I don't crave the warmth of your unconditional approval.
Do you ever have this problem where, when you’re trying to drink wine, the fumes from inside the wine glass keep funneling up and burning your eyes? So, you try to angle the glass, or angle your face so that that doesn’t happen, and then you just end up drinking wine with your eyes closed?
I’m just sitting here in bed at 2:00am drinking wine and thinking about that. And then I decided to write a blog post about it.
…I’ll be 30 soon.
I’m sort of peripherally aware of the controversy surrounding this Four Loko caffeinated alcohol drink. They’re banning it in NY, I think (as they did with Sparks before it)? Here’s the thing, though – it’s just alcohol and caffeine, yeah? I mean, probably not the best idea, but people are acting like it’s a mixture of ketamine and acid. I keep hearing that children are dying and people are throwing themselves off balconies and what not. Personally, I’m so caffeine tolerant/low energy that I can fall sound asleep standing up directly after consuming a venti red eye, but even normal people sometimes have a bottle of wine and a double espresso with dinner, yeah? Or a few Red Bull and vodkas? There’s nothing in this combination that makes people go starkers, so I don’t understand what the big commotion is all about.
People have a tendency to make up reactions to substances; like how everyone – everyone! – thinks they get a “sugar high” when there is absolutely no such thing at all. So between that and the fact that I don’t really react strongly to a lot of substances, I tend to simply dismiss it anytime anyone’s going on about some craaaaazy food or beverage that makes you nuts. For example, this whole meth thing: I mean, guys, is it really the meth that’s to blame, or is it just that deep down, you secretly want to develop a terrible psychosis while all your teeth rot away?
What a horror is the need for daily bread!
This eating for life is a terrible deal.
I often think I’d far rather be dead
Than fix up and eat one more goddamn meal.
First, there is the coming by the stuff -
shop or scavenge, prepare or eat out,
The daily task of procuring enough
Eats hours from anything else you’re about.
Then, there’s mealtime preparation,
washing and chopping and getting out plate.
The time it all takes could make a vacation,
if the need for food should ever abate.
Then there’s the stinking, sticky kitchen,
the cooking smells, the piles of trash.
A simple meal of rice and chicken -
the counter, grimey; the walls, backsplashed.
Another hour dies in washing up -
this chore recurs all through the day -
the scrubbing and drying after you sup,
the putting all uneaten food away.
The ratio of food is never right -
sometimes we are bloated, sometimes hollow.
Only once a year do we feel light,
but sated – yet still, more meals must follow.
All this eating eats up piles of dough
Even if we do not count time lost.
My stomach is my wallet’s greatest foe,
It always wins, regardless of the cost.
A proper diet is a ton of work,
vitamins, calories, fat grams, nutrition.
Trying to eat right would drive one berserk,
And, gain or lose, you won’t please the physician.
Many times I’ve sworn I’ll kick the stuff,
ignore the pain and simplify my life.
But in a couple hours, sure enough,
A pounding head, a stabbing like a knife.
I drop what I am doing and I run,
and spend more time and money I can’t spare,
And eat and fill with gas, and have no fun
in doing what I must, but cannot bare.
Mayor Michael ‘No Fatties’ Bloomberg would like to remove soft drinks from the list of items that can be purchased with food stamps.
In general, I’ve been a fan of Bloomberg’s waistline-reducing initiatives, but I think this one is pretty ugly, however unintentionally. Obviously, there’s a stigma around using food stamps, and people who use them say it can be humiliating to grocery shop with them. Cashiers and other shoppers can be nasty and intrusive; people don’t think you should buy junk food at all, but they don’t think you should be able to buy pricey, healthy food, either.
Here, the health commissioners defend the measure in the Times:
This proposal to adjust the food stamp program is just one of many steps New York City is taking to reduce obesity. The city also has programs to increase the availability of fresh produce in poor neighborhoods; has set nutrition requirements for meals served in schools, after-school and day care programs and centers for the elderly; and has begun advertising campaigns to educate the public about obesity and nutrition. Taken together, these efforts will bring us closer to stemming the wave of obesity and diabetes in New York.
They, and other proponents of the ban, argue that soda isn’t food, and that there are many restrictions on the use of food stamps and this is one that should have been there all along. But the thing is, it hasn’t been a restriction up until now, and this would be scoring a point about a mere symptom of a much larger problem at the expense of people who need additional social censure even less than they need a 2-liter of Coke. People on food stamps probably have other concerns currently taking precedence over kicking their soda habit, like, oh, say, getting off food stamps. Institutes that study such things say one of the big obstacles to digging yourself out of poverty is feeling like you have no control over your situation or your decisions, so further restricting people’s personal choices doesn’t seem very productive.
This very interesting blog post explains in detail how food stamps work in New York, and why this measure would be unlikely to produce the desired effect.
And here’s Sadhbhe Walshe in The Guardian:
On a recent shopping expedition (in my local C-town not some fancy organic joint), I paid $7 for a bag of apples, $5 for four oranges and $2 for one red pepper. Just those few items would eat up almost half one person’s weekly food stamp allotment. It’s no wonder, then, that people would opt for cheaper, high-calorie processed foods when money is tight.
The really frustrating part is that the reason that junk food and soda are so inexpensive (and therefore widely consumed) is that these products are subsidised by the federal government. All these foods contain high-fructose corn syrup, made from corn, which is a subsidised crop. So, while the poor are being frowned upon for their bad food choices, they are simultaneously being incentivised by misguided policy to make these choices. The hand that wants to take away is also the hand that giveth.
How much more sense would it make to subsidise the production of fruit and vegetables in low-income neighbourhoods, instead of Big Macs and 20-ounce Cokes and the like? That way, instead of imposing virtue on the poor, we could offer them a choice – and then try to move past the assumption that they might make a bad one.
Frankly, people need to stop talking about produce as if it were food in itself. It has hardly any calories in it, so, while we should all ideally be eating a bushel of it with every portion of carbs and fat, the produce itself is extraneous to assuaging hunger. It’s more like a really elaborate, time-consuming vitamin. For example, last night after karate, I had a big bowl of brown rice, eggs, beans and cheese, and I also had a giant handful of spinach, a tomato and two carrots. If I didn’t have any money, the first thing to go from that sentence would be the karate and the next would be the spinach, tomato and carrots, because, while they might be the most important part of that meal for my health, they’re the least helpful in my not going to bed hungry. Soda costs next to nothing, however, which is probably why it’s usually free where most people work.
Out-of-town friends visited over the weekend, and we exerted a truly heroic amount of energy, covering unheard of amounts of ground and absorbing far more food and alcohol daily than the USDA recommends. Here, for posterity, is a round-up of our activities:
Thursday evening:
Friday:
Saturday:
Sunday:
Monday:
I mean, that’s a lot of stuff, right? I had never been to the Statue of Liberty, or Ellis Island, or the Bronx, or the Fort Tryon area, and I feel like I really took advantage of my city. Thanks to my partners in crime for your unflagging energy and delightful company!
Now, I’m off to Tennessee to loll around a cabin for a couple days, hike in the woods, visit my old dentist, and just basically do the opposite of what I did last weekend. What a fun end-of-summer I’m having!
Last night, I visited the new Trader Joe’s in Chelsea, and it is sweet. The aisles are so big! The ceiling is so high! The space is so ample and bright! I am a long-time fan of Trader Joe’s, and I have been braving the throngs at the 14th Street location for a while now, even though it sucks there. Here’s a tip should you be so inclined to shop there: go at 9:45pm. The employees at Trader Joe’s work up to a certain hour past close anyway, so they don’t rush you to get out. You can shop freely at fifteen to close, and it’s nowhere near as crowded as it is every other time of day. Anyway, it’s not the lines that are a problem at TJ’s. Even though the lines wrap around the store, they move pretty quickly. What really sucks about the Union Square TJs is that you can’t get to any of the merchandise without shoving through the ever-present line, and this is not a problem at the Chelsea location.
Fortune has a long, interesting article about TJ’s, but it’s funny that they spend the first couple pages talking about why the stores are so popular without focusing on the main reason people go to TJ’s: low cost. They kind of cover this later, but they open with selection, and the friendly, small-town vibe. That’s great and all, but TJ’s is so popular in its demographic (students and young, urban, single broke people) because it puts paid to the whole “cheap, healthy or fast: pick two” conundrum. At TJ’s, you can get healthy, fully- or semi-prepared foods for low cost, which makes it the perfect store, even if you have to wait in line.
Also, TJ’s doesn’t have coupons or discount cards – the price is the price. Which, side-note, the whole discount card thing blows my mind, in that every single American consumer despises the discount (club) card system — nobody wants to give a store all their marketing information in exchange for sale prices, and then carry around a card all the time — but even though the entire spending population hates it, somehow every single store has adopted this system. I mean, what the hell? Why doesn’t the consumer have a vote here? It’s like we’re all serving the stores we shop at, rather than the other way around. I wish there were some way to coordinate everyone in the country to just refuse to use those damn cards, so the chains would all have to give up on that stupid system.
Ahem. Anyway, Trader Joe’s!
The friendliness of the employees wouldn’t be enough to get me to shop there if the prices weren’t low, but it is a nice benefit. I’m shy and don’t generally like to have to interact too much with the employees where I shop, but even I feel that it is more pleasant to shop at TJ’s then anywhere else. Turns out, the shocking reason why the employees are helpful and approachable is that they are really, really well-paid!
Store managers, “captains” in Trader Joe’s parlance — the nautical titles are a holdover from Coulombe (newly promoted captains are commanders; assistant store managers are first mates) — can make in the low six figures, and full-time crew members can start in the $40,000 to $60,000 range. But on top of the pay, Trader Joe’s annually contributes 15.4% of employees’ gross income to tax-deferred retirement accounts.
Apparently, the way to motivate employees to act as if they care whether they keep their job or not is to pay them decently. Who’d have thought?
When I first moved to NYC, I applied for a job at TJ’s, and I had to take this “simple” math test that included long division (I can’t even add or subtract, so I used my phone when no one was looking). So, presumably the employees at TJ’s must be fairly decent at the maths, even if they are occasionally so stoned, you have to count up your Clif Bars for them at the register (it’s charming, really). Also, the employees do all the jobs in rotation – they don’t have stockers and cashiers, and early-morning truck unloaders; rather, everyone does everything, which seems to work pretty well.
Anyway, it’s an interesting article. I didn’t know the company was so secretive, or that the owners also own Aldi. Also, the article cites studies showing that people enjoy a shopping experience more if there is a smaller selection, which doesn’t surprise me at all. And then there’s this:
Make no mistake: A typical family couldn’t do all its shopping at the store. There’s no baby food, toothpicks, or other necessities.
Really? Toothpicks – that’s what you’re going with there? Reporter Beth Kowitt must have recently quit smoking.
While I was out of town, my roommate was sweet enough to watch Thomasina for me!
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
I don’t think I’ll ask her again…
Well, I have just arrived home from a two-week vacation to lovely Tennessee, where I:
I had fun, but I’m very glad to be home. Thomasina didn’t remember me at first, which made me very sad, but she figured it out (and she is EVEN CUTER THAN I REMEMBERED!!). I have my first night of karate tonight after two weeks of inactivity, and I’m a little frightened.
On Monday, I was very excited to see these two food trucks parked right by my office! They don’t usually park here.
Two weekends ago, my friend and I were on our way into the city, when we saw lights in the distance from Bedfort Avenue (where we’d been eating Thai food). We walked down to the lights, and found a fairly large fair! I’d stumbled on this fair the year before, as well, but hadn’t known what it was. Apparently, it is the Feast of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel and San Paolino, a 12-day festival that happens every July. That would explain all the Italians.
Entering the fair...
Crowds at the fair.
A pretty big fair, too - it spread off in all directions.
There was everything you look for in a fair…rides:
This ride spins everyone around very quickly.
…guys grilling meat…
Meat!
…women frying zeppole…
This lady was upset at me for taking her photo.
…patriotic frozen drinks…
Red, white and blotto!
…souvenirs…
Not sure what any of these are.
…tasteful novelty Ts for i bambini….
Pity the poor child.
…games, where you can win a half-dead goldfish in a Ziplock baggie…
Chuck's Live Fish
…firefighters, lest things get out of hand…
In addition to these firefighters, there were many groups of funny cops standing around, but they told me that if I took their picture, they would confiscate my camera.
…and garbage, without great piles of which no street fair in July in NYC would be complete…
Smells better than the zeppole!
…and finally, bizarre religious iconography!!
Giant, garish, totem-pole-like thing.
Man in a boat. (Don't be immature.)
Now, according to this video that my roommate found on Gothamist, these two religious icons are stars in a ceremony, in which they are lifted by gangs of fellows and danced toward each other, to the tunes of the Rocky soundtrack. Please watch the video – it is something else. Unfortunately, we did not witness this spectacle.
After exploring the street fair, we went out a-drinking in the East Village, after which we thought it would be good to get Pommes Frites. Apparently, everyone else thought so, too.
Mmmm...Belgian fries up ahead.
We couldn’t find a handy stoop to eat them on, but luckily the nearby Max Brenner’s was closed, and someone had left some of the tables out! We spread out our fare and felt very clever.
Sidewalk dining at 3:00a.m.! No wait.
The next night, I went to see Jigsaw Soul, a local band that always provides a giant, multi-media performance experience.
Jigsaw Soul
The audience.
The Jigsaw Soul dancers.
Shadow visuals.
Choreographed keg cup stacking.
One of several giant papier-mache bird heads.
More visuals.
After the show, we were famished. Time for shawarma and falafel!
Mmmm, gyro-loaf!
After that, it began pouring, so we went over to Washington Square Park to watch the band and friends play dodgeball in the fountain.
Rainy Washington Square Park.
Hipster swimming pool.
It's all fun and games till someone loses a contact.
The next day, I was pretty tired. I went for a long, lazy Sunday walk, over the nearly deserted Williamsburg bridge.
Bike and pedestrian lane.
After that, I ate a massive cup of ice cream, but I did not choose to document that with photographic evidence. A pretty good weekend, overall.
Today in the park, I saw a pigeon spot a Ritz cracker lying in the middle of the path. This was a big, fat glossy pigeon, and he began pecking at the cracker. Presently, a smaller, darker pigeon ran up and tried to get a peck in. Pigeon A attacked Pigeon B with a flurry of feathers and they went beak-to-beak. Pigeon A won, and went back to pecking at the cracker. Another small black pigeon ran up, and there was another fight, with Pigeon A winning. After that, Pigeons B and C lurked around the cracker waiting for an opening while Pigeon A strutted in tight, little circles around the cracker’s perimeter, puffing out his chest and making proclamations. Eventually, he went back to pecking at the cracker, and before long, his beak speared it. He shook his head from side to side to dislodge the cracker, and it flew off some distance. The pigeon looked for it anxiously, as did Pigeons B and C.
At this point, a baby ran down the sidewalk, scattering the pigeons. The baby found some object wrapped in foil and put it in his mouth. I looked around for someone to intervene, and saw the baby’s mother running over. She chased the baby off down the sidewalk, yelling something in Polish that was probably, ‘Spit it out right now!’ Meanwhile, the fat pigeon found the cracker again, and was fighting over it with the two smaller pigeons. He sunk his beak into one of the smaller pigeon’s wingpit, and the bitten pigeon squawked and shimmied sideways, flapping its wing wildly against the fat pigeon’s head. Right that this moment, a tiny brown sparrow swooped between the fighting pigeons and the third pigeon who was hunkering to make another break at the cracker, snatched up the cracker in its beak and attempted to fly off. You could just tell how smart it thought it was by the set of its tailfeathers in flight. Unfortunately, the cracker was too big for it to fly with in a balanced way, and it was forced to land several times to rearrange its grip – the three outraged pigeons giving full, waddling chase. Finally, the sparrow managed to get the cracker to the grass, where it nestled down and became camouflaged. The pigeons went all over the place looking for it, and it worked at the cracker as quickly as it could.
I wish that was the end of it, but at some point when I wasn’t looking, the fat pigeon got the cracker back. The sparrow flew off like a shot, and there was the fat pigeon, puffing and proclaiming and strutting in tight little circles in the grass, while all manner of other pigeons made runs at the cracker. The pigeon kept battering everyone who got near, then took hasty pecks at the cracker, leaving off in time to attack each new intruder – he would even take on three adversaries at once.
I hate that Pigeon A won in the end. He was one fat, shiny, self-congratulatory, greedy, entitled jerkface, and as I sat watching him guard his meal, I wished harm upon him.
My current position on this is, I eat meat and probably always will, and I don’t feel much compunction about it, but I don’t approve of needless cruelty and suffering for animals raised for consumption. While I don’t make much effort to curtail my consumption of animal products, neither would I go to bat for it – if meat were unavailable, I wouldn’t eat it. Those of us lucky folk in the developed world have an abundance of food these days, and all questions of the historical food chain aside, we don’t need to eat animals to survive anymore. Food is not that important and I don’t see meat-eating as somehow essential to my character or inheritance. So, if humane conditions on farms, and in dairies and slaughterhouses and so forth, led to less available and pricier meat, I would think it a worthwhile sacrifice. I would love to know that any animal-derived product I bought had never been the cause of pain and misery to any living creature at any stage of its growth, manufacture and transport – and hell, let’s extend that wish to all clothing, electronics, home furnishings and so forth – and if that guarantee meant that instead of piles of affordable goods to choose from, I had a smaller selection of pricier items, I’d happily make the trade-off and quit inadvertently subsidizing and profiting from exploitation and suffering. I just don’t want to have to work at it.
The more we learn about the evolution of our species, the more difficult it becomes to draw a firm and absolute line between humans and other animals. Apparently, the latest word is we’re closer to dogs than chimps, which may go some little way toward explaining why we treat dogs like they’re people:
The marketing folks of the pet industry, in fact, use the term “humanization” to explain their good fortune. The pet owners driving the growth, many of them baby-boom empty-nesters, aren’t satisfied with shopping for their pets as animals. They’ve promoted them to junior humans, entitled to the same concern for health and happiness and company. Nearly half of pet owners in one survey say their animal sleeps in their bedroom (which probably explains the boom in the grooming business) and the most popular names for pets—Max, Chloe, Bella—sound a lot more like babies than the Spots and Fidos of yesteryear.
While the pet industry may be recession proof, we do not apparently ascribe the same importance to zoos, which have in fact declined in society’s estimation, at the same time as house pets have risen:
A lot of people wonder how much the current economic downtown resembles that of the Great Depression. One big difference comes in the support of zoos. In the ’30s, the institutions received significant support from Roosevelt’s Works Projects Administration. Artists created advertisements encouraging the public to visit zoos, and new buildings and exhibits sprung up in zoos across the country. St. Paul’s Como Park Zoo, for example, came out of the Depression with a bear grotto, monkey island, barn, and main building, thanks to the WPA.
Now, however, any allocation of funds to struggling zoos is immediately decried as wasteful spending. (I’m not saying I disagree.) And apparently, we haven’t been doing such a hot job of tracking and protecting endangered species, either.
Some feminists have long drawn parallels between mankind’s entitled disregard for animal welfare, and man’s viewing of women as an obligated sex class – both cases involve one group defining itself by its ownership of and right to use another group. Typically, these arguments are attempts by animal rights activists to persuade women of the importance of respecting all life as autonomous; PETA, on the other hand, offensively uses images of degraded women to market their animal rights agenda to men. (To me, the first is a stretch; the latter, an outrage.) Here’s Twisty on this:
The parallels between the myth of the happy hooker and the myth of the self-sacrificing meat animal are legion. . . . Both represent the privileged class’s celebration of itself and its contempt for anything it happens to debase in the course of its daily pillages. And the myths about oppressed individuals choosing to serve the vulgar interests of their oppressors have been created to allow the dominant culture’s beneficiaries to sleep at night.
Actually, these comparisons predate feminism:
A distinguished philosopher, Thomas Taylor, reacted to Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 call for “the rights of woman” by writing a mocking call for “the rights of brutes.” To him, it seemed as absurd that women should have rights as that animals should have rights.
(from the Kristof article discussed below)
Really, though, we all use animals to serve our purposes, even if that only involves misinterpreting canine affection as familial love, which, while not likely to cause any duress to the animal in question, might be nauseating to other humans.
But despite the many persuasive arguments for prioritizing the ethical treatment of animals, I can’t seem to work up much steam over animal rights. I know that worthy causes need not compete with each other, and that the way we treat animals is part and parcel of our overall attitude toward (and stewardship of) life on this planet, and so animal welfare is an integrated part of everything else in our long march toward a more advanced society. But at the same time, I care more about starving babies and enslaved women than tortured pigs and cows. (And by “care about”, I of course mean “think, read and blog about.” Not “donate to” or “campaign on behalf of.”)
Luckily, while my capacity for caring may be limited, no wee chicken is beyond the reach of the sheltering arms of my favorite journalist, Humanitarian Hero-at-large, Nicholas Kristof, who recently took a break from his usual coverage of the abuse, poverty and disease of unfortunate humans to pen a column on animal welfare:
One of the historical election landmarks last year had nothing to do with race or the presidency. Rather, it had to do with pigs and chickens — and with overarching ideas about the limits of human dominion over other species. I’m referring to the stunning passage in California, by nearly a 2-to-1 majority, of an animal rights ballot initiative that will ban factory farms from keeping calves, pregnant hogs or egg-laying hens in tiny pens or cages in which they can’t stretch out or turn around. It was an element of a broad push in Europe and America alike to grant increasing legal protections to animals.
Let’s hope there’s more of this, and that “guilt-free” food will come to mean something more significant than “low-calorie”.
Well, dear readers, it was bound to happen eventually: I actually went on a date last week. And you’ll be happy to hear that it was on every level an absolutely insane and embarrassing failure…not because you’re rooting for my continued loneliness (though you may be, I don’t know), but because it makes for a really entertaining story.
I met this fellow (let’s call him “Patrick”) while waiting for the G-train late one night. I was too tired to read anything and didn’t have my headphones with me. He made eye contact and I cut him dead with a glare, as is my habit. But he came over and started talking to me anyway, and well, he was really, really good-looking. So I gave him my card.
After the usual three-to-four day waiting period, Patrick called, and we agreed to meet up in the Village for dinner. He explained that he had to pick something up at 7:15p.m. around Washington Square Park?
I said that was fine, and then he said (and I thought this was really odd at the time), ‘Hey, wear pants, alright? Not, like, a skirt or anything.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Are we going bowling or something?’
‘Uh, did you want to?’ he asked. ‘I mean, I thought we’d just grab a bite and maybe-’
‘Oh, yeah,’ I said. ‘No, I just thought, because you said to wear pants that-’
‘That we were going bowling! That’s hilarious – do you always bowl when you wear pants?’ he laughed (a lot). ‘You’re so funny!’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘Why did you-’
‘So, I’ll see you then, then, in your bowling pants!’ he said, and rung off.
So, okay, whatever. People are strange.
Anyway, the big date night arrived, and I went down to the park (wearing my usual jeans), and soon Patrick arrived. He was still really good-looking. And he was carrying a small cage with a guinea pig in it.
‘Hi,’ he said.
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘What’s with the guinea pig?’
‘Well, this is what I had to pick up,’ he explained. ‘I did some work for this friend of mine, I, uh, I built this really piece of furniture for him, you know, and so then – get this – I get done, and he’s like, oh, I don’t have any money to pay you. But he just got this guinea pig? And I don’t know, I was just like, well, I’ll take the guinea pig. Because I’ve been wanting a pet, but I don’t have a lot of space. I’ll have to get a bigger cage for him, though. I sort of wonder…do you think they kill mice?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He’s cute. What are you going to name him?’
‘I’m thinking Palin,’ he said.
‘Topical,’ I said. I then told Patrick about how I knew this guy in Tennessee who raised guinea pigs and had cage after cage of them in his garage, and took them to guinea pig shows and so forth. And that there’s a guinea pig transport system, where if you live in South Carolina and you buy a purebred guinea pig from Seattle, there are people signed up in every state that will drive the guinea pig along to you, like a sort of pony express for guinea pigs.
‘I don’t believe you,’ said Patrick.
‘It’s true,’ I said.
‘I think you’re making up stories, and honestly, if you are, you should just stop it, because I’m about just being real.’
This was sort of funny, because I really do make up stories sometimes when I’m talking to strangers I don’t think I’ll see again (say, at a party…although sometimes I do end up seeing them again, often, and then it’s awkward because the lie has to be kept up forever), but this was actually true – I do know a bit about guinea pigs. I sort of apologized and changed the subject, and then we went back and forth on where to eat, and Patrick suggested Red Bamboo, which is this vegetarian place that I’d been to before and was agreeable to. When we got there, we had some issues with the guinea pig at the door. The hostess wasn’t sure we could bring Palin in, since Palin is basically a rodent, but after Patrick promised to keep the cage discreetly under his chair with his jacket over it, she said it was probably fine.
‘So,’ I said, as we looked at the menus. ‘Are you a vegetarian?’
‘No,’ said Patrick. ‘But I tend to…what I do is, I’ll like pick a color? And then for a week, I have to only eat things that are that color. So, this week, I’m only eating black things. So, I’m thinking I’ll get this black bean ginger stir-fry, but I have to check and make sure it really looks mostly black.’
Now, a lot of you may be thinking, ‘Freak!’ But I actually have really weird eating habits myself (Clif bars, anyone?), so I’m sort of understanding about this type of compulsive behavior. And additionally, I had once flipped through this book at Barnes & Noble about challenging your brain every day a little bit to keep sharp and stave off Alzheimer’s, and it basically said that you had to always be looking for ways to break your routine in non-routine ways so your brain doesn’t just go into habitual autopilot, and one of the specific suggestions it gave for doing this was to make a new eating rule every week, like maybe just pick a certain color and only eat things that were that color for a week. So, I figured Patrick had read this book.
‘Did you get that idea from a book about keeping your brain entertained?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘Um, eating all things of one color,’ I said. ‘Did you read to do that in a book about how to keep surprising your brain, so that-’
‘-It’s got nothing to do with my brain,’ said Patrick. ‘It’s about my body. I figure you should only ask your body to break down a certain kind of compound at one time, you know?’
This was a really bad sign, as I have no patience whatsoever when people start spouting this kind of bullshit, so I quickly changed the subject, and the conversation was more or less okay until the server came to take our order.
‘Is the black bean stir fry black?’ asked Patrick.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘It’s black beans, yes.’
‘But is it black-colored? Like, if I looked at the plate, does everything look black?’
‘Um,’ she said. ‘It’s in a black-bean glaze, but it’s all vegetables, but it’s…’
‘Is it mostly dark?’
‘I guess.’
He sighed heavily. ‘But is it- you know what, forget it, I’ll just get a double order of the black rice, and black beans, and a chocolate milkshake.’
Seriously.
So, fine, you know what? I got a gigantic dessert for my meal. Because I am always wanting to get dessert for dinner, but I always figure people will give me shit about it. But at this point, Patrick sure couldn’t say anything about it, so I got a slice of peanut butter tandy heaven cake with a scoop of mint chocolate chip ice cream.
‘That’s disgusting,’ said Patrick.
‘I’m only eating desserts this week,’ I replied, and stared him down.
At this point, I’ll admit, I was actually kind of thinking Patrick and I might be perfect for each other. I began to think it might be quite freeing to be with someone so much more eccentric than I am that I could just give total free reign to my own eccentricities. I imagined how being weird in a pair in public would be far more comfortable than being weird alone, and you know, actually, I could probably kick it up a notch and be even weirder if I had a partner who could act as a buffer. It might be really fun. And the conversation was going along just fine, the food came, all was well. And then…
We got to talking about our favorite authors, and I mentioned how upset I had been that David Foster Wallace just died.
‘Oh, me too!’ agreed Patrick.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘In fact, I have to say, I kind of cried when I read that-’
‘Me too!‘ screamed Patrick, and he burst into tears. I shit you not. Right there at the table, out of nowhere – and we’re talking giant, chest-heaving, gape-mouthed, wrenching sobs. I mean, he was screaming. Everybody in the entire restaurant went dead silent and turned and stared at us. I was mortified. I didn’t know what to do. It seemed like that moment went on and on for hours, for days. Patrick just bawled his head off – he didn’t even put his hands over his face, he just stared straight ahead with his mouth wide open and howled – and everybody stared at us, and I was so humiliated I wanted to drop through the floor…and then I started to laugh. I kept picturing the scene from the outside, as if it were in a story, the way it looks now as I’m blogging it, and it was just so damn hilarious that I went into a sort of hysterical, giggling anxiety fit and couldn’t stop. Patrick sobbed, and I brayed with laughter, and we sat there over our insane dinners with the guinea pig scrabbling around under Patrick’s chair, and I feared we’d be frozen there in that demented tableau for all eternity.
What eventually happened was the manger came over to ask if we were okay, and we both said that we were fine, and he suggested that we might be happier the hell out of his restaurant, so we paid (well, I paid – Patrick apparently had forgotten to go by an ATM), and got out of there as quickly as possible.
‘Do you want to come with me to shop for guinea pig stuff?’ asked Patrick, who had more or less gotten himself together, but had not apologized for his mad behavior.
‘I should probably head home,’ I said. ‘I have to be up early tomorrow.’
And then, even though I knew I should leave it alone, I just had to ask: ‘Patrick,’ I said. ‘Why did you tell me to wear pants?’
‘What?’ he said.
‘On the phone, you said I should wear pants. Why?’
‘Look,’ he said, looking pissed off. ‘I move slowly, okay? I’m a slow-moving guy. And I’m honest about myself. And I don’t make any apologies. So, just, you know, I take my time! And I won’t apologize for that.’
I didn’t want to press him further. I went home, and I haven’t heard from him since, about which I’m extremely relieved.
I rarely take a chance on going out with a complete stranger, and sure enough, every time I actually throw caution to the wind, the guy invariably turns out to be a complete psychopath. My intuition is either hopelessly broken or missing entirely, so perhaps I’m wise to be standoffish.
So, I recently joined the YMCA in my neighborhood. As it’s been over two years since I belonged to a gym and had regular access to weights, I’ve entirely forgotten my old regimen. So, I bought a few women’s exercise-type magazines to find a couple of routines. I usually steer clear of women’s magazines because they tend to make me both angry and depressed, and these were no exception.
I seem to recall reading Shape several years ago, and it was 95% about actual exercise, and the models were all ripped. Not anymore. Now, it’s 95% hideously overpriced clothes, and interviews with lying celebrities (“I mostly care about being happy and healthy, and my kids!”), and advice on how not to eat, or do anything much but spend insane amounts on worthless crap. And only 40 pages in (or 3 pages in, if you don’t count advertisements), there is an interview with Kaley Cuoco. Apparently, she is an actor on a sitcom, The Big Bang Theory. I’d never heard of her or the show. She’s 22-years-old, and this is what she has to say:
I go to [spinning] class three times a week, without fail. I always get there early so I can sit in the front of the studio, and I’m ready to go as soon as the instructor comes in.*
And:
…right now I can’t get enough of the 6-inch vegetarian whole-wheat sandwich from Subway. I pick one up after my Spin class . . . It’s my default meal; I know exactly how many calories are in it – 260 – and I never have to think about what to order.*
And worst of all:
Diet cola is my absolute favorite drink in the world; I used to drink four cans a day. But to help me cut down, I’ve turned it into a treat. Now, instead of having dessert, I’ll have a can of diet soda. Putting a limit on how often I can drink it has helped me appreciate it more.*
Oh my God, Kaley! I want to kill myself! You are the saddest girl in the whole world!
Seriously, I myself am far more ascetic in most respects than your average person could bear to be, and I often find my own self depressing in some ways. But even I want to kidnap this girl and make her go on some insane sky-diving, Fleet-Week-cruising, cocaine-snorting adventure in irresponsible hedonism. What’s the point of being rich and famous if your best idea of an awesome time is go to spin class and then eat a Subway sandwich and drink a can of Diet Coke?
Jeez.
He was still there, snuffling around outside the door.
‘Virginia,’ he whined. ‘Virginyaaa.’
‘What, what, what?’ she said in a whispery staccato, pushing herself from the floor onto the couch. ‘What?’
‘Virginia! Virginyaa….’
‘What? Oh, what?’
She wondered if she had a different name, would he incant it thus? Would he go as wild for Wanda? Or Elizabeth? Or Vanessa?
‘I’ve a cheese sandwich all made. And some teeeeaaaa. Virginia.’
‘Go away from the door. Go down the hall.’
But she let him in. She slunk from the couch, unbolted the door, and he tipped in backwards – he’d been leaning against it.
‘Oh, oh, oh, oh, what?’ she asked him, pushing her face back into the couch’s upholstery. He hated it when she had fabric imprints across her cheeks.
‘I’ve brought tea. I’ve had Nancy fix tea, and I brought it up to you on a little cart. I thought…’ he looked at her upside down, over his poofy hairline, from his position on the floor.
‘You thought what? You look ridiculous.’
‘What? I can’t hear you. Take your face from the cushions.’
‘You thought what? What?!’ she asked.
‘I thought we might,’ Leonard raised himself up and sniffed mightily. ‘Drink it. You see.’
‘Oh, damn,’ said Virginia. ‘And now we have to.’
‘Oh, good, oh, good,’ cried Leonard, leaping to his feet, and skipping in the air like a Disney Frenchman, he spun the tea tray in between them and busied himself with the cups.
‘You’ll love this,’ he cried, clapping his hands, and he handed her a saucer. ‘Will you eat the sandwich, or shall I? It’s cheese.’
‘Why is there only one?’
‘Well, because I didn’t really think you’d want one, you see,’ explained Leonard, through a mouthful of sandwich.
‘I want so many things,’ she sighed, and poured out the tea. Leonard held his cup with both hands.
‘Haven’t we any frankfurters?’ she asked, and Leonard shook his head no, his cheeks bulging from his face.
I have mentioned on this blog before that I am a compulsive eater. One easy way I have found to manage my weight is never to buy and bring home more than I plan to eat at any one sitting. While this is a more expensive way to eat, it didn’t used to be that unreasonable. You could generally eat for $5, and there were any number of $.99 snack food items in any drugstore or minimart you happened to pass.
Now, I understand that everything is more expensive now. I don’t like it, but I am beginning to accept it. What I don’t understand, however, is why there don’t seem to be single-serve portions of anything anymore anywhere. I regularly find myself with five minutes to spare before work running into every damn drugstore all up and down the snack aisles, and there are just giant bags of chips, huge cans of nuts, jumbo pouches of trail mix. What is this? I don’t want seven servings of a snack. If I take seven servings of a snack into the office, I will be eating seven servings of a snack.
The only single-serve portions available anywhere now, however, are those 100-calorie pack things, which are just totally worthless. One hundred calories on an empty stomach just prods it enough to make it furious – you’re better off not eating. I operate from a continuous base of low-level hunger, and when that hunger kicks from low- into high-level, I want to have just enough food in my purse to knock it back a little. If I have more than that, I’m going to eat until I’m actually really full, and then I’m going to eat whatever small amount is left after that, because there’s not that much left and I may as well finish it. And then I’m also still going to eat dinner three hours later anyway, even though I’m totally full, because I was so looking forward to dinner that I can’t bear the disappointment of just going straight from the office to whatever I’m working on that evening without my dinner break. And there you have it – the Duane Read has just ruined my whole day just because it’s no longer stocking single-serving bags of nuts.
I have this dream that there would be a wonderful grocery store that caters to people like me. This grocery store would have nothing but inexpensive, single-serving portions of all different kinds of food, and for an added bonus, maybe it could even be healthy food. And a wide variety.
Well, actually, there is such a place. It’s called Trader Joe’s, and there’s only one, and if you want to go there, you have to fight your way through a crowd of thousands and wait online for upwards of 45 minutes. Wouldn’t you think, every other retailer in Manhattan, that, given the immense popularity of TJ’s, there might just be a market there that could stand to be capitalized on???
Single-servings of portable, precooked food items for $5-$6.50 a pop!! And single-serve snacks for under $2!!! Available at a great number of convenient locations throughout the five boroughs!!!!
Somebody cater to my specific need, damn it!
–
Oh, and also, if you don’t already read Fafblog, this Sarah Palin post is a great time to start:
As a Jesus-fearing moose-hunting hockey-mom mother of five who hunts moose for Jesus, Sarah Palin is kin to the wild outdoors and appreciates its bountiful splendor as she is gunning it down from her airplane. Sarah Palin understands that America is dangerously addicted to oil, and that the only cure is more oil. . . . Sarah Palin may not know if global warming is man-made. She may not know if global warming is real. She may not know what global warming is. But if global warming is caused by abortions, Sarah Palin will fight it – by banning abortion, just in case the first couple times didn’t take.
Go, read all of it, and then read the entire rest of Fafblog, because it never fails to kick ass.
Regular readers of this blog will know that I am no fan of superstars. I resent the hell out of anything beloved by all. But sometimes somebody will deserve every last lick of praise they get, and Joshua Ferris is one of those people. I can’t even hate. TWCTTE is a fantastic novel – hilarious, relevant, charitable to everybody, and well-written. Go read it now, because no matter who you are, you’ll enjoy it. Damn it.
Remainder, on the other hand, is a whole bunch of nothing. I can’t believe I finished it. I got about thirty pages in, and thought, ‘Ah, this is very interesting. I think it’s going to go in one of several directions, and can’t wait to see which.’ Twenty pages further in, I thought, ‘Huh. It hasn’t gone anywhere yet.’ Twenty pages further in, ‘Still in the same place.’ And when I finally finished it, ‘Well. That really was just about that. All the way through.’
Wow, those are some slight reviews. So, here are some cool things this week:
Scientists got blood from stem cells:
Scientists have used embryonic stem cells to generate blood — a feat that could eventually lead to endless supplies of type O-negative blood, a rare blood type prized by doctors for its versatility.
Computer scientists thought of a good way to make use of those text boxes you have to fill out online all the time:
You may be deciphering a word from a decaying old book, helping to transform a historic text into a new digital file.
This entertainer found a way to use cicada shells to adorn herself (via CP). If you’ve never experienced the weird joy that is picking cicada shells off a tree, you should probably do that at some point. When I was a little kid visiting my grandparents in Mississippi, my Granddaddy and I used to pick grocery sackfuls of cicada shells off the trees in the front yard. We had no real object in this harvesting – I don’t know exactly what happened to the sacks full of bug shells, but it’s far more likely my Grandmother threw them out than that she wove them into her hair.
Also, this NY Times article proclaiming that coffee is nothing but good in every possible way, and even overconsumption of coffee works nothing but good effects on your body is the best news possible, and makes me feel utterly vindicated. I’m sure it’s unreliable and probably the studies behind it were funded by giant, evil coffee cartels, but I don’t care. I choose to believe it, because it is what I want to hear. Now all I need is an article saying that a cake-based diet prevents cancer.
Ali Smith’s The Accidental has a freaking form poem flight thing in the middle of it. No book ever has the right to priss about being cute with the layout of text on page – I hate that. If there were a gimmicky little concrete poem in the middle of the greatest book ever written, I’d detest it. Short sentences, run-ons, overlapping dialogue – fine. I love me some DFW footnotes. But any actual text effects belong on motivational posters or in powerpoint presentations, not in the middle of a novel I am trying to read. I can’t stand gimmicks.
I took a poetry class in college wherein the professor went on and on about the way poems looked on the page, the shape of the thing. What were we, calligraphers? If you have something to say and you’re a painter, show it to me visually. But if you’re a writer, freaking write it! Don’t put a precious little fucking flipbook in the middle of your novel, don’t put one word on each page for a time, don’t make the paragraph look like a cat when you turn the book to the side. How trite and cute can you be? I can’t believe real critics have any patience for this kind of nonsense, but sickeningly, it seems to be increasing every year. What’s next? Music boxes that play when you flip the pages? A small hologram? A scavenger hunt? A free toy in a hollowed-out space in the middle? A plush bunny on the cover with a squeak in its tail? Come the fuck on! If you can’t blow my mind with your prose, you won’t make up for it in doodles. And the hell with you for wasting my time.
And yes, I liked House of Leaves (although I don’t consider it revelatory or anything), but it is the exception that proves the rule. And I realize graphic novels are growing in importance and popularity, and eventually there might be bleedover and to enforce a stern boundary between novel-novels and graphic-novels will be pointlessly rigid and fusty. But I’ll adjust my ideas about that when I see it. Meanwhile, I don’t want to read the free verse horridness painters from a decade back were fond of scrawling across their canvasses in metallic gold paint pens, and likewise, I don’t want a toy or a bauble in text form from a writer.
And lest I be misunderstood, my issue with all this is not its novelty, but its meaninglessness.
Ahem. Even beyond the alienating concrete poem bit of stuff in the middle of The Accidental, I didn’t particularly care for the book. I just felt it tread over a lot of really familiar territory without adding anything much. I didn’t take away any truth or insight into the human condition. But apparently, people loved this book. It was short-listed for the Booker and had mostly good reviews.
I did really enjoy the passages in Astrid’s point of view, the family’s 12-year-old girl. The family is staying in a rental house, and at the beginning of the novel, Astrid spends a lot of time trying not to touch any of the surfaces of the house, or anything in it, because she’s disgusted by the idea of all the people who have used the house before them. She arranges a sheet over the bed before lounging on it, she tears bread from the middle of a loaf rather than use a knife and so forth. I can attest to the accuracy of this portrayal; I spent a ton of time in childhood trying not to touch anything. And actually, I never really grew out of it. Even as I backpacked across Asia, I had my rituals.
I was talking to a friend about this the other day. My friend was saying something about hygienic restaurant conditions, or something to do with food. And I said that I have no squeamishness about food and don’t really stress about the conditions in which it was prepared, because, even though I know that people not washing their hands and then handling food transfers diarrhea around (hence traveler’s tummy), and even though that’s disgusting if you actually think about it…well, really, all that happens is you maybe get a little sick for a day.
I said that I really have more worries in the tactile realm – that I don’t like to touch surfaces.
And then I suddenly realized how freaking crazy that is. I mean, I always knew that my obsession over not touching anything wasn’t rooted in any actual germaphobia, and had no real base at all – that it was rather just a general feeling of squirmy discomfort. It’s just that some things you have to touch are gross, the way you find some foods gross – it’s not that you think they’re dangerous; it’s just that you don’t like them. But I never thought about how nuts it is to put any old thing inside my body, but obsess about things touching the outside of my skin. Not to put too fine a point on it, but apparently, I would rather eat feces than sit in them.
Not that the realization did away with my baseless phobia, but I thought it was worth remarking on.
Jose Saramago’s The Double did not annoy me with any gimmicks, and I did walk away from it with, I felt, greater insight into the human condition. It’s commonly advised that, if you’re not “into” a novel by 100 pages in, you should put it down and start another. I have read quite a few books, however, where I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not until I finished the very last page. Perhaps these are books that don’t so much reflect how I see the world, as explain in a complete and compelling way how the world appears to someone else (the author). So, while I don’t hook into them immediately, by the time I come to the end, I feel satisfied. The Double is one of those books for me. And the same books that I can’t figure out if I like them or not until I finish the last words are generally those about which I cannot articulate what I liked, so I have nothing else to say about this.
