My attempt to convert HR to the Church of Italian food continues apace. He claims it's not working, but that I should keep trying every weekend. I suspect ulterior motives. The recipes are also getting healthier...in very gradual doses.

Salmon With Chevre Alfredo and Spinach

FOR THE SALMON:

2 pieces of salmon filet (if you're cooking for 2 people)
olive oil
salt and pepper
dijon mustard
fresh baby dill
herbes de provence
2 garlic cloves, chopped
2 slices of lemon

Wash the salmon and rub it all over with olive oil, then season with salt and pepper. Line a cookie sheet with aluminum foil and rub a little olive oil. Place salmon skin side down on foil, and brush top with a little dijon mustard, then top with the herbs, garlic, and lemon slice. roast in a 450 oven for about 12 minutes.

FOR THE SPINACH:

1 bag baby spinach
olive oil
salt and pepper
1/2 lemon
2 cloves garlic

Heat the oil and garlic in a pan until the oil is about to smoke. Add the spinach and stir really fast until it's just wilted. Turn off the heat and add the salt, pepper, and lemon juice.

FOR THE CHEVRE ALFREDO

1 leek
1 zucchini
olive oil
1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp flour
1 cup light cream
dijon mustard
3 oz chevre cheese (little over half the little log)
1/3 cup parmesan
1/2 lemon
white wine
herbes de provence
salt and pepper
1 cup chopped parsley
2 sprigs of chopped baby dill
1/2 box linguine
6 cloves garlic

put a gallon of salted water on. heat some olive oil and the garlic until the garlic is just golden. add the chopped leek and zucchini and saute until soft. season with salt, pepper and herbes de provence. Once they're cooked, push them to the outside of the pan and add the butter and flour in the center and stir together to make a roux. Add dijon mustard, cream, wine, zest from the lemon and both cheeses; stir to melt together and gradually stir in the vegetables and the chopped parsley and dill. cook the linguine, drain, and squeeze on some lemon juice; then add to the sauce and stir everything together.

Put the pasta on the bottom of the plate, then the spinach, then the fish. garnish with leftover parsley and parmesan.

On Sunday night I cooked, and it was kind of an...experiment. Hopeless Romantic is a near flawless boyfriend in many capacities, with one major exception being his cooking. Namely, that he's a really, really good cook. Of really, really bad food. I'm pretty sure he could metabolize a deep-fried car tire as long as he took a nice nap after it, and also he's from the South, where I gather a meal is looked at as something between an endurance sport and a dare.

Hopeless Romantic invented a dish called the Barnyard because he didn't think a Turducken went far enough. He makes cheeseburgers by wrapping dough around a 50/50 beef patty with a hunk of cheddar cheese, brushing it with butter and baking it. I once asked him to make something a teenier bit healthier than normal for lunch and his idea was mahi-mahi in bacon dripping. It's like dating a slightly furrier Paula Deen.

So anyway, I'm trying to take on a little more of the cooking, which isn't without its own set of problems. One of them is that I'm simply not as good a cook as he is, though I'm not bad either. Another part of which is that my repertoire mostly consists of baked goods and Italian food. Italian food, contrary to assumptions, can actually be healthy, but he doesn't think he likes Italian. Mainly because he's from the South, and therefore thinks Italian food is Prego over elbow macaroni.

So on to Sunday. We were over the house with his roommates, and I had decided to make carbonara. Now, there's really no way to make low-fat or low-cholesterol carbonara. But I could pitch it as 'it's like pasta with bacon and eggs, honey, you'll like it' and let him make the garlic bread, so peace reigned.

Of course, while he was distracted trying to figure out how much melted mozzarella a piece of bruschetta could support while maintaining structural integrity, me and the roommates could slip some healthy stuff in without him noticing. He did, however, notice us draining off the bacon grease, and whined for a good solid fifteen minutes.

In the end, me and the roommates LOVED my modified carbonara, which I am dubbing Carbonara Primavera, and he also loved it, "only next time, maybe a few less vegetables, and more bacon." Oh well, baby steps.

Sarah's Carbonara Primavera (serves 6, or Hopeless Romantic +3)

1 pound fettucine
1 rotisserie chicken
7 strips bacon
7 cloves garlic
olive oil
8 egg yolks
1 pint whipping cream
1 teaspoon rosemary
1 teaspoon chili powder
½ teaspoon nutmeg
20 basil leaves
1 lemon
salt and pepper to taste
6-8 green onions
1 cup grape tomatoes
½ cup white wine
1 cup grated parmesan cheese

1. cut bacon into 1-inch pieces. Dice or crush garlic. Saute in olive oil on medium low heat until bacon is crisp and garlic is golden. Drain off most of the fat. If your boyfriend whines, tell him he can dip bread into it.
2. shred breast and leg meat off rotisserie chicken into bite-size pieces, set aside.
3. put a gallon of salted water on high heat.
4. chop up basil and green onions, set aside about a third of chopped mixture.
5. Mix remaining two thirds of chopped stuff with egg yolks, half the whipping cream, chili powder, nutmeg, and rosemary.
6. zest the lemon and put the zest in the egg mixture.
7. Put pasta in boiling water and cook it until al dente.
8. Add the egg mixture to the pan and stir really quickly to cook the eggs without curdling them.
9. When eggs have come together (will be a pale yellow like custard), add chicken, wine, three quarters of the cheese and the rest of the cream to the mix and stir. Add salt and pepper to taste.
10. Cut the grape tomatoes in half or into quarters if they’re really big.
11. drain the pasta and put some olive oil on it to keep it from sticking together. Also squeeze the juice of half a lemon over the pasta and stir.
12. Add the tomatoes to the sauce and cook until they’re just warmed through. Add the pasta to the sauce and toss.
13. Serve the pasta with the reserved chopped herbs, parmesan cheese, and slices of the remaining lemon half. If desired, add a slice of delicious garlic bread that weighs about as much as your head.

http://www.sarahthomasonline.com

Constructive criticism is highly welcome. This took me the better part of a week and I can't look at it straight anymore.

So.

Boston, this time.

In one sense, it's a bit anticlimactic. I've moved so many places in the last few years; New York, Wales, Scranton, Florida, Scranton again, England (mentally anyway), Honesdale, Scranton for the third time. It was actually kind of funny, moving in; everyone was looking at my boxes of stuff, going "you need one of these" or "that'll never fit there." No, guys, really. You don't tell Mondrian how to draw a square. I got this one.

In another sense, of course, it's not anticlimactic at all. Because...it's Boston. Of all the places I've moved, of all the places I've LIVED, this is the first one I've wanted to be in. I've been planning and working toward this since at least February of last year, and even though I could never have predicted all the changes that would occur in my life between then and now, every change that happened has been evaluated in the shadow of this one goal; to get to Boston. To finally make, by any means necessary, a life for myself I wanted to live, in a place I wanted to live it. Not the most specific of goals, I know; postcollegiate life has kind of encouraged me to keep my goals modest and fluid. It's also prepared me for not seeing them work, so I still think part of me is waiting to wake up back in Old Forge, in the tiny little iron bed I slept in during high school, which is currently wedged netween a dead Xerox machine and boxes of mailing tubes, with the best thing I have to look forward to all day being sushi and nerd sex.

But no, I'm really, honestly here. Having sushi and nerd sex. (New nerd, needs a nickname. Shall be henceforth known as Hopeless Romantic because, for a housewarming present, he bought and installed me a shower head.) And there's a third way in which it is anticlimactic; all the things I came to Boston to DO have been on hold for a few weeks. School starts next Tuesday, my primary job a week after that. My secondary job starts tomorrow; I found it today, I'll be working in a cupcake store. This will most likely kill me, or cause me to blow up to three hundred pounds, resulting in a catastrophic drop in nerd sex. Oh, well, as long as I can attach a vibrator to a telescoping handle at least I'll die happy.

So yes. I've been in Boston for two weeks and...not done much. Set up my apartment, which is very small but has large windows; I love it as I have loved nowhere else I've lived. Gone for lots of walks, tried and failed to make sense of Boston's rat nest streets and transportation system, which was, I think, first developed by following a cow around and building T stops wherever it pissed. Explored little shops. Gone to the library and listened to free acid folk concerts, followed by a walk through the farmer's market and reading a book whilst dangling feet in child's splash pond.

This place fucking rocks.

I haven't met too many people yet; and yet somehow I haven't felt even a second of the catastrophic loneliness I've felt in the other places I've moved. Largely, this has to be credited to the spectacular trillador and tall lady; I could write a whole nother post on how indescribably amazing it is to finally live in the same city as your best friend after three - no, eight - years. But partly because there's a little voice in the back of my head that says, "hey, no rush." You walk down the street here, and everyone's under thirty-five and talking about politics. Most of them are wearing summer scarves and talking crap politics, but that's okay. When I want my own views reflected, I look in the mirror. The point is, they're there, and I don't have to force any moments to their crisis because who knows when I'll have an opportunity to make a friend again. This is an embarrassment of riches. No need to lade the pockets. Right now, I'm still inhaling this city; feeling long-ossified toxins leaching out of my system, feeling clean and new and optimistic in ways I thought I abandoned along with my blond hair and nose stud.

Now, the boring stuff; the address, for those who want it, is 1334 Commonwealth Ave. #35, Allston, MA 02134. The apartment is officially open; visiting is not only welcome but actively encouraged. All travelers to receive complimentary bagel breakfast, tour of city with highlights at the Brattle Bookshop and Newbury Street, and dinner in the absolute best pizza shop I've ever eated at, Upper Crust on Harvard Avenue.

And, more regular updates, I promise my promise this time. For no other reason than, starting next week, I'll have a fuck of a lot more to talk about. I'm a little nervous about that, no lie; been a long time since I paid someone else for the privilege of being in their company at a certain time, rather than the other way around. And in all the multitudinous ways I've grown as a person in my last 4 years of life, "taking pretentious criticism from some self-obsessed 23 year old brat in vegan sandals" isn't one of them. But I'll make it work, somehow. If I got here, I can do that.

Cue Mary Tyler Moore theme music.

There is a war going on for your mind
Media mavens mount surgical strikes
from trapper keeper collages and online magazine racks
Cover girl cutouts throw up pop-up ads
Infecting victims with silicone shrapnel
Worldwide passenger pigeons deploy paratroopers
Now it's raining pornography
Lovers take shelter
Post-production debutantes pursue you in Nascar chariots

They construct ransom letters from biblical passages
and bleed mascara into the holy water supply

There's a war going on for your mind

Industry insiders slang test tube babies to corporate crack heads
They flash logos and blast ghettos
Their embroidered neckties say "Stop Snitching"
Conscious rappers and whistle blowers get stitches
made of acupuncture needles and marionette strings

There is a war going on for your mind

Professional wrestlers and vice presidents want you to believe them
The desert sky is their blue screen
They superimpose explosions
They shout at you
"Pay no attention to the men behind the barbed curtain
Nor the craters beneath the draped flags
Those hoods are there for your protection
And meteors these days are the size of corpses"

There's a war going on for your mind

We are the insurgents



We are building up a new world
Do not sit idly by
Do not remain neutral
Do not rely on this broadcast alone
We are only as strong as our signal
There is a war going on for your mind
If you are thinking
You are winning
Resistance is victory
Defeat is impossible
Your weapons are already in hand
Reach within you and find the means by which to gain your freedom
Fight with tools
Your fate and that of everyone you know depends on it


-Flobots, "There Is A War Going On For Your Mind/We Are Winning"

If you are a trained professional who investigates stories, does research, conducts interviews, and writes your findings in an ethically-mandated fashion in a forum for public consumption, you are a JOURNALIST.

If'n you're three root-inches away from the Happy Acres trailer park, you have too much carpal lockjaw in your family to consider a lucrative career in sexual services, can't cover your caesarian scars well enough to strip, and want your afternoons free to prepare little Aleesha for her performances in baby beauty pageants, you are a BROADCAST JOURNALIST.

Observe:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/22/product-placement-comes-t_n_114220.html

This post brought to you by whomever LJ decided to throw in my banner. Lately it's been Levis.

EDIT: Nope, Interracial Dating. Guess that's what I get for all that Quark/Sisko slash fiction I've been writing lately.

Sometimes I wonder what future scientists will say about us.

Not really far future ones, like the alien archaeologists of 5200 who will probably make unintentionally hilarious conclusions like, "the Cheeto was the staple crop of the Americas" or "the major unit of worldwide currency was the iPod" or "Oprah Winfrey was a cult leader" (though that last one might actually be true...); I mean the social scientists, and plain regular citizens, of just a century or so ahead. What will they think when they look down at the transition between the 20th and 21st century, from the vantage point of the 22nd?

Will we be cool and retro, with all the niftiest kids in school modding their implanted wetware supercomputers to work through antique laptops they picked up at a Salvation Army? (Plastikpunk?) Will little girls having tea parties pretend to be the graceful heroines of the Reality TV era, being whisked to glamorous parties in gowns that show only a discreet flash of labia and dancing with dreamy men in baseball caps named Spencer? Will great great grandfathers on fifteen flavors of life support start annoying lectures with "In my day, we didn't need bioinjectable osseaginous alloy; we got plastic surgery! And we liked it!"

I suppose I hope, if we're remembered at all, it will be with a feeling like you get when your mom says "Whatever." Well-intentioned, faintly embarrassing, but not so tin-eared that it's completely ridiculous. At least, that's how I feel most of the time, except for when I hope that our entire culture is written off as the most abortive experiment since Calvinism and the Green Party COMBINED and the whole of civilization spontaneously decides on a total hard drive wipe.

Shockingly enough, one of those moments was today.

( Read more... )

Okay, it looks like Sunday is going to be the best day for those who said they could make it (although I'm not opposed to doing something non-movie-related tonight if anyone's got some ideas).

So: Sunday at 3 pm showing of Wall-e at Cinemark; my thinking is precede it with ice cream at around 2:30 with possible food of the dinner type and tasty beverages afterwards. Bring your friends, lovers, and anyone who owes you money. See you then!

Forgot to update this thing for a while...I'm home. As in, I no longer have an apartment type home in Honesdale, and am now living full time in Old Forge (until I'm not, that is).

Hence, I'm bored. Want to go to the movies this weekend?

I have a recurring dream about having a gun held to my head.

I don't always know who the person is; sometimes it's someone I know and trust, and sometimes I don't see or can't remember their face. Sometimes, to my great shame, it's a random black person or middle eastern terrorist; I guess the xenophobia I won't allow myself to acknowledge in the waking world leaks out in my dreams. At any rate, they're always angry, spitting, and enraged, shouting at me; I'm always on my knees. I never know what I've done. There are always other people in the room in my dream, again sometimes people I know. They never help, they just watch.

I've never been shot in one of these dreams, maybe because they say you can't die in a dream without dying in real life. I always manage to defuse the situation. I look up at the shooter, and I very calmly talk to them until they put the gun down. I don't move or raise my voice, and I don't show fear; with dream-logic I know that the moment I showed any fear, I'd be shot, no question or hesitation.

The fear I don't show in these dreams usually comes when I wake up. At which point I still don't say anything about it, because it's a dream and dreams are stupid, right? Apparently I have the same logic awake I do asleep.

I had one of my gun dreams last night. And something occurred to me this morning when I was washing my face and trying to shake it off; maybe on some level I think that, if I show any fear, I deserve to be shot in the head by someone I love.

Serious friendslist is serious.

Rather than, you know, help you address your problems, I'd rather you just tell me your weirdest ever crush and why you like them. This is apropos of dativesingular and me laughing online about middle aged television presenters and how they (fail to) measure up to Time Lords.

Mine would be....

( Read more... )

I just spent the morning in a state correctional institution for sex offenders.

Please, please tell me something beautiful.

Violently racist or hilarious? Both?

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com

Let me show you it.

http://www.strangehorizons.com

First published piece, bitches. Enjoy!

Ok, this started out as a response to someone else's post, but it grew and grew until eventually it threatened to take over my brain so I figured it deserved its own post.

Basically I was responding to someone on my flist who said that all women are crazy. Now, I'm not going to attempt to disprove that statement, because all women are crazy. However, a statement like that usually carries an unspoken corollary along the lines of 'and men aren't,' which is equally ridiculous. "All people are crazy" is a much better assertion, and carries the full weight of human history along with it; but I don't think it's what the original poster was getting at. I believe what he wanted to say was 'the natural insanity of the human condition manifests differently in females than in males.' And what I'd like to do is explain why.

There are four classes of reason female craziness is unique: sociological, physiological, epistemological, and ontological. The physiological reasons are the easiset to explain.

The two main hormones that make up the female menstrual cycle are estrogen and progesterone. The full effects of these hormones on the human psyche are only beginning to be understood, and more research is clearly needed to determine their impact. However, estrogen is known to be a suppressant to serotonin, the 'happy hormone' the brain releases in response to positive stimuli. The amount of estrogen in the system at any given point in the menstrual cycle is in flux, and varies from woman to woman. However, MTF trnssexuals beginning an estrogen regimen often report increased moodiness, uncontrollable crying, depression, and sometimes suicidal ideation. And of course they're on steady doses, not experiencing a constant flux of them in a cycle that follows the same timetable as full moons, which anyone who has ever worked in an emergency room will tell you make people act loony.

Progesterone on the other hand increases cognitive activity in very specific areas of the brain. Exactly what this impacts is, again, not clear, but some scientists credit progesterone with increased awareness of facial and social cues, and it has been bandied about as a treatment for autism. This may not seem like as big a deal as estrogen, but it does help explain why a woman might look at your face and see 'annoyance, existential torment, with a side of vague disappointment at my shortcomings' when you're just trying to remember how old the milk is. (This could also be associated with lateral memory, another area where women excel; there's just not enough research to tell.)

Which brings me to sociological reasons for female behavior. By this I mean the way females are socialized to behave. Now, I know as members of the first world, everyone reading this has benefitted from the most enlightened set of proscribed gender roles in the world. And please keep in mind that, when I talk about socialization, I'm not talking about my mother in particular or mothers in general. For one thing, a mother, no matter how wonderful, is one voice, one source of input in a girl's definition of self, and often she's not even the most important one. For another thing, mothers are just grown-up girls, trying to fight against the restrictive socialization they were subjected to by THEIR mothers, and so on. Socialization refers to the culture in which mothers and daughters live, one which is still backward in a lot of ways.

I could make a lot of very specific arguments about this. There's the old chestnut of sizeism, which effects us no matter how old, smart, or beautiful we are, and which I actually find pernicious enough to label a humanitarian crisis. But there are others too; merchandising for example. Consider this; for the last twenty-five years, women have outnumbered men in college. By that logic, you would assume that women's earning power had outstripped men's, but of course it hasn't. There's no simple reason for this, but I don't think it's a coincidence that over 70% of marketing is directed toward women. And what kind of marketing? Pillows, vases, designer purses forgodssake. Stuff that breaks, that's meant to be disposable, that goes out of style, that conveys status or lack thereof in the eyes of mainly other women. I'm not going to sit here and claim that men aren't told by the television to spend their money on stupid shit, but can you imagine men wishing they were wealthy enough to drop thousands of dollars on a closet full of belt buckles? Or believing that a $1200 dollar belt buckle with someone's logo on it was that much better than a $40 identical one? The prominence of logo is another niggly little evil thing, particularly since it brings race into the issue as well as gender. Women want Louis Vuitton handbags, black women want Kimora Lee Simmons handbags, and nearly all advertising for mutual funds and 401ks is directed at white men.

But these are volcanos. The fault line that births them is much deeper and more vile. Basically, it comes down to the fact that men are found attractive by women, and find their highest expression of selfhood, in outwardly directed activities, and women turn an equal amount of intellectual and psychic energy inwards. That is the true malice of gender socialization, and I have yet to see anyone even attempt to address it. You can see it anywhere you want to look; advertising makes it pathetically obvious. Flip through a fashion magazine and look at perfume and cologne ads sometime; I just did because I'm helping a friend do some market research. Nearly all fragrance ads feature either a man or a woman alone in a page size photograph; the man will be wearing some work-specific wardrobe like cowboy gear or a business suit, and they never stare directly at the camera. Whereas women are photographed in a prone position, in sleep or evening wear, looking upwards at the camera with heavy lidded eyes and a half-open, sexually available mouth.

This rant might come over a bit Dworkinesque, but it's an important point to make. There are always a lot of parents councils and teachers and storybooks and speakers and interested parties that exist to tell girls that it's possible for them to dream of being an astronaut, or a firefighter, or a sea captain, but images of female ideation still all look like prostitutes. Everyone wants to be sexy, and if you're a woman self-direction isn't. But by the time you get older and realize magazines are bullshit, the neuroses are already in place, ready to be passed down to your daughter.

This is the ultimate in trite, but think of the difference between a toy gun and a tea set. To have a toy gun is to be a soldier. It's to have a job; in the mind of most five year olds, a very heroic and exciting one. A tea set is an instrument of socialization. It's to be a woman, in the company of other women, having some tea. There's a world of difference there. Don't even get me started on toy kitchens, the home and garden channel, or gossip girl books.

And if you are thinking to yourself that this isn't something that plays out in the real world, just think of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. I don't like Hillary and I won't vote for her, but you can't deny there's a lot of sexist vitriol directed at her. Some pundits might say it's as hard for Barack Obama to run as it is for her, but Barack has over two hundred years of men running for office to teach him how to be president. Hillary is making the mistakes that an eventually successful female presidential candidate will avoid. She's breaking the ground, and bearing the brunt of the fear and prejudice because of it. Where a man saying exactly the same things she would say would be seen as emphatic and stentorian, she's hysterical and shrill. Because just like the first female whatever, she's in the unenviable position of trying to create a paradigm while also doing a job.

To go back to the original poster's phrasing, yes, to a certain extent, we were taking crazy classes while you were playing video games. We were learning to focus on self, improve self, adorn self, critque self, and adapt self. While you were winning the major league pennant or being a pirate. And for those of us of both genders who have a mental illness on top of the craziness of the human condition, this socialization effects how the illness manifests. If you've ever talked to a man and a woman both suffering from social anxiety disorder, you'll know what I mean. To the male, there's something wrong with others and something preferable in his own company. To the female, there's something wrong with HER.

Oh, and boys, lest you think yourselves separate from this process, let me point to the cultural influences that lead you to spend your formative sexual years chasing after the plum craziest of us all, because they're so 'mysterious' and 'hard to get.' By the time you grow up and realize crazy is crazy and sane girls are better, guess what? Neurosis locked and loaded. And you're understandably bitter. Which leads me to my next point, epistemological.

Basically, we're crazy because you expect us to be crazy. This goes both ways. A key aspect of cultural heterosexuality is attraction to the other, which also helps maintain normative gender roles (example: women have been wearing pants for nearly a century and there are some sexy pants out there, but the sartorial signifier of female desirability still remains the red dress because it's the polar opposite of anything a man would wear.) Meaning, of course, that when we want to be found desirable we play up the most gender specific cues we can. Women's makeup is designed to suggest the vagina; men grow facial hair to appear more masculine. This naturally extends to behavior too. But spend too much time trying to be the other and you start forgetting to be yourself, and there lies the heart of a lot of male-female miscommunication. I'm not going to sit here and say why ALL relationships end, or why they NEVER work, because clearly sometimes they do and the ones that don't all end for different reasons. But I'd be shocked to find a heterosexual couple that have never had a fight because one of the partners expected a certain kind of behavior simply by virtue of what was between their legs and didn't get it.

So you have that fight, say because the woman feels taken for granted because the man isn't romantic enough, or the man is annoyed that the woman won't tell him what's wrong, or whatever. And, because the woman KNOWS by virtue of malicious culture that men are insensitive and the man knows women are crazy, guess what? Men, still insensitive. Women, still crazy. And when you do get a woman who tells you about things that bother her, and you respond saying 'oh god, you're all crazy,' you've effectively equated the potentially legitimate psychological issues of a person you might respect with the most melodramatic histrionics you've ever seen on late-night TV. Which doesn't invite a dispassionate response. (Or it might, but that would be because the woman doesn't want to seem crazy, even though minimizing the feelings of someone else is rude no matter what the gender or circumstances. There's no more tragic reaction to this gender disparity than women who affect misogyny so as not to lose the respect of the men they love.)

And of course, we come to the last class of differences; ontological. Even if society were removed, even if the hormone cycle could be regulated, even if men and women interacted as individuals and not as genders, I truly believe there would still be inherent differences between the sexes and their behavior. I don't think I can put my finger on them; probably no one can, without engaging in some serious reductionism. It might be genetic, it might be a spiritual response to being built to give life, who knows. I know, however, that no political movement has ever been able to define or tap into it, which is why though I support women's empowerment I loathe feminism. It jsut builds another paradigm for women to try and adapt themselves to, while keeping them consumerists and insecure, and coincidentally provides a nice handy little way for misogynists and haters to vilify women they don't like. And don't even get me STARTED on 'the personal is political.' I don't know how a society where female endeavor was systemic and fully integrated would function, but I know feminists don't either, and while women who want better for themselves and their daughters are besotted with it it's stalling real progress. But I believe all people, male and female alike, thrive in an environment of maximum equality, and I truly believe that women have the same resources of brilliance, soulwattage, and human majesty at their disposal as men.

To feel that majesty stymied, belittled, and turned toward gaining a 26-inch-waist rather than saving the world...man, that would really make you crazy, wouldn't it?

Hey you gaiz!

This morning I was interviewed on "The Bryant Park Project," a news program on NPR. It's not syndicated in NEPA unfortunately, but they had a link to my segment on their website; they wanted to talk about the natural gas fields I've been doing stories on. I'm actually just as glad it wasn't syndicated, because it means I don't have to listen to crap from locals all day about how I got everything wrong and I'm stupid and want them all to die hungry and penniless with their arms wrapped around trees. Anyway, go have a listen, whether you've never heard my voice before and are curious or just want to see how amusingly half-coherent and 'um'-ridden I am when someone's asking me about mineral rights at 7:30 in the morning.

Oh, and I don't have a lisp in real life, my phone was cutting out on s's. Honest.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89025329

Because it's pretty much just frozen over.

Yep, I'm heading off to grad school in the fall. I refrained from saying anything publically until I knew for sure, because applying and not getting in = embarrassing if you're me, and even if accepted I wasn't sure I'd be able to afford it. But I applied to BU's School of Print Journalism back in January; I had had just about enough professional catastrophe that I didn't want to continue being a journalist if I couldn't be good at it at that point. Not losing-my-job kind of catastrophe; in fact I've been phoning it in here so hard since finding out I've pretty much come to the conclusion I'm bulletproof. No, it was more along the lines of 'we're going to gag your stories because they're true and the truth might offend the advertisers and there's nothing you can do about it because you probably wouldn't get a job at a bigger paper nyah nyah' fuckery. And that pissed me off, because when it's a little town like this you actually KNOW the people your silence is dicking over. You stand next to them in the grocery line. I've never made it a secret that I don't want to stay here, but that doesn't mean I don't care about the people and think they deserve to, oh I don't know, NOT get cancer from toxic drilling muds. But that's just little old liberal-pansy me. You know how it is.

Anyway, I applied to BU, which was really a stretch, since I attended the world's most obscure undergraduate institution and did okay, but not fantastic when I was there. And the job experience since has been...well. The stint at Highlight Magazine editing the Hidden Pictures is probably the most impressive part of it. I called admissions when I was applying and got their average GPA, average GRE scores, all that, of their accepted postgrad students, and on pretty much every scale I was nearly exactly average, maybe a little bit above. And BU, in addition to being competitive, is EXPENSIVE. Like, exceeding the national madate for a federal stafford loan by about fifteen thousand dollars expensive. To say nothing of the special joy of living in Boston, home of the five-dollar Yuengling. I could be accepted, not offered any merit based aid and I still wouldn't have been able to go.

Anyway, suspense is probably pretty much forgone at this point. They accepted me, and offered me 10k merit based off the bat. That shrinked the gap between stafford loan and cost to just under 5k, which I can easily come up with. So I know I can go. And there is much rejoicing.

That brings us to yesterday, when they offer me a chance to apply (ergo, not in the bag yet, but I'm cautiously optimistic) for their biggest assistanceship, which would make me a TA for 20 undergrads and pay 6000 a SEMESTER plus full tuition remission.

And today, they sent me an email about a full-time features writer job for their alumni newsletter.

If I get both, Boston University is effectively paying me to go to school.

So yeah, I'm slightly shellshocked and not long for NEPA. I had originally planned to stay until July because that's when I was promoted and I promised Steve a year, but we've sinced talked and he wants to hire a college grad to replace me, so he'd like to start looking in May or so.

So there it is. As of this weekend, I have about seven more weeks in Honesdale. I'll probably sublet my apartment furnished so I don't have to get storage or break my lease, and just head up to town with a suitcase to find some kind of starbucky thing for spending money and an apartment. I might even be able to afford my own place if both jobs work out, which is great, because as I told Trillador, I was half afraid I'd be sharing a basement in Mattapan (read: Harlem with a dumber accent) with two sculptors, a bank teller, and their homemade crack pipe collection.

Maybe I could get a place with a little balcony, near the ocean. I miss the ocean. I miss walking on the sand after work. I haven't even allowed myself to think about things like that for a long time, because it'd be like saying "I miss steak and fur coats." And now, it can maybe happen in a little less than two months. I'm still in a bit of a state of shock in case you couldn't tell, and waiting for the parts of the plan still up in the air to fall through. And I do know that time and money are going to be tight, and one way or another I'm in for two very stressful years of preparation for and even more stressful proffession. I know I'm probably going to dislike all the things about gradschool that I disliked about college the first time, and that I'm probably going to feel like a hayseed, and that I'm probably going to be the old woman in a room full of 22-year-old valedictorians from Amherst. But I'm still happy.

So be happy for me, bitches!

Ok, I've avoided talking about this race on here, mainly because nearly all my emotional responses have been just that; do I LIKE a candidate, rather than do I intimately know his stances on issues. That being said, you have GOT to watch these two videos.

The first is a music video mixed by Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas for the Obama campaign called "Yes We Can...." has to be one of the BEST political ads I've ever seen.


And of course, here's the Clinton campaign's response:




I don't think I even want to see McCain's attempt.

Happy New Year to all my friends, lovers, erstwhile lovers, sworn enemies, dependents, illegitimate children, pets, employees, and mom.

I feel like I normally have a lot to say about the year past, but it'd kind of be redundant at this point. I've mostly been open with my thoughts and emotions as they came this year, so all of you got to experience my dramabombing and irrationality in real time, you lucky bastards. No need to revisit now. So instead of trying to summarize what was, for me, a very odd year, I think I'll just make a list of a couple of the highlights, lowlights, and overprocessed strands that were 2007.

In 2007, I:

1. Almost died more than once.

2. Got arrested.

3. Lost my driver's license.

4. Was called brilliant by Gerald Van Gelder

5. Lost twenty-four pounds

6. tried to learn to draw; failed.

7. tried to learn to play the guitar; still a work in progress

8. got promoted

9. let go of a few bad memories

10. made some new friends.

Hmm. Seems a lot more convntional when I write it down like that.

Things I'll be doing in 2008:

1. Moving out of Honesdale

2. auditioning for and participating in a play

3. (maybe) joining a flat-track roller derby team

4. finishing my weightloss and documenting it in a weekly newspaper column

5. paying off my credit cards

6. pay off my lawyer

7. (maybe) buying a house or apartment

8. learn a martial art

9. taking a college class for fun

10. finish my film script

hmm. seems like a good deal to me.