I work at a university and classes start back this week, which means I’ll be spending most of my work time actually working– helping new adjuncts figure out their email, overriding students into full classes, assigning lockers, and generally telling everyone in the department to please take a deep breath and calm down. I’m also taking a class this fall and will be starting back to school myself for the first time in three years. Then we’re going to NYC this weekend for my husband’s birthday. And then I have jury duty next week, so who knows what that will be like. Basically posting will be lighter than usual for the next two weeks.
In the mean time, if YOU need to take a deep breath and calm down, I recommend looking at this picture of the Angel Oak. It’s a 1500 year old tree, the oldest living thing East of the Rocky Mountains, and I finally got to see it last week. I should perhaps be ashamed, but it sort of reminded me of the Whomping Willow, though it did not whomp us.
As I got on the bus, they giggled behind a Route 30 map. They wondered where they had gotten on, which stop was that? How would they know when they were supposed to get off? What if the driver didn’t stop? Should they ask the driver? Should they not? Aren’t these seats itchy? Doesn’t it feel like it’s giving you a rash?
It didn’t take me long to recognize them. They were me, about six years ago. Two new college roommates, who barely knew a soul and had just set up camp together in a tiny room on a big campus in a strange new city. They were clinging to each other and thinking they’d be best friends, not anticipating Cold Wars of attrition over who’d finally take out the trash, or that perhaps one of them would have an affinity for Jock Jamz while the other preferred Indie Rock, or that one might be nocturnal, and the other, well, normal. (OK, so I’m projecting, my first college roommate didn’t work out so well!)
I wondered if they’d been having scavenger hunts and raffles. If they’d endured an awkward sex talk with a dean. If they’d identified a cute boy that they thought they might like to date, having no idea that by the end of the next year he’d be a best friend, but more interested in dating men. (OK, so that happened to me too.) I wondered if there had been awkward name games. If they’d been to that first party yet, the one where they tested those mom-will-never-know-limits. I wondered if they’d just spent the summer meeting their true love, now left wondering what would happen next. I wondered if they were just SURE of their major, only to later change it three times. I wondered if they had any idea what was ahead of them.
Of course they didn’t.
But they had each other, they had a map, they were determined to make their way to Target, and they’d get there together. I helped them figure out where they’d get off, and I went back to my reading, eavesdropping on their conversation, smiling, realizing what was only six years ago for me already seems more than a lifetime ago.
Last night, while waiting for dinner to finish simmering, I flipped open this week’s issue of the Charleston City Paper, our local alt-weekly. This issue is the annual “welcome back college kids” issue, with advice on cheap eats, good places to go for dates, and ways to spruce up dorm rooms. Basically all kinds of great Charleston tips that I can appreciate even though I’m not a college student any more, because I’m on a tight budget. As I turned the page after reading a piece on local thrift stores, I saw this ad:
I could have applauded.
See, so often PSAs about rape and sexual assault focus on the materials in the first part of the ad, the part that is aimed toward young women. The part that says, don’t wear that, don’t drink this, don’t go to these places, don’t be out after this hour, don’t hang out with these people. The feminist in me tends to think that the culture of fear we instill in our young women serves to help keep them under control. Just thinking about it makes me want to crank up No Doubt’s “Just a Girl” and bop along with my teen idol Gwen. “Don’t you think I know exactly where I stand? This world is forcin’ me to hold your hand!” (Seriously, I wonder how many other 20-30 year olds can point to that song as a major source of their feminist awakening.) Continue reading “finally, a decent PSA”
How a CSA works: based on a seasonal commitment, community members pre-pay for shares of the seasons’ harvest. Members then receive weekly, a box of fresh vegetables. This method assures a variety of products picked at the peak of ripeness and flavor and delivered to a convenient location in your neighborhood.
Conveniently for us, our pickup point will be at one of our favorite restaurants right around the corner from our house, where we like to buy our local eggs.
Our first box of goodies will arrive next week, and I’m pretty excited. This will mean that I can’t just eat whatever I want, but will have to plan my meals based on what is seasonal. In many ways, this will be familiar to me, as I grew up eating fresh, home-grown produce from my family’s garden, helping my mom can the extras, and enjoying what each season had to offer. I expect that I’ll be sharing further about our new little eating experiment as we go along, and I encourage you to check out CSAs wherever you are.
This lady makes it look sort of fun...Image via the Google LIFE photo archive.
I’m married to a pediatrician. This means he really likes kids. This means he spends a lot of time around kids. This means that he spends a lot of time giving people advice ABOUT kids. This means at some point he needs to have a kid so he can test out for himself all the stuff he spends his days telling people about kids. This means at some point I need to have a kid.
And for a long time, this has pretty much been my line on the subject: “Yeah, I guess at some point I need to have a kid so Jon will know what he’s talking about!” (This is mostly a joke– he’s a great doctor, and most doctors spend their days treating things with which they have no experience. We don’t require oncologists to have had cancer, and most women are ok with male gynecologists, even if those men don’t really know what it’s like to possess a uterus, ovaries, or vagina.)
My other line on the subject has been that I won’t have a kid while my husband is a resident, working 80 hours per week, because “I didn’t get married just so I could be a single mom.” But we’re into our final year of residency, so that line won’t work for much longer.
Add to this that my husband is about to have a milestone birthday and is currently working in the nursery, surrounded by adorable babies and happy families, and you’ve got a clock ticking. I’m not even sure it’s a biological clock, but rather, some sort of societal clock that expects certain things to happen at certain times, particularly in the South and in the Christian culture in which we operate. Continue reading “maybe baby”
I probably don’t need to tell you that I’m deeply interested in the health reform debate. And lately I’ve noticed that the new buzz is all about “co-ops.” Before I jump in, this is what *I* think of every time I hear the word co-op:
Now that you’ve got that stuck in your head for the rest of the day, on to health care co-ops, which somehow seem way less fun than a community garden filled with puppets. The co-op plan has been presented as some sort of alternative to a public health insurance plan. The thing is, as Ezra Klein has pointed out, co-ops solve a POLITICAL problem, but not our actual health care problems. Ezra writes:
To put it bluntly, the co-op does not solve a policy problem so much as it solves a political problem. That political problem was, “How do you finesse a compromise on the public option?”
You could imagine a co-op proposal that actually offered a meaningful alternative to private insurers. Some months ago, Conrad, alongside public plan supporter Chuck Schumer, seemed to be edging in that direction. But I haven’t heard anything similarly encouraging since then. The co-op is now a favored alternative for Republicans who don’t agree that the profit motive is a problem in health insurance and who don’t agree that single-payer or Medicare-for-All represents an appealing alternative to the current situation. Given that constituency, it’s not likely to satisfy people who have the opposite perspective on all of those questions.
the co-op idea is so ill defined that no one knows exactly what it would look like or how effectively it would compete with commercial insurers.
As far as I can tell, every one agrees that not enough people are covered by our current health care system, costs are too high for the level of care received, and insurers are ill-inclined to listen to their policy-holders’ concerns or actually cover their care because they care only about profit and face very little to no competition for their market share. Solving this problem means creating an alternative, and it seems the co-op idea is about creating pools of people, much like the workforces of large companies which provide group insurance plans, to purchase group care from private insurers. This sounds like a half-assed, complicated, and expensive way to achieve exactly what a public insurance plan would achieve, but a public plan would achieve it with much lower costs (Kent Conrad, who proposed the co-op, says it is not a plan that would lower costs), with the added benefit of creating COMPETITION for private insurers, rather than just handing them more individuals paying premiums that add to their bottom line.
And would the co-op plan really solve the political problem with the public option, namely that Republicans and “Blue Dogs” say they won’t support it? Not likely. Steve Benen of The Washington Monthly‘s Political Animal blog notes that Republicans are already rebuffing the co-op plan as well, not to mention, “Republicans don’t support health care reform. Weakening the bill and scuttling good ideas to garner their support doesn’t make sense, since they fully intend to vote against literally any bill.”
I guess my major thought is, if you agree that insurers are a major part of the problem, if you agree that not enough people are covered, if you agree that we need to create some sort of alternative way to give people health coverage, wouldn’t you want to support the means of doing so that is most efficient, covers the most people, and cuts costs the most? That method is the public insurance option.
UPDATED TO ADD: This post can now also be tagged “Annals of South Carolinian Ridiculousness” because of good ole Sen. Jim DeMint(ed). DeMint apparently can’t tell the difference between a co-op and a public insurance plan:
Whatever they call it Neil, this is a government takeover. They may try to call it a co-op. They can call it a public option, but you know they’re all on record saying they want a single payer government system, so any Republican now that helps them pass a bill is helping them pass a government takeover of health care.
All the more reason to scrap this stupid co-op idea and go with REAL reform which includes a public option. I guess this means that DeMint won’t be taking to heart the letter I wrote to him last night expressing my wish for a public option.
I consider myself pretty well informed about food issues. My upbringing was decidedly unconventional concerning food, though I didn’t really know it until I went to college. My parents were rather prolific gardeners, growing most of our produce organically, though at the time I never really knew what “organic” meant. We had our own chickens from whom we gathered our eggs. We even briefly raised our own pig. The first taste I ever got of a frozen vegetable was in a cafeteria, and no lie, I called my mom to ask her why the green beans there didn’t taste right. She laughed at me, perhaps realizing she’d ruined me for life. As an adult, I try to frequent the farmer’s market, or at least buy organic produce at my grocery store. I thought I was informed, making wise choices, doing what was right for my body and the planet.
I even read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. So I really thought I knew.
But there is something different about SEEING it. We saw “Food, Inc.” this weekend and afterward, as I headed off on my bike, a backpack full of reusable bags, to the grocery store, my husband asked, “What are you going to buy?” “Oh, just some veggies and some yogurt.” “Good, because I’m not sure I can eat any meat today.” We’ve decided it’s time to get serious about our food choices after watching this film. It really affected us. And I hope you will see it too.
There are just too many reasons now for me not to do the right thing in my food choices. Because I care about the way farmers are treated by big companies like Tyson and Purdue and Monsanto. Because I care about the way workers are treated by big companies like Smithfield and Pilgrim’s Pride. Because I care about the way animals are treated, all along the food chain. Because I care about the way the land and the water are treated all along the food chain. Because I care about the impact on world hunger. Because I care about the way consumers are treated by large companies and the regulators who fail to protect them. Because I care about the health of my body and my community.
Now, I have friends who are already saying things to me about how they don’t want to watch this film because they don’t want to have to change the way they eat. This shows that they already know there is something wrong with our food system. They just don’t want to put in a little more effort, maybe cut back on spending in other areas in order to be able to afford more ethical food, maybe spend less time on the couch and more time in the kitchen. But we can’t sit here with our fingers in our ears singing “La La La La La, I can’t hear you” for too much longer. Because we KNOW something has to change. Continue reading “you(r values) are what you eat”
Ah, Monday morning. It always comes too soon. Begrudgingly I forced myself out of bed, showered, dressed, and, a cup of coffee down my throat, made it out the the bus stop where I stood in the oppressive humidity wondering why I bothered to fix my hair today when the thick Southern air was just going to undo all my efforts within five minutes outside. Soon enough the bus arrived and I found an open seat in the back, near a mom with three adorable toddlers. I sat there, wondering what the sugar rush would look like when the three toddlers’ sugar rush hit them, delivered by the bottles of root beer each was clutching. I wondered why anyone would give toddlers root beer at 8 a.m. I wondered why anyone would give a toddler a root beer at all, but what do I know about parenting?
Anyway, the bus rolled along, and, sitting in the back, I heard little but the roar of the engine and the occasional DING! signalling to the driver that someone had requested a stop. Until I suddenly heard something else.
OF COURSE I CAN’T HEAR YOU, I’M ON THE F***ING BUS!
This was shouted by a man with a ponytail, wearing a baseball cap, a neon green earbud protruding from his left ear, a cell phone held up to his right. He was wearing jorts. Of course he was. One of my favorite bus ladies glared at him. I gave the back of his head my best dirty look. Didn’t he know there were root beer-drinking toddlers on this bus? Won’t someone please think of the children?
I am the kind of person who reads The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. The kind of person who watches “King Corn” and “Food, Inc.” The type of person who pays $5 for a carton of eggs because I can buy them within walking distance and they were raised locally and humanely. The type of person who gets excited about a baby eggplant in the garden. The type of person who shops at farmers’ markets and Whole Foods and Earth Fare. The type who carries around a stainless steel water bottle and uses her own bags at the store and even has a reusable wrapper for the sandwiches she packs for lunch.
I’m also the kind of person for whom health care was a major issue in the last election. The kind of person who worked very hard to elect Barack Obama precisely because I liked his health care proposals. The kind of person who cried on election night with joy and pride. The kind of person who cried on inauguration day with joy and pride. The kind of person who really doesn’t understand how so many people can act like health reform is such a surprise when it was so clearly laid out before the election, and American VOTED FOR THE GUY who proposed it.
Apparently the CEO of Whole Foods doesn’t understand that the majority of his customers are people like me.
But I knew that we (being those of us in favor of health care reform and of the mind that America supported this idea when it elected Barack Obama) might have trouble when my husband mentioned that he had read the editorial and thought the guy made some good points. So. I’m taking it upon myself to refute some of those points, because I don’t want to see this gaining any traction. The quoted portions are John Mackey, and the rest is my response. Continue reading “mr. whole foods is nearly wholly wrong”
A friend shared this image via Facebook. LOVE the guy in the striped t-shirt and his sign. So much of this could be cleared up if these folks would just get some info from someone other than Rush or Glenn or Lou or Sean. I mean, lady, we HAVE term limits. And sir, yes, we the people are the government. We the people just had an election. You lost. That doesn't mean that democracy somehow died, it just means your side lost. Try again next time.
All the protests over health care reform reminded me of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth”:
There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware (in this case, it’s the protesters with the guns)
I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down…
What a field-day for the heat
A thousand people in the street Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly say, hooray for our side…
Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
It strikes me as deeply ironic that all the hoo-ra, gun toting, macho men of the right are the ones who are just so SCARED right now. What they are afraid of, I’m not really sure, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t actually have anything to do with health care. And the fears they CLAIM are related to health care are related to things that aren’t even being proposed. No one has proposed: socialized medicine, single-payer health care, death panels, taking away your health coverage if you like what you have now, government takeover of health care, rationing of health care, deepening the federal deficit. Basically, this reform will only affect you if you are unhappy with your current insurance or currently uninsured.
It will do things like: keep your insurer from denying you care based on what they call a “preexisting condition,” keep your insurer from kicking you out of your insurance policy when you finally need real care, cut down on the amount of paperwork and haggling between you and your insurer and your health care provider, provide subsidies to people who make too much money to qualify for Medicaid but too little to secure their own private insurance, encourage more employers to provide health coverage to their workers, and raise the income standards so more people can qualify for Medicaid.
I’m really hoping we get a public option, though it’s looking less likely, but even if we did, it’s an option, a government run insurance program exactly like something we already have now: the health insurance the government provides to federal employees. Far from destroying the free market, this might actually help CREATE a free market, by injecting some competition into an industry that is increasingly made up of monopolies. And it would be OPTIONAL.
When you lay the actual proposals bare, there’s very little room for paranoia and fear. But like the song goes, paranoia strikes deep.
As an update to 
But there is something different about SEEING it. We saw “
erniebufflo's south & west kitchen 