…is puppies in your cup!
case of the mondays
This is just a quick update to say there probably won’t be an update until after Wednesday. I have my first big bad grad school assignment due Wednesday, and I have to work, and we have family in town until tomorrow. Catch ya on Thursday!
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is it beer goggles?
I just read a post from Salon’s Broadsheet about a UK poll that found most respondents were having most of their sex while under the influence of alcohol, and the respondents said they prefer it that way. Broadsheet blogger Mary Elizabeth Williams mentions that a writer for the Independent suggested these women prefer sex the influence (SWI?) because of poor body image, and Williams also notes that we should consider the poll’s source, a feminine hygiene company. While I’d be inclined to agree that the type of women who find crotchular deodorants necessary for purchase may also have a tendency toward low self esteem in other areas, I sort of wonder if there isn’t another explanation.
At least in my observations of fellow young women, alcohol isn’t just a form of liquid courage to give us the confidence to get naked and down to business. It’s also a liquid excuse. Many young women pretend to be drunker than they really are as an excuse for doing things they wanted to do anyway. I’ve seen friends act completely wasted after one beer, because they seem to think drunk girls can get away with behavior “good girls” can’t. If you can say “but I was soooooo drunk,” you can excuse hooking up with a guy your friends (or you, by the light of day) disapprove of. In a society where good girls are supposed to say no to sex, alcohol becomes a handy scapegoat for our behavior.
I’m not saying I approve of excusing behavior by way of alcohol, first, because I think that we should be allowed to feel confident in our sexual choices, and to own them as proudly as we would stone cold sober, but second, because I’m wary of the level of consent anyone who is legally intoxicated can give. In many states, someone who is legally intoxicated cannot legally consent to sex, and I think men AND women should try to avoid having sex with drunk people to avoid thorny issues of consent-confusion.
Williams writes:
Lots of women drink. Lots of women have sex. Does it automatically follow that women need to drink to have sex? And is imbibing before bed the mark of a self-loather “looking for a boost in self-esteem when it comes to bedroom antics,” as Lakeland says, or simply an uninhibited sensualist?
I’d add that some of them are simply looking for an excuse for “bad girl” behavior. And either way, though I’m a fan of both moderate drinking AND sex, I’d encourage people who mix sex and drinking to make sure their partner is still capable of clear and enthusiastic consent.
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ta tas, boobies, WHAT?
October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and it’s just around the corner. Which means pink be-ribboned items are popping up everywhere and everyone is looking for donations for their Relay for Life teams. I don’t have anything against that. But last night, walking through the academic building where I have class, I saw all sorts of flyers stuck on every classroom door imploring me to SAVE THE BOOBIES! This immediately struck me the wrong way. “Save the boobies? I thought we were trying to save women’s lives.” I said to a classmate as we both noticed the signs. “Ugh, have you seen the save the ta-tas bumper stickers?” she asked, “Usually they’re on cars driven by women!”
Whatever happened to, y’know, saving WOMEN? Sometimes, in the great big battle against the evil that is cancer, breasts are a casualty, but WOMEN can be saved. And aren’t they more important than the sum of two of their body parts?
I got home and ranted about this weird ad campaign to my husband, and later hopped online to find out that the ever-awesome Kate Harding had just written about the exact same thing on Jezebel. She put it quite clearly and succinctly:
Dead human beings of the female persuasion = meh. Lost tits = crisis!
I have watched family members and friends suffer the ravages of breast cancer. And as they braved chemo and radiation and surgery, I can tell ya, they weren’t just fighting for their boobs, they were fighting for their LIVES. Sometimes, mastectomies took their breasts, but they kept on fighting. And when we try to get others to join the fight against breast cancer, we shouldn’t trivialize their struggles and pain and losses by making it all about boobies. Breasts are nice and all, but WOMEN are the ones we’re fighting to save.
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CSA: Charleston, in a pickle
Recently, I tried to search WordPress for “CSA” and got nuthin’. So, in an effort to create something other people can find when looking for information about Community Supported Agriculture, as well as a desire to document our experience, I figured I’d start doing a weekly post about what we got in our CSA box and what we did with all of it. This is what we got this week: 
To break that down that’s:
- 3 turnips, with greens
- 1 bunch kale
- 4 beets
- 8 cucumbers
- 4 zucchini
- 4 small green peppers
- 4 small ears corn
- 2 large winter squash
- 4 Roma tomatoes
- 3 “decorative pumpkins”
Each week when we get a box, I lay everything out on the kitchen table, determine what is preserveable and what will need to be eaten within the week, and what we can actually manage to eat in a week. Looking at this spread, I decided the corn and zucchini could be frozen for later. I usually shred the zucchini and freeze it in bags in quantities conducive to zucchini bread. The corn just gets shucked and frozen whole in bags as well. I also decided to make spicy refrigerator pickles with the cucumbers, which is super easy and something I just throw together on the day we receive our produce. Our fridge is slowly filling up with yogurt tubs of pickles, but they are SO GOOD! Continue reading “CSA: Charleston, in a pickle”
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germ theory
I work at a public university, and if there’s anything possibly spreading faster than swine flu around here, it’s swine flu HYSTERIA. I receive at least one email memo per day about H1N1. Hand sanitizer dispensers have popped up on campus everywhere I turn. Signs are posted in the bathrooms warning us to wash our hands and not touch our faces and stay home if we feel sick. Academic Affairs has been flipping out about revising the attendance policies because of the rash of H1N1 sufferers. The student paper seems to be doing an ongoing series wherein they update us with the total number of confirmed cases in large font headline on the front page each week.
And as the toll of the infected climbs higher and higher, I can’t help but feel like we’re postponing the inevitable. It’s like I’m just sitting here in my office, waiting for a typhoid Mary to come in and deliver the sickness.
And it got me to thinking… maybe they should just lock us all, sick or not, in the gym until everyone is sick. Then they could close campus for a week, let everyone get it over with, and then we could all get on with our lives.
Now, this plan might be entirely insane, and I am NOT a medical professional or epidemiologist or anything of the sort. But to me it makes a certain amount of sense– I am more and more convinced that by the time our doses of the vaccine arrive, half the campus will already be sick.
In the meantime, I use the sanitizer whenever I walk past it, and I’m planning to get the vaccine if I can.
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does racism have anything to do with it?
Yesterday, I wrote about what I believe is willful ignorance on the part of some of the loudest and most visible opponents of President Obama and his agenda. I asked why so many people choose to believe the most terrible things, things which could be disproven by means of a simple internet search. I wondered why people who have heard the truth explained to them over and over again still refuse to believe it. Then Jimmy Carter went and offered an explanation: racism. And the whole country flipped out.
In an interview, former president Carter said,
I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he’s African American…And I think it’s bubbled up to the surface because of the belief among many white people, not just in the south but around the country, that African Americans are not qualified to lead this great country.
And you know what? I agree with him. Continue reading “does racism have anything to do with it?”
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dunces
A friend posted the following as her Facebook status this morning:
“When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” – Jonathan Swift
And, while I’m less of a Jonathan Swift fan since studying “A Ladies Dressing Room” in my 18th Century Women Writers class, Swift’s line just got me thinking of something I’ve been mulling over as I watch the people protesting against health care, and, seemingly, Obama’s presidency and entire agenda. These are the dunces. And I don’t just mean the people waving signs. I’m talking all the way up to Joe Wilson, who screamed “you lie!” after a statement which was in fact A FACT, which I pointed out in a previous post. These people seem, in large part to be afraid of a monster in the closet which isn’t there. And yet they keep insisting it is, even after “dad”, whether he take the form of Politifact or the president, has opened the door, pushed back the clothes, and shined a flashlight in the corner to assure us that there is really nothing to fear.
And I’m sure some of my readers are already irked that I used the title dunces in reference to protesters. I’m not saying that ALL people who oppose health care reform are stupid or ignorant or dunces. I’m not even sure most of them are. But a large, large number of people seem to be moving into the willful ignorance category. What else can you call it when people insist on believing scary myths, even when confronted over and over again with the truth? When the truth is just one Google search away? When organizations like FactCheck.org and PolitiFact have read the entire health care bill and are handily debunking myths and distortions from BOTH sides (seriously, at the time of writing this, PolitiFact’s front page features statements from Obama and Howard Dean which fall on the wrong end of the truth-o-meter)? I mention the evenhandedness of PolitiFact for a reason: many love to talk about how the media, all of it, everywhere, with the exception of Fox News, is biased. Clearly there are sites out there, like PolitiFact, which are taking care to monitor the statements of people on both sides of the political spectrum. There’s really no excuse for believing or perpetuating easily-disproved lies.
One such example is the “death panels” trope, the idea that “Obama wants to pull the plug on grandma,” when in fact, the section of the bill Sarah Palin and others were attacking were about empowering patients like grandma to make their end-of-life desires known, so that the patient’s wishes would be followed in those times, rather than doctors or family members or anyone else deciding how a patient should die (not to mention when!). But through the fun-house-mirror of the opposition, empowered patients becomes government bureaucrats telling people what to do. And despite vigorous debunkings of this myth, it persists! Here’s some photographic evidence of the persistence of this lie, from last Saturday’s Tea Party Protest in Washington DC:
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CSA:Charleston
We’re not quite as good looking or well lit as CSI:Miami, but CSA:Charleston is a very colorful, sometimes frightening, often entertaining experience. Of course, by CSA:Charleston, I mean our recent adventures in Community Supported Agriculture.
After seeing Food, Inc., I mentioned that my husband and I could no longer ignore what we’d known for a while: we needed to radically change the way we eat. Within a week, Jon had signed us up for a CSA share from Pinkney’s Produce, we had vowed to eat MUCH less meat, and we started to think about what our new, more sustainable food life might look like.
Not too long after that, our first box of produce was ready to be picked up at the Glass Onion. Here’s where I should mention that my husband? He signed us up for a family-sized share, because it was a better deal (about $30 per week). So that first box of produce? It was ginormous. You can see pictured above a typical spread from our CSA, meant to feed us for one week, but really enough to feed us for like 3 weeks. And we’ve now been receiving these huge boxes for 3 weeks. Continue reading “CSA:Charleston”
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remembrance
8 years ago two towers fell and it seemed the entire world came crashing down. 2,751 innocent people lost their lives, and millions more of us lost our innocence.
I was a junior in high school, sitting in chemistry class, when someone ran into the room and told our teacher, Dr. Cravy, to turn on the tv, because our country was being attacked. The bell rang and we went to our next class, for me AP US History with Mr. Quattlebaum. He already had the tv on. I saw the second tower hit on live tv. We all sat, stunned. Dazed, shocked, and saddened, we watched the coverage all day long. We saw ash raining down on a city, we saw smoke rising into the sky, we saw our nation’s illusions going up in smoke, because we weren’t so safe as we thought we were, things that happened to other people in faraway places, like Israel, were happening to us. Here.
During my journalism class, just before lunch, there came an announcement over the intercom. Our school had received a bomb threat and were to report to the football stadium and await further instructions. A fearful day got even more terrifying as what was happening in New York and Pennsylvania and D.C. became connected to our small town. We sat in the bleachers, oddly quiet for a group of high school students, because so many of us just didn’t know what to say. Ironically, construction was underway on a nearby highway, and they were blasting that morning. When we heard the blast, we were sure our school was being blown up. We screamed and ducked and covered. We heard a second blast. Soon the principal received a call on her cell phone and announced via a bullhorn that the explosions were on the highway, not our campus. A little later we received the all clear from the bomb squad and returned to our hallways. Despite the all-clear, it looked like a bomb had gone off. They had opened and searched all of our lockers, and the doors hung agape, our things scattered onto the floor. School was dismissed early and I honestly can’t even remember how I got home.
That night, I watched with my family in stunned horror. The images of people jumping from windows to escape the fires inside reappeared in nightmares for many weeks. We kept watching every day after, looking for an explanation. A why. I’m not sure we’ll ever understand that. Somehow I managed not to cry until the news came that Daniel Pearl, the American journalist whose story I followed so closely because at the time he held my dream job, foreign correspondent, had been beheaded by his terrorist captors. As those images flashed upon the screen, I, a 16-year-old, collapsed into my mother’s lap and sobbed into her shoulder as she stroked my hair. I wept for my country. I wept for the people who lost their lives in planes and sky scrapers and the Pentagon. I wept for Daniel Pearl. And I wept for myself, because I could see that my innocence was over.
I don’t pretend that I have even the slightest understanding of that day 8 years ago. It was not my city. It was not my building. It was not my mother or sister or friend. But it was my country, and I and it will remain forever changed.
On this day, I pray for those who lost their lives, and for those who loved them. On this day, I pray for those who, as a result, fought and died on foreign soil, and for all those who loved them. On this day, I pray for my nation, that we may lead the way for peace in the world. On this day, I pray for those who are still innocent, who did not see that horrible day, that their lives may never know that kind of tragedy.
erniebufflo's south & west kitchen 
