered to describe the overt purpose of a thing, but cannot encompass fringe benefits or peripheral pleasures. It weighs the obvious against what in its terms are incomprehensible. When I drive from here to there, speed, privacy, control, and safety are easy to claim. When I walk, what happens is more vague, more ambiguous—and in many circumstances much richer. I am out in the world. It’s exercise, though not so quantifiably as on a treadmill in a gym with a digital readout. It’s myriad little epiphanies and encounters that knit me more tightly into my place and maybe enhance the place overall. The carbon emissions are essentially nil. Many more benefits are more subjective, more ethereal—and more wordy. You can’t describe them in a few familiar phrases; and if you’re not practiced at describing them, you may not be able to articulate them at all. It is difficult to value what cannot be named. Since someone makes money every time you buy a car or fill it up, there’s a whole commercial language built around getting us to drive; there’s little or no language promoting the free act of walking. Have you not driven a Ford lately?

Even the idea of security illustrates the constant conflict between the familiar and the intricate. When I drive, I have a large steel and glass carapace wrapped around me and my contact with other human beings is largely limited to colliding with their large metal carapaces at various speeds or their unbuffered bodies in crosswalks. Fifty thousand or so people a year are killed by cars in this country, but its citizens officially believe that safety lies in the lack of contact that cars offer. Walkers make a place safer for the whole community—what Jane Jacobs called “eyes on the street”—and in turn become more street-smart themselves. Too, safety is a reductive term for what being at home in the world or the neighborhood can provide. This is a more nebulous kind of security, but a deeper and broader one. It is marked by expansiveness, not defensiveness.

Walking versus driving is an easy setup, but the same problem applies to most of the technological changes we embrace and many of the material and spatial ones. The gains are simple and we know the adjectives: convenient, efficient, safe, fast, predictable, productive. All good things for a machine, but lost in the list is the language to argue that we are not machines and our lives include all sorts of subtleties—epiphanies, alliances, associations, meanings, purposes, pleasures—that engineers cannot design, factories cannot build, computers cannot measure, and marketers will not sell. What we cannot describe vanishes into the ether, and so what begins as a problem of language ends as one of the broadest tragedies of our lives.

we're all going to die

"Our relentless search for wellness through medicine has created a kind of therapeutic imperative, the urge to treat every complaint, every deviation from the norm, as a medical condition. We’ve come to believe that if a test can be performed, it should be performed; if a treatment can be used to lengthen life, no matter how incrementally, it should be used, regardless of whether the intervention will improve the patient’s sense of well-being, or is what the patient really wants. Families often tell doctors to “do everything possible” for their elderly and dying loved ones, often without realizing that “doing everything” won't necessarily stave off death for so long but could make the patient’s last few days or weeks more miserable than they might have been. Physicians, too, forget that their power to prolong life is limited, and that they are still able only “to cure, sometimes; to relieve, often; to comfort, always”, in the words of a French proverb.”

~ Overtreated: Why More Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Shannon Brownlee)

I guess I may get labeled as insensitive when I say this. But sometimes I get frustrated with all the rhetoric you hear about finding cures for diseases, especially ones relating to aging, such as certain types of cancers, Alzheimer’s, stroke etc… I get frustrated because we talk about prevention and cures for these diseases as though we could ward off death indefinitely.

On average, one hundred thousand dollars are spent per Medicare recipient in the last two years of life, from numerous tests for problems, to treatments that promise to prolong life for a few more months, to nasogastric feeding tubes and breathing machines designed to keep people alive far beyond what their natural bodies would allow.

We are all going to die someday. Why not accept it and do it with dignity? Why not do it without putting a huge burden on the health care system? Perhaps it’s better to die 10 years earlier, than to spend 20 years undergoing multiple treatments for various “diseases” that are but products of aging.

This is not to say that I’m against medical research altogether relating to aging or against any sort of medical treatment for the elderly. I do believe that they should be cared for and should be enabled to live their lives as fully as possible. But I guess because of this very belief, I agree with Brownlee—I wish the medical research we engage in and the treatments we use for the elderly would be more focused on alleviating their suffering and promoting their ability to enjoy the last years of their life, rather than trying to “cure” them of what is inevitably their old age and proximity to death.

But maybe I can only say this, because I'm young and haven't yet experienced the gradual decline of my body-- the aching of joints, the susceptibility to falls, the fuzziness of memory.... Perhaps because I haven't known my body becoming something other than my body as I know it, that I can say these words so easily. Perhaps because I have yet to experience the passing of a close friend or family member, that death for me is still an abstract concept that I can wax and wane eloquent on without actually knowing anything.

But we are all going to die. Maybe one day we will cure all cancers, but we will never be able to escape death.

~

“So little of what is done for old people seems aimed in any direct way at making the patient feel better. With medicalization, the role of physicians has become so expanded and technologized that we fail at our most important task—providing relief from suffering. Medical care of the elderly is particularly distorted by this new focus. Medicalization externalized experience, whereas the major tasks of aging are internal. Every clinician has witnessed the medicalized 80-year-old obsessed with arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease, and serum cholesterol levels. Contrast the patient with someone else in the same physical condition, who admits that her knees are bad and that she has trouble remembering things. Which patient is better off? Attention to some proto-illnesses arguably could benefit 80- and 90-year-olds: certainly osteoporosis, probably also high blood pressure. But 80-year-olds can ill afford the ceding of responsibility and loss of control inherent in medicalization. The challenges of very old age are spiritual, not medical. The appropriate role of the physician is a counselor or helper, not as scientific expert."

~ James Goodwin, geriatrician at the University of Texas Mexical Branch, in an essay in the New England Journal of Medicine