Even after a decade of being a part of Carnival, I stand amazed and awed by it all. At the start of every Krewe du Vieux second line, I spontaneously thank the universe for this opportunity. Thank you for this. Thank you for placing me right here right now. Nonesuch. None. Such.

However much I chide the city for its shortcomings, its importance and relevance only grows in my mind, especially during Carnival. What would you give for a place in time where your friends love you for who you are and not what you do, new friends invite you into their homes without question only to feed and dress you, your imagination takes life year after year and joy is there for the taking and giving? This is possible and right here on earth.

It’s totally about the costumes, beads, food and drink. And it’s much more than that. Next year, get that ticket in your hand.

Oh, and just in case you don’t understand the punchline of the first paragraph:

Whitney Houston was the first cassette tape my uncle bought along with a brand new player back in 1985. And while listening to “Saving All My Love” at the age of 10 was when I first really understood unrequited love and loss.

This isn’t about a post about memorializing celebrities, burnouts and addicts. It isn’t even about fame and addiction. It notes the talent and beauty of one female 80s musician, and her songs and videos that were so much a part of some of us growing up. We had our Depeche Mode, Madonna, Thomas Dolby, Wham! and all the pop and New Wave you can(not) handle, but we had Whitney Houston and it made all the difference. I can assure you that Lady Gaga and M.I.A. will not make as lasting an impression on today’s teenagers as Whitney and Madonna made on us. Maybe Adele, maybe.

Yet, it’s sad how some of the same folks who don’t care for Whitney Houston’s downward spiral and untimely death because they “don’t mourn junkies” consider a trip to Graceland a must-do. Elvis sank and died in a very similar fashion, you know.

The social media outlets are now blowing up with a WSJ article by Pamela Druckerman about how French parents are superior to their neurotic American counterparts.

… After a few more harrowing restaurant visits, I started noticing that the French families around us didn’t look like they were sharing our mealtime agony. Weirdly, they looked like they were on vacation. French toddlers were sitting contentedly in their high chairs, waiting for their food, or eating fish and even vegetables. There was no shrieking or whining. And there was no debris around their tables.

Shivers ran down my spine while reading this paragraph. See, none of this would have happened in the households in which D and I grew up because if you had by some stroke of ill luck lost the fear of God (our parents) and a sound thrashing, it would be reintroduced with a quickness. Act up at dinner? Too bad. You were turned away from the table and no, no plate saved for you in case you hungered later that night. In a house full of boys (D’s) or in which Indian and Arab food was prepared fresh everyday (mine), there were no leftovers. Should’ve pitched a fit after swallowing a few spoonfuls. Survival of the most strategic, baby. Act up at dinner outside the confines of home? Can you say “Dead Kid Walking?”

Be it due to low self-esteem, co-dependence issues or the need for unconditional love, Americans today, generally speaking, are way too indulgent of their children. Mine will not be raised that way. D says it’s all talk, I’m a big softie and will cater to their every whim. What he fails to realize is that authority is not my concern as much as being a good parent, and that is not being the kid’s friend or even the purveyor of morality but someone who makes him or her see that he or she is not the center of the universe. This is a very critical life lesson and lots more important than math, music, swimming, debate or religion. It breaks my heart to see my friends’ kids having kids or roped into being parents because their parents just could not and did not put their feet down to say and repeatedly, “Hey, I know life isn’t fair, but ruining yours and mine is not the way to deal with it” or “If you think suburbia is so boring, go downtown and volunteer or get a job.”

Back to French parents who

are raising happy, well-behaved children without all the anxiety.

Consistently-enforced parental discipline makes for well-behaved children but if you want your kids to be happy and have anxiety-free futures, you absolutely cannot beat the tar out of them, either. Occasional, warranted spanking is a-ok in my book, but whaling on your kid with the flyswatter, bottle of lotion or whatever is within reach is not. Such incoherence may stop the behavior but not the underlying cause and only builds resentment. (And all you white people who think spanking is corporal punishment or child abuse? You don’t know anything. Spanking! Ha! Haha!)

So, the trick is to stay cool but simultaneously firm. It’s a hard balancing act, especially with respect to this human being you created and provokes you like no other. It’s easy to indulge, relent or rage. And then I think of a certain sibling of mine and his family, in which the chill-but-rigorous approach to parenting has largely succeeded. It’s not impossible.

Another highly-effective child-rearing tool mentioned in the article is Alone Time. Except we didn’t have a term for it growing up because we were supposed to entertain ourselves for whole chunks of time while parents took care of, heaven forbid, themselves and their affairs. What ever happened to leaving or being thrown out of the house to go run around and get scraped up with the neighborhood kids? (And don’t tell me you can’t do it in the city or the America of today because I grew up among high-rise buildings in the sand-and-concrete desert of Kuwait.) Sitting in your room reading, doodling, thinking up stories and next adventures, rifling through your brother’s stuff or generally farting around the house? And, that’s just it, if you have to call it Alone Time and schedule it into your kids’ calendars along with similarly vacuous, antiseptic activities on the order of Play Dates, Tumbling Time, Mommy & Me or whatever the hell have you, you’ve discovered the root of the problem with modern American parenting. Leave the poor kid alone to build an imagination and independence. Give yourself a break, too, while you’re at it. Parenting is probably the most important responsibility one will ever have, but that doesn’t have to mean subsuming your whole identity in the Creature That Came From Uterus.

Or The Powerful Posse Of Playground Power Parents, for that matter. *shudder*

When I think of a general philosophy for any future kid, this is what comes to mind: I love you with all of my heart and will never harm your trust in me, but cross me and I will put you back whence you came. I joke and laugh with you and let a lot of things slide, but not the important things because I am not here to win a popularity contest. You will always be physically and mentally safe here, but there are things you need to hear and others you will have to figure out on your own. Everyone screws up, including parental unit over here, but please don’t do it in a bad way because your life is supposed to be better than mine, not a repetition or justification of my own mistakes. And I truly hope you become the best possible you, but even if you don’t, that’s ok. As long as you’re a good, self-reliant person and not moving into my basement in a few years. Because, sweet jesus, I want to retire in peace.

Didn’t mean to get all Kahlil Gibran on you, but if humans are not willing to think about at least some of these things ahead of time, we have no business reproducing. This is why I often think that the best parents are the ones that don’t have children.

Volcanoclast hosts this month’s Accretionary Wedge on countertop geology.

Have you seen a great countertop out there?  Sure, everyone says it’s “granite”, but you know better.  Take a picture, post it on your own blog or send it to me and I’ll post it for you.  Do you think you know what it is or how it was formed?

I was all set to write about the rapakivi granite (that’s “Baltic brown” to you realtors out there, who refer to everything as granite or marble) in my kitchen when, hark, from the sky down came a reminder of a really cool countertop of yesteryear. Black marble with deformed fossils. Or more precisely, a lightly-toasted, black, fossiliferous, Irish limestone in the shape of a large octagon that belongs to U2.

Black "marble" of Kilkenny

Some science channel or the other provides constant background noise in my house (with signal being occasional exclamations such as “That in NO WAY could have caused the K-T extinction,” “When will these TV earthquake scientists balls up and start talking about strain instead of stress?”, “That 3D dinosaur has more feathers than our last Thanksgiving turkey” and “Really, did that American geologist just say MOGMA?!” There’s also the gratuitous repetition of “bass-solt” after a Britisher says the word “basalt.” Nope, never really left fifth grade.) For the last few days, a Science channel commercial on heavy rotation has been the trailer for U2′s new documentary From The Sky Down. The U2 fans are going to be on me like a pack of rabid … U2 fans for this, but one can only take so much Bono cooing about the transition from playing notes to finding The Great Pumpkin or something while creating Achtung Baby. It’s like those who say they found god in geology or New Orleans; a lot of times life simply boils down to being really good at something and enjoying doing it. For the good times and cash money.

The roof over the bar (photo by bobsrocket on Flickr CC-BY-NC-SA)

Anyway, Accretionary Wedge. Countertops. U2 commercial. Of course! The Kilkenny marble countertop of Dublin’s Octagon Bar in the Clarence Hotel owned by Bono and The Edge. I’ve been in there twice, but it wasn’t until the second time, when the place was a lot less crowded, that I nodded off looked down, noticed the fossils, especially the sheared brachiopod (see above – bottom right), and realized that I was looking at the beginning stages of a marble with preserved fossil fragments. The bartender is usually asked when Bono’s coming in or if she’s waited on The Edge so was really surprised when she caught me scrutinizing the bar and asking her if she knew its source. That it’s Irish is all she knew which sealed it – Lower Carboniferous “marble” from County Kilkenny in the southeast of Ireland. Not to be confused with a Kilkenny stout, which I am pretty sure can be had at the Octagon Bar while listening to The Joshua Tree, which in my opinion was the best U2 album ever.

Is there anything you cannot do, Ireland?

Further reading: Kilkenny Geology

From SOPAStrike.com:

On Jan 24th, Congress will vote to pass internet censorship in the Senate, even though the vast majority of Americans are opposed. We need to kill the bill – PIPA in the Senate and SOPA in the House – to protect our rights to free speech, privacy, and prosperity. We need internet companies to follow Reddit’s lead and stand up for the web, as we internet users are doing every day.

As a scientist and representative of Project Gutenberg, i.e. an internet user, I stand against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its more insidious older twin, the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) winding their ways through Congress.

DMCA, ACTA, SOPA, PIPA, whatever you want to call it, extended copyright terms and draconian terms of punishment for use violation are not the worst the state of intellectual property has come to. Every single day, books, art and scientific results that belong to the public domain are actively stolen away from us, turned into copyrighted product and then “protected from theft” with the help of those elected to represent us in government. This is a serious breach of the social contract and absolute proof that our congresspeople have been bought. They now represent other constituents that go by MPAA, RIAA, IFPI and AAP.

Keep information free, especially that which was free to begin with, and help break down the bars of ignorance and illiteracy. Join the fight against SOPA and PIPA. It’s going to be a long one.

Today, Amardeep pointed out this lengthy response by Korean-American Wesley Yang to Amy Chua’s Tiger Mother phenomenon – Paper Tigers: What happens to all the Asian-American overachievers when the test-taking ends?

… Here is what I sometimes suspect my face signifies to other Americans: an invisible person, barely distinguishable from a mass of faces that resemble it. A conspicuous person standing apart from the crowd and yet devoid of any individuality. An icon of so much that the culture pretends to honor but that it in fact patronizes and exploits. Not just people “who are good at math” and play the violin, but a mass of stifled, repressed, abused, conformist quasi-robots who simply do not matter, socially or culturally.

I’ve always been of two minds about this sequence of stereotypes. On the one hand, it offends me greatly that anyone would think to apply them to me, or to anyone else, simply on the basis of facial characteristics. On the other hand, it also seems to me that there are a lot of Asian people to whom they apply.

I saw the article before when it came out in May, but was reminded of it at an interesting time. The more I talk with my parents and older adults of my family, the more I realize how Asian, or more specifically Indian, my thought processes are not. Increasingly, I am of it, but I am not it. They’ll probably never get me – my priorities and quirks, but mostly my logic – and they cannot. Of course, my thoughts and decisions will forever be shaped to a certain degree by being raised in Kuwait by Indian parents, but I am, for better or for worse, American.

It comes down to expectations because of what we look like. The ones our immigrant parents have of us because they bore us and we look like them. And those the “native” Americans of this country to which our families came have of us because, well, we look Asian, so we had damned well better behave that way.

That way. The high-achieving, hard-working, deferential and thus quietly successful way we Asians are expected to go through life. For all my defiant Other-ness, I am able to (barely) deliver everyone’s expectations because I happen to be well-versed in science, mathematics and American English, am pathologically obsessed with employment and can slide in and out of different cultural and sub-cultural contexts. It most definitely hasn’t been easy, as described above, but I get by.

What of my counterparts and the hordes of Asian-American kids behind me, however, who cannot partially differentiate their way out of a wet paper sack and also have the personality and spine of that same wet paper sack? The ones who really want only to draw, write poetry and play soccer or, heaven forbid, have no apparent skills and charms and subsequently no clue what to become when they grow up. I know several beautiful, young people whose future paths haven’t been walked by anyone else yet, but who live in constant, secret fear of being compared to the achievements of the rest of their model society as well as the inevitable rejection of their parents. Is a profound lack of imagination and cruelty the best these kids can hope to get?

It’s the last paragraph of Yang’s article that reminded me hope lies in readjusting expectations from what our parents want of us or what America expects of us to the forgotten What We Want Of Ourselves.

… though the debate [Chua] sparked about Asian-American life has been of questionable value, we will need more people with the same kind of defiance, willing to push themselves into the spotlight and to make some noise, to beat people up, to seduce women, to make mistakes, to become entrepreneurs, to stop doggedly pursuing official paper emblems attesting to their worthiness, to stop thinking those scraps of paper will secure anyone’s happiness, and to dare to be interesting.

Because let’s face it, we’re not either of them. Then the truth that it’s really us and neither our parents nor anyone else who ultimately have to live our lives, think our thoughts, feel our joy and pain and feed, clothe and shelter us. Once we accept this fact, the strange third place in which we find ourselves is actually a boon and we can be anything we want from here. So, to the All-Asian-American Rejects, I say: Look beyond your face and into who you are. Take your difference and define your own identity and success. There is no set path, so you have to figure out what you want and build from there. Your secret weapon is America – this still-undiscovered country that socializes you into smiling, talking with others, being the salt of the earth and even an honest, comforting, calming mediocrity – and having been born and raised here by parents who, at some point, were risk-takers, too. If you fail, you will have failed, but it will have been on your terms.

To mark the passing of Christopher Hitchens, today’s rock is the Hadean Acasta gneiss on display in the Smithsonian Museum. Give hell hell, Hitch!