I Am a Zucchinista! August 17, 2006
Posted by Snow Monkey in Food.9 comments
Inspired by the call to arms issued by the enigmatically named Green Mountain of the Zucchini Liberation Army (ZLA), I have formed the Zucchini Army of National Liberation (the Ejército Zucchini de Liberación Nacional, or EZLN, popularly known as the Zucchinistas). Our mission is to struggle for the rights of oppressed zucchini everywhere—especially in our kitchen, where they are subjected to ZGirl’s cruel tyranny. We shall liberate these courgettes so that they may grow free once again.
You may now call me…Subcomandante Calabacín!
Image Source: Wikipedia Commons.
A Letter to My Congressperson August 16, 2006
Posted by Snow Monkey in Adoption, Politics.4 comments
Yesterday, I vowed to write a letter to my representative. Here it is:
Dear Representative ———:
Thank you for representing us in Congress. We were proud to vote for you in the 2004 Democratic primary and the 2004 general election, and we will be proud to vote for you in the upcoming election as well.
Both of us teach at ——— and live in ———. We got married in 2003, shortly after we moved here. We’re currently in the process of trying to adopt a child from China. After almost a year of trying to conceive a child, we discovered that we couldn’t do so because of infertility issues. We want more than anything else in the world to be parents, so we decided to adopt. We spent the first seven months of this year collecting the paperwork that we need to adopt internationally, including the I-171H form from USCIS. This month, our adoption agency sent our application to the Chinese government.
We are writing to ask you to support H.R. 5888, which would extend the expiration date of the I-171H form from 18 months to 2 years. This bill, the Helping Families Adopt Orphans Act, was introduced by Representative Heather Wilson and co-sponsored by seven other representatives, including Representatives Barney Frank, Dutch Ruppersberger, and Bernie Sanders.
H.R. 5888 is important to us and to thousands of other families because it will help our adoption process. It appears likely that it will take more than 18 months for China to refer a child to us and approve our travel to complete the adoption. In the meantime, our I-171H form will expire, requiring us to renew the form at a considerable cost of time and money. Extending the expiration date of the I-171H would do nothing to harm the welfare of children. On the contrary, extending this date would save us—and many other families—money that we could then spend on caring for our new child.
Can you see what you can do to help H.R. 5888 make it through the House? Again, this piece of legislation is very important to us. It will help thousands of families, and it will also keep the already backlogged USCIS offices from having to renew the paperwork for thousands of families. We would greatly appreciate anything that you can do.
Sincerely,
[Snow Monkey] [ZGirl]
I’ll mail it tomorrow.
Update: The letter is in the mail. I’ll post any reply that we receive.
Goal for Tomorrow: Write Letter August 15, 2006
Posted by Snow Monkey in Adoption, Politics.2 comments
Props to Singing Bird for reminding me about the letter-writing campaign for H.R. 5888, which was introduced by Rep. Heather Wilson (co-sponsors include Reps Barney Frank and Bernie Sanders—huzzah!). Short version: this bill would extend the expiration date for the I-171H, that magical sheet of paper from the government that is necessary for an international adoption. As of now, the I-171H is good for 18 months, which may be not be enough time for ZGirl and me to receive a referral from China at the rate things are going. So, it’s time for me to write to my Congressperson.
By the way, the bill was sent to the House Judiciary Committee, which is chaired by Rep. James Sensenbrenner—not exactly my favorite politician (in particular, I’m not fond of his positions on some other immigration-related issues). So will I be forced to grant him some grudging respect, or will my ire toward him grow even stronger?
Americans’ Views on Adoption August 14, 2006
Posted by Snow Monkey in Adoption.2 comments
As someone who is in the process of adopting, I’ve already heard many different opinions about the subject. But what about the bigger picture? I was curious to see what polls tell us about Americans’ views on adoption. So far, I’ve found two major national surveys on the topic that were conducted within the past five years by reputable organizations.
The first of these surveys is the 2002 National Adoption Attitudes Survey, sponsored by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute and conducted by Harris Interactive. This was a follow-up to a similar survey conducted in 1997, so I wonder whether another one is in the works for 2007. According to the report on the results (pdf), public opinion seems generally pro-adoption:
The National Adoption Attitudes Survey found that two-thirds of Americans have a favorable opinion about adoption, and two-thirds have a personal experience with adoption. Favorable opinions about adoption are prevalent among all social groups in the United States…Other indicators of strong support for adoption include:
- 78% of Americans think the country should be doing more to encourage adoption.
- 95% think that adoptive parents should receive the same maternity and paternity benefits from employers as biological parents.
- Three-fourths (75%) of Americans believe adoptive parents are very likely to love their adoptive children as much as children born to them.
- Over 80% think that parents get as much or more satisfaction from raising adoptive children as from raising biological children.
- Americans also have very positive opinions about adoptive parents. They are seen as lucky by 94% of Americans.
The survey included two questions about international adoption in particular. Half of the respondents thought that international adoptions were “easier to complete than adoptions of children born in the U.S.,” versus 39% who didn’t think so [Hmm...I wonder how I would answer that question]. At the same time, almost half of the respondents (47%) thought that adopting internationally was “more likely to mean adopting a child with significant medical or emotional problems,” versus 40% who didn’t think so.
The report details all sorts of other interesting findings—far too many to mention here.
The second survey is a 2006 poll sponsored by ABC News and Time magazine. This one focused on adoption within the context of the foster care system. The report (pdf) provides this summary of the findings:
The foster care system is broadly unnoticed in this country, and to the extent they think about it most Americans believe it’s doing an acceptable job. But there’s also substantial concern about the system – and broad support for improving it, even at significant cost.
About one in four respondents said that they would seriously consider becoming a foster parent or adopting a foster child. The poll also found that the public was evenly split on allowing gay or lesbian couples to adopt children. That’s a big shift from the early 1990s, when public opinion was against gay adoption by a 2-to-1 margin.
Looking at these polls, I wish that they had included more questions about international adoption; I would still like to know more about how the public views it.
Thoughts on Chinese Food August 12, 2006
Posted by Snow Monkey in Adoption, Food.6 comments
I have a confession to make: I’ve never been particularly fond of Chinese food.
Don’t get me wrong—it’s not that I dislike Chinese food. I’m not one of those people who thinks that eating rice is weird. It’s just that my enthusiasm for Chinese food pales in comparison to, say, my enthusiasm for Thai food. Or Japanese food. Or Korean food. Or Indian food. Or Vietnamese food. Or…you get the idea (on the other hand, I’m more fond of Chinese food than German food—that’s for sure).
Given that we’re in the process of adopting from China, this is an issue for me. I strongly believe in the importance of trying to incorporate Chinese cultural heritage into our family-to-be, and food is a big part of culture (not the be-all end-all; still, it’s important). So I’ve been working on my relationship with Chinese food.
But first, a little history. I grew up in a small town that had not one Chinese restaurant. Let me rephrase that: no Asian restaurant of any sort. My first experience with Chinese food—make that “Chinese” food—came when my mother started cooking chicken chow mein. I love Mom, but this one was not one of my favorite dishes.
After I moved to more cosmopolitan places, I started eating at Chinese restaurants. I found most of them disappointing, however. There were exceptions—most notably, one high-end dim sum place in Seattle and another in DC (I’m also embarrassed to admit that I like the food at P. F. Chang’s, which I understand is a far way away from being the real deal). I always suspected, however, that the real problem was that I wasn’t ordering the right dishes in the right restaurants.
Last night, I had a dining experience that seemed to corroborate my suspicion. One of my former students—now a colleague and friend—invited us out to dinner with her husband. Both she and her husband are from China. We let them choose the restaurant, and they picked their favorite Chinese restaurant in town (they hold most of the local Chinese restaurants in low regard). This place has two menus—one that lists the Americanized dishes and one that lists the traditional dishes.
We ordered from the second menu. ZGirl and I had eaten there once before, so my friend’s husband asked me what I had ordered the last time. “Chicken with black bean sauce,” I said. He told me that this had been a mistake; the restaurant’s specialty is seafood. So we ordered three seafood dishes and one beef dish (I usually don’t eat beef, but this time I made an exception).
The food was excellent. Especially the squid.
Good to know.
Snow Monkey Family Values August 10, 2006
Posted by Snow Monkey in Politics.6 comments
Singing Bird inspired me to take a closer look at the recent court rulings against equal marriage rights for gays and lesbians in New York(pdf) and Washington (pdf). As she points out, the legal reasoning that the courts used denies not only the legitimacy of same-sex marriages but also the legitimacy of marriages involving infertile heterosexual people.
The New York ruling includes the following passage:
First, the Legislature could rationally decide that, for the welfare of children, it is more important to promote stability, and to avoid instability, in opposite-sex than in same-sex relationships. Heterosexual intercourse has a natural tendency to lead to the birth of children; homosexual intercourse does not. Despite the advances of science, it remains true that the vast majority of children are born as a result of a sexual relationship between a man and a woman, and the Legislature could find that this will continue to be true. The Legislature could also find…that an important function of marriage is to create more stability and permanence in the relationships that cause children to be born. It thus could choose to offer an inducement — in the form of marriage and its attendant benefits — to opposite-sex couples who make a solemn, long-term commitment to each other. The Legislature could find that this rationale for marriage does not apply with comparable force to same-sex couples.
If one replaces “same-sex couples” with “infertile heterosexual couples,” then the logic is the same. The majority opinion tries to rebut this point (essentially arguing that it would be too difficult and invasive to try to weed out all of the infertile heterosexual couples at the alter) but the dissenting opinion demolishes that rebuttal.
The Washington ruling sounds a lot like the New York ruling:
Therefore, we apply the highly deferential rational basis standard of review to the legislature’s decision that only opposite-sex couples are entitled to civil marriage in this state. Under this standard…the legislature was entitled to believe that limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples furthers procreation, essential to survival of the human race, and furthers the well-being of children by encouraging families where children are reared in homes headed by the children’s biological parents. Allowing same-sex couples to marry does not, in the legislature’s view, further these purposes.
Again, the same logic could be used to deny infertile heterosexual couples the right to marry (despite the court’s feeble attempt to argue otherwise).
As an infertile heterosexual person who is happily married, these decisions make me mighty peeved. Obviously, no court is really going to try to invalidate my marriage, but I don’t appreciate hearing gay marriage foes proclaim that the right to marry is founded on an ability to procreate that I don’t share. I’ve been a long-standing supporter of gay rights, but now I feel an even stronger sense of solidarity with gays and lesbians who are striving for their right to marry.
The bad news is that the New York and Washington rulings are setbacks in this effort. The good news, however, is that the long-term prospects for gay marriage look sunnier: the public as a whole may oppose gay marriage, but young Americans are much more supportive of it.
[Edited to add: I'm sensitive about revealing my infertility, even on an anonymous blog, but I did so here as a political statement.]
Reacting to the Reactions August 9, 2006
Posted by Snow Monkey in Adoption.8 comments
Monkeyette ZGirl and I have received some interesting responses from people when we’ve told them about our decision to adopt from China. Here are my reactions to their reactions (not what I said to their face, but what I thought to myself).
You’re such good people. [See Monkeyette's ZGirl's blog for more on the situation in which we heard this comment.]
Thank you, but we’re not any nobler than people who take the biological path to parenthood (why exactly would we be, anyway?). We’re adopting because we want to be parents. That desire—and not charity—is the foundation on which we want to build a family.
That’s such a wonderful way of ministering. [Again, see Monkeyette's ZGirl's post for the story behind this reaction.]
We’re not out to save anyone’s soul—not ours, not the kid’s. Hell, I’m not even religious.
Have you thought about fostering a local kid?
You seem to be implying that we did not reflect on our decision to adopt and that you disapprove of that decision. Perhaps that’s not what you meant, however, so I will try to give you the benefit of the doubt.
Dude, you’re so lucky that you don’t have to go through having a pregnant wife. Man, it’s rough.
I appreciate your kind effort at 1950s-style male bonding.
[Edited to change "Monkeyette" to "ZGirl"; see the comments for an explanation.]
The Heart of Bush Country August 9, 2006
Posted by Snow Monkey in Monkeys, Politics, Travel.add a comment
A few weeks back, I took a road trip to Big Bend National Park with my Texas-dwelling brother. The park is in the middle of nowhere, but it’s worth the drive: we saw a pair of spectacular canyons, a ghost town, and the Rio Grande (a.k.a. the Muddy Ditch). We also saw the entire length of one very long gravel road.
We camped in the mountains, thereby avoiding the 100+ degree heat in the valleys. As night fell, my brother drove off to go find something to eat, leaving me alone in the tent without a flashlight. After falling half-asleep, I awoke with a jolt when a sudden gust of wind sent the door flapping and the walls shaking (later, my brother received his own scare when a skunk tried to find its way into the tent).
We visited several other points of interest, all of which begin with the letter M:
- McDonald Observatory. A humongous observatory that sits atop a mountain in the Davis Range.
- Marfa. The home of the fabled Marfa lights—which, sadly, may be nothing more than vehicle headlights. In any event, we drove through Marfa during the day, so no lights for us.
- Mentone. The county seat of the emptiest county in the United States. We didn’t linger there.
- Midland. The hometown of President (and fellow monkey) George W. Bush. Oil wells, oil wells, and more oil wells.
Source: Bush or Chimp?
Strange World of Ladybug Mania August 9, 2006
Posted by Snow Monkey in Adoption.add a comment
ZGirl pointed me to Lilypie, a website that provides baby-related signature tickers for online forums. Under most circumstances, I would simply recoil in toxic sugar shock from something so saccharine. Like Monkeyette, however, I’m a little weirded out by one of the tickers for adoption. I’ve created my own version of it (ZGirl offers her take, along with some additional commentary):
By way of explanation, the ladybug is a symbol for international (and, specifically, Chinese) adoption within the adoptive parent subculture. I decided to place my little ladybug in a cabbage patch—maybe she was found under a cabbage leaf!* At the same time, I also decided to give her critical thought and political consciousness. Isn’t she cute?
* Sarcasm.
Snow Monkey Says No… August 9, 2006
Posted by Snow Monkey in Monkeys, Politics.add a comment
…to constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage.
Some snow monkeys are gay; others are heterosexual. Live and let live, I say.
