Location, Location, Location

        When we first started planning the wedding, I knew we had a ton of decisions ahead of us.  It was all a little overwhelming.  First big decision, finding a venue.  Turns out there are a lot of places to get married in the Bay Area.  That’s not even including the churches.    My family’s Muslim and Mr Hyphen is non-practicing,  But we had one other limiting factors that made the decision a little easier:  I really wanted to had to have Indian food at the reception.

            I got a little education in the finer details of how wedding venues and catering works.  I was amazed at how short our list was after we cut out all the places that wouldn’t let you bring your own caterer.  The Brazilian Room in Tilden Park and The Conservatory of Flowers, both associated with public parks, have allowed caterers lists.  So it’s not just restaurants and hotels pushing their own caterers.  This is probably old news to people in the know, but I was surprised by it.

            We have found a spot that we both love and is totally “us” and they’ll allow us to bring our own caterer.  It’s the Chabot Science Center.  It was the first place we went to see and has been at the top of our list for a while.  But before we can finalize the contract, they want to approve the caterer.  It’s been a bit of a headache to secure this place at the price we wanted, but I think it will be worth it. 

The day I made the appointment, I was getting pretty depressed about the prospect of trying to plan a wedding that my parents would approve of and that would make as many people in both our families happy.  At that point, my picture of us getting married was the two of us at City Hall.  But we went to get a tour and when I was looking out over the view, I thought, I could get married here.

But they really really wanted us to use one of their preferred caterers.  Which makes me wonder how other immigrant families handle the wedding planning process.  Is it all a community network thing?  I feel foolishly out of touch with my own culture when I realize I don’t know the behind-the-scenes details like this.  Luckily, it’s something that I can quiz my already-married cousins about. 

Did they have to hunt for “just the right place” or were their choices limited by size and catering options?  Because when I was looking at all the gorgeous pictures of country clubs and nice restaurants, I got really jealous of people who had the option of serving a “California Cuisine” menu.  It seemed the most likely choice for “ethnic” catered weddings were community centers.   

Different cultural groups plan their weddings in different ways, including the places they pick.  I’d naively thought it was because of some internal community preferences for certain spots, familiarity with a spot, etc.  What I didn’t realize was that there are market forces driving those choices.  I’m hoping I don’t get blown over by the gale-wind forces. 

Where Are You?

This spring, I’m taking a poetry workshop, taught out of the teacher’s home. Last week we got into a discussion about how everyone in the class has the technical aspects down and that we should start to think about manuscripts. Now bear in mind that this workshop has been tough because it’s easily the most advanced one I’ve taken. In the discussion, he said one question to ask ourselves is why we’re writing.

I was surprised to find that I don’t know the answer any more. It’s not the same answer it was when I started writing seriously in college. Over the years, every answer I come up with has gotten a beating at some point, and I’m cynical and skittish about being obvious about my reasons for writing. (Can I tell you how long it took me to write the “About this blog” entry?) I know that when I was learning, I was writing out of a desire to make words do the amazing things that writers I admired could make them do. These days, it feels like I write to make sense out of the world.

One of the workshop guys responded to the question by saying, “We’re adrift as a society and there’s a lot that I know, but I don’t speak up about.” I started asking myself what are the things that I know deep down in my bones. I’m not sure what I’m willing to admit I believe in. Maybe because the past few years have been full of some really big changes in my life and it’s changed my perspective. Enough that I’m not sure how to articulate what I believe. I don’t know that what I know is true for everyone. Or that I might feel differently in a few years.

But I think it’s something that I need to spend some time thinking about. More than once recently, the teacher’s turned to me and said, “I want to know where YOU are in these poems”. Not in the bare your soul way, but in the sense that you know there’s a strong voice behind all the poems in a book. I’ve become tentative in my writing, and I’m not sure why.

So now I’m asking myself, who am I now? And maybe more so, why is that such a hard question to answer? Am I living so much in the in-between that I don’t have anything to hold on to?

One shift that has happened is that I’m a lot more interested in writing fiction and prose than poetry these days. I’m sure that’s affecting my ability to answer the question. Of course, I need to block off time to write more consistently before I can understand what that means for my development as a writer. Believe me, as much as I’m learning about the craft of writing, it’s opened up a huge can of worms.

I don’t know if any of these questions have any good answers, but it’s given me plenty of food for thought. I know this blog still has a pretty small readership, but I’m curious to hear from fellow writers and artists about their answers to these questions.

Lift My Spirits

Whoo-hoo! The organics recyling bin and our kitchen scraps pail arrived this morning! I talked to the nice lady again yesterday, but when she said they’d both arrive today, I was skeptical at best. So when they came, I was pleasantly surprised.

I might have missed them completely because I was running late this morning. Luckily, I caught sight of the little green pail. I was about to run back up and show it off to Mr Hyphen, but did the responsible thing and just dropped it into the trunk of my car.

I am waaay too excited about this. But I’ve been feeling burned out and discouraged and it lifted my spirits. So if it takes a little green kitchen scraps recycling bin to make me happy, I’ll take it.

A Host of Golden Daffodils

It’s springtime here in the Bay Area. On a drive down to Southern California over the weekend, we got to see the lush green hills down the 5 and up the 101. Days are getting longer and warmer. Daffodils are cropping up in yards. Days like this, I daydream about…composting.

Well, actually, I daydream about having a garden and there’s always a compost bin somewhere in there. It delights the geeky kid in me — I’m probably going to be the kind of parent that gets more excited about backyard science experiments than her kids. Watching biological processes at work – what can beat that?

Unfortunately, all I can do at this point is daydream. I’ve got a fair-size balcony, but there’s a limit to what you can cultivate in containers. Plus, I’ve got limited time to devote to nurturing any kind of garden. There’s worm composting, but I don’t think I’d take it well if the colony died out, as my friend’s did due to mold.

So a compromise for me was to join the CSA that recently started at our office building. If I can’t partake in sustainable farming myself, I can support others who do. Plus they send us neat stuff like romanesca broccoli and leeks.

I think the best story of sustainable farming I’ve heard in the past few years has been the one Michael Pollan tells in Omnivore’s Dilemma about Polyface Farms. This family built up a piece of exhausted farmland over three generations and now has a thriving small farm. I told the story in great detail to Mr Hyphen in the car as we drove past acres and acres of farmland.

I’m not sure this kind of farming can withstand the market pressures that large scale farming has to deal with. Note, I’m referring to economic pressures that drive down prices, because overall, a diversified farm is an ecologically resilient farm.

This morning, I did call around to find out if we could participate in our city’s food scrap recycling program. Of course, the management company told me I had to talk to the city’s waste disposal service and they told me the management company had to clear all decisions, but I found a very nice lady to help me at the disposal service’s headquarters. More calls tomorrow, but we should have our little green pail pretty soon!

In the meantime, for your enjoyment, is the world’s only compost rap, starring Firefly’s very own Jewel Staite.

D.I.Y.

I’ve been fascinated by the emergence of Etsy (http://www.etsy.com), an online marketplace for handmade goods. I’ve made my own clothes and jewelry for years, given hand-made gifts and even tried my hand at selling, so of course I was intrigued. Among the popular features are the forums, chats and virtual labs that are part of the Etsy Community. Several sites like We Love Etsy (http://etsylove.ning.com/), a social networking site for Etsy fans, have sprung up in it’s wake.

The website launched in mid-2005 and has recently gotten a lot of attention, having made it’s millionth sale in June 2007. NYT and the Wall Street Journal had both featured Etsy in the past few months. What caught my eye was the gender breakdown: about 90% of the 800,000 sellers on Etsy are women. Ironically, the owners are all men and in the NYT article, Rob Kamin says, describing the early days, “We were the only guys around”.

I probably wouldn’t have noticed that detail if I hadn’t recently seen startup.com and if my dear fiance had not sat me down to watch Revolution OS. (I understood why he was so impressed I used Firefox). Both movies are about industries, software engineering and tech entrepreneurship, in which the workers are predominantly male and there are huge sums of money changing hands.

DIY and Open Source have one thing in common: the idea that individuals can have a collective positive impact. DIYers by combating excessive consumerism and open source by combating predatory vendor practices. Both movements rely on the determined self-sufficiency of their members.

So what’s up with the gender bias and division of labor? Making and selling handcrafted items is labor-intensive work. Despite the fact that there are success stories of artists doing well (the NYT story highlights Emily Martin among others), I wonder if the average Etsy seller makes minimum wage for the hours she works. You could probably say the same thing about eBay, but sellers there also sell big-ticket items and the average profit-per-hour of work can be higher.

Granted, the small scale of the endeavor is what attracts people to it and the DIY culture is a predominantly female one. I admire the self-sufficiency and entrepreneurship of Etsy sellers. But it makes me profoundly uneasy to see that women, who have traditionally made less than men anyway, make up such a big part of the Etsy user-base.

Etsy is described as a resurgence of handmade consumer goods. One explanation of it is that it’s a reaction to the fact that many more of us are “knowledge workers” and when we come home, we revel in the tactile pleasures of crafting. But again, why is it women who are doing the tactile-ing? What do male “knowledge workers” do in their free time? I know they do more than play video games.

Another factor that may draw women to DIY entrepreneurship is how many are mompreneurs, mothers looking for flexibility in their working lives. The forces at play in that work-family balance offer an unsatisfying answer; but trying to untangle those forces, societal, social, economic and otherwise is a topic for another blog post.

One last contrast with the Open Source movement: OP engineers (mostly men) are often self-taught, but they’re also overwhelmingly male. There’s an interesting two-part article (The Hidden Engineering Gap and A Modest Proposal) that asks why there aren’t more self-taught female engineers. In part two of the article, the author, Joyce Park (infamously canned by Friendster for blogging) mentions that if women were introduced to computer programming through social software, more women might stay with the field. It’s hard not to think of the popularity of the social aspects of Etsy. Maybe there’ll be cross-over.

About this Blog

Recently, I got engaged. Whenever I started to tell people about the complications of planning an inter-cultural wedding, I often heard the refrain, “You should write a blog!” I didn’t like the idea of writing a blog about gowns and flowers, so I didn’t take the suggestion seriously at first.

But I’m at an interesting point in my life. I make my living as a scientist, but I’ve also written for many years. Like so many writers, I’ve been curious about the blogosphere. And now I have the challenge of balancing work, writing, and family…and temporarily, wedding planning.

I’d like this blog to outlive the engagement. I’d hope to write for a long time about the negotiating the perspective that comes from growing up and living as a minority in a diverse community. It’ll be about more than what color sari I’m wearing.

A little background detail: My family’s from India and muslim. We left India when I was still in diapers, and I split my childhood between Toronto and L.A. So there hasn’t ever been a time in my life when I wasn’t negotiating the cultural landscape. Right now I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. My fiancée was born and raised here in the States (Wisconsin, specifically).

I remember when I was growing up that it used to feel like they were multiple worlds I inhabited. It’s not really multiple worlds, although sometimes it feels like it. It’s a global world, with all the anxieties and advantages that entails.