This morning, I read an article in the New York Times about an explosion in India that killed 126 people and injured hundreds more.  It took place at a temple where people had come from miles away to celebrate the Hindu New Year.  Apparently, although fireworks had been banned by the local authorities, some of the organizers of the event had them on hand anyway; when one firework misfired and landed on the building where the rest of the fireworks were stored, it set off a series of explosions that caused several buildings to collapse on the revelers.

The Times journalists write, “Public safety is a huge problem in India, where weak governance frequently results in the flouting of safety rules, leading to large numbers of fatalities.” This is the case not only in India, but in so many of the countries travel to in the course of my job. Weak governance isn’t the only cause: its is also often a symptom of poor infrastructure and a lack of economic resources to remedy the situation.

Reflecting on this story today brought me back to a concept that I’ve been pondering a lot lately: privilege.  Over the last few years, privilege has been hot topic in social media and in the blogosphere.  I am sensitive to the much needed discussion that is beginning to take place across this country about how embedded privilege is in our social system, and how that reinforces and magnifies inequality  and injustice. In the context of America, I myself come from a pretty privileged position: white, upper middle-class, highly educated parents who pushed me to even higher levels of education.

My position has given me opportunities to travel my whole life.  As I young child, I travel throughout the USA with my parents and my brother.  We never flew; we routinely drove from New York to Florida and from Vermont to Michigan.  In my early teens, we took a month-long road trip from the East Coast all the way to Washington, Oregon, and California.  I learned to love the ride…looking out the window for hours, watching the scenery change from one region to the next. As a teenager, I began to seek out opportunities to travel overseas, quickly becoming addicted to seeing new places and experiencing new cultures.

Two years ago, I had the opportunity to travel to India for the first time. More so than any of my previous travels to Ecuador, Mexico, Russia, or Mongolia, my trip to India opened my eyes to American privilege. Every citizen in this country has a much higher chance of growing up safe and healthy than a baby born in India. We have almost universal access to clean drinking water and indoor plumbing. We have much lower risk of catching an infectious disease, but if we do have to go to the hospital, we can trust that the doctors will be using clean instruments in sterilized conditions. And we are lucky to live in a place that places high value on public safety standards, and dedicated appropriate resources to ensuring those policies are enforced.

I’m not trying to minimize or discount the discussion about inequality or privilege in the United States.  We have a lot to work on.  And we SHOULD work on those issues, because we are collectively sitting in a place of privilege.

Last week, I wrote a bit about how overwhelmed I’ve been feeling at the prospect of trying to do my own research and evaluate the mountains of information about each of the Democratic Presidential hopefuls.  That swirling miasma of bickering, debating, and fact-checking is the backdrop for a major change happening in my personal life, demanding endless evaluation of information and advice for the next 9 months and beyond: pregnancy.

When I first learned I was pregnant a few weeks ago, I was almost immediately overtaken by panic over how much I don’t know: I don’t know anything about making a birth plan, I don’t know anything about what I should or should not eat, or how much to exercise, or how to prepare my apartment, or what supplies we really need, or… this list goes on and on.  I made my husband make a shared google document to list the topics that we need to research, so that we’d be able to divide and conquer; I knew that there was no way I could evaluate all the info myself, but maybe if we divided it in two we could start making some progress.  (Very shortly after that, the morning sickness set in and I’ve been spending most of my free time sleeping or fighting the urge to vomit, so I actually haven’t made any progress at all.  But the list is there when I can get back to it.)

I keep thinking back to a course that I took during my Master’s degree, which was entitled “Environmental Risk Communication” and focused on the challenge of explaining risk to a lay audience.  That semester, the professor chose to focus on Children’s Health Risks, so each student in the class researched various issues such as lead poisoning, rising rates of asthma in urban areas, air pollution, childhood cancers, and so on.  My peers and I dubbed the class the “nervous mothers’ class,” because we realized early on that by the end of the semester, we would have read so many facts and statistics about the threats to children’s health that we might never want to become parents… or if we did, we’d be nervous about everything our child ever breathed, drank, ate, touched, heard, watched, or was exposed to in any way.

A year or so later, I found myself in my first professional job, writing a curriculum unit for high school Physics students about Nuclear Energy.  Aside from the basic chemical reactions and laws of physics involved, the main idea that my colleagues and I wanted the unit to teach was that for a controversial topic like nuclear energy, students needed to learn how to read the information presented by both sides and evaluate the facts for themselves–key critical thinking skills for teenagers in the information age.

That was 12 years ago.  We certainly had the internet and google already, but we didn’t have smart phones in our pockets yet.  A good friend of mine had a baby that year, and I remember a piece of advice that her mom shared with her: “Don’t buy or read any of those pregnancy books about what to expect– they’ll only make you worry more.  Trust your body and your doctor and your instincts– you’ll be fine.”  I wrote to that friend last week and asked if she had actually been able to stick to that advice through the whole pregnancy; I’ve been so hungry for information that I can’t imagine not letting myself read anything.  She said yes, she had mostly stuck to that advice, but she conceded that it would have been harder if she were pregnant today, with her smart phone giving her access to the internet 24/7.

For now, I’m trying to pace myself.  If I have a specific question, I look it up.  I bought two books: one for the expectant dad and one that focuses on mediation and journaling throughout the pregnancy.  As the months go by, I’ll have to get more serious about researching hospitals and procedures and things like that, but for now, I’m just going to sit back and acknowledge how overwhelming this whole thing really is.

I’ve been feeling overwhelmed lately.

Not overwhelmed by too many things to do, but overwhelmed by too many things to research and evaluate.  Too many topics on which I feel like I need to delve in deeper and learn more, in order to form my own education opinion.

Today, I’ll start with politics.  In this season of primaries, it seems like everyone has a strong opinion as to which candidate is the ONLY choice.  Like most of my friends, family, and co-workers, I am a Democratic voter.  But unlike most of the people in my circle, I don’t see a clear choice between the two potential candidates.  There are important reasons for me to like each of them… and there are things that concern me about each of them.  Neither of them completely inspires me or fills me with hope…

I remember this time eight years ago… I’d been leaning towards voting for Obama rather than Clinton in the primaries, and then I heard this song that incorporated quotes and excerpts from Obama’s “Yes We Can” speech.  I looked up a recording of the full speech, and I was hooked.  I was inspired.  I was proud to be living the American experience, and I was proud to be full of hope.

Right now, I haven’t yet found the speech or interview with either candidate that hooks me in and sets me firmly in their camp.  And I’m feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of needing to dig in, search, research, and evaluate piles and piles of info and : in order to make up my mind.

I find the sounds of the city around me comforting.  Lately, I’ve been noting that I can tell what time it is – sometimes down to the minute – just by closing my eyes and listening.

Joyful kids and parents chatting in the morning means that it’s about 7:45 am and the kids are all getting dropped off at the church school across the street… and it’s high time for me to stop hitting snooze and get out of bed.

An idling bus outside in front of the same school means it’s about 1:45.  I can’t figure out why they never turn off the engine, but between the loud idling and the exhaust fumes, I’m usually forced to close my windows.   Even with the windows closed, the screams and shouts of a streaming swarm of middle schools moving en mass toward the subway station means that it’s 2:31 on the dot.  If the final bell rings at 2:30, it’s pretty impressive how quickly that jittery blob of peer pressure and insecurity can move the 4 blocks between the middle school and the sidewalk below my window.  On the rare days that I’m not on a conference call and haven’t closed the window to avoid bus fumes, I always find myself chuckling at some of the conversations I overhear, while simultaneously offering up a prayer of gratitude that I will never again have to relive the agony of the 12th through 14th years of my life.

Things get noisy again at the church school across the street at about 5:30, when the children who stay for after school care get turned loose on the small playground to await pick-up.

Evenings are a pretty steady hum of traffic, with the comforting clu-clump-scrape of cars going over the speed bump under my window too fast and bottoming out. The busiest time for fire engine and ambulance sirens seems to be between 6 and 9 pm; I suppose my neighbors here in Queens all commute into Manhattan for the work day, and get into trouble and mischief at home only in the evenings.

Adults chatting outside the church, accompanied by the smell of cigarette smoke, means that it’s about 9:00 pm and the Alcoholics Anonymous or other support group meetings are wrapping up, and everyone’s trying to get a few last words of support and camaraderie in.  These chats are sometimes boisterous, but never as distinct or discernible as the middle schoolers in the afternoon. This group has learned the value of discretion.

Once the traffic dies down a bit, after 10:30 or 11pm when I’m in bed reading or falling asleep, it’s pretty common to hear someone walking home singing show tunes or opera arias along the deserted street.  I haven’t figured out whether this is always the same person of if there are just enough Broadway hopefuls in my neighborhood that it’s a common practice among many residents.

Sometime between 11 pm and 1 am – the exact timing of this sound is less predictable than many of the others – the garbage truck comes to empty the dumpsters from the convenience store on the corner.  If I fall asleep before it comes, I’m usually able to sleep through it; if I don’t, I’m shocked by how loud and disruptive it is and astounded that I am ever able to sleep through it.

Between about 2 and 4 am, the street is finally silent.  When I find myself laying awake during these hours, I often find myself in awe of how peaceful and still it can be; it is such a stark contrast to the busy bustle of the day and evening.

By about 4:45, traffic picks up again.  Slowly at first – just the earliest commuters and taxis starting their shift.  The real morning rush picks up around 7… leading up to the flood of excited kids being dropped off at the church school by their harried parents at 7:45.

New York City weather this winter has been odd:  unseasonably warm for most of the winter, with one huge snow storm in the middle and a few arctic blasts here and there.  And now, before we even have any true signs of spring, we’ve got summer temperatures: 76 in Central Park yesterday, and a record-breaking 81 degrees at Newark airport.

Is all this craziness a sure sign of climate change and global warming? Maybe.  Probably.  Is that why it bothers me so much? I don’t think so.

I’m a northern girl at heart.  Other than 14 months living in DC, New York City is the southern-most place I’ve ever lived.  Born in upstate New York (real upstate: north of Albany) and raised in the mountains of Vermont, my world view developed in a setting with strong, distinct seasons. After college, I moved to Michigan, where winters were even snowier, and then to Siberia, Russia, where winters were colder, darker, and longer than I had even imagined possible.  And I loved it.  I was awed and delighted by how, on a clear sunny day when the temperature drops below negative 30 how, the air literally sparkles, because all the moisture in the atmosphere freezes and turns to ice crystals reflecting the bright mid day light.  I learned that the farther north you go, the more magical summer is, with long lazy days and warm languorous evenings, enriched by night hawks and crickets and katydids.  I love spring as a time of slow reawakening: tree buds busting and slowly developing into full grown leaves over the course of many weeks; different species of birds serenading each week as the weather gradually warms and the various migrants make their way back from warmer climes.

Without the stability and constancy of distinct seasons, I start to loose a bit of my sense of self.  A 70 degree day in early March – when the trees are still grey and nude and the ground is still brown and bare – just makes me uncomfortable. It’s too soon and too out of sequence.  I saw an article in the times this morning encouraging people to going out and enjoy spring and summer activities like picnicking in Central Park, noting that a distinct benefit of the unseasonably warm weather is that the mosquitos and other insects aren’t out yet.  I guess that’s a good point, but I’d much rather picnic on the lush green grass of May and June than spread my blanket over the sparse brown stubble of March.

Maybe what I’m feeling is nostalgia… or mourning.  As someone working in the environmental field, I know the climate change predictions all too well, and I know that – even if we meet all the lofty goals for cutting emissions and storing more carbon – these weather patterns are only going to become more and more frequent.  It’s likely that the only way to continue to experience the distinct and extreme seasons that I love so much will be to migrate further and further north every few years.  Otherwise, I’ll need to find a way to regain my sense of self amidst these weird warm winters and abbreviated springs.

At least the crocuses are still the first flower to start blossom, no matter how early the spring comes.