It Is Time to Get Really Serious About Not Poisoning Our Kids. This Is a Tipping Point. Stop Now.

I was a health food, organic mostly, natural fiber, no vac kind of mother. But if I had a child today, I would be a million times more vigilant. Every single day there is another horror story about another product that is deadly. I am not just saying harmful, I am saying 'deadly'. And it starts long before the pregnancy.

Just to name a few things; Aspartame (thank you Monsanto) can cause birth defects, infertility and other shit. Goodbye chewing gum, diet drinks, sweeteners. Roundup on your food or garden can cause these things and worse. (thank you Monsanto). Tampax has the same crap that roundup has. So, before you get pregnant, start now cleaning up your act. Not to mention all the things we all know about: smokes, drugs, booze. We know that. I am thinking about the million things we don't think about.

Household products and cosmetics and body products are chemical poisons, almost all of them. Think about it. Almost all of them are poisons. The good news is that today there are healthy alternatives, even organic dental floss. But the thing is for some reason they are more expensive. (you can figure that out). But at the same time, if you take a moment to look to the past million years or so before the chemical shit storm happened after WW11, there are very cheap, very effective, nontoxic alternatives. Baking soda, lemon, vinegar, bees wax... think "How did grandma or great grandma do it?" My grandma used newspaper and vinegar to clean windows. Everyone used baking soda to get rid of odors. Use your imagination. Or buy all natural, non gmo products. Or both.

Then the pregnancy thing. My caveat here: I am talking about healthy low risk pregnancies. In other cases, get the best medicine you can. I wonder about all the ultrasounds. What the fuck? Before ultrasounds there were none. Billions of kids are born without them. Billions. And the birth outcomes in countries that use them (Like USA) have shamefully bad statistics. Ultrasounds are shooting high frequency sound waves into the fetus. There has been little talk about what this might do to the development of the baby. When radiation was first used, it was perfectly safe. Oops, it didn't turn out to be that safe after all. Birthing protocols can range from wonderful to insane and change all the time. The fetal heart monitor has caused millions of unnecessary c-sections. Pitocin is being investigated for possible harmful effects on child behavior. Question everything.

Question the vitamin K injection. New news out about that. Question eye drops for the baby. If you don't have a STD are these at all necessary? Question the painful cringe of the baby having a photo taken the first second they are alive. Then each and every vaccine and its timing needs to be looked at very carefully and the combos and the ingredients. Does your nursing baby need a hepetitus shot? No, maybe when she goes to Thailand some day. Tell the doc you'll come back for that one.

Then the plastic thing,,plastic bottles, plastic nipples, plastic fake milk (look at the list of what is in safe formula), plastic toys, plastic diapers, plastic teething things, plastic fabrics, plastic mattress covers (smell them and you now something is very wrong just like that new shower curtain liner. No plastic for your new baby. Don't put their stuff in plastic bags. No plastic. It all gives off toxins and if anyone says anything different, they are either lying or ignorant.

Make your own baby food. It couldn't be easier if you have a stove and a fridge. Don't feed them anything with GMO or pesticides, herbicides or other crap in it. People made baby food for millions of years before supermarkets and factory foods were created (not so long ago). How hard is it to make a bowl of oatmeal or grind up a carrot.

There are babies being born today who have cancer when they are born. We have to stop this and it is not something that I would wait for the FDA or the food industry to sort out. It has to be us. Make it the coolest thing in the world to have no chemicals in your house that will poison your children. Wash diapers if you have to. Brush your teeth with baking soda if you have to. It is all so simple that the poorest peasants in the middle of nowhere have figured it out.

This isn't my whole rant I could go on and on. Flouride, iodized salt, all this stuff has problems, big problems. I am 71 years old so I am not in the market for baby stuff, but it is really frightening me how crazy we are to poison our children a hundred ways every day. Start now. Start with shampoo and soap and laundry detergent. Then keep changing and innovating and demanding no poisons for your kids. Even frigging cough drops have aspartame, dye, artificial flavors, corn syrup and more crap. Stop it now. Have that healthy happy child you deserve. The cost of taking care of a sick child is not worth a little extra care now.

Bali Magic and "Hello Russians".

Just saying, right now I have more readers in Russia than in the USA. And my Latvians have disappeared and as of a few weeks ago this blog is not blocked in China any more. Am I going soft or have they figured out that I am not important. I could have told them that. Always change.

So, I have been in lousy health since the Dengue. Still getting headaches then feeling like I have a fever, (I don't) and then feeling like I have a sinus infection, then feeling fantastic... a sort of weird cycle. Doctor says it takes a long time to recover from big viral infections. I am proof positive.

That being said, things keep happening that make me so happy I am here. This is on top of the amazing beauty, the endless religious and social discoveries, the sweet kindness of the people who always have time for each other and for moi. I have not seen one person who looks destitute or hungry. If Bali is poverty, it is the good kind. Families live in the family compound. The woman moves into the man's compound when she gets married. Or stays home when she doesn't. Muslims and Hindus seem to live in harmony. Respect for ancestors and belief in re-incarnation assure a social equanimity. The president of Indonesia, Joko Widodo, was a farmer not a billionaire or military as were past presidents. But this is Ubud, Bali, not Java. I don't know how life is for the other hundreds of millions.

About the Bali magic. This after the headache came again with a bit of a wobbly stomach. "What the fuck! Sinus infection, Dengue, ATM ate my debit card, now Bali belly. What life is this? The Russian woman who lives in the next cottage and talks LOUD on the phone a lot had stopped by me this morning and invited me to come hear her guru tonight at some ceremony. Big ceremony. Hundreds of people. He is the dude that was in "Eat, Pray, Love". I went to her veranda to tell her that I couldn't come  because of the unstable stomach and this headache. I really wanted to go, but hole in the ground toilets had me intimidated.

She said the guru would heal me. I said ya but with 1,000 other people there , what were the odds? She is organizing this whole event and it was about one hour ahead of the beginning. In spite of that, she rolled up her sleeves and said, "I just better heal you myself, then." She pounded my head and rubbed my arms and neck, head and muttered some things in Russian and then said, "you sick". Then she punched and pounded a bit more and then got some heavenly oil and massaged my hands and then said "You better". I felt great again and almost decided to go, you know the Julie Roberts thing and then my stomach grumbled and she told me "You go next time".

I can't get over that she took the time and gave me this healing and then told me to come tomorrow morning for a tuneup. She has been studying with the guru for 5 years and before that she studied in China with someone else. I think she is a little bit famous in Russia. (This has nothing to do with my Russian readership) but I will drop her name when I learn it.

I forgot to mention that I am busting my budget and staying at an incredibly beautiful place because I want to and it is as healing environment as I could imagine and I am discovering that I am so over the backpacking $9 a night places. I miss meeting some of the kids, especially the European ones who travel at that level.
But not that much and this years crew in this town all seemed to be into competitive yoga and incredibly clean colons and no gluten. I can only take so much.

That being said, I met another amazing person who stayed in the cottage on the other side of me. He bounced right over while I was having breakfast and gave an introduction to himself that was witty and masterful. He was also handsome. Did I mention that? He said he was one of the last living fossils of the British Raj. That got my attention. I read "Jewel and the Crown" about 10 times and same for the BBC movie. He certainly had the accent and the "to the manor born" thing going.

His family had been tea planters in Ceylon for 300 years, although the ones who stayed in England hadn't been merchants, just odd squires and heads of Sandhurst and various members of this and that. So when the English plantations were expelled from Ceylon, he became a wanderer. No home, no roots, couldn't stand living with relatives in Sussex. He had had enough of that when he was sent to boarding school in England when he was 9. This makes him sound like a proper snob, which in fact, he was not. He lived in many countries starting peasant co-operatives and getting local businesses going and moving on. He is an intellectual who has read everything and more and can quote from it all (move over Noam Chomsky). We talked books, and amazingly strange spiritual practices he grew up with and flying saucers and big conspiracies. It was great fun.

So, Bali. I want to be more proactive about my life, but there is something wonderful about sitting around drinking coffee and having the world come to me.

And without the internet, you took some chances.

I am not exactly nostalgic, but some memories are really priceless. I didn't always (read ever) want to spend the money on Lonely Planet books. Before Lonely Planet was the gorgeous book, "Europe on $5 a Day". Can you imagine? And some days you really couldn't manage to spend $5. The real problem with Lonely Planet was that they were heavy, especially if you were going to a bunch of countries. This was before the Internet, remember. One tactic we used was to get the book and rip out the pages we knew we weren't going to use and then throw away the ones we used after we had been somewhere. Not a very nice solution, but carrying stuff has never been my strong suit.

And getting strait info from locals took some adjustments. In Central America, it took us a while to figure out that people wanted to make you happy and didn't want you to be disappointed. So, if you asked if the bus was coming soon, you always got a strong positive answer. "Si, muy rapido, no problema." Soon might be tomorrow morning, but they left you with a smile on your face. Until you were cursing them and all their ancestors.

One time, after being assured by everyone that we could get to Key Caulker on New Years day, (looking back, what the fuck were we thinking?) we got to Belize City from Tikal by the good graces of a drunk taxi driver who assured us that his mother made a brew that sobered him up and he was fine. The special joy of his mother's brew was that he could get drunk 4 or 5 times on a given holiday and start over again after drinking her magic concoction. But, of course, there were no boats going on the the Island on New Years day or most likely for many days after and that was the bad old days in Belize City where no where was safe and I had the kids along. So we got drunk taxi driver to take us to the sorry excuse for a private plane airport. I walked into the hangar yelling "Is anyone here?" and found some bush pilot passed out on a couch. I woke him up and he said he could fly us over after he had a few cups of coffee. I offered him 100 bucks and he said fine, but I would have to run it through the charge machine because he couldn't remember how.

After we loaded ourselves and him into the plane and got up in the air over the beautiful western Caribbean waters. He said "shit." I said, "What shit?" he said he didn't think we had enough gas to make it. I said "shit" and "Shut up, I don't want the kids to worry." He said "Fucking fine, lady." I said seeing as how I paid him, I thought it should be his problem not mine and I didn't want to hear another word about it.  We made it and landed on the sandy beach.

Now, really, with the internet, this just wouldn't have happened. Everything would have been known in advance and booked and paid for and all that. Not all our adventures were so easy and we might not have had nights like the night when we were in a town cut off by the army and there was no food and we stayed up all night talking about roast beef sandwiches. Big arguments about mayo vs mustard. Hunger does strange things.

My conclusion about old time travel is that not knowing was a big part of the game and it was always an adventure, but sometimes a bit of a stress, too. Letters, when they worked, were a lot of fun. Phones were mostly useless. If you knew what city you were going to you had letters sent to Poste Restante and when you got to the post office they handed you a box with letters as old as 30 years and you looked and prayed that there was something for you. I bet if I checked in Antigua, Guatemala I would find a letter after all these years.

More than anything I am grateful for the Kindle with the built in light. I was forever running out of books and finding a half way decent reading lamp was often a sick joke.

Skin Whitening is Big Business in Bali. No Shit.

I am a fan of the sun. In fact, I suspect that I worshiped Ra and Apollo and other sun gods in my past lives. I have leathery old Yankee skin as a testament to my devotion. It has been years, eons, since I have actually sun bathed, but I walk a lot and swim whenever I get the chance and I like gardening, so I have had substantial exposure.

I have very mixed feelings about sun block as would any sentient being who has lived through the chemical miracles that turn into chemical nightmares of the past 50 years, Really, how can baking chemicals into your skin turn out all that well over time? Time will tell.

I admire the pale Irish beauties who have flawless skin and nary a wrinkle, but over all, I think a lot of white people look a bit bloodless. I equate health with rosy cheeks and high color.

I have gotten all fluffed up with righteous indignation seeing the cultural snobbery about upper class equating with being more white. You get that old shit in a lot of countries..Latin America, USA, Spain. We just perpetuate the class distinctions without even thinking about it.

All this being said, I bought some of the evil sun block in Thailand. As usual, I spent more time looking at the price than at the label. When I got to the beach and put it on my nose, I noticed that my nose had no color compared to my ruddy Irish skin. I checked out the sun block and it said "whitening" on it. Having a white nose on a tanned face was not my ideal so I went back to the market. Every skin product for face and hands had "whitening" ingredients. Everyone. Now, I think the Thai people have the most gorgeous skin and skin color. But, I think...fashion is very fickle. This must be this year's deal.

Then, one morning in Ubud, Bali, I mentioned this to a Balinese friend. She told me that skin whitening is a major industry in Bali. Major. She is in her early twenties. She said many of her friends spend a lot of money and countless hours and sometimes extreme pain whitening their skin. They not only buy many products, but get painful injections to accomplish this. I asked whether it was a class thing, maybe they didn't want to look like peasant laborers or rice farmers. She thought abut it and said, no, that wasn't it. That wasn't a thing here, a lot of the very wealthy were very dark, they just liked the look better.

It confounds me and challenges a lot of my ideas about race and class. Maybe it is really just the current idea of beauty. She and her friends couldn't believe that women in the USA go to tanning booths and lie around browning their skin. That idea made her laugh because in her world view they were paying money and time to get ugly.

We eventually concluded that women everywhere want what they don't have. She herself is very tiny, thin and graceful. She has been taking supplements and getting shots to gain weight. She thinks she looks funny so thin. Same I guess when people with straight hair work hard for curls and visa versa. We are all pretty weird.

Travel before the internet. Some different.

Then there was the money thing.No ATMs. Imagine that.So you could carry a credit card and dream of finding a place to get a cash advance. A big illusion which almost never happened. Before that was the Cooks or AmEx funny money. The infamous travelers check. So, you had to go to a bank and buy with real cash these travelers checks. They wrote down the number and denomination of each check and gave you a record book to keep a record of each one you spent so that if they got stolen, AmEx would replace the stolen ones. And they wanted you to take a bunch of small ones because most store and restaurants wouldn't cash large ones. I kid you not. We did this.

I always lost track of the book keeping or rather my record keeping. If my checks ever had gotten stolen I wouldn't have any numbers to claim. The next fun part was that in some countries, the black market was the deal. I remember sending my kids into alleys to cash checks illegally while I watched on the street for cops. These were the countries where you got a better deal on the street. Other places you had to find a bank, find an open bank, stand in line for hours and maybe get some cash. We very often paid the whole bill at restaurants with travelers checks and then everyone would pay us in local money. Pain in the ass. And in Europe, you had to change currency for every country. In fact you had to do that everywhere. The good old days.

So, now when I took the kids, I had this frigging huge bundle of our plane tickets, our passports, our travelers checks. Half a pocketbook full right there.

You had to take a real camera and real film. Imagine that. And mostly you had to wait until you got home to get it developed. Imagine that.

And phones, forgeddaboudit. I have told some Guatemala phone stories before. All day, very social, extreme frustration and so not worth the exercise or the money. And the time I sent Randie a telegram from Antigua to Todos Santos. I went to the telegram office and spent a good long time writing out this invite to Randie to meet in Honduras for some beach time. Had to be in Spanish and it was pretty sketchy. The telegram lady told me I would have to pay by the word. But the price was next to nothing. I wrote my message and handed it to her. She handed it back after about 20 minutes and said, "too long."  Now in this whole interchange, about an hour, there were no other customers. I asked how it could possibly be too long if I was paying by the word. "Too long." After another bunch of rejections of my efforts, I ended up paying 4 cents and sending the telegram that said "Roatan?". On Randie's end, no one near he house  in Todos Santos had a phone so someone from the telegraph office went to her house and told her she had a telegram. She went to read it and had to go back for ID even though she had lived there for more than a year and there were only a few hundred people. When they were convinced that she was she, they charged her 20 cents to read the telegram. For another 20 cents she responded to me "Ya no." "Not now." I had to bring my passport and pay 20 cents to see her answer.

How did these things ever work out? Somehow we arranged a trip to Honduras that included several friends who were living in Costa Rica as well. I don't know how we did this stuff before the Internet, but we did.

More tomorrow.

"How Did People Travel Before the Internet?" Oh boy. That's an Interesting Question.

So, a few of us were flopping around a low budget guest house patio the other evening in Ubud, Indonesia. I was seriously flopping because it has been frigging HOT both here and in Thailand last month. It is my promise to myself and my friends and family that I am breaking when I mention the heat thing. I have complained about the cold for so long that I swore off mentioning heat. But, that being said, in both countries the rains are very late and the build up of both dust and smoke and humidity is pretty epic. It is hot. Fabulously, it cools down in the evening when I am both drained and dehydrated. Hence, the 'flopping'.

This young Scottish guy, very nice, kind of wired for speed, and certainly in charge of his life was talking about his solar business which he is bringing from Africa to Indonesia. He sells (very cheaply) solar cells to villages without electricity so people can have a light bulb or charge a phone. And he was going on and we were asking questions that hopefully didn't leave us looking too very stupid.

Then he kind of looked at us with sort of a strange look and asked, "My God, How did you ever travel before the internet?"  He turned 15 the same year he got connected and has never experienced travel without the internet.

I got all sorts of defensive and wondered if he meant back before cars and planes or just in the more recent prehistoric times. My first big trip in 1963, I took a boat to Europe and it took us 13 days. (But we flew home) so we were pretty modern! But, he was asking the nuts and bolts kind of questions and it was a staggering challenge to him to picture it.

I am reminded of the time when my grand daughter was 3 1/2 and she called me from her iphone and I had an old flip phone and she handed her phone to her Mom and said, "The phone is broken, I can't see Grandma." She will never remember a time when you couldn't see the person you were talking to on the phone, let alone all the stages in between.

My grandmother Braucher in Kutztown, PA had a party line and the live operator made your connection. Then we had the hall phone and when it rang, everyone would rush downstairs and stand around. Then came the big excitement of the long extension cord so you could take the phone into the hall closet and be private, except for Dad standing outside reminding everyone that "This is expensive and the phone is for important business, not for chatting." He must have said that a million times over the years.

So we had a little fun telling about the old days and Nick got a chance to stretch his imagination.

Firstly, we had travel agents. Here he broke in and said but they don't do anything you can't do. This may be the case now, but in the late 50s and early 60s, your travel agent was very important. He/she was usually someone who had traveled. She was paid by the airlines. She made all the calls(!) to the airlines about schedules and prices. The airlines and ships and even trains cultivated the agents and gave them good prices so everyone benefited. A good agent could work wonders. I miss this today when I spend hours being frustrated by all the stupid time on the computer trying to figure out a good deal. I have had to become my own travel agent and it is a royal pain in the ass and I swear they got better deals because of their special relationships.

When I am going someplace I almost always have the moment of ruing the day when we had to become our own agent. Not to mention the insane frustration of the early days when the Internet was connected to the phone and a frigging call would come in just as you were booking and you lost everything.

Then the travel agent would get your tickets and deliver them to your house. Nice. Bad part was you had to carry the damn tickets around for the whole trip and if you lost them you were up the creek. Also a troublesome intermediary stage when some countries wouldn't accept e-tickets. That caused a few disturbances.

So, you figured out where you wanted to go and then you made your tickets. Things were different, of course depending on your budget and your destination. Going to Europe from USA was easy. Going to South and Central America or Asia or Africa, a lot more complicated. Some countries were closed to us. Tibet was a problem, China and Russia were complicated. You mostly had to go with a group and a watcher. Some memory that you couldn't go from Israel to an Arab country or visa versa. First you called the Embassy and sent in your passport to get a visa. Still do, of course, some places. But you had to call or mail for information or your travel agent looked into it for you.

When I called the Guatemala Embassy to get visas for my kids and me, the guy asked about our trip and then got all emotional and said this trip was a disaster and we shouldn't go and he wasn't going to be responsible for our deaths. I thought he was concerned about the genocide that was happening to the Mayans there. I said that I knew people who traveled there with their kids and loved it. He was nearly hysterical and I asked why. He said that I was an independent American woman and I was going to rent a car and be driving in the countryside and run out of gas at night because all the stations were closed at night and then we were going to be robbed especially of the car and maybe die alongside of the road and how could I do that as a mother.

I took a deep breath and said I was never planning to drive. I liked hiring a driver or going by bus. Never.

He took a deep breath and said, "Then you will have the most wonderful time of your life in my beautiful country. I will send the visas."

More tomorrow. God willing.