I have been adjusting to the time difference, and I thought I was pretty much back to US time, but yesterday was a tiring day, and today I am going to see Springsteen. I am a little worried about how I am going to manage to stay up. I can usually make it to 10:30 or 11, but we will be in traffic for a long time, too.

Anyway, woke early this morning and began checking out a few expat blogs. I read a bunch before I left for India and found Our Delhi Struggle, which I liked. I’m following them on Twitter, not that I check my Twitter feed often, which pisses Sujal off to no end. I went on Twitter this morning to make a snarky comment or two about the movie to which I was dragged last night, kicking and screaming, District 9. (Why bring your wife, who hates sci-fi movies, to a sci-fi movie, with a bunch of dudes? Just go see it with the dudes.) Nonetheless, The ODS folks posted a link to another blog, Same, but Different. They are either expats who once lived in Poland as well, or they are Polish expats. I could not tell, because it kind of sounded like they were ragging on Poland a bit. What is it with the Polish and India? I swear, it is a marriage made in heaven, and I should know.

Ultimately, that blog lead me to American Expats in India, and I really loved their photos. Honestly, I really miss being in India. Yes, I was on vacation, and that makes anyplace really awesome, but there is a certain busy-ness, a buzz of activity, that makes India vibrant. I also miss being around my sister and her family.

I’ve been home now for going on five days. I have been somewhat jet-lagged, but not too badly. The temptation is great for me to merely lounge around in my last week before school, though I have plenty of work to do. My fans beckon for me to finish the tales on my travels (and by fans, I mean Leslie and Lesa).

I just had a lovely birthday. Sujal and I initially had plans to spend the day in Northampton, one of my favorite towns ever. Alas, plans did not pan out. Sujal has not been feeling well the past few days.

We decided to grab breakfast around here — drop by Harry’s Pizza because they have a great breakfast on the weekends, and we hadn’t been there in awhile. The website says they serve until 2PM on Sundays. We got a late start and arrived at about 1:20. Sadly, it turns out the changed their hours. After driving a round a bit, Sujal and I settled on bagels at Bruegger’s, which, frankly, hit the spot. Then we did a little B-day shopping. I got a cool Eagle Creek travel purse (I love Eagle Creek bags!!), and Sujal got a Travel duffel. We picked up a cake and went home to do some tidying up around the house.

At six, we met up with our friends Joe, Lara, Rita, and Mike at one of our favorite restaurants, Bricco. Delish! Then everyone came to our place for cake. It is so lovely to spend your birthday with friends and loved ones. I could not have asked for a better day!!

So I haven’t wanted to write about this publicly until now. Sujal lost his job at Fanzter in November, which is a pretty scary thing considering he is definitely the breadwinner of our family. He interviewed with Newsweek in New York City, where he would have had a very attractive position working on their website. We went to NYC several times, but I just really did not want to move. I’m not much of a city gal — I really value space and quiet, to items that are at a premium in NYC and its environs. So to make a long story short, he turned down the position.

He was also interviewing at ESPN, and I am thrilled to say that he will be starting back at ESPN in January! Woo-hoo! While I have always maintained that I don’t love Connecticut, apparently, I do! Truth be told, I prefer small towns, but over NYC, I apparently love the suburbs. I love suburban Connecticut. There I set it. I truly am The Connecticutian. I love our house. I love our life. Could there, be improvements — of course, but things are pretty damn great. I’m also very happy at my school. It’s tough to begin at a new school. It’s like being a first year teacher all over again, and I like what I have established at my school.

The bottom line is, Connecticut, you can’t get rid of us! I am the Connecticutian: Hear me bore — I mean roar!

On a side note, Sujal found this great song by Jesus H Christ & The 4 Hornsmen of the Apocalypse.

It’s Sunday evening, and I have been cleaning out the kitchen cabinets. We got new dishes, Santiago Square green dishes by Dansk.

Those of you who are close to me know that I have been obsessing about dishes for quite a while. I’ve been wanting nice stoneware dishes, so I’ve done a fair amount of research. When I was in Buffalo, my mother and I went to Niagara-on-the Lake for her birthday. While there, we stumbled upon a Dansk store that was going out of business, selling dinnerware for 40% off. Woo-hoo for Sujal and me!

Another really cool part of that trip was that my mother and I saw two foxes. Here is a great shot I got:

I wish we had foxes in our yard. Foxes are the best.

Anyway, so I had to clean out space in our cupboards. Afterward, exhuasted and coaxed by my husband, I am now watching a documentary on fonts — Helvetica specifically. When he came and asked me if I wanted to watch a documentary on fonts, I rolled my eyes but was silently a bit interested. If he’d told me it was about helvetica — well, I’d have probaby said no. I’m not a fan of font without serifs. I know that probably sounds funny to most of you, but what can I say? I’m a serif girl. The documentary, Heletiva, was somewhat interesting, though I was writing this post through most of it. It goes through the genesis and life of the font. One aspect I found specifically interesting was one woman saw a correlation with helvetica and “right” politics. She associates the Vietnam war with helvetica. Check it out if you are: a. into documentaries b. into helvetica c. into design d. into font.

The Armoire

I have to say I am pretty damn proud of myself. I am generally quite domestically challenged, but this week, I made myself a jewelry “armoire.” I tend to be a bit frugal, while husband dear tends to be a spender. I hem and haw over making a big purchase. “Pre-shopping” is a full-time hobby of mine. Just ask my friends who got to the mall with me. They come home with bags, and I come home empty-handed after trying on a ton of clothing. Then I may go back and get one item. Well, I have been wanting a jewelry armoire for close to a year. (This one is nice, too.) But I go to JC Penney and check them out. Sometimes they are on sale. Sometimes I have a coupon. Yet somehow, it always seems like an insanely frivolous purchase. Granted, if we stopped eating out for a week, we’d recoup our loss.

Anyway, my birthday recently passed (35 — yipes! I’m officially middle aged, which is obvious when I now have to check the 35-50 box). I asked for the armoire. Sujal did not want to buy it, mainly because he did not think it would match our future bedroom set. Sometimes I wondered about the quality of the armoires. They can seem to be shoddily made. So I did not get one.

My friend, Rita, is doing a little eBay selling project. She has a closet full of wares to sell, so I was peeking through. She had this Ikea unfinished pine cabinet. When I saw it, I figured I could buy it off of her, stain it, put in some hooks, and then I’d have a fancy armoire! Basically, I just wanted one for my necklaces, so I could actually see what I have instead of keeping them in a tangled mess in little boxes. So I did just that. I went out and got some stain — oil-based — oops! I stained that puppy. Don’t worry. It has character. There are my finger marks on the top. Then I put in twenty-six little brass hooks.

We were going to hang the cabinet on the wall, though we are afraid of hanging things on the plaster, because we don’t really know how to. We’ve looked into it, but we’re always afraid the walls will crumble. And frankly, it looks damn good! (If I don’t mind saying so myself!)

The Garden

Then, Lara came over to take some flowering weeds off of our hands. The flower beds are the bane of my existence. The weeds are winning! So we dug and dug, pulling out Black-Eyed Susans, Lily of the Valley, and other flowering weeds that I don’t recall their names. Lara also had this great idea to “kill” weeds. If you weed an area where you want nothing to grow (at least for a bit), then lay newspaper down and mulch over it. The newspaper is biodegradable, so it won’t hurt anything, But the weeds can’t grow through it. I did this decent sized section, and next year, we can plant grass there!!

The next big home improvement task: taking down a border in our living room and painting lots of walls.

As I was driving on Wednesday, I heard this piece on All Things Considered. I heard most of it then, but I looked it up today after work. It’s part of a two-part series, and I listened to the second part today, as well.

The first part deals with small children (2, 3, 4) who strongly identify with the gender that is opposite of their genetic make-up. It details two boys, one on the east coast, one on the west — both who strongly identify with being a girl and with “girl-things.” The set of each boy’s parents goes to see a doctor about their son. The east coast set goes to Ken Zucker, and the west coast set goes to Diane Ehrensaft.

After listening to this piece, I began to read up a bit on Zucker and Ehrensaft. This article called “Drop the Barbie! If You Bend Gender Far Enough, Does It Break?” reveals how “behaviorist” and rigid Zucker is. As part of his therapy, he has parents take away all of the “girl” (in this case) toys. He has the parents disallow him to play with girls or pretend he is a girl character is his play. In the ATC piece, he brings up that if one were to bring a black child to a therapist, and that child says, “I’m white,” then should the therapist have that child live as white? or should the therapist try to make that child comfortable with whom s/he is? He says one would do the latter. He claims that both “confusions” stem from surrounding dysfunction.

This is not an apt comparison. At the very least, racial identity has more to do with cultural identity, since race is a social construct. Whereas gender is obviously cross-cultural, and it is biological to at least some degree. [Honestly, there is a lot more to this -- I can intuit it. It is not an apt comparison, yet at the moment I do not have the words to fully articulate it. One one hand, a) a black child identifying as white -- what does that even mean? White culture? The whole question of a black child claiming to be white relies on an idea that there is a limited way to be black and a limited way to be white. b) Does this happen? If anyone has thoughts on this -- I'd love to hear them!]

In terms of Zucker’s idea that gender “switching” in small children is caused by dysfunction (thus nurture), he, of course, seeks to find the cause (from the article “Drop the Barbie!”):

Zucker and his colleagues try to uncover the psychodynamics in the family that might be at the root of the child’s gender distress. Girls may develop GID, he believes, because they’ve formed the perception that being a girl is weak or dangerous. One little girl he saw recently, for example, had witnessed her mother being assaulted by the mother’s boyfriend. A boy, on the other hand, in a family where the mother is suffering from depression and is emotionally unavailable, might make an effort to act like a girl to get closer to her.

He goes on to say:

Parents are encouraged to set limits on the cross-gender behavior of the child. “We urge them to say, ‘Let’s figure out what other things you can do besides play with that doll,’” Zucker says. “In some situations, we have to work hard with parents’ own issues about gender. Could be a mother who’s had difficulty with the men in her life and has a lot of mixed feelings toward men. That gets translated to the boy, and her fear that he’ll grow up to be like those men causes him to reject being a boy.”

Hmmmm. This smacks to me of the ol’ “Let’s blame it on the mother…” “Gay son — he was mothered too much!” Here, mom is the cause of both disorders. I can’t say I see sound logic here, either.

When Ehrensaft was interviewed, she said something that I thought was pretty profound (from ATC):

Ehrensaft, however, does not use that label. She describes children like Bradley and Jonah as transgender. And, unlike Zucker, she does not think parents should try to modify their child’s behavior. In fact, when Pam and Joel came to see her, she discouraged them from putting Jonah into any kind of therapy at all. Pam says because Ehrensaft does not see transgenderism itself as a dysfunction, the therapist didn’t think Pam and Joel should try to cure Jonah.

“She made it really clear that, you know, if Jonah’s not depressed, or anxious, or having anything go on that she would need to really be in therapy for, then don’t put a kid in therapy until they need it,” Pam says.

If it’s not a dysfunction, then don’t make it one. Human nature is such an odd beast, and I wonder if I’d take that approach if it were some behavior that seemed truly wrong from my perspective. I guess the difference is that in order for something to be truly wrong, I would think it would need a component of causing harm — causing harm to the self or to others. Part of what is difficult for me is that this feels like an automatic response for me, to use a phrase I don’t really like, a “no-brainer.” Yet, I am having a very difficult time articulating why. Anyway, check the series out and let me know what you think.

I could not forget you, Banshee Buddy! I actually broke out the banshee today — had to shovel some snow. Hope your winter break is great.

Okay, so I haven’t written in like fifty years. This is mainly because I have been having the busiest semester of my life. Many of you know I am teaching a class on Bharati Mukherjee. It is taking up most of my time. This has also been the semester of many holidays and family visits. Diwali was a few weeks ago, and we went to visit my in-laws. And most recently, I was in Las Vegas for Thanksgiving. It was a birthday gift to my mother-in-law — and it was a lot of fun! On top of that, we just bought two rooms of furniture and we are selling some of our “old” furniture.

To top that off, I have helped run several events at school, including a parent book club — for which parents read The Middleman and Other Stories and a coffee house (open mic type thingy) sponsored by our school’s Amnesty International, which I advise. Sleep has been at a premium, and I have been facing a long string of colds. Though busy and stressful, everything has been good. I’m having a lot of fun, and teaching this class has made me a student again.

We threw a fun shower for Amy.  Here are a few pictures. In this first one Amy and Scott are opening a baby aquarium. Many of baby Neilson’s gifts were marine life themed:

Asha had a full house:

Congrats to Amy and Scott!