Last year I linked to a news story by Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post, about virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell playing anonymously for quarters in a D. C. subway station. The article (entitled "Pearls Before Breakfast") has just won a Pulitzer; it’s a good read still, nearly a year later.
bearing blog
bear – ing n 1 the manner in which one comports oneself; 2 the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~]; 4 pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation; 5 the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].
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Omnivorous.
I’m partway through reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan. Commenter, old friend and recipeblogger Christy recommended it to me some time ago, and my friend Kim lent me her copy after I mentioned that I was on a loooooong waiting list at the local library for it. (I’m trying hard to develop the habit of borrowing books from the library before deciding to have Amazon ship them to me.) It’s pretty good so far.
Pollan’s schtick is to follow four different meals from production through processing to dinner. One thing I like about it is that he has made a distinction between two extremes of so-called "organic" food — the industrial, and the "beyond organic" movement that’s trying to stay true to its roots, probably as a niche. I for one am glad for industrial organic, as it’s opened up the only way I see two goals to be accomplished: (1) agricultural chemical pollution to decrease significantly world wide and (2) to bring quality produce within the economic reach of the world’s urban non-rich. Without industrial organic, I can’t see how "organic" would ever be anything but a niche reserved for the privileged few who are able to pay a premium price for it. Your Prius may be able to drive out to the co-op farm, but the city bus ain’t going there.
One thing caught my eye right away. In the introduction, Pollan laments that we have a "national eating disorder" centered around the fact that we don’t know the answer to the question "What should we have for dinner?" He goes on to discuss reasons for this, including our lack of a national traditional cuisine, but I think the most telling sentence is near the end, when he writes that eating "is a political act." Well, hell, I thought, that’s why we don’t know what to eat in a nutshell. We don’t know what to think! If eating is political when choices are nearly unlimited, then the answer to "what should we eat" is bound to be as diverse and confusing as our philosophies and our religion. If we’re looking for a "national cuisine," maybe we should be looking for a "national philosophy" first. The U. S. is diverse politically, but I don’t think we’re devoid of a national philosophy. I’m not sure what kind of national set of food choices corresponds to it, or (until I see it) whether I would want to have it for dinner, but the food-as-politics identification strikes me as the answer to Pollan’s question.
(I read a couple of chapters this morning while I ate my omelette, consisting of direct-from-the-farm brown eggs from pastured chickens, European-style Plugra brand imported butter, conventionally grown garlic from Cub Foods, conventionally grown plastic wrapped Green Giant brand button mushrooms from Super Target, bagged shredded grocery store cheddar cheese, imported salt harvested from the French Mediterranean coast and purchased in Fairfield, OH from Jungle Jim’s Food Emporium — where else would I find French sea salt so inexpensively? I get some every time I visit Ohio — and fresh-ground black pepper that, like almost all spices sold in the U. S., was probably irradiated on its way here. Oh, also I had a glass of store-brand tomato juice from a plastic jug. And some black coffee which was three-quarters Cameron’s Intense French Roast and one-quarter shade-grown dark-roast decaf. Now you know everything you need to know about me.)
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Goetta.
Should I be taking goetta advice from a man whose last name is "Leonardi?" Even if he does live in Cincinnati?
I don’t know, but here’s his recipe.
Personally, I think the best goetta is my husband’s grandmother’s, but what do I know? Maybe I’ll make Rich’s and see how it turns out.
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MLK.
A quote of a quote of a quote, but a good one. From Get Religion:
Shaila Dewan wrote an interesting story about a vacation home that King never got to use. In the story, she told this illuminating anecdote:
Ms. Mitchell, a pioneer in early childhood education and one of the first black school board members in Beaufort County (the other was also a Penn staff member), said she was determined to ask Dr. King one question: “How can you tell me to love people who treat me as if I were not human?”
“I will never forget” his response, she said. “He said we are created in God’s image. So you love the image of God in that person.” She added: “I don’t know if I was able to use that, to apply that, in all different situations. But I always remembered it.”
I’m still vetting elementary-school American history books, searching among the commonly recommended lists of "living books" — many of which are pre-1980 — to find some that are, shall we say, linguistically culturally sensitive. It’s hard and even my own guiding principles are terribly vague.
Somewhere hidden in that quote is something that is going to help me. I’m sure of it.
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Medieval movies; or, the blog as memory aid.
Valerie’s family is studying the middle ages this year, and we’re going to be doing it next year. What better reason to link to her post about the movies they’re planning to watch as part of their curriculum? Maybe I’ll actually remember that I did this, and then I’ll be able to steal some of her ideas.
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Saved by the chili. Again.
I posted my foolproof chili recipe a few weeks ago in a post that I tersely entitled "How to make dinner the day you get back from vacation without having to stop at the grocery store on the way home from the airport."
I would like to submit the same recipe under a new title, viz., "What to do when, in charge of having dinner ready for two families by 5 p.m., you lift the lid of the crock-pot at 4:20 p.m. only to discover that 8 hours of cooking has not softened the beans in the soup one bit even though you remembered to soak them overnight before putting them on to cook in the morning."
Hannah was with me when I made the terrible discovery (she was, after all, scheduled to take the soup home to her own family). We had to make a split-second decision. Try to rescue the bean soup, or make something else? We were both on tight schedules; she had to drive home, and my oldest had a 6 p.m. swim lesson. Down to the freezer! "Here, run upstairs and start this defrosting," I said, thrusting into her hands two pounds of ground beef, "I’ll look for stuff to put in it." I found two cans of chili beans (half what I needed) and some cans of tomatoes and tomato paste. Upstairs in the kitchen I found a can of pinto beans and a can of spicy refried beans. "I put refried beans into my chili sometimes to thicken it," commented Hannah, who was already starting to open cans. I chopped two onions and sauteed them while she finished opening the cans, then grabbed the cans and dumped them into the onions with the necessary spices.
The meat was still defrosting. Eleven minutes left on the meat. Too long! Hannah opened the microwave, squeezed one of the packages experimentally, declared it thawed enough and pulled it out. While I stirred and heated the onion/tomato/bean mixture, she started to brown it in a separate skillet. As soon as it wasn’t pink anymore she dumped it into the chili pot. It was 4:45. We set it to simmer. I grated some cheese for the top. Since we had already made cornbread to go with the ill-fated bean soup, dinner was done!
I sent Hannah home with several mason jars full of chili and several more full of half-cooked bean soup to be finished in her own crock-pot for the next day’s dinner.
Well, eventually. Before he could sit down to eat, my husband had to jump-start her dead car. But we got to our swim lesson on time!
(By the way, it turns out that the chili is very nice with cornbread instead of spaghetti. So if Ohio-style isn’t your own, try it. I also think the chili goes well on tortilla chips, baked potatoes, or scrambled eggs.)
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Association and community.
Darwin has a thought-provoking post about chosen and unchosen communities, and their relationship to things like insurance.
One of the things I found most interesting about Marglin’s analysis was his distinction between "community" and "association". By his definition, community is not merely a place where one finds companionship, society and mutual aid, but also a group which one cannot leave without fairly serious cost. According to the old adage that you can chose your friends but you can’t choose your family, community is much more along the lines of family than friends.
An association may seem to have nearly all the same benefits as community: companionship, society and mutual aid. But an association is a group which one joins based on some sort of identified commonality and which one may leave at any time with fairly little cost.
Marglin argues that many structures which used to be communities in the past have become associations. While people used to experience serious costs if they left their occupations or neighborhoods, society and societal expectations have changed to make these relatively painless moves. Similarly, people now church shop with relative ease, while in the past leaving a church was a nearly unthinkable move.
Boy, this distinction has really clarified something in my mind. I have an acquaintance, a woman, another mother at home with small children, who says when you talk to her that she’s very committed to finding a "community" or "tribe" of mutual support and friendship. She has gone about it, though, in a way I’ve always characterized as community activism. She is forever trying to found new mother’s connections, attachment-parenting support groups, homeschooling support groups and the like. It seems every year she’s got some new support group running. "What this woman needs isn’t a support group," I was telling another mom the other day. "She needs a FRIEND."
She’s mistaken "associations" (as defined above in Darwin’s quote) for "community."
Even if you choose a community rather than having it chosen for you by birth or social class, the essence of community is risk. Risk of becoming attached. Risk of being hurt by being left.
There’s more in that post… read the whole thing.
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Purseless.
Dr. Helen experiments with liberating herself from purses and asks how wallet-users manage (especially when hampered by women’s clothes with useless pockets or none). An interesting thread to read. Dr. Helen says she feels dependent on a purse:
I decided to try carrying just a wallet… and see if it was worth punting the purse for a freer lifestyle. I thought …I could at least steal some guy traits that might make my life a bit simpler, and that included carrying a wallet. Men seem calmer than women, and maybe not having to keep up with a purse 24/7 is part of the reason.
How has it worked out? It’s hard! The first day I carried just a wallet, I kept looking for my purse and feeling that I had forgotten something. By the third day, I was over this but I didn’t have all of the things I needed such as various keys, my chapstick, stamps, my address book, my pepper spray, various food, gloves — and carrying spare change in my pocket drives me crazy. It jingles and falls out when you sit down. Is this normal? Are there some tricks of the trade that I do not understand here?
I have mostly carried a man’s wallet (that’s to say, one that fits in a pants pocket) for years now. I say "mostly" because I do own several purses in various sizes. They are hanging in my mud room and they are empty. I guess you could say that I have purses, but they don’t have me. Sometimes I use them, but I am not dependent on them.
My wallet has always contained 1) 2 credit cards 2) folding money 3) ID 4) a few other useful cards, like library card, insurance card, etc. 5) a teeny-tiny little prayer book and a "Braille" rosary stamped into a card 6) a few stamps. I try not to let it get stuffed too full of things, and a lot of my cards live at home in a drawer. I don’t carry a checkbook around. I don’t pay for things in cash unless I have to, and then I try to spend my change, leave change behind on top of the tip, or drop it in the barista’s tip jar, or whatever. I just don’t like carrying change around. There’s a lot of it swimming around in my car. Really, if you need stuff, how hard is it to get back to your car?
I keep my keys (just car and house — extra keys stay at home unless I specifically need them) on a lanyard. If I need my hands free and don’t have a place to stow them on my person, I hang the lanyard around my neck.
I hardly ever wear makeup, and if I did, I’d be wearing something minimalist that required little or no touch-up. I carry lip balm and little tubes of lotion in the winter, but then I’ve always got coat pockets to put them in. Sometimes I carry a camera, but I like little-bitty ones (and the next time I have to get a new cell phone, I plan to eliminate the need for a separate camera).
Oh, and I refuse to carry stuff for the kids. They each have their own backpack and if they want to take toys or candy or money, they have to tote it themselves.
So why have purses at all? Having them hanging empty in my mudroom is part of the minimalist plan! If I happen to be going out and my clothes don’t have any pockets and I’m not wearing a coat (which would have pockets) and I’m not carrying a diaper bag or tote bag or gym bag or day pack, I know I can quickly grab an appropriate purse or bag off the hooks in the mudroom; throw my wallet, keys and phone into it; and go. I don’t keep one purse perpetually stuffed with everything I might possibly need. I do take what I need when I need it.
Recently I have been experimenting with a larger wallet that doesn’t fit in many pants pockets but does fit in most of my coat pockets. There are two reasons for this. (1) I find that I haven’t been carrying it in my pants pocket anyway, because I don’t really like the uncomfortable bulge from a wallet in a hip or back pocket. (2) My new larger wallet has a tiny zip pouch, in which I can carry an Imitrex tablet in case I have a migraine and can’t get to the tablet I keep in my car.
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Synch and swim.
I blogged a bit in the last post about learning as an adult to enjoy swimming. As I wrote there, lately I’ve been reading about swimming, trying to get better at it in part by understanding its fundamentals.
One skill that I never mastered in lessons is sculling. It was in books, not lessons, that I first encountered that word applied to swimming. As far as I can tell, "sculling" refers to the type of motion you’re supposed to be doing with your arms when you tread water properly. The distinguishing feature of that motion is that the forearm travels in one plane, driving the water perpendicularly through that plane: the arm is more like a turbine blade than like a paddle or oar. My swimming instructor described the treading-water arm motion as a "figure eight," and that’s what the books mostly said about sculling too. I tried and tried to get it to work and it never felt right. What finally got the point across was an article that described sculling as "a bit like spreading icing on a big cake with your hand". OK, that motion made sense to me. I guess because I’ve iced cakes before. Whereas I’ve never, you know, been a fan blade, even though I’ve seen plenty of them.
Anyway, I bring this up just to point to a really cool video that shows a synchronized-swimming athlete using sculling to keep herself in a variety of positions. I guarantee you will never think of this sport as frivolous again, if indeed you ever did.
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Y not?
A couple of years ago, when I signed my oldest child up for swimming lessons at the YMCA where our family has a membership, I signed myself up for swimming lessons too.
Until then, I could only dog paddle. I’d never properly learned to swim. I grew up hating sports, gym class, anything to do with physical activity, and always thinking of myself as clumsy and unskilled. My family reinforced it neatly: I was the "smart one" and my younger brother was the "athletic one." My school reinforced it too — the phys ed curriculum emphasized team sports, with plenty of opportunity for screwing up and ruining the game for everyone else, and hardly ever forayed into lifetime-fitness (when it did, boys took weightlifting and girls did aerobics, not exactly inspiring).
Once out of college, and married, I discovered that, removed from competition with adolescents, humiliation was not a necessary part of physical. I got the first bicycle I’d had since I was nine or ten and found that I enjoyed even long, hilly rides. I tried strength training with free weights and liked the way it was easy to see that I could lift more each session. Long walks with my new husband became a habit of outdoor hiking.
But I still would comment from time to time about what a poor swimmer I was until a friend pointed out that, you know, they had these newfangled things called lessons.
I took lessons for a year, at the same time as my oldest son’s lessons, while Mark cared for the younger one in the YMCA lobby. When my lesson was done I would take the baby and Mark would leave to run around the track. After a year of lessons I could swim a decent front crawl and backstroke (I never could get the hang of the breaststroke; maybe I’ll take some more lessons later). A couple of years after that, swimming is my favorite weekday-evening workout. It’s not so convenient for when I’ve got all three children on my own, because if the baby cries in the gym nursery it’s easier to be fetched from, say, a treadmill than from the pool. But it’s great for "Family Gym Night" and for leaving the kids at home with Mark.
Just recently I decided to try to get better at it — that is, instead of just swimming comfortably until my time’s up, I would push myself to go faster or farther, and try various drills to develop my skills. I got a couple of books about swimming and read them and started to apply what I read. I learned something that might be obvious to others but was new to me: that when you’re actually trying to get better at something, it makes for a less boring workout. The time in the pool just flies by now and I wonder where it went.
Anyway, if there’s hope for me to become comfortable with any physical activity, I guess there’s hope for anyone. I can’t praise the YMCA enough (that’s with the M, not the W) — they gave me great aquatics education at a good price, and they’re a wonderful organization that does a ton of great stuff and deserves support.
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Vow of silence.
A few days ago I went to the clinic for a throat culture. The nurse came back to me with a serious face. "I’m afraid it’s strep throat," she said. Why was she so puzzled when I reacted with glee? Surely she’s seen this before? Surely she knows that You have strep throat means We have penicillin for that?
Even though the penicillin made the really painful, red, sore throat go away, it seems that in the last few days of shouting to make myself heard over the children I had irritated my throat some, and it still hurt (in a raspy, mechanical sort of way) to talk. So on my way to the restaurant where I sometimes eat breakfast on Saturday mornings before anyone else in the family gets up, I decided not to talk for a whole day. I knew that if I talked even a little, eventually I’d be shouting, reading books to the kids, and otherwise overdoing it. It would have to be all or nothing.
When I got to the restaurant I wrote on a pad of paper I brought from the car: I lost my voice – can’t talk today 😦 . Bistec criollo, 3 eggs over easy, no toast, grapefruit juice, coffee. The waitress, who has waited on me many times before, was kindly sympathetic — but she reacted as if I had also become deaf! Pointing at my coffee and miming filling it up, for instance. Very funny.
I got home before anyone had gotten up. My 7yo was the first to come downstairs. I wrote, My throat is sore. It hurts to talk. I am going to rest my voice. Please help me talk to the little ones because they can’t read. I will probably have to talk to them some but I am going to try not to talk to you and Dad. He felt important!
It was strangely peaceful not to talk. I did school planning, and some household chores. I let my husband shout at the kids. I managed to teach the 7yo how to fold a fitted sheet without speaking or writing, a feat for which I probably deserve national recognition. Milo kept coming up to me and screaming "TALK!" in my ear. I smiled, mimed zipping my lips, and pointed at Mark. Several hundred times maybe.
I broke my silence around dinner time, still a little raspy but not as pain-wracked. It was on the whole a pleasant day. Maybe I’ll try it again sometime.
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Asymmetric coverage.
This article in the Star Tribune about "Buddhist Christians" (or was it Christian Buddhists?) is one of many I’ve noticed in the last fifteen years about Christians co-opting Buddhist-style meditation techniques. Not ever having tried it myself, and not really knowing much about Buddhist-style meditation, I won’t offer any comments about the practice itself — except to note that Christianity already has a long and diverse history of meditation techniques, and I often wonder how much of these have been explored by Christians who eventually turn to techniques drawn from other faiths.
But the thing that I really noticed about this particular article was what was missing from it, and what begged to be covered. The article includes numerous references to Christians who are critical of this thing embraced by "Christian Buddhists" (or "Buddhist Christians"), and answers the criticism like this:
What Meadow [a retired religious studies professor] will explain to her critics — at least the ones who do her the courtesy of letting her respond — is that there’s a distinction between Buddhism as religion and Buddhism as a meditation technique. One is a belief system; she doesn’t teach that. The other, the one she focuses on, is a process.
So what I want to know is: What do Buddhists think of this? Of Christians, who say they don’t believe in Buddhism, taking up meditation technique and calling themselves "Buddhist?" Not a single Buddhist is quoted in this article, nor is there any information in it about Buddhism as a religion. Talk about a dropped ball!
Oh, and there’s one more thing that I just can’t let go by. We have in this article — completely unchallenged by the journalist — a quote from the featured "retired religious studies professor," described as "one of the world’s foremost experts on Buddhist Christians," as follows:
"Christianity includes a call to meditate, but it never provides a method of meditating, a step-by-step guide on how to do it," she said.
That is, um, bullshit. Off the top of my head I can think of two methods of Western Christian meditation that have provided a step-by-step guide, for, oh, at least a few hundred years. Lectio Divina anyone? That dates to 220 AD. Rosary? Since the 1200’s at the latest, and it’s had a "step by step" form since 1569. There are of course upstarts like the Divine Mercy Chaplet, very timely since the feast is tomorrow, born in Poland in the early part of this century. And then there’s Eastern Christianity. Hello? Icons?
Journalists should beware of the word "never," and not let it slip by unchallenged.
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