Photo by skyseeker

I’ve often wondered if we could tell our pre-child selves exactly what becoming a parent would mean — the sacrifices, the inhuman patience, the changes, the lack of sleep, the disappearance of late weekend brunches, the leash that binds you to your kids — how many of us would decide against procreation?

It’s not easy being a parent, but given the opportunity, would we want to return to pre-child life? I certainly wouldn’t. No, it’s not our children that make us unhappy. I’d argue that our children allow us to see the world more joyfully and with fewer pretenses. No, the source of our lugubriousness lies elsewhere.

Parenting By Committee Sucks

Apparently, there are rules for parenting that baby books fail to mention:

You don’t take your child out for dinner past 8pm. Your child shouldn’t jump, shout, laugh or make any noise unless in a place specifically designated for children. Travel with children is impossible. Homeschooling is whacky, and at no time should your child ever touch another adult’s stuff.

Take for instance a recent discussion I had on You Be Mom, the counterpart parent group to the Urban Baby Jennifer Senior mentions in her article. One mom vented about another woman, a stranger, yelling at her to “keep her children in line” because her three-year-old son touched this woman’s handbag.

“She’s right. Your child shouldn’t be touching other people’s stuff,” the majority of other mothers scolded.

I chime in my two cents that kid are kids; they run around. An adult should be mature enough to understand that.

Photo by sektordua

“You must be raising some really entitled brats,” I was told.

It’s what I call parenting by committee. We imagine everything that could potentially happen based on the needs of all the others on the committee, and then create rules based on those possibilities. Individual child and circumstance don’t matter.

Imagine, though, if the adult simply turns to the child and kindly but firmly requests “Please, don’t touch my bag.” It would have more effect on Lila than hearing my repeated orders of “Don’t touch strangers’ bags.” She’d also remember this lesson the next time she thought to rifle through another person’s belongings.

The Myth of Perfection

When Noah and I fight, the pitch rises and at some point he accuses me, “You think you’re perfect.”

But it’s not that I believe myself to be perfect, it’s that ideally I want everything to be perfect. Clean house, happy kid, work done, dog well trained, healthy meals, lots of free time and nothing out of order.

It would be nice. It’s never going to happen.

The sooner we embrace our imperfections and revel in the things that do go well, the more content we will be.

We’ve Lost the Ability to See the World As Children

“Did you see Babies?” asks Lois Nachamie, a couples counselor who for years has run parenting workshops and support groups on the Upper West Side. She’s referring to the recent documentary that compares the lives of four newborns—one in Japan, one in Namibia, one in Mongolia, and one in the United States (San Francisco).

“I don’t mean to idealize the lives of the Namibian women,” she says. “But it was hard not to notice how calm they were. They were beading their children’s ankles and decorating them with sienna, clearly enjoying just sitting and playing with them, and we’re here often thinking of all of this stuff as labor.”

This sounds suspiciously like existing in the moment.

Children handle the overwhelming influx of information differently. They ask a lot of questions, ignore some of it, fixate on other parts. They rarely worry about the future or past. That’s what allows Lila one minute to tell her friend Rosie she hates her and the next minute they’re best friends again.

Photo by slightlywinded

It’s one of the best things about being a parent, really, to have this little person forcing you over and over to be with them right then and there. Play with me.
Draw with me. What is that? Why is the flag so stretchy? What is the dog eating?

We Do Not Trust Ourselves

Last week, a boy at school told Lila that she’s not as pretty as Desiree. She was crushed.

“Are you friends with him?”
“No.”
“Do you think what he says is true?”
“No.”
“Then why does it matter what he says?”
Problem solved.

Generally, the things that bother us most are the things which we ourselves already believe to be true, and are based squarely in our own already well-cultivated insecurities.

Tell me my child is an entitled brat? I’ll shrug my shoulders. Call me a blue jumping lily leaping frog, and I’ll think you’re crazy. I know none of these to be true.

Suggest to me that I spend too much time working and not enough time with Lila. That hits home.

I am a much happier person today than I was before Lila was born. I am more content and less anxious about every area of my life. Again, this has nothing to do with Lila and everything to do with myself and the way I see the world.

If I’m more worried about the contents of a stranger’s bag than myself and my child, I rely on that stranger’s approbation before I feel right in myself. If I care what another says about my house, clothes, weight, my child’s development or any other number of things, I place the onus of my happiness in their hands.

Even if a stranger manages to touch on an insecurity hot spot, we still have the ability to recognize the insecurity, address it and change it.

Why hand over that power?

We Give Up Our Own Responsibility

Just yesterday, Lila had a huge fight with Rosie, because she wanted to be the cat and Rosie was supposed to be the horse. Rosie doesn’t want to be a horse. Rosie hits Lila. This escalates into crying, and even when Rosie apologizes, Lila does not want to accept. “She doesn’t even mean it!” she screams, tears running down her face.

Photo by bobby-james

Lila’s feelings are hurt. She’s angry. She feels rejected, because her friend doesn’t want to give her what she wants. There is little Rosie can do to ease Lila’s pain. Now Lila must decide for herself to move past her emotions.

While this may seem a childish exchange, the pieces are merely variables. Lila’s experience working through interpersonal relationships mirrors the adult experience.

You decide for yourself. When is it so much more important to be the kitty instead of the horse that you’ll trade your own contentment?

The Parental Conundrum of Self Development

Having a child forces us to be more aware, more in the moment and less selfish, all things that make room for tremendous self growth. But having children also robs us of the time and energy we need in order to make the changes we’d like to improve our lives and outlook, so we find ourselves constantly off balance. Then, we worry it’s not OK to be off balance, because we’re disappointing others. In the meantime, we’re not nourishing ourselves.

So there we are, standing on one foot, juggling horses in one hand and kitties in the other, all the while wishing we could be doing it better, with more style; that we could be happier doing it. At what point do we stop, pat ourselves on the back and say, “Hey, look at me! It may not be pretty, but at least I’m doing it.”

While it is often difficult to accept that perhaps we are the cause of our own misery, isn’t it good to know that the power to turn it around lies firmly in our own hands?

Community Connection

What life lessons have you learned from parenting? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Enter outrage and upset from breastfeeding supporters who feel her article is both an affront to those who breastfeed – let’s call ‘em Uberboobers — as well as discouraging to those who want to try. Then look at the other side of the field to those who found Kathryn’s article to be helpful, a breath of fresh air for those who feel criticized for choosing formula in bottles.

The real issue, however, lies elsewhere. The current debate raging on the internet about breastfeeding sets up sides, forms camps and then draws a line between the two. And really, who wants to choose between “putting your teeny, tiny innocent baby…where only a lover has been before” or “being a selfish person who puts her child second to her funbags.”

I searched for the original Mother & Baby article, but only found news items running quotes, most replete with the same us against them language. Kathryn Blundell, says one woman, “completely sums up the minds of us formula feeding moms.” Others reduce women who stop breastfeeding to “quitters,” as if deciding to formula feed represents parenthood failure.

I’m not sure where the dichotomy originates. With moms or with the media. Although I suspect, like most things, it comes from somewhere in between.

My Personal Experience?

I breastfed Lila for two years and three months. At the beginning, I loved it. By the end, I was done. I just couldn’t take it anymore. Keep in mind, too, it was relatively easy for me. This is not the case for all. For many, breastfeeding can be excruciatingly painful on both a physical and emotional level. The last thing anyone needs on top of a post partum lack of sleep is to be told you’re not being a good mom because you’re formula feeding. Nor do you need someone calling you a martyr for braving on when a bottle works just as well. Both sorts of advice produce a level of guilt that keeps you from making clear choices.

I, myself, continued far longer than I wanted because of pressure I felt from outside myself. Instead of supplementing with formula, so Noah or someone else could take up some feeding times, I decided I had to do it all myself. This meant I couldn’t be away from Lila for more than a few hours and didn’t sleep through the night for almost a year. Being a parent is a commitment, yes, but that is not necessarily the one we intend to make when having children. Nor should it have to be.

If and when there’s a next time for me, I will most definitely supplement with formula. I will not make parenting choices based on guilt and pressure and will instead figure out what is best for me and baby together.

But it doesn’t stop with breastfeeding

Not by a long shot.

There are tens of polarized debates relating to motherhood. Working Out Of Home Mom versus Stay-At-Home-Mom. Do you allow your child to learn to fall asleep on his own by crying himself to sleep? Or do you lie in bed with your child to soothe her to sleep? Do you hire a nanny or send your little one to day care? Do you have your baby in a hospital with a doctor or with a midwife at home?

It is exhausting and turns every parenting decision into one of right and wrong, moral or immoral. In reality, though, choices of this sort are not a black and white, thus, no matter what you choose, you will be wrong on some account. How’s that for banging your head against a wall?

The bottom line is if you are lucky enough to have the choice between all these options, rejoice. Please yourself first. Take care of yourself first.

The Ubiquitous Feminism Tie-In

Nancy Harder recently questioned if these days feminism is perhaps worse off than ever. As a partial answer, I’ll repeat here the words of Linsey Abrams, a feminist writer, fiction author and also my grad school adviser. “Leigh, ” she said. “Feminism is simple. It’s not a whole big argument with theory and miles of discussion. Feminism comes down to one thing. The ability to be able to make the choice to do what you want.”

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

What are your experiences with breastfeeding or formula feeding? Share your thoughts in the comments. For a male view of breastfeeding, check out Adventures in Weaning: Cold Turkey in the Great American Desert.

Photo by m00by/Feature Photo by szlea

It starts at birth when immediately you’re taken and tested with Apgar scores. Are you pink enough? Do you cry enough? Make enough faces?

It’s easy to understand why Apgar scores are important, though. They let us know quickly and easily whether or not a newborn needs immediate medical attention, but what about the other measures of our lives?

Here’s the rundown. Deep breath please….

Facebook friends. Linked In connections. Twitter followers. Pants size. Bra size. How much does your baby weigh? How many miles do you run? How often and how fast? Marital status. How many children do you have? How many countries visited. Languages spoken. Borders crossed. How many times have you been to Burning Man?

We have measurements to decide whether our children are gifted enough to start first grade on the accelerated track and No Child Left Behind tests to show if a student reads and writes well enough to pass to the next grade.

Photo by Tambako the Jaguar

Those tests in turn help us determine whether our teachers are teaching well enough for our children to pass those tests. Don’t forget SATs, A-levels, O-levels, APs, and whatever your home country equivalent would be.

Once you pass all those tests with high scores, you’re then free to move to the next level.

In college and university, the yardstick arrives in the form of cum laude, class rank and don’t forget the extra points for where you get your degree. Honor societies, sororities, academic clubs and sports teams. All that helps others decide whether or not someone should hire you, when it will then be decided how much money you’ll make for salary.

From there, these logically follow:

How much do you have in the bank? Credit rating. How many days vacation and where do you go. How many square feet in your house or apartment. What kind of car do you drive? How posh is your neighborhood? Depending on your profession and how many years you’ve been in the field, other tests quickly follow. Tests and more tests rank you on a scale of how good a lawyer, doctor, accountant — or really anything else — you are. And if you’re a blogger, you simple cannot forget Alexa ranking, Linked In connections, Google Page Rank, website stats and RSS subscribers.

Once we know exactly how much you make, where you live and what you drive, it’s far easier to find where you fit socially. Are you married or single? How many sexual partners have you had? Do you have orgasms one at a time or multiple and how big is your penis? How often do you have sex? How often do you date and where do you take your dates. What brands of clothing do you wear? What size clothing?

What is wealth without health?

We measure what we eat by calories and weight which help us maintain our hips, chests and clothing size. And just when you thought your food was safe once inside your body, here comes Rate My Poo to tell you how your shit compares to others. There’s even a Top 10.

There’s eyesight, hearing, height, weight, cholesterol, blood sugar levels and blood pressure. How long does it take to get pregnant? What is your sperm count? How many children do you have? What month did your child learn to sit up, crawl, walk and speak? How many hours in labor? Which then leads right back to where we began with Apgar scores.

Photo by woodleywonderworks

Then, when you find yourself listless and confused from all the prodding, poking, pulling and testing, someone comes along to quantify your happiness and self esteem.

Anyone else ready to have a nervous breakdown?

While these scales do provide us important information, at what point do we stop living our lives by numbers? Numbers that ultimately have the potential to damage our internal self esteem when we find others simply don’t respect us enough because we don’t rate highly enough.

What happens if the playing field changes? Let’s say you’ve done supremely well in high school, aced your college qualifying exams and then suddenly your family moves to another country where those scores mean nothing. Or you’re the perfect size 6 in clothing and somehow find yourself in a place where a larger, plumper body type is preferred?

What does that say about you? What does that say about our system?

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

What would happen were we to suddenly get rid of all these personal and professional measurements? Are some of them necessary to ensure our happiness and well being? Share your thoughts below.

Photo by author

It was summer. Lila and her friend Maia played in the sandbox while we moms sat on benches drinking latte from the corner deli and comparing notes about the upcoming terrible twos. That’s the day I learned Talya and her husband were edging toward divorce.

“How do you know when the problems are just too big?” she asked me.

“We’ve been together long enough that…” I began, but she cut me off.

“I know,” she said. “You and Noah have been married long enough that you have all this stuff figured out.”

But that wasn’t it at all. Quite the opposite.

Noah and I have been together almost twenty years. We’ll have been married for exactly fifteen years this coming Friday, June 25, and we dated four years prior. That’s more than half our lives together.

What I intended telling Talya that fine July day is that at some point in a long relationship, you’ll have at least one time when you realize, this is it, we’re breaking up.

Noah and I have had two. One happened soon after September 11th. Hindsight tells me stress did it to us. We had just witnessed the most massive human destruction we’d ever seen. We watched charred paper rain down on the roof of our building and heard sirens blazing from Brooklyn through the Battery Tunnel to the once-standing WTC buildings. Soon after, all freelance work dried up in the city and suddenly we couldn’t pay our bills.

The second time occurred around the time we decided to sell our stuff and leave New York to travel. Again, maybe it was the stress of it all. We sorted through every piece of our lives, decided what to keep with us and what to discard. Whether or not we consciously realized it, we had to be wondering if maybe we should just disconnect from each other, really start over completely. It was tempting.

But then what?

I’m the same person with Noah as I am without him. If I want to be alone for a while, fine, but what if I want another relationship? I bring to any other person the same quirks and faults as I have with Noah.

We tend to have between five and ten different disagreement at any given time. We draw the same battle lines, repeat the same arguments and generally make our way to the same conclusions. At times, it’s excruciatingly boring. Other times, it’s outright painful.

Photo of Leigh and Noah, taken by Lila

Over the years, some arguments drop off the list. Others appear. Some are stupid. Some relate to our deepest personal beliefs. Some are just sticking points, reasons to argue because you’re pissed off at each other, unable to communicate and get stuck in gridlock.

That’s when you take a deep breath.

And when you figure out what’s really getting to you. It’s never the teabag I left in the sink or the bill left unpaid that caused the electricity to be cut again. Even infidelity and the lies that go with it are not in and of themselves the issue.

It’s what those things mean to you about yourself. The anger we feel toward others, while often entirely justified, always stems from our own insecurities.

When your partner tells you you’re being a hypocrite or you’re not making enough money or you’re not supportive enough or you’re a fucking dickhead and I hope you die, or any one of a thousand things people say to each other out of honesty or anger or the desire to be hurtful, it will only cut deep if there is already a wound there.

There’s no such thing as happily ever after.

I used to think there was such a thing as a soul mate. Years with one person has made me change my mind. It’s not because I’m disenchanted with Noah, it’s more that I now believe it is possible to work through anything if you decide that’s what you want to do.

There will always be points of disagreement and discord, and even the most well suited couple, who seem to have everything in common, who agree on every point and never fight, will eventually reach a time in their relationship when it just stops working.

Does that mean you’re no longer soul mates?

Leigh at Burning Man

The way I see relationships is that when it’s good, I mean really great, those times you’re electrically charged toward each other, you can be sure those won’t last. You’ll always head into neutral or negative space again. But when they’re bad, there are no guarantees you’ll go back to the electric.

Some might call that cynical. Yes, I suppose. I see it as a reason never to take anything for granted.

Here’s the secret, I think.

You have to take care of your own needs first. Many will call that selfish, but seriously, if your head is in disarray or your body in pain, how can you possibly be there for or with anyone else?

It’s not really so much of a secret as something that’s easy to forget in the barrage of everyday life things. Whether you have kids or not, travel or not, are expats or not, there will always be something going on. Family, work, lack of work, natural disaster, death. Something will be there to stress you. Even more so, happiness can often be hard to handle. I mean, what do we do with ourselves when we actually get exactly what we want?

Then it’s just a matter of figuring out what it is you need in order to take care of yourself.

I like to be alone.

I don’t mean a couple hours to myself. I mean I need to get out and experience a bit of life on my own. That’s why I’m going to Burning Man this year, while Noah stays home with Lila.

I appreciate that he understands my need isn’t personal to him. In return, I try really hard to listen when Noah tells me the things he needs to take care of himself, even if it’s difficult for me to hear.

When you have that space to take care of yourself, you continue in your own development separately from your partner. You go your own directions, fuel your own interests and then can return to each other refreshed.

How do you know you’ll always come back to each other? You don’t. You just have to trust.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

How long have you been with your partner and what lessons have you learned along the way?

Check out the articles in our series Love in the Time of Matador where we explore the many facets of Matadorian love and relationships.

Some call it disturbing, saying a baby shouldn’t be imitating the sexual pelvic gyrations of an adult. Others say let a kid do what a kid’s going to do. It’s innocent dancing. But really, who cares about the socio-sexual-political argument?

A real argument for nature over nurture, eh? She’s got the moves of someone 20 years older.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

Who’s the better dancer, this baby or the dude who starts his own dance party?

Photo by hiperkarma

I peruse a few parents’ message boards out there. Sometimes to ask the occasional piece of advice. Other times, I drop in to see what’s what with the latest discussion. I logged on yesterday to see the following raging about Abby Sunderland.

Who is Abby, you may be wondering? Let’s hear from the message boards.

Girl who failed to sail around the world at 16. she’s planning on writing a book and is having lots of fun on her adventure, getting a ride home from some funny french guys

Then come the criticisms:

Who the hell lets their 16 year old daughter sail across the ocean by herself?

Am I the only one that finds it freaky that Abby is still at least a week away from home, getting rides on boats full of men?

Isn’t it illegal to let a 16yo sail the world alone? Like child neglect or endangerment?

So nobody but me is bothered by the fact that Abby the sailor wasn’t in school this whole time?

Some outright anger:

I seriously can’t believe that Australian tax payers will pay for Abby’s rescue. I would be SO pissed!!!

i am iffy about abby being found alive cause those dumbass will just do it again

Abby Sutherland [sic] should’ve been left out there longer they didnt learn shit

And then of course, my favorite:

I think about Abby every hour since she sent her distress beacon signals out and cry like a little fucking faggot. Her parents are dopes, but she’s a child lost at sea.

Photo by Christian Haugen

To be fair, that last one is a bit of an inside joke, and there were a few voices of support among the negativity, but ultimately, the overwhelming tone I hear from parents is one of fear.

Make sure you do things the traditional way. Don’t attempt something big, because you might die. Be afraid of men. Fear of failure There’s a focus on what’s wrong, what can’t and shouldn’t be done and then, of course, anger and punishment when you stray from those traditional boundaries.

This is why I love Lenore Skenazy.

Lenore Skenazy, the NY columnist who blogs about parenting on her Free Range Kids website, received similar attacks when in 2008 she wrote about allowing her then 9-year-old son to take the subway home alone.

Recently, she suggested parents take their young children — seven years and older — and leave them in the park to play alone. More uproar and outrage. Lenore’s exercise challenges parents. It forces them to face their own demons. Kids don’t know to be afraid of being alone in the park. They don’t worry about being kidnapped or weird men that may touch them funny or being murdered by a random stranger. Those are parental concerns.

Children learn their fears from their parents.

Is Abby An Abject Failure?

In my opinion, no. Did she succeed at her original goal? No, but she is willing to try again. Her parents would be willing to support her again, even though it seems they now have the enormous burden of paying the bill for her rescue. And really, how many of us would know what to do on a broken boat in the middle of a stormy ocean? That alone shows amazing ingenuity and knowledge.

Photo by foundphotoslj

Still, my heart sank when I heard of her disappearance, because I knew immediately fingers would point saying “See, she never should have tried.”

And suddenly, the accomplishments of Jessica Watson, who recently completed her solo trip, or Abby’s older brother who boated his way around the world, would disappear. For many, their complete goals wash away in the face of one apparent failure.

But failure is a normal part of life, and people who actually go out and do things will not succeed 100% of the time. They will, however, accomplish their goals some of the time. Those who never try, succeed zero percent of the time.

What Message Will We Gift Our Children?

Lila is six. She’s not asking me to outfit a boat and send her out on the Indian Ocean in winter storms. Nor is she asking to circumnavigate Central Park on her own with only a subway map and some change to make calls. But one day she will want to strike out on her own.

When that time arrives, I will no longer have a choice. When that time arrives, will I have provided her the tools she needs to explore this expansive, exciting, fascinating and yes, sometimes deadly, world on her own?

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

Now, it seems, there will be a reality show based on the Sunderlands. I admit, my heart took another dip and dive when I heard that.

Does this change the way you see Abby’s ability to survive on her own? Does this suddenly make her parents’ motives suspect? Share your thoughts below.

OK, I’m being dramatic, but ultimately, if I’m spending time watching movies with my daughter, I’d like to see something I genuinely enjoy.

Movies So Good, I Watch Them Even When Lila’s Not Around

Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro No Kamikakushi)

This Japanese animated film directed by Hiyao Miyazaki tells story of a young girl named Chihiro whose parents are turned into pigs at the start of the movie.  To save them from being eaten, Chihiro must work in a bath house run by spirits. I never get tired of it. Ultimately, this movie imparts lessons on growing up, friendship and developing the ability to be responsible for your choices.

I’ve included the Japanese trailer with subtitles, because the straight-up English version doesn’t represent the film well, but you can find the full feature dubbed in English.

Other options:

Fantastic Mr Fox by Wes Anderson. Need I say more?. Pixar’s Up makes even the most hardened adult laugh, cry and maybe realize that the meaning of life is found in the now. The Iron Giant written by poet, children’s writer and husband of Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes and directed by Brad Bird whose diverse portfolio spans children’s movies, comedy, action and adventure.

Avatar, not intended to be a kids movie, but I find it more enjoyable to think of it as one. 9, produced by Tim Burton tells of a world after Armageddon. Humans have destroyed themselves and rag dolls save the world. Then there’s Yellow Submarine with the Beatles. Milo and Otis (aka Koneko Monogatari) narrated by Dudley Moore. This flick is guaranteed to give you a contact high. Chicken Run features Mel Gibson as a catapult riding chicken saving the girl chickens from a death farm. What’s not to love?

Movies That Take Us Back To Childhood

Sometimes, remakes and revisits of movies or books we adored as children disappoint us in adulthood. At their best, though, they transport us back in time, allowing us to see the world as we did then. When you watch these with a child you love, the excitement of discovering a great film for the first time is infectious.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Roald Dahl’s book was the first I read by myself in its entirety. It took weeks and required running back and forth to my parents bedroom to ask for word clarification. Then I reread the damn thing until the cover fell off and pages fell out.

While I do enjoy the 1971 Gene Wilder version of the movie, I prefer the more recent remake. Johnny Depp perfectly portrays the kooky, weird Willy Wonka from my imagination. My favorite scene: When Violet Beauregarde turns into a massive blueberry after chewing gum she’s not supposed to chew. Gets me every time.

Other options:

ET, The Wizard of Oz, My Fair Lady, Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music and The Parent Trap Both old and new versions are of the Parent Trap have their merits, but I’m partial to the 1961 film with Hayley Mills and Leo G Carroll. Then check out newer films such as Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, The Secret Garden, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, Cat In the Hat, Horton Hears A Who (Who doesn’t love Steve Carell?) and, finally, Where the Wild Things Are.

Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki

I’ve never seen a Studio Ghibli film I didn’t like.

Kiki’s Delivery Service follows Kiki and her bad attitude black cat as she leaves home for the first time to find her way in this world as a witch. She moves to a new town, starts her own business. There’s never any fear of leaving home nor is there any danger involved. Perfect message for young kids and a great reminder for adults that at some point we all need to leave home and find a new one elsewhere.

Some Studio Ghibli can be a bit frightening for children, but Kiki works for all ages.

Other Ghiblis:

My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Castle In the Sky, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and Howl’s Moving Castle.

Movies Made For Adults, But Kids Like Them, Too.

27 Dresses. Great for little girls into fashion. They may not understand the plot, but watching Katherine Heigl play dress up with an endless stream of ugly outfits was enough to keep all of us occupied during a long layover in Panama. Legally Blonde serves the same purpose, only add a small yippy dog and a lot more pink leather and nail polish.

For boys, consider Jim Henson’s Labyrinth with a Ziggy Stardust done David Bowie and lots of trolls. Then there’s Dune: another freaky science fiction piece with enormous worms, Sting and silly names like Yueh and MaudDib to fuel the best kid crazy talk. If, by the end, you’re not standing in your living room fist in the air proclaiming yourself the kwisatz haderach, clearly, you’ve worn a suit and tie one too many times.

And while we’re talking Jim Henson, for the love of God, don’t overlook The Muppets. From movies to the show that popped on television every Friday night before I had to go to bed, they appeal equally to all ages and genders.

I’ll finish off this adult list with the all pleasing Princess Bride. Have fun storming the castle!

Kick Ass Series

Star Wars

The story of a girl, a boy and a universe a billion years in the making. It’s epic– an adventure unlike anything on your planet. Yep, it’s big. This trailer may be like nothing you’d see today, but the films, all six in the series, hold up fantastically. I still get chills when the music begins.

After that, check out the Harry Potters, Wallace and Grommit, The Chronicles of Narnia and Transformers.

Disney Disclaimer

You may have noticed I haven’t yet included a single Disney animation in this list. I’ve avoided them mainly because they’re not really my thing, but if I had to choose from the vast array of Disney animated features available, I generally go for the early ones.

In the older films, Snow White and Cinderella as prime examples, evil was truly evil. It showed up at your door to poison you or locked you in a high tower to die. There’s something far more appealing to the hard edge good versus evil of the early films — however racist and sexist they may be — than the updated PC versions of women and ethnic groups that have been so watered down, they’re just plain boring to watch.

If nothing else, the shock of seeing Red Indians dancing around a fire saying “How” from Peter Pan or the painfully stereotypical characters in Dumbo will make you feel like you’re seeing it for the first time.

Most times I forgo these films altogether, but when Lila insists on watching one, I try to steer her towards my favorites: Mulan, Brother Bear, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Alice in Wonderland.

Pixar Picks

My favorite Pixar film changes over time. We watch over and over until Lila’s ready for the next. In this way, we’ve been through every Pixar film numerous times. What I like about this Disney branch-off studio is how the films incorporate inside jokes and references that relate to each other. Even better, they all include nods to other great films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, War of the Worlds and even This is Spinal Tap.

Each time I watch these films, I notice something new.

Right now, Toy Story II sits on top of our family movie time rotation.

There’s nothing quite like watching Kelsey Grammar as Stinky Pete the Prospector macking on two Barbie Dolls while Buzz Lightyear pops a wingspan boner after watching Jessie the Cowgirl flip through the air. I haven’t yet figured out a way to explain to Lila why those are funny.

Other Pixar favorites:

Finding Nemo, The Incredibles (another Brad Bird), Wall-E, Monsters, Inc and Cars

Stephen Spielberg and Dreamworks

I have only seen the trailer for How To Train Your Dragon, but it’s enough to tell me I would enjoy watching it at least once with Lila. It reminds me of Harry Potter wrapped in the promise of a young boy learning that dragons — ie metaphor for anything we don’t understand — aren’t quite as scary as we think.

While Dreamworks doesn’t sit at the top of my favorite movies, no list of kid’s flicks would be complete without including the following:

Antz with Woody Allen as a self-actualized New Yorky complaining ant looking for individuality. Mike Meyer’s as Shrek doesn’t disappoint. Will Smith and the myriad of hip-hop and R&B references in Shark Tale is always fun. Plus, I’m never one to miss any film — animated or otherwise — in which Robert Dinero plays the Don. And while we’re mentioning actors reprising familiar roles, let’s not forget Jerry Seinfeld in Bee Movie.

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What did I leave off the list?

For more ideas to inspire travel and introspection, check out Matador Goods list of movie and book recommendations.

Photo by Lachlan Hardy

I’m supposed to be writing an article about the different ways in which we measure ourselves, but I can’t concentrate because somewhere in the yard behind me I can hear Lila screaming at the dog.

Sometimes she laughs, which makes me smile, but it inevitably rises into a whiny crescendo. When the pitch reaches a particular note, I know without a doubt that soon the dog will nip, scratch or do something to otherwise offend her, and it will all end in tears.

Yep, there we go. She’s crying. This time, because he’s destroyed the intricate pillow fort she’d constructed for him. Instead of doing just what she required of him, he’s broken free, grabbed the leg of her pants and is now pulling hard. The two are twirling around in circles.

I figure I’ve given her plenty of instruction on how to stop this little game, and there’s not much more I can do to help. So I sit here typing away, taking occasional sips of my tea and cringing between Lila’s shrieks, the dog barking, and hearing Noah intervene with “No, no biting. No biting.”

Excuse me a second. I have to deal with this.

Ok, five minutes later, and I’m back. The dog has been completely riled up, and I’ve just been accused by Lila of liking the dog better.

Am I the only one who wants to run away from home?

You know the feeling.

When all the things we now possess or maintain, when the weight of all the fragments of home life suddenly take on the density of star matter. Car payments, floor to clean, alarm to wake us up at 6:30 am which we then snooze because it’s winter, but you have to get up to feed the dog. They pull us in, and down, and hold us tight to suffocation.

Photo by oddsock

It’s the flip side of homesickness: sick-of-homeness, if you will.

Homesickness often hits when you least expect it. At the supermarket when you realize there’s no peanut butter or maple syrup, or when you’re tired and haven’t seen a comfortable bed in weeks. It’s disconnection.

Sick-of-homeness arises from too much connection and grabs me when I’m most frustrated. It hits hardest on weeks like this one. Lila’s been sick, and we’ve barely left the house in seven long, repetitive days.

Friday passes into Monday which becomes April, May, soon-to-be June, and the only thing marking the difference is my weekly Tuesday morning Skype call with an education consultant in New Jersey, and Lila’s Friday afternoon horse riding lessons.

Daily life requires so much tedious maintenance, and i feel trapped. Washing dishes, putting away clothes, organizing… only to realize a couple of weeks later that it’s all a mess again and needs to be reorganized. It makes me want to divest ourselves of those new dishes – already chipping after six months of use – pack a couple of small bags and get back on the road.

I begin to devise my escape, but is breaking free what I really want right now?

How To Know When It’s Time To Go

It’s actually quite simple. Ask yourself the following two questions:

• Do my choices move me toward something I want or away from something I don’t want?
• Am I afraid of making the change?

If my reasons for either staying or leaving lie only in the things I want to escape, then I have more work to do before making a choice. If fear guides me toward my decisions, it’s time to find another motivator.

As you evaluate the different parts of your life one by one, you’ll find each fits into one of these two categories.

Photo by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino

Try it. Family. Friends. Career. Pet. Significant other. Volunteer work. Favorite pizza place. Access to clean water. Exhaustion. Frustration. Sublime happiness. Great biking trails. Clean air. Horses. Backyard. Children. Access to education.

As I assess the parts of my life here in Salta, I ask myself if there is truly something here for me, right now.

It’s taken over a year to find and settle in a new house. We have a dog. Lila loves her school – which is fabulous – and she has lots of friends. I’ve started teaching again, working with a group of children in a place where I’m able to make a real difference in their lives and in mine as well.

And I love Argentina. It’s a unique country with so much to explore and so many people to meet.

The frustrations of the day will pass, just as they would resurface were I to settle elsewhere or turn full-time nomadic again. Leaving my current home would mean abandoning the promise it holds, leaving questions unanswered and projects undone.

I am not afraid of departure, but I will regret that which I leave incomplete.

Eventually, I will move on. When? I have no idea. It could be a year or three years or more. But right now, my place is where I am, even with that damn barking dog and all those other ordinary everyday joys.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

Why are you where you are right now? Let us know in the comments below. And if you are looking for inspiration to take the plunge and head off, here are ten reasons to let you know it’s time to go.

The other day, I came across a list of fourteen downloadable files of books that have been made illegal or banned.

“Banned books?” I thought to myself. “Feh.” I generally look skeptically whenever I hear something has been banned because experience has shown me when someone says a book shouldn’t be read it’s an attempt at censorship and not because there is truly something harmful in the book.

And really, how can a book be harmful?

A quick scan through a list of banned books through the ages only confirms my initial feeling.

• The Diary of Anne Frank banned in Lebanon for portraying Jews favorably.
• The Da Vinci Code deemed offensive to Christianity
• Gustave Flaubert was prosecuted in France for “offenses to public morals” because of his Madame Bovary.
• Not Without My Daughter banned in Iran because it shows Iran in a bad light.

Do you see a pattern here? People and political bodies excise literature and art that conflicts with their world view. As world view shifts, as it inevitably does, the list of censored and outlawed materials changes too. While truth may be a difficult entity to determine, when a government or other body seeks to limit and thus carefully construct the information their citizens receive, propaganda overtakes our vision of reality.

George Orwell’s novel 1984 — banned by Joseph Stalin in 1950 — vividly portrays the type of world created by just this type of censorship.

It Begins By Indoctrinating the Children

According to the American Library Association, parents challenge books more often than any other group under the guise of protecting their children. I’m so proud! “Anti-family,” I believe is the doublespeak term used to justify these actions.

Ironically, when a government wants to censor the actions of its people, they first indoctrinate children in the ways of “correct thinking” and those children then spy on their parents. Refer back to Orwell’s 1984 to see how this happens.

But are there some books that shouldn’t be open for public consumption?

Last week, I would have said no. All books should be open and readily available to those who want to read them.

Of course, I get that certain books contain materials that aren’t appropriate for younger children – be that with sexually explicit or violent content – but you don’t protect children by simply removing the offending material from public consumption.

Then I came across this list of 14 books.

Should Simply Reading About Illegal Subjects Be Outlawed?

Photo by PugnoM

This list includes a Beginner’s Guide To Growing Marijuana and another on How-to Grow Psychedelic Mushrooms. Fine, I understand they might be banned because they encourage and teach people to cultivate illegal crops, but those are plants, right? How much harm can they really do and how many mushrooms will the average person grow? That and whether or not these crops should even be illegal is a topic worthy of another article in itself.

Then I come across a book with 100 Ways To Disappear and Live Free. Or the secrets of manufacturing methamphetamines by Uncle Fester.

All of these are already available for sale or even free over the internet. While my Amazon search for Justin Gombos’ Fooling the Bladder Cops only lead me to a small selection of deluxe hydration bladders, Yahoo brought me right to what I wanted to read.

That’s when my initial resolve begins to waver.

While many of us might find it a great party trick to pick a lock or help a friend set up grow lights in an empty closet, the bottom line is these books help train you to commit crimes or learn to get away with them.

Do you really want someone at the wheel of your flight or train ride having tricked a urine test?

How many of those people living free and clear off the grid are law abiding citizens who mean and do no harm but simply want to be alone. (If my experiences living on a tiny island off the coast of Panama is any indication, that number is extremely small.)

Some other titles to consider:

• Twenty-one Techniques of Silent Killing.
• Silent But Deadly: More Homemade Silencers.
• The ever maligned Anarchist’s Cookbook.

Is Information Dangerous In Itself?

When I originally found this list of books, my thought was to publish the titles as a list of interesting banned and illegal books with quotes and links to them, but then I had a second thought. After all, there’s plenty of information to suggest these books are indeed dangerous.

Do you agree with our decision?

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Photo by dizznbonn

Take Hazel Soares who just graduated from Mills College in Oakland, CA with an art history degree. She is 94 years old.

Do away with your hundred indecisions and all of your revisions. Is it worth it to wonder “Do I dare?” Instead, start now, no matter what your situation, your age or your physical condition.

Gulf War veteran Dana Cummings made it through two tours of service without major injury then came home to lose his leg in a car accident. Know what he did? He took up surfing.

Jessica Watson successfully sailed the world at sixteen years old in spite of other people’s doubts. “People don’t realize what 16 year olds and girls are capable of,” she said. “It’s amazing when you take away those expectations, what you can do.”

What Can I Do?

You can ride a dune buggy. You can parachute jump. You can become a professional photographer at any age!

All you women in your early to mid-thirties can stop worrying that your fertility is slowly seeping out of your ear and read about a woman in India who gave birth to twins in her seventies.

You can become the world’s oldest male stripper like Bernie Barker, who took up dancing to get in shape while recovering from prostate cancer.

You, too, can become a painter after a successful career as a writer.

Photo by Bruce Tuten

When you hear yourself creating reasons for why you can’t. Too old. Too weak. Too long. Too far away. Too whatever. That’s just fear talking. The I-Can’ts. I-Won’ts. They lead you to the overwhelming question.

What If?

Do you want to look back and say, it would have been worth it after all, but in short, I was afraid?

What if you never try? What if you could have done it but allowed fear to stop you instead? What if you stop asking questions and take a leap into the abyss?

What if you dare to eat that peach?

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

Is there anything you are letting fear stop you doing? Is there anything you simply must do before you die? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Photo by bengsoon

Last month, Diaspora launched it’s campaign to begin another social media site, meant to be similar to Facebook but without all the pesky privacy and censorship issues.

They gave themselves 39 days to raise $10,000. They made their goal in 12. Even more impressive, they reached $50,000 mostly of small individual donations through microloan website Kickstarter, where they give you a chance to “decentralize the web” by supporting their project.

Now, Diaspora has moved onto the big time.

They’ve been featured in the New York Times and Techcrunch and have well known supporters, the likes of TWiT’s Leo Laporte.

Will Facebook learn from its tiny rival and change its privacy and censorship policies? Or will the giant be forced to step aside for this latest addition to the social networking family?

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

Will you join Diaspora? Or is this just another flash-in-the-pan social media flap that will eventually die out, and we’ll all go quietly back to Facebook?

Or to join our discussion on privacy in social media, check out Andy Hayes’ How To Live Life When Everyone Is A Stalker.

Photo by author

When I first heard the story of Nudge, a gay dog, and his blind owner Ian Jolly being refused admittance to Thai Spice, an eatery in Australia, I was stunned. Apparently, the Thai Spice host misheard when Mr. Jolly demanded entrance for his “guide” dog, hearing “gay” dog instead. They assumed the dog had been “desexed.”

Still, at first I gave the restaurant the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it was a joke. Or maybe, as with many restaurants, Thai Spice doesn’t allow dogs because of health code violations or because many people simply don’t feel comfortable watching a large mutt licking his genitals over lunch.

It’s Just Not Funny To Mr Jolly

As I read further, though, I began to realize this is no joke at all.

Photo by author

You see, it was not just one person involved in this horrible discrimination. The entire Thai Spice staff banded together to agree that this desexed – clearly another word for gay – dog should not be allowed to dine.

Thankfully, the miscarriage of justice was swiftly made right when the South Australia Equal Rights Tribunal ordered the restaurant owners to send an apology and $1400 in compensation to Mr. Jolly and his dog.

But the damage had already been done.

“I always have that fear now, when I go out,” says Mr Jolly. “I just want to be like everybody else and be able to go out for dinner, to be left alone and just enjoy a meal.”

Yes, because of this egregious incident, Mr Jolly will always live in fear.

Gay Dog Discrimination Hits Home: Is He Or Isn’t He?

I just got a new puppy. He’s only three months old now, but what if my puppy, my sweet little Manuel, is also gay? How would I handle the type of inexcusable discrimination faced by Mr. Jolly and Nudge?

Director Jason Bolicki produced a fabulous video detailing twenty guidelines to help determine whether or not someone is gay. These range from throwing like a girl, to being catty, to the love of dance.

The Case for Mani’s Gayness

He loves to dance. He’s a drama queen. He’s most definitely a whiny bitch and a mama’s boy. Mani adores being center of attention, and not a day goes by I don’t see him running through the yard with his most trusted gal pal, our daughter Lila.

The Case for Mani’s Heterosexuality

He does NOT pepper his dialogue with pop culture references, nor is he into water sports. He actually seems to hate water, as evidenced by his scrambling immediately from the tub every time I try to give him a bath. Thus leading to the next measurement of gayness. He is not at all clean. Mani is unbelievably stinky.

Some measurements were inconclusive. If he’s gay and we, his family, are the last to know, then how exactly would I even know that? I also have no way of gauging how dearly he values education, and I was simply not up to the task of testing to see if he likes a fist in his butt. I’m all for science, but one must draw the line somewhere.

Final results: Nine gay characteristics. Eight non-gay characteristics. Three inconclusive.

Darwin Was Wrong!

The more I research the topic, the more I find information that contradicts Darwin’s original premise of sexual selection. Males do not exclusively choose female animals for mating. In fact, there’s a very vibrant and vast gay animal kingdom in which over 450 species get it on with the same sex.

Photo by janet

Clearly, it’s too soon to know if our little Mani is gay, but if he is, that’s alright. If he prefers not to mount the nearest female in heat and instead chooses to partake in the penis fencing and genital massage of the bonobos, or the all-male orgies of the bottle nose dolphin, so be it. We will love and support him as he is.

If Mani is, in fact, gay, this presents us as parents with a unique opportunity to teach our now six year old daughter tolerance and equanimity. She will learn that sexual identity is not a reason to discriminate or deny marriage, joint health care or living will rights.

Perhaps this new era of the gay dog will usher in a time of greater peace and understanding. A time in which all people and animals will look one to the other and say, “You’re OK by me.”

Or maybe it’s a sign of the impending apocalypse? I don’t know. I often have trouble discerning between the two.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

What do you think about Nudge being refused entry to the restaurant? Do you have a gay pet? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

The day is celebrated differently on different days for different reasons worldwide, but all have in common a connection to some birthing body. It could be Mother Earth, Mother Mary and the day of the Immaculate Conception. It could be in protest to a war and the mothers who lose their children.

And every reason for Mother’s Day reflects tenfold the complicated relationships we have with our own mothers and children.

Maybe you lie about what you’ve been up to in order to keep her from worrying or asking questions. Or maybe you’re honest with her. I’m a bit of both; the older I get the less I need prevarication. It ain’t easy having a kid who lives like a gypsy, so all you traveling folk, call your Mama Kin.

Mama’s Got A Girlfriend to all the mamas whose papas aren’t around or those who never wanted one in the first place.

Moms are blamed for everything. Sometimes it’s their fault. You made me cry; you told me lies. You could have been a better friend to me, but Mama I’m Coming Home.

Bob Dylan’s lyrics always hit home whether sung by Jeff Buckley, Jack Johnson or the original Mama, You’ve Been On My Mind. “I’d just be curious to know if you can see yourself as clear as someone who has you on his mind.” Because I’m not sure we ever see our mother’s the way they see themselves. Or the way they are.

There’s Danzig’s Mother.

And what I think of as the Rolling Stone’s homage to American stay-at-home mom’s of the 60s. I won’t speak for moms today, but I’d like to think things have changed. Although I know from experience how difficult it can be to stay at home with your kid. Then I also know from experience the difficulty involved in making the choice to work. Often, it’s other mothers who criticize the most for choices made in this arena.

And finally,Rosanne Cash’s Motherless Children captures exactly what a mother means when she sings of life without your mom. Your father will do his best. Your husband will try to understand. Auntie will do. Sister will be there until she gets married, then she goes to her own life.

No matter who your mother is. She can be the perfect hot chocolate when its cold mom or she can miss your birthday or maybe your mother is an abusive alcoholic. Mom will always be in your life in some way, even when she is absent.

Moms aren’t perfect and never will be. Something that becomes all too painfully clear when you become a mother yourself.

Feature photo by Ctd 2005

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

What mama songs sings most loudly to you?

To see some of Matador team members and their moms, check out our Matador Mother’s Day celebration.

Photo by Juliane Huang

Would you call me crazy if I told you you can smooth your skin, clear your pores and soften your hair with only a few simple ingredients probably already found in your kitchen? Yogurt, honey, oatmeal and almonds. Yeah, you probably would. “That’s not beauty,” you might tell me. “That’s breakfast.”

You wouldn’t be the first.

Think of it this way: would you eat that honey almond mask you find at the pharmacy? What about the cucumber sugar scrub you just bought for thirty dollars or more at your local Body Products Galore Store? Then why would you put in on your skin?

And I’ve personally used each of these numerous times and have always been happier with the results than with any product I’ve bought.

Still not convinced? OK. To prove how beneficial these home-made products can be, I enlisted the help of the Matador Life team in testing out my favorite beauty concoctions.

All the ingredients necessary. Hungry yet?

Yogurt, Honey & Oatmeal Mask

Like it sounds. You mix plain yogurt, raw honey and rolled oatmeal together in a bowl until it’s a spreadable consistency. Put on your face and relax for about half an hour. Wash off. The oatmeal is best when slightly ground, but you still want a bit of texture to it.

This mixture is particularly good for dry and especially inflamed skin. Obviously this applies to slight inflammation. If you have a weeping rash, go to a doctor. This bit of breakfast cereal won’t help. If you have a bit of redness, though, oatmeal can soothe and smooth your skin. The yogurt tones and moisturizes while honey has gentle antibiotic properties.

The lovely Candice Walsh roped her roommate Renee into the process and had the following to say after applying this mask to her face.

Candice is ready to put oatmeal on her face.

It was ridiculously easy to make, more enjoyable with a teaspoon of honey to get started. A small amount of each is more than enough.

Renee — my roomie — and I spread it on our faces. The texture was weird for a facial, gritty, but the mixture was extremely cool and felt nice to apply. Both of us are redheads, so our skin has been through sheer hell with this Canadian winter. We’re very prone to dryness and irritation.

After 30 minutes, the facial starts to harden and become crusty, but not so that it becomes uncomfortable. Renee and I both agreed when we washed it off that our faces felt nice…really moisturized but without the greasiness.

You can modify this recipe to include finely ground almonds instead of oatmeal for a gentle scrub and extra moisturizing.

Avocado Skin Treatment For Dry Skin

As with all these treatments, they’re fantastically simple. Step one: Mash an avocado. Step two: Mix with a bit of plain yogurt and raw honey. Put on any body part you want to be more moist than it was before.

The inimitable Nick Rowlands roped his mother and brother into testing this mask. He provided us with ongoing commentary before and after they slathered this taco topping on various parts of their bodies.

Before:

Top: before; Bottom: after!

Nick: “OK. According to my editor, Leigh, this thing is great to put anywhere you want to feel more moist. How do you feel about that?”

Jamie: [Sniggers] “I’m all oily and greasy coz I’ve been working all day. Feel a bit of trepidation about putting avocado on my face because avocadoes are for eating. Not for putting on your face!”

Mum: “What a waste of a good avocado! I’m a bit apprehensive. I won’t like the gunginess of it.”

After:

Me: “So, how do you feel now?”

Mum: “I’m positively glowing, but it made my nose red.”

Jamie: “I’m gonna go home and watch the Sex and the City movie!”

Mum: “And I’m going to save some in a pot and do a face mask before Frances’ wedding.” [Frances is Nick's sister. She's getting married on Saturday.]

It concerns me, though, that anyone felt itchiness or tightness while wearing the mask. This should not happen with this or any other of these recipes. Also, it should not make your nose or any part of your face red. The ingredients are extremely gentle and if you feel any discomfort, wash it off immediately.

And of course, congratulations Frances and the Rowland family. I’m so glad my little avocado concoction could be part of the pre–wedding week. Oh, and Jamie, don’t blame my mask for your desire to watch Sex and the City. If you suddenly had the yen, that’s all you.

Herbal Facial Steam

This is my favorite. It’s relaxing and helps clean your face. Also, if you have a cold or allergies, it can help clear out your head a bit. You’ll find yourself sweating quite a bit with your head over the water. Again, nothing should hurt or burn.

Take any of the following plants, flowers or herbs: Chamomile, mint, calendula, basil, rosemary, lavender. Whatever you use should be dried. Boil water and pour over the herb(s) of your choice. Tent a towel over your head and let the steam and herbs from the bowl comfortably wash over your face for about ten minutes.

Chamomile will help dry an oily face but also works for nervous tension. Rosemary is a bit more drying and will also help with acne. Basil is good for overall relaxation. Mint stimulates. Lavender is gentle, helps with just about anything from stress to insect bites to rashes to really anything. Calendula is antibacterial and helps clear out pores. Mullein can help clear your sinuses.

Photo by: Mel B.

Oil & Sugar Body Scrub

Take any oil you want. Almond, sesame, peanut, cocoa and olive oil are heavier and better for dry skin. Grapeseed or sunflower oil are good for more sensitive or oilier skins.

Fill a bowl with about one cup of sugar. Then slowly add oil, mixing with a chopstick until you have a consistency you like. Some people like it looser and oilier, but you want it so that most of the oil is mixed in and not floating around. You can also add ground herbs or essential oils to this.

This is great to use in the shower. You rub the scrub slowly over your skin in the shower, then rinse off when you’re done. Careful not to slip. It is after all, oil.

Deep Conditioning Hair Mask

Heating the mixture in a hot water bath.

Take one egg and about 4 tablespoons of olive oil in a heat safe dish. Mix together well. Then heat.

Heat a pot with about 1 inch of water. Put the dish in and let the mixture heat up very gently, mixing the entire time. When it starts to emulsify or look more thick and cohesive, take it off the heat. It should still be comfortable to touch with your bare hands. You can also heat it in the microwave. Heat for 2-3 seconds. See if it’s warm. If not, try another 2 seconds. It happens very quickly.

Too hot and the egg begins to scramble. If that happens, just keep scrambling and put it on some good bread with cheese and a dash of hot sauce.

Assuming you don’t overcook, the next step is to slather the stuff all over your hair. Cover hair in a plastic bag. Cover plastic bag with a towel and sit and relax. My hair is extremely thick and dry, so I find I can’t leave this on for long enough. The more the better. If your hair is thinner, more oily, try for 15-30 minutes.

The fabulous Juliane Huang slapped this eggy mixture on her long strong locks e-mailed the results at the end:

Juliane has egg in her hair.

The hair mask was very easy to do, and my hair is feeling super soft and silky right now– success! I had heard about this mask years ago, but never got around to trying it. Plus didn’t know specific instructions so got really interested when you told me about it.

It totally smells like egg, though. I suppose because the mixture was heated, it brought out the egg smell more? The smell disappeared after I washed it out.

End result– soft, silky, and not limp! that’s usually my problem with conditioners; they tend to weigh down my hair and make it really flat and limp. This mask doesn’t do that AND still conditions!

Some last notes: It’s better to use raw honey and ingredients that are as unprocessed as possible and don’t contain any ingredients other than itself. So no flavored oatmeals, sugared yogurts or salted nuts.

So there you have it. Cheap easy methods you can take directly from your kitchen.

Thank you to Candice, Juliane and the Rowlands for being such good sports and for teaching me the word gungi.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

Learn more about herbal remedies and other simple methods of keeping yourself healthy and relaxed both on the road and at home in Matador’s Travel Heath section. For more information about potential herbs to use, check out 10 HerbsTo Use For Common Ailments.

Photo by alborzshawn

I’ve been couchsurfing going on four years now and in that time I’ve hosted and surfed couches all over the world. When I began, I didn’t have a place of my own, so I surfed. I kept notes, too, on the things I most appreciated from my hosts and tucked that information away for the day I would finally have a couch of my own.

I love couchsurfing. How great it can be to meet a complete stranger one evening and by the time you climb on your bus, car, or airplane a day or two later, you’ve shared something deep, fun, silly or stupid and that stranger has become a friend?

But surfing can be exhausting. You’re always on the move and you’re living by the rules — for lack of a better way to describe it — of your hosts.

Hosting, I find, to be much more relaxing than surfing. You’d think having a stranger in your house might put you on edge, but really it’s the opposite. As a host, you’ll find you have fewer responsibilities than as a surfer. You set the boundaries of the interaction and don’t have to live as much by someone else’s schedule. That is, if you’re doing it right.

So how do you do it right?

1. Be clear about what you offer as a host.

Don’t offer more than you can afford money, time, space or any otherwise.

Photo by Aine D

Are you uncomfortable leaving a stranger with the key to your home? Write that in your profile. Are you alright with showing your guests around at night, but want them out of your apartment during the day? State that directly.

Some other guidelines to think about: How much space do you have for guests and how many people can realistically fit in that space. Some people are perfectly happy to have 10 people sacked out pile-of-kitten style in sleeping bags on their living room floor. Some are not. Do you allow smoking in your apartment? Are you comfortable with people drinking or would you prefer they do it elsewhere? Do you have pets? Are families welcome in your home?

If you check the Describe Your Couch section of the Couchsurfing profile page, you’ll find other ideas to keep in mind as you fill in your own profile.

One warning I include in my profile? If you break something, just let me know. I’d much rather you be honest about what happened, than sneak off and pretend you had nothing to do with it. I care much less about your ability to replace said-broken-thing than about your stupid lies.

2. Say no to those who haven’t carefully read your profile.

If someone doesn’t have the decency to actually find out who you are before asking to stay with you, do you really want this person in your house?

Of course, not everyone feels this way, and many don’t mind having random people using their house as a hotel. Most people I know, do not share this sentiment.

In fact, many of my closest and most experienced Couchsurfing friends bury a sentence somewhere deep in their profiles asking you to mention a specific word or topic in your couch request. If you don’t mention that word, they know you haven’t read their profiles from top to bottom and immediately deny your couch request.

Photo by elementality

3. Carefully read the profiles of potential guests.

You want to know who will be sleeping on your couch, right? Well, you should.

You learn a lot from a profile. I’ve read literally hundreds of profiles over the past four years and have found the questions and layout to be extremely efficient in letting you know exactly who a person is. That’s why I tend to ignore incomplete profiles. If I don’t know who you are, I don’t really want to take the chance with you sleeping in my house.

You’ll also quickly learn whether you have common interests. You’ll know from references the types of things a person likes to do. Sometimes, I’ll see a profile and all references are very bland. Nothing sticks out. No inside jokes. That makes me think this potential guest maybe doesn’t interact much with his hosts. Does the person talk a lot about staying out late pounding beers? Does that appeal to you? Great. That may well be a match made in heaven.

4. Trust your instincts.

Once you’ve read everything you can about a potential surfer and you’re still not sure. They have good references, but it’s difficult to let down your guard and allow a complete stranger into your life. This is not something people normally do in polite society. It’s not within societal norms in most countries, particularly in big cities.

That’s when you turn to your gut. Are you excited to meet this person? Or are you feeling uneasy? Go with that feeling. It has never let me down.

5. Turn down requests when you can’t host.

There are many reasons you might want to turn down a potential surfer. Maybe you don’t have time. Or you’ve just had another guest and want some down time. Or maybe the surfer’s profile just doesn’t mesh with the type of person you want staying with you.

Don’t be afraid to say no. You don’t even have to supply a reason if you don’t want.

6. Be mellow and flexible.

Yes, I know I’ve been all up in arms about being straight forward, defining your boundaries and not being afraid of sticking to them. Now it seems I’m telling you to bend those boundaries?

Well, sort of.

If you’ve done your due diligence, your guest has arrived. You get along smashingly, have loads in common, and you’re finding her to be pleasant, fun and very respectful of your space.

But you said in your profile you don’t have extra towels or blankets, and now this lovely, pleasant person is standing there asking if you have an extra towel.

It happens. I’ve asked. I’ve been asked. And if on that particular day, I do have a clean towel to share, I hand it over. If I don’t, I simply say I don’t, and we go about seeking a solution.

7. Be helpful. As much as you can.

Keep a folder of bus schedules, maps and general information about your area. That can be tourist pamphlets, restaurant menus or even hand written directions to your favorite local haunt. Take an evening to show your guests around. Introduce them to friends. Take them to a local Couchsurfing gathering.

But don’t worry if you can’t do these things. Couchsurfing is supposed to be fun. It can be difficult enough sharing space with people and sometimes you find you suddenly have a huge work deadline or maybe you simply need to be alone.

That’s ok. Just let your surfer know that he will have to go out and about on his own. A good guest will respect that. You’ll also find experienced travelers — as the vast majority of Couchsurfers tend to be — are happy enough to go exploring alone.

Photo by love2dreamfish

8. Do let your guests make dinner for you, wash dishes or help out as they offer.

Please, for the love of God, always accept the gift of dish washing. When your guest asks you to point him in the direction of the nearest supermarket along with an offer to make dinner, put on your coat and walk straight to the nearest supermarket. Better yet, take them to a local market singular to your town.

Last week, we had four guests. Two couples. You might already know them as Dan and Audrey from Uncornered Market and Jason and Aracely from Two Backpackers. We all took turns cooking and cleaning up, and I barely touched sponge to dish the entire time they were here.

This is a perfect example of how hosting actually made my life easier.

9. Do expect them to clean up after themselves.

This should be self explanatory. Yes, it’s obvious, but if a guest makes a mess, leaving you something more to add to your to-do list, consider mentioning that in your reference for them. It doesn’t need to be a big production or complaint, but in my book, leaving a host with more work, washing or stress is high up there on the list of bad guest faux pas.

One caveat to this: some people like their homes and lives straightened organized and clean in a very particular manner. If this is you, it’s probably unrealistic to expect the same from your guests.

Sure, you can provide them with a long list of rules detailing the direction in which the knives must point in the middle drawer or which brush to use when cleaning crumbs off the couch, but honestly, if that’s your bag, perhaps hosting isn’t for you.

10. Don’t expect them to clean up after you.

They’re guests. They’re there to share time, space, maybe a meal or a drink out. If you want a personal servant, go to Craigslist and shell out the cash for someone who actually does that for a living.

11. Leave A Reference

Good or bad, references allow others to better evaluate the time you spent with a guest. If the time was good, you should let your guest and others know. It’s can be a sweet parting goodbye.

If the experience was a bad one, mention that too, and don’t be afraid to leave a negative reference if the situation warrants.

What warrants a negative reference in my book? Only if a surfer is dangerous or threatening in some way. I would only use a negative reference if f I want to warn others not to accept couch requests from that particular profile.

I’ll add, though, in four years, I have never even come close to leaving a negative reference. That’s why I so strongly emphasize the importance of reading profiles and turning people down if they’re not complete. I have read hundreds of profiles and have yet to find a person who differs greatly from the image portrayed on their page.

12. No rule applies in every situation.

Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing is 100%. None of these rules apply in every case, so ultimately, you have to use your own judgment.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

What tips do you have for being a good host? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Do you think when he wrote about these repeating patterns and ideas found in human culture, he for a moment envisioned a future filled with grammar nazis, women farting into pudding or cats in fruit helmets?

Now, there are literally thousands of these repeating images, viral videos and stories reproducing their way across the internet. Here are just a few for you to explore then send to a friend who can send to his friend and her friend and so on.

1. Kids Doing Stuff

It all began with that creepy dancing baby that began wiggling and squirming its way across computer screens in 1996. The original baby danced to Hooked on a Feeling. Now the baby dances to everything.

Now, you can find kids doing everything from chasing cars, destroying property, and everyone is a sucker for a kid playing a ukelele.

2. Is It Peanut Butter Jelly Time?

In 2002 a badly pixelated banana danced on to the scene to the tune of Peanut Butter Jelly Time by the Buckwheat Boyz.

Does the repetitive beat pull us to a universal desire for tribal drums? Maybe it goes back further, delving deep into the monkey brain to say, “Hey, I like bananas.”

3. Excuse Me Sir, Do You Know Who Took My Kidney?

Who hasn’t heard the travel horror story of going to some foreign country — the foreigner the better. You trust someone, pay for a tour, go out for a drink and the next thing you know, you wake up in a bathtub without your [insert body part here]. Chances are whatever crucial organ was brutally removed from yourself will be carried out in a dirty Styrofoam container to be sold for tens of thousands on the black market.

Want to know if a rumor is actually true? Check out http://snopes.com. Want to see how this rumor has grown, mutated and been turned into it’s very own meme? Check out Charlie the grouchy magical unicorn.

So when are we going to Candy Mountain?

4. Literal Music Videos

Have you ever tried to make it to the end of Men Without Hats’ video for Safety Dance? Not a particularly easy task. Now, change the words, mix it up a little, make it literal and it’s infinitely more watchable.

Now apply this to Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart and you turn an unintelligible attempt at being mystically deep into this:

Favorite part? I walk onto a terrace where I think I’m alone, but Arthur Fonzarelli’s got an army of clones. Or maybe it’s the strip football? Staring at the swim team gets you killed by a gang of dancing ninja men who know how to twirl? So hard to choose.

5. The Bait & Switch, Rickroll

One of the oldest, most illustrious of all internet memes. This began when one day someone received a link to a particular topic. You follow the link in said article or e-mail and next thing you know you’re watching a video of Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up. Bottom line, you think you’re getting one thing. You get another. You think you’re going to see naked photos of Jessica Alba and end up with a shrieking zombie face designed to scare the crap out of you.

Recently we find the appearance of what is called the Russian Rickroll.

Why it’s called that, I’m not quite sure. Maybe because it’s just purely random. Perhaps because you think you’re going to see something different and really it’s just a badly lipsynched song from a popular Russian singer. I dunno. You tell me.

6. Watching People Resist the Urge to Vomit & Other Reaction Videos

2girls1cup appeared on the scene a couple of years ago. Around that time, I tried to watch it. I made it through about two minutes and haven’t been back since. The follow video pretty much documents my own reaction.

Then watch the Marine reaction, the Ghetto reaction and the Muslim reaction Notice how the retching sound seems to cross all cultural and religious boundaries. Notice how no matter how bad, no one actually stops watching.

And as usual, Family guy has a response.

7. It’s Too Painful, Yet I Have To Watch

Blame Bob Sagget and his bloopers, but everywhere you go you’ll find someone being dragged, bumped bounced or making complete asses of themselves. We cringe and then watch again and again.

From the treadmill fail to watching the worst sports announcer in the history of sports announcements.

He started off good but then eventually but the ball state but women’s team shot down and ended up doing poorly. Need I say more?

8. Oh, How We Love to Dance

From wedding dances to baby breakdancing (who the hell is that talking in the video?), we simply cannot resist the urge to pass these along.

Most memorable? The Evolution of Dance.

9. Watch that Polyglot Gummy Shake His Ass

Normally, you wouldn’t think one video dubbed into ten or so languages would be its very own meme. According to Know Your Meme, it absolutely qualifies as a 100% full-fledged meme.

10. Scientific Wonders & Other Things You Do With Candy

Grapes or poptarts bursting into flames in the microwave, the killer combination of Pop Rocks and soda pop and mentos creating the explosive yet infinitely entertaining fountain of delight. We never tire of what amazing wonders evolve from the average sugary snack.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

What is it about these memes that create the desire in us to watch, repeat and send them along? Share your thoughts — and your favorite memes — in comments below.

Photo by Denise Finzer /Feature photo by Kendra Wivell

Why? Because Facebook “does not allow photos that attack an individual or group, or that contain nudity, drug use, violence, or other violations of the Terms of Use.

What was the photo? It was Emma breastfeeding her two children a mere six hours after the birth of her second. Now look at all the other photos shown in this essay. They too have been banned by Facebook.

Photo by Emma Kwasnica

Each represents an incredibly private moment between mother and child, yes. But do they represent content that is “hateful, threatening, pornographic, or that contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.”

Facebook says yes.

A Brief History of the Debate

Kelli Roman founded the Facebook fan group Hey Facebook, Breastfeeding Is Not Obscene after a photo of hers was deleted from her profile. Soon after, the group’s supporters hosted an online nurse-in to protest. Heather Farley, whose photo can also be found in this essay, organized the physical nurse in at Facebook, Inc. headquarters in Palo Alto, California.

Now it looks that there may be a class action lawsuit against Facebook. Those potentially leading the suit charge that while Facebook allows plenty of breast photos, it seems that breastfeeding ones have been specifically targeted for removal.

Hmmm, maybe that’s be the reason Facebook failed to return my repeated calls?

What Does Facebook Have To Say?

After the online and physical nurse-ins at Facebook headquarters, Facebook representative Barry Schnitt spoke to the press.

We agree that breastfeeding is natural and beautiful and we’re very glad to know that it is so important to some mothers to share this experience with others on Facebook. We take no action on the vast majority of breastfeeding photos because they follow the site’s Terms of Use. Photos containing a fully exposed breast (as defined by showing the nipple or areola) do violate those Terms and may be removed. These policies are designed to ensure Facebook remains a safe, secure and trusted environment for all users, including the many children (over the age of 13) who use the site.

Of course, Facebook does not address why the female nipple is objectionable yet the male nipple is not. Nor does Facebook explain why classic art imagery of Mary breastfeeding baby Jesus would be removed. Nor do we know why photos of mothers breastfeeding older children that show no exposed nipple or areola would present a danger to children.

Meanwhile, many legitimate groups and individual profiles display full and partial nudes and exposed breasts presented in a sexual or other non-breastfeeding related manner, yet those photos do not seem to be banned with equal frequency as breastfeeding photos.

What Is Their Policy?

It’s important to remember that Facebook itself does not choose photos for removal. Instead, they rely on community members to report photos they deem to fall outside of Terms of Service guidelines. The photos then go to a team of people within Facebook who make the final determination.

Dr. Paul Rapoport — the founder of Topfree Equal Rights Association an Ontario based group that advocates equal rights for women to go topless — believes Facebook’s policy to be random and impossible to enforce in any fair manner.

How they choose what they choose is an unanswerable question. They hire a bunch of people who don’t seem to have training. You can see from the photos that have been deleted there’s not much of a pattern to it. It’s sloppy and careless. With that kind of capricious nonsense, you can’t form any kind of rule.

In response to the Facebook bans, Paul published an entire section on his website of banned breastfeeding photos.

What Do Facebook Users Have to Say?

April Purinton posted this photo of herself tandem feeding her twins Rhys and Quin.

Photo by April Purinton

There is nothing in this photo that directly violates the guidelines Facebook determines. Yet her photo was removed with only an e-mail to let her know. She wasn’t even told which photo was removed, although it wasn’t difficult to ascertain.

“After three years of infertility and a traumatic and pre-term birth, I finally tandem nursed my babies successfully for the first time. Facebook told me this picture was offensive. And warned me that they will delete my account if I continue to break the rules.”

That same blog post includes examples of non-breastfeeding photos April found on Facebook that show the same amount of exposed breast, yet hers was singled out for removal.

The Cultural Aspects of Breastfeeding

Comments on a recent article on The Traveler’s Notebook highlight how different cultures and religions may inherently find an exposed breast to be offensive. Matador intern Heather Carreiro says she would feel uncomfortable sharing this photo with many of the people she knows from her time living and teaching in Pakistan.

It’s basically about the cultural relativism of modesty. In context of Pakistan and northern India, women — outside of posh areas — are expected to be covered. Leaving your dupatta (large scarf) at home or not using it fully cover your chest – in addition to your clothing – is seen as being close to naked. Even just seeing the contours of a woman’s body often makes people uncomfortable. With that in mind, you might be able to imagine how my sharing a link [with an exposed breast] would be kind of like sending a link to an X-rated site

007 Breastfeeding publishes a collection of person-on-the-street comments, asking people worldwide for their views on breastfeeding in public.

Breast feeding is very common in Pakistan. Even working women take babies to their working places and feed them. It is free source of pure milk, full of vitamins and protein. According to Islamic teaching, there is emphasis on mothers to adopt breast feeding for their babies up to two year duration.

Photo by Heather Farley

Coincidentally or not, the World Health Organization also suggests two-years as the optimal time for mothers to breastfeed their children.

In fact, many countries, often considered as part of the imprecisely-titled undeveloped world consider breastfeeding to be the primary form of feeding infants and young children. In Ghana, where bottle feeding is for orphans, “if a baby cries and you do not breastfeed, people draw the conclusion the baby is not yours.”

But What About the So-Called Developed World?

In the United States, Canada and Europe, we regularly see partially nude women on television, movies and in advertisements. Even children’s movies include characters who expose almost as much breast as April Purinton or Emma Kwasnica do in their photos.

Why the disparity?

Why are western, non-religion based cultures so comfortable with breasts but not breastfeeding? What is it that causes so many western women to see two years of breastfeeding as an acceptable norm for women in these developing countries and yet not for themselves?

Economics certainly can play a large role in that. Let’s say you’re working a full time job. Are facilities available for you to breastfeed your child at work? Doubtful. It’s also likely your child will be at a daycare in another part of town and thus impossible for you to breastfeed.

If you still prefer your child receive breastmilk, you will then have to pump.

Photo by Anne Hinze

Which, if you’ve never pumped, as I assume a large percentage of the population has not, can be done by hand or with a machine.

Either way, it can be time consuming and often yield frustrating results as many women who could successfully breastfeed their children often will not find the same milk yield through the pump.

Economics, though, is most certainly not the entire story.

Says Iris Marion Young in The Politics of Women’s Bodies:

Patriarchal logic defines an exclusive border between motherhood and sexuality. The virgin or the whore, the pure or the impure, the nurturer or the seducer is either asexual mother or sexualized beauty, but one precludes the other. Breasts are a scandal because they shatter the border between motherhood and sexuality.

Have we become so conditioned as a society to see the female body as purely sexual that we have lost touch with reality?

Emma Kwasnica explains her point of view. “Breasts have the primary function of feeding babies.” While breasts do play a role in initiating the reproductive process, the reality is, they are one of many erogenous zones that come into play. There’s only one part of the body that produces milk enough to sustain a child for the first year of life.

Breasts are not biologically intended to solely play a sexual role in our lives, just as childbirth cannot exist independently of the sexual act. Yet somehow images of sexuality that include pregnancy, breastfeeding or other images of motherhood are considered perverse, obscene and pornographic.

Photo by David Miller

The community led banning of honest, normal photos of motherhood and the human body hints at a much larger issue.

It shows a slice of society that seeks to disassociate humans from their nature, ultimately turning women into large, empty breasted dolls designed for sexual pleasure and caricaturing men as primarily sexual beasts who have lost the capacity for multi-faceted thought in relation to the women with whom they attempt to mate.

In truth, divorcing form from function of the human body does us all a huge disservice. Are you suddenly no longer beautiful and sexual because you have become pregnant? What happens after labor and delivery? Will a man no longer be attracted to his female partner because he’s watched her give birth or breastfeed? Surely we are far more complicated and less capricious beings than that?

Barry Schnitt claims Facebook believes breastfeeding to be natural, beautiful and healthy. Based on the photos you see here and the guidelines presented by Facebook, does his statement ring true in your ears?

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

Breastfeeding and childbirth tie in closely to discussions of self-esteem and body image. How does the leaning to say only certain types of bodies or body parts are appropriate for public exposure while other types must hidden play itself out both as a cultural phenomenon and on the ways we see ourselves?

Photo by Aussiegall

Our team has grown. The topics we cover have expanded to include, among other things, politics, social media, science and technology. You, too, have helped guide the direction of Life with your comments and article submissions.

Meet the Team

When I began it was just me writing articles and sorting through submissions. Then the ever lovely Candice Walsh joined as contributing editor. We think similarly, which, I admit, often leaves us distractedly discussing the merits of the latest, most disgusting video on the internet. Most times, though, it’s a thought provoking cocktail party where we’re able to complete each others ideas before deciding on the next drink.

Neha Puntambekar and Nancy Harder — two amazing writers with fabulous ideas and interests — help even us out a bit. They answered our call for help formatting articles and general assistance. Even better, they add their voices to Life with articles about finding peacefulness at home, pets and coming soon, cooking, home renovation, personal mindfulness and more.

Juli Huang has been great support to us helping when we needed last minute details completed for an article. She was part of the Matador Team before Life existed and has now taken to orchestrating our new relationship series called Love In the Time Of Matador. Cheesy title or no, we’re a bit enamored of it nonetheless. Look forward to the first in the series this week, a discussion of open relationships when one part of a couple is on the road.

Finally, the wonderful Nick Rowlands joined us. I admit, when I first e-mailed him to ask if he wanted to be part of the team, I assumed he was too busy. Turns out, busy or not, he wanted in. Shows you the importance of asking even if you think you know the answer.

What Is the Meaning of Life?

(I never tire of that pun.)

At first, I found it difficult to get my head around what exactly Matador Life is meant to be.

Photo by Evil Erin

Life is just so broad. As the section develops, though, I find that breadth translates into the freedom to cover everything from where we originate to where we have settled. We touch on our choices and with whom we’ve decided to make them. We discuss tools to improve life: physical, software, online, emotional or psychological. We open up to make room for articles that connect our travels with home as well as the non-traditional, such as living in your car, nomadic life in an RV or polyamory.

Juli best described us as “a happy discussion balloon floating anywhere it wants in the internet sky, with Matador holding its string and keeping it from floating off.”

The possibilities are endless.

Where Are We Going In Life?

Over the course of these six months, I’ve met many of you through the travel community, through e-mails but mostly through the thought provoking discussions in article comments. From a discussion of positive stereotyping as racism to disagreement on what age, if ever, one is too old for adventure travel, you help me rethink my own view of the world.

For that I cannot thank you enough.

Without you, our community of readers, there would be no reason for us to write, photograph and think. We would have only half the conversation.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

Help us decide the direction of the next six months of Life. What articles would you like to see? Of what have you seen enough? Or simply describe for us the role you see Life playing in the greater Matador Network and community.

Photo by alicepopkorn

But wait! Does this mean I can no longer call myself a bonafide traveler? In some ways, yes. Mostly, no.

Travel isn’t about having the crazy-hard story to tell, about the time you got stuck on the bad side of town with no idea where you were after missing your boat and ended up sharing your mat with a chicken. Although those are fun stories to tell. Travel also isn’t just about visiting the wonderful sights and experiences this planet has to offer, although that’s a huge part of it. I mean, imagine if I left Iceland never having visited the Blue Lagoon spa? (Which, by the way, if you’re going anyway, I suggest visiting immediately upon arriving in the country. There’s an airport bus that will take you and your luggage to the spa and then after, when you’re properly relaxed, to Reykjavik.)

True travel is something else.

There’s a certain openness of spirit common to all Travelers.

Your eyes, ears and mouth open wide to even the most mundane of daily events, and each sense welcomes the new without expectation. It is, dare-I-say-it, exactly how a child sees the world.

Travel is about adapting to the new and allowing experience to wash over you without judgment. It’s about rolling with the punches and not rolling your eyes.

And it is each person’s choice to see the world as a Traveler or not, just as happiness is so often a choice. Living in one place with one job and one weekly schedule, it’s easy to believe the restlessness or even unhappiness you feel comes from routine. Of course, it’s easier to see the world anew each day when in fact, everything you’re seeing is actually new, but it’s also just as easy to recreate your routine on the road.

The challenge, at base, is to view each day, each event and each moment with fresh eyes, because no matter how little luggage you may bring along for your next trip, you always bring yourself.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

How far do you go to see something new in your world?

Photo by Mr Wabu

I first learned of this custom of giving gifts on my birthday in college. I was working on a project focusing on Native American culture in the United States and found myself sitting somewhere near Greenville, South Carolina in the backyard of an Occaneechi man named John Blackfeather drinking beer and attempting to shoot his home made arrows. Before we left, he gave me an arrow and a dreamcatcher he constructed himself.

“It’s my birthday,” John told us. I must have given him a funny look because he continued. “Oh, we Indians are different,” he joked. “We give gifts on our birthdays instead of receiving.”

So that is exactly what I did. The only rule is it can’t cost money. This year, by the end of the March 20th, I learned how true a tired old adage can be.

It’s Better To Give Than Receive

Photo by Wonderlane

I’ve always thought this little saying was tied to an often misguided altruistic streak that runs through our common human nature, and many times, it’s only words. Thing is, in spite of all I write about finding the positive in things you dislike and trusting life, I’m really quite a cynical person. Ten-plus years living in New York City, I suppose, can do that to a person. This year, though, my little birthday experiment taught me more about generosity of others and gratitude than I ever could have learned by saying thank you for gifts bought and bestowed.

In the immortal words of every writing teacher I’ve ever had: Show don’t tell.

I was presented with 25 (so far) different challenges.

Fourteen of them center on writing, blogging, editing, researching or requesting particular subjects for upcoming blog posts. All things I do for my own work. Thank you for telling me that you respect my expertise and enjoy reading my writing enough to want more.

Five people requested we meet for coffee the next time I’m in Atlanta or New York. How could I possibly refuse people who tell me that when offered anything, all they desire is my presence?

Four seek travel advice. You value my opinion?

Pam Mandel from Nerd’s Eye View asked me to spread word about the TBEX call for entries. I’ve been planning to send in an entry myself but then forgot entirely. I didn’t even put it on my to-do list. Thank you for the reminder.

Matador’s own Nick Rowlands presented an interesting challenge.

I’d like you to write a letter – a proper, old-skool pen and paper job – to any friend or family member that lives overseas and you haven’t contacted for too long.

We all have complicated relationships in our lives. This is one for me. There’s one person with whom I haven’t spoken in three years. We haven’t written, e-mailed or called.This person had been one of my best friends for over a decade. Someone I wrote to regularly throughout college and to whom I turned when my life seemed most overwhelming. The story of what happened is filled with sturm und drang and I really can’t get into it here for many reasons, but last night I put pen to paper, sealed and addressed the letter I sent today.

Thank you, Nick, for this. I never would have reached out otherwise. Life is too short to hold onto complications.

What Would You Like?

I’m about half way through the list of challenges now, and as I fill each one, I find myself wishing there were more. I realize, too, how much courage it takes to ask another human being for a favor. These days, too often, it seems we equate wanting help with weakness. And even though my birthday has since passed, I invite all of you to request something.

That will be your birthday gift to me.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

Photo by Anne Merritt

Nick’s mum came to visit two weeks ago and brought Vermont maple syrup in her luggage. Since then, we’ve been giddy and liberal with the stuff; pancakes, fruit parfaits, and a big batch of our collaborative granola. Usually, we’re on different ends of the cooking spectrum. He makes healthy, hearty dishes, curries and soups. I make the unnecessary stuff, the pies and cookies and buttery comfort foods. But we come together to make granola, and I do believe our maple nut recipe is perfection.

After a week of granola gorging, our huge batch shrank down to some crumbs in a jar. Today we passed it back and forth between us, eating handfuls, wiping crumbs on our jeans, happily planning the next recipe. Cashews instead of hazelnuts? Raisins this time? It’s an amazing recipe, but there’s always room for change. I love that.

Want to try it for yourself? Here’s the recipe!

3 cups rolled oats
1 cup sliced almonds
1 cup sliced hazelnuts
3/4 cup wheat germ
1/4 cup sunflower seeds
1/4 cup sesame seeds
1/3 cup brown sugar

Combine all of the above in a large bowl.

1/2 cup maple syrup
1/4 cup vegetable oil
3/4 tsp salt

Combine the above, then pour onto the dry mix. Pour the mix onto a cookie sheet and bake for 1 hour at 250 F, stirring every 15 minutes.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

You can see more of Anne’s writing and photography and hear about her travels on her personal profile in the Matador Travel community. And if you’d like to submit a photo of your own, take a look at submission guidelines.

Feature photo by Poldavo. Above photo by Hauggen

When we first moved to Salta, we lived in town, so it was possible to get around without a car. Then we moved to the country. It’s not far from Salta, and while possible to move back and forth by bike, we drive Lila the10 miles to school every morning. Then Noah, who usually takes Lila to school while I work from home, went out of town, so I had to drive.

If you know anything about driving in Salta, you’ll know that it is one of the most insane places to drive on the planet. So my choice was to keep Lila home the entire week. Or brave the streets.

The first day wasn’t too awful. A bus bum-rushed me, then swerved around into oncoming traffic. Meanwhile, every car behind me honked incessantly because I wasn’t moving fast enough. From my point-of-view, though, going faster would have caused me to crash head-on into the bus while concurrently knocking over at least three pedestrians, a motorcycle carrying an entire family of four — no helmets — and two men on bikes. But I made it on time, only my ego a bit bruised from all the nasty looks and hand gestures.

Day two, the main road closed for construction, so I followed a group of cars around on a detour through traffic-lightless intersections in which size of vehicle governs right of way. I learned quickly to push ahead anyway.

By the third afternoon, I found myself wending my way through stopped cars, hitting the gas to bypass oncoming traffic and my trip into town took 15 minutes instead of 30. My hands, no longer white-knuckled, relaxed on the wheel, but I couldn’t stop cursing at passing drivers as they bobbed back and forth across one lane to overtake me. “I hate this,” I shouted.

“Don’t worry, Mama.” Lila’s little voice piped up from the back seat. “You’ll eventually get used to it.”

Am I just trying to fool myself?

Two thoughts arrived in my head simultaneously.

The first: She says that because she’s heard the exact phrase from me.

“Mama, I don’t like school,” Lila complains.
“You haven’t had to get up early all summer. You’ll get used to it.”

“Mama, I don’t know how to put my whole head underwater,” Lila lets me know.
“It feels funny to be in a place where you can’t breathe. You’ll get used to it.”

The second thought? I prickled. “I AM used to it, I thought. I wasn’t nervous. I didn’t hesitate. I know what I’m doing. I’m used to it. It’s just that I don’t like it.

Then I wondered. Is there a difference? Do we dislike things only because they’re difficult for us? Or because they scare us? Or they make us uncomfortable in some way?

Photo by Gemsling

I tried to think of example to show that you can both dislike something and be comfortable with it, and aside from food choices — I do not like dulce de leche — I could think of nothing. How often do we say we don’t like something before we really even try?

So what do you think?

Is that feeling of dislike — for people, places, things and choices — simply a form of of avoidance? And perhaps are these dislikes simply negatives in our lives that keep us from accomplishing what we truly want? Then, of course, there’s the other side of things. Why do we so often stay with things we don’t like? A job. A relationship. Even possessions, like houses or clothing. Do we too stubbornly hold onto that which makes us most comfortable in spite of what we lose?

I have no definitive answers to these questions.

Returning to me and driving. By the time Noah returned home, I’d had enough. I immediately handed the keys to him. Still, Lila’s innocent question made me realize I should continue to force myself to drive until I do truly feel comfortable.

That’s one step closer to greater freedom.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

We talk often here on life about how to move past the things that hold you back and keep you from living your dream. From the I-Can’ts to recognizing when it’s time to move and travel and when it’s time to put down roots.

How do you know when you’re setting up your own obstacles? And how do you avoid them?

So I began documenting my life with photos this past Saturday. Since then, I’ve had some really lovely, relaxing days, but I can’t say anything of huge import and significance happened. We didn’t hike the Incan trials of Peru. There were no death defying adventure treks. The best moment of my weekend involved a little yoga and a really excellent cup of coffee while swinging in the hammock.

But isn’t that what so much of our lives tend to be? We have our highs and lows, but in between, there are what I like to call the ordinary everyday joys.

I’ll Show You A Couple of Mine

I bought this pepper plant at the Salta municipal market about two months ago. Until recently, I’d always lived in apartments and small spaces, so the idea of growing a plant and actually watch it sprout something edible amazes me.

The bushy plant behind the pepper is thyme. I plucked some leaves from it to use in a pinto I made for lunch.

Silly little finger puppet. We had Couchsurfers from Portugal staying with us this weekend. They made these puppets with Lila — my five year old — while I chopped the garlic and thyme. The puppet was a decoration for a birthday present. We went to three, yes, three little girls’ birthday parties this weekend.

Now Show Us Yours

We here at Matador Life want to know more about what happens day-to-day in the lives of our readers and our community, so we’re calling for Matadorians to send in photos and share with us the things — big or small — that are important to you. We’ll post our favorites here on Matador Life.

How To Submit: Choose a photo and email your image to leigh@matadornetwork. Your photo should be at least 1000 pixels at its largest dimension. Tell us a little about the day it was taken. Please use This Is What I Did Today! in your subject line.

Also include: Your Matador ID name and personal website.

Due Date: Ongoing project. Keep ‘em coming.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

Lila doesn’t like to get her feet wet. She doesn’t like mud. She was tired. She wanted to be carried.

Too bad, though, we were already an hour along the path and carrying her was not an option in that particular terrain. She stopped and refused to keep walking.

“I can’t do it,” she cried, my little one’s face all scrunched up with the drama as she stood pathetic and weeping on the river bank. “I can’t!”

Yes I can! No I can’ts.

I’m not big on rules — which is another discussion altogether — but we do have one in our house that everyone must follow. No one is ever allowed to say “I can’t.”

This started because Lila likes to use I can’t when she doesn’t want to do something. Or she doesn’t know how. Or she wants help. Or she’s scared. I can’t get the milk from the fridge. I can’t clean my room. I can’t bring my toys in from the porch. I can’t climb over this rock. When I know full well she can.

It’s great to be a kid and have an adult entirely take care of your needs, and I think that’s much of what childhood should be, but such pampering must also have limits. I’m more than happy to help or do things for Lila as long as she asks. This requires her to

1. Be aware of her needs.
2. Be aware of her abilities.
3. Communicate her need for help (without I can’t or whining).

I-can’t circumvents all these important social interaction and self awareness skills. I-can’t implies you are incapable of doing something. It weakens you. It takes away choice and turns you into a victim.

Later in life, who will do for Lila when there’s no parent around? If she doesn’t learn now how to walk into an overwhelming situation and step-by-step conquer it, when will she learn?

I’ll do it later. Not now. One day.

As soon as Lila realized I can’t wouldn’t work, she tried another tactic. I’m tired. Let’s do it later. A completely reasonable request, so we stopped and had the picnic I brought along. Thing is, once the food was gone and she had rested, Lila was no more ready to tackle the mud, water and hills than she had been before we stopped.

How many times have you given yourself that out?

Alex Fayle calls this the Someday Syndrome. On his website of the same name, Alex discusses the different methods we employ to try to trick ourselves into believing that it’s OK to push off what we really want or need to do now for another day.

Your Somedays stay Somedays without a single action taken. Do you want to know why? It’s not what you think. It’s not because you’re a lazy person. It’s not because it’s someone else’s fault. And it’s not because you honestly will get to it later.

Procrastination comes from one of three things:

* Disinterest
* Inertia
* Fear

Those are the only reasons why people say “I’ll get around to it someday” and if you can overcome those three blocks, you’ll never say that again.

Fear. Procrastination. Distraction. Worrying about the outcome, whether or not we can achieve. Will we fail? All these things are road blocks. If you allow any of them to stop you, you will not reach your goals.

So back to Lila crying piteously in the river as water swirls around her little legs, almost knocking her off balance.

It would be so easy to do it for her, to lift her and put her on land. But doing so won’t get us to the end of the hike. We still had about an hour to go and plenty of rocks, water and sandy hills with little traction.

Photo by author

Plus, I know she can do it. I’ve seen her climb steeper hills and navigate more slippery terrain. Add to that, I don’t want to carry her. Nor do I want to stay knee deep in this river for the rest of my life.

When Lila realized she had no choice, that none of her I-cant’s, I’ll-do it-laters or I-don’t-want-tos would change the situation, suddenly she pulled herself together and finished the hike.

Sometimes it really is as simple as that.

Yes, there were times she needed help when crossing a particularly rough and deep patch of water, then I gladly lent a hand. And the next time we went hiking, she didn’t think twice before scrambling up the rocky surface like a happy little monkey.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

Ever suffer from Someday Syndrome? What other road blocks stand in the way of your goals and what do you do to bypass them?

For more tips and life lessons from parents check out this photo essay on busy twitter parents. You can also read how Claire Moss’s travels prepared her for parenthood.

Yesterday, our very own Candice Walsh took us on a tour of the sordid, silly and surreal world of Chatroulette. Today, I ask where will this latest fascination take us?

What is the allure of ChatRoulette?

It is a challenge to find the weirdest, most interesting, most sexually odd stranger. It is anonymity. When you don’t have a name, you can say what you like and not take responsibility. That is extremely liberating.

It is human contact. It is human contact with absolutely no strings attached. We all wonder what it would be like with a stranger. It is a chance to see a naked stranger possibly shirtless and masturbating..

It is a search for the self. Deep down, how many of us hope that we’ll find our doppelgangersoulmateselfstranger?

Photo by Buzzfeed

Every article I read about ChatRoulette discusses in detail the rejection, more than one describing the “horrifying” moment of watching your stranger reach a hand out to the keyboard before F9ing you.

It is as the name suggests, an opportunity to shoot yourself in the head with every flip of the keyboard. Yet, every single person went back more than once to this place where you can be anyone. A cat. A whore. A samurai. A complete and utter pervert. You can travel to Turkey or have a drink with a stranger in Amsterdam even if you’re under 21 and couldn’t get into the bar in real life. You can play “Make this face” or “Hey, I’ll draw you!” Then settle down for a chat with a nazi, ghost, skeleton or dog. Real dog, not just someone dressed up as one.

Only your imagination limits you.

Is ChatRoulette the So-Called Next Big Thing?

It could be.

Sam Anderson tells us in his New York Magazine article that “if ChatRoulette catches on, it might even swing our collective online pendulum back toward chaos.”

A little bit of chaos may be just what the techgeek ordered in this overly monitored and measured world. Who are we kidding? This isn’t just for techgeeks. Everyone occasionally seeks escape from the self to find adventure. That’s why we travel. That’s why we jump out of planes. That’s why hostel sex is fun, then you get up the next day and are on your way. Chatroulette provides just a small taste of letting go before you return to your normal life.

Says Jonah Lehrer at ScienceBlogs

Human interaction, of course, is pretty damn predictable. We’ve got elaborate rituals for dealing with strangers, thus minimizing the chance of a surprising interaction. (“How are you?” “Good, thanks. How are you?” “Great. Thanks for asking. Have a nice day.”) And then there’s the fact that the vast majority of our interactions are with people we already know, whether it’s family, friends or co-workers. So they probably won’t surprise us, either. The end result is that our social exchanges become tedious and rote. They might be rewarding, but they’re rarely exciting.

Many don’t get it, though. Just like people didn’t get online dating, then Facebook, then Twitter. They didn’t get it. They didn’t get it. And then suddenly, everyone realized they had to get it because if they didn’t, they’d be left behind.

I keep hearing metaphors for what ChatRoulette is like. Speed dating, urban subway ride on your computer, slot machine made of other people. This revolving door of metaphor is part of the not getting it. We’re all trying to get our heads around it. We want to understand what it is and what it means about us but don’t quite know yet.

-Photo by Rodrigo Basaure

Here’s a tip. If you hear a large group of people saying something like “I don’t get it. What’s it for?” you’re probably onto something.

What does the future hold for ChatRoulette?

The future of ChatRoulette will be guided by two things. Will it be monetized? Will it remain anonymous?

Andrey Ternevskiy, the 17 year old creator of ChatRoulette, provides some insight on monetization in an interview with Brad Stone in the New York Times Bits blog.

I think it’s wonderful that I do not have to put a lot of advertisements on my site to keep it running. I am not sure why it is so. Maybe because Google AdSense (the thing I use to show the advertisements) shows links to various video chats. I don’t think this is a bad thing. I actually think it is a good thing, because only people not interested or tired of using my site click those links, to explore other services.

How’s that for pure sentiment in our post modern, advertising media savvy days?

But can ChatRoulette remain alive with such minimal monetization? The ability to make a living doing something you love, be that travel blogging or coding anonymous chat websites, is hugely alluring. If Mr. Ternevskiy doesn’t do it, it’s inevitable that someone else will come along to fill the void.

The Case For Giving Up Anonymity

While the ability to say and do what you want with no strings attached is a beautiful thing, if you don’t know what someone wants, where they live and what they need, it is extremely difficult to market to them, thus making ChatRoulette into a business rather complicated.

Again, Sam Anderson nicely sums up the possibilities:

I found myself fantasizing about a curated version of ChatRoulette—powered maybe by Google’s massive server farms—that would allow users to set all kinds of filters: age, interest, language, location. One afternoon I might choose to be thrown randomly into a pool of English-speaking thirtysomething non-masturbators who like to read poetry. Another night I might want to talk to Jets fans. Another night I might want to just strip away all the filters and see what happens. The site could even keep stats, like YouTube, so you could see the most popular chatters in any given demographic. I could get very happily addicted to a site like that.

The ability to keep stats strips away anonymity. Without it, ChatRoulette becomes a different animal but one with a world of possibility.

“Like what?” you may ask.

Psychoanalysis.
Professional or pop, you can log into a room looking for someone who will listen to your problems and hear you vent. Choose between Freudian, cognitive behavioral, gestalt and eclectic flavors. If you like the person you meet, you can arrange to meet again.

Games.
Here you can play chess, connect with a World of Warcraft buddy or even an entire group for mahjong or bridge. No, I don’t suddenly see a market for college mahjong tournaments, but it sets the stage for older users as well.

Babysitting.
Tired of your child sitting slack jawed and wide eyed while watching the same video over and over and over. Here you can connect with a real person who will occupy your child.

For an fantastic vision of what computer babysitting and education could be, read Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age: A Lady’s Illustrated Primer. (Definitely up there as one of my favorite sci-fi books of all time). We can require sitters to register and login with work history, favorite games, and even police record.

-Photo by Don Hankins

Online Dating.
It doesn’t take much thought to see how ChatRoulette adds another dimension to online dating. Instead of e-mailing for a week, you immediately connect, see if there’s attraction before wasting time with an awkward, man-you-seemed-cool-but-in-real-life-you’re-a-lot-doughier-than-I-expected night on the town.

Art and Entertainment.
Flip between live shows, plays, improv, comedy, and it’s all there just for you, the audience of one or however many happen to be in front of your monitor at the moment. The longer the audience stays with a program, the higher the rating. Highly rated shows, as in any other system, get advertising.

Trivia.
Need an answer to a question? Connect with experts from all over the world on any number of subjects.

Parental Control
Right now, no one monitors you as you wheel through a world of strangers, but what happens the day some 12 year old logs on to watch two naked men in leather beating a third while a fourth jerks off in a corner. Suddenly, lack of responsibility doesn’t seem so funny anymore. And like Google executives who have recently been convicted of privacy violations because of a video uploaded to YouTube of an autistic boy being bullied, someone will be held accountable.

Any of these fit easily into many different potential business models, but once this happens, once we’ve begun to quantify, qualify and find ways to monetize as is natural in the course of internet entropy, we lose the spontaneity and freedom that currently makes ChatRoulette so damn appealing.

Maybe for now, we can relax and just enjoy this little slice of painful, horrifying, rejection with a side of titillation. There’s plenty of time to put order in the chaos.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

What do you see as the future of Chatroulette and other live video chat feeds?

]]> http://matadorlife.com/the-thermodynamic-theory-of-chatroulette/feed/ 12 http://matadorlife.com/wtf-is-it-about-those-cats-lol/ http://matadorlife.com/wtf-is-it-about-those-cats-lol/#comments Mon, 22 Feb 2010 14:15:01 +0000 Leigh Shulman http://matadorlife.com/?p=3974

Above photo by author. Feature photo byTorley

My five-year-old daughter Lila spends a decent amount of her time on YouTube. She loves hopping from video to video, and I always get a kick out of her favorites. The overweening appeal of cats — and the effect they can have on a blog or website — dawned on me this weekend when she found The Mean Kitty Song.

Over thirty one millions hits. Yes, you read that right. Thirty. One. Million. Hits.

It’s a cute video, and even taking into account the number of small children who, like Lila, will view this thing 30 times a day if left to their own devices, that’s still a lot of people watching a cute little tabby cat in action.

The adorable spiky haired guy singing? I can’t help wondering how many times he got laid because this video.

But it doesn’t stop there….

This video of a cat freaking out also holds its own as far as Youtube views with well over 9 million views.

Why is this poor thing acting this way? According to the video notes, she’s never been abused, she just doesn’t like men.

And finally, this next video of an orange feline clocks in at over 2 million views.

I suppose I’d also be somewhat miffed if someone named me Burger and Fries.

The Magical Allure of Kitty Cat Cuteness

Beyond Youtube, you’ll find a proliferation of funny and popular cat websites like Lolcats.com which features the ever famous cat in a fruit helmet photo. There’s also sparklecat.com apparently written by cats for cats. It even has a Cat-To-Cat advice column offering tips on everything from how to keep your human from dressing you up in costumes to methods of coping when your person comes home smelling of other cats.

Even the most hardened human cannot resist a pissed off cat dressed as a taco, two cats talking or yet another cat in citrus head gear, this time with wayfarer animation.

How do we harness the all powerful attraction of cats for our own websites and projects? I’ll let you know when I figure it out. In the meantime, hang in there!

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

Just can’t get enough? Take a look at photos of Matador member’s pets or learn more about taking your pet along when traveling.

Cards of Change is what would happen if Post Secret and Operation Beautiful had a three-way with Linked In. This website allows you to upload your new and improved business card in order to connect with others who have been laid off as well as potential employers.

Our mission is to collect as many business cards and stories of positive change of people who have recently been laid off and connect them with new opportunities from potential employers, business partners and people who make the effort to look on the bright side of life

The current beta form of the website includes a place to upload your revamped card to a searchable database which can be parsed by location. Unfortunately, it seems this search function isn’t entirely in working order yet. All searches I tried yielded no results. Hopefully, this will be functional soon.

In the meantime, I suggest checking out the Top 100 Cards list.

There you’ll find a former Chiat Day employee who now volunteers reading to children. Or Tiffanni who is making the time to doodle. And over and over, the message resonates from people who are living more freely, richly, openly and lovingly even though they’re not making as much money as they did before losing their jobs.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

“Why?” you may ask. Because he was worried “the black people” would come. Of course, the fact he lives in an extremely white and rather isolated part of Long Island didn’t seem to ease his fears. In order for those black people to come, they would need to hop in their cars – train wasn’t an option, remember, because of the blackout – and drive all the way over to Long Island in the pitch dark just to steal his stuff.

Really, what are the chances?

The reality of that night?

I’ve never seen people so decent to each other. The neighborhood kids, usually quite hooliganish, carried flashlights to help people to their homes. Grocery stores and bodegas gave away free food, because it would go bad left unrefrigerated anyway. Never before and never again in ten years did I see Cobble Hill as such a community.

Fear jails you. We sat on our stoops chatting. He sat there wide eyed and fearful for one long wakeful night.

Almost seven years later, my family and I still laugh at this guy. We’ve even adopted a phrase — the title of this article — in his honor. It refers to any time someone assumes the worst about another person because of prejudice. It means shortsighted, irrational fear of something unknown.

The Other Side of Irrational

Then there’s Emma. She’s a housekeeper in NYC. I met her in the laundry room of our building where we’d exchange pleasant smiles and hello. We couldn’t speak because she doesn’t know English, and at the time, I didn’t speak Spanish.

Skip forward five years. Emma started babysitting for Lila, and I learned a little more about her.

Emma is Bolivian.
She used to be a nun.
She worked in an orphanage.
She left because as a nun she wasn’t able to adopt the children.
She adopted two.

Emma is one of the most wonderful, honest decent people I have met in my life. She works hard, and nothing is too difficult, too complicated or too much for her. I trust her with my daughter, which is the highest praise I can give anyone.

When I think of what a Bolivian is like, I think of Emma.

-Photo by antisocialtory

Of course, living here in Argentina on the edge of Bolivia, people have a slightly different story.

When I visit public offices here in Argentina – immigration for renewing our visa or registro civil for residency here – I’m treated differently than many of the people waiting — almost all Bolivians — in the office. We are warned to watch out because, you know, all those stories of Bolivians kidnapping young children at the mall for ransom. We’re told we need shots for Hepatitis A and other diseases because, well, they come from Bolivia. Bolivians don’t work hard. They steal.

Sitting on the front porch making saints.

The reality is my view of Bolivians is as much a stereotype as the other. It may be easier to stomach, because I ascribe positive attributes, but it is still a stereotype based on one wonderful woman. I doubt there are many like her in the world, let alone an entire country of Emmas. It’s the flip side of sitting on your porch. I call it saint making. Same thing as a bad movie where out of nowhere, the wise man or woman – usually Native American, Voodoo priestess, African shaman – appears with inchoate words of advice that lead the main character from darkness to light.

Both blind us badly.

Two recent articles on Matador raise similar issues.

The first, Fear Among Men:Notes On Traveling With A Girlfriend, frustrated and angered people in its portrayal of women as helpless travelers in need of care. On the other side, many found a main character, called The Israeli, objectionable.

A second article, Barakku: Black Culture in Japan, explores one man’s questions about race, culture and whether or not he’s comfortable being accepted by virtue of the color of his skin.

What can we understand about our own prejudice?

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

Is it our duty to eradicate stereotypes, see the world more evenhandedly or can prejudice sometimes serve a useful purpose?

Photo by Let Ideas Compete

They’re presented in alphabetical order, and each one was mentioned at least three times. Most titles popped up over and over as people’s e-mails and tweets rolled in.

These are our favorites.

1. Amelie

Director: Jean Pierre-Jeunet
Year: 2001
In One Sentence: One person can change your life forever.

Amelie, a naive country girl living in Monmarte, Paris decides to find justice for those around her. She reunites an old man with a childhood toy, sends a gnome on a round-the-world trip and and meets Nino Camcompoix, a boy working in a porn shop who loves finding photos left behind in photo booths. Quirky meets quirky is meant to be.

2. American Beauty

Director: Sam Mendes
Year: 1999
In A Couple Words: Look closer.

This is a film about Lester Burnham, a depressed suburban father in a mid-life crisis who develops a twisted attraction for his teenage daughter’s friend. Suggested by Matador editors Ian MacKenzie and Kate Sedgwick.

I know Ian mentioned this one,” wrote Kate, but I watched that movie at a time when I had just had a fight in the context of a stifling relationship. I went into the movie depressed and alone, and I came out of it with the resolve to stop wasting my life and get out of that situation. I haven’t seen it since, and I couldn’t tell you now what about it helped me to make up my mind. I just know that it helped me understand that life is too short to live on someone else’s terms. Less than a month later, I was on the highway leaving Texas alone.

American Beauty writer Alan Ball also wrote the HBO’s extremely dark Six Feet Under. The final episode presents a montage of scenes that somehow sums up the cycle of life and death and leaves you with a sense of acceptance. Yes, I know that sounds cliche and thus impossible. Trust me. Watch it. You’ll either be stupefied or in tears. Either way, you won’t stop thinking about it for a week.

3. Babette’s Feast

Year: 1987
Director: Gabriel Axel
In A Sentence: Never has watching a table of fastidious 19th century Danes eat been so beautiful and sensuous.

Babette, a French refugee appears on the doorstep of two women, sisters living in an isolated — and extremely pious — village in Denmark. They take her in as their housekeeper. Babette suddenly inherits a fortune and uses the entire sum to prepare a luxurious dinner for the townspeople, most of whom consider such extravagance a sin.

Old Martina (after hearing Babette spent all her money on the dinner): Now you’ll be poor for the rest of your life.

Babette: An artist is never poor.

4. Bad Santa

Director: Terry Zwigoff
Year: 2003
In Short: He’s a drunken, thieving mess. Just the person you want coming down your chimney and playing with your kids.

Willie has not one single redeemable characteristic. Not one. He lies, robs department stores on Christmas, takes advantage of the young and old. The only thing keeping him from doing more harm is that he’s usually passed out in a drunken slop pile. Still, his connection with a snot nosed, geeky fat kid and a woman with an odd Santa fetish proves that even the oddest of us deserve good and family togetherness.

5. Big Fish

Director:Tim Burton
Year:2003
Tagline: An adventure as big as life itself.

A angry son visits his father before he dies. He does so out of duty, but really can’t get passed the fact, an inveterate teller of tall tales, spent more time on the road with other people while working as a salesman than in his son’s life. The son seeks truth, but finds that truth and fiction blend. At a certain point, though, he finds it no longer matters which is which, but that you enjoyed the story.

6. Breakfast On Pluto

Year: 2005
Director: Neil Jordan
In A Question: How do you survive when you’re different?

This slightly lesser known film by the director of The Crying Game, Interview With A Vampire and Michael Collins tells the story of Patrick “Kitten” Braden. He leaves his town in Ireland to look for his mother and because his transgendered nature goes beyond the town’s understanding.

7. Chocolat

Director: Lasse Halstrom
Year: 2000
In A Sentence: Haven’t we all at some point in our lives wanted to roll around in a bed of chocolate?

Vianne, her daughter and their invisible kangaroo arrive in a small French village and shake up the rigid morality of the place. How? By opening a chocolate shop.

My good friend Andrea, who I met through Couchsurfing , describes Chocolat as a passion for discovery, knowing your home isn’t a physical place, no fear of leaving, indulging the senses, loving people while you can. and knowing that sometimes it’s time to stay in one place.

Two other wonderful films worth watching from the same director: The Cider House Rules and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.

8. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Director: David Fincher
Year: 2008
In Short: Your life is defined by its opportunities even the ones you miss.

Imagine the possibilities if you had the strength of a 20 year old but the eyes of a 70 year old. Such is the case of Benjamin Button, who is born old and ages backwards.

Benjamin Button: It’s a funny thing about comin’ home. Looks the same, smells the same, feels the same. You’ll realize what’s changed is you.

9. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

Director: John Hughes
Year: 1986
Says it all: Life moves pretty fast. You don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

Ferris Bueller has one last sick day to take, and yeah, he grabs that day by the balls.

Ferris: Cameron, what have you seen today?

Cameron: Nothing good.

Ferris: Nothing – wha – what do you mean nothing good? We’ve seen everything good. We’ve seen the whole city! We went to a museum, we saw priceless works of art! We ate pancreas!

10. 50 First Dates

Director: Peter Segal
Year: 2004
In One Sentence: Imagine having to win over the girl of your dreams, every friggin’ day!

The final scene of this film gets me every time.

11. Groundhog Day

Director: Harold Ramis
Year: 1993
In One Sentence: He’s having the worst day of his life over and over.

Phil is hateful, angry, pissy weatherman with an enormous ego, so it feels like divine retribution when he’s forced to wake up every morning on the same day in the same boring town on a very cold Groundhog’s day.

Phil: Well, what if there is no tomorrow? There wasn’t one today.

Phil: When Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope. Yet we know that winter is just another step in the cycle of life. But standing here among the people of Punxsutawney and basking in the warmth of their hearths and hearts, I couldn’t imagine a better fate than a long and lustrous winter.

Note: For Harold Ramis fans: There’s a Ghostbuster’s III scheduled to come out in 2011.

12. The Hangover

Director: Todd Phillips
Year: 2009
In A Sentence: Sometimes you have to be beaten, electrified by middle school students and marry a hooker to learn what’s really important.

A Las Vegas-set comedy centered around three groomsmen who lose their about-to-be-wed buddy during their drunken misadventures, then must retrace their steps in order to find him.

Alan Garner: You guys might not know this, but I consider myself a bit of a loner. I tend to think of myself as a one-man wolf pack. But when my sister brought Doug home, I knew he was one of my own. And my wolf pack… it grew by one. So there… there were two of us in the wolf pack… I was alone first in the pack, and then Doug joined in later. And six months ago, when Doug introduced me to you guys, I thought, “Wait a second, could it be?” And now I know for sure, I just added two more guys to my wolf pack. Four of us wolves, running around the desert together, in Las Vegas, looking for strippers and cocaine. So tonight, I make a toast!

13. Hoosiers

Director: David Anspaugh
Year: 1986
In Short: Everyone deserves a second chance to finish first. Sometimes you get it.

Coach Norman Dale, a local drunk with an ugly past, takes a small town high school basketball team to the championship game. Says my high school friend Matt of Hoosiers: This film may be less interesting if you aren’t into basketball. Or meaning. Or romance. Or the difficulties of becoming a man.

Coach Norman Dale: I would hope you would support who we are. Not, who we are not. These six individuals have made a choice to work, a choice to sacrifice, to put themselves on the line 23 nights for the next 4 months, to represent you, this high school. That kind of commitment and effort deserves and demands your respect. This is your team.

Rudy, another based-on-a-true-story film by the same director appeared on the list almost as often as Hoosiers.

14. It’s A Wonderful Life

Director: Frank Capra
Year: 1946
A Quick Overview: An angel helps a well meaning but frustrated businessman by showing what life would have been like if he never existed.

It may be old, but this movie name still popped up more often than just about any other. A staple in American culture of learning to accept the joyful things in our lives and not allowing ourselves to be mired down in the details.

15. Koyaanisqatsi

Director: Godfrey Reggio
Year: 1982
In A Question: What will happen to human beings if we destroy all silence and nature?

Koyaanisqatsi, the Hopi word for “life out of balance” is not your traditional film. It has no plot, no characters and no ending. It does, though, have a very clear message.This film sets images to the haunting music of Phillip Glass showing our disconnection with the natural world and perhaps unwise reliance on the world of technology.

16. A Lesson Before Dying

Director: Joseph Sargeant
Year: 1999
In a question: How do you act when the hope for truth and justice is gone?

In the 1940’s South, an African-American man is jailed for killing a a white store owner. Even though he’s wrongly accused, he will die. This movie shows how we must accept our roots before we can truly move forward. Based on Ernest Gaine’s 1993 novel of the same name.

Ernest Gaines shares some reasons why he writes and how writing helps him find his center. Check out The Traveler’s Notebook for more writers on writing.

17. Life Is Beautiful

Director: Roberto Benigni
Year: 1997
In A Sentence: A man protects his child from the horrendous truth of the living in a Nazi death camp by turning it into an enormous game.

Giosué Orefice: “No Jews or Dogs Allowed.” Why do all the shops say, “No Jews Allowed”?

Guido: Oh, that. “Not Allowed” signs are the latest trend! The other day, I was in a shop with my friend the kangaroo, but their sign said, “No Kangaroos Allowed,” and I said to my friend, “Well, what can I do? They don’t allow kangaroos.”

Giosué Orefice: Why doesn’t our shop have a “Not Allowed” sign?

Guido: Well, tomorrow, we’ll put one up. We won’t let in anything we don’t like. What don’t you like?

Giosué Orefice: Spiders.

Guido: Good. I don’t like Visigoths. Tomorrow, we’ll get sign: “No Spiders or Visigoths Allowed.”

18. Midnight Cowboy

Director: John Schlesinger
Year: 1969
In Short: The most unlikely friendships can set you free.

Touted as the only X-rated film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture, Midnight Cowboy shows how distrust turns to friendship and stupidity can be a virtue.

19. Midnight Express

Director: Alan Parker
Year: 1978
In One Sentence: This film is the reason we double search our bags for contraband before traveling internationally.

Based on the book of the same name written by Billy Hayes. Midnight Express details Haye’s time spent in a Turkish prison. Says Matt Scott, a Matador writer and intern: It’s not a feel good movie, but it does make you appreciate life.

Billy Hayes: What is a crime? What is punishment? It seems to vary from time to time and place to place. What’s legal today is suddenly illegal tomorrow because society says it’s so, and what’s illegal yesterday is suddenly legal because everybody’s doin’ it, and you can’t put everybody in jail. I’m not saying this is right or wrong. I’m just saying that’s the way it is.

20. Motorcycle Diaries

Director: Walter Salles
Year: 2004
In Short: Change yourself before you change the world.

Traveling by motorcycle introduces Che Guevara to his life calling. We know what happens after that.

Says Matador community member and Moustache Hunt aficionado Travis Crockett: I finally finished watching “The Motocycle Diaries”, a reminder that travel can lead you to a destination that you never planned or even imagined, a life less ordinary. Not sure I would swap places with Che though.

21. Office Space

Director: Mike Judge
Year: 1999
Tagline: Because everyone wishes they had the balls to gut a fish on their desk at work.

Prophetic tale of company workers who hate their jobs and decide to rebel against their greedy boss. How many left our jobs to travel and escape the daily cubicle farm? And don’t forget Milton Waddams.

22. Once

Director: John Carney
Year: 2006
In A Question: How do you find the right person?

A modern-day musical about a busker and an immigrant and their eventful week in Dublin, as they write, rehearse and record songs that tell their love story.

Says Matador Brave New Traveler editor Christine Garvin: I’m not really a favorite movies kinda person, but just re-watched this, and I was surprised how much it moved me. Even better, I was traveling the first time I saw it, and it reminded me both about what the world holds for us if we are just open to it, and the quick and powerful possibilities of love.

Girl: How come you don’t play during daytime? I see you here everyday.

Guy: During the daytime people would want to hear songs that they know, just songs that they recognize. I play these song at night or I wouldn’t make any money. People wouldn’t listen.

Girl: I listen.

23. Precious

Director: Lee Daniels
Year: 2009
Says it all: Life is hard. Life is short. Life is painful. Life is rich. Life is precious.

An overweight, illiterate teen living in Harlem is pregnant with her second child when she’s invited to enroll in an alternative school in hopes that her life can head in a new direction.

A powerful movie based on the novel Push by Sapphire. Mariah Carey plays an extraordinary role as Precious’ guidance counselor.

I haven’t seen the movie but have read the book. It strikes me particularly because I taught poetry workshops to students in the same neighborhood where Precious lives. I didn’t have the same access to my students lives as Precious gives us, but if nothing else, this book and film should remind us to look beyond what you see in front of you.

24. Rushmore

Director: Wes Anderson
Year: 1998
In A Question: Has Wes Anderson ever made a bad movie?

Max Fischer, the king of Rushmore Academy, is on probation and eventually expelled from the school he loves and hoped never to leave.

Travel bloggers Pam Mandel and Jen Laceda were the first of many to suggest Rushmore. This movie points to the importance of developing individuality, accepting who we are and learning to grow with what we are offered in life. You may not get everything you want, but that in itself is important to know.

Herman Blume: What’s the secret, Max?

Max Fischer: The secret?

Herman Blume: Yeah, you seem to have it pretty figured out.

Max Fischer: The secret, I don’t know… I guess you’ve just gotta find something you love to do and then… do it for the rest of your life. For me, it’s going to Rushmore.

Sex and the City

Director: Michael Patrick King
Year: 2008
In a sentence: Time is short.

Ok, no one named this movie in my polling, but it’s worth mentioning because some movies are just so awful that the teach you the importance of time. I saw it last night and actually watched all three hours. I only share this shameful waste of my time as a warning for you to turn it off. Better yet, don’t even turn it on. Instead, go take a walk, play with your kids, fly a kite. Anything. It’s as long as Ghandi but without the meaning, message or drive. It will be three hours you will never get back.

25. Up

Co-directors: Pete Doctor and Bob Peterson
Year: 2009
In short: Often adventure has nothing to do with travel at all.

When Carl Fredricksen’s wife of 70 years dies, he’s left with an empty house and a dream of traveling to South America unfulfilled. So he ties an enormous bunch of balloons to his chimney and lifts off.

Tens of people mentioned this film, from Matador Sports editor Adam Roy to Matador Goods editor Lola Akinmade and don’t know how many other friends and family members, too. Funny how many prefaced their suggestion with “Don’t think I’m silly…” or “I know it’s a kids movie, but….”

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

So there you have it. 25 of the top suggested movies from everyone I know professionally and personally. I know, I cheated and included many more, but it’s really impossible to choose just twenty five. I know, also, that this list isn’t comprehensive, so please leave your additions and why you love them in comments below.

I consider Audrey Scott and Daniel Noll to be friends even though we’ve never met face-to-face. I know them through their blog Uncornered Market — a favorite of mine — and through Twitter . Social media friends, I suppose you can call us.

Their most recent article, The Joy Of Living Deliberately, posits seven separate questions to ask yourself in order to help decide if the life you’re living is one you live because you’ve just somehow accidentally fallen into the patterns and choices that run your life or if you’re living consciously and deliberately by design.

This post provoked much thought for me; these are only some of my responses.

Question One: What are your priorities?

Priority is defined not just by what you want, but by what you avoid as well. Problem is, our emotions tend to blind us to what we want. Fear, sadness, worry, anger, even the so-called positive emotions of love and fidelity distract us toward the path of least résistance.

Oh, it may not feel like the easy way, but generally, when we choose to stay with that which leaves us unhappy, it is because we are more comfortable with discomfort than the idea of change.

How do you become more conscious of what might be standing in the way?

Sorry, I don’t really have a definitive answer for you. I do, however, have a couple thoughts.

First, discomfort is a good indicator of something. Think of it this way. You have a pair of shoes. You love the look. You used to love the feel, but suddenly they’re wearing thin at the sole and are rubbing in back. You’re getting blisters. You may not like it, but it’s time to move on from those shoes.

Another wonderful article by Kelly Diels titled Relationships. Hold On (Maybe) lists a number of ways to know when it’s time to move on. While she specifically discusses relationships, her guidelines apply well in other areas as well.

The truth is a beast. Ugly. Big teeth. Relentless. Patient (sometimes). Hungry. It will be fed. Sometime.

If you know, you know.

And all the reasons in the world that are stalling your exit – kids, family, property, social expectations – are just that: stalls. The biggest stall is the dream. The myth. The internal myth making and myth busting….is more dangerous and damaging than anything inflicted on you from the outside.

Myth breaking:
• fairy tales and happily ever after, always
• The One [way of doing things]

Myth making:
• I can’t commit to anything
• I quit again
• I failed again
• This is all my fault
• I should be stronger.
• I should just buck up and grit my teeth and get through it
• I will never find another
• I will die alone with cats because that’s what the unlovable do.
• I will never have children
• [I will never reach my goals if I don’t continue]

All those “again”s. They indicate personal narratives and toxic loops you’re knitting yourself into.

Sometimes we enslave ourselves to our stories. So tell yourself a new story. Tell yourself the truth. Start with this:

If you know, you know. If you don’t know, wait until you get to the knowing. More heavy lifting, hard works, stillness and listening.

Question Two: Do you recognize that you have choices? Always?

Photo by jurvetson

Ok, Audrey and Dan. In this one point, I disagree, at least partially. I get that the point of this is to say that even when it seems we have no choice, we still have control over ourselves and can make choices within the situation, but something about that doesn’t feel quite right.

There are those in this world that have been egregiously, unfairly robbed of choice. Disaster. Disease. Mental illness. Totalitarian regimes. Lack of resources.

Unfair, though, is a child’s word and has little reflection in real hard life. Try telling an earthquake that your loss isn’t fair. Thus, the loss of choice robs you of your childhood – that is innocence, love, hope — leaving pain and despair in its place.

Yes, there are those individuals who overcome, but I certainly cannot fault anyone who does not. I’m not sure what I would do in such situations.

I am, however, able to look at my own life and be fully conscious of the fact that I am one of the luxuriously lucky on this planet who can still look at the world without that potentially soul-crushing sense of loss. That is a great blessing.

Question Three: Do you regret?

What are your regrets? Mine tend to be of the things I did not do. I wish I got a teaching certificate in NYC instead of being put off by Board of Education bureaucracy. I should have gone to cooking school instead of continuing in my job at MTV. Things like that.

Regrettable things I’ve done? I have my share of unfortunate choices, but aside from a horrible haircut I got in college that I call the Duckbutt Cut, really, none stand out as regret.

Something broken may not ever fully return to normal, but it can almost always be makeshift fixed to some degree. Something that never existed? There’s not much you can do about that.

Question Four: What’s better? Talking or doing?

I will agree with them and say definitely doing.

For Audrey and Dan, that meant taking big steps such as quitting their jobs, selling everything and leaving to travel. The same doing does not apply to all.

My best friend’s mother’s name is Linda. She’s from Connecticut. She married and moved a few hours north to New Hampshire where she’s lived ever since. Linda raised three amazing children, encouraged each to be self sufficient while still following individual desire and direction. She works in social services teaching families how to better care for themselves. She has worked steadily in this area for decades, and because of her, countless people have been fed, received adequate health and dental care, prenatal care and countless other useful information to improve their lives.

Linda gets up every morning, early. She brews a pot of coffee, reads the news and is always open for a chat, to give advice or to babysit for a mom who badly needs a break (Thank you!).

Question Five: Do you realize your choices have consequences?

Yes, you will make mistakes. You will hurt people. You will hurt yourself at times, and that may well lead to regret. Ultimately, you can only do the best you can do at any given time with the information you have at that moment.

Can you with a clear mind and heart say that to be true? When you make a mistake, will you take responsibility for your error and move on?
If you can say an honest “Yes, most of the time,” then you have done supremely well.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

So now, tell me, are you choosing your life? Or is your life choosing you?

Photo by kaktuslampa

It happens to all of us. You go shopping with the best of intentions. Then a week passes. Two. Maybe even three, and you find yourself with a drawer full of old vegetables. They’re still edible, technically, but no one really wants to dig into their soft wrinkly skin.

Some ideas of what you can do with instead of throwing them away.

Pickling

From kimchi to kosher dills, pickling has been preserving food for centuries. You can read about the science of pickling and compare notes with other picklers at the Exploratorium: Museum of Science, Art and Human Perception.

Pickling works best as a preemptive strike. Say you went to the market, got all excited and ended up buying more than you need. It’s simple, quick to prepare and has a long shelf life.

A Simple Pickling Recipe

Photo by biskuit

3 cups distilled white vinegar
1 cup water
2 cups sugar
¼ cup salt

Then add whichever spices appeal: dill, whole allspice, whole raw garlic, celery seeds, mustard seeds, whole black peppercorns.

Use this liquid to preserve just about anything from tomatoes , cucumbers, carrots and peppers to fruits like mango and peaches. Store in the refridgerator.

Boil It Into A Jam Or Sauce

Chutneys, preserves and sauces provide ample opportunity to hide imperfections.
Sautee garlic, onions and spices before adding your old tomatoes. Cook them until saucy. You can also throw in any other vegetables or even fruit pureed or whole for additional flavor. Jams are also easy in that you simply heat your old fruit with water and sugar and cook until thick.

Chutney, a more savory type jam, works on a similar principle as pickling except where pickling is cold, chutney is heated. Throw in fruits like mango, apples and peaches with vinegar, sugar and spices and cook.

Spicy Apple Chutney

Photo by Clara S.

4 apples, peeled and quartered
2 tbs vegetable oil
Whole mustard seeds
1 onion, chopped
2 tsp finely chopped garlic
1 tsp fresh ginger
1-2 chillies of your choice, sliced. Include seeds for a spicier.
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup red wine or apple vinegar
1 cup water

Heat oil in a large saucepan. Add mustard seeds until toasted. Then add onion, and salt and cook until onions are translucent. Add garlic, chile and ginger and cook another minute. This releases the flavor of these last ingredients.

Add remaining ingredients and cook over moderate heat until everything is soft. Takes between 30-45 minutes depending. Stir occasionally to keep from burning.

Roast Them

Salvage your root vegetables – potato, yam, carrot, turnip and the like – by roasting.

Batatas Bravas

Chop whatever you have into bite sized pieces, coat generously with olive oil, salt and powdered chile pepper. Bake for 30 minutes at about 375F/200C until soft. Then turn oven to broil and let cook until everything turns crispy. Add more oil if you see the pan drying out.

These are incredibly spicy and go perfectly with beer.

Hide It All In A Soup

Again, the boiling principle comes to the rescue. Just about any vegetable can be salvaged by a pot of water, vegetable stock cubes or tomato sauce and spices.

Vegetable Soup

Photo by rusvaplauke

3 tbs olive oil
4 cups of whatever vegetables you want to add, chopped into bite size pieces
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
2 tsp rosemary
1 16oz can of crushed tomatoes
2 16oz cans of water
4 tbs dark soy sauce (also called sweet soy sauce)
4 tbs regular soy sauce

Heat oil until it runs like water in the pan. Add onions and cook until translucent. Add garlic and rosemary and leave on heat for another minute. Add rest of vegetables and cook.

When the vegetables just begin to soften, add crushed tomatoes and water and cook covered for half an hour. Pour in both kinds of soy sauce and cook uncovered for another ten minutes. You may want to add additional soy sauce depending on your preference.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

What are your favorite food preservation recipes, tips and tricks? Share them in comments below. Then check out Matador’s Food and Travel page where two favorite past times unite.

Photo courtesy of MickRheault!

But this isn’t about vegetarianism. This is about how to make your bowl of wings that much easier.

Behold. Food Wishes blog shows this video on the correct way to at a chicken wing.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

Photos courtesy of Moustache Hunt Appreciation Society

All her friends photos seemed to be variations of the same pose. Then it hit me. Every one of these photos contained somewhere a person with a fabulous, bushy, brushy, crazy moustache.

Yes, the Moustache Hunt Appreciation Society Facebook page boasts image after image of these wonderful bushy things that seem to be some sort of halfway house between clean shaven and a full beard.

I immediately became a Facebook Fan, then contacted Travis Crockett, the creator of those lovely photos that gave me such enjoyment.

Moustaches are weird, says Crockett, it appears they serve no practical purpose. As a fashion statement, their popularity peaked in the 70’s and has been in decline ever since. With the advent of Movember, it seemed that perhaps moustaches were making a comeback, but only for one month a year.

However, when I met Vaughan Grandin – founder of the Moustache Hunt Appreciation Society — in Paris, late 2008, it became apparent that moustaches are still fashionable in some parts of the world all year round. Moustache hunting was born.

Moustache hunting began as a fun group activity, during a tour of central Europe, to keep Crockett amused when moving between different tourist attractions. Now hunters hail from everywhere. Bavaria, Italy and Spain all prove fruitful ground for the hunt, although Turkey tops the list with a “the thicker the better” attitude toward moustache sporting.

Luckily, you don’t have to travel far to be part of the hunt. Pick up a camera and join the club from wherever you live.

Moustache Hunting Rules Are Simple

Spot an exceptional or interesting moustache and approach with caution. Then with the aid of a wingperson photographer, position yourself, as the hunter, as close as possible without alerting said moustache to your presence.

For a “Mo shot” to be accepted by the Moustache Hunt Appreciation Society, the moustache must be in plain view with the hunter clearly visible in the photograph. Most important, the subject must not be aware that it is being photographed for its moustache.

The best hunters are able to further enhance shots by posing, which involves placing the index finger across the top lip or simply pointing to the moustache region of the face. Other qualities that can make a mo shot standout are proximity of the hunter to the prey, when the shot also contains a scenic or famous background or when the subject mo is making eye contact with the camera, usually resulting in an hilarious bewildered expression on the part of the mo owner.

I managed to take my first Mo shot on a bus in Zurich. Do I get extra points for bringing my child into the picture?

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

What are the best places in the world for moustache hunting?

Above photo by tyreseus

Le Trung, artificial intelligence engineer and creator of Project Aiko, brought the work of his lifetime home to meet his parents this past Christmas. Aiko speaks two languages fluently, can recognize 250 faces a second and her silicone skin is touch sensitive.

“If you grab or squeeze her too hard,” Trung tells the Daily Mail, “she will try to slap you.”

Imagine the real life implications of a gynoid robot such as Aiko who can be used for airport security, provide home care for the elderly or be your next uber-office assistant.

Then there’s Roxxxy.

She’s the kind of robot girl you don’t take home to mama.

True Companion, founded by ex-Bell Labs AI engineer, boasts real life dolls intended specifically for sex and like forms of companionship. She can talk and play, but she won’t cook or clean like Aiko.

True Companion’s website tells how Roxxxy was inspired by the loss of a friend in the 2001 World Trade Center destruction.

The initial concept for the current sex robot began with a conversation several years ago. A friend and Douglas Hines were remembering a dear friend who passed away. Douglas thought that it was sad to not be able to ever talk to him again. He said “wouldn’t it be great if I could create a robot with artificial intelligence and have it hold someone’s personality and preferences – this way, we could talk to the robotic version of that person and ask it questions whenever we wanted”? We thought it was a great idea though we both agreed that it would be a very big undertaking.

How they began with the desire to speak to an old friend and ended up with a sex doll is another story I suppose. One not told on the website. In fact, the website seems rather devoid of information or photos in general, so I called their 800 number.

What do you see in the crystal ball?

Douglas Hines happened to answer and we chatted about Roxxy and talked science fiction futures of AI.

Hines sees sex as only one small part of Roxxy’s capabilities. She’s a companion, one who knows you, your desires and can talk in addition to being a simple body with “three inputs.”

Photo by striatic

Thus, Roxxy comes in a variety of flavors, a.k.a. personalities. There’s Frigid Farrah, for those who want a bit of a challenge. Wild Wendy. S&M Susan. Young — a definite eyebrow raiser. And Mature Martha. You customize their personalities to your taste, and can even swap personalities with your friends to use on their own dolls. Partner swapping via software.

All rather tempting options for those who may be too shy, maybe embarrassed to experiment with a human partner or those with sexual dysfunction.

Hines and Trung carry us one small step closer to a future in which we find seamless interaction between humans and robots. My imagination runs wild with questions arriving straight from the pages of sci-fi novels and films.

Suddenly ethics and morals involve themselves. If a robot is so real as to perfectly mimic human interaction, then must we treat it as human? What rules should govern relationships between robotics and robotics? And if software is capable of generating new software is that procreation?

Sounds great, right?

Still, something here feels not quite right. Is it the idea of sex or a romantic interpersonal relationship with what is, in essence, a really smart doll, perhaps allowing people to avoid real human interation? Or perhaps we’re somehow uncomfortable with the idea of humans buying something humanoid to be used only for personal enjoyment?

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

What role do you see robots taking in our future? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Feature and lead photo by simminch

Then this earthquake hits Haiti. It’s horrible. Unimaginable, really. We sit at our computers and by our televisions waiting to hear what’s going on, wondering what we can do.

That is when Matador’s own Julie Shwietert Collazo set out to create her own viral media campaign, capitalizing on the ever growing Matador Network. It began with an e-mail to all of us on the Matador team asking for us to tweet the following message.

@JetBlue: If @MatadorNetwork could fill a plane with volunteers, would you fly them to Santo Domingo to help#quake vics in #Haiti?

So we tweeted and retweeted. Then members of the extended Matador Network picked up the mantle. Then they told a few friends, and they told a few friends and so on. JetBlue heard. The media heard. Better yet, hundreds, no thousands of people all over the internet heard and began to respond in e-mails, comments on Matador, gave donations and with contacts and ideas to help further the campaign.

Then Came the Criticism

@mikebarish If we send people to Haiti “more chaos would ensue.” Looking at you @MatadorNetwork. http://bit.ly/8xDix8

The link leads you to an article stating how it is completely misguided to send all those who want to volunteer into Haiti. Untrained volunteers would not only get in the way and, yes, cause chaos, but would be an additional burden to the already hurting country.

Photo by simminch

And I completely agree.

But no one ever said Matador or Julie ever said anything about sending untrained volunteers to Haiti? If only the author of that article had been privy to the internal Matador team updates or bothered to reach out to Julie to address her and Mike Barish’s concerns.

They would have known the following:

1. Priority will be given to volunteers who have demonstrated one or more of these skill sets: French/Creole language fluency; military experience in Port-au-Prince (mainly b/c they know lay of land and have disaster relief experience in the area); and nurses/medical professionals.

2. We do NOT have proposed dates yet. While I want to capture the good energy while it’s fresh, I also will not put anyone in danger by taking them into a place where we have no reliable contacts or information.

3. In addition, Julie’s husband Francisco had been talking with the Haitian consulate in NYC in order to coordinate efforts in a useful, efficient and timely way.

I’d say they had their basis covered.

What do we learn from this?

Social Media is only the beginning.

Twitter is a wonderful way to disseminate basic information. You can reach huge numbers of people with the goal of bringing them together in one place. In this case, the retweeted message brought people to Matador and to Julie’s article on how to help.

Twitter, however, does not provide the full picture and can in many cases, lead to disinformation.

You Must Do The Legwork For Yourself

It’s easy to take the little tidbit you get on Twitter and take it as truth, particularly if it comes from a trustworthy source, but it is crucial you do your own research. Follow any included links and read carefully. Google to find out more information.

Better yet, reach out to the source of information for clarification and solid fact.

Another thing to keep in mind: When crises are unfolding and, in particular, crisis responses are being developed and deployed rapidly, there are many elements of these plans that are occurring behind the scenes which cannot be disclosed. Early disclosure could lead to rumor, misinterpretation or will compromise other partners.

That said, Julie and Matador are happy to address any questions or comments you might have regarding this campaign. You simply need to ask.

Don’t criticize unless you have a solution.

Did Mike Barish’s critical tweet add anything? Did it further aid to Haiti? Did it even help clear up any confusion surrounding the viral campaign?

Not really.

Photo by Gauravonomics

By contrast, State of Place wrote an article providing five constructive criticisms for how to improve the campaign. They did contact Julie with their concerns and learned that everything they mentioned was already under consideration.

Many others contacted Julie with resources, ideas and other information that augmented the campaign as well. Their foresight and insight are well appreciated.

Know Your Source

I don’t know as much about Mike Barish as I do about Julie, so it wasn’t difficult for me to dismiss his criticism.

Julie is trained in crisis intervention and was an emergency counselor for Project Liberty immediately after 9/11 and for more than a year to follow. In addition to a full time job as the assistant director of a social service agency where she had a caseload of 30+ patients, Julie worked evenings as a bilingual therapist with women whose husbands had either been killed in the WTC or whose husbands had essentially been disappeared by Immigration.

I trust her decision making and process ability implicitly.

As she received responses from the viral campaign, she spent hours sifting through over 1,500 emails, meeting with the Consul, airline representatives and communicating with potential partners. She verified every source directly, leaving nothing to hearsay as is crucial for any viral campaign.

So even before knowing the specific details of her campaign, I was sure whatever was happening would be carefully planned.

Collaboration Leads To Better Campaigning

The Matador Network social media influence extended to reach the countless individuals, organizations and businesses. Julie told us in one of her updates that even she was amazed by the scope and reach of the network and the generosity and forethought of network members. Among them Partners In Health. SODA. Richard Branson. The Bresma orphanage in Port au Prince. And a military service man with GPS coordinates on the ground in Haiti.

Photo by simminch

Create Something Permanent For After the Campaign

Julie saw during 9/11 that so many people wanted to help but there was no organized means for them to do so. In creating Matador’s campaign, Julie wanted everyone who read our articles or who found our tweets on Twitter to feel like they had some degree of agency, input, and ability to make a difference beyond simply donating money . Thus, an integral part of Matador’s plan was to create infrastructure for them to contribute, one that will remain standing beyond the immediate needs of the emergency in Haiti.

Yes, it can be messy, but that is the nature of social media, not to mention natural disasters and emergency relief. This viral campaign may not be perfect in all detail, but in the face of untold destruction, perfection is a luxury. If just one life can be saved, one organization receives money or one household drink unpolluted water, then the campaign has been successful.

That said, I’ll only hint to tell you that as things now stand. The final result of that original tweet is far greater than anyone expected as all these separate elements come together in a plan that will provide some relief in this time of crisis.

We’ll let you know through regular social media channels as details unfold. So stay tuned.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

What other elements are important when addressing an emergency through Twitter? Tell us your experiences and thoughts.

Photo by .ygor

Turns out the switch between traveler and expat hit me much harder than I could have expected. Now we have a lease on a house, Lila’s in school, and we have work. We are committed. In some ways, that’s really lovely, something I found myself dearly craving after so long without a place to call home.

Of course, I’ve been so busy trying to settle in, work, get the house cleaned and liveable, find my way around, meet people, and locate doctors for the family. I’m pulled in so many directions I don’t even know where to go first.

Photo by tourist_on_earth

Then there’s my new job at Matador. It’s quite an amazing experience. I’m meeting creative, interesting people, honing my writing skills. I’m learning loads about search engine optimization, writing articles that bring big hits and producing (hopefully) quality pieces in short time. Matador has opened up my writing and teaching career in new wonderful ways. It’s also my first so-called real job since before Lila was born.

Thus my life feels like triage. I run from one line of my to-do list to the next, never quite paying complete attention to anything and never finding time to properly rest. Ironic, I think, given that what I write for Matador is all about finding balance and thriving when you’re not on vacation. On the job training, I suppose.

So Why Is This and What Can We Do?

As I’ve struggled with all this, I’ve come up with four different reasons why life balance — too often happiness as well — eludes us.

We’re searching for something missing in our lives.

This is how I felt when living in NYC. Not at first, mind you. The city challenged me, but after ten years there, I no longer enjoyed the choices I’d made for my life. I felt stuck, angry, uncomfortable. I just wanted to be free.

We spent the last three years searching and have since found ourselves in a wonderful new city, where the people are perhaps the kindest, most helpful and most decent I have ever met. My work is going well. Lila is happy with school and friends. Noah and I have new projects on the horizon, and all seems well.

I have everything I could want, so why so unhappy little bear?

We’re adjusting to something new.

I recently saw Facebook status update from Paulo Coelho saying: Change is part of life. Friction is part of change. Get used to it.

Yes, change is a part of life, and often the good, happy sort takes as much adjustment as the really hard painful kind. Perhaps the key is to simply, as Coelho suggests, accept it. Let it just exist and eventually, friction wears down to comfort again.

We Need Something New

So it stands to reason, that if change is a normal healthy part of life, if you’re not changing, you’re stagnating and thus will feel friction from that as well. Sort of can’t win on the happiness train, can you? Then again, it’s not really so much about winning as it is realizing that life is a cycle of constant movement.

Photo by chrispearson

This is different from my first point in that you can have everything you want in your life, nothing is missing, but you are searching for change. Many times, you simply need to shake things up before going back to your life as it was.

We Always Want More, More, More

You’re thinking of the future and past, what you used to have, what you hope to have. You look at your life, house, career, spouse and friends seeing what isn’t there, what could be, what used to be. Worst of all, when you turn this eye on yourself, the criticism will be the most harsh.

While happiness isn’t something we can expect to have every moment of every day of our lives, at times sadness is necessary, this sort of thinking will leave us permanently dissatisfied. Unless you break away from this cycle, you’ll never find those crucial moments of rest and happiness.

So Where Do I Go From Here?

I sit here at home typing with a gentle breeze blowing through the kitchen, birds of all ilk chirping and still I wonder to why I can’t shake this feeling. I don’t feel myself anymore.

Then I realize, perhaps it is not that I am somehow not myself. Instead, there is a part of me that will always remain off balance until I make the clear choice to shift my thinking.

“How?” you may wonder. Well, first step is recognizing why you feel the way you do. Then you can start making a change.

Community Connection

How do you practice finding balance and happiness? Discover some new tips for adjusting to life in a new home, or learn how some parents keep afloat in a busy world.

Photo by World of Warcraft

Alleged drug dealer Alfred Hightower was finally captured in Canada after successfully running from drug charges for the last two years. How was he caught? His World of Warcraft account.

Authorities came across Hightower’s War of Worldcraft connection while investigating his background and subpoened Blizzard Entertainment for Hightower’s personal records. Blizzard played along, giving up Hightower’s information and location. Voila. Criminal in custody.

This isn’t the first time playing games on the internet has helped law enforcement. Xbox helped track a thief. Playstation lead to the arrest of child pornographers.

What does this say for our privacy general? In order to play these games, we have to give up personal information. That information allows us to be measured, tracked and ultmately found. Of course, no one wants thieves, drug dealers and child pornographers running free, but are we comfortable with the limits placed on companies such as Playstation and Blizzard to protect our information?

Perhaps this story also sheds light on how addicting games of this sort can be? I mean, the guy is willing to leave his family, friends, and the life he’d always known in the United States but he wasn’t willing to give up his online gaming? WoW!

Community Connection

What do you think? Is sharing our personal information a good thing, or an invasion of privacy?

Photo by James Jordan

I write this post from Mitzpeh Yericho, a small religious Jewish settlement on the West Bank of Israel. We’re surrounded by the hills of the Judean desert where Bedouins wander; although these days, they’re less nomadic than in the past.

The wheels of our airplane touched down this morning, and since then, I have not heard a single Happy New Year wish. No one seems to realize it’s new year’s; I suppose mainly because for a majority of people in this country, it’s not.

Photo by dweekly

Who does what and when?

Jews celebrate Rosh Hashana in September. The holiday is also known as Yom Ha-din, or Judgment Day, during which people prepare to be cleansed of a year’s worth of sin. Muslims mark their new year as the first day of Muharram– Gregorian date changes depending on the lunar calendar — and tend more toward fasting and serious contemplation than wild drunken Times Square ball dropping.

Then let’s not forget Chinese New Year. This year, February 14, 2010 begins the year of the Tiger. And Persian New Year, which I can never forget, because it’s the same day as my birthday and the first day of spring.

Really, it would be fair to say that more of the planet doesn’t recognize January 1rst as new years as does.

If not now when?

Im lo achshav, u’matai, the Hebrew for “If Not Now When” was originally spoken by Hillel, ancient Jewish philosopher. It reminds us to act now, do things now because you may not have another chance. In which case, yes, let’s all take this particular New Year’s event to think back on the last year to see where we have traveled. Then think forward to the following year and imagine the next destination.

Photo by Zahrasyed

Then there’s the other famous adage by Hillel:. “If I am not for myself, who will be for me. If I am only for myself, what am i?” Taken together, they show us how every day, every moment we should support ourselves, make sure we have what we need in order to be healthy, happy and strong. Yet at the same time, we must remember there is a reciprocity of giving. That the each person on this planet, whether Chinese, Persian, Canadian or Chilean, has wants and needs, and that just because a person is a stranger living on the other side of the planet, doesn’t mean it’s ok to always put personal need first.

What was and what’s next for all of us and for Matador Life?

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all Matadorians for your thoughts, input and advice since I became editor here at Matador Life. It’s been a busy and challenging few months for me, and I’ve learned a lot. I’ve also enjoyed getting to know many of you in the travel community through blog posts and your comments on our articles. Keep writing. I love it!

Finally, I wish you all a new year full of love, luck and happiness. Happy new year, whenever you so choose your year to begin.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

Where have we been and where are we going?

Leave your thoughts in comments on your own growth or how you’d like to see Matador Life grow and change over the next year.

Photo by Lisa_at_home2002

I’ve had my share of screaming family arguments. They leave me feeling hurt, angry, horribly unbalanced and almost never lead to anything positive. There’s been quite a bit of trial and error, but these are the things that help me remain calm and collected during sometimes difficult family time.

If you know who someone is, then you know what to expect from them.

It could be a constant stream of questions. Or maybe it’s the look your mom gets on her face when she sees your new haircut. Or how your brother starts every freakin’ sentence with “You really should…” Or any of the other fun family stereotypes that drive us batty.

You feel put on the spot, completely misunderstood and unheard because, quite frankly, you don’t ever intend on marrying some nice boy or “settling down” in the way they think you should.

Don’t let it hook you. Yes, easier said than done, but when you know a question is coming, why allow it to make you angry? Prepare for it instead. Have a joke ready in response. Stuff a roll in your mouth. Or just smile hugely, lean in and give your inquisitor an enormous hug.

The trick is in knowing you have no obligation to respond unless you really want. If you do choose to respond, here are some tips to avoid saying something you’ll ultimately regret..

Photo by Computerjoe

Don’t drink or do drugs if you know they have a negative impact on your emotions and behavior.

Pretty simple, actually. If your inhibitions will be lowered, leaving you more likely to get into an argument, don’t imbibe. You can always meet up with your favorite cousin later and discuss over a drink how grandma detailed every moment of her last bowel movement while serving the roasted potatoes with brown sauce. Yum!

Don’t expect more from people than is fair to expect.

Relationships go in phases, and you will not get along with everyone all the time. Some family members are simply different than you. You don’t see the world in the same way, and thus, you don’t get why your aunt prefers to live in an elaborate apartment in New York City while she may never understand your desire to travel through the Mekong Delta with only a backpack and shoes.

Accept it with grace and ease and talk about the things you have in common. I find children seem to be a binding point for many. They can distract you with their games, and two adults who disagree on everything can usually find something they both love about the smallest members of the family.

Make time to take care of yourself.

Do you need occasional time alone? Would you prefer your deeply offensive uncle stay far away? Are you vegetarian? Make a list of the things you most need in order to feel sane and comfortable.

Photo by Lefthand

Of course, there’s a fine line between addressing your needs and being flat out needy, so perhaps choose your top three and work toward making them a reality.

At first, family may be offended, but over time, I promise they’ll get used to it if they’re rational and see that you’re making an effort to be part of the group in other ways. If they’re not rational, there’s no point in rearranging your life and behavior to accommodate someone who will likely never be pleased.

Pick your battles very wisely

Sometimes we want things our own way because we’re feeling pressured, disrespected or unheard. While these may all be good reasons to stand up for yourself, you have to decide whether the family Christmas dinner or New Year’s party is the best time to address them.

Fight only for what you need to take care of yourself, not for what you think should be or what you believe is fair. Fair tends to lose meaning, anyway, when faced with so many personalities, desires and personal philosophies.

If you do fight, do so with humor and sensitivity.

Don’t approach anyone in the throes of anger. Instead, take some time to compose yourself, focus on which issues are most important to you, then address those things directly. State them as a reflection of your feelings and experience, not as an accusation.

Example: It makes me uncomfortable when you make racist comments in front of my African girlfriend.

If your family member makes excuses, don’t get sucked into an attempt to justify yourself. Just repeat, I hear what you’re saying, but it makes me uncomfortable when you make racist comments in front of my girlfriend.

It isn’t easy to remain calm and friendly while restating the same thing like a broken record, but you’ll be surprised at how well this works.

Don’t discuss past details, either.

Details tend to lead to more details and pointless discussion. Next thing you know, you’re screaming about five years ago when Uncle Phil trotted out his travel tidbit of how Brazil is beautiful, if only there weren’t so many brown people it. Yes, Uncle Phil is a schmuck, but it’s not going to address your situation sitting at the dinner table in the here and now.

Walk away if you feel you’re not getting the response you want or feel yourself getting angry.

Everyone Loses It Sometimes

It’s not an inexcusable character flaw to make a mistake. Calm down. Try again or don’t. Take time alone. Or choose another way to disconnect from the drama.

Photo by Symic

Remember, losing your temper is not the end of the world, no matter what anyone else says about it, and no one is exempt from slipping up.

All in all, it’s important to see each visit as its own entity. No matter how much history, practice or experience you have with a person, what happens during one visit exists as a distinct event from anything else that has ever happened in your life and times with your family member. Each family event is just one opportunity to add a bead to the string of positive experiences.

Then, you go back to your own life.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

How do you cope with family stress over the holidays? Share your insights and experience in the comments.

Screen capture of Men With Pens website logo. Feature photo by Brocco Lee.

Oh, poor, James, um, Jamie, you couldn’t get a job as a woman so you became a man. Oh, I totally understand. Of course, you’re in your late 30s. It was so much harder for us women to find work and support our children way back in the 1990s. Of course there weren’t any women in the workforce making their way back then. James, you poor thing. You’re so right. I’m sure Simone de Beauviour would agree, too.

This fills me with righteous indignation

It’s like watching Betty Draper told that even though her husband is cheating she better stay with him because basically as a woman she has no rights at all in a divorce. Or how women weren’t allowed to vote.

Photo by Mckaysavage

If only someone had thought to address these issues of discrimination against women at some point in history so that woman could begin to achieve the same things as men.

Life can be so unfair when you have a vagina.

Is this just a deliciously ironic mistake in copy?

The Washington City Paper says this goes far beyond a simple constructed masculinity in order to make a living. That, too, was my first thought when I saw the Men with Penises web page. I went, saw the deep gray brick walls and that phallus-shaped object shooting through the logo. I thought to myself, what is that? Is it a bullet? Is that supposed to be a pen? What?

This morning, I check the Men With Pens website again to see a new article titled Taylor’s a Feminist — But So Is James with authorship attributed to James. I tried to read the author profile, though, but was led to a blank page. (I assume this will change later today, though.) Bulls-eye of success, indeed!

Luckily, we women are easy to manipulate and confuse.

What also strikes me is that Taylor-James begins the article with the ever provocative statement of “Feminism is starting to piss me off.”

I can’t imagine what effect that was supposed to have on readers. Certainly not anything cheap or tawdry like garnering our attention right from the beginning, roiling us up in a fine feminist frenzy against James or Taylor or whatever man with a pen is doing the writing.

Photo by Quinn.Anya

Then we find we are mistaken. Turned around, shaken up in our silly stuck ways of thinking when we find out this James is a woman. A woman who luckily, for the sake of her career, was given the ambiguously gendered name Taylor.

This female Taylor-James says she has kept the other-James’ secret, that she understands that all those years ago, it was so much harder for a woman to make her way in the world alone. She understands why the-other-James had to slop on a detachable penis and pretend.

Does this sound fishy to you too?

The original copyblogger article has almost 2000 tweets and 500 comments. And how high do you think the Men with Pens website has jumped in unique page views since the original article published? It has sparked discussion all over the internet, and who knows how far it will go. Today Show? The View? Maybe even Oprah?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, this 37-year-old woman who makes a living writing must head off and make breakfast for my daughter, and then maybe I’ll go get some chocolate to calm myself down a bit.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

I recently wrote an article for my blog asking why it’s so difficult to find balance and happiness in life. That post was born out of my own frustrations trying to juggle all the disparate elements of my own existence. Too often, I feel like I’m running to catch up, and too rarely am I able to relax and reflect.

“How do others manage?” I wondered, and thus, the inspiration for this photo essay was born. I immediately began contacting other families and parents I know through Twitter. Some are traveling full time. Others are well respected writers. Others are business entrepreneurs, chefs and teachers.

I’ll admit, I half expected to hear pithy, cliche aphorisms about how you too can manage your life if only you follow these clear simple instructions. What I found instead was true, solid insight and advice that brings perspective and perhaps the acceptance we need to find order in our chaotic schedules. Not just for parents, but for anyone seeking harmony between the many parts of our lives.

1. The Vogels — @familyonbikes — can be seen stopping on the Panamerican Highway in southern Colombia. Nancy and John gave up their jobs teaching to travel the length of the Americas by bike while homeschooling their two boys. You can read more about their travels at their website Family On Bikes.

THEIR TIP FOR BALANCE: When you live a simplified life on the road, balance comes naturally. We wake up. We pack the bikes. We ride. We eat. We sleep.

2. Christopher Elliott — @elliottdotorg — is National Geographic Traveler magazine’s reader advocate and writes the syndicated column The Travel Troubleshooter.

HIS THOUGHTS ON BALANCE: Balance? What’s that? In an always-on world with its 24/7 news cycle, I’ll settle for staying afloat.

But if you want to try to find balance — not saying you will, but you can try — you have to block off the time and announce your plans to the entire family: “We’re going to SeaWorld on Saturday! We’ll ride one of those pink Flamingo boats out on the lake!”

Then, if something comes up and you try to back out, they’ll put you on a guilt trip that makes the terrifying Kraken rollercoaster on the far side of the park seem like Disneyworld’s It’s A Small World.

Word to the wise: Don’t disappoint a two-year-old. Or her brothers. Ah, balance.

3. Paul Sullivan — @paulosullivano — is a writer, author and photographer specializing in music, culture and travel. He lives in Berlin with his girlfriend and 20-month-old son. You can read more about Paul on his website. He is also a contributing editor and Matador Network’s editor-at-large.

PAUL’S TIP FOR BALANCE: Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.

4. Julie Schwietert — @collazoprojects — blogs about parenthood at www.9mos.wordpress.com and about the writing life at www.cuadernoinedito.wordpress.com. She’s a new mom and the managing editor of Matador. Here she is at the airport. Mom, kid, dog and luggage. What more do you need?

JULIE’S THOUGHTS ON BALANCE: Balance? Muah huah huah!

No, seriously. I’m pretty sure I’m never going to feel like I’ve achieved balance (there’s too much I want to do to fit into one life), so I try hard not to pursue balance as a goal.

I do that by not setting rigid rules for myself or my family. For example, I just read about someone who has a rule about turning off the computer at 8 PM. That’s nice, and I’m glad it works for them, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it works for me (especially because I work with people in different time zones) or that I have to adopt that as a rule in my own life. I also quit trying to impose impossible expectations upon myself. I just do the best I can.

Oh, and one more thing: I have an extraordinary husband who handles all the dirty details of life: eating, cleaning, laundry, and the like. That’s the real secret!

5. Jenna Park — @whimsyandspice — has been working as an art director and designer for over 13 years. She and her husband Mark run a Brooklyn confectionary called Whimsy & Spice that was founded in 2008. You can catch them daily on their blog, sweet fine day, which chronicles culinary, family and New York City life.

Read on to the next photo for Jenna and Mark’s ideas on how to maintain balance in family life.

6. Mark Sopchak — the other half of Whimsy & Spice –has been working as a pastry chef in the NYC restaurant industry for over 12 years.

HOW JENNA AND MARK KEEP THEIR BALANCE: How do we find balance between our working life and family life?

After nearly 6 years as working parents, first with a freelance business and jobs, and now with our own confectionary business added to the mix, we are still trying to figure it out. 1 kid became 2, and with each age comes its own challenges and needs. You feel like you figured out how to handle the 2s, but then they turn 3 and turn your world upside down, and so on.

I think the key for us has always been to just go with the flow and take each day’s challenges one by one. As business owners, there are no boundaries between home and work life – one often flows into the other at all hours of the day, so we’ve stopped fighting it and let our lives become what it is.

Some days have better balance than others, but we always make time to drop and pick up the kids from school, eat dinner together as a family and spend some quality time with the kids a good few hours each day.

7. Lea Woodward — @leawoodward — lives a location independent life and founded the Location Independent Network to help others manage successful careers while traveling. This photo shows her working hard on her balcony in Dubai. She just left Dubai to spend a few months in Thailand.

All the while, Lea continues running her online businesses with her husband Jonathan. She has just launched a new site with parents specifically in mind, www.LocationIndependentParents.com.

8. Even with her busy travel and work schedule, Lea makes time to play with her daughter.

LEA’S TIP FOR FINDING BALANCE: Finding balance is an interesting one.I’ve found recently that it just requires making the decision to balance whatever is out of balance and then doing it…and then seeing what the consequences are and living with them. Not always easy but sometimes necessary.

9. Debbie Dubrow — @deliciousbaby — created and runs Delicious Baby, a website dedicated to making travel with kids fun. If that wasn’t enough, Debbie is also one of those responsible for Passports With Purpose, a raffle fund-raiser currently working toward building a school in Cambodia, complete with clean water, vegetable garden and a school nurse.

In this photo, she enjoys family time with her kids at a Seattle Storm game..

DEBBIE’S ADVICE FOR CREATING BALANCE: I don’t know any parent who has an easy time balancing the different areas of their life. Instead I try to focus on making sure that I spend the bulk of my time doing things that I either truly enjoy or that contribute to my goals.

When one area starts to take over too much, I sit down with my schedule and figure out how to rearrange things and where to cut back.

10. Jamie Pearson — @travelsavvymom — was in Belgium in a hotel dining room when her then 3-year-old daughter threw up. In the mortifying moments that followed, she caught the vomit in her cupped hand, called to the waiter for help, and was (eventually) handed a single paper napkin.

Most parents can relate to such a situation, and if they can’t, they will eventually. Thus the idea for her website Travel Savvy Mom hatched, and she went about creating a website where parents can find kid-and-family friendly hotels worldwide.

JAMIE’S WORDS OF ADVICE: When I was growing up my mother often told me that I could be anything and everything I wanted, just not all at the same time. This is the best advice I ever got.

In addition, she has three points for all traveling parents: 1) Never leave home without peanut butter, 2) No child is too big for a stroller, and 3) Bring plenty of new toys—$50 for three pounds of plastic crap will seem like the deal of the century at 3am in a London hotel.

11. Allison Nazarian — @AllisonNazarian — is a well-known writer, author (OneMinuteCopywriter.com) and consultant who lives in Boca Raton, Florida, with her son, daughter and Black Lab. Read Allison’s truth at www.AllisonNazarian.com.

WHAT ALLISON SAYS ABOUT FINDING BALANCE: I first became a Mom 12 years ago this month. I was and still am what you might call a Control-Freak-Type-A-OverAchiever (I’m in Recovery). I thrive on order and organization and things that are smooth and predictable and controllable. So when my first child was born, you can only imagine my utter inability to make heads or tails of my life. I was overwhelmed and definitely not in control. I was a mess!

I went on to spend years judging myself and my mothering abilities. I was never good enough. Or I worked too much. Or I was not involved in school enough. Or I should have made more nutritious dinners and snacks. Or I should have spent more/less time helping with homework. Or I made a mistake in “forcing” one or the other to do a project themselves instead of taking the easier route and doing it for them (happens all the time … Parents, you know who you are!).

Until, finally, somehow, I realized I was already good enough. I just stopped the constant attack. I was already everything they needed. Even though I make mistakes or curse in front of them or get fast food more than I should or tell them they are on their own with the math homework, I am a great Mom. Just this year, I became a single Mom. My kids’ Dad and I are great friends and great parents together. Being married does not a great parent make, and I resisted my natural urge all year long to feel any guilt or beat myself up over the divorce. We are still a family and always will be. And in the end, the constant quest for balance is more the same than different.

So I am human and messy and imperfect. And I bet you are, too. Yet I am an awesome Mom. And I bet you are, too.

12. Leigh Shulman (that’s me!) – @thefutureisred — spent the last three years traveling with my husband and daughter. In this photo, we went horseback riding in Cafayate, Argentina. It was a five hour ride, and Lila chatted happily away the entire time. You can read more about our travels on my blog The Future Is Red.

MY TIP FOR ACHIEVING BALANCE: I’ve come to the realization that no matter what, there will always be something more, something else, something different. Worry doesn’t help. It only makes you less likely to enjoy the moment.

Aside from that, the best advice I ever got about parenting also relates well to finding balance and in many ways ties in many of the ideas and thoughts of these other parents. Try something. If it doesn’t work, try something else.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

Food As Porn

Photo by Shannalee T’koy. Feature by Theilr

Not since Georgia O’Keefe has one woman made inanimate objects seem quite so sensuous and alive. Shanalee T’Koy of Food Loves Writing fills her blog with soft, warm, tasty photos of fruit, bakery buns, brunches and the people who lust after them.

In spite of her fantasy-provoking and mouth watering photography, Shanalee’s writing and recipe style is down-to-earth and easy. She makes you feel like you’d just love to sit down over a plate of blueberry waffles and spill all your dirty details.

Food As Frugal Philosophy

Daniel Koontz’ Casual Kitchen is about cooking more, thinking more and spending less. There, Daniel presents easy to make, healthy and unique recipes that work easily within a budget while simultaneously offering thought-provoking food related philosophy links around the web.

First, brush up on Daniel’s glossary of Casual Kitchen memes before diving into discussions of ways to help the environment from your kitchen or new ways to think about rising food costs.

Food As Fashion and Art

Luxiraire, without a doubt, presents the most jaw-dropping and awe-inspiring creations I’ve ever seen.

Photo by Sean McGrath

The most difficult avocado recipe ever first caught my eye. Then I became distracted by a parfait. I’m not usually much for parfaits, not to mention finding the word silly, but Luxirare’s method of creating solid caviar-like bubbles out of a juice to use as a layer in the dessert simply won me over.

Food As Culture

Laylita grew up in Vilcabamba-Loja, Ecuador. Her recipes have been inspired by her mother’s New Mexico cooking, the Ecuadorian market food stalls and street snack carts and from the food she ate made by her Texas grandmother.

I found Laylita’s website while searching for a good humita recipe. Humitas are fresh corn cakes served traditionally throughout Argentina, Peru and Ecuador. The corn is ground, cheese added and then wrapped in corn husks and steamed. They can be made dulce or salada, sweet or savory.

Food As Obscenity

The food creations on This Is Why You’re Fat will make your stomach turn and churn, yet you won’t be able to look away. In fact, don’t be surprised if you find yourself marveling in disgust at photo after photo of the most horrendous, artery clogging, sickening food combinations you’ve ever seen.

Photo by Alexik

Ok, maybe the Oreo S’more doesn’t look so bad, but the bacon maple hot dog drizzled with chocolate sauce?

Or how about the infamous Widowmaker? Any food that begins with 1.5 pounds of ground beef, continues to a whole package of bacon and not one, but TWO entire packaged pepperoni pizzas has got to be worth a mention.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

Have you made or eaten anything spectacular, disgusting or amazing? Share your favorite recipes and websites in the comments below.

For some of our own Matador food porn, be sure to take a peek at our tasteful beefy centerfolds or read our guide to seven decadent New Orleans desserts.

Feature by MiiiSH. Above by enfad

I remember sitting there, waiting for the instructor to begin my first yoga class. I wasn’t sure what to expect, was apprehensive about whether or not I’d be able to physically complete the poses — called asanas — and wondered if my body could handle it.

Now, almost twenty years later, I realize my concerns were for nothing. In fact, yoga teaches you how to feel discomfort, walk into situations where you don’t know what you’re doing and how to move your way through life with greater ease. This is what I’ve learned.

All Bodies Are Beautiful

Have you ever taken an Ashtanga class? I don’t mean ashtanga-based, but the real deal hard core ashtanga series.

It’s non-stop movement from asana to asana, and each pose requires lots of jumping, lifting, extreme balance and strength.

As you make your way through this grueling class, you find yourself marveling at how the bodies in the room move. You stop judging, noticing extra flesh or worrying what other people think and instead start to find extra space in your joints and marvel at the strength in your muscles. When you walk out, you will literally feel a greater confidence in the way you feel, stand and are.

Sometimes You Fall On Your Ass

Everyone looks ridiculous at some point while in yoga class, and chances are, you’ll end up falling many, many times. Try tree pose, crow pose or peacock, all of which ask you to balance precariously on some body part or another. In the same way, you’ll make mistakes at work, yell needlessly at your partner and forget to pay your health insurance bill.

Photo by Lululemon

It’s going to happens sometimes, maybe often, and the sooner you get used to it, learn how to laugh through it, the happier you’ll be.

You Can’t Do Everything

Fifteen years of practice, and I still cannot do a full back bend from standing. I’ve tried, I’ve done preparatory stretches to make my back more limber. I’ve tried abdominal strengthening postures to develop the necessary strength. Yet it still hasn’t happened for me.

I know one day I will eventually do it, but even so, there will be another pose, something else I won’t be able to complete. Yoga always presents you with another challenge.

You Achieve Your Goals Faster When You Don’t Force Things

We live in a world where we’re supposed to struggle and constantly move forward, but sometimes it’s better to just let your mind and body rest.

Try a seated forward bending pose. You sit legs straight in front of you and reach gently toward your toes until you feel the stretch. Now, if you attempt to make your body move more deeply into the pose by pushing and straining, you’re more likely to hurt yourself or get discouraged than reach past your ankles.

Instead, just sit in one place and breath for a slow count of twenty. I promise, by the time you reach your final number, you will be reaching more deeply than when you began. Often, farther than you thought you could go.

Consistent Practice Is More Important Than the End Goal

You’ve probably noticed I refer to yoga as a practice.

Photo by Axel Buhrmann

That’s because it’s meant to be something you do every day. Same applies to your life. Are you frustrated with your boss? Do you wish you didn’t watch so much TV at night? Would you like to take a dance class, but don’t know when, where or how?

Do just a bit today and again tomorrow, and you’ll find the effects cumulative. Over time, you stand a little taller, breath a little deeper and perhaps face the rest of your life with more confidence. You realize you have no where in particular to go, you’re already exactly where you are and need to be.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

Share with us the lessons and benefits you’ve found in your yoga practice. Or if you don’t yet have one and would like to, search for the perfect yoga retreat or begin a vipassana meditation practice. In the meantime, here’s some great advice from Christine Garvin to help you survive the holidays with a little extra calm.

The children of Krang Yaw welcome us to their village in Cambodia. Photo by Matador editor Lola Akinmade

I’ve had my share of those lovely slices of solitude walking the coast in Cinque Terre or the beach in Panama where the only others awake are fishermen. Usually, I’ve dragged myself out of bed early so I can greet the foreign sun with morning yoga.

Waking up early at home, though, doesn’t always bring the same sense of peace and rejuvenation, mainly because home is the place where you do things. Opening your eyes early only brings you more quickly to piles of dishes, mounds of laundry and any of the other things on your endless to do list.

The times I get up first to do yoga, it’s rarely to greet a gorgeous sunrise on a watery horizon. More likely, it’s the sun peeking through the window, sometimes past bars, and I have to push aside toys, clothes and any other number of things to make room for my mat.

Yes, life takes up a lot of space, so how does one clear it out in order to find the rest we need in order to feel truly alive.

Keep A List Of All Your Favorite Things

I keep a list of mine in the memo pad of my Blackberry. There,

Photo by Fabbio

I note down all those details that stick out in my mind. They can be major events, like the birth of a child or a wedding. Or they can be minor, like trampoline jumping somewhere in the South of France. Feeding leftover bread to the ducks and geese after a picnic. Or staying out all night dancing with Couchsurfers in Bocas del Toro. Over the years, I have literally hundreds of little moments tucked away. I turn to them when I need a break, a smile and a little window to somewhere else.

That’s when I turned to the other Matador team members to hear some of their favorite moments, moments of quiet, joy, even of fear an loneliness. These are the times that give us pause, allow us to close our eyes travel to another place, time or event even for just a few seconds where we simply exist. Then bring what you find there back to the present.

Call it meditation, call it nostalgia, better yet, don’t give it a name at all. Just breathe in and enjoy what you find.

1. Slowly, slowly, you will climb the mountain.
2. Feel the fear as you come close to the edge.
3. Reading Festival, opening day before the crowd arrives.
4. This is how we are patriotic!
5. Who can resist the sunset? (Especially from a van!)
6. The little things in life.
7. I sip my vanilla ice blend, sitting in a comfortable 70 degrees with my nice shoes on
8. Learning how to let go.
9. Experience the glory of the giant redwood.
10. The boatman wore a crooked smile.
11. Reflections on a first meditation retreat

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

We hope you’ve enjoyed this little peek into our brains and the events that make our lives special. Now share some of yours with us in comments below or begin a blog of your own in Matador’s own travel community..

Feature photo bymatzukawa1971. Above photo by mandiberg

I’m a total wordophile. Love word play, puns, love neologizing when the occasion permits – and it’s surprising how often it does.

So when I saw Oxford University Press’ latest blog post announcing their new word of the year, I was sucked in like Augustus Gloop up a glass chocolate pipe.

Yes, the word is out. Oxford University Press cites its New Word of 2009 as… drum roll please….

Unfriend.

As in, I no longer want to be connected with you on any one of many social networking sites, but most specifically, Facebook.

The History of Dictionary

Samuel Johnson – scholar, literary critic and translator — wrote the very first dictionary. In spite of criticisms of him as an idiot from time to time, his dictionary stood as the foremost authority on the English language until the Oxford English Dictionary was published one hundred and fifty years later.

Alas, the ever changing nature of the English language drove him to distraction. No sooner could he capture a word on paper, the meaning, sense and usage would change. The English Language became his white whale — an allusion to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick — his never ending journey, and can in many ways be blamed for the depression and mental illness that plagued Samuel Johnson until his dying day.

Photo by glitter feet

Today Language Evolves With Much More Immediacy

I wonder what Samuel Johnson would do today with the internet, where you can literally watch language develop.

September 2008, Saturday Night Live put together a skit of a press conference with Sarah Palin and Hilary Clinton. It was fabulous. That night, I heard the word FLIRJ for the first time.

I immediately went online to research further, excited to learn more of this word I’d never before heard. And I thought I’d knew it all, in part due to my rather scholarly background in Literature and Creative writing, but mostly owing to the hours I’ve spent browsing certain sections of Craigslist then cross-referencing with Urban Dictionary.

Yes, my ever favorite Urban Dictionary. Where anyone can enter a word and definition which are then given thumbs up or thumbs down by anyone else who happens by. There you can find any word you could possibly want along with no fewer than three definitions.

FLIRJ was not there.

Wouldn’t you know, though, the next day it appears.

A Comparison Between The Erudite and the Troglodytic

I decided to compare other words from the OED to the UD to see what’s what.

HASHTAG
OED says” a # [hash] sign added to a word or phrase that enables Twitter users to search for tweets (postings on the Twitter site) that contain similarly tagged items and view thematic sets.”

UD says “its a tag used to talk about an especif [sic] subject on twitter. Once all the users use it, it gets a lot easier to search subjects at the Twitter search.”

TEABAGGER
OED says “a person, who protests President Obama’s tax policies and stimulus package, often through local demonstrations known as “Tea Party” protests (in allusion to the Boston Tea Party of 1773)”

UD cites multiple meanings “1) one who carries large bags of packaged tea for shipment. 2) [ed.note: we all know what this one is. if not, please look it up yourself.] 3) one who has a job or talent that is low in social status 4) a person who is unaware that they have said or done something foolish, childlike, noobish, lame, or inconvenient.

FLIRJ, however, still has yet to enter the venerable OED.

Other Resources For Building A Stronger Vocabulary and Improving Your Knowledge Base

Thesaurus.com helps me find words like troglodytic, erudite and the like, then allows me to switch into Dictionary.com with one click so I can look up words I don’t know.

Ambrose Bierce, traveler and journalist, compiled his ever snarky – a word that certainly didn’t exist in his day and probably would have pissed him off if it had – The Devil’s Dictionary.

This includes definitions such as:

DICTIONARY:
A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.

Once you’ve compiled your entire list of new, modified and self-generated words, you can compile them to create your very own dictionary in Word.

Then check into Mental Floss Magazine for a wealth of wordie – lover of words – articles such as The Nautical Roots of Nine Common phrases or Nine Tasty Foods Named After People.

Yes, we’ve come a long way since the days of Samuel Johnson and his white whale, a phrase I might add that is also included in Urban Dictionary. Although I’m sure Johnson never gave a moment’s thought to what it might mean to be moby-dicked.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

Do you have a favorite new word or silly online source for the same? Let us know in comments.

When you’re finished exploring words and fun facts, it’s time for you to start writing. Start your own blog in Matador’s Travel community. Want some inspiration first? Check out 15 Punk Rock Travel Narratives or school yourself at MatadorU and learn the tips, trades and secrets of the best travel writers in the business.

Feature photo by playerx. Above photo by Sue Waters

Dear William Bradley,

I just read your Huffington Post blog about the Trouble With Twitter. When I tried to post a response, though, I found comments had been closed, so I’m writing to you here instead.

Let me begin by saying I completely agree with you.

Yes, Twitter is a method for deeply self absorbed people to give you too short bits of information that you never really needed. Then while the inanity and insanity stream by you at a breakneck pace, your head fills with tidbits of factoids and marginal information that all run together into a big blur until BOOM! Your head explodes.

Let me then continue by saying, I completely disagree with you.

I, too, have been a technology geek for as long as I can remember. I designed my first website well over a decade ago, chatted on IRC long before AOL cottoned onto the instant message and even programmed my very own “Hello World” in C — although I am somewhat embarrassed to admit this last one.

I never watched Max Headroom, but I did read a lot of William Gibson, and let me tell you, Johnny Mnemonic is my hero. Do I want to run around town, carrying unimaginably vast stores of information in my head? Do I dream of hooking into a virtual world that is in many ways indistinguishable from the so-called real world?

Hot diggity-dog-damn I do! Even if it means my head might explode,

You cite a number of issues with Twitter.

It lacks context and the medium is simply too short, you say. You don’t have enough room to create the context you need to send the message you want.

Good lord, I’d hate Twitter if people could drone on and on as so often happens in comments and blog posts. At least Twitter allows me to take just one bite of whatever a Twitterer has to offer, go back for more if I so desire. Or spit it out.

I also very much enjoy the challenge of creating both context and meaning in such a short space. As a life long writer, I find it hones the craft in a way only writing poetry in form can do. Seriously, try writing a Petrarchan sonnet. When you’re forced to make your words fill a very particular space with a very particular rhythm, you quickly learn not to waste words. By extension, you don’t waste your reader’s time.

You call Twitter inane. Yes, it most definitely can be, but we, as followers can choose to ignore. Twitter quickly teaches that you’re never going to absorb every single Tweet, so why even try? You just let go and accept that you get what you get. Most times, I find that even after a short time on Twitter, even if I’ve only followed a few links or read a couple of quotes, I’ve learned something worthwhile. Those who don’t have something of value to offer, I unfollow.

Photo by Doug Curran

You accuse twitter of driving the current themes of inundation, fragmentation and ADHD so ubiquitous in our culture. But does Twitter drive these things or simply reflect them? Glut of information is part and parcel of our world now, and has been for some time. We’re deeply into the post-MTV generation where we don’t invest time in thought provoking movies, develop film or read books anymore. Instead, we watch music videos that allude to old films, revel in digital photography and buy the graphic novel instead.

Is that innately wrong? Or is it simply the natural course of things?

That’s how I see Twitter. It’s a new medium for a new world. People think differently, see differently, and Twitter is our training ground. It’s cyberpunk-lite, and we are just beginning to see what the medium can do.

Are there people who abuse Twitter?

Sadly, yes, far too many of them, but you can’t blame Twitter for those people.

Twitter, like Facebook and other social media networks, is a hammer, a tool to be used for many purposes. It can be inspirational, motivational and creative. You can write haikus or novels, send in your coffee order and have it ready to pick up as you swing by on the way to work. You can raise money or awareness for a charity.

Myself, I’ve found among other things wonderful community, both work and friendship, through Twitter, without which, this very post would not have been possible.

But it’s still a hammer. If someone so stupidly decides to take his hammer and bash it repeatedly over his neighbor’s head, you don’t go blaming the hammer.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

When I first saw this video on YouTube, I thought so what? Then I began reading through the long list of comments to see what people had to say. Some made me smile. Others made me raise an eyebrow or two. Others questioned the war and then were attacked for doing so.

As I read on, though, I found a small window into the life of Lt Schmidt, his wife and his dog extending beyond these few minutes, spanning years to tell the true story of what it means to both go to war and then come home.

Truckdrivah:
OMG I am crying. Truly, dogs (or bitches) are a man’s best friend.

Debby429:
He is your friend, your partner, your defender, your dog. You are his life, his love, his leader. He will be yours, faithful and true, to the last beat of his heart. You owe it to him to be worthy of such devotion.

5293278363:
Semper Fi – (do) !

Ltschmidt02:
Gracie is half golden retriever/ half corgi. We saved her from the pound in 2004. She’s sitting at my feet as I type this, begging for cheese and crackers.

Princess8788:
LOL when my husband came back from Iraq the second time. He got out of the truck and his dog launched herself from the ground straight into his arms.

Ltschmidt02:
Gracie is still doing great … she is a hell of a good friend. She is six now and still gets a ton of attention even now that my wife and I have a young son.

Doglover1:
Therefore by the grace of God, goes Dog.

LtSchmidt02:
There are tens of thousands of combat arms soldiers and Marines on their third+ 12 month deployment down range; I’m only gearing up for my second. I don’t want to be made a symbol for something that I don’t deserve to be. You have to be careful, because you have no control when you go on TV unless you are very, very savvy (I am not). Or you get crazy and end up building a UFO weather balloon in your back yard.

Now I have to go change a diaper, then walk Gracie.

sleepyrodent:
I’m sorry if all the attention this clip has received is getting a little overwhelming (I think I’d be a little intimidated too!). It’s really selfless of you to sacrifice a bit of your privacy to make so many people happy with this slice of your life. It gives hope to those of us with loved ones over there that we’ll get to have such a happy reunion.

colodomom:
My husband is a prior enlisted Captain in the Air Force who did some time in Afghanistan.You’re right, the guys deployed for a year or more are heros and so are their wives. I think I know why your video has become so popular. People are aching for a good story. We’ve heard lots of sad stories, lots of heroic stories, but I think people are looking for a simple, happy story. Thanks to you and your family for giving that to us. Best wishes and stay safe.

Ltschmidt02:
I have been activated again. Bummer. I am going back to Afghanistan soon for six months. Maybe there will be another video of Grace and me in 2011.

Because you never appreciate how much you love home as when you know you’re leaving.

We look forward to your next homecoming video, Ltschmidt02. This next one will be even sweeter, and perhaps more private, as you’re greeted by your wife, child and, of course, Grace.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

Why do you think people have had such a strong reaction to this video? And should we perhaps leave him alone now?

Feature photo by Breathindigital. Above photo by Tambako

According to statistics provided by the dating website Beautiful People – where you must be rated by other members and found attractive enough to join – the British are uglier than pretty much anyone else on the planet.

Yes, the Polish, Russians and Germans seem to give the British a run for their money, but British topped the pops as not only being dipped in a bath of fug, they are truly beyond repulsive. A whopping 85% percent of British women and 90% of British men were rejected by members of the opposite sex for inclusion in the dating pool.

Even the British seem to agree.

Says RickyBee in a comment to a similar story on TVNZ:

We’re mostly heinous. It’s a combination of things: our miserable faces, horrific school food, the weather, an addiction to out of town shopping malls, scraped up dog-burgers, chips, litres of coke, complaining, a big streak of nastiness and stupid hair”

Or as Matador’s resident Brit Paul Sullivan says, “I am a dirty minger.”

Leave it to the British to come up with a word for ugly that comes from the Gaelic word for septic vagina.

Binge Drinking A Recurring Problem

Looking more deeply into the problem, it may also have to do with the massive binge drinking the British have so desperately tried to eradicate in recent years by closing pubs early or banning loud music

Not simply because of the toll consistent binge drinking takes on the body or the many nights spent face down in a ditch, but because Britain is a country with a permanent case of beer goggles. There’s no real need for Britons to spruce up their appearance in order to, as we Americans like to say, get some.

How Can You Be One of Them?

To see what the British are up against, I took a quick mosey off to Beautiful People and browsed through photo after photo of the most beautiful people in the world in order to devise a few tips to help you gain acceptance into this elite club.

For Men: All photos should be shirtless with rippling chest shaved and well greased. Always pose with the ever attractive “thumbs up” sign.

For women: Your breasts or hair – whichever feature is better — should be the main focus of your photo. Make sure to pout for the camera.

Both sexes can be greatly helped by wearing sunglasses or making sure photos are slightly blurry and taken only from the neck up.

Oh yes, and one final tip? Don’t be British.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

The definition of beauty changes greatly from person to person. It can be mind over matter. Or beauty can be best when at its most pure and natural. Other times, our attempts to make ourselves more beautiful backfire, and we find the opposite of what we want.

What does beauty mean to you?

I’m all for artificial intelligence and even look forward to the day I can have a nice chat with my toaster over a cup of coffee, but that doesn’t mean I want to spend my time listening carefully to voice recorded options.

Photo by Ernop

You know who I mean. That annoying (usually) woman who tells you to wait until you’ve heard all the options before making a choice. Normally, that’s good life advice. This does not apply when you’re trying to get through to AT&T to find out why your bill is suddenly twice what you think it should be.

Enter Get Human!

An online listing of hundreds of companies worldwide with information on how to reach them by phone and how to quickly dial through the voice messages in order to talk to a real live human being.

Brilliant!

Then we can all get back to the important things. Like stocking up on free iPhone apps, read a book or even wash your dishes,

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

Feature photo by Aperte. Above photo by Bandita.

Someone always wants something. “Mommy, I can’t find my shoes.” Is the article done yet? Lord, I really should get to the gym today. You have a lot to do. There’s always a lot on your list. There will probably always be a lot on your list.

And that is why those dishes remain in the sink, mocking you. Worst part? The second you clean them, they immediately begin to multiply. Like laundry. Like dirty floors. Clean is only the first step on the way to dirty.

But dishes still have to be done. This is how I do them.

FIRST: I put on a pair of thick rubber gloves, to protect yourself from pruney fingers and scalded skin.

SECOND: Turn on the music. Make sure it’s something that really gets you going.

Oh, you’re telling me you don’t have any great music for that. Take a moment to explore music from around the world. Stack your ipod with fresh beats.

Do away with your excuses and turn on your favorite music, loud.

This is no time to worry about permanent ear damage. Stop thinking about your deadlines. If the baby cries, you won’t be able to hear her anyway. It’s only fifteen minutes. This is as good a time as any to give yourself permission to stop worrying about every other thing in your life.

Then I begin. Water on hot hot hot because that scrapes of the muck most quickly. Wet everything down, start scrubbing. It’s just you, music and dishes.

By now you should be dancing around the kitchen, trying the latest move you learned in belly dancing class. Oh, sorry, you haven’t been? Maybe now is the time to start? You know you’ve always wanted to try belly dancing.

Eventually I flip off my shoes, and I’m swinging barefoot around the kitchen. It’s great, too, if you happen to be wearing a flouncy skirt, because when you twirl around it flares outward.

Photo by Hankish

If you’re saying, I’m a man, I don’t wear skirts, I’m going to tell you to just shut up. Shut up now. Why are you creating more I-Can’ts?

Have you ever tried a flouncy skirt? Maybe something shiny, bubbly. Maybe try it with a shiny blue wig to match. Have you seen the men at Burning Man?

Soap the silverware and plates, put them aside. Then onto the cups and do another twirl around before the bowls.

You are an Arabe queen in your jingly skirt. You are a capoiera master flying through the air, the sexiest tango dancer on the block. You are a fire god, a water goddess rinsing away suds in time to the beat.

What? You’re embarrassed of dancing in public? Who cares? Certainly not you. Not a whit, not a bit. You’re just there to glide through life, move around, play and have fun.

Before you know it, your dishes are done.

Above image by Pedrosimoes7. Feature image by Lucas the Experience

The only thing that separates a real writer from a non-writer is writing. Do you put pen to paper, use a typewriter, on a computer? Then you’re a writer. If you don’t write, then you’re not.

You can tell yourself it’s more complicated, but it’s not. Want to be a writer? Write, even just ten minutes, every day. Done.

Some other tips to get you going.

When You Don’t Have Anything Specific To Say, Freewrite

Sit down and write for ten minutes without stopping. Don’t erase anything. Don’t edit. If you make a mistake, just move onto the next line and keep going. If you can’t think of anything to say, say that. If you feel stupid, write it down. I promise by the end of ten minutes, you will find something you like developing in front of you.

Do Away With Judgment

Good or bad mean nothing. The only purpose putting such labels on your writing serves is to slow you down and separate you from what’s on the page. If you’re having trouble with this, go back to tip one and freewrite.

Keep A Journal.

Photo byStarkos

Mine is a red, unlined Moleskine. In it, you’ll find, photos, drawings, to-do lists and various random thoughts. Your goal is to get things down down on paper.

Journals have two purposes. They become a repository of your ideas, somewhere to turn when you’re looking for something to write about. It also helps you shift from ideas in thought-only to ideas on paper. It’s all about practice.

Finish What You Start

Ok, so you’re writing. Now it’s time to finish something. It can be a short story, a poem, an new article. Just finish. Most writers doubt themselves at some point, and many allow their doubt to leave half-written works strewn about behind them. Truth is, it’s far worse to never finish then to write something awful. At least something awful is real, it has weight and meaning. The unfinished short story means nothing at all.

If you find yourself not-finishing, stop writing new things. Sure, put your notes in your journal, you can return to them later. But don’t sit down to work on anything new until you have finished something old.

Then you’re ready to publish, which is an entirely different game from the writing, and that, too, is much easier than you think.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

Spend some time at Matador’s Traveler’s Notebook to read tips, narrative and ideas from other writers, and don’t forget to join in the conversation by leaving your thoughts in comments. For hands-on instruction on how to become a travel writer yourself, check out our own Matador U.

One of these designed by a 5-year-old The other by 35-year old.

I first heard about Tux Paint — a silly, fun little program — from Wired’s Geekdad blog a few months ago. We downloaded it immediately.

Yes, it’s great for kids.

Cute little penguin mascot. Lots of silly noises. Great features that are all easy enough for even a two year old to use.

The Tux Paint penguin

I suppose they say it’s for children because aside from make stuff, you don’t really do anything with it. Although, as someone who regularly uses and teaches Photoshop and other design and photo-editing software, the logic process used to navigate this program sets the stage for using the more heavy duty photo editing programs.

And it’s fun.

I worked with it a bit so I could teach Lila to use it. Next thing you know, she’s sitting next to me as I’m rubber stamping cherries and distorting them with the bubble filter — known in TuxPaintLand as magic – while she’s begging “Mama, I think it’s my turn now. Can I have a turn?”

What’ll you make when it’s yours?

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

You’ve tried Tux Paint and want to move onto more advanced design software? Check out our Brave New Traveler review of free photo editing software found on the internet.

Feature photo by sappymoosetree. Above photo bywilderdom

In a recent Newseek interview, Maurice Sendak tells anyone who thinks the new Wild Things movie to be too wild to just go straight to hell.

I applaud him.

Just as I applaud him for fighting the original publishing house who wanted the soup waiting in Max’s bedroom to be warm instead of still hot.

I tried to convey how dopey “warm” sounded. Unemotional. Undramatic. Everything about that book is “hot.”

It makes me crazy to think anyone would seek to neuter this wonderful book by telling us life shouldn’t be hot, dangerous, shouldn’t be something that maybe, just maybe might force us to stand close to the edge look down over the abyss and think, “Oh, shit. This is huge.”

Where The Wild Things Are terrified me as a child. It took years before I could hear it all in one sitting. Yet I still came back to it, time and time again, until I fell in love with it. Now, when I read it to my daughter, I read as much for myself as for her.

Skipping forward almost fifty years, it seems the same fight surfaces with the film as parents worry our children will be too frightened by it.

I see this too often.

In the playground: Parents hover over their children, interrupt when they fight instead of allowing these young people to develop methods of their own for coping with conflict. I see it when I hear adults complain of the endless routine in their lives, but they are scared of what lies beyond what they already know. Thus, these same complainers stay unhappy when they could travel, find a new job, develop a new project, join a skydiving group or just try something to push the edges of comfort, even a little.

Photo by myradphotos

I’m not saying it’s easy, but it’s certainly no more difficult than staying in one place, bored and unhappy.

H.G. Well’s Time Machine depicts a world in which humans follow this culture of fear to its (possibly) logical conclusion.

Are we to become the Eloi, a bunch of simpering weak beings who live only to escape death at the hands of the Morlocks, a band of menacing underground dwellers? They don’t go out at night, constantly look over their shoulders, and wait for death as the ground might swallow them whole.

Is that really what we want to be?

I can certainly understand the desire to provide stability for your children. They need family, a home, a place where they can feel secure while they explore the ever growing world around them. At a certain point, though, the safe world stops allowing for the same level of growth.

That’s when we need to branch out to find bigger playgrounds for exploration.

Take your children to the movies.

If it’s really too much for them, believe me, they’ll let you know, and you can leave, but at least you have given them the opportunity to stretch their own boundaries and choose.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION: What ways have you pushed your own boundaries? Would you suggest it to others? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Feature photo by Leigh Shulman. Above photo by Arvindgrover

We’re all relaxing around the kitchen, chatting and drinking coffee at Ran’s place in San Ramon, a suburb just outside of San Jose.

“You’re making the pinto this morning,” Ran informs me.

Yes, gallo pinto, the classic Tican breakfast of beans and rice.

Then he turns on the loud Ritmo, because reggaeton makes him feel like cooking, and starts swinging his hips.

He helps me assemble the ingredients:

One onion, chopped
Three garlic cloves, chopped
Oil, butter or animal fat
Two stalks Celery, chopped
Half a Sweet Pepper, chopped
Handful of chopped Cilantro
1.5 cups Black Beans
2 Cups Rice
Your choice of alcohol, beer works well.
Salsa Lizano Unlikely to be found outside of Costa Rica but is similar to mild green salsa found elsewhere)
Salsa Inglese aka Worcestershire sauce
Salsa China aka soy sauce
Salt and pepper

We’re all inside opening our first beer of the day. Yes, it’s first thing, but we woke up late, so it’s more like lunch than breakfast.

Begin With A Hot Pan, Garlic and Onions

First things first. I sautee garlic in olive oil, then add onions.

While I’m at the stove with the onions, Lila’s leaping and giggling in Ran’s bedroom, turning Noah into a jungle gym and Ran’s sweet dog Drunk – pronounced dronk with a fully rolled r – is in the backyard humping a towel.

Ran comes up behind me, takes my arm and gently rotates the spoon in the pan.

Photo by Randall Arias

“How’re those onions coming, honey?” His other arm encircles me, and we dance a little together, before he gives me a kiss and heads off to see who’s at the door.

Another friend arrives. There’s clearly some drama going between the two, so I focus on the pan in front of me. The onions have caramelized nicely. It’s time to add the celery, peppers and cilantro, keep stirring over heat until everything is cooked.

Now it’s time for the rice and beans.

There are two ways to make pinto. The first, comes from the Guanacaste province. They put the rice in first, and it makes for a drier, crunchier pinto. The other originates in the central valley, where the beans go first and the final dish is moister, mushier. We’re making Guanacaste today.

In goes the rice. Ran tells me to “fry it as much as I want,” although I’m not entirely sure what that means. I let it go about five minutes before adding beans, salt and pepper.

Final Touches

Then top with alcohol, salsa Lizano, soy sauce and a bit of Worcestershire sauce. Mix and you’re ready to eat.

Serve with naitilla – sour cream if you can’t find it — cheese, fried sweet plaintain, any kind of meat or eggs. You really can’t go wrong.

Photos by Leigh Shulman

Mornings have been difficult in our house lately. My five-year-old Lila takes her proverbial sweet time getting dressed. Every little thing, shirt, shoes, socks, everything becomes a massive time consuming endeavor. Most days, I find her sitting on the floor wearing only underwear and a pair of socks while singing made-up songs and acting out little shows with her stuffed cat – Kitty – and two plastic toy puppies named Rainbow Sprinkles and Flower Rice.

While I have to admit, I find it adorable, and even more so, applaud her creativity, getting dressed involves multiple reminders on my part. Read: nagging. Otherwise, it’s impossible to get out the door.

Lord Save Me From Sticker Charts

“Use a sticker chart,” people told me. But I’ve always hated those stupid charts. How tedious and demeaning. I mean, if you tried to motivate me out of bed in the morning with a sticker, even a puffy, sparkly Hello Kitty one, I’d seriously have to fight the urge to punch you in the face. And I am not normally a violent person. I don’t want people talking down to me. I don’t want to be treated as if I’m an idiot, needing some small and pointless reward in order to move me onto the next simple step.

But after trying everything else I could think of, I gave in, bought a notepad, some princess stamps and a pile of stickers.

1. Put on clothes.
2. Brush Hair.
3. Shoes.
4.Brush Teeth.
5.Take a Shower/Wash Face.
6. Brush teeth once again.
7. Go to bed.

For each activity she completes with great alacrity, she receives a stamp on her chart. For every full day of things she does without more than two reminders each from us, she gets a sticker. Every five stickers – meaning a perfect week without constant nagging on the part of us parents – Lila gets to do or have something fun of her choice.

See what I mean? Painfully tedious. You probably don’t even want to read the list.

I Was Wrong

But you know what? Lila adores this system. It excites and invigorates her. Our mornings are nagless as she runs to us to show how she’s completed each task and relishes each choice of stamp. I watch as her delight in a sticker becomes synonymous with her daily routines. Kitty, Rainbow and Flower partner in her project and she incorporates play into the more structured framework of her life.

That’s when it hit me. How wonderful to find pleasure in these small things. Perhaps the real problem is that we adults somehow stop finding contentment so easily. And maybe, just maybe, it would be pretty damn great if someone coaxed me through each of my daily projects with the promise of some minor reward.

Maybe a sticker wouldn’t excite you, but what would?

Photo by Leigh Shulman

A good piece of chocolate? A strong coffee or an afternoon alone to do as you please? Those would all be lovely, but do they strike you with the same intensity as Lila exhibits when she gets to choose her sticker at the end of the day?

My graduate school writing mentor Ed Rivera, author of Family Installments: Growing Up Hispanic in America, told me once that he believes the crux of creativity lies in the ability to never stop seeing the world as a child. I remind myself of that each time I sit down to write.

What would it take for you to find that pleasure in life’s everyday ordinary joys?

Feature photo by leah.jones. Above photo by zappowbang

I know many too many women with breast cancer.

A great aunt, two close friends and quite a few other family members. My mother does breast cancer research and is herself a survivor who has been in remission for seven years. She works in the same lab where her own biopsy was diagnosed. Statistics tell me there is a 1 in 8 chance that I may one day be fighting as well.

So what can I — and all of you — do now, to prevent, educate and support in the fight?

Take care of yourself first.

Learn what you can do to educate yourself, prevent and protect yourself from breast cancer. This includes, among other things, monthly self exams and yearly mammograms. If you find something suspicious, talk to a doctor immediately.

Shave something for solidarity.

Your head, your beard or whatever other body part makes sense.

This year at Burning Man, my good friend Stephanie and husband, Noah both sheared their locks to support our friend Gail. It was without a doubt the most meaningful event of the entire week.

Another friend of ours is shaving his beard for the first time this decade to be part of Movember, a yearly mustache growing charity event held in November each year to raise funds and awareness for men’s health, because, remember, not only women get breast cancer.

Create Community

Lotsa Helping Hands allows you to develop a “free-of-charge, private, web-based community to organize family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues for someone currently undergoing treatment.”

There you can develop a framework to provide meals, rides to and from the hospital and whatever else might be needed.

Create Your Own Fundraising and Awareness Event

Passionately Pink, part of Susan G Komen for the Cure, gives you all the resources and materials you need to set mobilize friends, family and even strangers to raise money and work toward a cure. You can join an already existing team or run an event of your own.

Listen and Share

Too often, we believe those with cancer don’t want to talk about it. In truth, it’s more likely our own discomfort causes us not to ask questions. Instead, open yourself to listen and really hear what a friend with cancer has to say.

Finally, I call on all of you to share your own experiences and resources by leaving a comment below.

Lila and I on the beach in Panama / Photo: Leigh Shulman

The best advice I ever received came from a wonderful woman I met while studying forest conservation in Brazil’s Mata Atlantica, a subtropical rainforest just outside of Rio de Janeiro.

This woman, Amanda, is the sort whose presence makes you feel immediately at ease. You just know with her that everything will turn out right. I spoke to her one lovely evening sitting on the beach. I had no idea what I’d awaited me in the US once summer ended. No job, no apartment, no plans, and I was worried.

“Leigh,” she told me, “Trust life.”

It sounded great in the moment, sitting there drinking strong coffee and listening to the waves. Of course, life will bring me whatever I need. Her words, however, turned slippery and elusive as I sat on the airplane back to Brooklyn.

Trust life? How?

If something seems overwhelming or even impossible, say yes anyway.

Find a way to make the impossible a reality, because nothing is too big, too far, or too much, unless you decide it is.

You can see what you already-know in a way you’ve never-before-seen by simply taking the world, turning it slightly and looking from a different angle. The other day, my five-year-old daughter Lila asked me, “Mama, what happens if you touch the sun?” How would you answer her question?

I believe in collaboration. Many voices make for a richer more beautiful song, and I hope all of you will not only return to read Matador Life, but add your tone in comments and perhaps through your own submissions.

What It Means to Thrive Between Trips

Travel, it seems, comes in stages. The first, you just want to be out there on the move. I felt this way when my family – husband Noah, Lila and I – sold everything we owned and left Brooklyn to travel the world. I didn’t look back.

But constant movement can be exhausting. You move onto stage two, where you still want the strange and different travel brings, but at a slower pace. That’s when we rented a small wooden house on a tiny island off the Caribbean coast of Panama and lived there for six months. We always knew, though, we would move on.

Finally, we wanted roots, a place to be comfortable. We wanted to go home.

Now, home means many a varied thing, but I posit a few commonalities. Home means you make a commitment. Those commitments can arrive in the form of payments, work, someone you love, so you stop moving for a while. You no longer expand your world by the distance you cover, and instead cultivate your mind and yourself while standing in one spot.

Matador Life, as I see it, is about existence in that third place.