MotherPie

Ramble: Still the Weekend & Hugging Manhattan...

My brother is here and we're rambling all over NYC.   For me it is a weekend week.  I'm off playing. My ramble for today: the most interesting links of the week.

Best Post Earth Day Post: Earth Day Leftovers from Eating Liberally and how Rachel Carson's ideas were swatted down among other Einstein-y ideas.  Another good post on this site: how plastics might be entering the food chain via increased trade with China (dog food, hog deaths).  The pollution in China is well-known.  More in today's NYTimes on the open secret of animal feed filler and the terrible food safety records and problems in China.

• Who will be politically influenced via new media?  An April '06 blog ad survey found that the median political blog reader is a 43 year old man with an annual family income of $80,000. He reads 6 blogs a day for 10 hours a week. 39% have post-graduate degrees. 70% have contributed to a campaign. 58% say blogs are "extremely useful" sources of information. Women have moved into the blogosphere in large numbers since then and Sen. Hillary Clinton is out to reach them. Her first blog post outside of her own blog (see how new media is impacting politics) was on firedoglake on the topic of Equal Pay, Equal Respect. 

• Little  lies will come back to getcha.  The Dean of M.I.T. resigned when it was discovered that she lied about her academic credentials...28 years ago. 
• Bad in Baghdad: Riverbend, author of the award-winning blog from Bagahdad, Baghdad Burning, has announced that her family is leaving Iraq.  She sees that the tatters of her society are no longer tenable.   Following her blog has given me a new media view of what is happening there. 
• Dogs Express Emotion: a big story in the NYTimes is about how a dog will wag its tail to the right when attracted to something - the muscles in the right side of the tail reflect positive emotions.  Animals are left-brained, too. 
• Hug more often and for longer - The Happiness Project blog says that frequent huggers have lower blood pressure and higher levels of oxytocin (a chemical that promotes bonding).

I've hugged my little brother and I'm off to hug Manhattan.  Still the Weekend Cheers.

Love Birds on the Ledge...

Nesting in Manhattan.  Making a happy bird perch.

Pale Male is working to build the nest and bring in food. Will Lola's eggs hatch?  Is their home on a concrete ledge covered with spikes going to be good for reproduction?

Lincoln Karim's spectacular photos daily of the famous Fifth Avenue love birds are so beautiful, as is this one of Karim's, from April 26th... my wedding anniversary.

The mama in me loves this continuing saga of a pair working hard to make a life way up high in a city that never quiets at night.   Stats on this couple and his previous mates on Karim's site.

Western Chic hits Manhattan...

"This makes for a suspicious amount of wilderness nostalgia, given the unlikelihood that a broad swath of the New York City population grew up in the Elmer Fudd lifestyle," writes the NYTimes, commenting on antler chandeliers in NYC stores, mounted deer head trophies hanging on the wall of restaurants and "rough" style that (?) is a back to nature movement?  This is yet another example of NYC myopia.  "In popular culture, they are likely to mean something else entirely, but what?" asks the article on spring trends and fashions.  Scratch head.  NY is slow to "get it" I think. They only started wearing cowboy boots fairly recently here.   These things are indiginous frontier styles, echoing true authentic American western styles.  Frank Phillips,  founder of Phillips Petroleum, built his western-themed retreat, Wooloroc, outside of Barltesville, Oklahoma, where he would have buffalo hunts and chiefs to entertain Eastern financiers  with buffalo heads mounted on the wall - and this, back in the early part of the last century.  Wooloroc was built in "the lodge style" which is still popular today. 

Methinks these authentic trends can't be swept away and regarded as just blips in the fashion scene. 

About 20 or so years ago this trend in Western design began to gather force and steam in the red states.  Rough, nature style design referencing the outdoors and the western past took a big step forward in the 1980s when the NYC interior designer, Naomi Leff, decorated a business retreat, Saddle Creek Lodge,  for American Express in Beaver Creek in the Vail Valley in Colorado.  Americana hand-made quilts were on the beds, floors were wide-planked and antler chandeliers decorated the foyer.

In a city where "nature" is one large park and itty bitty city dogs are the only critters around (ok. rats, too), and people become riveted watching  a pair of red-tailed hawks trying to have a normal life nesting on concrete...

I get it.  Right. I'm not from here.  I've lived in a lot of places from the south to the west.  Even though I wasn't born in Texas, (I was born in the state that wants to be known as The Big Friendly, Oklahoma, a state with more shorelines than the Atlanta and Pacific coast lines combined), I've spent the most years of my adult life in that great state where my Daddy was born.  Thanks to Texas friends for sending me this.   

What I Love About Texas:

Becoming a Mom...

That first child teaches you how to be a mother while at the same time you relive your childhood as you move through each stage.  Somehow these things aren't as intense the second or third time through.  Birth order is significant.  As a first born, I relate in a special way to my first born, the fourth generation of the maternal line of first-born women.  It is a she-strength experience. 

Today my oldest turns 24.  The memory of holding her and looking into her eyes for the first time is as fresh as a memory from yesterday.  The fierce urge to protect was animalistic and the immediate bonding rocked us both into a forever relationship.

She will always be the most precious of gifts, this little chickadee, to me, Marmalade.

Seeing Double: Twins...

The stroller crowd is out and about  on the sidewalks now that spring has really sprung in Manhattan. There are a ton of twins here and it is because, I would say, that people postpone childbearing until they are set in their careers.  Polly Morrice reviews Liza Mundy's book, Everything Conceivable - How Assisted Reproduction is Changing the World, in this week's NYTimes Book Review and writes that technology has impacted the number of twins born in the U.S. - up 75% since 1980.  A Manhattan sidewalk dance: dodging double strollers -- pushed by nannies in the daytime and Dads on Sundays. 

Sixty percent of married mothers of preschool children are now in the work force and maybe the trends are changing, author Linda Hirshman writes. Maybe theThe NYU students and young 20-something young women tell me that no guys get serious until after 30 and no one "dates".  Is global warming altering our cycles?  Regardless, young women - freeze your eggs.  Expecting mothers - bank that cord blood.

Spring Thinking: Rhizomes

We've been taught to think with the image of trees -- hierarchies, branches, roots and leaves, all stemming from the one with new seeds planted independently or blooming from the same bulb.  Independent living, stand-alone ideas that branch rather than roots and shoots from nodes.  As mothers, we think both ways. 

Our thinking and our way of working with ideas is changing because of technology's influence.  We are becoming more like the iris or the aspen with connections that stem out in various directions into new links.  Rhizome is a philosophical term for this concept. It is a horizontal way of proceeding rather than vertical thinking.  It is the idea of the team rather than the individual and the idea of incompleteness, of constant change in any direction and from any spur.   Two theoretical French men, Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze thought on deep levels about rhizome philosophy.  Their ideas have become relevant when applied to the idea of the algorythms of connections that occur through links online.   I've thought about it in terms of (new) media theory.

Children are taught to think now in bubble ideas, drawing lines to connect ideas.  It is like a new spider at every leg with many options for new directions, various routes out and many routes in.  Think of how you follow links on the computer.  One path leads to another.  The methods of wayfinding change.  It is no longer a straight highway from here to there.  Things are no longer black and white and binary thinking.  The approach is more fluid, more malleable, less rigid.

A more feminine influence in thinking?  Technology? Changing philosophy? Non-western ideas? Globalization?   Je pense en printemps.  Spring thinking as daffodils bloom on my terrace and in Central Park.

Marketing Through New Media...

The effort to reach consumers has gone up a few notches, escalating especially in the online environment. One of my friends emailed me that her son had submitted a jingle for the American Idol Pringles contest.  To go vote for his jingle to be the Grand Prize Winner, I had to sign in to vote, providing my name, email address, birthday and zip code.  I gave ten minutes of time to Proctor and Gamble dealing with Pringles.  (Go here to vote for the Pringle Jingle - his is the "United States of Pringles" and it looked fun and creative).  A bunch of people spent a lot of time and creativity for just for fun (or to win the award).  The audience reach is much higher, the engagement is much deeper and the cost is - I presume, much lower than traditional advertising.

What a way to get people to connect to your product for free and encourage others to spend time engaging with it, too.

John Edwards is the fifth-ranked Twit (or was when I wrote about it last month - the NYTimes is just now writing about Twitter) and has a lot of MySpace friends, too.  News of his $400 haircuts hit the news and a YouTube video of him primping his 'do became viral.  Like Hillary's off-key singing video, some of this is reverse marketing but it is a new way of reaching audiences -- very  different from billboards, tv and radio commercials.  New media is changing political marketing and communications -- there will be a default line in this presidential election dividing old media marketing impact and new media marketing in influencing outcomes.

The blog MotherTalk is promoting Arianna Huffington's new book, Fearless, encouraging every mother blogger to write about a time when fear was overcome and linking to Huffington's book. My blog friend Lauri takes up the promotion and encourages others to think about the challenge.  All of this is completely free promotion for Huffington's book by creating a meme for bloggers.

The Webby Awards are voted on by people. I got an email from the Cooper-Hewitt Design museum in my NYC neighborhood letting me know their website has been nominated and encouraging me to go vote.  Verizon is the sponsor of the awards. In order to vote, you have to sign in to access the site and that first page is a marketing trick for Verizon. After spending ten minutes trying to register and giving emails and setting passwords, Verizon had a lot of my attention but now it has my frustration. I'll stick to Sprint.  After trying three times to get past tech glitches, I quit. When I tried to respond to their email that sent me registration problems, techsuppport_pv@webbyawards.com, it bounced back as an unknown user.  But if you want to go register and vote for the webby awards 2006 People's Design Awards, go. Tell me if you had the problems, too.   It might just be my computer.

My brother is coming from Colorado this weekend and he'll help with some of my tech woes.  I can't comment on some blogs after I deleted all of my cookie files (my anti-virus was deleting 60 harmful cookies daily so I just deleted them all).   

My study found that most mom blogs were not interested in monetizing their blogs.  The marketing effort is sure moving online like a tsunami this year.

Perfect Love and What Peeves Me...

Some proclivities can't be parented away and it is hard to change our spouses.  What we are, at our core, and the good and bad of it and how some of our behavior is just a sour thing to bear for those around us made for a very interesting family dinner converstion.  When I asked what I did that just really got their goats...well, they didn't hold back.  Funny, that I have forgotten what they said about me.

We have these things with our friends and our loves, these things we have to overlook, get past, endure or...maybe even suffer. One of my friends forwards me emails and never says anything personal.  I just hit delete.  What if we had personality delete buttons that could just delete detestable behavior?  In others, of course.   ha. haha.  Before my oldest daughter was engaged, I took her to see "I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change."  Hmmmm.  Does this say anything about us culturally that this is the longest running off-Broadway musical?

Clarissa Pinkola Estes told a story in her book, Women Who Run With the Wolves, about a woman who tried to make her true love perfect.  Her lover died and in completely embracing the rotting corpse he comes to life from a love that loves even the very worst.  It is a good fable about moving beyond infatuation to unconditional love.  The idea of love, warts and all.  Warty.

Even still, there are those warty things that really really push my buttons.  I can't stand it when...

A Room With a View, a Space of One's Own...

Everyone needs views for creative living. Women also need a space or place for their own creative work, be it sewing, painting, planting or writing.  Virginia Woolf wrote early in the past century that women need their own money and their own room (her classic ground-breaking book on women, A Room of One's Own, evolved from her thoughtful lectures) in order to be societally productive beyond wife or mother roles.  An aside: Woolf's classic book, coupled with Anne Morrow Lindbergh's book, Gift From the Sea, are two books that every woman should read in their early 20s and pull out as life goes along.

Life is a morphing thing. Right-o, westward-ho. Views chez nous are changing: from the beautiful yang views of Manhattan - concrete in every direction - to the mountain and sunset zen yin views of  New Mexico.

 Perspectives -- a way of looking at living. 

Earth Day and it is Warm...

Everyone is outside enjoying the warm spring weather and the jonquils and forsythia are in full bloom.  Central Park is crowded... I played there all yesterday afternoon on assignment and will head back out later this afternoon.  Lola and Pale Male fans are watching for signs of viable eggs, like this guy, above, looking through the telescope set up for just that purpose. I sat on a bench next to the toy boat pond and a woman told me her theory: Lola's eggs can't be kept warm because the building ledge where the nest has been built has little metal spikey things so that the air circulates under the nest.  ok.  Sounds logical to me.  Another person watching the red-tailed hawk pair thinks that global warming has disrupted their cycles.

"Oh, I just can relate to Lola. I know what it is like to put so much effort into something and then just have it never amount to anything," the woman next to me said as we talked of Lola's eggs.  She is in the finance business and works on commission.   I care about mothers on the ledge of things, so I nod.  All of New York cares about Lola, it seems, as I watch these Lola-gazers with binoculars on the benches peer at Pale Male peeking out of the nest. 

Well Google, the $150 billion juggernaut, hasn't let all its profits take the play away but the seriousness of Google's Earth Day graphic today is worth noting. 

In all seriousness, attention needs to be given to this year's farm bill, up for the next cycle of congressional approval.  Its influence on the environment, immigration, our collective health and well-being makes it an issue for all of us to heed.  What is happening with agricultural subsidies and policies is just wrong. A good article,  You Are What You Grow, by food author and journalist Michael Pollan on the subject when I can get it.  When I was a new mother and shopping for the family, someone told me to shop the perimeter of the grocery store and to buy local when I could.  Mothers should be acting on this issue - for the health of our families, our farms and the earth.