Pictures: Peachy Baby Violet

A few weeks ago I finally met Miss Vi.

Although her mama Carolyn has been a friend of mine for years, it was kind of like re-meeting her as well. She's the same wonderful, creative person, but her life is different. She's so excited to have met one of her very best friends.

It is an amazing thing to watch a friend transform into a parent. When I was in grad school with Carolyn years ago, I noticed that her interactions with everyone around her were marked by tenderness and enthusiasm-- talking to her feels like an embrace.

It makes sense then, that she would give us Violet: a child so sweet and juicy and fuzzy and full of smiles that she's very nearly the baby embodiment of a peach.

Violet currently enjoys the following things: breasts, smiling, chatting, putting up her dukes, and breasts.

Carolyn's relationship with her kid is so fun to see-- they totally get a kick out of one another. When I held Vi, she went right into my arms with the self-assurance of a kid who knows that her mama is totally available.

I have a feeling that Vi will go on many cool adventures, always knowing that home is still there, waiting for her.

Go, Violet, go! You are part of an awesome team.

Consumership and Handcrafts: Three ways to get stuff-- Make, Barter, Buy

MAKE

After I bought my used Series-E Nikon prime lens at Barn Attic, I found myself just throwing it into my purse whenever I thought I might want it later, which was dumb. It could easily have broken or gotten scratched. I checked out some lens cases online, but the ones I could afford looked ugly. I decided to make one myself.

 I used this tutorial, and some leather I got from the Scrap Exchange in Durham last summer. I also used my very fancy hedgehog bias tape from Treehouse Kid and Craft in Athens, Georgia, which I had been saving for a special occasion. It took a few tries (and wasted some good materials) to figure out how to make the case the way I wanted, and it's not perfect, but it does the trick.

 My favorite things about this case is that I made it (and bought the materials from sources I trust). I know exactly where it was came from and feel comfortable with the ethics, so owning it carries no psychic weight for me-- I can use it without guilt.

BARTER

Here's what happened: Last month I spent a fantastic morning at Rock Creek Park with my friends, A and J and their son, X, splashing in the water, talking about the Hardy Boys and taking some family photos of them. I learned a ton about outdoor portraiture and they loved the pics that I took. Everybody was happy.

A few weeks later, I received an exciting package in the mail! Inside were a pair of the most beautiful socks, hand knitted by A, and a very sweet thank you note. I love comfy socks. When I can, I buy Goodhew Socks, but these are the most special pair I own-- so warm! So pretty! Made by my friend's own two hands!

Everybody got something they wanted/needed (socks! portraits!) and everybody had the chance to engage in an activity they enjoyed/excelled at (knitting! photography!) and see another person(s) reap the fruits of that activity.

Technically, this transaction is a more representative of a gift economy in which participants give what they have with the general expectation that others will do the same, but it looks a lot like bartering. I really like the idea of gifting or bartering as opposed to just making everything for one's self, because it allows people to concentrate on doing the things that they love and do best. I can't knit for shit, but I can take the hell out of some pictures. And wear the hell out of some socks.

 In a bartering economy, people are more explicit about the exchange (I'll give you these socks if you take these pictures), which gives people even more leverage over the situation. I wish that there were more ways to exchange goods in this way. Maybe there are. I'll be looking into it.

BUY

I made fish tacos for dinner this past weekend and while I was browsing Union Market for supplies with Rachel And Jan, I stumbled upon Number 1 Sons, an Arlington-based brother and sister pickle operation. Yes.

I told Caitlin, the sister, that I was making fish tacos and she got super amped because she had always wanted someone to try her Acapulco Kraut on a fish taco. I got super excited too and we kind of high-fived. Then I bought the kraut, plus a tub of salsa verde. Caitlin was like Hey! Send me a picture of your tacos! And was like Will I ever! And Rachel smiled upon us with great tolerance.

The kraut was so, so delicious, and I couldn't have made it myself because it involved lactic acid fermentation (the process that makes kosher pickles and kimchi so tangy) and I don't know anything about that. It was a special treat because I don't often by prepared foods like that but I'm happy to pay someone to do things I truly cannot-- just the way I don't make my own clothes because I don't want to look like I'm at Ren Faire. Even though it's a splurge, I'll probably return next month and get myself another tub or two of pickles from Number 1 Sons. These people are making kimchi with kale, ya'll. Respect.

Going for walks with myself

A few weeks I took a slow walk through San Francisco. It was 2.5 miles from our hotel in the Financial District to the Mission, and I spent about an hour covering the the distance.

I'm a West Coast n00b--this was my second time ever seeing the Pacific Ocean-- and all the things that I expected to be different-- the names of streets, the shapes of trees, the corner stores, the demographic makeup of neighborhoods-- were just as different as I thought they would be. I loved it.

I walked down Mission Street through artsy SOMA and then down a few blocks I might have avoided had I known the route better. It was 11 am, and San Francisco was out and about, pushing shopping carts filled with junk, riding bikes, hawking used cell phones, looking for brunch, hefting baskets from the farmer's market. It was easy to note the marks of gentrification that spelled the beginning of the Castro- shop signs changing from neon coils to hammered zinc-- but regardless of the neighborhood, there hung around me a quiet that felt unfamiliar, a hush I couldn't quite put my finger on.



It wasn't until I was sipping my coffee at Four Barrel that I realized: not a single time over the course of my walk had I been catcalled, shouted at at or approached. No men yelled. No teenagers whistled.

Only once did anyone speak to me at all. I was skirting around an outdoor market and I stepped on the fringe of a blanket where a man had laid out his wares. I waved in apology, and the vendor tipped his chin upward in my direction and murmured, "Mama", with the same intonation that people once said, "Ma'am" when passing a lady on the street. The tender formality of it, the term of endearment I hadn't heard since leaving Honduras, felt like ice water down the back of my neck.

All my adult life I've gone for walks alone, in Paris and in San Pedro Sula, in Durham and in Washington DC, and not once have I ever done so without being shouted at.

It doesn't always make me angry. Sometimes it makes me laugh. In Honduras, I would occasionally bristle if I wasn't catcalled, wondering if I looked ugly that day, feeling suddenly rejected by the same men who had frightened me the day before.

Once, a year or two into my time in Honduras, I was walking down the mountain a few kilometers to buy groceries when I heard shouting and trilling from a hundred yards away. I ignored it as long I could, but I ended up looking reflexively over my shoulder. A group of teenagers, boy and girls, had managed to wedge a jumbo-sized kiddie pool between the rocks in a nearby clearing and fill it with water from the stream bed. They were yelling at me to come swim.

Conditioned by years of catcalls, I didn't even glance their way again. I kept walking, and I was a mile down the mountain before I realized that their attention probably wasn't threatening and it might have been fun to go say hi.

 I didn't know them. There were men in the group. It was probably a good call. But still. I was so hot. A swim would have been awesome. And what must those kids have thought when I wouldn't even look their way? I was so angry then at all the men who had yelled and whistled at me and walked too close behind me and spoken loudly to one another about my ass. I was hot and tired. And I felt tremendously lonely.

This customary attention-- bawdy, demanding, flattering or threatening-- is my constant travel companion as a woman. While it's convenient to say that it must be accepted as a cultural norm, and just as easy to say that it must be fought as a sexist injustice, it's most honest to simply examine the shape of it in my life. And the lives of my sisters, my mother, my friends. Someday, my daughters.

It's a shape that marks my identity by filling my moments of quiet and moulding the way I carry myself, where I walk, who I talk to.

It was nice, for an hour in San Francisco, to mark the contours of who I am without it.

Pictures: I get to keep this one

Truly: with every birth I have ever attended, I have fallen in love with the baby. I started practicing as a doula when I was 23, so the first children I saw enter the world will start the first grade this Fall. I can still remember how each of them arrived.

Usually, after the birth is over, and everyone is tucked in bed and the baby is feeding, I slip out of the hospital room, walking backwards so I take one last mental snapshot of the little family that has just coalesced before my eyes. Then, except for the occasional post-partum visit, I don't see that perfect creature again.

Except! Oscar.

Because Oscar's parents are dear friends and coworkers as well as doula clients, I get to snuggle him and snap his picture and talk about his poop and laugh with his parents and watch his family grow. He birth was incredibly beautiful, but his tiny self is even more so.

While I always feel that the babies I see born are perfect, I must say that this one is particularly perfect.

And he gets perfect-er each time I see him.

Oscar's family is surrounded by a massive community of aunties and uncles and internet-cousins, all of whom utterly delight in his existence. His parents keep saying how lucky they feel to be enveloped in so much love and support. All of us keep saying how lucky we are to witness the creation of their family and the growth of their beautiful son.

Just by being, Oscar is a gift to the world. Just by loving him, we help him grow into the person that he truly is.

All he needs to do is be himself, and he makes people very, very happy. So may it always be.

Here's to Oscar, and to his parents, and to their community, and to the amazing way that true love multiplies. We are all the lucky ones.

People: Boots Riley of The Coup

I've been a huge fan of The Coup since senior year at UNC, rocking out to "Baby Let's Have a Baby Before Bush do Something Crazy".

Boots Riley is still awesome, and he's making a ton of sense in today's interview with SF Weekly.

"Making the music that feels emotionally true to me is first. Because there's a lot of revolutionary music that I don't like and that I won't listen to, no matter how much I agree with it. And there's a lot of music that I love that has nothing to do politically with where I'm at."

"I believe that the people I'm talking to already agree with me — they may just use different words for it — and that the main problem is that people don't think that they have the power to do anything about it. It's not, 'I need to expose these wonderful facts to you so that you see them and you change your ways.'.... The only reason people are on different sides has to do with whether or not they think anything can be done."

Indeed.

image credit: Sam Miller

Food: Canning Sour Cherry Jam

The best books for kids (or maybe ever) are the Little House on the Prairie series, and the best parts of all of those books are about food. Do not try to convince me otherwise.

I am particularly fond of the chapters devoted to "putting food by" for a long hard winter. Like the time Laura's family killed a whole pig and spent the day boiling its hide and playing soccer with its bladder and roasting its tail as a crispy and delicious treat and oh my god nothing has ever sounded so fun to me in my entire life.

Well, maybe seeing Taylor Swift live in concert. But the day after that, driving back to DC, blasting Fearless with four pounds of sour cherries riding shotgun was pretty great, too.

I am not particularly good at making jam. It takes patience and an eye for detail, neither of which I really have.

I used a recipe from Marisa McClellan's fantastic website Food in Jars, as I almost always do when I make jam or pickle. The recipes are easy to follow, low-sugar and safety-focused.

Taking the jars from the water bath feels like magic every time. They make this pinging sound as they cool, and that's how you know they've sealed. Then they keep for a year or more on your shelf! Sadly, there is no crispy and delicious tail to roast.

Or a hide to de-bristle. But there is toast!

And enough jars to dole out as little gifts through the end of the year.

 I'd never had sour cherry before, it has a really nice cherry-pie flavor, brighter, more aromatic and a little more bitter than dark cherries.

  

Man, I can't wait till the hipsters in Bloomingdale start up the pig bladder soccer league. Until then, I'm going to pickle some okra.

People: Taylor Swift (LIVE, INCHES FROM MY FACE)

I am a Taylor Swift fan. Fan as in I buy all her albums, turn up her songs on the radio, and would like very much to hug her. On Saturday night, at Lincoln Financial Field, I came about as close as I'm ever going to get.

I'm not really interested in the big debate around Taylor Swift's love life and whether or not she is a feminist and why she only writes about breakups and blah blah blah. I find the whole conversation pretty boring. I enjoy her music.

Anyway, many smart people have already written very nicely about why she sucks versus why she does not suck. As the Jezebel article points out, it doesn't matter whether or not she calls herself a feminist-- she sure acts like one, because she does whatever the hell she feels like, even if she ends up looking like an adolescent girl in the process. Oh wait, she IS an adolescent girl.

I am AM interested in Taylor Swift as an artist who repeatedly (and wisely) indulges her own creative obsessions. Example: rain and water. Specifically, making out in the rain. Homegirl can't stop writing about it. One time she decided to make it rain onstage while she was singing. Why? BECAUSE SHE WANTED TO. Respect.

The fact that people are parodying her her lyrics and using them as way of thinking about the world of ideas? An excellent sign that she's getting shit done.

FeministTaylorSwift ‏@feministtswift21h

Time won't fly / It's like I'm paralyzed by the patriarchal constraints / Enforced on women's sexualities

 I wish I had had the good sense, between the ages of 17-22, to just let my obsessions rip like that.

Anyway, the best moments of the show were when she seemed to forget herself, dancing and screaming just like the kids who had come to see her perform.

What an awkward, sweaty little beast. I could just squeeze her.

I was also really impressed by Taylor Swift's awareness, in concert, of the (FIFTY THOUSAND) young girls who were there to see her. Her pre-song banter was geared, roughly, toward the 10-15 age group. She took the time to explain the ideas behind her songs in developmentally appropriate language, even delving a little bit into the concept of color as a metaphor for emotion.

Look at those tiny little hands reaching up. I cannot with the cuteness.

The whole haters-gonna-hate narrative made famous by her 2009 run-in with Kanye West is a huge part of the Taylor Swift brand, but I was pleased that she summed it up thusly for an audience of young women: "You can't change the way other people behave. You can only change your response to it". I know, right? Right?"

Whoever scripted those words, no matter how tired they may sound to some of us, the second sentence of that statement is true as hell. And it came out of Taylor Swift's mouth. And fifty thousand girls were listening.

Plus, you know that squealing, puppy-like enthusiasm that simultaneously delights us and breaks our hearts?

This was a pretty safe space for them to express it.

That squealing can make us feel uncomfortable. And vulnerable. Like a single beam of light refracted, we imagine all of the yearning and hypocrisy and acculturation and potential that such squealing contains, and we are terrified. We want to look away.

We don't write articles dismantling our own girls, trying to parse their vanity or their motives or the sexist syllogisms they unknowingly repeat. We love them, and want them to be loved. We stick with them. And part of that is witnessing, from all of the most terrifying angles, their desire to be larger than life.

And helping them try to understand that desire, and learn to control their reactions to it.

And helping them to learn how to admire someone without idolizing them.

And telling them, when the moment is right, to go ahead and let it rip.

Places: San Francisco Faves

So we went to San Francisco. We did the raddest things, but not all of the things. It was a perfect balance. I am very, very lucky and privileged. Here is what I loved most of all*.

The Ferry Building

I mean, guys. Guys. Every once in a while, it is a good to have a hope-renewing experience wherein something is JUST AS AWESOME AS YOU KNEW IT WOULD BE AND MORE. This place is a Wonderland of Food, all of it so gorgeous and beautifully presented that I thought I might cry.  I went back three times, wandering around with my camera, looking every inch the tourist, which was fine because I was a tourist.

 It is rad enough to be able to sip a chicory-laced cold brew New Orleans style iced coffee from Blue Bottle. It is additionally more delicious to accompany that with a macaron from Miette (I tried both chocolate lavender and rose geranium). But in addition to being able to grab a coffee (the most delicious coffee) or grab a treat (the most delicious treat) it is also possible to stop off and grab an oyster. Yes. You go to the lady, you give her $2, and she gives you an incredible oyster. You top it with all the fixins (cocktail sauce, Atomic Hotsauce, horseradish), slurp it down and you’re on your way. Just stoppin’ off for an oyster lalala.

The Gold-Colored Light Everywhere

Gorgeous!

The Hills

So steep!

The Fog

Surprisingly poignant! Not sure why!

Juicy News

I heard about this place from Heidi Swanson’s San Francisco Guide, thought it would be cool to check out, forgot out it, then stumbled upon it while looking for coffee. So many beautifully bound, hard-to-find periodicals, plus all of the usuals. A handful of good literary journals. Smells like very fine paper. I found both Kinfolk, which I’ve been meaning to check out, and Cereal out of the UK, which seems equally awesome.

The Fillmore Jazz Festival

Highly recommended, but also obviously time-sensitive.

Transamarican RedwoodPark

A little grove of redwoods in the middle of the Financial District. No biggie.

The Tadditch Grill

Subway tiles. Old fashioned private banquettes. Gregarious bartenders wearing lab coats. A huge bowl of cioppino, dark-crusted sourdough and a plastic bib to protect your outfit. Since 1903, of course.

A Highly Recommended Walk

A long stroll from the top of the Twin Peaks down through Chinatown and North Beach, stopping for minestrone soup, and then on to Fisherman’s Wharf.

Fisherman’s Wharf

That place is terrible. Do not go there.

The Mission and Castro

My hipster wonderland. Gah. This neighborhood has lived in my imagination since I read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius at age 15, and it was just as cool as I imagined it would be, with an open, sunny, unpretentiousness that I didn’t anticipate. The hipsters in San Francisco are doing the Maker movement right, and I’ll be thinking for a long time about why I found this particular group of creatives so inspiring. It seemed (from an outsider’s perspective) like there was a very high level of cooperation and comradery. People appeared to champion one another’s projects rather than compete with one another, even in a town that is nearly saturated with people doing projects.

Over the course of one glorious morning I drank a pourover Ethiopian Wote at Four Barrel, had a rad conversation with the owner/designer of Nooworks about consumership and creativity, spent some birthday money at Voyager, ate an arepa at Pica Pica, test-rode a Public Bike and flipped over the raspberries at Bi-Rite Market. My honesty here is going to cost me—my sisters will be making fun of me for this list of activities for years to come. BRING IT ON, PUNKS.

*Note: all of this was possible because I had very sweet and generous travel companions who indulged my (mainly food-related) mania at every turn. I am a lucky lady in that regard most of all.