For the past 5 months I've been working on a project with two wonderful men from Paris. We're building a baby. It involves me, the egg donor, and another great lady, the surrogate, and of course the gentlemen who must provide the other ingredients.
First, I had to make the eggs, and lots of them. A woman on a natural cycle would make just one egg, on this sci-fi journey I made at least 20. It took lots of fertility hormones and I got real plump for a couple months, then we went to L.A. to suck'em out of me. It was a process...They then inseminated the eggs and according to our doctor the embryos are ''Absolutely beautiful.'' Here they are = the daddies call them Tic and Tac, for now
All of us met up for dinner on our last night in L.A. to celebrate, as one of the fathers puts it, ''the beginning of the beginning...or the end of the beginning...or the beginning of the end...'' or, you get it.
The surrogate was successfully implanted with the embryos and now we shall wait for the tech-assisted miracle to grab hold of her life-baring womb.
Asa Tibbs- fried trout with veggies and Yebeg Tibbs-lamb w/ rosemary at Merkato Ethiopian Market, Little Ethiopia, L.A.
glass noodles, squid, tempura'd gimbap, veggies, and more squid at a supermarket cafe in Koreatown, L.A
Japanese hot-pot, shabu-shabu at Mizu 212 on Sawtelle Blvd. David, Ed, and I ate here so long ago, had to go back. It was better the first time before I had had hotpot in many iterations in China and Taiwan. I think the ponzu and goma sauce are great, but I like the Chinese boiling broth/oil better than the Japanese version, water with a hint of seaweed. But I'll have to have it in Japan to really know which is the superior style...
Korean sparerib tacos, from the Kogi taco truck
Mango Lassi and cheese-based Indian desserts from the Indian Sweets House near the Museum of Jurrasic Technology and The Center for Land Use Interpretation
Cambodian spread- Peppered Shrimp, Chinese broccoli, beef lemongrass stew at Bamboo House in Little Cambodia, Long Beach
Not pictured- Good burritos in some little busy cafe on the 720 bus line Excellent banh mi from the Phamashed truck on Wilshire and Fairfax Great tacos in some neighborhood Mexican grocery store Decent vegetarian Indian in a classic old, empty Wilshire Blvd. restaurant A couple nice salad bars Boring daily continental breakfasts A wonderful meal at Ramayani Indonesian restaurant in Westwood A mediocre meal at a Persian restaurant in Westwood
Last but not least... A totally fabulous time eating pickles, hamburgers, etc. with our new international family at Junior's Delicatessen on Westwood.
There are a plethora of videos out there about barefoot/minimal shoe running, I'm sure you could find plenty good ones yourself, but I found these to be sufficiently helpful and informative. Just two's enough to start...
Why change your stride?
I'm not advocating this particular shoe necessarily, but the advice is good.
It's important to transition from a heel strike to a forefoot slowly. You're using different muscles, specifically those in your calves. At first, I ran half my normal mileage in shoes and then finished for about 20 minutes, shoeless, in the grass. I did this for about a week. My calves were sore and I didn't push it, but I was persistent with the training. I then found a pair of over-sized crocs sandals. They had plenty of room for the toes to splay out, they had marginal cushioning, so I could transition to the forefoot while still running my normal distances, 4-6 miles. I ran in the crocs for little less than a week before the soreness in my calves eventually went away. I now have running moccasins, and I'm in the midst of another adjustment phase, as they are nearly close to running barefoot.
The most important aspect of this whole transition is moving the strike from the heel to the forefoot. It's liberating to know that you already have the equipment to run, you needn't even have the 'perfect' shoe*. You could pick-up any cheap, flexible tennis shoe, take out the overly cushioned insole, and with some trial and error achieve the same result. At first, it's not solely about bare-feet and it's not about the shoes, it's about changing your strike and getting closer to actually using the machinery of the foot.
When I feel my form slipping during a barefoot/minimal shoe run, I tell myself: Head up, and still Shoulders up, never slouched Arms in, not pumping (unless going fast) Shorter stride, not longer (unless sprinting) Faster cadence Bouncy Knees up (especially when I feel the beginning of a blister, or some pain somewhere)
I think about trying to imitate the incredible Haile Gebrselassie, you know, why not!?
If something hurts, slow down and just 'spin' the legs underneath you, as if you were running in place, although you're still running straight. In other words, trot.
Cushioned running shoes make it easier to just push through discomfort. Running on your feet, however, makes you deal with the cause. Always adjust the stride, pace, posture in order to make the discomfort actually stop. You actually cannot run in pseudo-bare-feet without adjusting. Feet are designed to constantly adjust to the surface, let them do that. A Simple Exercise for making the transition to a forefoot strike: Jumping rope is one of the best exercises I used for building up to running on my forefoot. When you jump rope you must do all of the above: keep shoulders and head up, your arms are mostly fixed as your hands rotate the rope, they aren't flailing around, you're jumping from your forefoot only, and you're using the spring tension in you calves and quads for the power, just as in a forefoot stride. Bonus, you can do it in regular training shoes, at a gym, at home, anywhere safe from rain, snow, and hail. And it really practices the good form you need for running efficiently. Now for my 'Testimony' I've been running just about everyday since 1999, with several down periods due to injuries. The last year in Taiwan was the worst. I injured my ankle while I was bending down to sit in a circle with some kids. When I got up I couldn't walk without pain. What the hell, right? So the 7 month (boring and sucky) recovery began. I stopped running, started swimming and walking. All I wanted to do was run, but I couldn't, that's a crappy feeling. As soon as I thought my ankle was recovered I gradually started jogging, only to find that I would re-injure it, undoing the recovery. Up until changing to a forefoot strike, I had to wrap my ankles after every workout. I was depressed with the thought that I will have reoccurring injuries forever.
The best thing I learned from this period was all the preventative exercises that built balance and proprioception, which in this case, is the ability of the ankle to react faster to situations where there is too much strain on the ligaments. I now make these exercises a part of my regular routine...google: proprioceptive exercise, balance exercises for runners, etc. There's lots out there, but here's my suggestion:
Several times a week, stand on one foot with your eyes closed, count to 30, or 50, or 100, whichever is most challenging, do it twice on both feet. (There's a cute story here**) That's a basic and good one. Build up to a higher count, add arm circles, touch your nose. There are tons of articles like this one that conclude that even at such a low prevention efforts such exercises have extremely good results in preventing injuries.
Also, at one point I had low-level metatarsalgia, which is forefoot pain in my right foot. I couldn't walk barefoot without feeling some kind of pain. After running on my forefeet for only 1 week, that pain disappeared. It's called strengthening your feet by using them! Why spend money on fancy, expensive insoles that coddle your feet and promote foot atrophy?
So, coming back to the States this fall I was psyched to pick up the book Born to Run looking for the inspiration and some new (old) ideas about how to run. This book is the current running zeitgeist, and I'd really recommend it for people that love running. It's a fun and easy read rolling through all sorts of natural histories about running, the Tarahumara of Mexico, ultramarathon culture, the Shoe Industry. Lots is introduced, though little is really expanded upon. (Ch. 25 to the end is the good stuff) But that's what the internet is for, right? I'd read this book to get yourself encouraged to change your stride. It makes you want to run; and it made me not give up on running, and not succumb to the idea that I will be forever injured.
(Not surprisingly in Taiwan I couldn't go to a local track without seeing some older man in trousers rolled up to his knees running or walking barefoot around the track. If the Chinese are doing it, there's usually something to it. )
*I looked around at some of the popular minimal running shoes. I was reluctant to spend a $100 or more on shoes, when the whole point is to simplify. I'm a cheapskate, I want to find something cheap, un-fancy, and good-enough. I finally gave into the purchasing a running moccasin from Soft Star Shoes if only because they are, in my eyes, a model business: family-run, local raw materials, good craftsmanship, solar-powered factory, all in the USA. Yay! Not to mention the product is super quality and un-techy. After a decade of forking over $60-80 every 6 months to New Balance, a company that is more than likely entirely overseas manufacturing and sweat-shopped-up, I had zero qualms with giving my $100 to Soft Star Shoes, it felt really great, in fact.
** In my class in Taiwan, in order to a get a little proprioceptive exercises done while at work, I'd have my young students practice counting to 100 in English as I stood on one leg with my eyes closed. I'd flail around and look funny, they'd giggle and count loudly. They loved it. Cute, eh?
I've been changing my stride in the last two weeks. I doubled my typical mileage in one week. That's a little extreme. You're supposed to increase by 10 percent a week if your easing into a new pace or stride. I casually run 3 miles to the gym, lift weights, and walk three miles home as a typical workout, but yesterday I ran 6 (which I do once a week) and walked the three miles home. It felt easy and great at the time, but now I can't walk because my calves are solid rods of swollen meat.
But in a months time I'll have strengthened my feet and calves and six miles will be typical and 12 miles will be my long run! I love my new stride, it's the best thing I've done for my workouts in a long time.
My Taiwan photographs, "Suan Suan Tian Tian", are going to be in the FORMAT Photography Festival this spring. I've tidied up the requisite Bio and Statement for their published materials. Here they are: Bio: Hannah Pierce-Carlson is a language teacher, student, traveler, and where those inspirations converge she’s an artist. She has formally studied cultural geography, geoscience, and creative writing, and grew-up in a household inundated with music and a curiosity for foreign languages. At an early age she aspired to use some creative means to allow her ideas and observations to play-out. She has found one aspect of her creative self satisfied by photography, but aspires to become fluent in any number of creative skills as well. She has lived, worked, and traveled (by bicycle!) in East Asia and various places in the United States. As of 2011, she will find herself back in China to teach and create with Michael Julius, her artistic partner and husband.
Statement: Suan suan tian tian, in Chinese, means "sour sour sweet sweet." The phrase is the title of several saccharin pop songs popular in Taiwan and China; and commonly, it's a phrase describing a flavor whose metaphor extends to matters of the heart. My photographic senses are drawn to intimate, ordinary scenes that are belied by a note of ambiguous tension.
I spent a year living on the island of Taiwan. As an outsider, all I can attest is to my everyday experience. Perhaps under the influence of an on-going cultural adjustment, the days vacillated from gloomy to bright, from grey utility to colorful superfluity, from a droning monotony to a sporadic, exotic festivity. I hope that the photographed moments epitomize how the sour and sweet- or choose your opposing forces- are always in operation on the everyday, even beyond these Taiwan moments. The idea is to embrace their combination.
Bus parked outside the tragically collapsed temple Existential puppy Sisters on the very green grass Graffiti zen stairwell trans. "Do Not Piss Here. Zen"
Handsome soap opera man
Pole dancing at the birthday party for the goddess, Fuozu Laundry still-life: “xi yuan, xi fu” trans. "Cherish wealth, cherish family"
Studying GRE Studying Chinese Reading books about Dangdut, English, Pakistan, Running Practicing Indonesian here and there (!) Under going fertility treatment for egg donation Waiting to go to China Learning how to run barefoot Making our own bread Blogging and all that...
One of the French gentlemen expressed their wishes that we meet again* at some time in the future a while after the child is born. Meaning, of course, that I will meet the child face to face who is half me half one of them. I wonder what that will feel like? Like meeting any other of my friend's children? Or like meeting your *child*? The later seems too Soap Opera for me. It wouldn't be my child, that is it wouldn't be *mine* in possession, Jesus. I like to think it will be a pleasant blend of meeting a friend's kid that you happen to believe is more awesome than any other kid (by virtue of it being some kind of reflection of yourself).
*Specifically, it was requested that we should meet in the South of France during summer when the heads of the zucchini are ripe for grilling. Well, yeah, I don't see why not!
The much coveted pet dog will be named "Spinach" and the collectible toy horses in lieu of having the dog will be named the words meaning 'spinach' in various languages of the world.
On my toes in cheap aqua socks down the steps of a pedestrian tunnel strewn with broken NyQuil bottles and wet sheets, under which the night before, I can only imagine, the cold-sufferer slept and relieved himself mid-dream, as the high plain winds made the paper litter dance, and the vibrations of an entire freeway and railroad overhead rumbled like a sedative the cement on which he lay fetal, and I move like a baby new to walking, through the dark and scary.
Took the Parisians for a mosey through the Stockyards. They saw USA motorcyclists dressed as "USA motorcyclists" and one man dressed as John Wayne. Somewhere near the gift shop corral, Michael and I spotted a family dressed identically in black dress shirts and blue jeans stamp down a lowly bush as the SLR portrait artist zoomed in around their huddled figures in front of a weathered old barn-like door.
I told the Parisians that Americans love railroad tracks, brick walls, urban alley ways, and red barn doors as backdrops and props in their portraits. What does this say about us, I think? I think it must be something to do with the first images that we've ever seen of ourselves as Americans. It has something to do with those Old World urban immigrants, Mid-West homesteaders, Western pioneers and the tracks that linked them all, and the walls that those people stood in front of as the flashbulb exploded on them.
Parisians had a good time, bought a painted cow skull. To mark the occasion, I gave them some small leather cowboy boots for their yet to be conceived child. They gave me elegant dark chocolate from Paris and a box of addictive little pastries called "Calisson D'Aix."
My fear of my teeth is as large as that of my fear of stumbling and spraining my ankle. I fear that at any time I might be struck with a serious abscess that will cost me a thousand dollars to fix. I'm no stranger to dental pain. I've had root canals in three different countries. Moreover, I have fallen off bikes and stumbled over my own feet injuring my ankles in more inconvenient places than that. So these are my fears, as they are completely warranted.
So I am trying new things. I am strengthening my feet and ankles by trying to run barefoot, or by at least changing my stride to a forefoot, mid-foot strike, rather than the artificial heel strike that expensive, and overly cushioned shoes insist upon your movement.
Also, I am using the old Ayurvedic practice of oil pulling, which involves swishing the oil in your mouth for about 20 minutes without any swallowing. This is particularly effective using coconut oil, a natural anti-microbial which is good for periodontal health. I am also using my own face "soap" using honey, salt, and coconut oil, wiping off using a wet rag, rather than using a surfactant which takes away the moisture in the skin. My skin has softened dramatically, the color tone is more even, and my breakouts are slowly, but surely clearing. This oil seems to be something of a panacea.
These new practices I've found to be not only pleasant, but immediately healing.
Passing the low bridge, one’s beads give vent to a volley of abuse. The chestnut trees shed their leaves one by one. Trying one topic of conversation after another, the door admitted visitors singly. Why not?
Was it for this we eschewed attention-getting moments in the plaza after the sun finished sulking? There were rabbits in the oasis no one told us about, least of all nougat merchants in close quarters. One lullaby fits all. There is no clause in hearing, only nimble perspective-gulping giants or loneliness asserts itself, featureless though picked out in pills of light.
