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better left to the pros

My hair BEFORE the incident.
My hair BEFORE the incident.

Some things, I like to say, are better left to the professionals.  Like teaching.  And doctoring.

And now, hair cutting.

I have a difficult time with getting my hair cut.  I’m pretty sure my mom trimmed my hair as a small kid, and the same lady cut my hair from the third grade until my wedding day.  I even drove home from college to have her cut m hair, because she was the only one who understood my cowlicks, my hair’s weird ways of refusing to hold both a curl and a straightening, my baby-fine texture, my scalp’s sensitivity.  She saw me through the great DIY highlighting disaster that left me with ORANGE HAIR.  We went through a lot together.

And then I moved 1000 miles away, where all our friends were also transplants, where I worked with a bunch of dudes.  How was I supposed to find a good stylist?  How would any stylist be as good as Joan?  So I went to MasterCuts and kept to simple styles.  And other women always seem shocked, but seriously, MasterCuts can give you long layers or a classic bob as well as anywhere, don’t hate.  But after a while with MasterCuts, I began to feel that trimming my hair would be easy enough for me to do myself.  Or better yet, since I can’t reach or see the back of my head very well, for Jon to do!  He can even cut a straight line better than I can!  So today we decided to try it… Continue reading “better left to the pros”

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thanks for proving my point

Come to think of it, using THIS sort of mace would probably be more satisfying. Image via Flicr user hyku.
Come to think of it, using THIS sort of mace would probably be more satisfying. Image via Flicr user hyku.

This is just a quick follow-up to yesterday’s post about men who approach women in public places.  I had a lovely day on the bus today.  This morning, the bus was very crowded.  I had to wedge in between two people in one of the few remaining empty spaces, and the space was really about half the size of a “seat.”  And yet, perhaps because it was such a gorgeous golden morning, everyone on the bus was in a good mood.  At least everyone in the first half of the bus with the two long rows of seats that face each other.  We were all chatting, one lady talking about her upcoming two weeks of vacation, another about her daughter’s first birthday, another guy about his sister’s birthday party this weekend.  I got off the bus with a smile and a spring in my step.  Even this afternoon, the bus arrived on time (something it rarely seems to do on Fridays), it wasn’t crowded, I chatted with the 2-weeks vacation lady about her plans and our busy Fridays.

And then I got off the bus.

As I was crossing an intersection, a car slowed down as it got close to me.  It was an Acura, full of “bro” looking dudes.  They were hanging out the windows of the car, waving their arms, screaming loudly at me.  It seriously startled me.  I jumped and recoiled.  I think I half expected them to throw something at me.  I have no idea what they were screaming.  It shook me up.

I have no idea why this happens to me so often.  I have no idea why these men do things like this, though my theory is that they get off on intimidating women on the street.  I think I’m going to get some mace or pepper spray for my keychain.

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shoot me to the moon, dad!

Image via Flickr user Irargerich.
Image via Flickr user Irargerich.

So apparently we bombed the moon.  I’m not sure how I feel about interplanetary acts of aggression (though I imagine Marvin the Martian is PISSED), and I’m pretty sure this scheme was cooked up by a bunch of bored nerdy pyromaniacs at NASA, perhaps late one night when they were all a little delirious.  OMGZ, I GOT IT GUYZ, LET’S EFFING BOMB THE MOON! IT WOULD BE SWEET!

All of this reminded me of another nerdy pyromaniac I know and love.

When I was a very small child, we lived in a house on Mulberry Street, a fact I have always loved because I have a soft spot for the Dr. Seuss classic To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street!  The house on Mulberry Street had a tire swing in the back yard.  I don’t have a lot of memories from those years, since we moved from that house when I was five, but I do remember the tire swing.  And I remember my dad pushing me on it.  And I remember squealing, SHOOT ME TO THE MOON, DAD!  And he’d push me sooooooooo high.  In retrospect, it was probably not all that high, but when you’re five, there seems to be a very real possibility that a tire swing really COULD launch you to the moon.  I’d hang on and squeal and giggle and close my eyes tight, waiting for the big push that might one day really launch me into space.  It was obviously a much sweeter shooting of the moon than the one that happened yesterday.

These days, I don’t spend much time on tire swings, but thanks to my dad, I do spend quite a bit of time looking at the moon.  And the stars.  My dad is a bit of an amateur astronomer, and is always calling me to tell me to go outside, IMMEDIATELY, and look at the moon.  Or Jupiter.  Or a meteor shower.  Sometimes I’m the one calling him, like I did just the other day, because the harvest moon was just too big not to get excited with someone about it.

And even though I’m far away from my family, every time I look at the moon, I remember my little sister’s favorite nursery rhyme, which she said so often my mom eventually embroidered it on a quilt for her:

I see the moon and the moon sees me,

God bless the moon and God bless me.

I recently learned another verse:

I see the moon and the moon sees me,

The moon sees the ones that I wish to see.

God bless the moon and God bless me.

God bless the ones that I wish to see.

I’m pretty sure my tire swinging, moon blessing childhood self would have been pretty freaked out that we were bombing the moon. But I’m also pretty sure that my nerdy pyromaniac dad, who loves to make me squeal, would have said, BLOW IT UP! And I would have squealed, NO, DADDY NO! DON’T BLOW UP THE MOON! And then we’d have quite a giggle.

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wish i could pass this out like candy

Shapely Prose has a particularly wonderful guest post up by someone with the handle Starling on the subject of men who approach women in public.  You should go read it right now. It’s seriously so good I wish I could print out about 50 copies to carry in my bus-riding-tote and hand to every man I see on the bus.  I’ve written about my experiences being harassed both waiting for and riding public transportation.  Sometimes I wish I could wear a t-shirt with the words PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE emblazoned across the chest, but it’s probably not work appropriate.

One particularly wonderful thing about this post is the way it makes clear something I’m not sure male friends or even my husband fully understand: as a female in public, I’m constantly evaluating the threat level from others.  Starling puts it this way:

The first thing you need to understand is that women are dealing with a set of challenges and concerns that are strange to you, a man. To begin with, we would rather not be killed or otherwise violently assaulted.“But wait! I don’t want that, either!”

Well, no. But do you think about it all the time? Is preventing violent assault or murder part of your daily routine, rather than merely something you do when you venture into war zones? Because, for women, it is.

Starling notes that this may sound crazy, but she sites the statistical likelihood that 1 in 6 women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime as a major cause for concern. She also notes that based on rape statistics, 1 in 60 men is a rapist, and they don’t all look like creeps. She puts it much funnier:

These rapes are not all committed by Phillip Garrido, Brian David Mitchell, or other members of the Brotherhood of Scary Hair and Homemade Religion.

In fact, most rapists don’t look like mug shots of serial killers. They look like normal guys. Maybe even like friends, or boyfriends, or coworkers, or just someone you chat with in line at the grocery store. They look like “nice guys.” And so, women in public are on their guard, looking for signs that the guy approaching them in public might be approaching them in order to do them harm, and at the same time, women are sending out signs that let those who approach them know when to back off, if the approach-er is paying attention. Continue reading “wish i could pass this out like candy”

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food rules

If I had to name the top three people who have changed my life the past few years, they’d be Rob Bell, No Impact Man/Colin Beavan, and Michael Pollan.  All have significantly shaped the way I think about my life and my choices and my raison d’etre.  This post is only about one of them.

Michael Pollan created a famous tagline: Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.

It’s the tagline for his book In Defense of Food, which I have not yet read, but hope to. The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which I have read, is excellent.

Anyway, a while back Pollan started soliciting others’ food rules in the vein of his famous maxim, and today the results of this search are presented in a slide show over at the New York Times.  I thought I’d share some of the ones that interested me, and maybe muse a little on my food rules.

Picture 1I rather agree with this one, perhaps because my father (a physician, though this is probably not a medical opinion) was a big believer in eating real butter.  He reasoned that it tastes so much better that you only eat a little of it, and the increased pleasure is worth it.  I tend to agree.  I use real butter, drink 2% milk, put actual half and half in my coffee which is sweetened with real cane sugar, and tend to like tofu best when it’s not pretending to be something else.  My one hangup is turkey bacon.  I do love real bacon, and often use it in my cooking, particularly now that I’m cooking mostly veggie food, just using the bacon for flavor.  BUT.  If eaten alone as a breakfast food, turkey bacon is my choice over real bacon most of the time.  I think it goes back to texture issues related to a childhood refusal to eat anything with actual fat attached, because I hate the gummy squishy way fat feels in my mouth.  So, turkey bacon excluded, I’m all about eating real food. Continue reading “food rules”

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CSA Charleston: mustard greens SUCCESS!

Another delicious week with our Pinckney’s Produce CSA!

DSC05643

This week we received:

  • 1 cantaloupe
  • 3 winter squash
  • 1 bunch kale
  • 3 turnips and greens (in addition to 3 large turnips left over from last week)
  • 1 bunch mustard greens
  • 5 ears corn
  • 5 tomatoes
  • lots of little okra
  • 4 large carrots
  • 4 radishes
  • 6 banana peppers
  • 1 bunch lettuce

The first night I roasted the squash, and made them into a puree, which I added to last week’s saved squash puree and made into a soup (no real recipe, I sort of made it up, but leave me a comment if you want me to detail the process).  I served the soup with a salad made from the bunch of lettuce, 1 banana pepper, 1 carrot, 1 radish, and 1 tomato, along with some No Knead Bread.  I also saved the seeds from all the squash, rinsing them and getting all the squash gunk off, and I tossed them in olive oil with some Greek seasoning and toasted them in the oven.  Never knew you could toast and eat winter squash seeds just like pumpkin seeds, but you can! They made a nice snack for a couple of days!

The next night, still smarting from last week’s mustard greens FAIL, I decided to attempt this frittata recipe.  I figured I can eat anything if it’s covered in yummy fontina cheese, and I was right.  It was delicious served with some homemade No Knead Bread toasts.  It was also a super quick meal on a night when I volunteer and don’t get home until after 7:00.  I am so happy to know that there is at least one way I will eat mustard greens, and I imagine the recipe would work well with other greens too. Continue reading “CSA Charleston: mustard greens SUCCESS!”

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it’s The Jungle out there

Image via Flickr user VirtualErn, used under Creative Commons.
Image via Flickr user VirtualErn, used under Creative Commons.

The New York Times has an investigative report out today about E. coli in our meat.  Michael Moss writes that tens of thousands of Americans are sickened by E. coli each year, most of it coming from ground beef.  Though we like to think we’ve come a long way since Upton Sinclair first exposed the dangers of the meat industry in The Jungle over 100 years ago, despite all our science and technology, we really haven’t.  In fact, Moss writes, “eating ground beef is still a gamble.”

Why ground beef?  Moss writes:

Ground beef is usually not simply a chunk of meat run through a grinder. Instead, records and interviews show, a single portion of hamburger meat is often an amalgam of various grades of meat from different parts of cows and even from different slaughterhouses. These cuts of meat are particularly vulnerable to E. coli contamination, food experts and officials say.

In particular, he highlights a tainted batch of Cargill patties. The patties in question were

made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin. The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria.

You may be shocked right now, thinking, WE EAT FOOD THAT’S BEEN SOAKED IN AMMONIA? Yep. It’s one of the things I learned while watching Food, Inc. which features scenes inside a plant where ammonia-soaked hamburger additives are made.  And yes, these additives are found in patties marked “Pure Angus.”  Tell me, which part of the Angus contains ammonia?? Continue reading “it’s The Jungle out there”

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wholeness

I haven’t done a post on the whole Roman Polanski thing, and I probably won’t be doing any sort of in-depth post on the subject, namely because so many other great writers have already said it better, and because, if you follow me on Twitter, then you already know how I feel on the subject, which is basically that: 13 year olds can’t legally consent to sex with adults, ever.  People who are intoxicated or under the influence of drugs cannot consent to sex.  If you tell someone NO and beg them to stop, you are not consenting to sex.  And whether the victim had been 13 or 30, she was under the influence, and she begged him to stop.  He PLED GUILTY.  And then he committed the additional crime of fleeing the country.  He got what’s coming to him and I hope he receives a just sentence, and I am disgusted by his defenders.

ANYWAY.  The entire jist of this is to highlight Kate Harding’s latest post on the subject, in which she ties in another rape controversy involving an adolescent girl: the filming of the movie “Hound Dog” starring then 13 year old Dakota Fanning, who appeared (fully clothed) in a rape scene.  Harding interviewed the film’s director, who ended the interview with this:

“When you rape a girl, the problem is not that you’re taking away her purity — which is what gets religious right up in arms — it’s that you’re taking away her wholeness. And trying to keep her ‘pure,’ repressing her sexuality, silencing her voice, also takes away wholeness. It’s two sides of the same coin.

“I don’t want my daughter to grow up pure,” she said. “I want her to grow up whole.”

I’ve always been rather uncomfortable with the way “we” in a societal sense talk to kids about sex, particularly those of “us” (societally speaking) who support “just say no” abstinence-only messages.  Kampmeier’s quote sums up how I feel about most experiences, sexual or otherwise.  Does it make you feel more whole? More power to ya, I will cheer you on.  Does it make you or others involved in the experience feel less whole?  That’s not something I support.

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octohhhber

I took this photo out at the beach last October. The cute little girl was a European tourist.
I took this photo out at the beach last October. The cute little girl was a European tourist.

Charleston in the summer can be pretty brutal.  The humidity in the air gets so thick you can literally see it in a haze around the moon.  Temperatures rise into the high 90s and stay there for weeks. Months.  At least we have the beach! we say.  When friends from outside the South come to visit and marvel at the oppressiveness of our summers, the way the water in the air seems to cling to every cell of exposed skin, the impossibility that it’s not somehow literally steaming what with the wet and the heat.  Oh but you should be here in October, we say.  October is the best month of the year.

Last weekend it was 88 degrees and we were out at Folly Beach.  But October was coming, sneaking up as leaves began to fall in fits and starts, one at a time from the trees.  My dog Bessie snatches this falling foliage like it’s a snack, dropping like manna from heaven, but she also enjoys eating grass and vegetation of all kinds, so shes’s a weirdo.  October was coming.

And indeed it did.  On the verrrrry last day of September, the temperature suddenly cooled off, to the point that I had to break out a cardigan to wear on my commute.  Right on schedule, October has arrived.  And it is glorious.  I feel like a Romantic poet all stirred and uplifted by the beauty of my environment.  If I weren’t such an awful poet (truly), I’d be composing sonnets on what happens as September sets and October rises like a harvest moon.  Instead I’m daydreaming about bike rides that don’t end with me flopped in a sweaty heap under the living room AC vent, the dogs licking the salt off my skin as I swat them away, laughing at their tickling tongues.  I’m thinking about oyster roasts, as they say the season is finally back in full swing.  I’m itching to go camping, maybe on the beach, maybe up in the mountains where we might actually see some fall color.  I’m wondering when is too soon to bring the boxes of sweaters down from the attic, afraid of a last gasp of summer that might try to hang on, and keep me in sundresses and flip flops. I’m eagerly anticipating what fall goodies will be showing up in our CSA box, though slightly worried it might be an endless stream of mustard greens and beets.  I’m watching for my tan, accumulated over beach weekends since April, to start to fade.  I’m looking forward to October.

Ohhhh, October is here.

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CSA Charleston: the great mustard greens FAIL, food, and faith

All the goodies we got this week!
All the goodies we got this week!

As you can see, we got another cornucopia this week.  To break it down:

  • 1 watermelon
  • 1 cantaloupe
  • 4 tomatoes
  • 1 bunch greens (more on this in a minute)
  • 3 winter squash
  • 5 ears corn
  • 6 banana peppers
  • 1 small eggplant
  • 3 turnips with greens

Right off the bat, I have to confess that not only have I STILL not used last week’s beets, but this week’s turnips didn’t get used either.  The watermelon was enjoyed as a beach-day snack, and the cantaloupe is sliced and in a box in the fridge for snackies.  The tomatoes, banana peppers, and corn were grilled and eaten with steak with guests Saturday night. The squash was roasted and pureed and was made into soup along with the squash we received in our box yesterday (that box will be the subject of next week’s post).

Which leaves the greens.  I thought they were just greens, like kale or something, so I made some salmon and sauteed the greens with garlic and olive oil, for a little yummy wilted greens action.  Internet, I took ONE BITE.  My nose started to burn, my throat refused to swallow.  I had to spit them out.  It turns out they were MUSTARD greens, which, as a blogger friend helpfully informed me, turn into mustard gas, that great WWI weapon.  They were inedible.  I will have to do some research to figure out what to do with them, because we got more in the next week’s box.

Now that I’ve described the contents of the box and what we did with it all, I thought I’d share a little more about how I feel about this little experiment in eating. Continue reading “CSA Charleston: the great mustard greens FAIL, food, and faith”