In which I cooked, like, all afternoon, basically.
Today, I made two salsas:
A hot poblano-corn relish:
Spicy black beans:
Mexican brown rice. That weird cottage cheese guacamole I make. And shredded chicken, for him.
Cheddar, sour cream.
There’s leftover queso blanco dip, so I heated that up, too! What the hell!
Look at that. Fuckin’ delicious burrito bowl.
And I didn’t even have to put on pants!
In which there’s a clarification.
In case you don’t know, internet parlance uses “jew” to mean the 1% far more often than the race. It’s extreme stereotyping parody.
Is it still racism, to hyper-attenuate a quality typically associated with a particular race and use that word to mean certain financial activities?
Is all stereotyping racism?
There’s still a blogosphere, sorta.
Entirely by accident — I was looking for recipes for leftover fried fish — I found a blog written by a middle aged white woman. I read a couple of her posts (one entirely about a jacket; another, about internet anxiety and unfriending people on Facebook and not really using certain platforms), and then I clicked through her blogroll.
The blogging experience we all had ten or fifteen years ago, and think of as “over”? Is still happening.
I clicked through to one and the author’s been dead of breast cancer for two years. Another featured a year-old post about how the blogger’s giving up blogging because of fatigue and a fucked up family. But another was current and about buying and using makeup. Another was also current, with brilliantly written little posts about everything, about anxiety and a sort of timidity about enjoying things.
And they all link back to one another and all have or had non-ironic readers who comment. They have layouts and themes even older than this one. It’s so great.
It’s also really weird, because every blog I read back in the day is dead… most of the links in my blogroll haven’t been updated in years, and three of the domains are expired.
I remember blogging earnestly and non-ironically. I remember how the internet was, in various corners, before the wonderful and terrible shit-show that is social networking and trolling and painful awareness of privilege. I remember it so well that now I keep an analog diary now and rarely post here, even though I pay for the hosting and the domain year after year after year, even though nobody reads it but me and maybe Stanley.
I love goblinbox, though, and my dad still blogs here, so it’s worth it just to host that.
As for my “what should I be wearing at my age” question, apparently middle-aged white women wear skinny jeans, expensive shoes, expensive tee shirts, leather bomber jackets, carry an expensive handbag and, for a pop of color, wear name-brand red lipstick. So, that’s me in sweats forever, then.
In which it’s Superb Owl Sunday, and I’m not even sure who’s playing!
It’s 1:24 in the afternoon and I’ve already downed this:
(It’s a brilliant bloody mary with lots of pickle juice.)
And this:
(A mostly-homemade bean tostada of excellent excellence.)
Life is a wonderful — and delicious and tipsy — thing!
In which, yet again, I become what I judge. This time was quicker than usual! (It took twenty years for me to end up fat and the owner of a fake Christmas tree, but only weeks to end up with a Traveler’s Notebook!)
Behold. My Traveler’s Notebook.
This object has totally captured my imagination. I’m not really sure why, as it’s just a piece of leather and some elastic, a tin clamp, a waxed thread bookmark, paper, and accessories, but I adore it. (No hyperbole. Sometimes I just sit and hold it and look at it.)
So elegant and clever. So satisfying. The smell of the leather, the feel of the paper. The thoroughly modern faux-rusticity.
You feel as if, should the world end, you’d carry this with you always, and scribble in it with the smallest and most cramped hand to save what little paper was left. Future feral generations would marvel at the even-cut edges, the fineness of the paper, the way the leather was treated. The impossibly complicated dried-out old plastic-and-steel pen, and the precision-milled pen clip. It would be scarred and bent, but beautiful, and you’d have put all you knew in it for them.
(Of course, what will really happen is that when this journaling generation goes, there will be millions upon millions of these things, stuffed with inspirational stickers and craft paper flowers and tabs and clips and cutesy drawings and a personal, woman’s-eye view into life way back in the teens, unearthed in boxes in grandmas’ houses and glutting the antiques market and whatever will pass for eBay by then. If they come back in style, like Polaroid cameras have now, people will probably buy them and gut them and re-use the by-then antique leather covers.)
I got the notebook itself (a “fauxdori,” made by a company called September Leather) for free, using points from my Chase Amazon card. (I can’t tell you how much I’ve spent on accessories since it’s completely embarrassing.) I soon restrung it with a Midori repair kit, even though the original elastics were just fine, to make it look more like a Midori.
I’ve purchased hand-made inserts, official Midori inserts. Pencil boards, kraft folders, pens. Colored pencils, brush pens, a couple of stencils. Book darts, washi tape, a repair kit, double sided tape, pen holder clips, and Midori post-its designed to fit inside.
And, if all that weren’t enough, I also bought a passport-sized Midori, plus a few accessories for it, too.
I use the little one as a wallet. It’s the most expensive wallet I’ve ever carried, and it’s not even a wallet! But it does hold one’s passport perfectly, plus money and cards.
I looooooooooove it.
The big one, the standard size, is my daily journal. And sketchbook. And spiritual journal. And place for lists and to-dos, and a catch-all for random bits of paper, and post-its dispenser, and pen holder, and it just looks cool and feels cool and is fun to handle.
It’s really nice to journal by hand again; I haven’t done so regularly since high school. It’s different than writing online or even typing, and I’m enjoying it very much. My wretched handwriting is slowly improving, and I’ve begun to sketch and doodle, too — something I’ve never really done.
Sometimes I sketch things from books I’m reading; other sketches are scenes from what I’m watching on TV. I have no talent for art but it’s fun, and feels better than wasting time scrolling endlessly on social media.
I discovered the Traveler’s Notebook by accident when looking up Bullet Journaling. And here’s where the judgement comes in.
In August, I posted this innocuous entry about the chores I’d done that day, and Jinjer, whom I blame completely for my journal obsession, told me about the world of BuJo and posted a handy link.
I clicked.
And fell down the rabbit hole of modern planner obsession. Just like standing in front of a Franklin Planner display back in the day, only seemingly infinite. Instagram hashtags, Pinterest, endless blogs and YouTube flip-throughs. And eventually I stumbled across the Midori Traveler’s Notebook, a refillable Japanese stationer’s flagship product, and that was that. Had to have one. Had to have two.
The judgement thing was that, at first, as I looked at all the stuff, at the endless pictures of piles of planners and journals and pens and stickers and stamps and tapes and myriad other stupid meaningless and often plastic accessories, I thought, “Gross. Wasteful. Needless. These people could bullet journal with a Bic and a two dollar spiral notebook!”
I came across online stationery and pen stores, and thought, “How fucking stupid and pretentious can anyone be? Nobody needs a two hundred dollar fucking fountain pen.” But before two months were out, I’d placed my first Jet Pens order, and read through maybe half of their lovely, clever tutorials, learning several useful things.
Full disclosure: I did buy a fucking fountain pen, but it was under two bucks. I just wanted to see if I, as a leftie, could write with it. Turns out I can, but I have to hold it upside down, in order to pull rather than push the nib. I’m not super fond of it because I prefer superfine pens, and it writes medium-to-heavy.
So my knee-jerk reaction was a negative judgement, and I ended up turning into what I’d judged. In almost no time at all.
Do I need not only one but two relatively expensive journal solutions? No, I could write online here, or in a private local document. Or if I simply had to go analogue (which I felt I did, as there appears to be evidence it’s good for brain plasticity), any pen and pad of paper would do. It’s just typical Western gluttony and wastefulness (even if it does stimulate the economy (which I’m not confident is wholly good no matter what they say)).
Do any non-professionals need special paper types, wide varieties of writing utensils, or other accessories? No, not at all. I’m no artist, or famous diarist, or world traveler.
But do I really need most of what I have? No. And I’m ashamed of it, honestly, but not enough to force privation on myself. I focus instead on my gratitude and good fortune, most of the time.
Much of my adult life I couldn’t have afforded to buy these things on a whim; I would have put them on wishlists and eventually forgotten about them. Now that I’m in a spot where I can drop sixty bucks on a glorified wallet I don’t need, well, I did. So I’m just like everybody else and I use my discretionary income to buy shit I do not, in any way, shape, or form, need, but only want.
It feels weird. It’s strange that when my life is at its most abundant and comfortable, I’m mentally so Spartan in outlook. I frequently feel a sense of melancholy about how normalized my relative wealth is, when so many are still suffering heartbreaking lack. I have so much, from hot running water to grocery delivery to the luxury of enough free time to make my own bread and pickles and salsa and soups and sauces and hats and socks. Other people are literally shooed off of the park benches they’re trying to sleep on.
Oh, well, enough pontificating. The positive outcome of all this is that not only do I have a couple of objects that give me great pleasure every time I use them, and a new habit of offline analog time, but also I donated an equal amount to the local food kitchen and shelter just so I could stand myself! True story.
In which I ponder the cuddle-the-baby or ignore-him-when-he-cries approaches.
I’ve been reading a lot about Universal Basic Income lately.
What is it? Well, the basic idea is that everybody gets enough income to keep them just out of poverty even if they never do anything at all.
In the U.S., it would be the equivalent of about $1,000 per month.
Everybody. No matter what. If you’re wealthy, you’d probably just shove it in your IRA or something; if you’re not, it would keep you sheltered and fed and off the streets and off welfare. It would put a lot of social services out of business. Homelessness would plummet, for instance.
Would people “abuse” it?
Well, let’s consider abuse:
Is deciding you don’t want to work abuse? I don’t want to work. Working sucks! With the exception of a couple of jobs that stimulated me and were interesting for awhile, I generally have never enjoyed work. Nobody truly likes going to the same place every day and doing the same meaningless shit over and over (especially not while being abused by the public). Most humans do not enjoy pretending to be total twats for money, just to align with the inhumane dictates of some company that doesn’t give a shit whether you live or die and which will fire you at the drop of a hat no matter how faithfully you perform/conform.
Is using that money to buy drink or drugs abuse? Well, if you’re addicted, you’re going to get those substances anyway. With basic income, you’d get them with your own money rather than other people’s. Probably a measurable reduction in theft. If you’re not addicted, you might party for awhile, sure, but that sort of life is pretty boring, so eventually you’d stop and look around for something fulfilling.
Many people object to the idea of giving everybody money because they think it would encourage laziness and slovenliness, but I think those objections reflect the objector’s personality more than anything else. Just because you’d drop out and let your place go to shit if you got free money doesn’t mean everybody else would.
And I think a lot of people would drop out, briefly, especially those in the bottom classes, and let the pizza boxes pile up. Daytime TV ratings might explode for awhile, sure. But so what? Eventually, people who are not disabled physically or mentally will get up and go do something. It’s human nature. And with basic income, that thing wouldn’t have to be degrading jobs at fast food restaurants or big box stores. That thing could be going back to CC to get qualified to work in a nice restaurant’s kitchen, or learning how to finally write that novel, or volunteering full-time to rebuild the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. With universal income, if your circs sucked, you’d be free to reject them, leave, begin again elsewhere. You could find your correct place in society, eventually.
People in good, satisfying jobs would probably stay put. But people in shitty, demeaning jobs would probably migrate out of them, forcing employers to retool those jobs to be less shitty and demeaning in order to attract workers. Right now, and for the last thirty years, it’s been an employer’s market. They’ve lowered wages and worsened scheduling, benefits, and other work parameters to the point where most jobs below a certain level are really, really awful. I know this because I’ve worked them; if you haven’t, you can shut the fuck up. “Random scheduling” doesn’t sound that bad until you’ve done it for a year. Closing at eleven followed by opening at six followed by no schedule certainty for years on end will exhaust you: physically, mentally, emotionally. It’s bullshit, because it serves no purpose. We’re not at war; we’re not fighting for our lives and our way of life, we’re just making the rich richer. This is not sacrifice-worthy, noble employment. It’s theft.
Ignore-him-when-he-cries people think that by ignoring requests for attention, we’ll raise strong, self-dependent kids.
Cuddle-the-baby people think that by answering every need, we’ll raise confident, self-assured, unafraid children.
Obviously both approaches can fail and create selfish, self-serving monsters. Both approaches are imperfect, because they choose law over what’s actually on the ground.
I say the law was never meant to presuppose every possible nuance; you have a brain for that. React appropriately in the moment. And in the moment, machines are taking jobs, and a lot of industries are dying. Considering the lay of the land, it’s not possible to bring back all those dead manufacturing jobs. Not to mention that so many of the jobs that are left are poor quality and don’t pay shit. (If you’re working full time and still on welfare, something’s very wrong.)
It’s not like we don’t already have the wealth needed; if everybody had income, no matter what, we’d have a much healthier economy.
I believe that the more I learn about it, the more I’m very much in favor of UBI.
In which I buy stuff I don’t really need like an asshole, but at least it’s all used so I can say I’m “upcycling”!
Bought a table today! A used table! A TABLE YOU CAN EAT AT!
It’s a brown pub-style table and chairs set, and it’s taller than strictly necessary but I think it’ll be comfortable for the man, who is tall. The chairs are not-awful considering how austere they look, and not so high I can’t easily reach a sewing machine pedal.
I’m already imagining our having our next bi-annual games night while sitting at it, and it’s still 3 blocks away! (We’re going to bring it home when the man gets home from work.) Trivial Pursuit! Yahtzee! Cards! Dice! At a pub table! Brilliant!
I have also, I might add, in the past two months, bought: dishes, water glasses, a gravy boat, and candlestick holders, mainly in anticipation of setting a semi-proper Thanksgiving table this year. It’ll only be the two of us again, of course, but I’m so tired of eating on the couch hunched over the coffee table on holidays. It’ll be so great to sit down to a proper meal together on occasion!
You don’t think of yourself as “a table person” until you go over two years without one. I haven’t owned one for a really long time, but I lived with one until moving here. You just don’t really notice the stuff a table’s good for until there’s no table. Games night. Sewing. Filling out Christmas cards. Dinner dates. Wrapping gifts. Opening boxes from Amazon. Putting down the groceries.
I was, briefly, considering buying TV trays, but then I was just, like, OMFG, NERD, GET RID OF THE RECLINER WE LITERALLY NEVER, EVER SIT ON, AND THEN THERE WILL BE ROOM FOR A SMALL TABLE! So I took pictures of it — the recliner, I mean — and put it on Craigslist and it was not only gone in a week, but we got $25 more than we asked for!
Now that I have a table, I might buy fabric and make a runner, or placemats, or a tablecloth or something! Or, OMG, I could do seasonally appropriate centerpieces. It’s already September, I need a bowl and some pine cones and mini-pumpkins, stat! (While that is a joke, it’s also not. I’m totally gonna centerpiece it up for turkey day: I don’t even care that it’s common and privileged and totally something white bitches my age obsess over. Whoo! I even have a tray that’ll work for Xmas, maybe with candles and ornaments…)
Oh, who am I kidding. It’ll be covered in random shit within two weeks, and nobody’ll ever see any decorative centerpieces, and I’ll have to clean it off in order to eat at it, but at least I don’t have to eat on the couch anymore! Whoo! I’m gonna post the best Thanksgiving pictures this year!
In which I wax enthusiastic about a very old product!
Even with shipping, I got a frying pan, a sauce pan, and two lids for $25. Which is a really decent price, considering you could easily pay almost that for a lidded 6″ non-stick that you’d have to throw out and replace in two years.
Behold the P-81-B, which is the 1-pint covered sauce pan on the left, and the P-83-B, the 6-1/2 inch covered skillet you see on the right! The “P” series ran from 1958 to 1972, so these pans are 44 years old at the very youngest, and they could easily be older than I am by a decade.
These things are awesome! They heat up just as fast as cheap non-stick pans, and while they’re not non-stick per se, you can fry eggs and hamburgers in them with a little bit of butter and nothing sticks!
They’re also a pure and angelic white, so they look antiseptic as fuck. They scrub clean with remarkable ease.
They’re small and they have lids. I find that I’m cooking in them over much lower flame than I would with bigger pans, and of course lids keep the heat in too. Today I’ve fried a couple of eggs and a hamburger over very low flame in not much time at all. So they’re unexpectedly fuel-economical. Who knew!
And while you can’t buy either of these particular pieces new anymore, Corning Ware still offers some of the casseroles in this pattern. (I totally want them, and no doubt they’re worth every penny of the retail price, but if I do buy them I’ll probably buy them used because I’m cheap. You can almost see why so many companies went for planned obsolescence rather than quality when you contemplate that Corning Ware’s 50-year-old pieces are viably competing with their brand-new products.)
I love their sizes; great for cooking for one or two. (Not to mention great for not cooking far too much food every time you step up to the stove.) I’m not really sure why pan sizes have grown and grown when family sizes are smaller; I do know that when I was learning to cook I always made far too much food because the pots and pans were so big.
Knowing that the sauce pan holds exactly enough soup for two small bowlsful makes me happy.
I’m pretty sure there are a couple of these in my g’ma’s kitchen, but I didn’t cook with them much (beyond occasionally using one to put something in the toaster oven). I always used the small non-stick to fry or scramble eggs rather than the Corning Ware frying pan; habit, I suppose. Plus they look like they should stick, after years of using Teflon-coated pans, but they don’t.
I think between these and a decent cast iron pan or two, a person could easily give up cheap, disposable non-stick pans entirely! (I can’t speak for high-dollar non-stick cookware, because I’ve never had any.)
I love these pans!
In which I got a shit-ton of stuff done today.
Here’s the very exciting list:
tidied up generally
scrubbed the stove top
made awesome coffee in the Pyrex percolator
took pictures of the brown recliner
put all the throw rugs in the hall
swept the living room and bath
mopped the kitchen until the mop fell apart
put all the kitchen and bath linens into the wash
took all the rugs outside and shook the hell out of them
spot-scrubbed the living room and entryway floors with the mophead
listed the brown recliner on Craigslist
put the laundry in the dryer
made a pile of his stuff and asked him to deal with it
dusted and washed the coffee tables
washed the garbage pail lid
made the bed
put the rugs back down
folded the laundry and brought it back up
took pictures of the extra office chair to sell it
got permission to sell the PS3
Yay! Accomplishments!
In which it’s so political out there that it’s just better if I bitch here, where nobody but, like, five people and a couple of bots will ever see it.
This article just showed up in my timeline. Being a woman, I clicked on it.
https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/the-reality-that-all-women-experience-that-men-dont-know-about-kelly-jrmk/
Oh. My. Fucking. GOD. Don’t click through. It’s awful. Let me summarize it for you:
“Men have libidos and they look at us, beginning as soon as we go through puberty. We’re totally TRAUMATIZED by this and expect to be protected from ever being looked at or desired, ever. Because we’re inherently weak victims by nature.”
I am so sick of this idiot “narrative” that can’t tell the goddamned difference between evil (murderers) and horniness (young males), between actual danger (ISIL) and vague interest (a guy who looks at you), and which remains so completely convinced of its intrinsic worth and right to a voice that its adherents complaint-blog about men everywhere, constantly, all the time.
Sometimes it’s not even about “sexual harassment” (aka being human in public); they’ll blog about males simply being nice to them, because their victim-as-identity mentality is so deeply embedded in their psyches that they can’t tell the difference between a male with bad manners and a male that is trying to be helpful. Literally.
Any time a male interacts with them and doesn’t cower and grovel and spew “feminist” platitudes, it’s “harassment.” And if a man tries to help them, they’re instantly pissed off and insulted because they don’t need help from men and are perfectly capable, and being offered assistance is an insult!
Ladies: you’re not “feminists.” Feminism died before most of you were born. Actual feminists fought for equality and had legitimate academic clout. “Feminism” has degraded into a male-hating pogrom and it’s ugly, unbalanced, ignorant, privileged, immature, selfish, sexist, and wrong.
I loathe this article. It’s simple, petulant, and privileged, and sounds like it was written by an indoctrinated twelve-year-old still struggling with puberty and the measurable, demonstrable fact that boys and girls are different.
If I were more attached to my sex than my humanity, I’d be embarrassed by it, and go on apologetically about how most women aren’t nearly half as stupid, self-obsessed, and immature as the author appears to be, and I’d say that most of us are quite capable of rational thought and can tell the difference between being looked at and the legal definition of harassment.
Except judging by the massive volume of complaint-blogs about males and re-posts by women, apparently it’s not true.
This kind of thing isn’t groundbreaking, it isn’t useful, and it isn’t feminism. It’s privileged whining as a wrapper around full-on hatred of the masculine. It’s sexism.
I can’t believe how many otherwise intelligent women are applauding this article. Wives of husbands, mothers of sons! And if they’re instilling this kind loathing into their boys, well, it’s no wonder they’re all transgender. (Three of the women who reposted the link are mothers of boys who want to be girls.)
+~+~+~
This was posted, in earnest I believe, on Facebook yesterday:
http://mysteriousearth.net/2016/07/17/smithsonian-admits-to-destruction-of-thousands-of-giant-human-skeletons-in-early-1900%E2%80%B2s/
Really? Are you not even gonna use any part of that university education you paid tens of thousands of dollars for? I won’t even bother to say that both Nat Geo and Snopes say “hoax,” because it’s obvious.
Filed under chemtrails. Ye gods, people.
+~+~+~
http://www.salon.com/2016/03/03/my_gen_x_hillary_problem_i_know_why_we_dont_like_clinton/
A more mature rant, but still about the same shit: ZOMG SEXISM IS EVERYWHERE, ENTRENCHED AND RAMPANT!
Please. You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. Women abandoned tech because they didn’t want to be there. I personally spent my career — what there was of it — in tech. Women don’t like tech for two reasons: they don’t like being on call all night because they have families to deal with, and nerds expect them to be competent. The ones who aren’t competent find that using feminine wiles on (most) nerds is an epic fail, because (most) nerds either don’t notice or don’t care but they definitely know you have no idea how to configure a border router or do subnetting in your head.
Being annoyed once in awhile by an idiot who happens to be male and says dumb shit does not equal rampant, entrenched sexism. The rest of your male employees and clients were capable of behaving normally, but the occasional reject proves “sexism” to you? Really?
Sexism is “prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination on the basis of sex.” It’s when someone says, “I do not believe you are capable of doing this because of your chromosomes.” Not getting a job in the engineering department because you don’t know how to subnet is not sexism.
‘And then I turned 40 in the office,’ and confused sexism with ageism. Any idea how many males get let go because they’re “old”? Our culture is obsessed with youth.
And let us not forget that our culture undervalues motherhood as a whole and half of “our culture” is voting women who haven’t bothered to do shit about it. If you chose housewifery over a job that undervalued home and family and valued only itself, that was capitalism, not sexism.
It’s not men who say that making money at work is so important that it must take precedence over caregiving, it’s all of us. If women wanted it fixed, they’d get it fixed. Our society in general feels, if pay rates are anything to go by, that being the CEO of a successful corporation is valuable, being a doctor is less valuable, being a teacher is even less valuable, and being a mother is worth nothing at all.
Don’t like it? FIX IT, LADIES. YOU HAVE THE VOTE.