Well, we moved. I rewrote a second book proposal. Wrote an article for the New Scientist and two short pieces for Science. Wrote an essay for Seed and the Chicago Tribune. Wrote a book review for the NY Times. Writing another piece for Science. Haven't pitched much lately -- gave it up for Lent, though the lash of no's coming from one direction and the terror of pennilessness on the other would be penance enough and even make a Friday good. Have also consulted on, edited and/or wrote 5 or 6 grants, with others in the pipeline. Let me tell you, there are some weeks when getting paid by the hour, not the word, is the real ticket.

A short piece I did for the Texas Observer is here.

If you think people in America should speak only English, maybe Texas isn’t the state for you. Between 2000 and 2005, the number of people who reported speaking a language that’s not English at home rose by 860,000 to 6.86 million. They now make up 33 percent of the state’s population. (Come to think of it, maybe the U.S. isn’t the country for you: In 2005, 52 million people reported speaking another language, up 5 million since 2000.)

The Modern Language Association has just released colorful charts, based on data from the 2005 U.S. Census American Community Survey, that allow you to pull out data by state for the 30 most frequently spoken languages in the U.S. (All the data and maps are at www.mla.org/map_data.) It’s worth noting that these stats only cover speakers of languages other than English, not their fluency in English, so they capture seventh-generation, bilingual German families in New Braunfels as well as newly arrived Farsi speakers in Houston.

Spanish speakers account for the larger part of the increase in the population of non-English speakers. In Texas, they added about 737,000 non-English speakers. Texas had the second-largest increase, behind California. Even with anti-immigrant sentiment a major concern for the GOP, Spanish speakers gained in 44 states in the same period; only in Mississippi, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, Maine, and Vermont did their numbers drop. That’s a 4.1 million-person increase nationwide.

The polyglotting of Texas and the nation seems so inevitable that true connoisseurs of xenophobia should rejoice about the boost in Spanish speakers. Spanish, after all, is a European language. It’s the only European language on the rise; the numbers for French, German, Italian, Greek, and Polish, all spoken by older generations of immigrants, are dropping. Spanish is written in the Roman alphabet, so you can sound out written words even if you don’t know what they mean. And the language has thousands of words recognizable in English because of a shared heritage. MALDEF or LULAC aren’t likely to adopt this as a slogan, but we’ll say it here: Compared with Chinese, Thai, or Urdu, Spanish is practically English.

This is the fourth piece I've published since 1996 about Joe, a friend I made during the summer I lived in Alpine, Texas. It begins like this:

Remember Joe, my old friend from Alpine? He would be 80 years old this year, but he’s long gone. Survived cancer long enough to see the truth of God—he’d finally asked to see a priest after a lifetime of avowed atheism—and watch the twin towers fall. A month later I was driving to Midland for a burial in a place he never wanted. But Joe haunts me still. Especially when the economic news gets bad. I can hear his voice: Do you know what a derivative is, Michael? A liquidity put? Phantom envelopes mailed from Alpine arrived filled with clipped newspaper articles and forecasts of human greed highlighted with yellow marker. The words in my ears: Michael, you need a gun, and cash, small bills.

The second paragraph of my new essay, an homage to my time at the Dobie Paisano ranch, up at Design Observer:

Cutting cedars is a lot like writing, but it doesn't replace writing, and I've never gone out until I've done my daily. Standing, searching, bending, cutting, standing: it's repetitive work but has its art, too. You have to jam the clipper mouth around the tree stem below the dirt so the stump can't find the light and send up sprouts, but not so low that you grab a rock and chip the blade. Always in the back of your mind you have to know the line you're walking and working, more to guard yourself than for cedar-cutting efficiency, because the bigger trees would rather beckon you into the thick stands, where they grow fourteen, twenty feet high, and deep in their midst, where no sun ever reaches, the dry branches will first blind then skewer you, and there you'll wither and twist out of sight of the sky. Jerky gifts for coyotes.

And with that I'm also a contributing writer at Design Observer, where I've been happily writing sporadically for a few years. (An archive is here.)

Over at Design Observer, my Dream Job Project was recently launched. In this first post, I invited people to post the concrete aspects of the work they do or the work they want to do. Later I'm going to boil down this input into a set of parameters that would serve as the outlines of modern, creative work. Some of the postings so far have been about values, like autonomy. While those are important, certainly, I'm more interested in articulating the concrete, practical aspects of this "autonomy." Other people have posted about content, along the lines of, "I want to work with dogs." This, too, is crucial, but it's not the whole story: I doubt the dog lover would want the job as the canine euthanizer at the local pound.

I rather fear that I've been too abstract in my requests, but then again, this is an experiment: whatever people leave in the comments is what I've got to work with. This isn't a utopian project, in which "dream jobs" are available for everyone, and in which we can ignore the particular historical moment we live in, which creates needs and provides rewards but no escape hatch (except for suicide, I guess) from the reality of toil itself. Neither is it dystopian, in which we're nailed to the reality of toil (like the figure in the movie Metropolis, chained to the giant rotating arms of the clock), so we might as well count our blessings and make the best of it.

Really, it's this: if humans are meant to find meaning in work, and if "dream jobs" are really just variants of existing kinds of work, and if we're driven by our aspirations, then what can we give people to understand how close they might actually be to work they want to do? Or how far?

So our baby is 6 months old, and we're about to start using baby sign language, which I view with some trepidation -- oh, great, another language to stumble around in. On the other hand, kids don't seem to develop very big repertoires of signs, so even though I'm sleep-deprived and distracted, I think I can remember two dozen signs. More. Eat. Drink. Cat. Dog. Thank you. Please. Outside.

This decision is pretty representative of the decisions we've made overall. In an interesting scholarly paper analyzing some hearing families who use baby sign, the authors (Pizer, Walters, Meier) write that "baby signing fits neatly into the parenting ideologies prevalent in the professional class in the United States. These ideologies value early communication with infants and promote the adaptation of the physical, social, and linguistic environment to their perceived needs." Yes, that's us. Professional class; adapt the environment to the infant's needs; promote early communication.

One of my favorite books to read in preparation for parenthood was David Lancy's The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings">, a vast (and very readable) cross-cultural and historical account of the cultural meanings of various stages of parenthood and childhood. There (and on his website, here) he lays out two broad models for when cultures decide that children should be socialized. One model he calls "pick when ripe," which is used in societies where babies and toddlers are largely ignored, may not be named until they're weaned, and undertake what he calls a "village curriculum" -- that is, not a formal education, but running errands, running messages, and doing small-scale versions of adult tasks. The other model, indicative of industrialized societies (Europe, Japan, the US), he calls "pick when green." In that model, it's never too early to socialize babies. Teaching signs to babies for use is pure "pick when ripe."

To be clear, we're not just teaching him how to say what he wants, which will supposedly make our lives easier, we're socializing him.
--We're socializing him into the notion that children's self-expressions are significant in some fashion -- too significant to be merely guessed at or ignored
--We're teaching him that children can have opportunities to display knowledge as soon as possible (and in fact, one of his roles already is to put on display what he can do; his "tricks")
--We're promoting socially appropriate behavior
--and we're promoting how to make one topic of communication the communication itself, which is what you get in a family with two highly verbal people.
--We're socializing him in how people interact with each other, at a more basic level (like how we take one-at-a-time turns when talking), as well as what are the platforms for further interaction.

It is not, I'll admit, about promoting an awareness of Deaf culture, or even building the start of basic fluency in American Sign Language, and I see that websites on baby signing promote this as a plus, including this dubious claim: "Should your baby continue to learn American Sign Language past his or her 3rd year, s/he will have acquired a 2nd or even 3rd language!" I mean, let's not get ahead of ourselves, shall we.

There's a lot more to say on this topic, so I'll be posting more on this, including a summary of the research that evaluates the claims that teaching babies sign makes them smarter and verbally more precocious, and maybe I'll dig into some work from Australia about the predictors of verbal precocity.

Managed to remember to teach the sign for "dog" today. Also invented a sign for "outside," which I know is going to come back and haunt me -- the boy poking one finger through the other hand's closed fingers, over and over and over. But what the hell. And sometimes, we'll want to be outside.

Needless to say, we've talked more about signing than we've actually signed. DOG and CAT get into regular rotation, as does MORE. Other than that, we're using spoken English. All throughout the last couple months, the baby's said phantom words a couple of times. For instance, you ask him some question, and he responds with something that sounds like "yes." Dad double takes, Mom double takes, and we ask each other: Did you hear that? Who's talking in the baby's mouth? (Babies, of course, precipitated the birth of ventriloquism: up to about three months ago, I could give voice to stuffed animals and he'd look at the stuffed animal, but now he looks at me. It's not enough motivation to learn how to throw my voice, but I do see where the impulse comes from.)

I'm back from two weeks of traveling to Anchorage, Alaska, and the Aleutian islands for vacation, then to Sonoma, California, for a day job meeting. When skies were sunny, they looked like this: