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that most people’s favorite word is their own name.

That just sounded true when the character Lars said it in Lars and the Real Girl. Surprisingly good- I’ve finally found a movie to review in my Recommended Movie side bar. Tomorrow.

Tonight was our last Bradley class. We did an hour-long rehearsal of a birth from start to finish. That’s another post too. (Chad was great.)

that most people’s favorite word is their own name.

That just sounded true when the character Lars said it in Lars and the Real Girl. Surprisingly good- I’ve finally found a movie to review in my Recommended Movie side bar. Tomorrow.

Tonight was our last Bradley class. We did an hour-long rehearsal of a birth from start to finish. That’s another post too. (Chad was great.)

After weeks of procrastination and many wilted bunches of greens, I finally made the Authentic Chicken Enchiladas that Maya taught me how to make.

It was just so against my general cooking inclination to blend up a green sauce out of green onions, cilantro, tomatillos, jalapenos, fresh baby garlic, and RADISH GREENS that felt as spiky as a beavertail cactus. The filling was roasted chicken, queso fresco, shredded jack, and tofu (and I threw in some leftover rice).

It turned out beautifully and there was plenty to share and I still put two small casseroles in the freezer. (Ann, Al, one is for you guys…)

Thanks to Flavorgirl for hanging with me on the phone while I got started washing all those greens!

Now I look forward to making it again for when my sister and her family visit after the baby is born. They don’t get much Mexican food in Bangkok.

Despite the heat this weekend (yesterday it got up to 90 degrees), Chad and I got in another hike in the Cleveland National Forest. (If you’re wondering where Bella was, she was at home completely rejecting any physical activity after ten hours of track practice a week, and lounging around watching One Tree Hill on her laptop.)

This time we didn’t pass the Candy Store, we just parked directly across from it and took the Upper San Juan Loop trail. (The Candy Store was a bust. Good for a cold can of soda and an ice cream bar – but pathetic selection of candy. Just bite the bullet and call yourself what you are: Mountain Mini-Mart.)

And although the hike was only just over two miles, the heat and the climbing gave us enough of a workout to be satisfying. We managed to avoid all the poison oak and didn’t swallow any bugs, although there were plenty to be swallowed. We also managed to eat our chocolate and oranges by the water again.  And again we were completely alone on the trail. Where are all the people who belong to the cars in the trailhead parking lot? We even managed to forget our camera again.

But this time we thought to pull out our cellphones for pics. The images are small and fuzzy (I am so over my RAZR), but they do give an impression of how pleasant our day was together. I took the top three pics and Chad took the rest. He did better with the “landscapes” (I used quotations, because can a tree butthole be considered a landscape?)

My photo of Chad.

Chad’s photo of me.

Chad must have stopped for a pee break, because I don’t recollect ever being that far ahead of him on this hike – or on any hike for that matter…

Next week is our last Bradley class (natural childbirth) and Chad and I had a small marathon today, finishing up a few borrowed birth videos, including The Business of Being Born (IMDb 6.9/10.0).

I liked the movie, but considering that Bella was born at home with a midwife and that we are anticipating another home birth (in six weeks), this documentary by Ricki Lake was preaching to the choir, because I think that it’s really meant to convey information to people who don’t know much about home birth. In fact, one of the dads interviewed revealed the appalling lack of awareness about midwifery in this country when he said that he thought a midwife was what you used when you wanted to give birth in a barn!

I wholeheartedly support birth with midwives and home birth and I think that it’s a damn shame that less than 1% of babies in the United States are born at home, especially when the rates are so much higher in western Europe and Japan (where infant and maternal mortality is lower. ) So, I absolutely support Ricki Lake in producing this film; however, I did have some issues with how the medical establishment was represented. I believe that the cultural biases towards scheduled c-sections, epidurals, pitocin, short “easy” labors – are just that: cultural biases, that stem from many different sources – but I am not convinced that the problems stem from doctors (or hospitals) wanting to make more money.

I come from a pretty medical family – by that I mean, both of my parents were doctors, one grandfather was a doctor, two of my uncles are doctors, four aunts (and uncles) married doctors, and two cousins are now practicing medicine. (Whew – I’d never counted that before.) And besides vacationing with doctors and their families most of my life, I also worked in the medical school applications office at Georgetown University one summer while I was in college. You know what I discovered? That doctors are just people. Generally, extremely hard-working, career-driven, focused people, true – but rarely were they greedy or lazy, which I feel this movie implies.

Doctors are highly trained and (hopefully) highly skilled professionals, and generally I think they try and make the best medical decisions for you when you are sick.

But seeing as I don’t consider pregnancy, labor, or birth to be in the realm of sickness, I believe that most of the time having a doctor attend a birth is overkill. Furthermore, I think that you are actually at risk of being treated as if you are ill if you do have a birth in a hospital. If you don’t want to be treated like you are sick, stay out of the hospital. I also believe that nobody is going to care about our baby’s birth as much as Chad and I do – I do not expect the doctor to care about much more than my physical well-being – so if I want my birth experience to be serene, nurturing, loving, and amazing, I consider it Chad ‘s and my responsibility to make it so. And the best place for for creating that kind of birth for us in in our own home.

I think the level of compassion we expect doctors to have is beyond reasonable, much in the same way we expect too much from public school teachers. When I was teaching, I could emotionally understand that a parent wanted the best for his or her kid, but realistically, that kid was one of 150 kids I had in class each day. I could give a kid only so much before it started to subtract from what was going to another kid (or my own at home). For a doctor too, you are going to be one of many, many patients he or she will see that day. I think that’s just the reality that needs to be faced when you see a doctor. This does not mean that a patient (or student) should not be treated with utmost respect, but just that if you want a specific, individualized (read: with high spiritual or emotional content) experience, you’ll probably have to make it for yourself.

Darn – I did not intend to rant. Kudos to Ricki Lake and Abby Epstein for making this film; however, I guess I was a little disappointed in the depth of coverage. We need another film: one that goes beyond doctors/hospitals = bad; midwives/homebirth = good.

And WHY would they end a pro-homebirth documentary with a homebirth that ended up being an emergency hospital transport? (The mother went into labor six weeks in advance of her due date – that fact has been haunting me today, because I’m six weeks away too. Stay inside a while longer little baby!)

Last weekend, Chad and I drove up Modjeska Canyon near where the fires had been last year and found that the trail we wanted was closed indefinitely (The Hardy Trail). We spent a rambling bit of time strolling in the Tucker Wildlife Sanctuary (run by Cal Fullerton) and then browsed in the bookstore, found another hike, and took off.

We ended up at the end of the 241 toll road and Oso at a park (Riley Park) neither of us had even known existed. There were lots of cars in the parking lot but very few people on the trail. The tall grasses and blooming sheets of yellow and purple were gorgeous and I wish my camera could have done them justice.

Shoot – you can’t even make out the purple flowers in these pics. But you do get a good feel for the open expanse. I imagined it was a little like hiking on the heath in the UK, but drier.

I have detached myself from both book clubs at this point: the first one, because it was falling apart anyway and a two-hour drive to boot, the other, well, I just couldn’t get over the political spam I kept receiving from one of the members of the group. When in doubt, I usually turn to the Man Booker Prize winners – but I’d forgotten that until just now.

It seems that everyone has become so busy that even my old stand-by avid reader friends don’t have a recommendation for me. How about my librarian husband you ask? Well, he’s still making his way through Pynchon’s Against the Day (which I have no interest in tackling) and otherwise he’s just read Katherine Neville’s The Eight (which wasn’t as good as the hype he says) and Marcus Reeves’ Somebody Scream!: Rap Music’s Rise to Prominence in the Aftershock of Black Power (which I feel like I’ve almost read by virtue of having now listened to the music of all the featured rap artists via Chad’s regularly updated new 160 gig).

So I have resorted to asking strangers for book suggestions – well, he’s practically a stranger, but I was curious to hear what a recent MFA Poetry grad from UCI might recommend. And so far it’s been an interesting way of choosing a read.

For fiction, he recommended We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver, In Revere, In Those Days by Roland Merullo, and Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris.

For poetry, he recommended Human Wishes by Robert Hass, New and Selected Poems by Michael Ryan, The Wild Iris by Louise Gluck (speakers of poems alternate between flowers, humans, and god), and Complete Poems by Alan Dugan.

And for a general tip, he recommended a website where members share their reading lists called goodreads.com (which I promptly joined and then forgot about).

I got ALL the books he recommended (via the librarian husband) so that I could peruse and make a choice at leisure, but now I’ve just finished the first fiction book and enjoyed it enough to consider just holding on to all the books until I’ve read them ALL. That is except for We Need To Talk About Kevin, which looked interesting but the subject matter, a mass teen shooting, seemed too gruesome for pregnancy.

I just finished Joshua Ferris’ debut novel, Then We Came to the End. And while I would give it a B, I have to say that I got a strange maniacal pleasure out reading all about the hyper-pressurized relationships within a corporate ad agency. The story was built around the flimsy water cooler conversations of the of characters with names like Jim Jackers, Marcia Dwyer, Tom Mota, Benny Shassburger, Joe Pope… and it took me nearly to the end of the book to be able to keep all of them distinct. But in a way it didn’t matter, anymore than it matters to keep your own office stories straight – it’s all a way to pass the time in a life that seems outside of life. The more than slightly frenzied feel of the novel felt very contemporary to me. It seemed like a methodology born of being raised with the internet and massive multi-tasking, although in the end the story revealed itself to have a more conventional tie-up-the-loose-ends infrastructure that I hadn’t anticipated. Ferris is also an MFA grad from UCI. Next, I’m jumping into Revere, In Those Days.

And for all the inbetween times, I am reading lots of poetry and loving it. Especially the Dugan. Whew – that man pretty much just opens his coat and shows you everything the way it is. A Bukowski of sorts, but not as crass or as drunk.

In the once widely-disdained credit cycle proposed by Hyman P. Minsky, we are currently in the panic stage of the housing/mortgage market, and interestingly, John Cassidy of The New Yorker does not blame Bush, but Fed Chief Greenspan for his decisions back in 2003 (and since then).

But as I don’t know much about economics, I’d like to just highlight a couple quotes of interest (The New Yorker; Feb 4, 2008) that raised my eyebrows over my egg burrito this morning:

“According to Dean Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, average house prices are falling nationwide at an annual rate of more than ten per cent, something not seen since before the Second World War. This means that American households are getting poorer at a rate of more than two trillion dollars a year.”

and

“It’s hard to say exactly how falling house prices will affect the economy, but recent computer simulations carried out by Frederic Mishkin, a governor at the Fed, suggest that, for every dollar the typical American family’s housing wealth drops in a year, that family may cut its spending by up to seven cents. Nationwide, that adds up to roughly a hundred and fifty-five billion dollars…”

Makes you kinda want to stay home and not spend, doesn’t it?