Year: 2006

Summer Identity

The cur­rent weath­er fore­cast for Van­couver is sunny and warm (into the high 20s; around 80 F) mak­ing it a pretty good place to be right now. All the garden­ers of course are busy turn­ing on the water­ing sys­tems, but giv­en Van­couver also has lots of water this isn’t as much of a prob­lem as in oth­er places. We’re look­ing for­ward to hav­ing a decent sum­mer this year, unlike the last one which was basic­ally miser­able for most of the time.

Which makes Van­couver a pretty good place to be in July: the weath­er is usu­ally superb, sunny and warm but not too hot, life reas­on­ably relaxed, the sea­wall and beaches full but not over­flow­ing. Just the right time of year for stand­ards com­mit­tee meet­ings! I’ve hos­ted DOM WG meet­ings in Van­couver in August, with par­ti­cipants enjoy­ing the com­bin­a­tion of effect­ive work and a bit of tour­ist­ing. If you’re look­ing for an excuse to vis­it Van­couver, now’s your chance — not only is the Liberty Alli­ance hold­ing one of its quarterly spon­sors meet­ings in July (the week of July 17th, to be pre­cise), it’s also hold­ing a con­fer­ence jointly with the Inter­net Iden­tity Work­shop on the Thursday and Fri­day. This will fol­low the stand­ard IIW “uncon­fer­ence” format, to allow for lots of flex­ib­il­ity in top­ics and speak­ers. The attendee list is cer­tainly impress­ive! I’ll be there for as long as the baby lets me (I assume she’ll be the young­est participant).

Liberty Alli­ance non-mem­bers will also be wel­come to attend the Liberty Alli­ance meet­ing itself on Tues­day and Wed­nes­day (NDAs will have to be signed). This is the first time that the Liberty Alli­ance has opened up a spon­sor meet­ing to non-mem­bers in this way; I hope lots of people who are inter­ested in iden­tity issues take the oppor­tun­ity to find out more about what the Liberty Alli­ance does and how it operates.

Regis­tra­tion for both the Open­Space event and the Liberty meet­ing for non-mem­bers is at Iden­tity Open­Space Regis­tra­tion; early-bird regis­tra­tion is now closed but it’s still cheap­er to register now than onsite.

If you want an altern­at­ive set of hotel, res­taur­ant, and tour­ism recom­mend­a­tions, try the North­ern Voice Van­couver page (North­ern Voice is the blog­ging con­fer­ence I help organ­ise each year). The Liberty Alli­ance meet­ing hotel is about a block from the North­ern Voice con­fer­ence location.

Recovering

Those not inter­ested in preg­nancy-related mus­ings should skip this post…

Those not inter­ested in preg­nancy-related mus­ings should skip this post…

I’m recov­er­ing well from the birth, and my feet are finally back to their nor­mal size. So I thought I’d bore every­one who has­n’t been, or isn’t likely to become, preg­nant mut­ter­ing about vari­ous preg­nancy-related ail­ments and how I tried to cope. Not that I’m com­plain­ing about hav­ing been preg­nant, of course, since hav­ing a baby makes it all worth­while, but some of the symp­toms are less than pleasant.

Unlike when I was preg­nant with my first child, I had no morn­ing sick­ness. One or two days of feel­ing vaguely queasy, but that was it! So much for the old wives’ tale about hav­ing more morn­ing sick­ness with girls than boys; I had 5 months with my son and had to take dic­lectin to stop los­ing weight and not one day with my daughter.

To make up for that, in the third tri­mester I had reflux. At first diet kept it under con­trol, then I took Gav­is­con, by the end of the preg­nancy I was on Zantac 75 every day and still hav­ing to watch what I ate and sleep with my head propped up on mul­tiple pil­lows. For­tu­nately Zantac is com­pletely safe (at least in late preg­nancy). The reflux dis­ap­peared imme­di­ately after the birth.

As in the first preg­nancy, I had edema. At least this time it was­n’t related to pre-eclamp­sia. I man­aged to keep the swell­ing more or less under con­trol with pren­at­al mas­sage and keep­ing my feet up when pos­sible until about week 36 when things went hay­wire. First the feet, then the ankles, swelled up, no mat­ter how much I res­ted. By the time I had the baby, the swell­ing had reached my back, and was mak­ing walk­ing dif­fi­cult. I tried the vari­ous sug­ges­tions I found on the web (tak­ing flax­seed, soak­ing the feet, drink­ing lots of water), but none of them worked. It took almost two weeks after the baby was born to lose all that flu­id again.

And, of course, the big belly. I tend to stick straight out in front when I’m preg­nant ( pho­to­graph­ic evid­ence), and giv­en the size of this baby (9.5 lb) I stuck out an awful lot. Since I’ve been doing Pil­ates for a couple of years, my back and stom­ach muscles are much stronger than before and I had no more than a couple of twinges of lower back pain. I did find that wrap­ping a strong cloth around the belly to sup­port it helped, as did rest­ing (a lot!). I also had to be care­ful walk­ing down stairs since my centre of grav­ity shif­ted so much and I had a tend­ency to tip for­ward. The Pil­ates stu­dio I attend (up till about week 35, when I got too tired and could­n’t do more than half my sim­pli­fied pro­gram) helped a lot with my pos­ture, help­ing me fig­ure out how to stand and sit to min­im­ize the strain on vari­ous muscles and avoid over-com­pens­at­ing. I’d recom­mend doing Pil­ates to any­one think­ing of get­ting pregnant.

Those were my major con­cerns; I had a very healthy preg­nancy in all and these issues were minor com­pared to what a lot of oth­er women go through. Now the baby is here, and all of this will shortly be for­got­ten in the dim mists of sleep-depriva­tion. Nature is some­times kind.

First Days Home

As Tim pos­ted, our baby daugh­ter was born on Thursday June 8, and today I finally had the energy to pick up my laptop and post this. It’s amaz­ing how intensely a squirm­ing squeal­ing bundle can rule your life; right now she’s burbling in the bassin­et, threat­en­ing to wake up [and did, so it took a while to actu­ally fin­ish this short piece].

First off, thanks to all who sent Tim and me con­grat­u­la­tions on the birth. We both appre­ci­ate it and have saved all the emails to share with her when she’s old enough to appre­ci­ate them.

The sense of relief that she is finally here, healthy, pink, and strong, is over­whelm­ing. We’re start­ing to settle in to the new regime and got a reas­on­able amount of sleep last night; by no means enough of course, but bet­ter than it’s been. We’re not think­ing about wheth­er the same will hap­pen tonight or any oth­er night in the near future – we’ll have to see what hap­pens when the time comes. Life has slowed down right now, we’re enjoy­ing each moment of peace (wheth­er she’s awake or asleep or feed­ing, which is a twi­light state some­where in between), and endur­ing each moment of cry­ing and frus­tra­tion. It’s a cliché to say that each child changes your life; the non-cliché part is that you nev­er know how until they’re there.

Reg­u­lar-style post­ings will recom­mence at some stage, with some­what more reg­u­lar­ity than in the last few months. That’s the plan any­way, although it’s sure to be derailed, either occa­sion­ally or often, by the new­est mem­ber of the household.

Upgrading to WordPress 2.0.2 from 1.5.2

I’ve been prom­ising to upgrade to Word­Press 2.0.2 for some time, and being on preg­nancy leave seemed to be the right time to do it (up early in the morn­ings, no press­ing work-related pro­jects). As usu­al, the actu­al pro­cess of upgrad­ing was simple and mostly just worked; I use WS-FTP Pro to trans­fer files and it tends to kill the per­mis­sions but a couple of minutes with chmod soon fixed that. Of course it took longer to backup the old files from the 1.5.2 install­a­tion first than to upgrade, for which I am grate­ful. Please let me know of any prob­lems; I don’t expect any, but you nev­er know.

Changes:

  • The image upload sys­tem now appears a little more stream­lined and has more options. I’ll find out more about how it works next time I try it out.
  • I activ­ated the data­base backup plu­gin, since I’ve been using phpmy­ad­min up till now and mak­ing it easi­er might mean I backup a little more often
  • I’m try­ing out the Slim­Stat plu­gin to give me some idea of what people are read­ing on my site. I hope this one does­n’t clog up the data­base too much, oth­er­wise (as happened with a pre­vi­ous stats plu­gin I tried) I’ll have to unin­stall it.

Next step: upgrad­ing the Atom 0.3 feed to Atom 1.0.

“Maps for Lost Lovers”

A review of Nadeem Aslam’s “Maps for Lost Lovers”.

For a change, I’m going to review a book that has­n’t been read by the book­club I go to, the only reas­on being that it’s a rel­at­ively slow read. “Maps for Lost Lov­ers” by Nadeem Aslam is the story of events and people in a Pakistani com­munity in Eng­land. But it’s a much deep­er, multi-faceted, and lyr­ic­al work than a curs­ory read­ing of the back cov­er would indicate. 

The first chapter of the book details a murder, and who’s been arres­ted for that murder. This murder is the start­ing point for an exam­in­a­tion of the life that people in the com­munity lead, and what drives many of the chil­dren to leave the com­munity. The ties to Pakistan, the influ­ence of the cler­ics, the inhu­man­ity of many of the cus­toms, are all examined in a sens­it­ive but unflinch­ing man­ner. This makes the descrip­tions of these cus­toms and laws and what they lead to even more hor­ri­fy­ing; this nov­el shows the effects on people who are try­ing to do their best to cope with the effects of a sys­tem that val­ues men greatly and women very little, that has extremely strict rules on beha­viour, and that encour­ages “hon­our” killings. The main char­ac­ter, Shamas, is well-mean­ing but weak, his wife Kaukab so pious and naive she wreaks hav­oc on the fam­ily She is a sym­path­et­ic char­ac­ter des­pite her actions, her thoughts and hopes and fears pic­tured as she slowly comes to the real­isa­tion that not all the cler­ic advises her to do is neces­sar­ily cor­rect. When read­ing about Kaukab, I could­n’t help but think of the women in Palestine who are inter­viewed on tele­vi­sion and say how happy they are their sons have become sui­cide bombers and how they wish they had more sons to become sui­cide bombers. It gave me a little more idea how someone could go down that path.

The reviews on Amazon vary wildly from those who highly recom­mend it to those who find the por­tray­al of the cul­ture and people racist and ste­reo­typ­ic­alb. I don’t know enough about Pakistani cul­ture to know how truth­ful the por­tray­al of much of it is. One item struck me as odd so I did a bit of research — one of the char­ac­ters, Suraya, was divorced by her hus­band, who later regret­ted it and wished to remarry, but they could­n’t remarry until she had mar­ried and divorced someone else. This turns out to be true, although the inform­a­tion I found made it sound like the divorce pro­ced­ure itself isn’t quite as easy as por­trayed in the book, and that recon­cili­ation is encour­aged. So, a little exag­ger­a­tion there for the pur­poses of the story, and it’s likely that such exag­ger­a­tion hap­pens in oth­er places in the book as well. That being said, “hon­our” killings do take place, and women who are depressed over arranged mar­riages are some­times sub­jec­ted to exor­cisms to get rid of the djinni the cler­ics claim have pos­sessed them.

I have seen a little of Pakistani cul­ture — I knew a woman in Aus­tralia who was mar­ried to a Pakistani. She came from Afgh­anistan and it was an arranged mar­riage that her par­ents wanted to get her out of Afgh­anistan (this was dur­ing the Taliban regime). The pre­vi­ous wife had been divorced as she bore the hus­band no chil­dren. I watched the video of the mar­riage — I have sel­dom seen any­one look as scared as this poor woman did, being told to marry someone she first met on the day of the wed­ding and move to a coun­try she knew noth­ing of, where she knew no-one and did­n’t speak the lan­guage. For her it worked out well (apart from hav­ing the moth­er-in-law liv­ing with them) since the hus­band was kind, she was lucky enough to bear him sons quickly enough (after hav­ing four chil­dren in not very many years the doc­tors for­bade any more), and even­tu­ally her sis­ter mar­ried her hus­band’s broth­er and they also moved to the same dis­trict in Sydney. She got lucky; I doubt that the first wife found life as good.

Although the main interest of the book is the por­tray­al of an unfor­giv­ing cul­ture and the clashes it has with West­ern styles of liv­ing, it does speak to prob­lems that any immig­rant faces when in a new coun­try, that of try­ing to save what is pre­cious and worth­while from the cul­ture and beliefs you were brought up in, and fold­ing that into the cul­ture you live in. This book is full of regrets, people who thought they were only going to live in Eng­land for a short time and miss the flowers and trees of Pakistan, people who bring their pre­ju­dices with them and hate that they can­’t force oth­er people to do what they want them to, people who no longer have any­where to live where they truly feel “at home”. And the gen­er­a­tion clash (exacer­bated by the cul­ture clash) of par­ents doing what they think is best for their chil­dren, where the chil­dren dis­agree. Don’t read it when you’re feel­ing down.