Bionic Teutonic

Last Wednesday, my wife and I had a little baby boy. Octavian Orion Fetz Stallings (tavi for short) was born at 4:41pm and weighed 8lbs 7oz. He was breech during the entire pregnancy so we ended up having to do a planned cesarean at Swedish hospital, but it went smoothly and now we are back home settled into our place.

So far, things have gone really well. Ariel is recovering quickly and though still a little slow, we have been getting out for daily walks with Tavi and our dog Sassafrass, which has been great. He sleeps like a champ so far, which means that we have been avoiding the dreaded sleep deprivation, at least for now. He is tiny and cute and healthy as can be, which is really all you can ask for.

I’m just at the very beginning of this adventure, but my life has opened up in so many ways already. My heart feels like it opened up a huge new space for him to settle in to. It’s crazy how natural that feels. I’ve known him for all of 4 days and already I feel so connected to the little guy. I would pretty much do anything for him at this point.

There are so many thoughts swirling in my brain about being a new parenthood, about the miracle of life, and my little boy specifically that it’s hard to even know how to write about it. There is all the little logistical stuff that changes, but more than that, the shift in outlook has been huge. My hopes and desires are now tied up with this little being that is just at the cusp of his life. Not that I don’t have my own, but they all need to be inclusive of him and the support he will need.

One of the changes is just how present I feel. I try and cultivate that through yoga, meditation, and just reminding myself to be present, but I get distracted with all sorts of things during the course of a normal day. The mind veers off on tangents and it’s hard to stay in the moment as much as I would like. This past week though has been nothing but me being in the moment. I don’t want to miss any of it. All the little things that he does, all the little explorations of this new world that he has already begun. And I can only hope that I can continue to be this present after the newness of parenthood wears off.

I’m sure that I will have tons more to say in the coming months, but for now, I’m just thankful for a healthy boy, that both Ariel and I are in such a great place to welcome him into the world, for our amazing group of friends who have been supporting us, and for much more. Couldn’t have asked for a better Thanksgiving than this one.

Last night Ariel and I tried to go to the Raphael Saddiq show at the Showbox. We haven’t been going out the last few years much. I usually find myself fairly uninterested in clubs or bars these days, but both Ariel and I are big Saddiq fans, so we decided to go. When I went to go buy tickets online, Ticketmaster was charging $8.50 per ticket on a $20 ticket. That’s almost half again as much! What the hell? I actually balked at that and got all worked up (’monopoly’, ‘gauging’, ‘evil’, etc) and didn’t buy the ticket. We didn’t think the show would sell out anyway, and that we’d just go down there early and get tickets. We got all dressed up fancy for the show, drove down, parked the car, walked up to the Showbox in the cold, only to find a big ‘SOLD OUT’ sign on the door. Bummer. Seriously though, something about Ticketmaster is just wrong. How can they charge almost half again as much as the full ticket price? Of course, me getting worked up about it meant that I didn’t get see the show, so I sort of shot myself in the foot, but it still irks me. We need a revolution.

After 15 years, I’ve decided that I am going to try not being a vegan for a while. I have though very long and hard about this and feel like this is the right decision for me (for now). A decision that has scared me oddly (even writing this post scares me), but I think that fear reinforces for me my feeling that I’ve become too attached to veganism as an identity and that I should back off for a while and figure out my relationship to it and reexamine my original intentions. A sort of vegan Rumspringa as it were.

A bit of history. I’d grown up eating meat (in Montana, Iowa, and Germany – all very meat heavy places). Even vegetarianism wasn’t much on my radar. At one point the girlfriend of my step-brother’s dad was a vegetarian and would eat tofu burgers, which my brother and I found completely baffling and would make fun of in a “can you believe what she is eating” sort of a way. Neither of us could really wrap our heads around it. The very concept was funny because it seemed so outlandish.

When I was in high school, I was pretty active in a variety of environmental causes and groups and I started to be around more vegetarians and even a few vegans, which also was a new concept. But at least I started to get it. Eating lower on the trophic pyramid means less land used to feed us means less deforestation. I could wrap my head around it and even began to contemplate it. Then one summer, some friends of the family (who were my age and vegan) from Germany came and stayed with my mom, Susan and I. So while they were with us, we made sure that the food we made was vegan and they did a fair amount of cooking as well. After the month they spent with us, I realized I had pretty much been vegan the whole time and it didn’t feel that difficult and I felt good.

Over the next couple of years, I really dove in. Reading as much as I could, experimenting with different diets and foods. And I was pretty dogmatic about things for the first several years. I was fully in it to win it and I’m sure was probably quite annoying about it at times. But I really connected with it and brought a lot of awareness and attention to what I was doing.

Now, 15 years later, I’m feeling a bit like I’m vegan by default. I don’t pay a ton of attention to my diet these days, which especially as I’ve become increasingly active is not a good thing. I know that I’m not getting enough of certain things in my diet and also don’t really have the motivation to really step up and do the nutritional research and experimentation to develop a good vegan diet for my athletic performance needs. Just to be clear, I’m fully aware that you can be very active on a vegan diet. There are vegan iron man competitors who are much, much more active than I, but it requires a level of attention that I have not had the motivation for lately.

Another thing that has been on my mind as I’ve been considering this is the idea of attachment and identity. I’ve been doing a lot of reading and studying of the yoga sutras lately. The yoga sutras say that the cause of suffering is “the association or identification of the seer with the seen”. Being vegan is one of the biggest identities that I have taken on over the years as who I am. Of course, it’s not who I am, but I’ve associated with it to a degree that I feel is a little too unquestioning at this point in time. It can make us a little bit too dogmatic when we claim an identity. And eventually it means that we have a set of rules that guide our behavior that don’t need to think about anymore. We don’t look for circumstances where those guidelines may not be the best thing for us. We can just sort of cruise by on autopilot and that’s what I feel like I’m doing right now with my veganism.

None of this means that I won’t be back to a vegan lifestyle in a couple of months, a year, or however long it lasts, but I think I need a reexamination. I’m going to have to go pretty slowly introducing dairy into the diet so my stomach doesn’t hate me. So we shall see how this experiment goes. I could hate it and come running back quickly, I could stay away forever. I’m really trying to be as receptive and attentive as possible and examine with an open heart and open mind. Here goes.

It’s been snowing like crazy here in Seattle. And fluffy snow too. Not the normal wet, depressing stuff we usually get. Yesterday, it snowed most all day long. It was beautiful. People were out with sleds, cross-country skis, snowboards, trash can lids. Midway through yoga class yesterday (which was very small as people were either stranded or out enjoying the snow), the instructor opened all the blinds so we could bask in the glory. I used to have this fantasy when I was a kid about living in a cabin in the woods during the winter, where I’d cross-country ski into town for groceries one a week or so and just live in the woods. There would be lots of hot chocolate and marshmallows in this fantasy, lots of good books, and lots of snowshoe walks in the woods. It may not be quite the same thing, but right now, Seattle feels like a good substitute.

It snowed! Oh, how I miss snow sometimes. Granted, this snow will probably turn to slush soon, as I do live in Washington, but for the brief time that it sticks, it’s a winter wonderland. Across the street from us is the Seattle AIDS support group house, which sells Christmas trees every year. I’ve been taking Sassafrass by the house on our walks every day because they smell soooo good. Now all the trees have snow on them in it’s making me a bit nostalgic for the Montana Christmas of my childhood. I don’t know how I got so much Christmas spirit all of a sudden. I even went to the library and checked out the John Denver Muppets Christmas album, which we listened to every year as I was growing up. Totally cheesy but I love it. Also, the cold snap that is coming is supposed to be good, as it kills the beetle larvae that have been decimating forests around here. Yay winter!

So far, I’ve been really enjoying being unemployed. I have so much time to focus on the things I want to be doing and pursuing my new career which is great. However….. I have reached the point where I am at home WAY too much. It’s hard to maintain focus and concentration and I find myself becoming restless around mid-afternoon every day. The exact time when this restlessness begins occurring has been happening earlier and earlier also. That is one of the good things about having a job is that it forces you to get out of the house and imposes a little bit of structure on your day. And those days where I do get a lot done, by the time Ariel gets back home from work and my ‘work’ day is done, I can’t come up with the energy to be anything other than slightly bored at home. Yesterday however, I went to the library for the afternoon, and all of that disappeared. I got all the studying done I had planned, I got a long walk out of the deal, and when I came home, my brain wasn’t going all caged monkey on me. I think I need to do this more often.