Next Word

Well, yes, it appears that I have abandoned you, but I have not. I was busy Being Social the past few days, and working hard last week, so I have been slow getting to your other words. Events included a hockey game, a play, and, of course, much good food. (The play was "Desire Under the Elms," which, good lord, what a depressing piece. Also, of the two theater productions I've seen in the past two weeks, there were a total of ten characters, exactly one of whom was female. Also also, "Desire" is very very shouty; there's barely a word spoken that isn't in the form of yelling or some other kind of thrashing around. Entirely too much Drama for me, thanks so much. But I feel all Cultured and shit, so there you go.) So anyway; on to the words. I'll get through the ones I can tonight, but I'd rather take my time and ponder a few of these, so you may only get a few at a time.

Chicago Ah yes. I have lived here, let's see, 23 years, which is longer than I have lived anywhere else. Even though I know the city reasonably well--and I know quite a few bits of it, and I know some of it better than many residents, for reasons I'll elaborate in a minute--it still does not feel like home to me, and I doubt that it ever will. I'm not a midwesterner, for one thing, even though I don't know that I could tell you exactly what characterizes a midwesterner or a non-midwesterner.

The city comprises 77 neighborhood areas; the areas were originally delineated by sociologists in the 1920s, pretty much along ethnic lines. What's truly interesting is how much of that character has survived for nearly a century. There's still a south-side Irish parade; there's still a Polish neighborhood (where many people actually speak Polish, mind you, and the businesses advertise in Polish); the city still celebrates Pulaski Day. The city is also, still, profoundly Catholic, and specifically Irish- and Polish-Catholic, which have a different flavor than Italian or French or German Catholics. (People my age who grew up Catholic in this city will still ask people they've just met which parish they're from; someone I knew in grad school said it wasn't until she moved away from the city that she realized most people do not identify the place where they live by the parish they're from.)

Part of what this means is that people often grow up in and remain living in the same neighborhood, or near enough to it, for their whole lives. Chuck could tell those stories better than I, but many people regard "downtown" as a foreign country, and a suspiciously foreign one at that, despite the fact that the public transportation to and from downtown is actually pretty good for most parts of the city. (Except for the poor black sections, but that's a different story.)

The city also has a profoundly racist past: past mayors built housing projects in ways that were designed to segregate black people into overcrowded neighborhoods, and woe betide any black person who attempted to move to a white neighborhood. In the 1970s, whites basically fled to the suburbs, abandoning the city and the school system. This has not worked out well. One of the side effects is that many of the white suburbanites live in their outposts and possibly work there as well, sucking benefits from the fact that the city exists but not paying their fair share (see Myron Orfield's work on this). It is not uncommon for kids to grow up in the 'burbs and then live in Lincoln Park or Lakeview or downtown or Wrigleyville after graduation for a couple of years. (Some go to school in the city, thus expanding their years there.) Eventually they meet someone, marry, and then move back to the suburbs once they start procreating. They will have visited few other parts of the city and will have utilized public transportation for few of their ventures, and they will only rarely have interacted much with someone who is Not Like They Are, but they typically think they have lived in the city and Experienced it.

It is also still possible for people to arrange their lives so they rarely or never see someone of a different race--which, in a city that is slightly less than 40% black and slightly more than 40% white, is pretty amazing. I go out to dinner quite a bit, and I can tell you that most of the time, most places I'm eating, there are few or no black customers, which is only partly a comment about where I'm eating dinner. I can also tell you that vocal racism is alive and well: many is the time that someone has made a remark to me, assuming that I share their views because I share their skin color. The old ethnic white neighborhoods that haven't seen much development are particularly notable for this. (To Chuck's everlasting credit (and to the credit of his mom), although he has many of the markers to fit right into that mold, he profoundly does not.)

I'm unusual in a number of ways: I've lived in three very very different parts of the city, and have spent time in three or four others, including the neighborhoods in which I have worked. I take public transportation everywhere, pretty much (not having a car will do that to a person). At least two of the neighborhoods in which I've lived, including the one in which I now live, are racially much more mixed than the downtown neighborhood. I don't root for the Cubs OR the Sox.

So anyway.

There are things about the city I appreciate. There are things I enjoy. As anywhere else, there are many nice people. I live here, even though it's not Home, not least because I'm not even sure what would count as home for me these days.
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One last thing tonight: yes, I am peeved that Hosea won Top Chef. I'll elaborate at a later date, but let me say it had nothing to do with his supposed romance with Leah.

All About Me(me) x 5

Thanks to Jonquil (whom you really should be reading if you're not already): Comment to this post and, if requested, I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your blog and elaborate on the subjects given. Here are the five that Jonquil provided to me:

Baking My experience with this enterprise has led me to begin to believe that I really have to go back to school every now and again, in order to master some new body of knowledge. Of course, one could argue, quite easily, that I have not "mastered" baking in any serious, Brazen-Tart-Top-Chef sense of that word, and, if I'm going to be doing that going-back-to-school thing, I really must either win the lottery or find cheaper ways of going back to school. Caveats aside, I find that there is, in fact, a subtle but real sense that I'm Much Better at this than I used to be. I was always a pretty good baker--I wouldn't have come up with the idea to start a bakery if I hadn't had some notion that I already had a frame on which to hang subsequent knowledge--but I can do more, and do it better, than I used to be able to do, and I like that. The chefs in school said that they would expose us to everything, and, indeed, they did. The bakery enabled me to use quite a bit of it, at one point or another, which embedded it even more deeply. This doesn't prevent me from forgetting useful bits (today, while making a batch of nougat, I'm looking at the pan of sugar, water, honey and corn syrup and thinking, "Hmm, I wonder if that's going to boil over?" Answer: Yes; all over the stove), especially because, now that I'm back in Officeworld, I don't use the bits every day. Flip side, though, I enjoy using them a lot more.

Buddhism Sometimes I think of myself as the accidental buddhist. I've never studied it or practiced it, in the sense of belonging to a sangha; I (mostly) haven't read the texts (though at two different points in my life I had a lover who studies one or another of the schools of buddhist thought, and one of them read Sanskrit, IIRC); I don't meditate or even practice yoga at this point; and i suspect my grasp of some of the concepts is more on the order of misconstrued lyrics than anything else. I also don't find myself in search of a religion or in search of meaning in my life. What I find useful about buddhism is that it focuses on finding truth (and provides tools for doing so); it doesn't have any deities; and it advocates compassion at all times. I find the distinctions between engagement and attachment interesting (though I have no clue whether I think about this in "buddhist" ways). I find it interesting that enlightenment is (at least theoretically) available to all, not through the grace of a deity or other intercessor, but through one's own actions, and that each being is responsible for his or her own actions. I have to add that my own attempt to practice compassion as Chuck and I were splitting up ended up being one of the best things I have ever done.

Homekeeping One of win-the-lottery fantasies has to do with buying or building a home that is a model in some way, or a home that has a masonry bread oven in the back yard, or a home that runs on solar energy, or . . . something. Even though I have lived in a major city for nearly 30 years, I have this fantasy of living someplace that is not-city (and definitely not suburbs; I cannot do suburbs, at all). What the fantasy is about, i think, has as much to do with the various arts and sciences necessary to keeping a home, especially the arts and sciences centered around the kitchen and the hearth and the sewing space (and the writing space and the art studio, as long as we've won the lottery here). I think that's actually the fundamental truth that comes out of a Marxist analysis, that we most of us, perhaps all of us, need and want to be able to do multiple things. (This notion is explored to interesting effect in both Ursula LeGuin's "The Dispossessed" (and some other work) and Sheri Tepper's "The Gate to Women's Country," in both of which the residents of the imagined societies are expected to learn and practice multiple arts, crafts, sciences, etc. Much of our capitalist society doesn't think in terms of home "keeping": instead, we're expected to use, dispose of, buy new, in order to create a market. That seems so fundamentally wrong to me, and so at odds with homekeeping.

Friendship I have spent much of the last 30 years living by myself. Since 1981, Chuck and I lived together for about 5 years, and I had a roommate for less than a year in 1983 or so, but I have otherwise lived alone. Given that my family is about a thousand miles away, this has meant that I've built multiple networks of friends over the years, and I love them all. Some fade in and out of my life; some were friends in a specific time and place; some are closer to me than some of my family; some are more casual; and, thanks to modern technology, some I've never seen or met in person. Doesn't matter. We're all a part of these great webs of life and death. Sometimes our intimate (read: marital and familial) relationships and the way our society puts those at the center of everything makes friendship seem like an afterthought, but it isn't. I don't feel as though I have friendships "instead of" marital or familial relationships, because I have or have had all of those; I feel as though the fact that marital/familial relationships haven't occupied the center of my vision and my living space has enabled me to see how friendship is the thing that makes the other relationships possible in some important ways.

Starting over again Oy. Sometimes I feel as though I've lived several lifetimes in this particular lifetime. What I mostly feel is thankful that I have some ability to be resilient, and thankful I have the friends and family who can help me and support me through difficult times. As y'all know, I can also feel sad or angry or self-pitying, sometimes even for stretches of time. But what else can you do except . . . do the next thing? Well, yes, you can blog about it, ad nauseam, but sooner or later you must get the fuck ON with it. I could easily allow myself to be consumed with sorrow & regret, and some days/times that happens; I wish I could have been a professor, or owned a bakery, or been a programmer; some days I even wish I could have had a kid. it's not that my life is somehow incomplete without those things--the Brazen Tart once pointed out, correctly, that one cannot do everything. It's that I would really have liked to do those things (or the first two, for sure, anyway), and I think I might have been good at them, and I wish i could have found out whether I would have been, and I feel like I would have been able to offer more to people if I had been able to do those things (i.e., it's not a purely selfish wish to have done them). Instead, I slog along, writing reports and proposals that maybe four other people will ever read, and it feels like a waste. But it is what it is. And I still get a comma in every paycheck and I still don't have to lug 50-pound sacks of flour up a flight of stairs, so, hey, it could be a lot worse.

Book Love

When I was in my early teens, I'd go to the local public library with my dad. I'd rummage around on the "new fiction" shelf, and the "adult fiction" (as opposed to the YA fiction, which I found tedious in multiple dimensions), and maybe look something up with the catalogue. I'd end up with a stack of books, and sitting in the car with that stack always gave me a little thrill. I'd read the first couple of pages of a few of the books, or look again at the description on the inside jacket flap, and I'd decide on an order in which I'd read the books, saving what i thought would be the best book for last.

It turns out that, 35 years later, I still do this.

I zipped down to the library late yesterday afternoon, expecting to pick up one book that was on hold for me and finding that two others had come in as well, and I stood on the train platform and started doing that surveying-my-haul thing.

While rummaging through the library's online catalogue, I stumbled across Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, about his hiking on the Appalachian Trail. I have had to be careful where I read the book, because he makes me laugh out loud--he is a very good writer, and it's extremely funny. (He could use a good editor or spellcheck program, though; I've found three or four egregious typos.) I highly recommend that particular book, and I'm definitely going to find some of his other stuff as well.

The other thing I found online recently is a bakery-cam. Yes, that's right; there is now a live webcam in the back of the bakery where I worked. It's more a stop-action cam--it updates every 10 seconds or so, rather than being a continuous feed--but still. I just peeked in and saw Phil and Bossman making rolls (it looks like they have a new roll divider; I'll have to ask him about that). I have to say that watching it the other day made my stomach clench a little bit: I look at it, and I am nothing but happy that I'm not doing that any more. In fact, being away from it for a year (and being able to watch it on my monitor) has made me realize just how much I hated working there by the time I left, for a combination of reasons.

I liked the people, and I even liked a number of aspects of the work, but I got up every morning and had to will myself to not think about how much I didn't want to be doing it. That kind of numbing isn't good for anyone. I've had office jobs where that was true, too--I think it's unavoidable, no matter what you do; that's why they call it "work" and why they have to pay you to do it--but I never felt anything like I did at the bakery. I think it was the combination of low pay and physically taxing work, along with the knowledge that I had absolutely no future either there or in that line of business generally, that made it so depressing.

And as for today's rant:

Burger King has now managed to completely piss me off with a second ad campaign. The current one has these two guys, one with a bag full of their new mini burgers. He tells his buddy to watch, and shows the bag to a woman, who proceeds to squeal idiotically over them, about how cute they are, etc., as if (a) the burgers are babies and (b) all women squeal uncontrollably at the sight of something small and cute. It is beyond annoying. Their previous campaign featured the announcer saying something like, "people are going to bed hungry tonight," or something like that, the solution being BK's new late hours. It was beyond offensive. Got news for you, Idiot Ad-Writer: many people are going to bed hungry because they can't afford food.

I know! Let's cut taxes! THAT will work, for sure! Or at least that's what the idiot Republicans will tell you. I can't even write about politics, because it will make my keyboard explode. (If I could lose weight by ranting, I'd have it made.)

And another thing . . .

Orange's comment on the last post reminds me of another aspect of the whole thing that annoys the fuck out of me: I do not believe that all of the people who align themselves with the godbag asshats actually share the beliefs of the GAs. I believe that people like ol' Ann align themselves for reasons that are disingenuous at best, and cynical exploitation at worst. I also believe the leaders, or many of them, cannot possibly believe the things they promulgate. (Fred over at Slacktivist has written a number of posts about this, but I am too lazy to go find them in his archives.) I think that many of the people who DO believe are ignorant--sometimes willfully so, but often because they have little or no exposure to alternatives, and they are frightened of alternatives, and the people who preach to them, like the GAs and their fellow travelers, exploit and encourage those fears.

I've been slammed at work, still, which is wearing me out. Three major things are due in the next three and a half weeks (a proposal; a yearly report to the federal government, which has multiple aspects; a financial report for a federal grant) and several other things are due at about the same time, plus a coworker is out of town for three weeks, so I'm doing some of her shit, too. Between now and mid March, forget about it. But, hey, I can only do what I can do, and there are limits to what I'm willing to sacrifice. I've been working full force since I was hired--and this week is my one-year anniversary.

Anyway. I'm fried tonight, too, so I got nothin' else.

Sleepytime

I think I matched a personal best yesterday, for amount of time spent doing absolutely nothing. Saturday featured some running around--to get something framed, to pick up a few items at Trader Joe's, and to make tiramisu as a months-late birthday cake for Friend. Friend then fetched me and we hied back to his place to cook dinner (mahi mahi with lime butter; wild and brown rice; and a mix of slow-roasted tomatos, onions, black beans, and mango) and admire his "new" dining room. The room has been there all along, but it has housed computers and such for several years; he has been on a roll lately, rearranging stuff at his house, so he was very pleased to be able to have dinner in the dining room.

Yesterday, however, I sat on the couch in the sunny front room, with a fire in the fireplace and a cat on my lap. I had a book next to me, but I didn't exactly read a lot of it; I did spend a fair amount of time kind of staring into space, or into the fire. Friend continued to move crap around as part of his grand rearranging plan, and occasionally came in to put another log on the fire. I eventually got off my ass to take a shower, and, later, to start cooking dinner (more rice; cauliflower that was steamed and then baked in a cheddar sauce that curdled on me but still tasted good; cabbage that was steamed and then sauteed with onions in a little butter, with black pepper; chicken that marinated all day in lemon and ginger and was then basically poached/pan-fried in the marinade). Friend came in at the last minute to do the chicken, as the rest of the stuff was the time-consuming bit, and I did all that fussing so he could continue his operations. We ate in the dining room again, and then retired to sit in front of the fire for awhile. It was every bit as pleasant as it sounds, and I think he was pleased to be able to get more stuff done..

Today I wandered through Whole Paycheck on my way home, and once again bought more than I should have tried to carry (look! pistachios and cherries! I can make nougat . . . and almond paste--I could have used some of that the other day . . . and that fig and almond thing I like . . . Ginger-O's are on sale; must stock up). I managed to shlep it all home, and even did my laundry, which was the real task for the day. And I cut up the pineapple and the grapefruit and threw in the rest of the frozen cherries and blueberries, so I have fruit salad for the week. (I know; doesn't quite measure up to Brazen Tart's adventures in Kauai, does it . . .)

The tiramisu was tasty enough, though not exactly what I had in mind. First, I had decided to make a dacquoise instead of using ladyfingers, which worked reasonably well except it didn't rise enough and the almond flour wasn't fine enough (I suspect those two things are related). I also made a chocolate dacquoise, merely by dumping in some cocoa powder. I combined mascarpone with some "light" cream cheese and some heavy cream, in an effort to make it a teensy bit less heavy, and that worked okay, and I layered fruit in there, too (frozen raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries), to help cut the sweetness. I put a layer of regular dacquoise on the bottom, soaked it with coffee, smeared some of the cream/cheese mixture, and put on some berries; added the chocolate layer, did the same; and added the top layer of regular dacquoise. I had run out of the cheese mix, so I whipped the rest of my heavy cream and used that as a top layer. Remember those chocolate hazelnut cookies? I had crumbs from them in a bag and used them as a sprinkle on top instead of cocoa powder. I think for the next round I'll make ladyfingers or a spongier sponge cake instead of dacquoise, or possibly a combination.

Meanwhile, thanks to my responding to a stupid poll last week (on purpose, to fight the oh-we-christians-are-so-persecuted crowd), I've ended up on the email lists of the godbag asshats from the AFA and affiliated organizations. There's a part of me that wants to stay on the lists, just so I can keep track of their slimy shit, but I just cannot bear it. What a bunch of assholes. And, of course, what with the long weekend and such, I keep getting email, despite having sent multiple unsubscribe notices. If I'm still getting their shit by Wednesday, there will be problems.

I cannot abide them. They keep wanting to stick their noses into everyone else's underpants, for reasons that make no sense to me. Their views on homosexuality and their opposition to equal rights are offensive. More to the point of the shit they keep sending, they have this notion that somehow christians are being "silenced" and "persecuted." That is such a distortion of reality that it's difficult to take seriously. Are churches being burned? Are christians being sent to concentration camps? Are they being denied the right to vote? Are they forbidden to pray? Of course not; quite the opposite. Or, let's look at it this way: when is the last time the populace of the United States elected as their president someone who isn't at least an avowed christian? How many members of Congress aren't christian? (I suppose their answer to that would depend on whether they count catholics and mormons.) Then explain to me how one can even claim persecution with a straight fucking face.

Okay; that's as much energy as I can muster for the day. (It's a sorry state of affairs when I only have the energy to rant for two paragraphs . . . )

Letter of Love

Thanks to Bill, I have the letter "g." In particular, the task is to list ten things that I love that start with my letter. So:

greens I have always liked spinach--there's not much you can do to it to make me hate it. But of late I've been branching out, to kale, and collards, and beet greens, and I like those every bit as much, it turns out. It's felicitous that they're also quite good for you.

guimauve You know this as marshmallows. We made them in pastry school, and I loved them, not least because they are a cousin to Italian meringue, which I adore (beat egg whites, and then drizzle in sugar water heated to the correct temp, which I'm too lazy to look up right now, and let it continue to beat; the sugar cooks the whites). Guimauve isn't particularly good for you, and isn't particularly fancy, but that's not the point.

generosity And I'm not even really talking about money; it's more about being willing to give, whether it's credit, or a thank you, or a compliment, or a lollipop, or whatever. We all have something we can give away that someone else will be glad to get, and the giving encourages others to do likewise. It's a quality that I try to cultivate in myself, in part because I think it's one of those things that grows on itself and encourages others to be generous as well. I don't know that I succeed particularly well--that is, I don't think I'm *more* generous than the people around me--but that's okay.

game This one's kind of a cheat, in that I'm getting two for one, because I like game, as in venison, and wild turkey, and rabbit, but I also like game in the Michael-Jordan-he's-got-game sense. I think having game is wonderful to witness, or to recognize that one has oneself, on those days, or in those places or circumstances, where it all just comes together.

genitalia Speaking of coming together . . . okay, sorry, couldn't resist that. Genitalia are just fun. I realize people vary in terms of what they like to do with them, and what kind they like, and what they like to do. Not the point. The whole enterprise is one of the great pleasures in life.

g-spot And, hell, might as well throw this one in, too. I like it. I'm not going to provide any details, at least not any personal ones, and if you really need more, well, you know how to work the

google I sometimes wonder what the hell I did before the Google. If you don't use it, I can't explain it (but you guys are experts, I'm sure).

grammar If you don't care about it, well, then you are contributing to the downfall of civilization--ALL civilization.

goo-goos Most people do not regard this as a worthy goal. I disagree, deeply and profoundly. And I am extremely goddamned sick and tired of hearing the right wing of this country deride government; I am particularly sick and tired of hearing elected officials--who are collecting government paychecks--deride government. Especially the asswipes who have sucked at the public teat their whole long lives, but don't want a poor person to collect an extra fucking food stamp (coughPhil Grammcoughcough). Oh; wait; this is supposed to be things I love, not the rant zone . . .

Okay, so let me end with:
ginger Of course. Could I have left this off? No. I like it dried, fresh, pickled, and crystallized. I like it in sweet and savory dishes. I like tea made of it. I like the color. I love it deeply and passionately.

Needs

I'm very whiny tonight. (For the usual reasons: didn't work out; haven't worked out in a couple of days; not fitting into clothes; am not getting the support I need at work; am tired. Etcetera. There; now I don't have to detail any of it.)

I've also been annoyed by this article. And, really, who wouldn't be? I do not give a rat's ass that the people around you are taking two vacations a year ($16k) or have a car and driver rather than take public transportation, or have a nanny, or "need" suits and evening gowns, or need a vacation spot in the Hamptons or wherever the fuck the rich people are hanging these days. Really; I don't care. The culture that supposedly requires you to do that so that you can fit in is a broken culture. And it's broken in two very important ways. For one thing--and this is my lesser complaint, actually--that particular kind and level of consumption is problematic. For the other, more important, thing, though, the level of consumption is apparently provided and expected no matter how well or poorly these bozos perform. If I did my job as "well" as these titans of industry and finance, I'd be out of a goddamned job, not whining about how I just cannot get by on a measly half-million a year.

Take, by way of contrast, someone who has been incredibly successful in the financial world: Warren Buffett. Does he live that lifestyle? Um, no. Do his kids? No, again. I'm sure he's not perfect; none of us are. But the whole notion that one should be paid exorbitant sums (a) simply because others are making exorbitant sums, (b) regardless of whether one's own performance is good, in order that (c) one can maintain the Lifestyle of those others, is simply fucked, and not in a good way.

The worst thing, for me, is that these people don't actually MAKE anything. They do not build anything, they do not own businesses that build or make anything. You cannot eat, wear, drive, live in, or hold their "products." In fact, they work very hard to ensure that the products we need are produced elsewhere, in some other country, because that makes more money for the shareholders, who are, you guessed it, another part of this immense circle jerk. Not that I'm peevish about it or anything.

Weather Report: Exhausted with a Wad of Writing after Sunrise

1. I keep starting posts and then not finishing them, because bed or a hockey game or something is calling.

2. No, the proposal isn't done yet, and I'm exhausted today--bed didn't call early enough last night.

3. I'm quite glad about who got eliminated on Top Chef this week; the person who annoyed the shit out of me the most of the remaining contenders. It was also interesting because of the cheftestants who were eligible to be booted, i.e., arguably three of the best chefs on the show. Remind me to tell you why the person annoyed me, if you care.

4. Going on a three-day walk is not, in fact, "speaking out against breast cancer in the boldest way possible." Or, well, I suppose it might be, but you know what? Breast cancer does not give a fuck. Really. All of your "speaking out" won't do shit.

5. Also? Your life does not, in fact, have any meaning, and going on a three-day walk is not going to change that.

6. W/r/t the last post, I realized, based in part on your collective response, that my self-applied "loser" label has more to do with how I have lived up to my own expectations, rather than how well I have lived up to any external demands or expectations. I also recognize that at least some of the piles of crap that prevented me from getting to do some things were simply unavoidable--shit does, in fact, happen.

7. Did I mention exhausted? With a wad of writing to do today.

8. Made the cookies again (rosemary/cherry/lemon) and Was Pleased with them. They're cakey, rather than crispy, but I'm okay with that. Otherwise, little to report on the food front; I've had popcorn for dinner a couple of times this week, which tells you all you need to know.

Why was Aretha wearing that hat?

Because she IS Aretha, and, yes, she can wear any damn hat she wants. I also appreciated the subtext of shout-out to Marion Anderson.

As I noted elsewhere in Blogistan, I was watching Tuesday's ceremony in our conference room, on ABC, because that's the channel our TV-plus-rabbit-ears received the best. (We do not have cable at work, apparently, so we rigged this up so people could watch.) One of the blatherers commentators said, on seeing Nancy Pelosi and Senator Feinstein and the President-elect come on to the porch, that we would not have seen that tableau a hundred years ago. I blurted, because I could not help myself, that we would not have seen that tableau FIFTY years ago. There was general agreement about what I said, but the fact that the commentator was so ahistorical still kind of amazes me. Seriously: how can you claim to be a journalist and say something that fucking stupid?

Tuesday was also my first exposure to Rick Warren, and what a tool. At least I got a shout-out in Obama's speech. Incidentally, w/r/t the former, a number of my non-atheist friends were completely offended by Warren's recitation of the so-called lord's prayer (including my boss the ex-priest). It took me awhile to figure that one out, because, on some level, to me a prayer is a prayer is a prayer, and I find pretty much all public prayer offensive, particularly at sporting events and official government functions. (If you want to pray at any time, please feel free--I will even, you may remember, make space for said activity at my own (possibly) damned dinner table; but invocations of a deity at sporting and government assemblies are an enforced religious observance that annoys the fuck out of me.) However, I have learned that that particular prayer is profoundly christian, and, thus, at least potentially offensive to anyone who isn't christian but is religious in some way. Apparently there's a dispute within christianity, as well, as to whether one is supposed to have one's debts or one's trespasses forgiven; ah, sectarian disputes.

I believe we have "godless communism" to blame for much of this. I know you can find piety and references to deities all throughout U.S. history, but the upheavals of the beginning of the last century ratcheted everything up a notch. Communism, socialism, and anarchism, and, with all of them, atheism: many Powers regarded them as pure evil, and anything that could be associated with any of them, and anyone who didn't sufficiently despise all of those isms and anything associated with them, could be denounced freely. Same with labor unions, in part because the early labor movements were related, philosophically and sometimes politically, with the isms; all of them had as their goal a kind of liberation and justice for the common person.

Marx's historical analyses may well have been mistaken--that is, though the workers of the world may well unite at some point, I don't foresee that OR the withering of the state occurring any time soon. In addition, the attempts to create marxist-influenced society in eastern Europe/Russia and China were wrong in practice and possibly in theory as well (I do not claim to be any kind of expert on marxism/leninism). Nevertheless, Marx's analyses of capitalism and the oppression of the workers that results from it have much to recommend them. Some teacher along the way pointed out that Smith's and Marx's analyses of industrialism weren't all that different; rather, Smith is less disturbed by the oppression of the working classes that is a necessary facet of capitalism. If that's true, it is thus hardly surprising that the monied powers that be regarded any of the spawn of Marx's analyses as a danger. (Stalin and his evil ilk basically played into the hands of the anti-communist and anti-socialist forces by providing reasons for condemnation--reasons that had nothing to do with the message of liberation and justice that is at the heart of the marxist analysis. Whatever else Stalin was about, he was not about justice or liberation.)

On a completely unrelated note, it's been kind of strange to see Caroline Kennedy in the news of late. She's very close in age to me, and she was most frequently in photographs in women's magazines, either the ones my mom got or the ones I was reading for my dissertation, in the 1970s or so, i.e., when she was quite a bit younger than she is now. The current photographs show a middle-aged woman, which is a very striking reminder that that's what I, too, look like these days (and, let's face it, I don't have a stylist of any kind). Somehow, in my head, I'm still somewhere around 35. I'm trying to figure out how to revise that.

Some of it I know has changed: the other two women that my boss manages are in their mid-to-late 30s, and they're just in a different place than my boss and I are. I can definitely enter the rant zone, I can definitely go off on a tear, but the past five years seem to have made a major change in me. I don't feel as though I've finally reached some end spot, but I also sense that I don't get wrapped around the axle in quite the same way any more. I can't explain it very well, especially because most of you either don't know me IRL or haven't known me all that long, and I know that even to people who know me well IRL it may not be obvious, because, really, I am still capable of ranting like nobody's business.

But it just doesn't matter.

I guess part of it is that I've stopped believing that I'm ever going to do anything that matters or lasts, and I've stopped believing that I'm going to get to do any of the things I've dreamed of doing. Every one of my plans has, after a certain amount of effort and expense and time on my part, gone to shit. I'm doing basically the same work I was doing in 1986 when I left the east coast for graduate school in the city in which I still live. Yes, I have done some fun things--and paid dearly for them, in several senses of "paid," as well as met some wonderful people--so I don't want to sound too poor-pitiful-me, because that's not where I'm going with this. I've also foregone a number of things that might also have been fun--having kids, for example, which was something that I wanted to do only if I had (a) a partner (b) who also wanted to have kids. Having a kid by myself while I was in grad school, for example, or immediately afterwards, when I was deeply in debt and unemployed, seemed like a very bad idea.

So, given that, what am I going to do? Sit around and feel depressed and sorry for myself because I'm a loser? Yeah, okay, whatever; that doesn't sound like very much fun to me, so, no, thanks, I'll skip that. I've experienced depression several times in my life, and I have to say that I found it profoundly boring. I can expound on that if anyone cares, but I really did find it boring.

Okay, so no job I really want; no well-paid sinecure; no kids; no meaningful and fun work (though I do like my coworkers and my current job). I can either be happy with what I have--which is nice, relatively speaking--or I can be perpetually dissatisfied and depressed and crabby. Eh; the latter sounds like too much work. I'd still like to write a book, and I'd still like to start doing needlepoint again, but I don't know whether I'll manage either of those things. I'd like to live in a nicer space at some point, but the thought of moving makes me cringe, and I really don't want to pay all that much more for an apartment.

Whatever. I've resigned myself to being a loser. As noted, it just doesn't matter, so this doesn't disturb me nearly as much as it might have when I was younger.

One final note before bed: I constantly threaten my boss that he's going to be in trouble when I win the lottery. When things get really crazy, I inform him that I'm going to drain my savings account to play. Today he informed me that I'm never going to win, that he has called in all karmic debts to ensure that it doesn't happen. Which cracks me up--the thought that he's praying that I NOT win just amuses me to no end (though I don't know that he prays or even believes in a deity, per se, any longer).

Of Magic and Polar Bears

Okay, the Hairbozo on WNTW is cutting off all of someone's hair again. What a fucking surprise. She had hair nearly all the way down her back, and it was definitely in need of a good trim, but Mr. Whackhappy chopped it all off, to above her shoulders, and gave her bangs. What he basically does is create the need for constant hair fussing. Bangs need to be trimmed, or you're constantly pinning them back awkwardly, hacking at them yourself, or just moving the outgrown bits out of your face. (If your hair is wavy, you may even get the Bozo effect.) I thought she had gorgeous long hair, and a good trim and some styling advice--how to pin it up; how to do some interesting braiding--would've been preferable, not least because I don't much like the short haircut; it makes her look like every other person whose hair he styles.

Yes, I know, I need to get out more, perhaps.

Not this weekend, though. I'm going to tie myself to the computer and edit away, plus do some chores. And play some solitaire.

I particularly like Forty Thieves, and I have a version of the game that enables me to go back, to the beginning of a particular game or just a series of moves, and replay, as many times as I want. Apparently (because i am so lame I looked it up), a winning percentage of about 10% is common, with "good" players able to win upwards of 20%. My winning percentage is around 28% (okay, 27.6%). I tell you this not to prove my lameosity, of which you should be well-convinced by now. I've been playing it regularly (okay, sometimes obsessively) for maybe four or five years, and I will often replay a given hand multiple times. Other hands I win or bail on pretty quickly. I have a few basic principles--when to move cards and when to let them be; what cards to use to fill gaps in the board--but I don't have a lot of rules about using them and I don't count cards. (I try to keep track of deuces and threes and fours, which is 24 cards, but I'm not obsessive about it, especially not the first time through a hand.)

The interesting cases--to me, anyway--are the games that appear unwinnable for some reason and that I don't win within a try or two, but that I have some . . . "sense" can be won. Way more often than not, I'm right, even if it takes me awhile to actually win a given game. I had one yesterday, and I kept fussing with it, trying to figure out which kink was responsible getting stuck, in addition to the fact that two deuces of one suit were buried at the beginning of the hand, but, eventually, win it I did.

What's interesting to me is that sense that a given game can be won, and how often I'm right about that. (And it's not as though I replay every game; I bail pretty often.) I'm sure there are mathematical formulae about the whole thing, but I sure as hell don't know what they are. It seems that some part of my brain can do the calculations, however--or, at least, can reach the right conclusion--and I marvel at that a little bit. There's a kind of calculation going on there, an assessment of some kind, as though my brain can see the moves that need to happen, even if it takes me awhile to get to them, and it's clear that it's a product, in part, of playing a lot, along with some ability at pattern-matching, at least some of which is happening on a subconscious level.

And that's why I'm not just an atheist; I also eschew the magical new age crap. That is, I firmly believe that there's a lot of information available at any given time, but that we can only make sense--or make patterns that make sense--of some percentage of it. We have to learn to edit out the bits that don't fit or that are just (literally or figuratively) noise. Some conditions (autism-spectrum disorders, perhaps?) and drugs affect the editing functions, in ways that can be enjoyable, or scary, or overwhelming.

The point is, the information we're editing out is still there; it didn't go away, even if we don't have (conscious) access to it. Is it possible to develop mechanisms or techniques to apprehend more of the information consciously? Yeah, probably, and I'd also argue that what we call "intelligence" has something to do with the ability to manage large amounts of complex information quickly. But there are certainly limits, not the least of which are the fact that we communicate with each other. (Side question: if you take a non-human primate of a particular species to a new colony of that species, can the animal communicate? That is, do all chimpanzees speak "chimpanzee"? Are there local dialects? How are they communicated?) Thus, while I am occasionally surprised by the accuracy of information I wasn't aware of having consciously, I'm not surprised that it exists and that I can tap into it. It's not magic or spiritual.

I'd really like to tie this to Fred's post about gerbils and polar bears, but I really must edit, so I'll leave you to go read the post yourself.

More Nothing

Yes, it is cold in these here parts. Very cold, as a matter of fact. Squeaky cold. Bitter cold. Killingly cold. (Thus, the manager of our program for homeless people was very excited to have spent two hours out in the cold this morning, as she was able to get someone to go into detox/shelter.) Among the many things I have come to hate about the cold weather is that even those of us who are not, as we say, experiencing homelessness, end up wearing half of our closets on our backs anyway. One must thus have all of one's things for the day gathered in one place and ready to go, because one (a) cannot move much once all of the clothing is on, and (b) will get overheated if one runs around inside with all of those layers upon one's body. Whatever. I have sufficiently warm clothing and a sufficiently short commute that it's not that big a deal for me.

Work continues to cram upon me, but I keep slogging away. One thing due tomorrow got submitted today, successfully (I wanted to submit a day early in case there were glitches), which eased my mind a bit; the next part of that submission, due February 6, is a bigger deal with more and bigger pieces, and I have multiple things to do before that happens--things in addition to actually writing the damned proposal, I mean--but I continue to eat the elephant.

Today's idiocy: My bank has a "points" program, up for which I signed. It already has resulted in free money for me, in the form of a $50 Starbucks card (I had my choice of retailers and goods, and selected that particular thing), and, given that I don't pay for my banking, it really is free money. Occasionally they try to get me to sign up for this or that thing to get more points, some of which I'll do, and others of which I won't. One such promotion involved signing up to automatically transfer money from my checking account to my savings account; okay, no big deal. I signed up to automatically transfer $25/month for six months, starting January 15.

Except the bozo who completed this transaction signed me up for $250 a month to be transferred. Luckily, I was looking for the first $25 transfer today and didn't see it. I called a different branch--the branch I prefer--and asked someone about it. You can imagine my dismay when he mentioned a $250 transfer, instead of the $25 I was expecting. We straightened it out, over two phone calls, and nothing bounced, but I was quite peeved. Dipshit.

I moved my banking, such as it is, to this bank about 8 years ago, primarily because it was a small, locally owned bank. A few years ago it was bought by another bank in the region. Okay, not that big a deal. About 18 months ago, it was bought again, by a bigger bank. And a couple of months ago, it was bought yet again. I am still using checks with the name of the second bank on them, which should tell you how quickly this is moving. I find it tiresome, at best, and wish there were a good local alternative. By "good" I mean: free checking account; multiple no-fee ATMs in locations that are convenient to me; no stupidly outrageous fees for overdrafts and the like (I don't normally bounce checks, but I am offended by the exorbitant fees banks charge for that shit, and the predatory way they structure the charges, such that the largest checks are counted first and all subsequent checks will bounce, thus multiplying all of the fees and so on). A commitment to the community would be nice, especially if it takes forms other than plastering the bank's name on cheap crap to give away at 5k runs.

I left Comedy Central on after the rerun of TDS and Colbert, and eventually some comic came on, and he is annoying the everloving shit out of me, because he's being a patriarchal pig. Bring me more Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, damnit! Sophomoric? Occasionally. But not patriarchal pigs, generally.

Anyway.

I probably have more somewhere in my brain, but it ain't comin' out tonight. Sorry, campers; I'm just boring these days.

Systematic

I am about to make several people's lives a tad more uncomfortable. Not quite miserable, perhaps, although I'll give it the good college try (albeit neither for the gipper nor for the Reagan portrayal of same), but, yes, distinctly uncomfortable. It seems that we--and I use that pronoun loosely in this case--are not providing quite the number of services that we have told our funding agencies and our board of directors that we would be providing. This is by and large NOT true for the whole organization, just for one segment of it, i.e., I hasten to reassure you that your tax dollars are being spent prudently. But I am diligently providing my boss with the fuel to light some fires under some asses. And the matches. And the kindling. And, if need be, some bellows.

I'm kind of enjoying it, if you must know. Keep in mind that I'd be just as happy--even happier, really--if everyone were doing what they were supposed to be doing and I was merely gathering evidence that that's so. The reality is, I just like having systems in place, and backups for those systems, so that we know what we're doing, we can show other people what we're doing, and we have proof that we are, indeed, doing what we say we're doing. One of the things that's turning out to be fun about this job (and frustrating, some days) is the fact that there ARE no systems in place, despite the screaming need for same, which means I get to create them, which is a task I actually enjoy. This may not be a surprise, coming from someone who created systems to make 4,000 croissants or more a week.

I keep starting paragraphs and then erasing them, which I'm going to take as a sign that I'm done with this post.

Back to Work

First off, raise a glass in memory of Donald Westlake, whose work I've touted here repeatedly. In reading the obit, I discovered that he wrote an average of something like four books a year. I still recommend him, and I'm seriously bummed that this means no more Dortmunder novels.

Friday I had lunch with a new person at work, someone on whom I intended to rely for a bunch of things (things that are actually in her sphere of responsibility). Turns out that's likely not going to be possible, as she does not have the skills necessary to do her job. To her everlasting credit, she is the one who has figured that out--within days of starting the job, a few weeks ago--and she is trying to figure out wtf to do about it. She can't just quit without another job, but she's pretty sure (and I concurred, based on what she told me) that she's headed for failure in this one. The problem is, her boss explicitly told her she didn't need to know X or be able to do Y--but she does, in fact, need to know X and be able to do Y.

Her boss is just clueless about this, and I knew (knew, knew, knew) this would happen with this job, and warned my own boss about it when the hiring process began. I tried to be helpful, and made several suggestions about paths she can take, but I didn't try to reassure her that, oh, everything will be fine. I think she felt better just having her sense of things validated, and perhaps having someone else who knows the situation. It may also mean that my boss and I are screwed on some things, and I gave him a confidential heads up today.

Some good food got made last week. I needed to have some pork on New Year's Day, to assuage my grandmother's superstitions (as transmitted by my mother). Friend had pork chops and pork tenderloin in the freezer, and got out the chops, so I grabbed some cookbooks and rummaged around, trying to come up with something. I ended up modifying (of course) a recipe from one of the Silver Palate cookbooks. Okay, what I made was REALLY different from the original recipe, but it worked nicely.

I trimmed the fat from the chops and set it aside, then cut the meat into small chunks. I marinated the meat chunks in red wine, with a couple of splashes of balsamic vinegar; chopped figs; chopped prunes; dried cranberries, some molasses; fresh thyme; pepper; salt; and a little honey. It only marinated for a couple of hours--all day might have been even better. And I'd put fresh sage in it, as well, if I had any. I put a little olive oil in an oven-proof pan and rendered the pork fat in it, then removed and tossed the fat. I browned the meat, then removed it and sauteed half a large onion (the other half went into the beans) and threw in a minced clove of garlic as well. When the onions were soft, I dumped everything back into the pan--meat and marinade--and added some wild turkey stock, probably about 12 ounces. The stock was frozen, so I melted it and brought the whole thing to a boil.

Then it went into a 350-degree oven for an hour and quarter or so with a lid on it; I stirred it once in awhile. I eventually took it out, took off the lid, and threw in a little more red wine, then stuck it back into a lower-heat oven, because we were slacking and things didn't happen all that quickly. It ended up cooking for about 2.5 hours rather than 2, but it was extremely tasty--I would like to do it again, with venison, perhaps. It was good with the rice and beans, and i would have liked it with polenta or with a different grain as well. It was very intensely flavored, and it tasted rich, even though it wasn't all that fat-laden.

Back at work today, I started trying to deal with the huge pile of crap that I must complete in the next six to eight weeks. It's going to be ugly, and the aforementioned issue is going to make everything potentially much worse. But, eh, whatever. I'd intended to come home and finish up at least one of the two side projects I need to finish this week, but instead I worked out, hacked up a pineapple and a grapefruit for my week's worth of fruit salad, and made some rice for my lunches this week (I already have the stuff that's going to go on the rice). The other stuff can get done tomorrow.

Kind of a boring post with which to start off a new year, but, hey, it's all I got.

Answers and Links

1. Most surprising pleasant thing:
I have a hard time picking just one--there have been quite a few, as I think about it. I'd say the two top ones are (a) how quickly I found a job, such that I didn't have to implement any of the backup plans at all and (b) how much I'm enjoying baking and cooking again. I applied for the new job on January 3rd and started on February 19th--long before I had to start thinking about what-ifs or start to panic. And the baking and cooking, well, it's interesting how the changes in my life have affected that, but it's a longer post.

Most surprising unpleasant thing:
I really don't have all that many unpleasant things, and even fewer surprising ones. I'd say the most surprising one is the collection of minor bodily complaints that have plagued me off and on this year--the persistent SI pain; the apparent inability to drop some weight; the dragging-on of menopause; and, to be completely trivial, the greying of my hair, which has accelerated such that I'm now about 2/3 grey. None of these is particularly serious, I should add, or even all that unpleasant.

2. New foods? Got rid of foods?
I've had way more beets and kale this year than ever before--I've probably had more beets in the past six months than in the last six years put together. I've experimented with more grains, too, but I've been doing that pretty steadily for about 15 years.

I haven't really gotten rid of baked goods, but I'm eating way less of them than when I worked at the bakery. I miss the bread, though, and have decided that needs to get back into the mix.

3. Risks:
I suppose it was a risk to quit the bakery job before having anything else full-time lined up, but that didn't feel all THAT risky. As y'all know, because you were able to read my minute-by-minute account, I planned it and strategized it to within an inch of its life, and the bakery clearly had become untenable, so leaving didn't feel any riskier than staying. And I'd say it has worked out.

4. Performance?
Hmmm. I saw so much--open-wheel racing; baseball; hockey; music--it's hard to pick just one. So, let's see, I'll say Dweezil Zappa at a teensy venue and Mickey Hart at a street fair.

5. Habits:
Exercise. That's been the biggest change in habits, and I'm still not entirely happy with where I am with it. I waffled from joining a park district gym to walking to nothing, until I bought the rowing machine, and that has been extremely helpful. As noted, I'm not working out as much as I'd like, but I'm getting better. I miss yoga quite a big, but I seem to do absolutely nothing to get it back into my life. And I still miss handball. I guess the short version is that, now that I no longer play a sport, I'm trying to figure out how will I get exercise in ways that are reliable, that I'll actually do, that are sufficient, and that I actually enjoy. Partly it's that I played handball for about 15 years, so it was a pretty firmly entrenched habit, and I didn't have to think about it much, just go do it; I added yoga into the mix about halfway through, and that fit in with my living situation and so on, and, again, didn't require thinking. I've had to rethink everything, plus I'm older, plus I live in a different section of the city.

Meanwhile, kstyle's answers.
and Ann's.

Year-End Questions

If you answer on your blog, I'll post links here.

1. What was the most surprising pleasant thing that happened to you this year? What was the most surprising unpleasant thing?

2. What food(s) did you start eating this year that you haven't eaten much before? Did you stop eating something, or dramatically reduce your intake? Why?

3. What risks did you take? How did they work out?

4. What performance (music, dance, movie, theater, etc.) did you most enjoy this year? (If you were doing the performing, then which did you most enjoy doing, and which did you most enjoy experiencing?)

5. What habits are you trying to change? What's encouraging, motivating, and/or inhibiting you in your efforts? Did you add any new habits that feel like they're becoming part of you? Did you drop any that you'd like to resume?

Bringing the Weird

Yes; yes; my life IS, in fact, weird; it's no wonder it functions as Larry's reality show.

I managed to get some work done yesterday, which is good, but I also won the "How Many Excuses up with Which Can You Come So You Don't Have to Exercise?" contest, so less good on that. But that's not why my life is weird.

First, I got a nice holiday card/handwritten note--from my ex-sister-in-law. I have neither spoken to nor otherwise communicated with her in, let's see, nearly three years, so I found that very touching. Seriously: she has absolutely no reason to do that except genuine goodwill, and I appreciate and honor that. And, really, I always liked her a lot, so I will take this opportunity to send a note in return.

Second, I had dinner tonight with Chuck and CK, and we had a good time. Or, I did, and they sure seemed to, so everybody wins. Despite that, it doesn't feel "normal" to be doing these things. Good, on some level, but not . . . usual.

He told me that he's going to need to move, to save money on rent, and one of the options is to move in with a friend--one who lives close to Friend. Chuck studiously avoids talking much about Friend; I avoid it because I can see that it often sends Chuck into a not-good place and I don't like the nasty that sometimes comes my way as a result.

Hey, if it's okay with Chuck to run into Friend at the train station or on the bus, it's none of my business; I'm just not entirely convinced that it's going to be okay with Chuck. Otherwise, I don't have an opinion unless/until it makes Chuck wacky or unpleasant to deal with. I have had enough unpleasantness and drama (as has he, I'm sure), so I'm a little uneasy about a situation that may well increase the occurrence of those things, but he's the one who has to figure it out.

Part of the crunch is that he is paying, in addition to the things for which I also pay, like rent and utilities and such, for insurance for him AND CK, AND child support, AND half of CK's tuition--basically, those latter three things add up to a second rent, and it's killing him. And CK's mom gets to declare CK as a dependent on her tax return, every year.

Although of course I think Chuck should pay his fair share, I think CK's mother is unreasonable, and I think that Chuck isn't willing to take a stand with her, and that combination costs Chuck dearly. When we were together, there was more wiggle in his budget, but now there isn't any. Take the insurance: it's in their divorce decree that Chuck has to pay for CK's insurance, which is fine. However, Chuck works for a small company, so he is paying a buttload for insurance; mom works for a bigger company, and the additional cost of insurance for CK is probably somewhat less through that route, and I know that Chuck would happily pay her for that cost. CK is still insured, it costs Chuck less, everybody wins. But it would not occur to her to suggest it, and she most likely would not go along with it if Chuck suggested it, because . . . He Owes Her. In her mind, anyway.

Don't get me wrong: I don't think he should fight over every fucking cent; that's a nightmare that drains the soul and the wallet. But he does everything for her that he can--replacing her water heater, which probably saved her close to a grand; putting up and taking down her pool every year; doing all of the transporting of CK--and she is still an asshole about nearly everything. (I asked him tonight if he could talk to her about the insurance thing, and he circumspectly noted that they're not talking about much of anything right now. I didn't ask for details--not least because CK was there--but I was around for enough of those times to be able to fill in the blanks.) She is selfish, and self-centered, and full of shit, and she has no fucking clue; she acts as though Chuck Owes Her, because she didn't get the perfect picket-fenced life she expected as her due and expected him to provide. (Unfortunately, he buys into that, at least emotionally, way more than is good for him, but trying to change those kinds of emotional habits is difficult, at best.)

In some ways, her craziness probably makes me look positively rational. And, to give him his props, he has tried to find amicability with me, and we seem to succeed more and more often. It's painful for him (and for me), in many ways, but we both continue to grope for some kind of peace, in large part so I can maintain some kind of relationship with CK. I really don't want to go down the path of venom and hatefulness. I find it morally distasteful, I don't like how it makes me feel, and I don't like what I know about how it makes him feel. We've both been through enough shit; why bring about more? We spent a lot of time together, and we still know each other very well, and that can actually be a source of fondness and amusement, it seems. It's definitely bittersweet, but I look at the choices, and bittersweet seems like a fine alternative. He has said that he would prefer to have nothing to do with me, and maybe that's true; certainly it would be easier in many ways. But it would also end my contact with CK, which has always felt wrong to me, and, I think, to Chuck, as well. I'd like to think that it's good for CK--frankly, I'd end it in a minute, despite the pain to me, if I thought it was bad for CK.

I'd like to think that, overall, it's the best alternative for everyone concerned, of the available choices, despite the bitter in the bittersweetness. Neither Chuck nor I is consumed by the bitter, at least not most of the time. What's the point of carrying the anger and the bitterness around? He has continued to try to move in the right direction in his own life (in ways that I'm not going to detail here), as have I. If we'd been able to do that six or eight years ago, maybe things would have been different, but (a) it's not clear to me that he or I COULD have done that six or eight years ago, and (b) "different" does not necessarily mean "better."

Then again, that whole concept of better/worse doesn't work for me very well. I had to figure that out when my sister died, and again when I couldn't find an academic job, so this time was more like remembering than figuring out. That is: would my life have been different if my sister hadn't died? Of course; absolutely. Would it have been better? Well, it would have had her in it, which certainly is a big "better," but overall? Who the fuck knows? Would my life have been better if I'd gotten the tenure-track job at the small liberal-arts college? Different, for sure, but better? No way to know; what would that "better" look like?

Essentially, it seems fruitless to me to compare my current circumstances to some imagined parallel alternative. One cannot change one thread or one row in the knitting; the whole tapestry has to change, or the whole sweater has to be unraveled and reknit, and one still must make the best of whatever the circumstances are. There are other kinds of changes that might well cause more change--and identifiable harm--than others, of course, particularly if they're changes that cost money one doesn't have. If people slip below a certain level of financial wherewithal, then everything really goes to hell in a handbasket, and that did not happen to me--partly out of my own hard work, but also partly out of luck (e.g., in not getting injured; in getting enough work on the side), and partly out of having friends and relatives who could help if things were desperate.

All of which made it difficult to know what to say when Chuck would ask me if I'm "happier" without him/with Friend. It sometimes seemed Chuck thought I was holding back somehow (i.e., that I really am "happier with Friend" but just didn't want to tell Chuck), but I wasn't--I really don't know how to answer that, and I really don't look to Chuck or to Friend or anyone else for my happiness. Is my life "better"? Than what? Than if I had a teaching job? Than if I had a bakery? Suppose I had been denied tenure and couldn't find another job? Suppose the bakery drained my life savings and failed, or I got sick or injured? I regret not getting the chance to try those things, but I don't fool myself into thinking that success was guaranteed in either case--neither was failure, of course, but you have to remember both alternatives when you do the if-onlies.

Eh; enough philosophy for this morning. I have some work to do, to which I'll get eventually, but this morning I'm going to Whole Paycheck, the bakery (I have yet to find bread anywhere that comes close), the camera store (to get a charger and a USB cord for the camera I found), and to Peet's for more tea. The weather absolutely sucks--it's warm, but it's raining, a lot (I hope Friend's basement isn't flooding . . .). Still, the trip will enable me to putter even more tomorrow, and do laundry and baking at will. And I must work out. (Overall, I've been doing moderately well with that: the rowing machine right in the middle of the living room makes it hard to ignore all the time, so I do manage to get on it. Not as often, or for as long, as I would like, but I'll get there, and I don't have to go to a separate place to get exercise, so I'm still very glad i found this thing and bought it.) Time for errands . . .

Reasons Why Top Chef Annoys Me

1. It's bad television.
There actually are several pieces to this, but it can be summed up by noting that the suspense is so fucking manufactured as to make me want to smack somebody. And even this is annoying on several levels, but I don't want to get too carried away with my outline formatting here.

First off, I really fucking hate reality shows--there's the putting-writers-out-of-work thing; there's the manufactured bits pretending they're not manufactured; there's the notion that this is in any way whatsoever "reality"; there's the scripting and editing; there are the premises of many of the shows. Most important, though, there's the completely overwrought drama of the whole thing.

People, it's a show about cooking. Noone is going to cure cancer. Noone is going to invent anything useful. No lives will be saved. Someone will almost certainly Learn Something, because the moral seems to be that One Must Learn From One's Experiences. Which, yes, I get, and even agree with, but I don't think the things one should learn are the lessons I hear parroted on these shows, or at least not on the few that I've seen.

The other part about the drama is that it's just bullshit. Seriously. (I find things like "Survivor," which I've seen once, and the one with the teams trying to get from one place to another, which I've seen once, even more tedious than the ones I've seen more.) Did I mention it's a cooking contest? It's basically a Pillsbury Bake-Off each week, and the contestants have tattoos and creative facial hair rather than aprons and pumps. Think about the good suspense/drama that you've seen--I'm thinking now about something like "Hill Street Blues," or even "M*A*S*H" in the good years, or "Northern Exposure," or any of a zillion different shows. They were suspenseful and dramatic because you came to like and know the characters. I realize that the producers of these shows are creating characters from their contestants, but see above, re: actual writers and the producers versus whoever is "creating" the characters, or, at least, characterizations.

And that kind of points to the real tension here. All of us have suspense and drama in our lives, except it is often messy, and it often doesn't fit neatly, and we don't always learn the right lessons from our experiences (or learn any lessons at all, for that matter), and shit just happens, and most of it is tedious to people who don't know us (and probably to some who do). Some of it seems good; some seems bad; some is just . . . shit. But that kind of actual life doesn't really fit into "reality" shows all that much, though it occasionally breaks through.

Instead there's all this manufactured drama about the undercooked egg, or the raw scallop (yes, Jamie gets on my nerves, plus, can she cook with anything other than scallops?), or the extra mushrooms, all these long serious faces, and tears and hugging, and discussions among the judges in serious tones that make it sound like it's Life Or Death, rather than a cooking contest.

Also, the long-drawn-out pauses? The huge commercial breaks at Crucial Moments? Yeah, I suppose that latter one is understandable, but the former is really fucking annoying. I'd much rather they have more in-depth discussions, discuss the dishes or cooking theory or whatthefuckever in more depth, rather than long pregnant pauses before someone is told to pack his or her knives. It's really a wasted opportunity to put actual, real drama in the show; instead they replace it with the aforementioned pregnant pauses.

Let's hear the judges having a longer discussion; let's have more of the contestants discussing what they tried to do with a given dish, BEFORE the judges' panel, maybe even with some honesty about what they think worked and what they think didn't work; maybe even, if you want to add some drama, have the contestants judge each other's dishes in some way that doesn't get someone thrown under the bus. All of those options would provide real information, and, at least potentially, real drama, instead of the crap. A final note to the producers on this: little segments on this or that person's life history do not turn people into Characters. I'd rather hear about dishes that so-and-so tried and loved; that worked really well in the restaurant but that the staff hated for some reason; that the staff loved but that didn't work, and why not. Quite frankly, that would give me more insight into what the cheftestants are thinking than little tidbits on this one's gay, that one's flirting, the other one's old.

2. There's no joy.
Fuck; there's not even humor! I realize that humor, like drama, comes in part from the characters, and it's difficult to do that on a show like this, but there is no humor at all. There's a lot of sturm und drang; there's tense nail-biting; there's stress and tension and flinging things around the kitchen, but don't these people ever fucking laugh? Stefan and Fabio seem to laugh once in awhile, or at least make jokes, but no one else does. Don't they enjoy what they're doing?

I can't quite figure this one out. I don't know about places like Charlie Trotter's or Everest (the latter of which is a silent kitchen, which means the only thing you say is "Yes, Chef"), because, hey, the bakery was not those places, and the joy there may work differently. But every place I've ever worked has . . . some kind of happiness and laughter around it. Bossman regularly cracked me up, as did Phil, because they're both genuinely funny people.

But there was also joy. I don't know how else to put it. There's something just about taking water, sugar, butter, flour, yeast, and salt, and making beautiful, delicate croissants. Yes, it was grinding and grueling, but even in the middle of that we managed to laugh with each other, and, more to the point, there's a love of at least aspects of the doing. And there's also a joy in the rhythm of it all, of stepping in at just the right moment to help Phil toss the baguette dough through the one-way sheeter (thereby saving him 15 or 20 minutes), then stepping back into whatever I was doing; and a joy in the barely literate dishwasher figuring out what I needed or didn't need and doing that for me, without my asking; and the joy of making good products and getting them out the door in time, of improvising when necessary, even when it's incredibly difficult and frustrating. (As an example: I went by the bakery today to get some baked goods, and found out that the freezers broke, so they had product sitting outside to keep it cold, and probably crammed into the downstairs freezer as well. It's the day before the busiest day of the year, and the freezers broke?!? Oy. Hard to find the joy in that, I know, but you just figure something out, because what else can you do?)

Which leads to the next point:

3. Being a chef is not only a solo gig.
Most of the competitions out there emphasize solo performance, as does this one, but cooking in a professional kitchen (or baking in a bakery) is a dance with many. Some of it is purely practical: everyone cannot have his or her own dough sheeter, for example. Yes, everyone has his or her own responsibilities, and someone who cannot perform is a drag on the whole system, and this is probably even more true in a restaurant, where people have particular stations. Yes, for the Really Big restaurants there is a visionary of some kind, someone who is doing a lot of the creating (though I would argue that part of what the visionary is doing is the marketing of the personality of the chef, not just creating "signature dishes"). But you had better be part of a team, or the whole production system will fall apart.

The Top Chef competition eliminates much of this aspect. The chefs sometimes work in "teams," but they typically still seem to produce their own items as members of that team, rather than working together or collaborating to produce a product or series of products. The two major exceptions were when the chefs were divided into two teams to produce Thanksgiving dinner for the Foo Fighters (although they still each produced their own dishes) and when everyone pitched in to help Hosea and Rahdika overcome the fact that their meats had been in an open--and therefore insufficiently cooled--fridge overnight and could not be served. The latter was just a random occurrence, but it was closer to what probably happens than any of the other more staged bits.

4. Being a chef is not only a solo gig, part 2.
The really big part of how it's not a solo gig, however, is the part where one does not just instantaneously produce The Perfect Dish. It does not happen that way. Think about how the Brazen Tart describes the dessert creation process at one of the top restaurants in this city. Think about the way we play with recipes and ingredients and write about it on our blogs (and you guys do, too). Think about how Bossman worked on formulae for his competition--over a period of a year, fer chrissakes--and how he and I both worked on items for the store. Although we might well have come up with something that we could sell the first time around (Bossman isn't big on tossing out product if someone will buy it), we'd still continue to work on it until we got it right. The competition completely eliminates one of the major major aspects of creating product--the iterations, and reiterations, and rereiterations, until the people involved feel like it's good, reproducible, and salable. I find that process to be quite interesting and fun and challenging--I liked it in school, for that matter.

How this plays into the competition is to make what they produce LESS interesting, IMHO. Tom was having a hissy fit last week about how everyone is doing "safe" stuff, and he has a point, but, dude, the way the show is set up encourages that to some extent, and the way the challenges I've seen are set up reinforces it even more. There is no time to fuck up or rethink or recover if something didn't work. Think about Eugene's soup for Martha Stewart: he had to use cornstarch to thicken it, because he didn't have enough time to let it reduce; everyone hated the cornstarch. Well, okay, yeah, I would rather not use it, either, but he had an hour to produce a fab dish for Martha, from scratch. Think about the salad that Ariane won with--not terribly interesting or exciting, but they had to come up with a dish they could produce reliably and teach on TV in 2.5 minutes. That isn't going to encourage creativity, sports fans.

On one hand, he says the point is to "win." Well, yes. So doing something interesting or risky that might not work the first time, that might need tweaking but that would rock the second or third or fourth time you tried it, isn't going to be an option when you have a total of five hours to come up with, shop for, prep, and prepare a dish. Sorry, there, Tom, but no. If you really want people to do interesting things, you have to give them the opportunity to (a) fail the first time and (b) incorporate feedback and criticism into the second (or third) time. THAT would be an interesting challenge: make a dish that meets X criteria, with the knowledge that everyone will give you feedback and you will have to incorporate the feedback into a second round of making that dish. In fact, every goddamned challenge should have a variation on that theme in it, not just the judges'-table-you-suck-or-you-rock aspect.

What would be interesting about that is how people would incorporate that feedback, quite frankly. Jamie, for example, and the blonde with the bangs (Melissa?) are really fucking annoying about that. Plus, I think that feedback thing would call out Jeff (who gets on my last fucking nerve), because he doesn't seem to think anyone has anything useful to say to him because He Is A Kitchen God. Yeah, okay, dude; did you see the part about it's just a cooking show?

I chalk all of my complaints up to a failure in conception. That is, no one is exactly clear on what a "Top Chef" actually is. What are the rules? Winning the most competitions? Not getting eliminated? Getting lucky with a particular dish when your strongest competition happens to fuck up? Those are not useful rules, and they especially are not rules that anyone could use or incorporate. compare this with What Not to Wear.

At least with WNTW there are distinct rules that the hosts try to teach, complete with explanations about why the hosts think those rules are good things. You can disagree with the rules--which I have done--but the rules are clear. The other thing with WNTW that's sort of interesting is that there's a certain lack of judgment-dispensing that's kind of refreshing. They don't tell someone OMG you're a total frump or a total slut or whatever; they say, given your body, and given the image you want to present, here are ways you can do that that will work better for you. (Aslo, on WNTW the "suspense" or the drama is manufactured sort of naturally: when the person's friends and family see her for he first time.) The same was true with "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," which I also kind of liked.

Basically, both WNTW and QEftSG provided the participant as well as the viewer with relatively clear rules to follow, along with some rationale for doing so. Those shows were/are the equivalent of teaching someone to fish in his or her own particular pond. Top Chef is more: make fish for me! in an hour! while hopping on one foot! Which isn't that interesting, no matter what you do to tart it up.

But I'll probably watch future episodes. And be annoyed.

p.s. Larry is right, on some level, in his comment below (which I tried to say, but blogspot foiled me), except that, just looking at the recipe, I knew that it would be too greasy and too sweet, even for PB cookies, so I tried to rectify that, and I'll do so again, even if I use the chopped peanuts that Epiphenita reminds me to use.

e.t.a.: Okay, I changed the title, because some of you may not want big cursey words right there in the title, especially if the title shows up on your blog (*coughkstylecough*). You're on your own for the rest of it, though.

More Bitching about Family and Cookies

Well, I've been writing posts in my head, anyway, even if they haven't made it here.

I made peanut butter cookies yesterday, from the Cooks Illustrated baking book, which you would expect to be good, given the yammering they do about The! Best! Recipe! Evah!!! And, yes, I did change the recipe a little (reduced the butter; added a little applesauce to make up for that; subbed honey for the white sugar and reduced the amount, but left the brown sugar as is; didn't have a cup of peanuts, so just used two cups of peanut butter, though the peanut butter was made from just peanuts, so should have affected texture more than taste; and added chopped chocolate), but I was still completely underwhelmed by these cookies. They were still WAY too sweet, for one thing, and not nearly peanuty enough, for another, so they were kind of a fail. They're edible, and still cookie-ishy, so people will consume them, but I really rather hated them. I know, I know; y'all are looking at that list of changes and thinking, well, of COURSE they didn't taste the way the recipe promised they would! But the two biggest problems with the flavor--the sweetness and the peanut flavor--should not have been affected by those changes--should have been unaffected, or even improved by it, perhaps.

So I'll keep working on that recipe, too, because I want some peanut butter cookies, damn it. In rummaging around on epicurious, however, you'll note that there are many recipes, but none that everyone seems to like, even the ones from Bon Appetit and Gourmet and such. The other thing about the recipes is that they all have a ton of butter, on top of the peanut butter, and a couple even have oil AND butter, which, I don't know, sounds wrong on so many levels.

Meanwhile, my mother continues with her but-you'll-be-aloooooone-on-CHRISTMAS lament, which is getting on my nerves. I've been trying to be patient with her about it, but it's starting to bug me. I explained that I have to work on Friday, which doesn't stop the lamentations--what's Friend doing? why didn't I "come home"? but you're going to be aloooooone--and I really don't know what to say. I have pointed out that I really do not give a good goddamn. I've noted that I have to work on Friday, and thus couldn't travel anywhere anyway. All to no avail. She persists in complaining/whining about how I'm going to be alone, which is a state that does not disturb me in the least. If she said that she missed me and she wished I could be there, I'd actually be more okay with that, because that's an expression of her feelings about the situation and about me, but she can't or won't come right out and say that, so she instead expresses dismay at a situation that does not dismay the person who is actually experiencing, i.e., me. (Expressing her actual feelings is not something at which my mother excels.)

The other thing that bugs me about it, but that I do not have the heart to mention, given her and my father's current health situations, is that not once in the past 30 years has anyone visited me for the holidays. Never. Not when I lived an hour and a half away; not in the 22 years I've been living in this city. Never. Chuck and I traveled there for Christmas more than once, including once with his son, and I have gone to them many, many times. But there has been no reciprocity, number one, and, number two, it was legitimate for me to be here when I had a husband or husband-to-be, but not when I am (wait for it!) alone. I will not even begin to try to explain this to her, because critiques of patriarchy are not something she has ever understood, but also, and more importantly, because she cannot visit me for the holidays now. They have talked about visiting next summer, and may actually do so--dialysis is certainly available in this city--but she hates cold weather and would be nothing but miserable if she were here now (did you notice the -20-something wind chills yesterday?), and managing dialysis in a different city and bitterly cold weather and not being around her only grandchildren is a bit much to ask of her. Still, I do wish she'd quit nagging about what I'm doing (or, rather, not doing).

I've been busy at work, and I still have several things I must accomplish before the end of the year, but I must also admit that I have not been terribly motivated some days (like today). Some of it is that I really do want (a) some time off and (b) a substantial raise, but I don't see either of those things coming my way any time soon. Other days I do manage to get some stuff done, but, really, did I mention some time off? I will get some this week and next--we get off for the eve and the day, for both Christmas and New Year's--so I can get some chores (like laundry) done, and also just kinda do nothing much. I have some side work to do, too, which means a couple of nice checks after the beginning of the year. The editing has been slow since July--only two jobs, including the current one--but I'm assuming it's merely a question of timing rather than a sudden decision that I suck. And, really, much as I enjoy the extra bucks, it's been nice to have a break from it, and after paying off the student loan. It'd be nice to get some work after the first of the year, admittedly, but my situation is so much improved from last year at this time. Tomorrow will feature some actual work--or it had better, anyway--as well as some meetings and such. Plus? Warmer! And, if I get it together, tomorrow I will bitch about Top Chef for your entertainment.

p.s. Get well, Brazen Tart!!

Trading Places

Of the things I should have done tonight--work out, or edit, or, preferably, both--I have done none, opting instead for sitting on my butt and eating cookies. This is not a useful state of affairs, of course, but is the one with which I find myself faced. Because I am a slug.

I spent a fair amount of time today in meetings, or on phone conferences, all of which was tiring and some of which was tedious, and some time on the phone trying to figure out whether my dad should go into a clinical trial. I found the trial, and I think it might actually be a good fit for him, as his bladder cancer keeps recurring and there isn't anything else out there for him, except removing the bladder, which, really, isn't an option that I think he would enjoy. So I've talked my mother through the clinical trials process, and talked to a study coordinator (although not the one with whom they would deal), and I think they're going to go check it out. I emphasized that he doesn't have to agree to anything, that he doesn't have to sign anything, and that they can ask any questions they want, and I pointed out that the drug they've been waiting for (a) still hasn't cleared the FDA, even though their last info suggests the manufacturing difficulties should have been cleared up 9 months ago and (b) only works 20% of the time. Thus, this clinical trial may be the only other thing my dad can try. We'll see what happens.

It is definitely nice to have experience that's useful, not least because I've been feeling rather useless lately. Yes, I know I do Good Works and all, but when push comes to shove, I'm doing almost exactly the same work I was doing in 1986 when I quit my job to go to graduate school. I'm probably making a little more money, but not a lot, and I'm certainly not doing anything now that I couldn't have done then. Yes, the intervening years have provided enough other experience so I'm doing it better, but almost any experience will do that, if you're paying attention. Certainly cheers ME right up to think how I've spent my time and what I have to show for it.

On the other hand, at least I didn't try to sell a Senate seat for whatever I could get for it. I waded through some of the transcript from the press conference that Fitzgerald held this morning, and various other news bits, and it's truly amazing; the guy seems to be a seriously delusional psychopath. Now, it's true that the kind of money he wanted is peanuts compared to what the Wall Street guys take home, but, in my mind, that just shows even more how incompetent Blago really is. (That is, if he were smarter, he could BE one of the Wall Street crooks, but he's only a two-bit political hack.) The other thing, though, is that the Daley machine has learned not just how to keep its own hands clean but also how to pass the patronage around to racial and ethnic groups that once were excluded from city largesse, while Blago is in it for his own profit rather than for patronage or a machine, per se.

Is the Daley patronage machine the best way to run a government? Nope; not by a long shot. I work with city workers on some contracts, and some are competent and some not so much. I did a stop-smoking group with city workers a few weeks ago, and the tales they told in the 10 minutes before we started the group made me annoyed, because it's such a waste of money (and, ultimately, talent, if the cushy jobs are going to incompetent hacks).

But I don't see things changing in this city any time soon, so my desire is that the patronage be distributed reasonably fairly; that competence is a necessity in the places where that matters the most; and that the city provide the basic services (water; firefighting; policing; trash removal; school system; other public services) equitably and competently. If there's a layer of cost on top for patronage jobs, well, okay, just make sure they don't do too much damage or cost too much money, or get in the way of the people who are actually doing the work.

Anyway, the Governor does appear psychopathic: he knew there were wiretaps, fer chrissakes, and he continued to negotiate! He seemed to think he could get away with all of this, which, to my mind, is where the delusion comes in. The transcript of the press conference is interesting (and it makes me lurve Patrick Fitzgerald all the more): Fitzgerald seems truly taken aback by the whole thing, and appalled, not in that Inspector Renault "shocked, shocked" kind of way, but genuinely gaping in wonderment at the chutzpah of the guy.

I don't care how squeaky clean your political arrangements are, we all tend to look more favorably on people who come with a recommendation from someone we know, and on people who have something to offer (though I do mean that broadly, not just in the mutual backscratching kind of way). We do favors for people--hire their sons or daughters, perhaps, or spouses--and expect favors in return. I've never personally been in a position to be on either end of that, but I'm neither surprised nor appalled to know it exists; it's the way of the world, and, like anything else, it can be used for, and can work for, either good or evil. But this shit? This is a whole other level of WTF, so I do hope the guy goes to jail for a long fucking time. If he's guilty, of course.

Another Post About Food

Jesuschristonapogostick.

Yet another outbreak of the What You Eat Is Wrong Wars, over at Twisty's site. Here's the latest comment, as of now:

a deep respect for the animals they hunt and eat

So murder is A-OK as long as you “respect” the person you murder? Care to try that in a court of law? Oh no, of course not, we’re talking about killing “animals” here. Othering is a tried and true foundation for all manner of discrimination. Bravo.

If you go to the original post and the comments, you'll find a few comments by Yours Truly (though, I guarantee, I'm done with that particular thread). The point, though, is that I am damnsickandtired of hearing how whatever the fuck I eat is Wrong, Immoral, and Not Feminist, Plus Other Species Are The Same As Humans and You Are A Murderer If You Don't Agree.

There are multiple paths, people. I understand the vegetarian argument, and the vegan argument. I do not happen to agree that they are the only moral arguments, but I recognize the spirit behind those arguments and I respect them. Hell, I will even cook by them, if you have dinner at my house. In return, please acknowledge that I have thought about what I eat, and how, and respect my choices as well, and stop regarding my conclusions as the choices of one who is insufficiently evolved. kthnxbye.

Meanwhile, today I edited for awhile, then embarked on a cookie-baking marathon. I redid the almond cookies, except this time I toasted the almonds first. I also reduced the amount of egg whites, because I didn't have quite enough eggs to do everything I wanted to do, but the cookies still came out okay; toasting was a Good Thing. Another white or two would have improved things somewhat, but not enough such that anyone other than me and the Tart and other graduates would have noticed. I reduced the sugar, too, and tried to remember to add some lemon extract but forgot until it was really too late.

I remade the chocolate cookies, and I was less unhappy with them this time. I cooled the chocolate a bit more, and I chopped the toasted hazelnuts a bit more (the original recipe does not include hazelnuts, but I think they make an otherwise very boring cookie much much better), and paid more attention to the shaping, and, all in all, they're much better than the last batch. (Again, mostly to me; everyone else seemed to like the first batch just fine.)

The ginger cookies (a.k.a. Ginger Bites), well, they're still a work in progress, but I'm closer. I left out the chocolate this time, and increased the ginger dramatically (i.e., more than doubled it), and added both orange peel and orange juice, as well as some cinnamon and molasses, and a little more butter. I like the flavor, but the texture still needs a little work.

Finally, I adapted the Cooks Illustrated Black & White Cookie recipe--reduced the butter; replaced the sugar with honey--and added rosemary, lemon peel, and dried cherries. These were a nearly complete success. The shaping needs some work, but I was extremely pleased with the flavor. The flavorings really work well together, and I will make these again.

I had some meditations on whether/how my pastry school and bakery experience has affected my actual baking, but I'm tired and want to sleep, so they'll have to wait.

Tonight's Dinner

For tonight's cooking adventure, you'll need a bunch of kale (about 3/4 pound, before cleaning), a can of beans (Great Northern, in my case), a large can of tomatos (Muir Glen organic peeled chopped; fire-roasted would have been fine, too), an onion, some garlic, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar. Wash the kale and spin it dry. Heat some oil in a big-ass pan (I use a mondo stove-top stainless steel wok) and throw in the chopped onion. Set another pan of water on another burner at whatever temp you need it to be so it starts to boil in 15-20 minutes. Smash and throw in the garlic with the onions. If you're using fresh herbs, throw them in now, too. (Sage would have been nice, but I didn't have any.) Cook that for awhile, until the onions are soft and starting to brown a little. Chop the kale and throw it in; cook it for 10 minutes or so (kale takes awhile, so you have some time here; it's not like spinach). Throw in the can of tomatos and the can of drained beans, some salt and pepper, and whatever spices you want (I had oregano and parsley) and a splash of vinegar. Let it cook for awhile, basically for the time it takes to cook the pasta, stirring occasionally. Your water should be boiling by now; throw in the pasta. Cut and grate a hunk of cheese (this will go on top of the final product, not in the mix). I also threw in a half a bag of frozen spinach at this point, just because. That batch of vegetables made enough for four sizable servings for me (I portioned and froze the leftovers); you could probably get 5 or 6 out of it, depending on your taste for these things.

But you probably knew all of this already.

As you all know, I have pretty wide-ranging tastes. Nevertheless, I have become enamored of kale, which I probably hadn't had until a couple of years ago, and last night I had beet greens for the very first time. I've also come to like beets way more than I did as a kid, probably because roasted fresh beets are a different thing than canned pickled beets. As for new grains, I had tried quinoa years ago (and liked it, though I don't cook with it much), but hadn't tried to cook farro until I finally found it in the store last winter. (Loved it--can't wait to cook it again.) And I've done more with barley, too.

I don't have a point here, really; I'm just kind of musing on the stuff I eat. What do you eat that is a departure from what you grew up eating or what you used to eat? How did you add this or that to your diet?