03
Sep
2010
Kameron Hurley
“You pack the guns. I’ll make the pancakes.”
- Sarah Conner, The Sarah Conner Chronicles
01
Sep
2010
Having a Baby…
Me: Just one more push! We’ve just got one more!
Steph: YOU SAID THAT THE LAST FIVE TIMES!!!!!!!!!
Me: I meant, one more in this set.
Because baby-birthing is the ultimate total fitness workout.
27
Aug
2010
First They Came For…
They came first for the gays and the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t gay, or a Jew.
Then they came for the immigrants and the socialists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t an immigrant or a socialist.
Then they came for the Muslims,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Muslim.
Then they came for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up.
Seriously, you guys. Stop with the historical wheel of hate, OK? As somebody with a background in historical studies, it gets really depressing, and leaves me with very little hope for a future that doesn’t look like V for Vendetta.
27
Jul
2010
I’m Not Sure Yet if This is Depressing Or Not
“You must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you.”
– Joseph Campbell
24
Jul
2010
Three Things Make a Post. Pity I Only Have One.
Started writing a post about The Windup Girl, then was beaten out by the heat.
Tra-la.
Have been spending most of my updating time on Facebook, as it’s faster and easier to update than the blog when all you’ve got are a couple of links and some piecemeal reactions to random life events. Too much work blogging means too little personal blogging, and that is kind of a problem.
Hoping for a day without a heat index of 100+ and humid. May free up the brain pan some.
07
Jul
2010
For the Record
… the nearest Meetup group that shows up when ones searches for “feminism” is in Louisville.
I suspect searching for something like “women’s studies” would end up with similar results.
There is a gay Christians group, however. Go figure.
You’ve got a long way to go, Ohio.
29
Jun
2010
Book Contract for God’s War & Infidel Arrived Today
(yes, yes, this is the SECOND one. It’s a wacky business)
Need I say more?
23
Jun
2010
Words for the Road
“As long as you make an identity for yourself out of pain, you cannot be free of it.”
-Eckhart Tolle
20
Jun
2010
Eating Real Food
Half our cauliflowers appear to have been eaten by some kind of fungus, but these two turned out lovely, and we’ll be turning them into a fine cauliflower mash tomorrow.
And here’s what our garden currently look like, after harvesting some peas, a tomato, two cauliflowers, and two broccoli (including harvest of broccoli florets after initial head harvest):
I’ve been growing more keenly aware of where my food comes from (and what it’s actually made out of) the last couple of years. I grew up eating fast food. My parents both worked at a fast food company for 25 years. It was just… what you ate. It never occurred to me that you should eat any differently. I didn’t spend much time in the produce aisle until I was 18 and interested in dropping some weight I’d put on while on the pill. Switching to fruits, vegetables, and protein meant dropping 60 lbs in about 6-8 months. It felt almost effortless.
I’ve read all the books – like Fast Food Nation, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food – and watched all the shows, like King Corn, Supersize Me, and Food, Inc.I know how we got here. And I know why.
These days, I work hard to eat well.
And, of course, that’s just it – I have to work hard to eat well. Folks who haven’t tried it really don’t know just how tough it is. Fast food, prepared food, soda, crackers, canned soup, frozen meals… these are revolutionary, time saving victuals that make it possible to feed a tremendous number of people on a very small amount of land with 80% of the base made of up just one versatile commodity crop – corn.
And it’s a blessing.
Yes, it’s killing us prematurely, because we have no defense against a double bacon cheeseburger. It sets off all of our primitive pleasure centers. Why not eat them all day?
Because, of course, you’ll die of malnutrition. But you’ll keep doing it, and doing it, like a rat with a way to self-administer cocaine. Giving up carbs is really hard to do. Even before I was sick, I’d get the shakes, and intense cravings. Then there are the visual cues, which are constant. As somebody in marketing and advertising, I know just how helpless we can be in the face of $5.99 single-topping pizza specials, particularly when you’re exhausted after work, haven’t eaten in six hours, and are faced with the prospect of an hour’s cooking time before food ingestion.
It’s amazing that we can feed ourselves so cheaply and easily in this country. Try growing a garden. Try losing half your cauliflower crop to fungus, like we did. “It’s a good thing we’re not relying on any of this to feed ourselves,” I told J. as I pulled out the cauliflower. Our little garden is just for fun. When we get a house with more land, we’ll likely be able to feed more of ourselves with it, but even a “for fun” garden is disappointing when you discover half your land was wasted on crops that don’t feed you.
As sympathetic as I am to the bullshit and poison that’s ended up in our food, I’m also very much aware of how things were before cheap food. Farming is not a fun life. Food doesn’t just roll out of the truck at the end of the day, full-formed. And after you grow it, you know… then you need to cook it. And that takes time. And planning.
On the one hand, the West is addicted to a diet that’s killing us. On the other hand, we spend less than 20% of our income on food and spend less than, what, 10 hours a week? preparing food (on average). As somebody who’s had to rebuild her entire conception of food from the ground up, I’m still sympathetic to the thinking behind where we are today.
There is another way to eat, I know, somewhere between industrialized, corn-fed fake food and fungus-ridden-today-we’re-eating-dirt-grown-your-own-grass food. There are farmer’s markets. Local agriculture. All that jazz. But that doesn’t take into account how people are going to eat during the winter, or those precious spring months when you’re growing what you’ll gorge on come end of summer. You end up eating a lot of turnips and jam and drinking a lot of vodka.
What”s on offer now is so damn good that’s it’s been a struggle to break the pizza-burgers-prepared-food-cycle. Taking that next step – the parsley-at-all-meals-turnips-all-winter step – is something I just don’t know that I can do if I want to continue to maintain a modern lifestyle.
There’s a better way to eat. And I’m still struggling to find it.
20
Jun
2010
What We Eat
I made the switch to eating like a real person back in Chicago (I lived well in Alaska, too, but fell on hard times in South Africa where I subsisted mainly on peri-peri rice, spinach pies, and Woolworth’s prepared foods), but I’m still sometimes impressed at the amount of shrubbery that goes into the shopping cart each week.
The older (and creakier) I get, the more I pay attention to what I eat. Getting sick four years ago only made it easier to make the correlation between mood and what I was eating.
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"I'm not afraid of storms, for I'm learning to sail my ship."
— Louisa May Alcott
"No person is your friend who demands your silence."
— Alice Walker
"I never expect men to give us liberty. No, women, we are not worth it until we take it."
— Voltairine de Cleyre
"The vote means nothing to women. We should be armed."
— Edna O'Brien
"The dogma of woman's complete historical subjection to men must be rated as one of the most fantastic myths ever created by the human mind."
— Mary Ritter Beard
"They sicken of the calm that know the storm."
— Dorothy Parker
"I got kicked out of ballet class because I pulled a groin muscle. It wasn't mine."
— Rita Rudner
"Adventure is worthwhile in itself."
— Amelia Earhart
"Don't be afraid your life will end; be afraid that it will never begin."
— Grace Hansen
"I never realized until lately that women were supposed to be the inferior sex."
— Katharine Hepburn
"Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow talent to the dark place where it leads."
— Erica Jong
"I have always had a dread of becoming a passenger in life."
— Margareth II, Queen of Denmark
"I'm never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don't do any thing. Not one single thing."
— Dorothy Parker
"You can't be brave if you've only had wonderful things happen to you."
— Mary Tyler Moore
"Life shrinks or expands in proportionto one's courage."
— Anais Nin
"No more tears now; I will think about revenge."
— Mary, Queen of Scots
"You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do."
— Eleanor Roosevelt
"Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."
— Muriel Strode
"People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute."
— Rebecca West
"If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression."
— Toni Morrison
"It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees."
— Delores Ibarruri
"Study as if you were going to live forever; live as if you were going to die tomorrow."
— Maria Mitchell
"This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes."
— Hannah Arendt
"If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it."
— Toni Morrison
"I have no regrets. I wouldn't have lived my life the way I did if I was going to worry about what people were going to say."
— Ingrid Bergman
"We know that we can do what men can do, but we still don't know that men can do what
women can do. That's absolutely crucial. We can't go on doing two jobs."
— Gertrude Stein
"The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off."
— Gloria Steinem
"It's all make believe, isn't it?"
— Marilyn Monroe
"I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."
— Virginia Woolf
"I'm just a person trapped inside a woman's body."
-— Elayne Boosler
"Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, 'She doesn't have what it takes.' They will say, 'Women don't have what it takes.'"
-— Clare Boothe Luce
"Soon they'll be telling you you can't be Batman, Shakespeare, President, or God. Little fat baby, going on schoolgirl, you can be anyone, but it won't be easy."
-— Marilyn Hacker
"We've begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters."
-— Gloria Steinem
"Remember our heritage is our power; we can know ourselves and our capacities by seeing that other women have been strong."
-— Judy Chicago
"My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who work and those
who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there."
-— Indira Gandhi
"I want to walk through life instead of being dragged through it."
— Alanis Morissette
"Nothing will work unless you do."
— Maya Angelou
"Feminism is the radical notion that women are people."
— Cheris Kramare and Paula Treichler