Two days ago i went out to check on the babies a little before noon, and there was only one left in the nest. I saw two sitting up on the firehouse roof chirping and looking a little bewildered. Fearing the worst, i looked down into the alley below, but thankfully could not make out any splatted baby birds. I saw the daddy come over to the babies on the firehouse and then fly away again. I let Nathan know of the developments, and by the time he came home for lunch there was just one sitting there across the way, still peeping, and the nest was empty.
After a while we realized that the last baby was still sitting under the lettuce just beside the nest, looking up at his sibling and contemplating his first flight. I took one last photo of him, inadvertently encouraging him to join the others in leaving home forever. He flew directly to the firehouse rooftop with no trouble at all.
That was the last we saw of them. It’s been two days now, and we’re officially empty-nesters. Looking out at the garden box gives me a little pang of sadness every time. Nathan and i have been spending more time with each other now that there are no little ones around. Their nest is the same way they left it so far, but we’re contemplating converting the space into a bed for another basil plant. We’ve talked about taking up golf, and i plan to begin scrapbooking the memories as soon as we return from vacation in August.
I couldn’t pick just one favorite, so here are several shots i took yesterday when the parents came to feed their babies:
They finally got cute. 
They’re about 2/3 the size of the adults already. When the parents are away they get up and hop just outside of the nest and flap their wings. If they see us coming, though, they pack themselves into the nest and become quiet and still. They’re so big that usually one is stuck directly underneath another one so that they can all fit in the nest.
After reading several non-fiction books earlier this year, i decided to take a break and read some fiction. One of my favorite books of all time is “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Bronte, and so eighteen months or so ago i had picked up another of her books, “Villette”, the long rambling fictional memoir of a homely but passionate English woman who ends up teaching at a French boarding school and pining after a couple of different men. I only got about halfway through it at that time, so last month i decided to pick it up from the library and finish it.
Prior to that, Nathan and i picked up “The Giver” by Lois Lowry, since i was probably the only American public school student in the nineties who for whatever reason never read it. He read it to me over the course of a few weeks (yes, you read that correctly. We’re that cute). The story about a futuristic society that is willingly void of both pain and love was thought-provoking and entertaining, but had an ending that i found to be rather depressing, even if it’s meant to be vague and possibly hopeful.
I never would have imagined that these two books had anything in common, but when i finished Villette last night i was amazed to find that their endings are quite similar.
Lois Lowry ends “The Giver” with a scene that can be interpreted as either the last hallucination of a dying person or the actual attainment of a very unlikely dream. Lowry herself says that she “doesn’t think” that the protagonist just dies, but it’s pretty difficult to convince oneself otherwise. Being a realist, i assumed the worst, and felt a little disappointed by it. It’s fitting though, and i accepted it as a sort of Orwellian cautionary tale.
Villette is the story of the mostly un-charmed and lonely life of Lucy Snowe. One can’t help but hope that she’ll end up being loved by someone, and finally toward the end of the book her friend M. Emmanuel gives her his love and promises to marry her – but he is about to embark for Guadeloupe and won’t return for three years. And so she waits for three years, and declares to the reader that they were actually the happiest three years of her life. Then, on the very last page, she describes the terrible storm that struck on the day her lover was to return to her at last. She keeps the outcome hidden though, and encourages us to imagine that she lived happily ever after. As if that were possible! There was no lesson in this book, no poetic reason for life to have completely crapped on Lucy Snowe once and for all, destroying whatever little happiness she had finally managed to attain. After reading 580 pages of her struggles, i wanted a happy ending, damn it! Why did it have to be another “probably this is not a happy ending, but go ahead and imagine that it actually was” sort of thing?!
I’m going back to non-fiction!
In all honesty, i enjoyed reading Villette if only for the language. The English is flowery and passionate, and the smattering of French was a nice refresher-course for me. Still, i’m having second thoughts about picking up where i left off in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” I already know that the ending of that one is rather less than uplifting.
First of all i’d like to mention that i’m typing this in my brand-new WordPress admin, which will probably mean nothing to most of my readers but it’s something that makes me happy. Essentially, i’ve successfully installed an update to my (somewhat superfluous) user interface, and the sense of accomplishment it’s given me is exactly why i’m a web designer.
**SPOILERS!**
Nathan and i went to see “Bruno” last Friday. To give you an idea of how outlandish the film is, suffice it to say that they were actually checking each person’s ID at the theater entrance. It’s more suggestive than actually graphic, but its contents are enough to turn the stomach of any red-blooded straight man. Which actually makes it all the more hilarious to the female audience, in my opinion. See it while it’s new in theaters, ladies, and listen for the men’s reactions.
I actually thought the naked fight scene in “Borat” was a little over the top when i saw that movie. However, it was used to present a contrast to the American way of life and to of course garner a reaction from passers-by, making it a doubly humorous scene for the movie audience. “Bruno” is composed almost entirely of this sort of awkward physical confrontation, and the film is a little less brilliant than “Borat” for that reason. It still manages, however, to take a telling glimpse at the dark underbelly of our country, even if, as Anthony Lane of The New Yorker points out, the chosen targets are proverbial fish in a barrel. It’s by no means challenging to expose the homophobia of the South, the bigotry of the Church, the phoniness of so-called “psychics” and the vacuity of Hollywood, but oh my god is it funny to watch.
Sacha Baron Cohen’s brilliance does shine through at moments. I was amazed to hear professional PR consultants talk about how hot the issue of “Dafor” is, and agree that it’s, like, near Iraq and stuff. I had to collect my jaw from off the floor after hearing a woman agree to make her thirty-pound daughter lose ten pounds in a week if it meant she’d get a modeling gig. I laughed at the delightful irony as Paula Abdul agreed to sit on the back of a latino man and then proceed to discuss her humanitarian efforts. “Bruno” may be more gruesome and less witty than “Borat,” but it was definitely the most hilarious movie i’ve seen in a long time.
The top story on CNN.com today is entitled “As nation gains, ‘overweight’ is relative.” And the title pretty much explains the gist of the article – Americans today perceive themselves as being less overweight than they did a decade or so ago, despite the fact that the average person has gotten a little larger. We see our body size as it compares to the people around us, and heavy is becoming normal.
They start off the article with a discussion of “vanity sizing.” They say size 10 is the new 14, and retailers are enlarging their sizes to make us feel as though we were shrinking, when in reality our waistlines are expanding. Case in point: i’ve been shopping at Express for jeans since high school. Back then, i wore a size 3/4. Toward the end of high school, i’d moved up to a size 5/6. But then in college, the 5/6es in the store started to seem baggy, and although my body hadn’t changed i moved back down to the size 4. By the end of college, again although my body hadn’t really changed, i was wearing a size 2 at Express, as i am today.
Now, i saw a photograph of myself that someone had taken from behind me a few weeks ago, and i said to myself “that is not a size two butt!!”
So, i launched into a Google search for the history of dress sizes and what my actual measurements would have translated to in the days of size-fourteen-Marilyn-Monroe. Alas, i could find no such size chart, but feeling incensed that Express had so misled me, i researched vanity sizing and found that it isn’t some manipulation of our collective psychosis, but a practical measure that the fashion industry has no choice but to take.
This article i came across on Fashion Incubator explains that each retailer has number or relative (S/M/L) designations which range across its garments from smallest to largest, and each retailer has a different range depending on who buys the garments. For example, if you make tutus, your “large” is still going to seem tiny to the average person, because ballerinas are necessarily tiny people. It would be impractical to have standardized sizing across all garments and retailers, because then ballerinas would have to choose among XS, XXS, XXXS. Makes sense, right?
So, the retailers aren’t just stroking our egos by making their size twos as big as sixes used to be. People are getting bigger. If you’re Express and people stop buying your size zero because nobody is that small anymore, and you start getting harassed by people for not carrying size fourteen (discriminating!), doesn’t it make sense to make all the garments bigger, but keep the old number scale?
Maybe we’re pointing the finger at the wrong industry. Maybe we should take exercise and nutrition into our own hands and stop claiming to be victimized by pop culture and the fashion industry that is supposedly slave to it. Or, just maybe, we could stop judging one another and ourselves and start to just be comfortable with the bodies that our culture produces. I think there are a lot of forces at work in this problem, but i’ve come to realize that perhaps the least of them is so-called vanity sizing.