4.25.2006

domestication nation

i've been bitten by the domestic bug over the past few days; here's a list of the food i've made since friday, when it all began...


friday
  • hummus
  • cous cous with fresh spinach
  • roasted carrots
saturday
  • fresh banana muffins
  • carrot and spinach quiche
  • marinara sauce (made from an old bottle of little pengiun shiraz)
sunday
  • sweet potato soup with ginger and nutmeg
  • "vodka sauce"/cream of tomato soup (see below for explanation)
monday
  • baby zucchini, yellow squash and tomato casserole
  • baked spaghetti squash
so, yes, i don't know what has gotten into me, other than jeremy buying an incredible amount of spinach, and me feeling the need to keep it from going to waste...and, at the same time, get back into the habit of making evie's meals as much from scratch as possible.

i must say, i am really a fan of allrecipies.com right now. the soup recipe came from allrecipies,and it was delectible. (my assistant/baby daddy, jeremy, accidentially added 3x the nutmeg call for in the soup. oops! and, as he noted, it's much more a fall soup than spring. but delish, nonetheless).

i started the sauce on saturday to find a use for the old wine, and attempted to turn it into a soup on sunday. it ended up as a vodka-type cream sauce (with shiraz rather than vodka, obviously) which was quite good.

the spaghetti squash baked yesterday will become another quiche today for dinner. some of the squash will also be added to pasta and leftover sauce for another meal.

i'm quite obsessed with the mantra "reduce, reuse, recycle", as anyone who has seen the current condition of my jeans can tell you. it's almost become a game for me lately, to see how far i can stretch things, reinvent, etc., and how little i can waste.

i'll report back with news of today's food adventures soon.

by the by, the problem isn't that gas is too expensive, it's that gas (i.e. oil) is a limited, and dwindling, resource. we need to start thinking in terms of renewable energy...and that it is far less expensive to run a hybrid system than a completely oil-guzzling one.



4.19.2006

i should be eating right now...

...but instead find myself tired, hungry, hot and annoyed, and insisting on making a list of the movies i've watched over the last few days.

i haven't watched a movie in ages--i think since "sideways" over christmas.

so--over the last five days, i have watched:

the ten commandments
walk the line
the incredibles
the fantastic four
pirates of the carribbean (i was only half awake during it, tho)
daredevil
men of honor
ray

on the "to watch" list for today--hotel rwanda, pi

the adults here are all afflicted with the same chest cold/head cold nastiness. i'm doing my damndest not to come down with it; by doing my damndest i mean not sleeping enough, drinking too much coffee, not eating when i'm hungry...generally neglecting health. it's the reverse psychology approach.

hell, maybe i'll just go crawl into bed with the little one and take a nap.

easter--before and after




4.12.2006

what's the etiquette for this...ms. manners????

i have a relative who sends me emails of this nature quite often:



Try Doing This...


a.. Try driving around as a Gringo in Mexico with no liability
insurance. and have an accident...

b.. Enter MEXICO illegally. Never mind immigration quotas, visas,
international law, or any of that nonsense.

c.. Once there, demand that the local government provide free medical
care for you and your entire family.

d.. Demand bilingual nurses and doctors.

e.. Demand free bilingual local government forms, bulletins, etc.

f.. Procreate abundantly. Deflect any criticism of this allegedly
irresponsible reproductive behavior with, "It is a cultural United States
thing. You would not understand, pal."

g.. Keep your American identity strong. Fly Old Glory from your
rooftop, or proudly display it in your front window or on your car bumper.

h.. Speak only English at home and in public and insist that your
children do likewise.

i.. Insist that all products' labels, owners manuals, instructions,
etc., be written in English as well as Spanish.

j.. Demand classes on American culture in the Mexican school system.

k.. Demand a local Mexican drivers license. This will afford other
legal rights and will go far to legitimize your unauthorized, illegal
presence in Mexico.

l.. Insist that local Mexican law enforcement teach English to all its
officers.


Good luck! Because it will never happen. It will not happen in Mexico or
any other country in the world..
. except right here in the United States..
Land of the naive!


If you agree, pass it on. If you don't, go ahead and try the above in
Mexico or Iran, or just about any other country in the world, for that
matter.

Words of Wisdom: "Support the country you live in ... or live in the
country you support" *God Bless America*




obviously, this offends my political, cultural, intellectual and familial sensibilities on all fronts.

i worked for two years on campaigns to rid us of the scourge that is george w. bush. i am half mexican. i support our troops, thank you, but do not buy into that meaning i must blindly follow bad logic and lies; how then, can i put a stop to these annoyingly 'proud to be THAT kind of American" "if you're not with us (even in this email) you're against us" kind of rubbish flooding my inbox?

maybe i need a disclaimer.





(a quick note)

anyone notice the story stating bush's admission of being the leak (the GOP would call it admitting to having declassified the info) was on yahoo for all of an hour yesterday...then mysteriously disappeared? ahem, orwell.

i am really wishing that jeremy hadn't lent my copy of 1984 (for which i traded my english teacher at holly senior high school mrs. beverly mckenzie, an extra copy of wuthering heights) to a cross-trainer named tyler or trevor or something. regardless, the kid (a huge pothead) forgot (surprise) to bring it with him to the next meet-up in pennsylvania (which is called ohio pyle!) and, alas, the book is gone, along with the very juvenille margin notes.

incidentially, my english teacher said i wrote with too much parenthetical phrasing.

indeed, indeed.

4.09.2006

oh john kerry, why couldn't you be this man two years ago?

Kerry Sharply Criticizes Bush on Several Fronts

my favorite part of this article:

A Roman Catholic who has struggled at times to talk about his own faith, Mr. Kerry also told the group that he believed "deeply in my faith" and that the Koran, the Torah, the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles had influenced a social conscience that he exercised in politics.

"I will tell you, nowhere in there, nowhere, not in one page, not in one phrase uttered and reported by the Lord Jesus Christ, can you find anything that suggests that there is a virtue in cutting children from Medicaid and taking money from the poor and giving it to the rich," Mr. Kerry said.



i have to wonder, where was this "tough" (meaning, tougher than what he offered then) talk during the last election cycle? this morning Kerry appeared on Meet the Press, and Tim Russert read a statement made by John Edwards (you'll remember him as the Ken Doll-ish man who ran with Kerry). Edwards said, quite strongly in the statement, that he was wrong to vote to authorize the war in Iraq. The intelligence was wrong, there were no weapons, and on and on and on.

I have held, and may have said here before, that Kerry could have easily combated his image as a "flip-flopper" by taking the offensive, and saying "I am not", rather than attempting to educate the American populace (who pay little attention to politics as a whole) on the nuances and message contained in each of his votes. For example, voting to authorize the war, and then voting against more funding; the public saw it as flip-flopping. Kerry wanted us to understand his reasoning: 1., he could not vote against the war retroactive one year, meaning he could not now vote against a war based on faulty intelligence. 2., he didn't agree with the method of the war, as in the way the money was being spent, the fact that the war was continuing, etc.

anyhow, i still believe all mr. Kerry had to do was say, a la Oprah on James Frey, "I was duped." I would have said, "I was lied to, presented a very convincing case by Colin Powell. Had I known the intelligence amounted to lies, as I know now, I would never have authorized this cluster-fuck we now find ourselves in. But I was duped. And you, America, were duped as well. You should be outraged, as I am, that our leaders would deliberately mislead us; join with me in assuring this will never again happen. "

i suppose i could console myself with a "better late than never" outlook; but no, this simply reminds me that i have a lot of work to do before the next round of elections.

4.06.2006

doublespeak, newspeak, scooter libby, leak

maggie posted this link today on her blog; you can find it here.



i love the "double-speak" here--hard core right wingers will say that there was nothing illegally done, because the president declassified the info; they'll ignore what everyone else will pounce on: the reactionary/vindictive practices of this administration, i.e. blowing the cover of a CIA agent to make an example of her husband, who dared to question the administration.



a thought: even if Bush did declassify the info, wouldn't someone have alerted plame to the fact, and taken steps to insure her safety, etc first? and perhaps even gone so far as to secure the informants she was working with, in the interests of protecting the national security this group of jackyls claims to care so much about?

suggested reading:

1984, george orwell (pay special attention to the middle section, about newspeak)
[also, read the afterward carefully; orwell writes about the moment the US changed the name of the department of war to the department of defense as one of the "light bulbs" going off in his head that something was shifting]

politics and the english language

animal farm

obvious choices, i know...but still quite frightening when you see the similarities between such a nightmarish regime and, well, this nightmarish regime we live beneath.

shudder.

for a more comprehensive overview on orwell, check out the wikipedia entry.


4.05.2006

lament; or, whatever happened to the blue collar working class?

in the spirit of living in michigan, with its nation-leading unemployment rate rising daily; with the big three screwing the unions and their workers; a letter from charles bukowski to his publisher, john martin, which i found here.

8-12-86

Hello John:

Thanks for the good letter. I don't think it hurts, sometimes, to remember where you came from. You know the places where I came from. Even the people who try to write about that or make films about it, they don't get it right. They call it "9 to 5." It's never 9 to 5, there's no free lunch break at those places, in fact, at many of them in order to keep your job you don't take lunch. Then there's OVERTIME and the books never seem to get the overtime right and if you complain about that, there's another sucker to take your place.

You know my old saying, "Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors."

And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don't want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does.

As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can't believe it. What do they do it for? Sex? TV? An automobile on monthly payments? Or children? Children who are just going to do the same things that they did?

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: "Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don't you realize that?"

They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn't want to enter their minds.

Now in industry, there are vast layoffs (steel mills dead, technical changes in other factors of the work place). They are layed off by the hundreds of thousands and their faces are stunned:

"I put in 35 years . . . "

"It ain't right . . . "

"I don't know what to do . . . "

They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work. I could see all this. Why couldn't they? I figured the park bench was just as good or being a barfly was just as good. Why not get there first before they put me there? Why wait?

I just wrote in disgust against it all, it was a relief to get the shit out of my system. And now that I'm here, a so-called professional writer, after giving the first 50 years away, I've found out that there are other disgusts beyond the system. . .

I remember once, working as a packer in this lighting fixture company, one of the packers suddenly said: "I'll never be free!"

One of the bosses was walking by (his name was Morrie) and he let out this delicious cackle of a laugh, enjoying the fact that this fellow was trapped for life.

So, the luck I finally had in getting out of those places, no matter how long it took, has given me a kind of joy, the jolly joy of the miracle. I now write from an old mind and an old body, long beyond the time when most men would ever think of continuing such a thing, but since I started so late I owe it to myself to continue, and when the words begin to falter and I must be helped up stairways and I can no longer tell a bluebird from a paperclip, I still feel that something in me is going to remember (no matter how far I'm gone) how I've come through the murder and the mess and the moil, to at least a generous way to die.

To not to have entirely wasted one's life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.

yr boy,

Hank