Fall is in the air!

Just added to my fall wardrobe... from J. Crew of course.

By the way... all pants 20% off this weekend at J. Crew stores!

Snuggie Time

Bella has decided that it is winter. Our house is not that cold, but little miss pri(nce)ss can't sleep comfortably without a blanket on her.

She has requested a dog Snuggie, size L, for her birthday (Oct. 20).

Niagara Falls

This weekend involved a trip to the Great White North, otherwise known as Canada. At the border, the Canadian immigration official asked us what we were doing in Niagara Falls. What does everyone do in Niagara Falls? TOURISM. Anyone who gives another answer clearly is up to something. We were then stopped by a lady with a clipboard who was collecting data for some statistical purpose. She also asked us what we were doing in Canada. TOURISM. If we had been coming over to partake in illegal activities, why would we tell them? Seriously.

So our tourist activities involved the Maid of the Mist tour, which takes you and forty other blue-poncho clad tourons pretty damn close to the Canadian Horseshoe Falls. No one really cares about the American Falls. Eddie and Turner got soaked because they did not put the hood up on their poncho. I, however, remained perfectly dry despite some soggy Birkenstocks.

We also engaged in other tourism-related activities like people-watching, beer-drinking, and nacho-eating. When we crossed back to the United States, the border guard wanted to know what we were doing in Canada.

Seriously?

Blog Recommendation

Adorable blog i bought a pair of Camper boots and now i am broke. The blogger illustrates all her purchases in hopes of curbing spending. I wonder how well that is working!

Home Office Tour

Welcome to my new home office. Most of the furnishings are from Ikea. This has been a few weeks in the making, ever since I sat up one morning in bed and decided to turn the "extra" room into my office. It has turned out exactly how I envisioned (how often can you say that?!?).

I still don't have an office chair though.

The Curtain

Sometimes when we come home from being out, we find that Bella has bent our curtain rod into a U-shape. This is why. I came downstairs today to find her half-asleep under the front window curtains.

She's special.

I was born...

I have a new wrinkle. I found it just now looking in the mirror back at me.

It's just above the inside corner of my left eyebrow. I didn't have this wrinkle as a 28-year-old. It is my 29-year-old self peaking through the younger facade.

I thought that a few musings on this day of days would be somewhat appropriate. Especially since I just returned home from a graduate seminar on feminist theories of natality, Hannah Arendt's reworking of the persistent emphasis on death by Western philosophy. Natality is the primal condition of being born, of the coming-into the political by a subject. It is hope and change. We all experience natality but only in its absence. I say, "I was born on September 1, 1981 in Seattle, Washington," but I wasn't really there. We weren't there as a fledged speaking subject capable of expressing our immediate potentiality.

I was born... to two loving parents who had all the hope in the world for me. Although Arendt's concept of natality is not limited to physical birth, the capacity for each human being to be born presents them with the potential for political agency. To be part of a public, and act in such a way to enables the potentiality in others, can liberate the staid ideology of the old guard focused on the second absent event, death. At death, we return to an unspeakable state. Death can be witnessed but not experienced. To what extent does birth imply a more public event? As the mother becomes mother and child, the splitting of one into two is not reversed with death. In death, two becomes one in the return of our physical body to the earth, but this can only be seen as a political, public act if we ascribe agency to the earth. By grounding this theory in the inorganic, or inanimate subject, vital matter assumes a subjective role over the dead.

Back to the wrinkle. The intersection of birth and death is life, an event that can be experienced. We can speak about life. We can act with intention, thereby fulfilling the promise of natality given at birth.