Archives for 2009

I love watching Rachel Maddow. Not just because she’s not hard on the eyes and not just because she’s, well, butch enough. I love watching Rachel Maddow because she thinks and that makes me think and while I generally agree with her political position, sometimes the things I think are contrary to what I get the feeling I should be thinking as a “good liberal.”

Since I stopped getting the daily paper I’m cut off from a lot of news so I find that I need a good, heavy dose of what’s going on “out there” to stay informed. Maddow’s show gives me that. Yet, I was shocked to learn last week that the “birthers” – you know, those people who don’t believe that Obama is eligible to be President because he wasn’t born in the U.S. – are still alive and kicking. Not only are they alive and kicking, they seem to be gaining some traction.

Part and parcel of how conservative pundits are talking about the real issue – which is not Obama’s birth place or eligibility for the presidency but his race – is to latch on to the Gates arrest in Massachusetts and to Justice Sotomayor’s comments about how race plays a factor in a judge’s ability to make decisions. And it’s getting ugly. Really ugly. So ugly, in fact, that Rush Limbaugh flat out called Barack Obama an oreo – a black person who “acts white;” oreo is a charge frequently leveled by poor, supposedly more authentic, blacks at middle class blacks who do things like maintain stable family relationships and encourage their children to get good grades and go to college – on the air.

And the liberal position still is stupidly, blindly, that racism is entirely the fault of “whites.” Why do I say this? Well, mostly because I’ve been thinking about this segment from Maddow’s July 29, 2009 show where she talked to Melissa Harris-Lacewell, who is an Associate Professor of African-American studies at Princeton University, about what is fueling the race debate in America and how conservative politicos might try to tap “white outrage” over loss of racial privilege. Watch the whole segment or just watch the excerpt where Prof. Harris-Lacewell proffers her theory on the differences between the perceptions of blacks and whites in America. [Read more…] about Justify my outrage

Memory is a funny thing. Some memories stick with us for the longest time taking us right back to the moment they were formed complete with joy, desire, rage, shame or humiliation, or whatever emotion characterized the event. Memories like that you actually feel rather than just recall. Some memories age with time getting soft and fuzzy, and often more palatable as we get farther and farther from the actual event. Our subsequent life experience shaves the sharp edges off these memories, curling them like photographs printed on cheap paper. And then there are the memories that don’t really have to do with experiences but with people and how we recall them, memories that are formed either by repeated or singular exposure that fix your perception of someone.

Enduring memory hangs on to details that were present – like needing to lose a few pounds or having long hair – when you were regularly interacting with someone. Even if you see someone after a key detail has changed, on your subsequent meetings the fact of that change will still come as a shock, for a while anyway, because that change conflicts with your enduring memory and you no longer have that regular exposure to reenforce that this person weighs less or now has short hair. I’ve had three encounters with enduring memory recently, and only two of them were about getting older.

Wait, she’s doing what?

My aunt has a best friend. This best friend has a husband. The husband has a company that buys season tickets to the Washington Nationals. Not all of these tickets go to clients. The best friend asked my aunt if I would be interested in tickets to any games. While picking up these tickets from my aunt I inquired about the best friend and her family and how everyone was doing. Turns out everyone is fine and that C., the best friend’s youngest, is now living in a trendy part of town and working as a bartender at an even trendier restaurant while she waits to hear about graduate school.

My enduring memory of this now at least 21 year-old is as a fussy about 8 year-old kid who didn’t like brown mustard and really wasn’t keen on eating the roll and could we just please give her the hot dog and some ketchup thank you very much. A benign encounter with enduring memory, the kind that comes with age and is perfectly natural.

Yes, we are all about to hit 40

No way to hide it: my high school graduating class, those of us that survived this long, is turning 40 this year in one massive wave.

We are the last gasp of the 1960s, post-“summer of love”, post-Prague Spring and assassinations and the Democratic National Convention, post-riots, post-White Album and Elvis’ first “comeback” special, and, really, post the naive idea that the world can be changed just by refusing to participate in the existing paradigm. We were born with the Stonewall riots, the moon landing, Woodstock, and Altamont. And we are getting middle-aged spread.

I’m on Facebook and I’ve reconnected with some of my 743 classmates there. If you’re not familiar with Facebook you might not know that you get to post a profile picture. Most people are pretty good about posting something (moderately) recent but to maximize recognition in these 50px x 50px photos, most people have chosen a close-up, face filling the frame and showing as much detail as possible. One of my friends who did this posted some photos from her recent vacation and it was something of a shock. See, her cheeks have always been a little chubby which is why the profile picture was no big deal; hell, we all carried a little baby fat in our faces even at 18, but the shock for me was to learn that at 40 she seems to have picked up all the weight I’ve lost since high school. Again, a moderately benign encounter with enduring memory that comes with age and is, in many ways, just as natural as the one that made me realize that yes, I’m getting older. Only with this one, it turns out I’m not getting older as fast as I thought.

And why didn’t the divorce challenge my enduring memory of you?

People’s identities shift over time. This is a fact. But lately the shifts have started to seem less like natural growth and more like “do you want to buy a some ocean front property in Phoenix Arizona” tectonics. See, a friend of mine after 16 years of marriage and a moderately easy divorce has decided in her 40s that “now was the time to really investigate this and explore being a lesbian.”

Hold the phone…what?

Yes, coming out of the closet in your 40s will have a tendency to mess with my enduring memory of you, particularly when you have a five year-old kid and have been either married or getting divorced the entire 15 years I’ve known you.

After I got over the spit take, and got over the flash of anger at the phrasing and my own prejudices – investigate and explore all you like but some of us have to live here -  and over a slight bit of envy – my friend is what is euphemistically referred to in personal ads here as a “professional lesbian” and I am, well, not, which means she’ll have a significantly easier time socially than I did – and after I got over wanting to point out to her that the state in which she lives is probably, outside the true Southern Bible Belt, the least likely to overlook a same sex relationship when it comes to child custody, and got over the impulse to say to her “Look, I get that busting down the closet door is all exciting and scary and transgressive and everything and while you are in for a very interesting time, after a couple of years if this is truly who you are it is going to cease to be a big deal so just chill already, OK?” I started to wonder why this fundamental change in her identity was such a shock, such a blow to my enduring memory of her when her divorce was so easy to accept when her marriage was just as long-standing a part of her as her previous heterosexuality.

Perhaps it’s because divorce is common, or maybe it’s because I didn’t actually like her husband; he was one of those men who acted as if he was the most virile, attractive man on the planet and of course he was going to refuse your advances but thank you for asking sweetie. Or maybe it’s because marriage is a choice not a fundamental part of who you are. Or maybe it’s because while I can appreciate that Hugh Jackman isn’t hard on the eyes, my sexuality isn’t so fluid as to want to get up close and personal with him and I have difficulty understanding how if that wasn’t  what you really wanted you could go through the motions for so long. All I know for sure is that my enduring memory of her just melted like the Wicked Witch of the West.

And maybe this isn’t such a bad thing. Maybe it’s time to try and make those enduring memories disappear and be more in the now. Either way, it’s been a crazy couple of weeks.

I’m not a big fan of Starbucks – the coffee is both overpriced and bad – but every now and then I find myself adjacent to one and in need of a snack. Rather than get a 400 or 500 calorie “creme” Frappucino^® (no coffee in those), I tend to indulge myself with a slice of iced lemon pound cake (which, oddly, isn’t listed on the web site’s nutritional information but I doubt that it has fewer than the 330 calories (110 from fat) that a slice of marble pound cake has). This week I noticed something interesting.

The made from 100% unbleached paper with 20% post-consumer recycled content bag that my slice of pound cake was delivered in also included verbiage about how Starbucks had “removed the artificial trans fats, artificial flavors, artificial dyes, and high-fructose corn syrup” from their food products. My first thought was: does that mean all that crap has been in their food all along? My second thought was: what’s the profit motive?

See, Starbucks is a company that doesn’t do anything unless it’s going to turn them a bigger profit. So how has Howard Schultz figured out a way to make taking artificial crap out of his company’s cakes and cookies a financial win because he’s sure not doing it out of the goodness of his heart.

High-fructose corn syrup gets a lot of the blame for America’s obesity epidemic. Sometime in the late 1970s soft drink and other processed food producers figured out they could save a few pennies per unit if they switched from actual sugar to high-fructose corn syrup. And they were right. The other thing that the switch, which they have not made in Europe where Coke and Pepsi are both still made with sugar, allowed particularly soft drink producers to do was move more product.

See, high-fructose corn syrup does this sneaky thing in your body: it doesn’t digest chemically like the sugar your mouth tastes it as. Your body when it processes this additive treats it like undigestible vegetable matter. So while high-fructose corn syrup has the same number of calories as sugar, your brain doesn’t get the message that you’ve consumed those calories and the chemical trigger that says “full now, stop eating” doesn’t fire. This allows you to drink more soda, and consume way more calories than your body needs, while still not feeling satisfied, hence the term “empty calories.”

Having just spent two weeks in Europe eating every single meal out at a restaurant I can tell you that while this additive – which is in everything from soda to bread (as a preservative) – does play a big role in our every widening ass problem, mostly it’s the size of the portions we get, and make for ourselves, that are the biggest problem.

Italy is the land of meals in courses: antipasto, primo piatto, secondo piatto, contorni, dolce and café. That’s potentially five courses at one dinner sitting, and not as uncommon as you would think but it’s the size that really matters. Antipasto is maybe 3/4 of an ounce of prosciutto crudo with a slice of cantaloupe, or a medium sized tomato with the same amount of fresh mozzarella. Your first plate is pasta or risotto, probably no more than 1/3 of a cup, lightly sauced. Your second plate is meat or fish, generally not more than two to three ounces. Contorni is some kind of vegetable, green beans or verdura alla griglia (grilled eggplant, zucchini, carrots, and some times arugula, all sliced as thin as paper and no more than a two to three ounces total). And your dolce is small as is your café.

In an American restaurant, you couldn’t eat like this for less than 5,000 or 6,000 calories. Hell, Livestrong.com says there are 2,310 calories in the Bloomin Onion at Outback Steakhouse. That’s your daily calorie allowance and then some just for your appetizer (aka: antipasto) course. Even some of the items on Ruby Tuesday’s “smart choices” menu have upwards of 450 calories per serving (pdf). So, does it really matter what’s in our food if we’re eating double or even triple our recommended daily allowance of calories in one meal? I’m thinking not.

And that leads me back to my original question about Starbucks and ingredients: real ingredients, sugar, fresh tomatoes, real berries, all of these things cost more money to procure and use. The spoilage rate is higher which means you’re not only spending more on the ingredients you are, in the long run, getting less out of them. The only way I can see that Starbucks is going to make money off this move is to make the portion sizes smaller. And really, that’s a good thing.