social coordinator

Andrew arrived a week ago, and I've kept us busy.

Last Thurs. was a night of sushi and Grey's Anatomy. Friday we had lunch at Nexus with Meredith, and then rested up for a night at the Nut House (followed by an inauguration of the TA Lounge). Saturday was a day of grocery shopping, a night of Belgian food and Brahms in the city. Sunday we had a triple date night at The Counter with Jill and Meredith and their SO's. Monday we had a lovely neighborhood hike at Russian Ridge, where we caught the tail end of the wildflower season; after, we had a sort of picnic dinner at Andronico's.

During the week I tried to balance our social and work obligations -- Andrew started at Microsoft, and I had the Writing Center, reading Sartor Resartus, reading for class, and providing graduate students with coffee and lunch. On the social end, we had tea with Sara, dinner with Dan (Andrew's CS comrade from Amherst), and dinner with Alex and Kaitlin (they introduced us to a great Turkish restaurant in Menlo Park). And last night we *finally* watched There Will Be Blood. Our response to the climactic final scene was complicated by our realization that the SNL milkshake skit really *was* cut straight from the film. We kind of couldn't stop laughing over "I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!"

So today was kind of a day of errands -- clothes shopping at Gap (I found a skirt for *six dollars*), food shopping at Nak's, book trading at Feldman's...

Busy busy week.

re-watching

I was just watching the beginning of Dirty Dancing over dinner, and noticed this awesome detail. When Robby tells Baby that he's not going to help Candy because "some people count, and some people don't," he hands her a copy of Ayn Rand's Fountainhead. Baby proceeds to basically call him an asshole and spill water on his shoes.

I have a productive day

Well, most markedly if you count food and exercise.

Not only did I read a hundred pages of Nicholas Nickleby, and at least *glance* at my notes toward dissertation ideas, but I also took a walk on the dish (clear day finally! could see San Francisco), and made: avocado rolls, pasta salad for tomorrow's lunch, chocolate cake (with frosting).

And I had some good Scrabble moves.

Apparently this is what life looks like post-orals, pre-dissertation proposal?

HUGE crush on Jon Stewart

Second part of Stewart's interview with Doug Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy when the administration decided to go to war with Iraq. AMAZING. This is the sort of calling out of tortured logic that I was hoping we'd get with the McCain interview...



Calling out at its best:

- Outright contradiction that the administration had more reason to go to war with Iraq than with, say, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Pakistan...

- Best analogy: if the government knew the risks and didn't tell us, isn't that *worse*? Isn't that, as Stewart says, the jump from manslaughter to homicide?

- Jon pointing out that the "selling of the positive" in the run up to the war *was* a freaking hypothetical, so Feith's claim that he didn't want to "get into hypotheticals" about worse case scenarios, doesn't umm... MAKE ANY SENSE.

repubs: only free market when it suits biggest lobby

I'm loving this story about the Bush administration blocking companies from *responding* to consumer demands for safer beef:

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration on Friday urged a federal appeals court to stop meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease, but a skeptical judge questioned whether the government has that authority.
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The government seeks to reverse a lower court ruling that allowed Kansas-based Creekstone Farms Premium Beef to conduct more comprehensive testing to satisfy demand from overseas customers in Japan and elsewhere.

Less than 1 percent of slaughtered cows are currently tested for the disease under Agriculture Department guidelines. The agency argues that more widespread testing does not guarantee food safety and could result in a false positive that scares consumers.

This is the legitimate result of the free market (I feel like that term should be in all caps, neon, especially coming from a liberal in favor of regulation). Consumers would rather purchase food (and countries would rather import food) of which they have some way of verifying the safety. Obviously they can't easily test every animal, but this strawman "argument" at the end (more testing could result in more "false positives") is patent bullshit (pun intended). You know, more HIV tests mean more opportunities for false positives, and that might alarm the .01% of people that that would affect -- so let's just not test anyone! Problem solved!

Are the Bushies unacquainted with the myriad stories about our food safety issues? (E coli outbreaks, which are largely the result of factory farming; atrocities committed at slaughterhouses, resulting in unsafe meat, which we'd never hear about if it weren't for the Humane Society; tainted products from China, etc.) Or, more likely, are the people in this administration simply so out of touch with real Americans and the "common" food said Americans eat, and so lacking in empathy for anyone making less than a million a year, that they just don't care?

So come on, Bush and Co., and let the free market give the customers what they want. How much is the National Cattlemen's Beef lobby paying y'all to help them keep what happens in Texas, stay in Texas?

the fuzzy wuzzies

With the move to Madison now in sight, Andrew and I have been thinking about adopting a cat.

I really just want to come home to a fuzzy wuzzy like these every day:




I want to both engage in baby talk with these creatures, and laugh at the bemused "wtf" expression that seems to come with the excessive fluffiness.

Andrew: i can tell you're going to really enjoy getting a cat like this
i don't think you'd stop laughing
that nasally devilish laugh

the radical feminist agenda: eradicate obsolete tampon machines

I once came across what seemed like a crazy idea at the time: why aren't tampons and pads available in restrooms, same as toilet paper? If men menstruated, would baskets of tampons in restrooms be the norm? The knee-jerk reaction against such a tampon-free-for-all, I imagine, since I had the same reactionary response, is: won't people just steal the tampons? But then: toilet paper theft isn't exactly a prevalent problem. What if tampons, like free newspapers and toilet paper, were simply dispensed in a way that prevented one from being inclined to waste one's time -- maybe keep the dispenser, and leave the coin part? Google provides baskets of tampons in its women's restrooms, and (amazingly), they don't seem to have any problems. So what's up with the tampon machines?

I ask, because I sometimes run out of tampons, or forget to throw one in my bag in the morning. I imagine this is part of the female condition. Anyway, I usually figure I'll try my chances with the tampon vending machines in the restrooms. But let me tell you: you have better odds in Vegas than against your average feminine product dispenser.

Yesterday I ran out of tampons, but I figured, I have dimes and quarters, I'll get one on campus. So toward the end of my Writing Center shift, I pocketed a quarter and walked down the hall -- only to discover that the machine only takes dimes. So after ANOTHER TRIP with a dime, I find that the machine is also empty or simply not functioning. Then I tried upstairs: one machine would neither dispense the promised tampon, NOR return my quarter. Now there's a business model for an entrepreneurially inclined, sadistic bastard. So I moved on to the next bathroom, only to discover that said bathroom has only a pad dispenser (are we living in the freaking '50s, people?!). Jesus CHRIST. The problem is, these machines are obsolete, ineffective, and fucking mysterious (do you pull the knob? turn it? give it a secret handshake?). I don't *trust* a machine I can't see into. I mean, when's the last time you put a dollar in a vending machine for a candy bar you couldn't *see*?

Operation Mayhem: on the feminine product vending machine. Because it's time we brought equality into the restroom.

the salad to cookie ratio

Bring on summer salad

Farmers' market medley: spinach and baby gem salad with snap peas, raw beet, strawberries, and mint. Dressing: white balsamic vinegar and local olive oil, with a spritz of lemon.




Underbaked cookies

The best chocolate chip cookie recipe ever, after much searching on allrecipes.com. Is it the extra egg yolk? Something makes these good -- but underbaking them by two minutes makes them great.

lies that rhyme

So I was reading Feministing this morning, and came across this ludicrous American Life League campaign: "The Pill Kills." I decided to actually read their website to see what sort of lies they were managing to fit under that sing songy slogan. It's a little disturbing, insofar as this really lays bare the end game of the anti-choice agenda: reversing court decisions that allow access to contraception (ultimately, this isn't about some misplaced fetishizing of babies at all -- the pill prevents a zygote from ever even forming). When they want to take away your ability to plan your fertility, you know the movement is harboring some serious misogyny under the jingles.

Without further ado, I'm going to tear into this write-up, entertainment brought to you by Marie Hahnenberg, a woman that *clearly* was never in my PWR class:

As a woman who is very conscious of what type of chemicals I put into my body, I am appalled by the number of women today who are on the birth control pill despite the wealth of information about this deadly drug.

Not enough people talk about the dangerous effects of the birth control pill. Many women do not realize what is really going on in their bodies when they use the pill, patch, IUD or other birth control products.

I'm also very conscious of what I put in my body -- which is why I bothered to do some research before using hormonal contraceptives and talked to my doctor. If this writer had bothered to do the same, she would know that the modern day pill contains only a fraction of the hormones that went into the original pills, and that the risk of side effects is far lower than the risks one would undertake with a pregnancy. And that there are even *lower* dosages available now, either in pill form, or in the nuvaring. So yeah, "deadly"? Way hyperbolic.

[Side note: does the writer realize "what is really going on" when she takes an advil? Probably more "deadly" than taking the pill.]

I won't even quote the section in which the writer laments the fate of the "human being" (ie, zygote) if somehow the pill doesn't function properly (needless to say, the writer does not provide any evidence of why she thinks the pill would fail to prevent the release of eggs, or how often this is supposed to happen in her fantasy). The stupid burns a little too much.

One cannot forget about all of the other horrible side effects such as breast and cervical cancer, blood clots, infertility and weakened immune systems – so a woman is more susceptible to the AIDS virus.

Actually? No. Again, the pill is safer than pregnancy. And the relationship between the pill and breast cancer is still being researched because it's more complex than this: it seems to have a slight effect while/soon after a woman takes the pill, but this might be the result of increased *screening* for breast cancer while a woman is on the pill (those yearly gyno visits). This slight increased risk isn't permanent. And the pill actually prevents ovarian and endometrial cancers.

We are all called to different vocations in our lives. Some are called to be married. Married couples should be open to God’s amazing gift of life. By contracepting, you are saying "no" to God’s plan by selfishly taking part in sexual relations without fulfilling the entire act or the purpose of the act. The reason God designed sex was for a married man and woman to become one and to procreate.

Well the logic in this only works if you believe in Marie Hahnenberg's imaginary friend. Which I don't. And even then, the logic is kinda tortured. I mean, what does "saying yes" to God's plan look like? Isn't the rhythm method just a less reliable and more complicated way of doing exactly what the pill does (ie, preventing pregnancy)?. And what's this mythology around leaving one's fate to God? I mean, Hahnenberg, do you also think that taking an aspirin is interfering with God's plan to give you a headache? Do you, or do you not, consciously engage in sexual relations while you're fertile? Do you think God micromanages your desires?

Contraception opens the door for marital infidelity because when spouses get used to contraceptive methods, they tend to forget the reverence due to a woman’s body, her cycle and to God’s ultimate plan for marriage and the family. Contraceptives also offer an incredible temptation for youth and singles. If you’re single, participating in premarital sexual activity is giving into sins of the flesh and can ultimately affect your salvation.

So infidelity was invented with the pill? I'd love to know what sort of Bowdlerized history and lit *she* was reading in high school.

an obsolete definition of insanity:

when one continues to do the same thing over and over, expecting different results.

I also love that Jon Stewart calls out Bush for (once again) being *incredibly* condescending while speaking about a problem that he clearly doesn't understand well enough to even begin to solve.

fragments

I do this thing, where I keep stories/blogs open that I feel like I want to post about, and create new tabs in my browser to accommodate them. Sometimes I don't end up posting on the material because it seems less interesting later, and sometimes I put it off and have a little collection going. Now I have so many tabs open on Firefox, that something has to be done. So here's my current political milieu:

A recent NYT oped by Frank Rich on why McCain still should worry about dissent within his own party (Repubs in PA voted in the Primary apparently just to show that they *don't* support McCain). Which is interesting, because he's flip flopped on so many issues in his mad dash to pay homage to the "lunatic fringe" of the right. So either the deference is too much too late, or some Republican voters are catching on that they don't want another 4 years of McSame policies. Anyways, I'm most interested in McCain and his attitude to the working class and working poor:

Last week found Mr. McCain visiting economically stricken and “forgotten” communities (forgotten by Republicans, that is) in what his campaign bills as the “It’s Time for Action Tour.” It kicked off in Selma, Ala., a predominantly black town where he confirmed his maverick image by drawing an almost exclusively white audience.

The “action” the candidate outlined in the text of his speeches may strike many voters as running the gamut from inaction to inertia. Mr. McCain vowed that he would not “roll out a long list of policy initiatives.” (He can’t, given his long list of tax cuts.) He said he would not bring back lost jobs, lost wages or lost houses. But, as The Birmingham News reported, this stand against government bailouts for struggling Americans didn’t prevent his campaign from helping itself to free labor underwritten by taxpayers: inmates from a local jail were recruited to set up tables and chairs for a private fund-raiser.

And this digestion (at Down with Tyranny) of why McCain is hypocritical when he says that Obama is "insensitive to poor people" (if I knew of an adjectival form of "cognitive dissonance" I'd include that as a likely diagnosis):

...when it comes to giving working families a break, McCain has been a nightmare. You want to know why American jobs get shipped overseas and why American workers who lose their jobs are left in the lurch? Just examine McCain's voting record, a voting record that has tossed the poor, native Americans, veterans, our country's children, and the unemployed under the bus. McCain was one of only 28 right-wing extremists who voted to kill the minimum wage and has long opposed legislation to increase the minimum wage, even filibustering to prevent working people from getting a hike in the minimum wage. Similarly, McCain has opposed health care for poor children and when Bush vetoed a bill that increased health care for children, McCain loudly rubber stamped his decision. Clearly, John McCain has been no friend to poor people.

Also, I kind of feel like adopting Arianna Huffington's Right is Wrong for some fun reading. Because it wouldn't hurt this country to reflect on the fear mongering tactics that the right will likely pull out again in this election:

During the 2004 race, there was an endless line of members of the Right's establishment eager to parrot the "al Qaeda wants Kerry to win" talking point -- including Senator Orrin Hatch, who made the despicable claim that terrorists "are going to throw everything they can between now and the election to try and elect Kerry."

Even without a photoshopped photo of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi sporting a Kerry-Edwards campaign button, this "terrorists for Democrats" routine was laughable, loathsome, and a new low in American politics. It was also patently untrue. Why in the world would the terrorists have wanted to get rid of George Bush? He is their chief recruiter: a man who has alienated our allies, isolated us, and united the Muslim world against us.

The president's preemptive invasion of Iraq has been such a boon to al Qaeda that in 2004 the British ambassador to Italy, Ivor Roberts, called Bush the terrorist organization's "best recruiting sergeant."

And now I can finally close some tabs.

*this* is elitism

Better Off?

I've seen some of the "younger than McCain" ads, and while those are entertaining, they need to be making the point that *this* commercial makes: McCain is seriously out of touch with the economic realities of the average American, and has earned his nickname McSame for some very good reasons.

on being done

My oral exam was on Friday. After Alex said "congratulations, you passed," he said I should take the weekend off. Which I proceeded to do.

Friday was kind of shot -- after decompressing with Jill and Meredith over sangria, I came back and *tried* to take a nap. It didn't work: I kept thinking about the questions and how I'd handled/not handled them. So I got back up, and had soup for dinner. It had to be soup because my voice was failing: after practicing my 15-20 min. talk twice, giving the talk, talking for like an hour and a half after that, and then decompressing, and then talking to Mum and Andrew, it was becoming painful to speak. So soup and internet tv: I watched the Medium and Desperate Housewives that I had missed earlier in the week.

Saturday was blissful. I woke up with nothing to do. I decided to take a walk through campus and down Palm Drive, to Anthropologie, where I proceeded to waste money. Shopping is therapeutic. I bought two sale things, and one thing full price (which I rarely do): but it's a flowy white shirt with yellow flowers, and how could I not? I decided that I can wear yellow as long as it's with another color that doesn't have a tendency to make me look cadaverously white.

Then I took my happy shopping bag with my parcels wrapped in pretty paper and went to Whole Foods: which is *also* therapeutic. I love trying new things.

And then I caught a bus back home, where I had time to watch Bill Maher and do laundry before taking a little nap and getting ready for dinner at Bridget and Nicki's.

Dinner was a dream -- Bridget and Nicki are delightful, and Nicki made *way* too much food, all of which was vegetarian and yummy. And between the steamed artichokes and homemade pizza and watermelon with mint, I got excited about returning to cooking. [Because food before orals was getting ridiculous: I relied upon cups of soups for evening study sessions at school, and by the 48 hours before the exam, I was eating bread with a hard boiled egg and tomato -- not together, just a whole tomato, a whole egg, and bread with brummel and brown, because what was the use of making egg salad sandwich if I could barely stand to eat, anyways?] I sorely needed the inspiration. So tonight I made green curry.

Today I slept till 10:30, went to the farmer's market with Jill, made lunch, watched Our Mutual Friend and took a nap, took a walk and caught up with Andrew, made dinner, started leisurely reading The Old Curiosity Shop because Dickens is my favorite, watched Desperate Housewives, cleaned my shower (it needed it: the homemade solution of baking soda, vinegar, and soap that Mum recommended worked wonders on the soap scummy layer that I had just about given up on -- thanks Mum!), took a shower, and now... I think I'm gonna eat some chocolate.

This is kind of how I feel (and probably what I would have been doing today if it had been just *slightly* warmer):

Till Friday

I just need to make it until 3:30 on Friday. Then I can begin drinking and forgetting the name of characters. Like Ivanhoe's love interest: Rowena. I never remember that name. Probably because it's so similar to *Waverley's* love interests (Rose, Flora -- which are kind of too similar, now that I see them together).

And then I can stop worrying about marriage plots and the development of the lyric and realism vs. naturalism... and start worrying about a dissertation.

"cactuses are dangerous"

FINALLY.

Christopher Walken and PLANTS

Apparently NBC was being an ass and made youtube take this down, despite the fact that NBC *doesn't* have the equivalent video up on its site. Yes, I looked. Because my oral exam is in ELEVEN DAYS, NBC, and I freaking need some GOOGLY EYES on some freaking PLANTS.

"spring break"

Andrew left today as his spring break ended -- and the apartment feels empty (as it generally does after he leaves). Despite my needing to read at least a 100 pages a day, we still managed to do things:

- Saturday, a St. Patrick's Day party at Alex and Kaitlin's, where one of K.'s coworkers gave me a Buddhist meditation chant to use in lieu of anti-anxiety drugs prior to my oral exam.

- Sunday, a trip into SF to meet up with Rachel, Josh, and baby Joel for lunch (at the most bourgie and yummy food court ever) and a walk, and a visit to the Zeum carousel.

- Watched Ratatouille.

- Watched Michael Clayton.

- Hung out on the lawn, had tea with Sara.

- Ate out: Siam Royal downtown, Patxi's.

- Ate in: made sushi, lasagna, green curry, eggplant parm, corned beef (St. Patrick's dinner -- found out I can't process beef very well any longer).

- Had Saturday in Palo Alto (Patxi's, cupa) followed by reading on the terrace till the sunset, reading in the TA lounge together, watching Fight Club.

- Visited the farmer's market... read outside... had a dessert/wine night in the studios with Jill.

And somehow I still managed to read The Origin of Species, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Morris's News From Nowhere, some of Wilde's essays (including De Profundis), and at least start Hardy's Jude the Obscure (bad choice to be reading while Andrew left).

Eek orals are coming up.

But looking forward to Andrew arriving in mid/late may for his internship: yay to the last separation!

katha pollitt: new hero

About a week ago, Charlotte Allen proved once again that being a woman doesn't translate into understanding women's issues, by publishing a piece of drivel in the WaPo about how women are "kind of dim." It was poorly researched, poorly argued, and resisted considering any counterarguments. Unfortunately, there are never a shortage of women who seem to loathe their own sex.

So by taking Allen to task, Pollitt is officially my heroine of the day. The entire article is funny, articulate, and right on. It was hard to select just one chunk. Read the whole thing!

Why did Allen, by accounts a good reporter on religion in a previous life, write this silly piece? It's tempting to say she wrote it because she exemplifies the dimness and illogicality she describes -- after all, this is a woman who cheerfully claims not to be able to add much beyond 2+2. But I suspect that Allen, who works for the right-wing anti-feminist Independent Women's Forum, is just annoyed that so many educated middle-class women are cultural, social and political moderates and liberals. Democrats, in other words.

Girls swooning for Obama, Elizabeth Gilbert leaving her "perfectly okay husband" to eat, pray, love and write a huge best-seller, Meredith Grey and Dr. McDreamy smooching between surgeries, Hillary Clinton running for president instead of spending the rest of her life apologizing for her marriage -- it does indeed make a picture. But it isn't one of women's unique "stupidity" -- raise your hand if you think Hillary Clinton has a lower I.Q. than George W. Bush. What bothers Allen about this picture is that these women reject, with every fiber of their latte-loving beings, the abstinence-only, father-knows-best, slut-shaming crabbed misogyny of the Republican right.

A far more important question is this: Why did The Post publish this nonsense? I can't imagine a great newspaper airing comparable trash talk about any other group. "Asians Really Do Just Copy." "No Wonder Africa's Such a Mess: It's Full of Black People!" Misogyny is the last acceptable prejudice, and nowhere more so than in our nation's clueless and overwhelmingly white-male-controlled media. I can just picture the edit meeting: This time, let's get a woman to say women are dumb and silly! If readers raise too big a ruckus, Outlook editor John Pomfret can say it was all "tongue in cheek." Women are dingbats! Get it? Ha. Ha. Ha.

Here's a thought. Maybe there's another thing women can do besides fluff up their husbands' pillows: Fill more important jobs at The Washington Post. We should be half the assigning editors, half the writers, and half the regular columnists too (current roster of op-ed columnists: 16 men, two women). We've got those superior verbal skills, remember? Drastically increasing the presence of women isn't a foolproof recipe for gender fairness -- Allen is far from alone in her dislike of her sex -- but I have to believe a gender-balanced paper would reflect a broader view of women than The Post does at present.

belated: the just oscars

This is rather late, but I actually watched the Oscars this year, and had actually seen some of the films up for awards. I even organized our studios' Oscar Party (which some of us left, because it was too damn loud to hear anything). I was particularly invested in seeing Once get an award (especially next to that cloying, trite crap from Enchanted). And Juno (I loved seeing Diablo up there). And No Country for Old Men (LOVED it). So I was ecstatic to see all three do so well.

Two things gave me pause:

1) Steve asking me why the Academy had preserved the strange gender divide in awards (which I later saw Feministing question, as well).

2) My realization around the time that they announced Best Actor, that if someone wrote a screenplay entitled No Country For Old Women, it would probably involve a Golden-Girl-esque exploration of menopause, grandchildren, and, possibly, if it were a drama rather than a comedy, cancer. Which is bothering the *hell* out of me. Why don't we tell ourselves more stories about women (and not just young, pretty women) doing mythic things like stealing drug money and drilling oil fields? Why the hell *not*?

And as an aside, what's with the turn toward the allegorical in Hollywood? Not that I'm complaining.