The lives of others

Throughout the Covid year, the New York Times' At Home section has recommended remarkable television shows and films from around the world, to engage us all during our confinements. (Incidentally, the last installment of that special pandemic Sunday newspaper section was this past Sunday 5/30/21, which may well be as definitive of an announcement that the pandemic is waning than we would get from the CDC.) I found some really great shows. Probably the most engaging 'international' shows for me over the past year have been Israeli and German-Israeli ones: Shtisel, Unorthodox, (both on Netflix), and Srugim, an older series (Amazon Prime). These all feature storylines about characters belonging to religious Jewish communities, the ultra-Orthodox Hasidim in the former two, and the modern Orthodox in the latter. Initially, I think my engagement was borne first out of fascination and connections from some limited personal experiences. (During one graduate school summer, I worked as a teacher at a Chabad House daycare/preschool, wearing long skirts and long sleeves, and I recall the rituals and kosher meals there. Also, every Saturday I see observant Jews walking to observe Shabbat in my neighborhood.) The rituals portrayed in Shtisel may be striking to outsiders (and seemed to be equally entertaining for some of the ultra-Orthodox themselves. See Why Shtisel has captured the global imagination, BBC, April 2019). For outsiders, it's also interesting to see the apparent incongruity of the strict religious rituals being practiced by thoroughly modern, contemporarily-clad characters, such as the young Jewish doctors, accountants, graphic designers, teachers in Srugim.

For its beautifully stark set design and cinematography, Shtisel is definitely worth multiple viewings as it has gotten from me. (I have also read the analysis Reading Shtisel by film scholar Maurice Yacowar, of course I have! He's got a new analysis to cover the third season too.). The show is a work of art, and a showcase for Israeli acting talent. (The miniseries Unorthodox features the breakout actor Shira Haas who was the remarkable Ruchami in Shtisel. At least two other actors from Srugim show up in Shtisel--the professor Avri who is the kind but lost Lippe in Shtisel, and the medical patient Mrs. Schwartzman who is the shrewd Rebbetzin widow in Shtisel.)

 And, yet. It's not the special rituals, or dress, or food that ultimately draw us in to these shows, but the common trials and tribulations of human life. Despite the men's knitted kippes and the married women's snoods, the quick blessings before eating and drinking, these shows are about the common slices of human life, no matter from where and of whom. The shows portray families seeking their way after the matriarch dies, of sons figuring out their futures and regretting past decisions, of women seeking a place and vocation, of close-knit friends sharing meals together while anxiously seeking life partners and comfortable lives. These struggles engage us because we can relate. We also relate to the human imperfections, to the fact that as with some of the characters, not everyone is likeable (Shulem!?), or makes the right choice, or exudes goodness, kindness, tolerance. It is these latter bits that pull me at me now, as I shift my attention to finding new shows or accounts: the snide comments about 'the evil people' (apparently applied to both non-Jews and Zionists, according to the elder Shtisel's brother) and the subtle mentions and glimpses of the Jewish settlements and the rural areas outside Jerusalem in Srugim, areas that I know are home to people not reflected at all in these shows. What about their lives, their families, their futures in these same lands, among these same people? How might a show about Palestinian families or young adult characters depict common struggles about the future, love, and happiness? I'm not making a political statement here, so much as a human one. I know the lives of these others are under dramatically different circumstances, deplorable ones in fact. But I also know there are common human quests, questions, and desires among them. So, as much as I enjoyed the Israeli shows depicting certain Jewish lives, I noticed an absence, an invisibility. I'd like to learn more about the lives of the others that were missing in these depictions; I hope I find that show on Netflix someday.

How to Cook A Wolf

Sourdough bread: yes. Sourdough waffles: yes, Dry cured bacon: yes. Sauerkraut: yes. Pressure-cooker chana masala: yes. Air fryer chicken wings: yes. Borne out of circumstance, we've baked, cooked, preserved, and experimented in our own kitchen, like so many others have this past year or so. It's not the Depression-era or wartime creative-out-of-necessity cooking, as described by MFK Fisher in her book How To Cook a Wolf. (Although there was that run on flour all over the country: remember that a year ago spring? Friends shared their flour supply with me, and one day my bread-baking neighbor discovered some precious rye and grabbed an extra bag for me.) It's also not the same world as Fisher's: she would be surprised by the grocery online ordering and delivery, the elaborate restaurant take-out, even to-go cocktails. But somehow there is something familiar there in Fisher's account. (She has figured prominently in my observations about food rituals earlier too, see Provence, 2013.)

I don't even think it's about the eating of the meals, although Fisher's wider works certainly celebrate the pleasures of eating. Maybe it's just the idea that meals--the planning of them and making them--in times of scarcity or in times of lockdowns, become especially pronounced in our daily lives and center firmly on where we make our homes. Meal-planning and preparation during the pandemic feel more painstaking, maybe more thoughtful, definitely slower. While my household is not looking into how to cook wolves, we read the At Home section in the NY Times each Sunday, looking for new takes on roasted chicken or one pan-meals, or we watch Samin Nosrat on Netflix or Kenji Lopez-Alt on Youtube, for ideas about how to use ingredients, or try new cooking techniques with basic kitchen tools. We confer during our work 'breaks' at home about the next meal. Even if we opt for takeout, there's a similar quality; we ponder the options and look over the online menus carefully before making our orders. And we consult cookbooks, on our shelves or online. Just last weekend, I was able to visit my in-laws (thank you Pfizer vax #2!), and I gathered and steamed clams from their beach, digging through my mother-in-law's cookbooks for the right recipe. While I'm no Kenji, I recorded the results on my own 'cooking video' last week to show some friends. You can call it my How to Cook Clams contribution to Youtube (below, or here Part 1 and Part 2). This is all to say, meals have become a central focus in many folks' day to day lives during the pandemic. That won't change soon, or ever, but it will shift. To mark the two weeks following our COVID vaccines, my spouse and I enjoyed a celebratory dinner the other night, at a real restaurant, with wine, with appetizers, with dessert, for the first time since 3/11/2020! We sat in the enclosed outdoor dining area at Ethan Stowell's How To Cook a Wolf restaurant in Seattle's Madison Park neighborhood, and while I did enjoy my meal, very much, I especially enjoyed eating it in someone else's dining room. 

Water, water everywhere

When a person becomes an all-season swimmer, floater, dipper, swimbler, every body of water one passes by, in the car or on foot, takes on new possibilities. They begin to look like potential dipping spots. In some ways, it’s like any other social phenomenon—the way we begin to notice everywhere the very thing we are wanting or perhaps experiencing ourselves: Suddenly and inexplicably, it seems everyone is pregnant, or drives that color car, or has that pair of sneakers. On the other hand, maybe it is a little different for all-season open water swimmers. For one, many of us are deeply motivated by the physical and psychological effects of swimming in the open. Secondly, it’s not like water isn’t around us. It’s just that we see it with new eyes. We suddenly notice that creek, or canal, or beach, and then begin assessing it for foot access, potential cleanliness, safety, water current, convenience. We post questions on social media boards about swimming holes in that town or that part of the county, state, country, or share tips of good places through word of mouth other ways. It’s as if we open ourselves to new possibilities.

What makes a suitable watering hole anyway? That depends largely on what we are seeking. Roger Deakin in Waterlog, his now classic account of a solo swimming journey through the British Isles, describes swimming spots that to me sound strangely stagnant, or abandoned, or creepily eel-filled, and even harrowing. But his was a pursuit of discovery, of country and of self. For contemporary serious open water swimmers who are training for triathlons or other sporting pursuits, a long shoreline, good proximity to the beach from the water, and manageable water currents matter. And then for slow swimmers like me (there’s a whole global community of us on social media), we’re just looking for some place not too exposed, not too busy with boats, where we can get in slowly, float around, look at nature, catch some sun rays or raindrops, maybe share some gossip if we’re in good company. I personally like a good cove on a lakeshore where the water is not too warm and definitely gin clear (an apt British aphorism, one of many I learned from Deakin), with a spot for a chair and my two bags, maybe some sun. Or I’ll take a saltwater seashore, if I can get into the water safely over sand, rocks, oyster shells and if the water isn’t too gunky at high or low tide, and the area isn’t too exposed.

A favorite swimming spot on the lakeshore

But these are preferences and being able to satisfy them is a privilege tied to where we live. That said, we outdoor swimmers are a flexible bunch, and some of us (not me!) are quite adventurous, like Deakin. I think the thing that ties us together though is that we all get such pleasure from open water swimming. The pursuit of this particular pleasure expands our perspectives. So we begin to look for additional opportunities to get wet. During the pandemic, this pursuit has added novelty and a sense of adventure to otherwise mundane routines. For me, that expansiveness has felt especially notable during seasonal changes, as we look back and we look forward. For example, as summer turned to fall last year, I was quite engaged with reviewing and documenting the places I’d swum all summer and the new places I’d found (planning the limited hiking and camping we did do, I prioritized bodies of water!). There was a sort of poignancy as the shrinking light and working hours of autumn limited my swimming options but also anticipation as I wondered how much longer I could do it and what I’d have to do to continue as the weather and water became colder. (Let’s just say my friends and I learned some remarkable body-warming strategies.) Then there was the transition from fall to winter, and the excitement of a cold dip to celebrate the new year-- polar bear plunges as they are called locally. I even noted social media posts of really creative wintery plunges around the world, into ice baths in garbage bins in gardens: pandemic conditions inspired creative swimming solutions!  Now we move from spring towards summer and the possibilities get even better in the northern hemisphere. With great excitement, we notice water temperature readings climbing out of the low 40s (F) or low teens (C). A friend reports on some potentially interesting swimming possibilities during a family outing last weekend along our Puget Sound waters (as she ruefully also admits she didn’t think yet to bring her swimming gear with her!). A British islander’s social media posts begin to feature locales different from the quaint village swimming spot she’s photographed all winter. We are paying attention to the water everywhere, looking for our next swimming adventure.

Stories

A few months ago I had the privilege of hearing Gloria Steinem on her book tour.  Part of her talk was a question-and-answer opportunity for the full-house audience, and the audience was instructed to ask short questions so that many would have a chance to address Steinem.  Of course, many people in their questions wanted to recount when they last heard Steinem, or to thank her, or to speak of their own consciousness-raising, all of which extended the individual questions.  I'm sure some of us were frustrated, because we wanted to hear more of Steinem's voice, but it was clear that Steinem wanted to hear all of the stories.  On stage, she spoke of the importance of stories, and in her book My Life on the Road, she describes how the stories she heard in talking circles, among women, among Indian villagers, inspired her life's work as an advocate for social change.  Hearing people's stories helps her see how people live and what they need.

Story-telling and story-listening have served Steinem well.  We use stories in teaching too.  A colleague uses 'stories' as a class theme, while I have introduced and assigned the story-telling method in my courses this past fall to help students see the narrative arc of the course they were in and the articles they were reading.  (See Cal Newport's post on The story-telling method.)   I have also scheduled a series of speakers this upcoming quarter, to give my students the opportunity to hear people's stories, of lives lived without homes, or without legal papers, or without easy command of language, so they may better understand social inequality and the importance of social justice.

Using narratives to communicate ideas is nothing new.  We use it in education, in our presentations of culture, even our politicians use them.  The narrative thread  presented by stories help us follow and discover, as we learn academic concepts, read difficult texts, or learn about a process or culture or messages. Just the other day, I followed a storyline myself, at a natural history exhibit at my hometown museum, on how raptors are captured for tagging by wildlife biologists along the coast, and why it is done.  (See Coastal raptors, at the Polson Museum in Hoquiam, WA.) The idea of the narrative is so common right now that the NY Times recently featured a discussion of it, in a recent First Words column.  (See Leibovich, Dec. 8, 2015, When the narrative becomes the story NY Times) Leibovich however suggests that real stories are on the wane, that what we have now, especially in politics are the idea of stories, of narratives, to show that certain politicians possess the requisite skills and presence to lead.
 
I think real stories still matter.  They are a way to reconnect and re-establish social ties.  We hear stories over the holidays, as we enjoy meals and libations together with family and friends, or as we read through holiday letters and cards.  Some stories we've heard over and over, like the one about the Christmas when..., while still others are new ones, and not always happy ones, but stories all the same.  Some relate to other stories, like my dad's story that he recounted on New Year's Eve--of the three kind men who stopped to change his flat tire this fall and did it so quickly he barely had time to thank them.  Such a story can take us in myriad directions, to stories of other kindnesses, or other flat tires (it does appear that there is a small epidemic of these in our social circle at the moment).  And what do many of us do on the first days of the new year, but imagine, as if looking into a crystal ball, the story of the year to come? What will be the next chapters in the grander narratives that represent each of our lives?

Some healthy competition

A few weeks ago, the NYTimes magazine focused an issue on walking around NYC (April 23, 2015). Contributors shared some favorite city walks, while other articles explored how NYC pedestrians and cars co-exist, and how much distance urban rats actually cover in their scurrying about the Big Apple.  A small collection of human New Yorkers were given fitness trackers to reflect the distance they cover on foot each day (see Sweeney, Camille. "City of 10,000 steps.").  Their short profiles in the paper edition of the magazine indicated how much of the walkers' daily walking distance was achieved often just by getting to and around work.  I found myself wistfully remembering my similarly pedestrian existence in Aix-en-Provence, France, where most of my errands were on foot, and even getting to the (single) family car required a walk down three flights of stairs and across a city block.  I didn't have to plan to walk, walking just happened.  Sometimes the walking was exhausting but overall walking everywhere enriched the social experience of getting to know a city and its people and customs (and it seemed to be good for my physical fitness too).

Back in the States, I am finding that more and more, I have to create reasons to walk and places to walk to because my daily life is so chair-bound as a professor or car-bound as my children's chauffeur.  The services that I need regularly are also no longer difficult to access without a car. I shop online, I renew licenses and turn in paperwork online.  A walk to the post office has become rare.  This hearkens back to the assertion made in a Slate magazine article several years ago, that walking has been engineered out of existence (see Vanderbilt, Tom. "The Crisis in American Walking, April 2012; I cited this in an earlier post on walking in France, A pied April 2012).  Indeed, without my standing date to walk for an hour with a friend several mornings a week, and occasional spontaneous walks, I am fairly inactive in comparison to my life in France or even to my life in Seattle a few years earlier when I walked my kids to elementary school every day.  In my current situation, I simply don't need to exert myself to accomplish daily life.  Unfortunately, this appears to be detrimental to my waistline (as others have also experienced).  Clever people at Northwest companies like Synapse, Nike, Microsoft must have seen this coming, because they have been hard at work at reconceptualizing walking, or re-engineering it, into a game-like activity, rather like a leisure sport. Now we can wear fitness trackers on our bodies--the currently popular ones are wrist bands--and try to meet daily goals (10,000 steps or about 4.5 miles is the goal on the Fitbit tracker, the one I took over from my spouse a few months ago).  Progress can be tracked by looking at the number of blinking lights on the wristband, or by checking the actual number of steps on a smartphone that is hooked up to the tracker by Bluetooth connection.  A strangely satisfying sustained vibration on the wristband indicates when the target has been met.  That alone is somehow motivating; NYC walker Chang who tried out the Fitbit for a week reported that she'd stand in her living room and do jumping jacks if she hadn't hit her 10,000 steps by the end of her day (see Sweeney above), and I've seen a funny picture on Facebook of my cousin's motivated wife going up and down the steps in her home one evening in an effort to meet her step goal.  My neighbor and I have been known to pop out together for a quick 350 step walk to meet our daily goals.  To appeal to Boy or Girl Scout types, some fitness trackers proffer digital badges and accolades when particular cumulative distances have been covered, while competitive types can share their distances on Facebook or become Fitbit friends, tracking and competing with each other via their smartphones. These same friends might even try to one-up each other by sporting the best Fitbit bling, or jewelry attached to the relatively ugly rubber wristbands. Designer Fitbit bling is available at Nordstrom, while less expensive alternatives can be found on Etsy: see mine below.

What makes this sociological?  For one, approaching the act of walking this way, as something that we do for fun (okay, maybe to achieve a relatively difficult to measure outcome--better health), and that is to be tracked, with the goal of the more, the better, is definitely a reflection of our time and of relative privilege.  It seems unlikely that our ancestors would understand why our fitness goals are to take as many steps as possible, when reducing the number of steps it would take to get somewhere or to accomplish some task has been a major goal for much of human history.  People in our society and outside it who are without access to good, reliable transportation, who must rely on a great deal of legwork each day, are also not likely to appreciate the attractions of counting daily steps for fitness. They may also not understand how fairly worthless markers like blinking lights and flashing digital badges are motivating.  They might better understand the motivation derived from competing with one's self or with other people, but even this motivation appears to be fairly flimsy, dependent on battery life. A friend and I have both admitted giving up on walking for the rest of the day on occasions when our fitness tracker batteries have run out!  We seem to have reached a point where we just don't see the point of continuing, if our steps aren't going to count towards our daily total.  I'm not sure what that says about me, but I'll ponder it as I work on my step totals over this long Memorial Day weekend, on a fresh battery charge.

Self-disclosure

We live in a time where we disclose a great deal about ourselves in public spaces such as on social media. We tell each other what we had for breakfast, how many miles we've run and our route, how our children are doing, and what we think about particular news stories.   Sometimes we reveal too much, as I had to remind a student recently who forgot to filter his information as he recounted his day of privilege and oppression for an assignment.  The presentation of self matters: you never know who is going to see what you put out there online.  Will it be a future employer?  Someone you care about?  Manage those impressions and avoid TMI! (Too much information!)

The student's ability to filter appropriately may be influenced by this time in which he is coming of age, but it is also affected by his youth.  The ability to filter or to selectively disclose is something we learn from experience.  I noticed author Sherman Alexie doing this skillfully at his talk at Cascadia College yesterday.  He draws heavily from his life experience in his writing and speaking, but the moments that he describes are embellished, fictionalized, drawn out, to make bigger points. Yesterday's story about the cherry red lip gloss and young love felt very personal, very revealing, but Alexie was really talking about complicated social identities, about race and poverty, about being an immigrant to the culture.  His first love wasn't really named Lori, (and she may not have even been his first love), but the messages intertwined in his re-telling were real, honest, and sometimes painfully so.  The story is how he gets to the points he wants to make or offer.

Alexie's books for sale after his talk at Cascadia College

Sometimes, the problem isn't filtering but unraveling and finding information.  Despite the ubiquity of social media, there are times when the big picture and the grand conclusions are not completely knowable, and it is the journey along the way that grabs us.  I picked up a book recently in which this is exactly what happened, where the author's meticulous research process was part of the story, perhaps the more revealing part, because it shows us that we can dig and dig for information, but sometimes we can't get to the very bottom of a story.  In this case, time and place and context complicate our ability to know about a life, especially one that was so carefully guarded, at a time when documents were on paper and easily lost or destroyed.  In Priscilla: The Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime France, writer Nicholas Shakespeare sets out to discover what really happened to his aunt,  a fairly ordinary, if beautiful, woman stuck in France during the Occupation, (New York Times review here).  By the end, we don't know exactly what happened to his aunt.  Talk about impression management! Priscilla was discreet, she was the master of what the French call les non-dits (the unsaid things).  We do have tantalizing details of what may have happened and we have a story about research discoveries, detours, and dead-ends.  (It's reminiscent of the metawriting in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks where author Rebecca Skloot also reflects on her research processes.)  In the case of aunt Priscilla, there's no great spoiler alert necessary for what happened to her--the story is as fully realized as it will ever be.

Will the story recounted in the podcast Serial that I've just started be similarly ambiguous, or will it come with a tidy ending, with the full story and details?  Already, the difficulty with reconstructing events that happened not quite two decades earlier, but before many of us had Internet profiles and facebook feeds, has grabbed my attention.  I know I can go find the spoilers on the Internet for this one, but sometimes the story along the way is as interesting as the discoveries at the end.  

Waxing and waning

I enjoy sending holiday cards.  It's my little way of reaching out, to the extended family on the other side of the globe, to friends made during travels and work and school, and to local friends too.  I often write a holiday letter if inspiration hits, and I enjoy receiving such letters myself.  The French don't follow this tradition so I know my cards last year surprised many of our French friends.  They seem much more likely to connect over new year's wishes, which are frequently sent via mobile texts or Facebook posts these days.  Holiday card sending and receiving may even be a little passé in the U.S., what with the ubiquity of social media, but frankly, in a year when I'm not writing a holiday letter (too little time and inspiration), sending cards still lets me connect with others, AND it is a very good way to take stock of the year and of one's social connections.  As it turns out, my address book and my card list both have needed some adjusting this holiday season, in ways that I haven't experienced before (and that I'm not sure I like).  Up to now, my address book has been something that has generally gotten thicker; it grew quite a bit over the past few years during my French sojourn.  (I use a physical address book to which I add little cards that represent each entry and that slip into a special binder: Levenger's mini-Circa model which may not even be available anymore.  I use digital address books for email and phone number lists only.)  Over the years, I've had to order additional cards to keep up with births, marriages, new friends, new addresses, but this year there seems to be a notable tightening going on.  In at least two alphabetical sections, I have had to cross out, condense, or rewrite a number of entries due to many more relationship breakdowns, divorces, and deaths than usual.   Perhaps it's just coincidence this year, but as a sociologist, I have to suspect that what I see may be a more significant, age-related shift in my social networks.

Is it all downhill from here?  Maybe, but maybe not.  As I consolidate my address book, my social networks on social media continue their intricate spread, even in the face of divorce or death. This month I've had my first significant experiences with the ways that social media are used to memorialize people and announce deaths.  I recently lost a childhood friend who was an avid Facebooker and while I got the news of her sudden passing via the now old-fashioned phone, it is through our more contemporary forms of social media, and the tributes posted via those media, that I have learned more about this friend's remarkable adult life.  And on my Facebook news feed the other day, I caught the announcement of a memorial service for another friend's deceased family member. While I haven't felt comfortable posting a personal message of sympathy on the boards for all to see, I've been astonished by the depth of feeling and the eloquence expressed by others.  I have also wondered if these posts and tributes are comforting to the immediate family, or is the 'public' sharing overwhelming?  I suppose we all in some way like to know that we have made a difference, or that our loved ones have, and perhaps these social media announcements and tributes offer sufficient testimonials to that.

Obituaries in more traditional media like newspapers also continue to be important testimonials.  In the U.S., at least in my local paper, the obituary section has grown while I was in Europe and now frequently includes photos and detailed stories of the dearly departed.  On the other hand, I have always found even the simple death notices in the national newspaper in Finland to be quite moving for the small glimpses they reveal, of the 'personal ', in what is generally a fairly discreet and private society. These are fairly large rectangular notices without the detail of U.S. obituaries, but there is often a poignant verse in addition to the name of the deceased, the birth/death dates, and the immediate survivors' names.  Such subtlety may be lost on the Facebook generation (and anyway, it's only the family that posts such an announcement in the paper), but I think such notices still matter. Posting Facebook tributes, reading obituaries, updating address books, sending (or not sending) holiday cards are all social rituals that mark, in small ways and big, the waxing and waning of our social networks and the inevitability of the human cycle of life.

Waste not, want not

I've tried several times now to de-clutter our refrigerator.   You'd think I'd be delighted to get back to our U.S. sized double wide fridge after barely managing with skinny French frigos for several years.  I appreciate the space of the U.S. version, but I find that more space means I don't have to be so strategic about how I organize or purchase the food, and it's really easy to over-buy.  I have to be honest; in our U.S. home we have two refrigerators, an old one in the basement for drinks, plus a standing freezer.  Sometimes we can't possibly eat all the food in storage before it spoils and this is precisely one point made in an article about the growing popularity of refrigeration in China.  Experts note that despite the advantages of refrigeration for food storage (to prevent waste), too much refrigeration can also lead to waste, at a later point in time.  (See Twilley, Nicola. 2014 (July 25). "What do Chinese Dumplings have to do with Global Warming" NY Times magazine online.)  The tendency to keep shiny big refrigerators well-stocked often means those same refrigerators serve as nice cold trashcans when the overstock isn't consumed fast enough or gets lost behind other more newly purchased food.  Anyone that has been to Costco knows these problems--how to consume the contents of the large boxes of lettuce or giant tubs of sour cream before they spoil or where to find that special condiment behind the big bottles of other ones.

The waste problem applies to other overly-abundant consumer goods too.  James Collins writes amusingly about his discovery that the box(es) of replacement staples for his paper stapler and his other office supplies will outlast him: (2014 March "Let Me Count the Days" NY Times Opinionator.)  He calculates that he uses about 15 staples a year, which means his box of 5000 staples is really overkill.  That box of staples is going to be something his descendants will have to deal with, and I'm afraid I have the same staple supply problem, even after parsing our belongings twice in 4 years to accommodate a move to Europe and back again.

Then there are the extra spaces that some of our homes come with which also create opportunities for waste: the garage, which everyone in the U.S. knows isn't really for our car but for storing all our STUFF, and the attic.  In France, we were lucky enough to rent a dedicated garage 'box' as they called it, but it was so small that we could barely get our car to fit into it, let alone any stuff, and it was a block from our home.  So not much storage there or opportunities for waste, but we did have ample space in our apt. for bikes that were hardly ridden and toolboxes and countless supplies bought at the hardware store.  As for our attic here in the U.S. house, we packed it with all of our belongings that we didn't take with us to France, and....it still contains a large portion of our belongings that we didn't take with us to France.  I think we could easily empty the attic and not even realize what we are missing.

Having abundance, of goods and spaces, is a privilege for sure and having access to refrigeration is too.  I wish everyone would have such privileges, and I appreciate how these can contribute to lowering some of the costs of living.  But, there is something to be said for that mindful shopping, that careful planning, that is required when we are dealing with less space, fewer means, and fewer options.      

Dressing up

I recently attended a concert by Natalie Merchant, an alternative rock singer from my college years, who, with her stunning voice. has experimented with different music platforms over the years. This time, she performed with the Seattle Symphony so her songs had a different sound and beat than her recordings and other performances do.  Perhaps to go along with that more stripped down style, Merchant was dressed simply and elegantly, swirling around in a black form-fitting dress with a lovely wide skirt, accompanied with heeled Mary Janes.  She seemed comfortable and confident in her mid-life body and I was also impressed by her long, now fully gray, smooth, loose hair.  It was as much a part of her act as her exceptional voice.  She looked real, she looked like an adult, she was beautiful.

Celebrities know more than most that outward appearances matter, as it is these that we use to present ourselves to others and manage impressions.  Some of us are more calculating about our appearances, striving to make a statement, or to express ourselves (this is how I interpreted Merchant's style), but for most of us, (those of us with the means to choose what to wear), we are just trying to not stand out too much.  To do this, we first have to know what is normative.  In the Pacific NW, for example, dressing for the symphony or dressing for church, well, these are fairly indistinguishable from dressing for the every day, and all involve a fair amount of earth tones, denims and khakis, flat shoes.  There are no real uniforms for different events, and comfort is the operative word.  The symphony crowd at the Merchant concert was dressed in this typical (in my mind uninspiring and somewhat sloppy) manner. Despite my opinion, this is simply the dressing norm where I now live, the Seattle aesthetic so to speak.  In contrast,  the French style has been described as real, adult, respectful (see two descriptions:  http://www.vogue.com/1648381/lauren-santo-domingo-parisian-style-french-women-make-coffee/ and http://www.parisescapes.com/paris_wear.html )  All this means is that the French have stronger expectations for what is appropriate dress for different settings and they do not consider sweats and running shoes as regular streetwear (see my earlier discussion of this: Les tenues, April 2013).  The French are no more real or adult than Americans, but their social conception of how an adult dresses is simply different.

In the U.S. we might call the French style 'dressing up'.  I hear that often when I have a skirt on in the driving rain, or have worn something other than sneakers to an athletic event.  I don't think of these as dressing up but as normal, or authentic for me.  I prefer styles that imply effort, thought, care, creativity, purpose (is this 'conscious dressing'?).  I also like the new attention placed on the dressing choices of older adults.  Before, it seemed that creative dressing was reserved for the young.  But, creativity and effort and style are ageless: here's a street-style blog I recently discovered that explores the style choices of older people: http://advancedstyle.blogspot.com/ (see below).   Dressing up?  Dressing one's age?  How about a style where one dresses authentically for the real, adult person that one is?
Ps. There is no reason that such authenticity must be maintained when it comes to naturally graying hair. That's the adult prerogative!

The Sociological Observer by Anne Katriina Tuominen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at www.thesociologicalobserver.com.

The beautiful game

For the time being, I think it's fair to say that I'm 'soccered out'.  I've followed more World Cup games in this year's competition than I've ever done, recording almost faithfully the outcomes of each.  This is all on top of the live trainings and games and tournaments in which my own son plays and which I orchestrate as the family's resident soccer mom.  So, while I wished Messi, the magician, had been able to help his fellow Argentines win, I found the goal by the German "Super Mario" yesterday to be a magnificent end, for his team, and for my 2014 World Cup viewing experience.  (An earlier experience, in 1990, culminated in a similar result, except then I found myself in Germany, celebrating that victory in the streets of a small town.  It's hard to believe that this year's hero, Mario Goetze, was not even born then.)

Soccer/football has been widely called the beautiful game.  It's the name of a documentary film on African football, and apparently, the soccer great Pelé has referred to football as such.  It's definitely beautiful because it is so simple, anyone can play, with very little equipment and space.  The game has also been called an illogical one and an anxious one, because it's not often the team with the greatest possession or the best shots at goal that wins, and this World Cup certainly showed us this a few times.  But why do I enjoy it so much?  I've never played it, not even as a child.  I suppose having children who play, especially at an increasingly higher level makes it beautiful because the experience feels very academic to me.  I learn so much from each game; I absolutely enjoy watching a game and then reading analyses or talking with knowledgeable individuals about what I've just seen.  I also learn about how the sport is organized in different societies, like what I learned about le foot in France: Un certain regard May 2013.

Friendships have also come about through this sport and that's a beautiful thing too.  It's not just our son who hangs out with his football buddies; our entire family spends a lot of time with football families.  We travel and socialize with them: we've recently  attended a wedding with our U.S. soccer friends, and in France, we camped several times over tournament weekends.  I even shared a humble bungalow with a French dad and his son.  Not all of the moments were beautiful ones, even in Provence, but the French penchant for proper pique-niques alongside the soccer pitch, complete with wine, (see A table, May 2013) and the many language and cultural lessons learned make for many cherished memories in my book.  (See Allez les gars for what we learned about Provencal cross-town rivalries, Nov. 2012, and Le bonheur, Dec. 2012, for the challenges some French girls face if they love the beautiful game too.)

The ultimate beauty of fútbol for me though is how sociological it is and how well it reflects social life.  David Brooks at the New York Times captures this, yes, beautifully, in his op-ed piece last week: Baseball or Soccer? 10 July 2014, where he argue that soccer is in a sense a mini-sociological platform, and how each of us in our social worlds is playing soccer.  We all have our roles, and these roles may be enacted in different ways depending on all kinds of social factors: who is filling the other roles--the ones with which we are interacting, what are the constantly changing environmental conditions (on the football pitch, in our workplace, or at home...) and so on.  Even when we feel tuckered out, by sometimes overwhelming social demands, by too many football matches, too many hard tackles on the pitch, whatever it is, we may retreat for a short while, but never completely.  Who we are, the game(s) we play, and the life we live are all inherently social.  I'll let Brooks sum this up:  "Most of us spend our days thinking we are playing baseball, but we are really playing soccer. We think we individually choose what career path to take, whom to socialize with, what views to hold. But, in fact, those decisions are shaped by the networks of people around us more than we dare recognize."

Game nights

Instead of those languid summer days we had in Provence the past few summers or that I seem to remember from my own childhood, I've had an exceptionally full June and July.  My teaching schedule is much lighter and my kids are out of school, but those same kids seem to have more activities than ever, plus we had a French exchange student for a few weeks.  So, the food and organizational demands on this household have been much greater than ever before.  That said, over the past weekends, we haven't done anything too much out of the ordinary for a summer spent in the U.S.: some swimming, some shopping, some fishing, a summer solstice festival day in town, a World Cup and birthday party, a day trip to Mt. Rainier, and a 4th of July weekend on Hood Canal.  From our visitor's perspective, several of the activities were probably no different from the ones he and his family would participate in at home, such as the various summer festivals and day trips.

The big difference though is in the weekday activities this summer, especially the scheduled kids' activities that persist year-round in the U.S. In France, music lessons and sports trainings are on hiatus for the summer so the weekdays are much, much quieter.  Being inner city dwellers the past few summers in France, our only real recreational options on foot during the day were to the neighborhood pools or parks, which weren't that attractive, to be honest.  There wasn't much to do at the parks in the broiling heat, and the pool area wasn't even properly shaded.  (This summer, that same pool in Aix is closed for renovations, which I really find to be strange timing!  See my blogger friend's post on this at Aixcentric.com.)   Here in the U.S., we easily fill each summer weekday and evening with sports camps, trainings, music lessons, games and competitions.  Just this week, I've already driven a carpool to soccer camp, am attending two evening swim meets, and am sending a child off to a five day national soccer tournament in North Carolina. I am hoping to fit in a water aerobics class or two for myself, make some raspberry jam, and get to the grocery store again, before I collapse on the weekend!

Apparently, our U.S. style summer did not overwhelm our exchange student like I thought it might; his father reported that his son arrived home to Marseille this past weekend radiant and 'very pleased' by his visit to the U.S.  I think that our activity level here in the U.S. does appeal to many: we just don't sit still much around here. (I've commented earlier on my quieter and more reflective life in France: En famille Oct.2013, Un été en Provence Aug. 2013 )  Even unscheduled activities seem to be more engaging or involved here: musical jam sessions between the boys (our guest brought his saxophone, one of my sons plays piano and guitar) became recording sessions and mini jazz concerts for the rest of us, casual fishing off a dock became a game of how many can you catch, the lighting of an enormous pile of safe and sane fireworks (the only kind I buy) morphed into a late night teen campfire circle, and the pile of board games in our basement led to a few game nights à la façon Américaine.  The fireworks and the game nights were especially novel to our guest because such fireworks are interdict in France and playing board games en famille is just not a common activity.  Both ended up being great ways for our guest to practice English and for us to share how we spend our time here, in this family, in this community, in this society.  And that is what a cultural exchange is all about.

Fake cake

Growing up, the only kind of cake in my home was homemade cake, made completely from scratch, as we say.  Cake mixes were something very exotic, very American to our immigrant eyes, and my mother never bought them.  My sisters and I were avid bakers as children, and we wished we could make a 'box cake' once in a while, like those brightly colorful confetti cakes served at our friends' birthday parties or those teeth-chatteringly sweet cupcakes that quickly sold out at the school bake sales.  I suppose we were a little like the son of one of my adult students who frequently complained to his mother that there was never anything good to eat in the pantry because all they had there were INGREDIENTS.  My sisters and I quickly learned though that our pantry ingredients made much better cakes than those composed out of boxes containing industrial blends of odd-sounding ingredients, flavorings, and colors.

When I got married years later, the sad truth is that my wedding cake was a box cake, made by a local woman in my small hometown community.  We had had to outsource the making of the wedding cake because my family was already making all of the other wedding food and we simply didn't have the time or experience with making wedding cakes.  I remember that the cake was a spice cake, in three tiers, decorated simply with white frosting and fresh pink flowers. The cake tasted fine, but it was not at all in the same league as the cake that a Norwegian family friend generously made as a contribution to our sweets table, full of luscious, light cream.  I only managed to get a small bite, but to me, that was a real cake!

Recently, I attended a wedding where I noticed that the wedding cake looked very much like mine had 20 years earlier, with its simple design: white frosting, several tiers, and fresh flowers.  After dinner, the bride and groom did the customary cake cutting and tasting, and then the wedding party and guests moved on to the dance floor.  A little while later I wondered why the rest of the cake hadn't been cut up and served, yet guests were appearing with pieces of cake on plates.  I made some joke about the fake wedding cake that turned out not to be a joke at all.  That beautifully simple multi-tiered cake was indeed a fake cake.  The only cake there was the small slice at the bottom, for the cake cutting, and the top tier, destined for the newlyweds' freezer.  The middle and bottom were frosted something--cardboard, styrofoam?  The real cakes were two sheet cakes being served up in the other room.  I learned later that this is one way that wedding cake is done these days; it's a much more economical way to serve wedding cake, particularly when the guest lists are large, and often allows a better quality cake to served.  Who knew!?

And, where's the sociology in all of this talk about having cake and eating it too?  It's a bit trite, but it's like the cakes in the French pastry shop vitrines that my sons and I were choosing between for our Sunday afternoon coffees last year: the prettiest ones were rarely the most satisfying or best tasting ones.  It's not just the presentation, but the ingredients that matter.  This is related to a core lesson in the Social inequality course that I am revising right now for this fall: we should be careful when forming impressions of others. It's easy to stereotype based on people's visible social markers, like their age, gender, social class position, or their immigrant status.  It's harder, but often ultimately more revealing, when we delve a little deeper, to see what's really there, influencing people's circumstances, choices, and opportunities.

In the boat

The Boys in the Boat, by Daniel James Brown (2013) is currently getting a great deal of attention in the Pacific NW.  The book was mentioned in the local Seattle paper before the opening of boating season this spring, a local university where I teach has just selected it as its common book for next year's incoming freshmen (see http://www.onlinefast.org/wwutoday/news/the-boys-in-the-boat-selected-as-western-reads-book-for-2014-15 ), and not too many months ago, I caught a mention of the book on a Facebook post by a brother-in-law who was a Husky varsity crew alumnus himself.  Brown frames the story around the life of a young man of very modest means who goes off to the University of Washington in the early 1930's to study engineering and becomes a member of the collegiate rowing team.  The broader story is about the importance of teamwork and perseverance and how underdogs do sometimes win (a favorite American theme).  Along the way, we learn about the sport of rowing and a little bit about the craftsmanship of wooden boatbuilding, and while the writing is a bit heavy on hyperbole and foreshadowing (the Nazi specter looms large as do impending dust storms, cold spells, and heat waves), Brown shapes and paces the story well, enhancing it with details of the broader socioeconomic and political context.  For me, the best part though is the endnotes which are offered in an abridged version in the book and more completely online.  Brown's transparency is refreshing and satisfying as he explains the sources of his accounts and statements and even how he contrived some of the obviously undocumented quotes.  Some might quibble that he was brazenly filling in too many gaps but I would say he was telling a story based upon his interpretation of the sources available to him (and he wasn't lazy in digging for sources).

It is the sources that Brown had available to him that really caught my eye.  The interviews, and especially the journal and logbook entries, printed photos, and personal handwritten letters that the author relied upon made me realize how increasingly rare those latter archival sources are, and make me wonder how our different modes of recording the ephemeral events of our lives today will color future stories and accounts of lives lived, victories won, or events experienced.  For example, my children have never written the kinds of letters or had penpals like I did, or experienced the regular bliss of receiving a letter in the mailbox (many of my letter-writing Finnish cousins and penpals, and my Swedish and Danish ones,are still part of my life, if in smaller ways than when I was younger).  They have never waited for photo prints to be made or thumbed through packets of them fresh from the photo processing shop.  They do not have boxes of old letters, in the handwriting of grandparents, younger siblings, from a romantic partner, or half-filled old grade school diaries, piles of printed photographs--loose and in albums.  I'm not imagining that any of those in the boxes in my attic and the files in my office will ever be of value to anyone except me and I am sure most will likely end up being thrown out someday.  I am grateful though that my spouse's grandfather's precious letters home during World War II were lovingly saved by his wife and later collected and archived by his eldest daughter so that we can all have a small understanding and the physical touch of how the war was experienced by a family member and how it likely colored his life.  Similarly, if those UW crew men in Brown's book hadn't kept journals and written letters in the first place, and if their sisters, girlfriends, grown children hadn't saved these, and if the logbook of the crew coach hadn't survived, we would not have the rich story that Brown tells us.  I wonder how authors will fashion and tell the stories that my kids and their kids will read years from now.  What will the documented sources of these stories look like and feel like?

Saving everything, especially today when many of us have so much, threatens to overwhelm us in clutter and garbage.  It is satisfying to reduce, to de-clutter, to clean out, but some of the 'documentation' that reminds me of the story of my life and of my world I just won't part with; I'll leave that decision to my descendants! They'll have to decide if my huge email inbox, my yearly wall calendars, my tattered photo albums, or even the posts of this little journal-y blog are archive-worthy.  Others are already making similar decisions about loved ones' materials on social media sites and on laptop hard drives.  In the meantime, I will record here, for posterity or for the garbage can, that my family had a magnificent in-the-boat experience once too, last year, when our German cousins arranged for us to take a one-day, 32 km paddling trip together down the Ardèche river in southern France.  While our less than harmonious paddling and some mild rapids resulted in a few out-of-the-boat instances and there was no gold medal at the end of our trip, the eye-catching nudist beach along the way, the very mad rush among hundreds(!) of other canoeists to make it to the endpoint in time for the last bus, and the eventual reward of a bottle of French champagne all made this an epic experience in our lives.  And I'm very glad I saved some documentation of it.

Longhand reading

Since my family's return to Seattle five months ago, we've noticed all kinds of differences and similarities between our brief French life and our American one.  (See The big (and) easy, 11 Dec. 2013, for some of those initial discoveries.)  More recently, I've noticed how tethered I've become to my smart devices, and how that has affected my concentration and memory.  Because I'm now in the same time zone as my students and colleagues, their emails bombard my various inboxes in real time all day long.  I am jumpier and reactive and spend little time reflecting.  By the next day, if I haven't taken notes about what I did or with whom, I forget some of the more mundane interactions and transactions of the previous days.  Similar effects are now being documented by the scientific community, such as the one about note taking.  UCLA psychologists have found that students who take notes longhand have much better retention and more sophisticated understanding of what they are learning than those that take notes onto their laptops or tablets. The latter mode tends to discourage students from engaging actively with the ideas but promotes instead the tendency to just transcribe word-for-word what is being presented.  (See Barbash, Fred. April 28, 2014. "Why students using laptops learn less in class even when they really are taking notes" Morning Mix. The Washington Post.)

For me, the more laborious, tactile, longhand approach also applies to reading.  In France, I read a lot of books, magazines, newspapers, usually in print, in French, English, Finnish.  Aix-en-Provence is a bookish town, and we were surrounded by bookstores, even a well-stocked English-language one. We bought books in London, in Helsinki, and occasionally, supplemented with orders to Amazon.uk.   A few times during our French sojourn, I used my ipad and the Barnes and Noble nook store to order and read some books for an Anglophone book group I had joined and during our final months in France when I did not want to add any more books to the numbers of boxes we were shipping back.  It is those books that I read electronically that I can scarcely remember.  For example, this past fall I read two such books on the ipad that I remember finding riveting and sociologically relevant but that I did not remember to add to my blog's book list.  I recently found the books again while idly tapping on my device and now I have had to skim them in order to refresh my memory. I believe my forgetfulness is partly due to the lack of my physical engagement with either book.  I saw the covers perhaps once, when I opened the books electronically initially, but the physical books were never lying around on my bedside table or on a chair so I do not have a very strong visual memory of them.  And with e-books, flipping pages and re-reading a passage or section, or skimming is awkward so I don't engage much in these ways.  It's no wonder Appassionata by Hoffman and Ousby's Occupation: The Ordeal of France 1940-44 both slipped out of my mind entirely: I simply had not had a 'longhand' reading experience with them.  Touching the physical book DOES matter to me, sometimes, however quaint this sounds.  (Mireille Silcoff writes about this quaintness amid the death and fetishization of books in this past weekend's New York Times Magazine. The online article is titled and dated: "On Their Death Bed, Physical Books Have Finally Become Sexy." Riff column, Apr. 25, 2014.  The picture on this post shows my color-coordinated but unsexy bookshelf of some of my English language reading over the past few years, and a small piece of the Berlin Wall that I brought home in 1990.)  I certainly read work documents, student work, and journal articles online regularly, but it seems that depending upon what I'm reading, the tangible physical experience may matter.  An academic journal article doesn't come with a great deal of visual 'personality' so reading it online doesn't change my experience much, but reading a book, a popular magazine, and even a newspaper is a much more colorful and lively experience when it's in my hand and I can feel the pages.  If that makes me fusty, then I embrace that characteristic.  Now my challenge is to keep finding those physical books and print media: one unfortunate discovery since my return to Seattle is that the local shopping center no longer has a single bookstore!

In the blink of an eye

While our attention is fading even as the story is incomplete, the loss of the Malaysian jetliner and the people on board now has some very clear sociological ramifications for the rest of us.  Similarly, so too do natural disasters, such as the mudslide that buried part of the small community of Oso in my home state of Washington a few weeks ago ("Oso, Washington, 'forever changed' by deadly mudslide, by Jonathan J. Cooper and Lisa Baumann, March 29, 2014, Huffington Post), or the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that is the subject of Sonali Deraniyagala's haunting memoir Wave (here's Teju Cole's review in the New Yorker, "A Better Quality of Agony, March 28, 2013). What am I talking about? It is the sudden disappearance of social roles that is especially relevant now.

Social roles, or social statuses as some refer to them, are the positions we occupy in society.  In my Sociology of Family course I lay mine out very clearly when I tell my students that I am a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a college professor, an immigrant, a woman.  These reveal my family status, my work status, my ethnoracial or immigrant status, and my gender status.  We all have social roles along these lines, some of which are more prominent than others. The ones that stand out as our central ones are called master statuses.  For example, in some societies, one's racial status figures as a master status, even if for the person himself his social roles as father, coworker, husband feel more important than his social identity of black man. Many of us no doubt have had the experience of seeing someone whom we identify so closely with his or her master status that we are tripped up when we see this person in a different social setting or playing a different social role: ever see your grade school teacher at the grocery store shopping for her family?  As children, it was hard for us to imagine a teacher as a mother and wife buying milk and bread for her family.
 

Femme [woman], 1953, by Le Corbusier

Social roles also evolve throughout our lifetimes; obviously at one point I was not a mother or wife, but a daughter and student.  Some people cycle through many social roles and some are even able to reinvent new ones relatively late in life.  (This weekend's New York Times presented a captivating joint interview of Nancy Pelosi, the current U.S. Senate Minority Leader, and comedienne Julia Louis-Dreyfus.  Pelosi tells us that she started her congressional career at age 46, after 3 of her children had gone off to college.  Now that's inspiring!  See Power Lunch, Times Two, by Philip Galanes, April 4, 2014)  Eventually, our social roles have to be replaced, when we age out of them, or when we die.  New mothers give birth to new sons and daughters, new business majors become marketing managers, new immigrants replace earlier ones. That's the normative pattern, and this all usually happens with some kind of transition, where we have time to adjust to new roles. Illnesses, injuries, graduations, job offers, retirement parties, moving plans all ease us into the new situations where we or others shed old roles and take on new ones.  However, suddenly the unexpected can happen.  Natural disasters or man-made ones may dramatically and irreversibly erase social roles, sometimes almost in the blink of an eye.  Two sons and a husband are swallowed up by a giant ocean wave, a town librarian is caught and buried in a mudslide, a co-worker and someone's daughter inexplicably disappears forever on an airplane.  These people's disappearances alter the social environment in which they were a part.  Not only do they and their social roles disappear suddenly but so do the ones of the people connected to them.   That's what struck me when I read Deraniyagala's recounting of her tsunami experience and its aftermath, where she had to make sense of her altered social role.  She was effectively no longer a mother or a wife even though she had been just a little while before.  The relatives,  friends, and colleagues of the people on the lost airplane or under many feet of mud are now similarly disoriented.  As living members of human society, we expect to have at least a little time to ease in and out of social roles so that we can adjust cognitively, socially and emotionally. While this is surely not much consolation to those suffering the profound losses of their loved ones and of their own social roles, sociologically speaking, we do know that life goes on, because human society depends on it.  Sooner or later, the newly vacant social roles will be filled again.

Spanish hours

[Spoiler alert: This is not a hoax blog post despite the date. :0]

Our server was a little slow to take our lunch orders yesterday and then to inquire about coffee after our meal, and I found myself irritated until I remembered that I had had the opposite problem a few weeks ago when I went out for dinner with my spouse.  After our time in France, we've become accustomed to longer and later restaurant meals and on a recent Saturday, we wanted to enjoy a full late-night dinner in downtown Seattle after attending a performance of the Seattle Symphony (photo below).  We'd always had problems finding good restaurants in Seattle that would serve full meals until midnight even before our French sojourn, but I was delighted to find a Spanish-themed restaurant (Aragona on Union Street) which recently was nominated for a foodie award (see this article by Britt Thorson in Seattle Refined/KOMO News, Feb. 20, 2014) and which conveniently approximates Spanish dining hours (Spaniards seem to eat even later than the French).  We made a reservation for 10:15 pm and were happy to find the restaurant still well-occupied by Seattleites, even if we were definitely the last ones to order dessert, a lovely flan.  Unfortunately, we had to rush through that last bit because our meal was stretching dangerously close to the time that the parking garage where we had left our car was closing.  It was very disappointing to have our evening curtailed, with the added pressure of paying a sizeable monetary penalty if we missed the midnight garage closure.  This was something we never had to worry about in Aix en Provence; the numerous parking garages circling the city never closed (except for the fermeture exceptionnelle for maintenance once in a very great while).   On the other hand, the shops closed in Aix sometimes in the middle of the day, just like they do in Spain.

The different cultural concepts of time have been well-documented in all kinds of literature.  Recently, a New York Times article reported on some revisited ideas in Spain of adapting to more northerly business hours (see "Spain, land of 10 p.m. dinners, asks if it's time to reset clock" by Tim Yardley, The New York Times, Feb. 17, 2014).  As the article reaffirms, time is clearly a cultural construct, and changing how time is used alters all kinds of cultural meanings and expressions.  That famous siesta in the middle of the afternoon for example continues to be a ritual for many Spaniards, and we thought it made a lot of sense because during the hot Aixois summers we ourselves were forced indoors into our darkened apartment to get through the hottest hours.  But that was possible because I worked at home.  My spouse on the other hand sat in an office all day, like many working adults in Spain and France do, so he didn't and they don't have the option to take such a significant snooze in the afternoon.  Workdays also start early enough these days and continue long into the early evenings that serving dinner to families at 10 pm creates problems in the mornings.  In many ways, parts of southern Europe have been tied to these traditional conceptions of time much longer than I expected, but they can change, because the social and cultural conditions change and warrant other adaptations.  Our family is a case in point; now, in the U.S., we still eat late, even on the weeknights, where 8 pm is a regular dining hour.  We enjoy this custom brought from Europe, but we also eat late because long commutes and evening activities make a 6 pm dinner difficult.  Dining at 10 pm though is something we save for the weekends because even that is a bit of a stretch for our family. (And that's no April fools' joke.)

Potty talk

As human society moves relentlessly forward, things that some of us experienced as luxuries have easily become normative expectations in contemporary society.  For example, my spouse and children were aghast to discover that our rental house (in which we have been biding time as our own home becomes vacant) had a big, old, fat television with only a handful of channels.  Quelle horreur! (How awful!)  The situation had to be fixed immediately, so now our own flat screen television sits atop the antiquated monstrosity. (Or, which is the monstrosity?)

Having an up-to-date television is one thing, but probably the greater hardship for my family in our U.S. rental has been sharing a single bathroom with one toilet.  Our sweet little rental home was built in 1936 and for the time in which it was built, that indoor toilet was probably quite the luxury.  In some parts of the world, indoor toilets still are a luxury and the focus of philanthropic work (see Gates Foundation work on this: "What we do: Water Sanitation Hygiene strategy overview"). Today though indoor plumbing is ubiquitous in the West; the OECD indicates that 97.8% of OECD countries have at at least one indoor toilet (see OECD better life index.). We've gotten to the point where a single toilet has become the minimal standard in private homes.  Most everyone we know in Seattle has at least two bathrooms with a toilet each, and during our sojourn in France, we lived in two different apartments with two toilets in one and four(!) in the other, arranged variously as full bathrooms or water closets (or wc's), with just toilets and sinks.  Occasionally, in France, we'd come across a bidet (not to be confused with a toilet), but these luxurious items seem to be much less common today.

Luxury in toiletry does seem to be reserved primarily for the private home.  Public toilets continue to be much more minimal, even in the West, although here there are variations.  In France, we attended quite a few all-day soccer tournaments with hundreds of attendees at public stadiums where that minimal standard of a single, barely clean toilet was considered sufficient to meet the needs of all the players and their families.  The conditions often required the provision of one's own toilet paper and the same kind of dexterity as the standing Turkish-style toilets at the French aires de repos (rest stops).  Talk about antiquated models! These toilets off the toll highways were really old school (or barbaric, according to one expat friend.)  In our beloved and bourgeois Aix-en-Provence, public money was finally coughed up in our last year there for the installation of several fancy public toilettes (these are always referred to in the plural in French, even when there is only one!).  I had to laugh at the installation of one which was right next to the location of a very popular children's bungee-jumping attraction, making it difficult for tourists to stand in line or to enter the 'facilities' without being jostled.

French tourist offices don't typically offer access to toilets (not in Aix, not in Nice, not in Lyon), but the staff do direct people to private toilet facilities where you can pee for a fee, but these facilities were often a bit scruffy too.  It seems that the French do not put a lot of money or effort into the provision of public facilities, while providing ample access seems to be much more important in the U.S., even if the toilets aren't always flushing models.  I'm thinking of the outhouse style port-a-potties such as the one I noticed two weekends ago, prominently stationed adjacent to a soccer field at my son's tournament in Beaverton, Oregon. Permanent facilities were also available at the sports complex, but since one particular field was a bit farther away, someone had thoughtfully installed a temporary toilet.  I've even been to tournaments where a dozen such port-a-potties were set up, all in a row.  When you gotta go, that's nice to know.
 

A moment of loudness

In a twist, today at 12:12 pm, the state of Washington will have observed a moment of loudness, in celebration of the Seattle Seahawks professional football team's recent Superbowl victory.  That shared moment will no doubt have been most deeply felt and expressed by the thousands of victory parade attendees in downtown Seattle, while other fans are decked out in fan gear as they go into school and work today.  (The superintendent of the Seattle public schools apparently misjudged the fervor of the fans in the city and had to back down from his initially firm statement that school absences to attend the parade would not be considered 'excused' by the school district. Local King5 news has reported on tv that over 500 of the 3000 district school teachers are absent today, and 13,000 students out of 50,000 are out.)  Markers of fandom are still visible in the aftermath of last Sunday's game, with ornaments and flags on homes, yards and cars all over Washington state (and apparently elsewhere, among non-Washingtonian fan club members, see "Vancouver Seahawks fans are Superbowl Ready," Jan. 31, 2014, CBC news).  The flags and jerseys depicting the #12 are especially popular (see flag in photo below).  It's not an idea original to Seattle apparently (see Ballard, Chris. "Into the belly of beast mode in Seattle's 12th man," Nov. 6, 2013, Sports Illustrated), but it has cleverly linked more fans to the team and created new merchandising opportunities.  As a single entity, the fans are depicted as the imaginary but instrumental 12th man on the 11-man team roster.  Those fans, the ones with tickets to home games anyway, have been credited with creating so much noise inside the stadium that they have helped derail opposing teams' efforts.  Presumably, other Seahawks fans wearing #12 jerseys while watching at home on tv contribute in spirit.

Such fandom represents the quest for social solidarity in modern society. It is similar to the religious fervor that ties people together and that fosters essential social cohesion of which sociologist Emile Durkheim spoke over a century ago. Social connectedness is what gives meaning to people in their lives as members of communities on multiple levels. Without it, societies would cease to exist. In the past, shared religious beliefs were the source of such ties in much of the West (and continues in some parts of the world), while nationalism, or national pride is a more modern source. In the current era, love of country is often supplanted by enthusiastic fandom focused on loyalty to sports teams and their wins and losses. Wars between countries fought on fields and trenches become socially constructed as war-like athletic skirmishes on artificial grass fields created by a "civilian leisure class", as Steve Almond notes in his riff about football and its real physical risks for players ("Is it immoral to watch the superbowl?" Jan. 24, 2014, The New York Times Magazine).  Some sporting events bring together national pride and sports fandom such as the Olympic games beginning today in Sochi, Russia. 

source: http://blog.thenewstribune.com/seahawks/files/2012/05/MemorialDay.jpeg

The connections between war and sport, and religion and sport are nothing new.  Neither are the intense feelings and the potential fanaticism that these all may bring about, and that spell potential danger. (Fan is short for fanatic.)  When groups of fans recognize and bond tightly over shared identities or feelings and expressions, the implication that often follows is that if we are this, then THEY, those people and groups who are not us, are something else, not as good, not as smart, not as human perhaps. This us vs. them mentality is inescapable even when the distinctions are really quite weak.  Obviously there is nothing that inherently different from a Seahawks fan or a Denver Broncos fan, or a Olympique Marseille fan and a Paris Saint-Germain fan if we want to talk football as the rest of the world knows it. Yet, in my family's short experience as denizens of the south of France, we quickly learned that it was interdit (forbidden) to root for the Paris team, even when this team was playing a foreign team such as Barcelona's team!  (Read my take on French football rivalries here: Allez les gars! Nov 26, 2012)  In this case, team loyalties seemed to go much farther than nationalistic ties, and sometimes these have led to fights and vandalism between warring fans.  When local or national or religious or sports pride supersedes good judgment and mutual respect for fellow humans, that is when we get into trouble and undermine our humanity.  It is our shared and more fundamental identities as human beings and citizens of planet Earth that would seem to be more significant (at least until we discover other analogous life forms elsewhere).  Go world!