…for a quick announcement: there’s not gonna be a new blog post today. Yesterday, I wrote my brains out. You see, I’ve been taking a grad class on the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, and I was just SURE that my final paper was due next Monday. I’d done most of the reading, but hadn’t written a lick since I turned in my 3-page precis a few weeks ago. Usually, most of my writing process takes place in my head, as I’m doing the research, and I just sit down to write and pour it all out, so I knew a week would be plenty of time to turn out a good paper. If there’s anything my undergrad degrees in English and political science taught me, it’s that I can write 3-4 pages per hour, no problem.
But then I showed up to our last class yesterday and realized papers were due. WHAT?! I knew I had to get home and get writing and try to get the darn thing done that day. And I did it. I wrote the fastest paper I’ve ever written: 15 pages in 5 hours. It’s not a masterpiece of fine editing, but it’s a paper incorporating Lacanian psychology, geo-physical theory, and theology to analyze Nella Larsen’s Harlem Renaissance novel Quicksand. I got it emailed to my prof by 7:00 pm, and sincerely apologized for not having it ready to turn in during class. I have no idea if this will mean points off my grade, but I guess the beauty of being a non-degree student is my world won’t be crushed if I don’t make an A.
So, I used up my words yesterday, and I just used up more telling you why these words in this space aren’t more interesting. See ya tomorrow.
Today is Earth Day. Being a big, tree-hugging dork, I am wearing a blue dress and a green sweater, the colors of Mother Earth. (I’m really not kidding about my level of dorkitude.) Today, the entire blogosphere is abuzz with tales of what finally made people open their eyes to the realities of climate change and the need to take better care of our environment. And truly, I could write a really handy post about how I discovered No Impact Man a few years ago and set out on a course to live more lightly on the planet, and be mostly telling the truth. But the real story is, I grew up doing this stuff, and I was basically just returning to a way of living I grew up on. I was basically raised an environmentalist. I’m not talking about growing up watching Captain Planet, either, although I admit, I did love that show and may have giggled about how much my high school class ring made me feel like a Planeteer. Continue reading “my environmentalist awakening, or lack thereof”
Both of my puppygirls. Olive is the black one. I've yet to see a "Baby Bessie" because apparently cow-spotted catahoula mixes with golden eyes are rare.
There are many benefits to adopting an older dog– by they come your way, they can sleep through the night without crying, they’re potty trained, and they have less of a propensity for chewing on your stuff (though lord knows both of my adopted-as-older-dogs have chewed PLENTY of my stuff). But one major drawback of adopting an older dog is you don’t get to know them as puppies, don’t get to see what they look like when they are small and fuzzy and cuddly wuddly, all chubby bellies and slightly out of control paws.
We adopted our second dog, Olive, what we believe to be a lab/border collie mix, the Christmas before last. She was less than a year old, and had been found in the woods near my parents’ home by a family friend, so starved they initially thought she was dead. I don’t know who left her, or if she ran off, or how she ended up in the woods. I see hints that someone must have been mean to her– the way she is terrified I’m going to hit her with a broom when I sweep the floors, the way she thinks every raised object might be used to strike her, the way she cowers and sometimes pees on herself if I use too forceful of a voice with her. Continue reading “I wish I’d known her then”
In this piece, Hamilton Nolan critiques a recent NYT article called “Does Working Out Really Help You Lose Weight?,” particularly its assumption that the goal of exercise, and indeed all of life, is being “thin,” a word that is used repeatedly in the NYT’s article. Hamilton writes:
Being thin is an awful goal towards which to strive. It is certainly not the goal of an exercise program. Writing an entire, ostensibly meaningful and important story on whether exercise can make you thin is analogous to wondering whether going to college can get you laid. Yes, but that’s not really the point.
The purpose of working out is get in shape. Not to get “thin.” To be in shape, for the average person, connotes being healthy, and improving on the basic elements of one’s own fitness: muscular strength, endurance, cardiovascular, flexibility, etc.
Amen! The goal of working out, and even of eating healthy foods, is to be HEALTHY, which may or may not mean being thin. In fact, for many people, it will not mean being thin. And being thin does not necessarily mean being healthy, either. I should know. I’m what the NYT might call “thin,” with a BMI* naturally in the “underweight” range of the scale, and yet I am still what you might call “out of shape.” I couldn’t run a mile if you asked me to. I have a rather high resting heart rate. But I recently started exercising regularly for the first time in my life, by taking yoga classes, and I am feeling stronger and healthier and happier the more I practice yoga.
Not to mention, thinness is a crappy way to motivate people to pursue healthy activities. I eat healthy food because it tastes good. I practice yoga because it’s fun, it helps with my back pain, and it makes me feel beautiful just to be in my body. I even hear tell that some people like to run because they think it’s fun, though I think it sounds like torture! Do what makes you feel good and healthy. Do what’s fun. It may or may not make you thin, and who really cares anyway?
*As an aside on the BMI: a lot of those feministy body-positive Healthy at Every Size blogs I read like to talk smack on the BMI. While they have a point that having a certain BMI does not necessarily mean one is by definition unhealthy, ie, just because one falls in the “obese” or “underweight” category according to the BMI does not mean one will have all of the health complications associated with that category, the BMI is still useful as a measure of predicting risk and determining if further testing is necessary. For example, according to my BMI, I might be at risk for infertility, osteoporosis, and anemia. Because of this, my doctors might suggest testing or monitoring to see if I have developed those issues, but it doesn’t mean I have to HAVE those issues– in fact, I don’t. The same goes for people who are obese according to the BMI– they are at risk for diabetes and other complications, and may require testing or monitoring, but will not necessarily have those conditions.
Today is the anniversary of an extraordinary tragedy: the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building by Timothy McVeigh. I was just reading a piece on TIME about the anniversary when the following struck me:
“Timothy McVeigh killed 168 innocent men, women and children in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.”
Why do we always say “innocent”? What does innocent mean? In my strange and sometimes heretical spiritual worldview, I understand that not a one of us is “innocent.” In some way, to me, it takes away the humanity of those people who were killed to always call them “innocent”. I’m sure some of them fought with a loved one that morning. I’m sure others of them were slacking off at work. I’m sure some were thinking uncharitable thoughts of a coworker. You know, the kind of stuff each and every one of us is doing as we go about our workday. Each of those people killed was just a person trying to have a normal day, and thanks to the actions of a violent extremist, didn’t wake up to see the next day. They were human beings with good and bad, dark and light, sin and holy image, all mixed into one. And losing them is a tragedy, an unspeakable horror, even if they weren’t “innocent.”
Not to mention, in what sort of mass bombing would the victims not be “innocent”? Is there some way of deserving to be killed while you’re just going about your workday? Who gets to decide who is “innocent” and who is somehow deserving of a tragedy?
our adorable house. don't you want to buy it so i can stop cleaning?
Because this blog has a whole section called “Tales from the Bus,” I feel like I have to confess something: I’m not riding the bus much right now. Because our house is on the market, it has to look ready for a showing all the time. Because we still live there, this means someone has to remove all traces of our presence every morning before leaving the house. Because my poor husband has to leave to be at work at 6:30 am these days, this means I’m the one to do it, because it’s hard to sweep the floors in the dark. Because if I drive instead of riding the bus, I have an extra hour at home, I’m not riding the bus these days.
Someone please please please buy my house so I can stop cleaning it! We’re no slobs, but making the bed, sweeping the floors (with two dogs, this is a daily necessity), rounding up the clutter, wiping down the kitchen counters, scrubbing the kitchen sink, and doing a quick dusting of the living room every single morning is seriously getting annoying.
My man on his bicycle. If you see him on the street, please share the road.
When you’re driving down the street and end up behind a bicyclist, how do you respond?
Do you get frustrated that the cyclist isn’t going 10 mph over the speed limit as you’d like to, and try to whiz around them? Failing that, do you tailgate them or honk at them? Do you yell that they should ride on the sidewalk? Do you think angry thoughts that they’d dare to ride on the road?
My husband commutes 3 miles to work by bicycle each and every day. He’s learned the hard way that drivers are not concerned for his safety, will run red lights or will turn into him as he crosses an intersection, and in fact believe he should not be on the road at all. You need only to read the comments on this local news story about bicyclists to understand why he was ACTUALLY AFRAID FOR HIS SAFETY after reading the piece. Several of the commenters expressed, angrily and in all caps, that bikes don’t belong on roads, and suggested that they feel the urge to run over cyclists with their cars. One commenter even suggested that he’d like to run over cyclists, back up, and then run over them again. I honestly worry about my husband’s safety on his bike every single day.
A "Ghost Bike" we saw in NYC. Ghost Bikes memorialize cyclists killed by cars.
Many of the commenters seemed to think that if cyclists get injured, it’s their own fault. Actually, CARS cause most bicycle accidents. My work-study student was struck by a car while cycling home from campus just this week!
Many car drivers want cyclists to get off the roads and onto the sidewalks. Actually, it’s ILLEGAL for cyclists to ride their bikes on sidewalks. Sidewalks are for pedestrian traffic only, and as a pedestrian, I appreciate not having to worry about being hit by bicycles. Bicycles are required to use the roads, and drivers are required to SHARE THE ROAD. Speed limits, which some drivers seem to think are posted as requirements for minimum speed in order to be allowed use of the road, are actually UPPER limits. More drivers need to be made aware of the law concerning bicycles. For example, bicyclists do not have to come to a complete stop at stop signs or red lights if the coast is clear, unlike cars.
So the next time you’re driving down the street with a cyclist in front of you, please remember that that might be someone’s husband. Or daughter. Or mother. Or uncle. Or friend. Please share the road. And maybe even thank the cyclist for helping make your city and your planet a better place.
So apparently there was some big basketball thing on the teevee machine last night. Like the Olympics of college basketball or somesuch. You can tell I’m a huge sports fan.
Being that I only marginally care about college sports, and even then, pretty much only barely follow Arkansas Razorback football, I didn’t really have a dog in the big NCAA championship fight. I thought the Butler bulldog was a pretty cute pooch, and I remember participating in some nerdy Talent Identification Program with Duke that had me take the ACT test in Jr. High, so I really could have gone either way on last night’s game.
And then I hopped on Twitter and noticed that apparently the only correct team to root for was Butler. Because “America loves the little guy,” and “everyone loves an underdog.” Seriously, Internet, it’s apparently un-American to like Duke. This morning the Twitters were filled with tweets lamenting that big bad Duke had won and made America cry. I had no idea. In fact, I had no idea that America really loves a little guy.
Take for example major league baseball. 99% of the people you meet are Red Sox or Yankees or Cubs fans. Sure, the Cubs seem to have a knack for losing sometimes, but all of those teams are huge organizations with mondo payrolls. I should know, I’m married to a Denver native who loves his Rockies and has been known to deliver a monologue or twelve on the subject of big teams who “buy their pennants.” If you ask him, and really, if you look at baseball, you have to wonder if America really does love an underdog.
I think the rooting for the little guy, the favoring of David over Goliath, is just a nice story we tell ourselves, even as we shop at big corporations who drive little guys out of business every day. It’s a nice story we tell ourselves even as we want our nation to be the sole world superpower, dominating global affairs. If America really loved the little guy, WalMart would go out of business.
“America loves the little guy” is just a nice piece of national mythology we use to make ourselves feel good, like we still believe anyone could make it, even as we turn a blind eye to systematic practices which keep little guys down each and every day.
But then, today, I saw some bumper stickers on a Subaru that made me want to flag the drivers down and ask them if they wanted to be BFFS. I saw this on my way home:
Because that’s a crappy phone picture I took all stalker style (I blurred out the license plate so as not to be too stalkeriffic), I’ll tell you what some of the stickers say: “Pro-child, Pro-Family, Pro-Choice” “Vaginas” “Uppity Women Unite” and “My kid has more chromosomes than yours.” SC, I probably don’t need to tell you, is quite a red state. So seeing a bunch of feminist and disability activist stickers on a car is rare and rather heartwarming for this bleeding heart liberal. I wish I could have pulled up alongside and waved and told the driver, “Hi, your stickers rule!” But the traffic didn’t allow. I sure hope that Subaru driver doesn’t get accosted by Sarah Palin fans, but if they do, I have a feeling they can handle it.
Just in case any of you get accosted by a Sarah Palin fan who wants to know how that “hopey changey thing is workin out for ya,” you can check out this handy list of awesome hopey changey things Obama has done in the past year or so in office. Then you can say, “Well, it’s workin’ out pretty darn well, actually!” And then you can feel like another sticker I saw in a parking deck today– like a Righteous Babe (or Dude):
Image: Spoiler_Alert, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from alexlane's photostream
SPOILER ALERT!
Just kidding, but really, this post is about spoilers and in it I might spoil a years old movie or book or two (particularly Harry Potter, so, don’t come crying to me if you don’t know how the series ends already). (Though I promise I’m not spoiling LOST in this post.)
SPOILER ALERT!
You may have seen that phrase on the internet, or even have heard it in conversation. You may have yelled it after someone ruined the ending to something for you. I admit, I’ve been one to use it. I’ve had a few things spoiled for me. Like “The Sixth Sense.” Before I ever got a chance to see it, some friend blurted, “Ohmygod, can you beLIEVE that Bruce Willis was freaking DEAD the WHOLE TIME?” Me, somewhat crestfallen, “Um, what? I haven’t seen ‘The Sixth Sense Yet.'” And then there was the time I was reading one of the Harry Potter books while working as a camp counselor and one of my campers was all, “Can you beLIEVE Dumbledore DIES??” Me, “WHAT!!! You’re lucky I can’t strangle a camper because otherwise you’d be dead right now!!”
And to some extent, it makes sense not to spoil books, as they’re something one reads on one’s own, or movies, as long as they’re still in the theatre. But what about television? Continue reading “to the viewer goes the spoils”
erniebufflo's south & west kitchen 