Right after I wrote that last entry about the evolution of my political views — like anyone gives a rat’s butt, but still — Graham told me that he pooped the Millenium Falcon.

I live in a suburb of Atlanta. Life is easy here in a way that things have never been easy for middle-class people before in the history of the world. We live the life of Egyptian kings, all of us, except the food is better and we have air conditioning and less pressure to be immortal and whatnot. We don’t have slaves like they did back then. Who does all our work for us? Machines I guess, and people in poorer countries. And high school students.

Life here is also packed full of entertainment, and it’s extraordinarily safe. Our food and water supply, the homes we live in, the things our kids play with are all things we can trust on some level to not kill us or give us serious lead poisoning or tetanus or salmonella unless we really work at it.

Yeah, there are trade offs to living in modern America. We feel stressed out a lot, there’s all these hassles and obligations and schedules and little pressures eating at us. We drive in traffic and our kids worry us, and other moms judge us for making slightly different parenting choices. We worry that we aren’t adequate, we worry that we’re gaining weight. But really? Big damned deal. Chances are our kids will grow up fine, and it’s not like gaining weight and going up a size means having to grow the cotton and weave a new pair of pants. We just stop at Old Navy on the way home.

We take these things all so for granted that even the phrase “take it for granted” doesn’t say enough. We take it for permanent. We take it for fundamental right. When we talk about our way of life being threatened by terrorist attacks or gas shortages or economy crashes, what are we talking about if not our ability to drive to Target and buy a new garlic press whenever we want?

Tiffany goes to Libertarianism
It was this kind of easy lifestyle that first led me to learn more about libertarianism. I still had a full-time job, but was moonlighting and daydreaming about a time when I’d be running my own business. It was the exciting dot-com days and things seemed pretty great for myself and everyone I knew — even my poorest friends had cable TV and cell phones — and it seemed like the good things were all thanks to capitalism. Capitalism gave me a good car to drive at an affordable $200 per month. It gave me ten different restaurants to choose from at lunch time, some chains, some quaint local places. I also worked in marketing which is all about compelling people to consume, giving them choices.

With this perspective, it’s easy to see why I’d start to think that the government should leave companies alone. It looked pretty straightforward: The government sucks butt at things. Private companies are good at things. The government is cumbersome and bureaucratic and corrupt. It’s slow to react, and inefficient and expensive. The problem, I argued, with centralized legislation is that some dude in Washington or NYC or Chicago might make a law that is impossible for a Georgia farmer to follow if he wants to stay in business. The free market, I said, can work things out. Ooooh trust the free market. Ooooh it’s such a beautiful idea.

I wasn’t a Republican, because on social issues I’ve always been a liberal-butted hippie. People everywhere just wanna be free. They want to do drugs and make mistakes with their money and have the anal sex. GO FOR IT, I say. Just don’t hurt anyone else who isn’t, you know, into that. But in terms of government regulation of businesses, taxes, income, property, etc – I found myself on the far conservative side of things. The Libertarian philosophy worked well for me: laws should be pared down to almost nothing. You shouldn’t need lawyers to interpret them, anyone should be able to understand what’s expected of them in this society.

In my mind this was a perfect, simple, beautiful thesis to test every political issue against. For six years my liberal friends would beat their heads against their computer screen and try to understand how I could agree with them on 16 out of 20 issues but still be so infuriatingly determined to see the Democratic party fall on its ass. The question I kept coming back to was this:

As a group, people who are on the left tend to be very (rightfully) suspicious of the man, of large organizations, of institutions, and of the government. So why would it make sense to give more power to the US government, arguably the biggest lamest corporation in the world?>

This contradiction bugged the shit out of me. And I couldn’t ever get an answer that made sense.

So now, here we are several years later and I have an answer:
I had it backwards. The basic tenet that we should entrust our government with great power requires that we remain vigilant. We must never trust our government completely, not despite the contradictory fact that we ask them to take over areas of our lives such as health insurance or education but BECAUSE of that fact. The suspicion is built in, the same way that red tape is built in to prevent anything from happening too quickly.

And for added points you could have turned the question back around on me:
If the federal government is just like a giant corporation, and is so terribly suspect, why do you trust the free market to do the right thing?

In fact, now that I think about it, someone did ask me that. “Oh!” I think I said, “Easy! Because the free market is better incented to respond to what people want. It may not happen instantly, but it does happen.” Here is the problem with that. And yes I do know that I’m now arguing with myself from four years ago, and it’s really fucking boring, but there are really three reasons that logic no longer works for me.

1. The government is designed to encourage suspicion and vigilance – the market isn’t.
   Politicians try to calm the population, and it works some of the time, sort of. But there’s always a good percentage of people going WAIT. WTF? Because that is part of the system. The market on the other hand is designed to assuage fears… shhh… there, there, don’t worry… don’t think too hard about what you’re buying. JUST DO IT, in all caps if necessary.

2. A truly pure free market is not possible unless consumers can make informed decisions.
   The idea that consumers will push companies to build safer cars and put less poison into baby formula assumes that consumers know what’s going into those products. The idea that we don’t need environmental regulations because the free market will encourage educated consumers to only buy from companies that use ecologically practices assumes that consumers know how products are built and what that means for the environment.

   With all of the inner workings hidden behind a big curtain, a lot of industries are impervious to market pressure. Others are dangerously slow to react even when the market is all Seriously. Stop putting poison into baby formula. We think it’s just that wacky China and their morally inferior business practices, but all they have is the kind of unregulated market that we had just a few decades ago. It’s totally what we would have now if consumers hadn’t gone to the federal government and demanded oversight and creation of The National Department of Not Putting Poison Into Stuff For Babies. Now we’re so used to our safe life with no poison in stuff that we find the news that companies would DO such a thing totally shocking. But they would totally do such a thing here, if they could get away with it.

   So the truth is that for all their talk, companies do not want a free market. A true free market would not mean that companies are free to do whatever they want without the pesky burden of stupid government intervention. The free in free market means — or at least is SHOULD mean — that people are free to spend their money where they choose. Under this definition, a free market would mean that companies would have to give consumers 100% of the information they need to make a decision, right down to the name and email addresses of the individuals who assembled this infant car seat or box of cereal. I want to know exactly what ingredients went into this thing I’m buying, and how exactly you made it, and what impact that has on the area’s water and air quality. I want to know exactly how you tested it for safety and what you’ll do if it proves unsafe. I want to be able to email the assembly worker and make sure that she’s working in decent, humane conditions for a living wage.

   Different consumers will have different priorities when making a purchase. Some people won’t buy from you if you make cuts in order to compete on price. Some people will. Hey, that’s the free market. In exchange for this kind of total transparency, companies would pay no taxes and be subjected to zero government regulations. Deal?

   But then my brain goes: But wait. What about intellectual property, patent rights, trade secrets? How would companies stop competitors from stealing their great ideas if they have to be totally transparent about how they do things? You’d want to put something in place to help protect and — shit. If you put federal laws protecting trade secrets, that’s not a pure free market anymore.

   Then I loop back around a few more times and come to the conclusion that the libertarian ideal of a pure free market is perfect except for being impossible.

3. There are certain things that aren’t sensitive enough to market pressure to be handled privately, but are critical to maintaining our way of life.
   Things like national security and healthcare and oh, I don’t know, saving people who are trapped in a major city that is under water.

   As a libertarian I didn’t understand what all the healthcare fuss was about. I became a full-time freelancer and still could not believe people wanted health insurance in the hands of the federal government. Then 18 months later, COBRA ran out. We bought our own and learned exactly how impossible it is to buy insurance as an individual. Insurance companies aren’t sensitive enough to market pressure because consumers aren’t the real customer. But also, because if they truly gave the consumer what they want – affordable, excellent healthcare coverage even for people who are very expensive to cover – insurance companies wouldn’t make a whole lot of money. And if they operated under total transparency, pretty soon healthy people would notice that they were paying for sick people and would cancel their insurance and the whole system would go under and we’d all be fucked.

   A year after Kevin had to shut down his business to go work in a dangerous and shitty chemical plant so our family could have health insurance, there was a pretty big hurricane down in New Orleans. Right after that another big hurricane hit Texas. Lots of people died while the world watched.

   Watching these events on CNN, where news anchors cried openly as they tried to convey the situation, I felt a new kind of outrage. This – THIS – is what we have a government for. Oh I know, it was actually not Bush’s job; it was the mayor’s fault, the state’s fault, but whatever. We have a federal government to goddamned keep people from dying if something goes terribly wrong in that chain. And if that’s not the way it works because that’s not how our federal government is set up to work, then I want that changed. I WANT the federal government to work that goddamned way. We’re a civilized, first world country. This is the very best place to live, we like to think. That’s not the way the world leader in human rights ought to treat its own citizens.

So where does that leave me, politically? Well, take a libertarian. Once you subtract a total stubborn hatred of all things legislative, and you add in a strong feeling that the government should play a role in protecting its citizens, you’re left with a social liberal who is skeptical of government but wants key areas of involvement and SHIT. That’s a Democrat.

I tried to fit all of that onto an Obama bumper sticker, but it didn’t work.

I want to write about poop. Well, really I don’t – that’s disgusting – but my life involves a lot of poop these days and since this is intended to document this time in our life it would be dishonest to ignore the poopcentric nature of having young kids. Although, maybe it isn’t this way for everyone. In fact, now I’m thinking almost definitely not because otherwise those “What to expect” books would’ve included like eight chapters each about poop.

Poop stinks. It smells really bad and sometimes you can’t tell where it is, like a fire engine with sirens that are coming from everywhere and you can’t figure out if you need to move out of the way or not. Only instead of sirens, it’s a smell like poop and oh my GOD there it is.

When Nicolaus was younger, he was considerate enough to be constipated throughout toddlerhood. Not Graham. Graham personally contributed his weight in poop-filled diapers to the local landfill every day for almost three years. It was gross and continuous and really made me hesitate to ever try potty training him.

But now that the potty era has dawned in the land of Graham, his system is all Woah WTF OMG etc. The poor kid is so absolutely determined not to have this sort of accident that he will sit on the toilet forever. At first I was such a good mom about it. I’d sit by his side and cheer him on. I’d supply books and activities. I’d tell the story of the Three Bears and drag it out for thirty minutes with textured character development and foreshadow, just so he wouldn’t get bored. But honestly, I don’t have a great attention span. As the 2-hour poop event became a nightly thing and I found myself giving a more abridged version of the three bears: Once upon a time there were three bears! Mamabeardaddybearbabybear! Porridge! They left. Then Goldilocks came! Too hot! Too cold! Just right! Chair – too high, too low, just right! And so on!

Which he didn’t seem to mind, but still. Pretty lame on my part. Then I got him all set up, said some cheerful words, wished him well, handed him a pen and some paper to draw on and then said “Oh! I’ll be right back!”

Then I didn’t come right back. I folded laundry and helped Nicolaus type a story about Star Trek and did some other things, and called, “Graham, you doing okay in there?”

“Yeahhhhh. But I’m! not! finished!”

I cruise back by to check on him just in time to applaud a successful poop and to help him get down and wipe and flush and everything.

Basically it’s like an airline pilot, right? All the hard work is at the beginning and the end of the process. The rest is just me waiting and being nearby in case something terrible happens. Like if the airplane falls off the toilet somehow and hits its head on the floor the pilot is there to come running to hug the airplane and everything and help the airplane get back up on the potty.

Anyway, thanks to my own lameness he is gaining great independence at this thing. I’m giving him juice to help get things moving again, and in the meantime he is weirdly content to sit and wait patiently for the great event.

And oh when the event comes, how we celebrate! First, he invites us all to check out his creation. Then he tells us what it resembles. So far this week, he has produced a man with two legs and no arms, a bird, a tiny little rectangle, Jupiter, and a machine that makes motorcycles or maybe trucks. Then I put him in the bath because he just spent thirty loosely-supervised minutes drawing all over his arms and legs with a pen.

So potty training is going pretty well. He got the whole system down perfectly after less than 2 weeks. Then two days later the novelty wore off and he started telling me NO whenever I suggested he might need to go potty at some point, which led to him peeing everywhere. But like most things that are horrifyingly awful before they become easy, it’s a process, not an event.

Ah, Monday. A new week, a fresh start, a week where I will not forget any classes or fail to do laundry or let my art projects take over the entire house. No one will get sick because I will it to happen that way. I won’t lose my keys or my wallet. I won’t put my cell phone in the washing machine, even though I found out last week that it survives being put in the washing machine just fine.

The seven pieces for my little art show are finished, done, at the gallery. I’m happy with how most of them turned out, and excited to be finished – partly because it feels good to finish something ambitious but mostly because for the love of everything I had to STOP making changes. It was probably costing us $30 a day just to have the dang things in our house; everywhere we went I’d see things that oooooh! Might look cool! It had to stop. I have mental problems that require medical supervision and yay! Birds! And glass and plastic and lights!

So that’s done.

On Friday I heard from a very exciting catalog that thinks they probably want to carry my Nerdy Baby products, but only if they can get samples right away, like instantly, will that be a problem?

Well. I learned one thing from a childhood spent watching great movies: When someone asks you if you are able to provide samples immediately, YOU SAY YES. I bribed my boys with a trip to Sonic and they gave me the space I needed to put everything together.

So! The new week begins. The house is kind of messy. A bunch of neurotically over-packaged samples are en route to New York City right this minute, and all should arrive by noon tomorrow. And then I assume, the company will forward me their standard “rich and famous” contract, and there will never be any problems in the world ever again.

In the meantime, I am happy to present to you the deeply nerdy little book, Pat Schrodinger’s Kitty. Need to go outside to get better photos, but these will give you the idea. Wooo nerdy!

Available in the etsy shop for now, and will be added to my main site as soon as I have a bigger batch of them put together.

Well, it’s ten minutes before midnight. My kids are just now asleep, the house is a mess, the money situation is mediocre, orders are slow, and we really need to go to the store one day. But still, I feel pretty great thanks to delusions of satisfactory accomplishment. Over the weekend I finished all of the commissioned artwork and made huge progress on my seven pieces that will go on display next week. The ones with the science and the birds and the broken glass? Very excited. Kevin’s helping me finish them in time for delivery to the gallery this Friday. It’s not a super snooty/prestigious place but still. They are birds! On plexiglass! With broken glass and water and light!

I’m about five years old.

In other news of things that make me jump up and down and flap my arms like a dorky little girl: Physics books for babies!

I’m assembling a bunch of them over the next week or so, and trying to figure out how to price these things. On the one hand, they are labor intensive, hand assembled and glued and everything. Very unique and specific to a niche market of approximately fourteen people. Look:

Plus the people have to have sort of a sense of humor and a money to spend on funny books made by weird people in their own homes.

So. Niche product. Unique, not widely available. Lot of work. Boutiquey. That makes it sound like a $25 item. But cheap labor and mass assembly technology have spoiled us on little activity books for babies: they aren’t supposed to cost more than $10 or so. Half that if you go to Walmart or look on ebay. Damn it all. Have to think about this more.

Meanwhile, the days go on. This week is wonderful, if only in contrast to last week. None of us have been eaten by rhinos or poisoned to death by the hand of a trusted friend. I’m feeling grateful. Tomorrow at the Ard School of Arts and Sciences we’re going to tackle the questions of how do airplanes fly and how do birds fly and why do they both need wings even though airplane wings don’t even flap.

I’ve also been teaching Nicolaus how to sew and, other than forgetting the word “sew” and calling it knitting all the time, he is really good at it. He’s making a little rug, working on patterns with different colors of yarn which might sound boring but he is holy shit! Obsessed with it. He takes it everywhere he goes and works quietly — that’s right, I said quietly — in the back seat while we run errands. He brings it into restaurants, and chooses knitting over checkers, bedtime stories, and nearly everything else. Tonight he seriously knitted himself to sleep. Why didn’t I try this sooner?

While Nicolaus knits, Graham goes to the potty. I’ve only ever seen the horrors of war as portrayed in old movies and books, but I don’t think it’s too sweeping to say that the first week of potty training is exactly as terrible as a real military battle. Maybe except that in potty training nobody dies. But! Follow me here – if instead of bullets they were shooting something nondeadly… like oh, I don’t know… poop and tinkle at each other, it would be exactly the same and the degree of post-traumatic stress syndrome would be no different.

Which I’m assuming that the military would then have to buy their ammunition at the Poop Store, which Graham says is his favorite store because they sell diapers that have already been used. And when you buy the diapers you think they haven’t been used, but then you get home and WHAT? There’s already poop and tinkle inside! And that is SO FUNNY.

So yeah. In Grahamland right now it’s all potty, all the time, but it’s getting easier already. He’s getting the hang of it, and it’s amazing to watch him reason through how this all works. He wants it to work. We have learned that when he said “I need to go” you’d better stop what you are doing and take him immediately. Even if he just went 30 seconds ago and you are on the other side of the store and it’s very inconvenient. Trust me dude. Take him now.

Enough! Enough posting! I’m very tired and they’re all asleep so I’m stupid if I don’t go to sleep.

Plan for tomorrow:
Wake up
Straighten the living room and my work area
Practice reading and math with Nicolaus while Kevin takes Graham to the grocery store
Pack orders
Look up how airplanes and birds fly
Take my kid to his actual class that he is actually registered for, at its actual correct time and day.
Post office
Sonic
Go to the park and exhaust my children, so that they’ll maybe stop staying up past my own bedtime
While they play on the playground, quietly obsess about the little physics books. OMG! They are so nerdy. I want to list them for sale NOW. But they aren’t finished yet. Stupid trip to the park, I could be home right now gluing and trimming and binding and… ah. This is such a better week.