Yesterday I responded to a DoubleX piece that called home cooking a waste of time and which suggested that people like me should be spending all our time on our careers instead of in our kitchens. Today, another writer at DoubleX tackled the issue. While Meredith Simons at least allows that for some, cooking can be as enjoyable a hobby as curling up with a good book (I happen to love both cooking and good books), she still misses the point. Continue reading “followup on “saving slow food for retirement?””
save slow food for retirement?
I’ve blogged a LOT about my forays into the slow food movement. From giving up most of the meat I had been eating to joining a CSA and all the adventures that entailed to starting to bake my own bread, the way I eat has changed a lot in the past year. Apparently, according to a DoubleX writer, I’ve been wasting my time. Margaret Wheeler Johnson writes, responding to the New York Times’ recent followups to their hugely successful No Knead Bread recipe:
The truth is that unless you are a chef by profession or truly love cooking, spending a minimum of seven hours a week in the kitchen—and that’s just making dinner—is not the best use of an ambitious youngish person’s time. Wouldn’t the energy we expend making the meatloaf our mothers never did, or feeling guilty that we don’t, be better spent connecting with peers, putting in extra hours at work, or pursuing personal projects? If you want an Amy’s loaf, get it from Amy’s. Otherwise buy a sleeve of Nature’s Own, and leave the no-need bread for retirement.
Continue reading “save slow food for retirement?”
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buy our house!
Just putting this out there on the interwebs in case anyone knows anyone looking for an adorable house in Charleston, SC. Our 1948 2 bed/1 bath bungalow is just around the corner from one of the best restaurants in Charleston (the Glass Onion), is very close to a brand new Harris Teeter grocery store, is 4 miles from MUSC (where my husband bikes to work each day) and down town (where I work, a quick CARTA bus trip away), and is 15 minutes from Folly Beach. We have loved this house and put a lot of work into it, and hope the next owners love it as much as we have.
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when i’m an old woman, i shall join a biker gang
Here in the Charleston, I see them a lot, traveling in giggly packs wearing glittery brooches and carrying purses festooned with feathers, all matching their red hats and purple dresses. They’re the famous Red Hat Society, inspired by this poem by Jenny Joseph. And while those ladies seem to have a lot of fun, I’ve found some other role models for my golden years, thanks to the headline that made my morning when I saw it in a tweet from Roger Ebert: Nursing Home Residents form a Biker Gang. You should really go read that story. It warmed my heart (ok, it could have also been that blessed cup of coffee) to read of old ladies getting tats and wearing leather and demanding dirty martinis from bartenders. And how awesome is it that the bikers came out to dance and flirt with them and are planning to take them out on the bikes when the weather is warmer?
Now that I know what I want to be when I grow up, it’s good to know what I want to be even after that: basically, the little old lady from Pasadena.
WARNING
When I am an old woman I shall wear leather
With a tattoo which doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on martinis and biker gloves
And black leather boots, and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall hop on my hog when I’m tired
And guzzle up cocktails in dive bars and set off fireworks
And juice my ride along public motorways
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out with my gang every night
And dance with the easy riders at the Evil Olive . . .
The way I see it, motorcycles are way too dangerous for me now. Thanks to growing up with an ER doc for a dad, I know how deadly they can be, and you’d never get me on one. But why not throw caution to the wind when I am 80? I’m gonna be hell on wheels. Too bad nobody told my Granny (my great grandmother) about this. She’d have loved the biking grannies, I’m sure, though even without the leather and martinis, she was quite the character. She dyed her hair a different color every time she went to the beauty parlor, always had a bright red manicure, had boyfriends with whom she played dominoes, flirted with her doctors, and was known to accost strangers in the grocery store over the things they chose to put in their buggies. I’m going to channel her spirit, which surely resides in my genes, in a more “bat outta hell” direction when I’m an old woman.
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she’s the bessiest
I’m not one to participate in blog memes like “Wordless Wednesday,” so please consider the fact that I’m posting this on a Wednesday a coincidence. I have a longer post brewing in my head, but I am too busy to write it until tomorrow. Plus, I wrote a whole Valentine post about Olive, so it’s Bessie’s turn. This is how my crazy Catahoula Bessie likes to nap: 
Sure wish I were napping too!
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dear vickie b.
Work should be cancelled on spring’s first sunny and 65 day. Since I’ve yet to get this passed into law, I had to make do with a lunch break spent outside in the sunshine, in a little sculpture garden near my office. I picked up the latest issue of Glamour and just relished some free time on a beautiful day.
One reason I continue to support Glamour, even though I’ve slowly cut most fashion mags out of my life (why is the subject of a post for another day), is that they seem to actually be trying to include a wider variety of beauty and spread a more empowering message, and I like to vote with my dollars to encourage that. Indeed, this issue featured a shot of plus size model Lizzie Miller, made famous by her naked photo that appeared in Glamour. It also featured an ad that says “YOU are beautiful” that I’m thinking of taping to my computer monitor. Other things I liked seeing included a letter from Eve Ensler encouraging readers to embrace themselves as emotional beings, and advice from Ellen DeGeneres to “Find out who you are and be that person. That’s what your soul was put on this earth to be. Find that truth, live that truth, and everything else will come.” Stuff like that almost makes up for ads targeting me for 0 calorie jello snacks (God forbid a woman consume a calorie!), ads for SlimQuick supplements (yay quackery!), and ads for tobacco products (can’t we just say no to accepting money from companies that peddle death?).
Anyway, this month’s cover girl is Victoria Beckham, with an adorable spread featuring her looking glamorous while cuddling with puppies and schlepping groceries and trying to seem “normal” as a pop star turned fashion icon with a soccer hottie for a husband can seem. And, as I read through the interview, I found myself wishing Glamour had maybe edited Posh’s interview a bit. Because reading that Posh said this made me mad: Continue reading “dear vickie b.”
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new look
If you’re not reading this in a reader, you might notice that the adventures of ernie bufflo has a new look! Much as I love actual buffalo, I decided I wanted something more fun, girly, and colorful. So I have decided that my ernie bufflo alter ego is a cowgirl. Whaddaya think?
Edited: So. Before today, I had never heard of The Pioneer Woman, which is apparently shocking because she’s apparently famous. As a result, after I Google Image Searched “vintage cowgirl” upon having my cowgirl idea this morning, I found the image I was using as a header on a site that collects vintage cowgirl pinups. I thought it was adorable, it reminded me of a vintage cowgirl wallet I rocked in high school, I went with it. Turns out I was jacking The Pioneer Woman’s steez (which, I apparently do all the time, as in my CSA cooking days, I joke about being a pioneer). Now that I have been alerted, I have selected a different vintage cowgirl. I hope this prevents it from looking like I’m copying her on purpose. That said, her blog seems wonderful, and I’ll be reading it from here on out.
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back from the land of the geeks
Have you missed me? I’ve been absent from the blog the past few days because I went out of town for an 18th Century Studies conference. I’m pretty sure there’s nothing geekier than an 18th Century Studies conference, except maybe a 17th Century Studies conference. I’m not an 18th Century Studies expert, or even a student in the field really, but I took a class on 18th Century Women Writers last term and had the final paper I wrote (on the political critique in Aphra Behn’s late 1600s play The Rover) accepted to this conference. I figured at the very least, presenting a paper at an academic conference could be a nice addition to my resume should I ever take the plunge and go from non-degree grad student to real grad student. In fact, for most of the weekend, I had to tell people, when asked about my program, that I’m a fake grad student, not a real MA candidate. By the end of the weekend, I had pretty much realized that becoming a real grad student is probably inevitable.
See, I got a BA in English and Political Science and then had no idea what I wanted to do with myself. This was actually somewhat convenient, as Jon had finished med school and we had to move to wherever he matched for residency– not leaving me many options even if I had been sure of a graduate program I was interested in pursuing. And often times, I’ve told Jon how jealous I am of his surety that he wants to be a doctor. He’s known since at least college that he wanted, more than anything to be a doctor. Meanwhile, I’ve waffled about what I want to be when I grow up pretty much since 8th grade Career Orientation class. Whenever I whine about my lack of a life plan, Jon first suggests that I hire a life coach and then says something along the lines of, “You love literature. You’re just going to eventually have to get a PhD and teach. You know that’s what you really like more than anything.”
And he’s pretty much right. I mean, I’m taking classes just for fun. I look forward to reading great works of literature, to analyzing them in class, to having spirited conversations about them, to writing papers and receiving feedback on my work. The highlight of my week is getting to go talk about books for a couple of hours. And, if I may be immodest for a moment, I’m pretty good at it too. When one of my professors found out, at the end of the term, that I’m not a “real” graduate student, she said, “But you’re so good at it!”
Of course, my inclination toward more school is still complicated by the fact that I’m married to an MD who’s not quite through with his education. In a few months we’re moving back to Arkansas (my home state, where both of us got our educations) for him to begin a 3 year fellowship in pediatric emergency medicine. While Little Rock has the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, they do not have an MA program in English Lit. We’d only be about a 45 minute drive from Conway, home of the University of Central Arkansas, which has a pretty good MA program, and the commute would be less than what I drove my senior year of undergrad. However, thanks to living in SC for 3 years, I’d have to pay nearly twice as much as an out of state student if I wanted to start in the fall, which I’m pretty much unwilling to do considering I lived in Arkansas for 21 years before we left. Add to that the fact that I had kinda been thinking about having a baby during those 3 years, since we’d be close to all of my family (a perk because I’m not sure how much longer my grandparents will be around, and I’d love for them to know at least one of my kids, and since Jon just turned 30 and we don’t want him to be “that old dad” by waiting for too terribly long), and I’ve got a quandry on my hands. Maybe I should just wait until Jon is completely done with all of his training. Then we’d have the luxury of him making a full peds ER salary and I could probably afford tuition and childcare and go to grad school full time.
Either way, I’m pretty sure I know what I want to be when I grow up. Then I could keep reading books, keep going to conferences, keep sitting on panels trying to keep a straight face while some other scholar presents “Delving into the Muff: A Freudian Exploration of Sophia’s Handwarmer in Fielding’s Tom Jones,” keep fielding hostile questions from PhDs who resemble Con Air Nic Cage and have issues with my paper. I think it sounds like a good plan, whenever I enact it.
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I’m a two-partier
Today, I posted a link to my Facebook, encouraging friends to check out the New York Times‘ story on the Tea Party (I’m using great restraint here to type Tea Party instead of my preferred Teabagger) Movement. In linking to the piece, I wrote, “An interesting piece. I’m still hoping that these people won’t destroy the Republican party (I think we need two functional parties for democracy to function) or the country.” A friend (whom I respect! and like!) left this comment: “I’ve got to disagree with you. I’m with Evan Bayh: the 2 party partisan system is killing America. Most people don’t adhere 100% to one side or another. There is definitely room for a Centrist movement.” Which is when I took to my blog to explain why I think a two-party system is crucial to the American way of government, and life. (I am leaving aside the part about how I think Evan Bayh is a hypocrite, a dirty rotten traitor, a selfish slimebag, and utterly in the pocket of big companies like Wellpoint.)
I got my college degree in both English and Political Science. As such, I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to take comparative government. It was in this class that I learned that our Founders (look at me! talking about the Founders like a Tea Partier! let me fetch my tricorn hat!) very deliberately chose a two-party system. More than anything, the Founders feared tyranny, and they believed that factionalism (we might say extremism) was the major cause of tyranny. In crafting a two party system in which the majority rules, our Founders created a system that would tend toward centrism. Each party would have to play toward the middle in order to secure the majority they needed to govern. In trying to secure a majority of voters, each party would have to tend toward moderation.
In contrast, look at governments that have more than two parties. I seem to remember my professor (himself a conservatve/libertarian, and yet my favorite in college) pointing at Italy as a particularly grievous example of the problem of more-than-two-party systems. In these systems, any party that can secure a bare minimum of votes is rewarded with seats in the legislature. This means that each party plays to its own small audience, and their specific needs and beliefs, in order to win their votes. If they don’t, those voters can simply choose from among a plethora of possible parties. In turn, with each party that can secure a bare minimum of votes being rewarded with seats, multiple parties have to form coalitions in order to govern– a coalition will elect the leader of the legislature and decide on committee heads, for example. While these coalitions might sound great in theory, they have a tendency to fall apart regularly, with each party holding the whole process hostage to get what they want, or leaving the coalition and forcing new elections if they don’t. Multi-party systems lead to every party playing toward the fringes, NOT centrism.
So this is why I believe a two-party system is the only way to centrism and moderation. I may not always personally LIKE the slow, incremental, glacial pace of change that results from a two party system, but it’s nothing compared to the gridlock that results in systems with more parties. The only reason I’d vote third-party is to teach my own party a lesson. And here’s where I break faith with the folks waving tea bags: I think that the current Democratic party is pretty darn centrist. Most of the proposals of the dreaded health care reform package, for example, are things Republicans were proposing back in the Clinton years. If anything, I find the Democratic party too moderate, and might consider voting Green Party in order to teach them a lesson about abandoning their Progressive base.
(I feel like I just took a test in one of Dr. Gitz’s classes. Give me an A!)
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snow in the southland
Last night Charleston got some snow. It’s pretty much the first snow that’s “stuck” in like 20 years. Even though we’ve seen PLENTY of snow in my husband’s home state of Colorado, we were giddy and excited like kids. I thought I’d share some photos.
erniebufflo's south & west kitchen 