Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.
Miss Piggy (from March issue of Real Simple magazine)
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Blog Project Day 93: “This ish is cray”
All I have to say about this video by Annabelle Quezada is… You’re welcome!
{Thanks to jb for pointing this out to moi.)
Blog Project Day 92: Cooking with both hands
The theme of this weekend has been adventures in food. Yesterday I tried out the balsamic vinaigrette recipe from my new cookbook Appetite for Reduction by Isa Chandra Moskovitz, and tonight for dinner I’ve just finished making Isa’s brussell sprouts and potato hash (which is delicious but only an occasional dish since it’ll require way too much cleaning of the Le Creuset). I also messed with a banana muffin substituting apple sauce for oil (which I’ve done before) and substituting almond milk for regular milk (yikes!). Those are coming out of the oven in about 3 minutes and I’m not quite sure what to expect.*
I’m not a natural born cook, and I wasn’t one of those women who learned from my mom. Both my mom and my grandmother preferred that my sister and I were far from the kitchen when they were cooking. I think for both of them, it was the time of day when they felt they could have the most peace. In college I survived on the dining hall, but after college, I either hoped my roommate cooked, ate out, or—most of the time—survived on a diet of Walker’s shortbread and Coke if I was working at the theater or a giant cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee and a coffee roll if I was in rehearsal for a show. It wasn’t until I joined Weight Watchers for the first time when I lived in Chicago that I finally cracked the spine on a cookbook.
I’ll never be a gourmet cook but I have picked up enough tricks over the past decade that I can feed myself even without a cookbook nearby. And, of course, I love the adventure of trying a new recipe, especially since the rule in my home is that if it comes out like crap, it goes in the trash and you order a pizza!
When did you all learn to cook? Favorite recipes? And when are y’all coming over for dinner?
* The muffins are good. I cut down the amount of sugar, and I think I might use the full amount next time (3/4 cup) or add another banana. But they’re moist but not goopy, and don’t taste like “they’re good for you” at all. And for my Weight Watcher friends, I haven’t checked the points yet, but since the original recipe was about 5 points each, I’m guessing it’s about the same or slightly less with my substitutions.
Blog Project Day 91: Apple pie in the sky hopes…for April
March may not have gone so well in terms of what I thought I might accomplish, but I have high hopes for the coming month. Here are 5 things I intend to get done in April:
1. Decide on a paint color for the wall behind my bed
2. Sort out all the books I know I’ll probably not get around to reading and cart them off to the thrift store
3. Bake at least one batch of vegan muffins
4. Check off 3 things on my Things to Do in 2012 list (that are in addition to any overlaps on this list)
5. Sign up for a class of some kind—swimming or letterpress or something
What are your plans for April?
Blog Project Day 90: A few words on March…
[INSERT REALLY COOL PHOTO THAT I SHOULD HAVE TAKEN HERE]
So I was all set to write a blog post on what I accomplished on my March to-do list….then I looked at the list and realized I hadn’t actually accomplished a dang thing. Sigh… If you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor, let’s just say March came in like a lion and just steam-rolled right over me. But on the upside, Mrs. Woolf and I are back together (I’m reading the bio by night and The Years during the day, well, when I’m not reading shelter porn), I instituted a monthly breakfast club with some of my dear work friends, I paid off two credit card bills, and as of tomorrow I will join Pyramid Atlantic thereby supporting another local arts organization. Oh yeah, and did I mention I also got my photo in Bethesda magzazine?
Okay April….bring it on!
Beauty is in the eye of t…
Blog Project Day 88: Taking aim at the elephant in the room
It’s hard, if not impossible, to not think about race and racism these days. Between the Trayvon Martin murder and the story about the racist tweets from people (teens?!) who saw The Hunger Games film, you truly have to have not just your head but your entire body buried in the sand not to realize that the whole post-racial society thing is a nice dream but not yet a reality.
I read yet another story yesterday: a black woman went to the emergency room with what may have been a sprained ankle. For unknown reasons the staff refused to treat her even though she was in considerable pain. (I’m unclear if she actually received any type of examination at all beyond the triage desk.) The hospital staff called the cops on her and had her taken into custody for trespassing. She was in so much pain that she couldn’t walk, so the cops carried her to the squad car and then deposited her on the floor of the jail cell. She died approximately 10 minutes later from what turned out to be a series of embolisms in her legs.*
The writer of the story posited that the hospital staff and the police treated the woman the way they did because she was black. In the comments many people came to the same conclusion the writer did, but there were some who rather indignantly wanted to know, “Why does everything have to be about race?” And while I agree that the hospital and police responses were probably driven in part by the woman’s perceived socioeconomic status, it’s entirely disingenous to not read race as a factor as well.
I’ve been pondering those comments, and wondering how on earth anyone who was obviously capable of reading and comprehending a news story could possibly doubt the racism that was at play not just in this woman’s case, but in the Trayvon Martin case, in the Troy Davis case, in Arizona’s curriculum decisions, in thousands of situations involving people of color that take place all over the country every day.
One conclusion that I’ve come to is that white people are just scared to talk about racism. They’re scared to be open about any of their own prejudices. And until we can actually have a discussion, get through the defensiveness, the denials, the “Well, he may be racist, but I have black friends,” racism will continue to be alive and well. You can’t slay the dragon if you refuse to acknowledge it exists.
I also think that many white people simply don’t know what racism is. They’re not burning crosses, or wearing white hoods, or using racial epithets, so they’re not racist. Yes, racism is all of those things. But it’s also my colleague demanding to know what the editorial content of Essence is like without first asking me if I actually read Essence (which I don’t). It’s standing at the office Christmas party and being able to count all the people of color in your mid-sized corporation on one hand. It’s having no close friends of color at all in your life and not seeing that as problematic.
Talking about race is messy, it’s disruptive, it’s painful. And someone’s feelings are going to get hurt on all sides. But I’d rather go through that and persevere till we come out the other side than have to read one more news story about one more mother’s child being trampled to death by the weight of the elephant in the room.
* I’ve only seen one news report on this story, so please chime in if you have more info.
Blog Project Day 87: Sometimes a girl’s just gotta whinge…
So, you’ll be delighted to know that Mrs. Woolf and I are finally back together. (Though I confess I almost tossed her over to dally with J.D. and Franny and Zooey but let’s just keep that between us.) We’ve traveled through Greece, lost her brother Thoby, and it turns out she may have been a lesbian as opposed to frigid, which was a bit of a surprise to me. (Yes, yes, I know she was in love with Vita S-W, but Colette was in love with lots of women and definitely wasn’t a lesbian.)
It was somewhat prescient that one of the chapters I read last night was about Mrs. Woolf’s difficulty in adjusting to her sister Vanessa’s marriage and subsequent children. On the way home, I was thinking about the fact that as a single childless woman, there are great swathes of my friends’ lives that I’m left out of. Nobody invites the singleton non-mommy to their kid’s birthday party (unless you’re related by blood) even though said singleton non-mommy adores your kid (or kids) and would love nothing better than to watch your new three-year-old despoil and desport himself with cake. I have other friends who I saw more when we lived thousands of miles apart than I do now when they’re just a couple of Metro stops away. But now they have a daughter—the most gorgeous, adorable kid I might add—so though they’re happy to see me when we sometimes bump into each other on the street, I’m no longer on the speed dial invite list for parties and such.
I think probably the hardest part is that I don’t really have anyone to talk about this. Most of my friends who are the same age and don’t have kids are purposely child-free. And not only does it feel a little too much like whining when I talk to my married-with-kids friends, but then you open the door to the platitudes when you really just want something to say, “Yeah, I know it sucks that it hasn’t worked out like that for you.” (And yes, I do feel like a whiner even as I type this post.)
So there’s no denouement or epiphany tonight, just the confession that as much as I appreciate all the benefits of singleton, some days I’m a little too aware of what I don’t have and don’t get to be part of.
Blog Project Day 85: The Hunger Games—fiction or fact?
The Hunger Games‘ Katniss Everdeen as drawn by Katherine Marshall
After seeing The Hunger Games (and reading the trilogy), I can’t help but wonder how many people see the movie or read the novels as pure fiction. “Why that could never happen today,” or “Well, that couldn’t happen here.” True, as far as I know, that exact series of events has not happened, at least not yet. But all the pieces are there. State lawmakers that are offering up increasingly totalitarian legislation here in U.S. The ever-growing chasm between the middle class and the wealthy, not to mention those who are living at or near the poverty line. The exponential glamorization of violence without consequence. And not to mention that there are places in the world where being a child soldier is an absolute reality. My friend Stephanie brought up the fact that the people of the Capitol went along with the government’s “solution” to quelling any future rebellions just as easy as the majority of Germans went along with Hitler’s final solution. I don’t think the Germans lined up to cheer the concentration camp transports the way the Capitol crowds cheered for the arriving tributes, but doing nothing was just as much an approval of the Reich’s plan.
As for whether or not we would publicly cheer executions, well, we’ve been doing that for centuries. Ever heard of the Romans and their gladiators? It’s interesting that in movies, these gladiators are often portrayed as men of 30 or 40, but I can’t help but wonder—given the typical life expectancy and ideas at the time of when children became adults—how many of those gladiators were barely out of their teens or in their early 20s? If you want to get a little closer to contemporary times then consider the lynching of blacks a mere six decades or so ago, when families would gather to watch, take pictures with the corpses, and even send lynching postcards to their friends. While these were not competitions per se, there was an element of sport to many of them, as victims were chased before they were trussed up and mutilated.
It’s not explicit in the movie, but in the novels, you learn that the eligible young people of the districts can sign up for tesserae, which earns them extra food but also multiplies the number of times the teen’s name is in the tribute drawing. I can’t help but think of all of the disadvantaged young people of all races who sign up for the military as a way to feed their families, make a better life for themselves, get on the other side of poverty. We’ve been at war for a long, long time now, which means, at least for the past decade, anyone who enlisted had a good chance of not only being sent to an active war zone but being sent there multiple times.
This is not a call for you to build a bomb shelter and go off the grid. Nor is it necessarily a call for you to drop everything and join the Occupy movement. It is a call, however, to stop thinking that something like the Hunger Games can’t happen. That’s exactly how it always starts.
