I Am Not Good at Waiting

Am bored now. Also tired, hungry, cranky, distracted, and hungry. And tired.

Foodthoughts

I was going to be all eye-rolly and complainy about AP, because she was So Upset by me today that she went to my boss's boss to complain. (It didn't work, and likely backfired.) Plus, she has been making us all completely insane--is it really that difficult to understand that you really do need to show your work, i.e., show where you got the numbers you want to fling around? Because I am not putting service numbers into a report unless I see where they're from.

And then I thought I'd tell you about what I'm doing as I sit around the house tonight, but you can probably figure it out for yourselves. Three things are helpful: first, the doc gave me pills rather than the liquids about which everyone complains, so I don't have to choke down something will cause unpleasantness AND tastes nasty. Second, someone at work provided me with two important words: baby wipes. Which, given that my normal TP is from the fine folks at 7th generation, i.e., it's not all cushiony soft, was an excellent bit of advice.

The third helpful thing is the incredible meal that the lovely Ms. Z and the Brazen Tart made for me last night. Z started us off with a cold sweet potato soup that was unfuckingbelievable. Seriously--here's her description of how she made it:

I put 4 white carrots, LOTS of fresh ginger, a dash of dry ginger, 2 peeled & cubed sweet potatoes & 2 cups of chicken broth in the crock pot on the lowest setting overnight (6-7 hours). I pureed it and added pepper. Once it was cool, I added lime juice and fresh carrot juice until I had the desired consistency. I sauteed regular carrots & fennel with salt & olive oil making sure they retained a slight crunch for texture & added them to the soup. Fennel fronds for garnish, VOILA!

It Rocked. The. House. And I'm sure it'll be good warm, too. Because I WILL be making it, oh yes.

She followed that up with a tart made with chevre, caramelized onions and shallots, and thyme, and a salad with some oven-roasted tomatos. Whoa.

The Tart then pulled out some blueberries that she had been marinating in either gin or juniper berries (or maybe both), along with some brie. Ohmygod, was it good. And easy? Hello! it was why you want a pastry chef who works at a schmancy place around: she will come up with flavors that are incredible but that you might never have thought to combine.

She also brought ginger cupcakes--that link is to her recipes and account of making same. (I was completely entertained that both of them put ginger into everything they could think to put it in--they know of my love for it.) I had three of the cupcakes last night (hey, I knew I was eating no food today OR tomorrow), and i brought six home with me. I have to be very careful when I open the fridge, otherwise **WANT**. And no food for me, at least not until tomorrow afternoon.

So my other bit of advice to you when you have to get a screening colonoscopy is to get two professionally trained pastry chefs, who know what you like and who are great cooks, to make dinner for you for the meal before the fasting day.

I've been thinking about food a lot lately (not just today, when I couldn't have any), in part as a result of my conversation with Orange on Friday. She describes herself as a picky eater, and I think there are some diet considerations as well (though not as restrictive as celiac disease or something), so she said that when she gets to a restaurant, she tends to go through the menu eliminating all the things that fall into the **do not want** category, and usually ends up with a very short (two items?) list of things from which to choose. The place we went on Friday, she says, is unusual in that she wants more than a few things on the menu.

I, on the other hand (and Friend, as well) end up having to do this elaborate winnowing process. Seriously, I often could pick nearly anything from the menu and be happy, and usually there are multiple things that would make me extremely happy. I hold out for ecstatic, when I can, but happy is good. And I've mentioned enough of the food that Friend and I have shared such that I think you see it covers a wide range of stuff. (OTOH, I also dated two brothers some years ago--sequentially, not simultaneously--who had palates made of stone, so far as I could tell. They were nearly completely unable to tell the difference between a really good meal and canned ravioli eaten unheated right out of the can.)

Now, mind you, I am not being judgy here. It's true that it's easier for me to hang a lot with someone like Friend (and I think he'd say the same about me) or K, that is, people who like a similar range and type of food AND with whom I spend a lot of time. But people have different tastes and preferences (and Orange is a supertaster, which comes into play as well), and I'm willing to do nearly anything except fast food, and I'll even make do there if I absolutely must. What I'm musing on is how those things, in general, shape the way we think about the food we eat and make and serve and order and whatever.

I'm also wondering how tastes develop. My mother's a good cook, and her mother was, as well, so I grew up eating things that were well-prepared and flavorful. They weren't particularly adventurous, mind you, but we were locavores (my dad's garden; the huge farmstand just outside of town, where we get things to eat but also would freeze or can a bunch of stuff; the side of beef was probably local, too), and my mother became vigilant about additives in the 1960s. Seriously--way ahead of her time on that one. Not much fast food. Oh--and I think I've mentioned this, but my grandmother apparently subscribed to Gourmet and/or Bon Appetit, and I remember her making things like cream puffs and tortoni, But those were special or holiday meals, not everyday meals. So, I grew up eating good food, so crappy foods (salty sweet chemical messes) just don't taste good to me, but I know plenty of people all over these spectra (e.g., someone whose tastes evolved precisely because his mother's cooking was so wretched; people who are picky but who also aren't motivated to eat anything other than crap; people who become incredible cooks or even professional cooks because they love food), and I don't think there's a single path in any direction.

Anyway, my coherence is fading rapidly here, so I'll let you all contemplate it, or not, in whatever ways you choose.

Weekend at the Table

Thanks to a lovely long lunch yesterday with everyone's favorite cruciverbalist, I actually have spots of sunburn on my person--a blotch on my neck, and my left forearm, mostly. Plus, the freckles have come out to play. Basically, we could sit there and eat our lunches and watch each other break out in melanin spots while discussing the merits of commas. Yeah, okay, not everyone's idea of a good time, but it worked for me.

This weekend will likely be low-key. Friend is with his family this weekend, so I'm going to try to get all of one of the editing jobs done while watching the IRL race and the last two stages of the Tour de France (which I've been watching all along; Friend got me watching it several years ago). Not a particularly thrilling weekend, but that's okay. Basically, I'm trying to get the two editing jobs, the lady-bits biopsy, the colonoscopy, and the latest proposal submission all taken care of before the second weekend in August, when Friend and I head to the beer festival (and there's some talk of going to hear DMB that Sunday night, as well, which would be fun, if we have the energy to do it). As you can tell by the contents of that list, getting it all done so I can just be done with it and drink beer and hang out would be a fine thing.

I feel better about the proposal, because (a) it's basically a project report (i.e., it's a noncompeting submission, unlike the May submission), and (b) I talked to the project officer this morning. My boss called me to beg me to sit in on the phone call with Annoying Coworker and the project officer, working under the assumption that I already knew about this call, i.e., that AC had, as instructed, told me about the call. Oops; no. So I sent her an email and she came to my office around 9, saying it was time to call. Oops; no; supposed to be 10:30. Still, the PO was okay with talking with us then, so we talked for nearly an hour. At one point, I basically had to shut AC up when she interrupted me AGAIN. But it went well, with the PO, and afterwards i tried to speak to some of AC's obvious fears/insecurities by making it clear that i want to make it easier for her to manage her programs.

Because, when all is said and done, I actually do want to do that. She drives me completely batshit, and I am most certainly not alone in that, but I want her to succeed, not fail. More to the point, i want her to succeed according to standards on which we all agree, not succeed according to her demented view of the universe. (My boss's counterpart in the sibling organization has observed that AC will repeat something four or five times, as though the repetition makes it so; each time she says something, the more convinced she becomes that it's true.)

Okay, time to work. The Tour is underway, the editing is calling. (Incidentally, the Tour is even more fun this year than the past few years. They have made a seriously concerted effort to get drugs out of the Tour, and, perhaps as a result, perhaps coincidentally, it is unclear who's actually going to win the thing, with only two stages (today and tomorrow) left to go. Which is actually pretty exciting.)

Going

Little by little, I'm clearing out my cabinets and freezers and such. I'm not entirely sure why I'm doing this, but it feels like the right thing to do, so I'm going with it. I've nearly finished off my cereal (I have switched to my Pretty Healthy Muffins for breakfast; if I were truly organized, I'd add a piece of fruit and have an even healthier breakfast). I had a few boxes of this or that--couscous, or a mix of some kind--and I only have one of those left. I don't have much bread left in my freezers. I have a little meat, around to which I'll get one of these days, and some chicken broth. Some frozen veggies. I have canned beans and tomatos, which I'm less concerned to use, and pasta and rice and various grains (coarse corn meal for polenta; quinoa; several kinds of rice; farro; probably some barley and/or some cracked wheat or bulgar). There are odds and ends of baking chocolate and nuts, and I'll use whatever of that hasn't gone funky (the nuts are the thing that are more likely to be rancid or otherwise ew). The refrigerator is pretty bare--rice, wheat bran, oats, some buttermilk (the latter three are for the muffins, except I never remember to add the oats), club soda.

I think part of what's motivating me is realizing that some of these things I moved here with me, two years ago. When you live in the same place for as long as I lived in the last place, it's easy to lose track of just how long some crap has been sitting around. (Chuck and I got in the habit of putting dates on cans of tomatos and beans, because I'd stock up when they went on sale, and I wanted to be able to use the oldest ones first.) I'm also realizing that my eating habits have changed pretty dramatically. If I cook at all, it's probably at Friend's house; my dinners at home these days have been cookies, or cheese and crackers (if there are any around), maybe some dried fruit, maybe some carrots and peanut butter (if the carrots haven't fermented--oh yes, they DO ferment, and it's nasty; who knew?). I haven't even been making lunches to take to work with me. In short, my eating habits have gone to hell in a handbasket.

My Taste Buds are Singing

Because Thursday night's meal was exquisite. Seriously, it's difficult to find enough superlatives to describe how awesome it was. Allow me to detail the whole thing.

Friend got there WAY before K and I did--I took a bus and a taxi south (I don't normally take taxis but my selection of a bus instead of a train meant that I realized I wasn't going to be on time if I didn't get off the bus and into a taxi), while she started at the other end of the city and headed north; we were meeting so I could stash my backpack in her vehicle. Friend, on the other hand, allowed time for public transportation vagaries and ended up killing time by sipping some sauvignon blanc and reading the wine list.

Once we assembled at the table (not next to a window, but I could still see out--it's on the 40th floor) and had some wine in hand, we perused the menu. We took a good long time at that, I must say, because everything on it looked fab. We finally made our selections.

The amuse bouches was a spoonful of spinach mousse, a mouthful of an artichoke soup, and a small piece of fish on a radish and cucumber salad (except they left the cucumber out of mine, because I mentioned the no-peppers-or-cucumbers thing).

You basically had three choices: the degustation menu, which was a page of food and which we opted not to do; two appetizers, an entree, and a dessert; or one appetizer, an entree, and dessert. We went with two appetizers, to maximize the things we could taste.

Our appetizers were as follows (they brought one round, we ate it, then the next round came out):
K:
Salad of Assorted Crunchy Vegetables and Poppyseeds: the vegetables were thin slices, dressed perfectly
Line Caught Black Cod, Pumpernickel Horseradish Crust, Pickled Cucumbers: my taste of this was good, but not memorable; K really liked it a lot, but I don't remember enough of the flavors to say anything useful

Friend:
Warm Maine Lobster, Fingerling Potatoes and Melfor: Lobster. Need I say more?
Boneless Frog Leg Soup, Watercress and Tapioca: I tasted it, while K and Friend exchanged stories of eating frogs when they were children, but I'm here to tell you that we didn't eat frogs in New Jersey. It was good, but it was still frogs.

Me:
Casco Bay Sea Scallop, Pomme Mousseline, Jus de Poulet au Tokay Pinot Gris: Whoa. This was possibly the best scallops I've ever had.
Roasted Maine Lobster in Alsace Gewurztraminer, Butter and Ginger: This was absolutely transcendent. The ginger was oh-so-subtle, but perfect. Absolutely perfect.

Entrees:
K had Baked Filet of Striped Bass Backaofa, Alsace Style, which was unbelievable. A hint of bacon in a sauce that was incredibly complex. I never worked the hot line (hell, I never worked a restaurant or a pastry line, for that matter), but I can tell you that this sauce was not something that just happened. There were reductions and glazes and who-knows-what. Deep, dark red-brown, rich, spectacular.

Friend had Filet of Wild Sturgeon Wrapped and Roasted in Cured Ham, Marinated Cabbage. Yeah, it completely sucked. Except totally not.

I had Poached Filet of Halibut, Garden Beans, Lemon and Tomato Confit, and it was exactly what I wanted. The tomatos were diced tiny, and every little cube was the same size. The beans were split in half. Evenly, perfectly. The whole thing was exquisite.

For dessert, K had a cherry compote, Friend had a selection of five chocolate things, and I had a New Wave Soufflé, which meant it was on the plate rather than in a ramekin, with Michigan raspberries. (I had actually picked two things, couldn't decide between them, so asked the server to surprise me.)

They brought us glasses of wine to accompany our courses, offering a taste before they poured. They were all quite lovely.

We didn't pass the wines around, but we all had a taste of each of the food items, which just enhanced the experience. Basically, we all got to taste twelve things.

The three of us have been discussing the meal since we had it (and Friend and I talked about how we were almost avoiding eating on Friday just so as not to disturb the memory of the meal). Two things make a meal like that. One is the attention to the tiniest detail, like the size of the cubes of the tomatos, or the arrangement of the food on the platter. The other is the flavor--the sauces, like the butter ginger wine sauce on my lobster, or the sauce on K's fish, take a huge amount of time, what with reductions and deglazing and who knows what else. The people who say, "Oh, it was good, but I've had equally good at Joint Down the Street," well, I don't trust their palates, quite frankly.

I also know, from a woman who staged at that place while she was also working at the bakery, that it's a silent kitchen, which means that the only words you will say all night are, "Yes, chef." I don't think that's the place for me . . .

So, yeah, it was pretty good. The thought of it will sustain me as I edit like a maniac today, I'm hoping.

Mundane Post Facto

I went to the doctor today: 106/65, people. (The 106 is accurate, but the 65 might be 63 or 68, I don't remember; I split the difference.) I gave up bodily fluids, and--seeing as how I have turned 50--got a recommendation for a gastroenterologist to perform The Procedure. My doc said, "You know what I'm going to recommend." I said, that's one of the reasons I'm here; I need a name. She gave me the name of the guy who did her Procedure, and I may actually be able to get it done by the end of the month. Which, on one hand, isn't my idea of a good time, but I don't want to fuck around with this, so I'd just as soon get it over with. Then I have to have a lady-bits biopsy the first week in August. I have a proposal and two big editing projects to finish in the next three weeks as well. But then? Beer! In the summer sun, with Friend and two of his friends whom I've met and like.

I'm a little jammed up on the proposal, because my boss and his boss want it done early--so they can go on vacation (it's due the 15th, and they want it submitted by the 8th). Really, I wouldn't mind so much if I had some confidence that we have all the relevant information, and it would actually make my life easier to get it in early, so I'm actually kind of behind it. But the coworker with whom I must work most closely on this project is unbelievably annoying, and, IMHO, not entirely competent. She's full of happy-talk--oh, we're doing great on that! oh, our project officer loves us!--but she's also full of shit. And? In every single meeting, when I start to say something, she just starts talking over me. She does this repeatedly--nearly every time I opened my mouth. When I didn't give way today, she'd start talking to one of the other two people in the meeting, while I talked to my boss. I warned my boss later that one of these times I'm going to call her on it, in the meeting. It is unbelievably passive-aggressive, and wildly rude.

I have not done any editing this week after work, because I just could not get myself to do it. But! I went to the gym Monday (intervals on the rowing machine), and yesterday I walked to and from work (about 6 miles total), and today I went to a yoga class, so I don't completely suck. And did I mention 106/65?

No iPhone for Me

No, I am not going to get an iPhone. First, the cell phone I have (and it's even a new one; my old one cracked, and my plan was up, so I just got a new one) is perfectly adequate for my uses. It doesn't web surf (though it could; I just refuse to pay for that service), and i don't send text messages, but it works fine for the purpose for which I want to use it, i.e., as a mobile phone.*

Second, this whole "mobile me" rollout has just sucked. I had no webmail at all for two days, service has been spotty since then, and it doesn't work well (it says) with the version of Safari I have on my iMac. I cannot upgrade Safari without upgrading the OS, and I'm not going to do that, either. If it were free, sure, why not, but I'm not going to pay to do it. That is, the fine folks at Apple were so intent on getting their iPhones out the door, they just screwed the rest of us. Look, people, I PAY for my email account and its accouterments, so I expect it to fucking WORK. Do not sacrifice it because you're rolling out a new product and haven't worked out the bugs yet; that is so not my problem.

Third, though, the only service provider in this country is AT&T, and I loathe them with the white-hot heat of a thousand suns. In additional to the unbelievably crappy service they provide, they have been running one of the all-time most offensive commercials of late; it makes me grit my teeth whenever I hear it. Seriously: I should send them my dentist bills. It's the one where these two guys say they're "so going to that concert" (it's an AT&T blue room commercial), and Guy 1 says he's going to tell Lisa (spouse or girlfriend), and he calls out to her that he's going to a three-day music festival and she calls back, "No you're not," and he says to Guy 2 that he can't go, and Guy 1 says, "Dude--it's like THAT?" And then Lisa calls back, "And pick up your socks."

I am so fucking sick of men being portrayed as these wonderful, fun-loving-if-sometimes-a-little-irresponsible beings and women being portrayed as the mommy/meanie who has to tell them what to do. The other commercial running right now has the guy wanting to play all kinds of music for his wife, and she says, not right now, while I'm giving birth, and he says, "Wait--drum solo!" First off, what the fuck is she doing reproducing with that man? On what planet will he actually help raise the children? Yeah, I know, it's supposed to be a joke, but it is not a fucking joke: he's an ass, and she leaps right into the patriarchally prepared spot.

One of the old tropes from Ms. magazine was, when you're wondering if something is sexist, reverse the sexes in the situation and see what that does. If you take my first example, if a woman said, honey, I'm going to this three-day music festival, and her husband said no you're not, and pick up your socks, we'd think she was probably in an abusive/controlling relationship. It takes on a creepy tone that, IMHO, points to the underlying creepiness of the actual commercial. What person wants to control someone else's life like that? What person wants to BE controlled like that? And, perhaps most important, the commercial makes it sound like it's women who are running things. I'm here to tell you that women are not, in fact, running things.

Anyway.

It turns out that most of my birthday celebrations are going to be after my actual birthday (which was Sunday--I am now a half century old). Friend and I had sort-of-maybe tentative plans that depended in part on the weather (for the camping and music option) and in part on a friend (who wanted to come down to join us), but you know about the best-laid plans. Friend played hockey Friday night and got hit in the ankle with a puck; when he woke up Saturday morning, he couldn't put any weight on it at all.

I eventually meandered over to his place Saturday afternoon, and spent Saturday and Sunday waiting on him, basically. (He's very low maintenance, so this was not a problem; I brought him food, and ice packs for his ankle, and occasionally sat on the couch with him while we watched something.) After I finished my editing, I baked a lemon blueberry tart and some cookies.

So, for my actual-birthday breakfast, I made us fruit pancakes (Joy of Cooking recipe that has become a total fave--it is incredibly easy, and pretty healthy, and really really good; I used blueberries and strawberries on Sunday, which is spectacular), and for my actual-birthday dinner, we ordered pizza and drank good wine. He wished that he could have made breakfast for me, but that would not have been a good idea. He gave me a wonderful pair of dangly earrings and it turns out he got tickets for a beer-tasting festival in early August, so that is part of the birthday celebration, too. All in all, a wonderful day. Not quite the big bash that I'd occasionally thought about assembling (and even made a few tentative plans to assemble, but then didn't), but I just didn't feel like doing that. I couldn't figure out all the reasons why not, but just decided to go with how I was feeling about it. Not that the celebrations are over, however.

Thursday I'm taking Friend and K out to dinner at VeryFancyPlace. Next Sunday, the friend from last Sunday will probably come down and join me and Friend for dinner, and later in the month, Brazen Tart and another pastry school friend are making dinner for me. I'm hoping to take the Tart out to dinner, too, at a Different VeryFancyPlace. So, all in all, lots of little celebrations, which sounds like a fine way to do things. The other thing that's nice is that the beer festival is the weekend after the proposal has to be submitted, and the weekend after all my editing has to be submitted, so I'll really be able to take off with impunity.
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*On the 3rd of July, Friend and I were grabbing some food prior to the fireworks, at a bar/restaurant near where he'd parked the vehicle. At the table next to us were a late-20s man and woman, seemingly on a date. However, they kept taking these moments to surf the web on their respective mobile devices (the ones that are phones but have the keyboard for texting), and text as well, for all I know. I find this bizarre, to say the least. What can you possibly be doing that is more compelling than the actual live person six inches away from you? Even if they weren't on a date, per se, it's just rude.

Stuff

Here's the thing.

Try to find something actually made in this country. My bag (by Tom Bihn, and the bags from Trager, before that) are made here. Foodstuffs of various sorts. The occasional piece of clothing, but that's pretty unusual. In general, though, not so much. If I were really ambitious, I'd go look up some facts and figures, but just reading the labels from the stuff you buy will tell you a lot. That's actually one of the side effects of shopping by catalogue: they have to say, right in the description, that something's "imported." You can go through whole catalogues and not find a single thing that isn't imported.

Let me hasten to add that I bear absolutely no ill will toward the people who are making these things; it's not at all that I think some group of Others is ruining everything. Rather, it's that I don't see how one can sustain ANY economy without people who make things AND people who buy those things--preferably the same people. Even Henry Ford, racist, patriarchal bastard that he was, understood that part of the point of industrializing was making it possible for the people who made his cars to also be able to buy his cars. The siren song of SprawlMart, though, has meant that nearly every manufacturing job you can think of has moved overseas.

In this country, meanwhile, any kind of factory work is done for crap wages, often by people who are here illegally. (This breaks my heart. I see these immigrants as like my grandparents and/or great-grandparents; they're just trying to make a life for themselves and their families, and they're willing to do whatever shit jobs for shit pay they can find.) The yahoos who are yammering about how immigrants are taking away jobs? Tell you what; you go do that job for awhile and try to support a family on it, and see how great that job is. Which, of course, means they can be exploited, to the hilt.

What this really means, among other things, is that there just aren't a lot of jobs out there. My organization provides services to people who are, as we say, experiencing homelessness, and one of the biggest causes of that situation is job loss. A substantial percentage of people who are homeless, especially people who are chronically homeless, have a mental illness and/or a substance abuse issue, and another group of women, often with children, who are trying to escape violent and abusive situations, but a whole bunch of people become homeless because they are barely making ends meet and they lose their jobs. Hell, Chuck came way closer to that than I have made clear here--and he could have gone back to live with Mom, though that's regarded as "doubling up," i.e., living with a relative or friend as a temporary fix.

The thing is, take some who is my age--late 40s, early 50s--but who has much less education, fewer IQ points, and a limited variety of experience, and take his or her job away, and good luck finding another job for that person. There are only so many "service" jobs that pay anything close to a living wage, and even the "professional" and quasi-professional jobs (I'm thinking now of the lower-level medical providers, like the ones my organization uses, or the aides in nursing homes) don't pay enough to live on. How is this good for anyone except the rich people?

Answer? It isn't, but the rich people do not give a fuck about it. Take Phil Gramm, that sanctimonious fuck, for one example. Let's see how well he would do if he weren't living on my fucking tax dollars. Let him try to make do on the wages of a bakery worker, or the wages of one of the illegal immigrants. Let him try to figure out what to do when his kid is sick, or his wife has cancer, but he doesn't have access to the health care to which the members of Congress have access.

But the MBAs of this country have fucking gutted the place. They have sacrificed us all for the god of Shareholder Profits. And I'm not even talking about the same profits as last year, or a modest level of profits: no, they have to show that profits have increased each year. Just think about the math of that; you can't do it over the long term (which is the fundamental flaw of capitalism: it assumes infinite markets, and infinite resources, but we live in a finite world). You can do it over the short term, by gutting the company and introducing what you call "efficiencies," but they will come back and bite you in the ass eventually. But they won't bite YOU, because you will have moved on to a new company, where you will have garnered an even more outrageous salary, because you can point to the massively increased profits that your cost-cutting garnered--on paper--at the old company.

And all the people who were put out of work by your cost-cutting, what are they doing now? Some have new jobs. Some have managed to scrape together something, though they're making a whole lot less than they did before. And some people are homeless, or living with a relative, and they'll never quite be whole again. They would be happy to be working for a living wage in a factory somewhere--they'd work pretty hard for you, and they'd do the work pretty well--but you moved that factory to southeast Asia, or India, or someplace where you can continue to show big profits and get your big bonus.

I'd start a revolution if I had the foggiest notion how to actually succeed at it.

The reality is, for an economy to work, people actually have to make stuff. If everyone is either a King or Queen of the Universe, or a nanny, or a gardener, or working at a fast-food restaurant, it will not work. People have to make stuff, and they have to make good money doing it, or it will all fall apart. You and I may not see that happen, but mark my words.

In what?

My wall calendar at work is from my dad's union. The pictures are mostly of local members. Except this month, when it's a big flag with "In God We Trust" in gothic letters. So I put a Post-It over "God" that has "dharma" written on it. We'll see if anyone notices.

Change? How is it a change if it's still a patriarchy?

I had all kinds of ambitious plans for this evening, mostly involving editing another chapter of the textbook, and, who knows, I may actually do more of that. But first? A rant.

Because of the state in which I live, I don't actually have to vote for Obama. He will almost certainly take this state no matter what I do; it's not even close. If it were close, I would, in fact, likely vote for him, and I still may. He is way more conventional than his adulators seem to realize--his health care plan sucked and blew, he has yet to put forth a true populist message, he mouths platitudes with little evidence that there's much there there.

However, he has pissed me off mightily in the past two weeks, first with his pandering to the godpeople. I do not, in fact, think that "faith-based" organizations are all that and a ball of cheese. You want to worship a deity? Or more than one? Have at it. If you want to study old texts for clues to how you should behave? I don't really have a problem with that, either. Hey, if you want to believe that the deity(ies) of your choice wrote or inspired those texts, I don't even care about that. But leave me out of it, okay? I do not think that such textual interpretation and related worshipping behavior should (a) exempt your organization from paying taxes, or (b) serve as some kind of be-all, end-all guide for everyone else's behavior, or (c) serve as the basis for a form of government.

I'm willing to allow non-profit organizations that actually provide services to people to get tax breaks, and if an arm of your deity's organization provides such services, well, that arm should get appropriate tax breaks. But a blanket exemption for religions? Not so much. And, more to the point, I do not think that FBOs have some special ability to provide human services, and I do not think they should be privileged in terms of getting my tax dollars to provide such services.

But this latest thing has me spitting. Via digby (who also provides some useful history about abortion politics in this country) here's an article about it, and here's a followup. He said, basically, that after 22 weeks, there shouldn't be much of a "mental health" exception. As the article notes, he thinks mental health exceptions can be "'rigorously' limited to only those women with 'serious clinical mental health diseases.' He said mental health exceptions are not intended [to] permit abortions when a woman simply 'doesn't feel good.' 'It is not just a matter of feeling blue,' Obama said."

You know what? Fuck that. Seriously. Who the fuck does he think gets to decide if a woman is in bad enough shape to "deserve" an abortion? And does he realize that the anti-choice brigades and the anti-contraception brigades have made it more difficult for women to get knowledge about pregnancy and contraception, access to reliable contraception, and access to safe, early-term abortions when that fails? This is such an epic fail that I really don't know whether I'll vote for him--how do I know that he wouldn't nominate a justice like Thomas or Scalia--who are the two who share his views on this issue? Because that's supposed to be--and, in many ways, is--the reason to vote for him, if all else fails.

Yes, I understand that his economic policies will supposedly be better than McSame's, and he'll likely get us out of Iraq sooner, but to just write off more than half the population of the country? To say that someone else gets to decide whether I bear a child? That, my friend, is forced pregnancy. And that line about "not just a matter of feeling blue." Fuck that. Because women are all la-di-da about the whole thing, and just randomly decide to wait until the end of the second trimester to have an abortion? Uh, no, asshole. Tell you what; why not actually talk to a bunch of women who terminated pregnancies after 22 weeks? (Good luck--they are a tiny percentage of the abortions performed.) And then sit there and tell me why someone other than those women should get a say in the matter. The issues involved aren't "feeling blue," and I'm appalled that he would characterize it that way.

That, in fact, is a huge part of my dismay. The people who choose an abortion at that late date are going through a pile of crap, I guarantee you; it's not that they were "feeling blue." And to even characterize it that way trivializes every last aspect of it, and, once again, strips from women their bodily integrity and the assumption that they can be trusted to make decisions about their own lives and their own welfare. So bite me, dude.