The girls, they just want to have fun!

After teaching Anthropology of Reproduction at 12noon, I sat down with my Kashi Pesto Pasta Primavera for lunch and read this article on the NYT: "Nursing Bras That Show Mothers in More Than ‘Work Mode’."

On the one hand, I am all for recognizing the woman in the mother and letting the girls get dressed up. Why should nursing bras be unattractive and otherwise unappealing to wear?

On the other hand, I find statements like this a tad irritating:

“As soon as you have the baby, nobody looks at you anymore,” Ms. Dimond said. “This is to treat yourself.”

I wish that the woman in the mother did not place quite so much significance in being looked at.

Even more troubling is this statement:

“Another driver is the rapid growth in size, influence and power of online mommy culture.”

As a parenthropologist, I could go on and on about the referencing of "mommy" and "culture," but the point that I wish to make is about commodification. To a certain extent, breastfeeding can be said to exist "outside" market economics (or at least is constructed to be free and "pure" of all that, which itself can have consequences both positive and negative for women who "succeed" or "fail" to breastfeed...) The making of a new market of glam and sexy nursing bras appears to me an attempt to commercialize what previously had been apparently uncommercializable. You cannot sell or buy the milk itself, but you can produce and consume commercial goods that accompany breastfeeding. You can make a commodity of the experience of breastfeeding.

It is true that women's breasts themselves long have been fetishized and commodified. The fact that lactating women's breasts, too, now are subject to it all... Is this really progress?

Plumbing the depths

Something I find more intimidating than even the process of buying a house is the process of remodeling. We moved into our house knowing that we would have to redo the upstairs bathroom (and eventually the kitchen and downstairs bathroom) and have been deferring that decision ever since.

However, the peeling wallpaper and paint flaking from the ceiling and the water staining on the vinyl flooring make abundantly clear that our upstairs bathroom requires attention. So, I am starting to think about the redo. Blurgh.

A particular challenge is that the bathroom measures about 5 by 8. Which actually is fine with me, except that I harbor a deep desire for deep baths. (Calgon, take me away!) Which is leading me to look rather longingly at the walk-in soaking tub:





Or is it too geriatric?

Or is that perhaps a forward looking investment in case we sell the house to empty nesters or stay here past retirement ourselves?

Coming next: Oh, how the Toto makes me want to go-go.

Keeping up with the Times

Tomorrow marks the first day of the fall term here at Central State University College, where I teach.

StraightMan will be sitting out the academic year. He is on sabbatical!

To mark the occasion, here are links to two Times features marking the start of the semester that caught my eye:

How American families pay for college today. I have been thinking about this quite a bit, as I had attended a presentation on children and finance during a visit with friends at the Chautauqua Institution. The audience clearly came from a privileged strata of American society: When the question was posed how much families should be saving for college, the rule-of-thumb figure suggested was $500 to $800 a month per child.

Another reason that I love StraightMan is that he is the kind of guy who, when I quoted him this figure, retorted that their kids would be heading to Hampshire and Bennington. Which is an elitist joke in itself, but still funny to me, as we are nowhere near saving what we are "supposed" to - I thought we were doing well just saving at all!

Redshirting in kindergarten. Look, I think there can be good reasons for why parents, in consultation with teachers, might consider delaying a particular child's entree into school, but at least some of the reasons for redshirting might be addressed more systematically - for example, I think the concerns about schooling boys ought to be addressed more broadly, for the good of more than a select few children who have especially engaged parents.

As an aside, Bubbie, age 3, just started his first week in the "pre-school" room at his child care - I feel a little like he is just too young (i.e., immature) for it, but the other boys (all 14! and only 2 girls...) seem equally too young.

Consuming ponies, Part 1

What is the appeal of this Pony Pals pony bike (above), which its manufacturers / marketers describe as having been invented for this reason:

What we love most of all is watching the joy children get when riding ponies. Four simple words describe it best; "saddle up and smile." But, unfortunately, not every child has the chance to experience this thrill. So that's why we created Pony Pals.

The bike pictured above is priced at $220.

What are American middle-class girls made of? Apparently, a mania for horses and ponies - which to parenthropological eyes like yours and mine does not emerge from a "natural" affinity with horses (despite what the story books tempt us into believing...), but an even more fascinating cultural and social relationship that I have been musing upon in recent posts.

If you know a little girl who is horse crazed, then you know that part of the relationship involves lots of stuff, like the bike above, or what anthropologists call "material culture" - and the production and especially consumption of said stuff is what we American middle-class parents decry as "materialism."

As an aside, I confess that I do not dislike stuff and in fact, derive enough enjoyment out of it that I sometimes get a little bit tired of everyone climbing on their high horses all the time about stuff... The problem with "consumerism" is that it deflects our attention from production and the work that we do and the conditions in which we do it (and also create). Stuff itself is not intrinsically "bad" and "evil," as I sometimes hear other parents describe it. Is it?

The pony bike probably makes more sense and has more appeal to a child than to an adult. I know, I know, I am an anthropologist and should be all about hybridity, but I find this particular hybridization a bit unsettling... The whole "Godfather" aspect with the horse's head, I think.

The WC

The air around here has been thick with the dust of cedar shakes being scraped for restaining, and heady with the scent of trim being repainted. For the last two months... Yesterday, there was also the buzz of saws cutting rotted wood and rusted metal from the flat roof of our laundry room, which had been added onto the house some time in the last 50 or so years and apparently never maintained.

Not to worry: StraightMan and I hired someone else to work on it. They seem actually to know what they are doing. When they are here, but that is another story...

Even as I write this post, StraightMan is in the kitchen, replacing the kitchen faucet. Last winter, our furnace quit, our pipes froze, leaving thankfully minimal damage, but it included hairline fractures in the neck of the faucet.

(If you were, are, or know a breastfeeding mother: You know when a baby suddenly pops off mid-nursing, sending the stream shooting across the room in a fine white thread? Our faucet behaved like that. For those unfamiliar with breastfeeding, now you learned something new about human lactation.)

Meanwhile, this is the first summer in the six years that we have lived here that I have weeded and pruned and even grown a few plants in pots. Something resembling landscaping has been emerging around the house.

I also am researching a remodel of our upstairs bathroom because the time finally has come to do it. The paint and the wallpaper are peeling, the vinyl floor covering is prying loose, the area around the tub has dark spots of water damage, and the vanity around the sink is rotting. Sigh.

In an earlier post, I decried the tyranny of the kitchen island, which in fact was a way of expressing my irritation with the so-called "not-so-big" movement, which seems really to be about not-so-small spaces and kind-of-big budgets.

To get ideas, I am turning to Web sites like apartment therapy because I realize that we essentially live in a duplex apartment with a bit of outside space not unlike a Manhattan roof deck or even a large fire escape.

I also just read about vintagesimplehome in a Better Homes and Garden Kitchens and Bathrooms magazine that I bought at Home Depot. I * heart * the bathroom, which is just similar enough in size and layout to our bathroom - except it might be a bit roomier (or is it just the effect of the pedestal sink?) and our toilet and sink are on the same wall (which I guess makes the layout quite different...) - it gives me hope that we can have a pretty bathroom, too.

A sure sign that I am approaching middle age: I so covet subway tile.

On the other hand, there is always Plan B.

P.S. The photo above came from here.

Conspicuous consumption

How has the existence of this not come to my attention before?!

Waste Not

How did I miss this?! OK, it probably has something to do with the fact that we live just beyond a day trip's drive to the MoMA, but I am sad that I missed this exhibit from last year - Beijing-based artist Song Dong's installation, titled "Waste Not." Here is a description from the MoMA's Web site:

A collaboration first conceived of with the artist's mother, the installation consists of the complete contents of her home, amassed over fifty years during which the Chinese concept of wu jin qi yong, or "waste not," was a prerequisite for survival. The assembled materials, ranging from pots and basins to blankets, oil flasks, and legless dolls, form a miniature cityscape that viewers can navigate around and through.

Interestingly, I just read about "Waste Not" in an article about hoarding in the University of Michigan's alumni magazine.

LSA Magazine reports: "Cheap overseas labor and materials mean that consumer goods are inexpensive, and people are spending more on things." Hoarding looks like hoarding looks like horading, I guess, wherever you go, but I cannot help wondering whether or not it means the same at the point of production (in China) and at the point of consumption (in the U.S.)

On a side note, LSA Magazine also noted: "Recently southeast Washtenaw County in Michigan created a hoarding task force because so many evictions are hoarding-related."

Spring cleaning, part 2

Having been raised as an American and a female, too, I find that accessorizing improves my impression of almost any task at hand. For example: On a whim, I have enrolled, with a few friends, in a cupcake decorating workshop. If you know me at all, then I might as well have said that I will be taking a a class in organic chemistry or a seminar on strip tease. In any case, the point is that the workshop requires that I bring a cake decorating kit, which I do not, or until last week did not, own because I am more the butter-knife-and-a-can-of-Betty-Crocker type. So, I bought said kit because I started to think that a significant reason why I have no frosting / icing skills (aside from the availability of artfully decorated cakes for purchase, not to mention my complete lack of interest until now) is exactly because I do not own the right tools.

The importance and meaning of accessories do not end there.

Recently, I replaced our indoor broom with a Casabella animal print broom that I admit I had eyed for a time. The broom says: I sweep, but I also have a sense of style and humor. Grrr.

But wait, there's more!

I confess also that when we lived in a place with a Whole Foods, I spent inordinate time in the home products aisle, considering the virtues of bamboo-fiber scrubbers and the like. At our local natural foods market (formerly known as a health food store), I like to browse the bottles of Life Tree Home Soap and Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day All Purpose Cleaner. In my office on campus, I keep an Eco-Cloth in my desk drawer.

I am a fool for "design" and the marketing of consumer items pertaining to the green-and-simple house and home. Like other domestic arts that became reframed as drudge work that are becoming re-reframed as crafts - knitting and cooking come to mind - cleaning, too, is being packaged and sold.

Not production, but consumption - and I seem to be buying it.