Rock'n'Roll Garage Mice

Random Act of Authorship #1

2011-10-15T13:28:00.000-07:00

I stepped
into the room and
I swear, it cracked. Not in any way that I am ever going to make any sense of to anyone, not in any way that I could point at and say, There, it broke there as if it was earthquake damage or the more weirdly probably hole in the wall caused by a random rare car accident. If I looked at you and said it cracked North by Northwest by Twilight Zone you would look at me

Yeah a lot like you’re looking at me now. But I do know a hawk from a handsaw even when the wind isn’t blowing, so give me some space. I’m not going to yell boo at you and make like an incipient ward of the mental community. Be lenient. I just felt a room fracture between reality here and reality somewhere else and describing it is a lot like telling somebody what that tiny something that you can only see out of the corner of your eye really, really looks like. I can’t see it straight on. I can only see it glimpse-wise. It isn’t like it has a shape or a color or a height or depth.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, there was a noise but the sort that you only hear between your ears, sort of like the feeling you get when a nerve pinches wrong and half your head feels like it just spasmed and your tongue feels paralyzed only auditory somehow. Dissonance. Not static or white noise. Just me suddenly a quarter-step out of tune with everything. And then not, but with aftereffect, like it’s still twanging around inside of me, or that it ought to be. I want to put my feet down again and not feel like they should be stepping somehow differently, or somewhere differently. I want to hear again without feeling that weird jangly feeling like I should be hearing something else.

It was the window, I think. That was the only bit I can remember like it actually happened, even if it never actually happened. The window was the wrong color. No, not really the window, it was the light as it fell against the window. It was a different shade than the light that followed me through the door. The difference between day and late afternoon, maybe. Not darker, just not where it should have been or how it should have been. And there was someone there, someone looking in, looking at the room, looking at something and I’ll bet anything they felt that place fall apart the same way I did. But I can’t tell you who he was or what he looked like or why he felt the need to look into an empty house one very odd and fine afternoon. Just that he was there and that his eyes were very very blue and very suddenly scared and then

And then he just wasn’t there anymore, and I don’t know what happened to him at all.

Gearing Up Again!

2011-10-14T23:59:00.000-07:00

Brief post: It's that time of year again, when the lure of the hastily and very badly written novel becomes well nigh overwhelming. Yes, it's tad over two weeks before NaNoWriMo and I am looking forward to splattering words all over my computer screen the way I used to splatter mud all over whatever was in the vicinity. At least this activity doesn't involve parents making me clean up and apologize!

Last year I went in completely unstructured, which usually works, but I also went in without my usual clear idea of what I wanted to write about, which in this case was an unmitigated disaster. This year my story idea bit me and then started dictating structure before I even agreed to write about it. Pushy little beast! Pithily put, this idea wants to be a tightly structured set of interconnected stories rather than a strict novel. Okay, I'm game. I'll have to come up with prologues, epilogues, and transition pieces along with the 6 interconnected pieces. I've never done this sort of thing before, but what the heck, it sounds interesting. And who knows? The whole conceit may fall by the wayside by the end of November. There's no telling what an author could come up with once they take that headlong plunge.

She's a starship, she's about to become fully sentient, and we're already arguing over names.

No clever titles, chapters, outlines, etc

2010-10-13T01:52:00.000-07:00

Since it's going to take another couple of days before I'm going to be healthy enough to die (got to love them little cold viruses. Virusi?) I have absolutely no inspiration coursing through my brain. Having been sleepless for the better part of 48 hours and courting the usual (for me) laryngitis tomorrow, my brain could be accurately described as "mush". It has a couple of connecting neurons that normally have nothing to do with each other, so information is getting woefully scrambled. I crave sleep the way zombies crave brains. Is it odd that I'm relieved this cold happened now, rather than in a month when I'd be slap-dab in the middle of NaNoWriMo, or is just normal writerly behavior?

Random inspiration: jot notes for Grenwahl Vale/Veil on the blog, so I have less of a chance of them disappearing into the ether. Set up Circa notebook for backup and longer background bits. Yeah. Doable. But going to look awfully random and notoriously chaotic. Pah. What else is new?

Wanted: A Good Hack'n'Slash Artist

2008-12-07T14:36:00.001-08:00

When I was eleven, I knew I was a writer. I knew it the same way that I knew my hair was brown and that my nose was too big for my face. It was a throw-away fact of my existence, like co-existing with my brother, avoiding homework when I could, and breathing. I was a writer. I didn't think of it as anything special and I never presumed that I would ever, ever make a living at it. This is how I ended up with my variety of job descriptions -- jack-of-all-trades at McDonald's, courier for a radiologist, AC apprentice, Journeyman Boilermaker (I still miss welding), and a stay-at-home-mom who's trying her hand at homeschooling. The romantic garret and the starving poet lifestyle were never for me; give me a solid income doing what I have to do and I'll write in the off-hours. Nobody is ever going to beat down my door for the All American Novel and nothing in this fact distresses me in the least.

For a while I really wanted to just be published in a nationally recognized venue -- a magazine, a major publishing house, something like that. Looking back I think this was because I felt that being a published author gave me some sort of stamp of approval; that being published meant that I was, at long last, a good writer. I was disabused of this notion the more I learned of the business I meant to be in. Being published means that the industry thinks it can make money on this manuscript and nothing else. There is a minimum threshold of competence, of course, but I've read one too many novels that I would not have deigned to waste the match it took to burn it, and I am by no means a literary snob. I think that being a popular novel is no bar to being good literature, and that many of the pieces being passed off as good literature get that label not because they are good, but because they are difficult to read and boring to boot. Stephen King has some fairly cruddy work on the market, but his best writing is classic and I have no doubt that it will stand the test of time.

Now, in my grim middle age, I don't have the desire to have a best-selling novel on the lists. It would be nice if it happened, and if there was a shot at it I'd probably work my tail off to get there. I just don't have the requisite obsession to pursue it. What I want as a writer is to be the best one I can possibly be. If I want a printed and bound copy of my work, well, there's Lulu.com. In fact, that's the route I am going to be taking just as soon as I have something worthwhile to bind. And, as Hamlet so ruefully noted, there's the rub. I want it to be the best I am capable of. I won't settle for anything less. I'm not an uber-perfectionist -- I married one of those, and one in a family is quite enough, thank you -- I just want there to be coherency, cohesiveness, and grammatical correctness. I want my beginning, middle, and end to gibe with one another. I want my beginning, middle, and end to be in that order. However many storylines I try to pack into my piece, I want them all resolved by the time The End gets tacked on. I want to be called on my prose, which tends to tint purple, wax poetical, and go on far too long.

In short, I need a good hack'n'slash artist, also known as a hellaciously good (while possessing saintly patience) editor. I had a good one in my mother. She never pulled a punch, no matter what skill we were learning. When my brother won a chess game, it was fair and square and he knew it. When I wrote a story it was a given that it would come back drenched in red ink until I got all the kinks worked out. Not to say she was always right in her criticisms but it was good practice in defending my choices and honing my skills. I've been looking for a good replacement editor ever since my mother died. They're rarer than hen's teeth.

This is not to say that I wouldn't hire a professional editor. I just think that the time to hire a professional is after I've got as many problems knocked out on my own as possible. Professionals are expensive and I just don't have the discretionary funds to spend lavishly on my hobby. Anything I send out of house has got to be the most polished draft I can make it, given that it's likely to be a one time deal.

When that is done, and I have something that I'm comfortable that I've done my best with, I'm going to spend the money it will take to get one or two copies for my shelf. And if that's all I do at the end of the day, as long as it's my best, it will be more than enough.

Random thought about the VP debates

2008-10-02T18:47:00.000-07:00

I bought a sixpack of Levitation ale and a sixpack of Red Seal in anticipation of the debates (think of it as headache preventative). Unfortunately I don't think it's going to be anywhere near close enough alcohol to make Mrs. Palin appear to make sense.

Whoa, Way to Go Giants !

2008-02-04T10:36:00.000-08:00

In my normal ordinary moments, I am not a Giants fan. The Giants as a team are usually relegated to the vague amorphous "other team" category that my team* generally loses against. I have two favorite teams, and the Giants only qualify when they're playing Frisco.**

But Oh My Goodness. I may have to change my favorites to the St. Louis Rams and the Giants when they aren't playing the St. Louis Rams. It isn't really because they beat the Patriots, althought the stainless steel shiny quality the Patriots were exuding was irritating the heck out of me and the endless inane chatter about the "perfect season" was beginning to chafe even my normally sanguine disposition. I confess I was quietly rooting for an upset because of this. But truly, I may have to change my alliances just because last night was the best game of football I've seen all season. Granted, I didn't watch every single game this season (an impossibility as far as I can tell, or I might have sacrificed that kidney for whichever cable tier would get me all of the Rams games. The Rams are playing poorly, so I get other games for which I have diminished enthusiasm.) My spouse tells me that there were actually some games worth watching. But this one...well, this one was football. Two teams that, for this night and this game and for whatever reasons, were pretty well matched. And they both wanted it so badly. I never once even thought of the remote control, much less twitched a finger to pick it up. There was never a single moment that I thought that I could do a leisurely loop around the channels because nothing much was going to happen in the next 30 seconds or so. I could live with the so-so commercials because I didn't want to miss one frame of football. That, my friends, does not happen in this house. I channel-flip through everything. Except for this Superbowl. The only performance I missed was half-time because I had to turn on the greenhouse heater (my citrus hates having cold roots) and I've been told repeatedly since that it was the best halftime show ever. So, powers that be, have Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers back next year, okay?

*The St. Louis Rams, if you must know. The originators of the phrase "Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory." The dirty rotten louses that deserted Sunny Southern California and decamped to their current location. Yup. My team. And the only reason I'm really mad at them for the desertion is that, while I might be persuaded to give up a kidney for a nosebleed seat, I really can't afford the airplane tickets and I really am not going to put up with the won'tkeepyousaferbutitlookslikewe'redoingingsomething security foofooraw. Especially if it parts me from my knitting needles for even a millisecond -- and I don't want to be sent to Guantanamo simply because I object to my Addi lace circulars being confiscated. This, however, is a rant for another day.

**My two favorite teams: the St. Louis Rams and whoever is currently playing the 49ers. Now, I do have friends and family who are 49ers fans; they are forgiven because they have many sterling qualities that overcome this obvious lack of judgment.

the cat

2007-12-12T21:08:00.000-08:00

one day he was old.

i did not want him to be; last week he was
in his prime
a few days ago he was as he had ever been and then
one day, he was old

and sick, and staggering, and i
was his only friend
when he looked at me with uncomprehending and
unquestioning eyes

i would have given much, and much
of what i had and what i did not have
to have answered that trust with
yes

yes we will fix this
yes you will be whole
again, and happy, and as you were once
last week
yes i can move mountains and shift the universe and
change the immutable laws of time and change

and what i said was, yes
i am human and
i am fallible and
yes, what i would do if only i could do is irrelevant and
what i can do is see that there is no more pain
or imbalance or
uncertainty

and i will tell myself the lie that everything is better this way
when there is no possibility of it being better in any way
when
i will only ever see him again
as someone just about to come around the corner
as someone who just left the room

51064

2007-12-03T20:18:00.000-08:00

I actually got through NaNoWriMo in one piece. Admittedly, it was a fried and frazzled piece by November 30 (some of which in all fairness does not have a thing to do with trying to write fifty thousand words in thirty days. But still.)

I also learned that I can churn out an incredible amount of verbiage in a very short period of time. Because I wrote those 51064 words in seventeen days. I started out all right, put in a few hundred words here and there, and then life interfered, and then before I knew it twelve days had gone by where I hadn't written anything. Not a single solitary much maligned word.

Whereupon I learned that I get quite grouchy when I feel like I'm under pressure. Note to self: NaNoWriMo 2008 -- get it done in the first 17 days and then put your feet up. At least one of my NaNo buddies managed this and there were a couple of others who weren't too terribly far behind. And they were busy. Like, painting boats and starring in plays busy.

In a funny sort of way I owe those words to the ones that didn't make it. Several writing buddies had to stop their challenge mid-way through because real life intruded in very adamant, much-more-serious-than-writing ways -- and then it became sort of a personal, I have to do this for those who could not carry on thing. Granted, the words that I wrote are inelegant and many of them are destined for the compost heap but a few are likely going to make it into the finished project. After all, "...the rumors that he had been circumcised with a fish knife had never been substantiated...." have a certain ring to them, don't you think?

2304 Words Nov. 1

2007-11-02T16:19:00.000-07:00

For a first go, not bad. But today I've been horribly behind. I just couldn't shake the tired, down, don't-wanna-do-anything blah feeling. After a while the blinding light came on -- it's an overdose of chocolate. I never thought such a thing could happen, but the correlation is pretty hard to miss. Several days of too much chocolate, suddenly my brain doesn't want to operate right. Now I have a sudden craving for carrot sticks, celery, something crispy and vegetative and non-sweet in nature. Unfortunately there's nothing like that in the house now...but I do have some canned and frozen veggies, so at least I can get my chlorophyll fix if I need to. And I have tons of potatoes; as long as I don't smother those in butter and cheese (and don't worry, the thought of anything greasy right now...igh) I should be just fine. And there's the rice steamer (it works great with lentils too) so really, if I choose to be intelligent about it I have plenty of good, nutritious, non-chocolate writing fuel lying about. I just have to get over my chocolate-induced lethargy and get it done.

But there goes plan A for staying awake and energetic; I couldn't even look a chocolate-covered coffee bean in the eye right now.

However, having been a Boilermaker in a former life, I do have some strategies that I had completely forgotten. For one out-of-town job I decided that I'd had enough of sandwiches and I let my cravings guide me; for nearly a week I took nothing but a loaf of artisan bread, a bagged salad, and a half gallon of grapefruit juice to work. My new co-workers thought I was a vegetarian for the longest time! But it worked; tons of energy and no lethargy. When my body told me it was time I started throwing a little protein in here and there. Grapefruit juice for me is legal speed without the bad effects (I get to keep my teeth and my freedom, for starters). And I wish I knew who I would have to bribe to get the bread recipe from Smith's -- they don't have those grocery stores around my home town, otherwise I'd just buy it and be happy.

I wonder what I'm going to have to do to bribe the dh into a grocery trip...

Just 'cause

2007-10-31T22:47:00.000-07:00

One of the blogs had to be the knitting blog. This one got to be the writing blog. I'm settling into my diversities; my dh would probably call it caving into my insanity -- but they don't have to be mutually exclusive, do they?

I'm staring at the clock, waiting for midnight to get here so I can start NaNoWriMo and then get to sleep. I have baking to do for a potluck tomorrow -- it was supposed to be last week but the smoke from the sunny southern Cali fires was so thick that any outdoor activity was deemed unhealthy. Yeah. I know. It was healthier to delay and now I won't have to worry about hacking and coughing but....

darn it, I have a novel to start. And I was realllly looking forward to being able to sleep in a bit tomorrow. And plan A. for staying alert went out the window when I got all of four trick-or-treaters; I have enough chocolate to feed a regiment and I'm already sick of it. No chocolate covered coffee beans for me...is it a sign of madness if someone seriously considers eating the espresso beans straight out of the bag?

A bit over an hour to go. I'm going to clean up the last of the pumpkin guts and blow out the candles, and then I'm going to use up all of the hot water in the house. Hopefully I will be wide awake when midnight comes around, 'cause I'm hoping to chunk out 2000 words and crawl into bed asap.

Somewhere Saint Vidicon is laughing

2007-10-03T18:49:00.000-07:00

My brother, bless his heart and may Saint Vidicon watch over him, left me his pricey paperweight...er, the HP laptop with the Vista system. It has been an education in and of itself, with more learning coming up quickly on the horizon.

If ever I get a laptop again, I am going to go into a computer store on an off day in a dead time so I can sit and play with the keyboard. I keep wanting to go left on this one and end up playing endlessly with the capslock key.

Anyhow, his plaintive wail as he headed towards his new job was, Make it work, O please make it work. And make all of those annoying popup thingies go away. Did I mention that he has a Norton security system? I keep looking for a way to convince the system that the very act of wanting to go online is, well, proof positive that I really want to go online. So why does it keep asking me if I really want to go out there? And every time I want to download anything it squalls and squeals and asks if I really truly mean it. Good grief, this is why I rid my system of it lock stock and bitter barrel. The last time Norton played nicely was when I was running Windows 95.

And his trackball is irritating too, but he knows that.

What is absolutely hysterical are the wise nodding owls in the background. What's Mom doing? She's fixing our Uncle's computer. Cool. And I have to keep qualifying that I am NOT fixing anybody's computer; I don't have enough system savvy to do anything like fix something. I'm doing what was requested: I'm playing with the system and figuring out practical ways of dealing with it. I'm also advocating for Apple or Linux with every fibre of my being. I run Windows and I have liked or at least amicably endured everything through XP, but Vista is driving me to drink and I don't even own this computer.

Resolutions 2007

2007-01-02T23:41:00.000-08:00

A bit of background here: a few days after Christmas my husband woke up from a nap and declared that the house smelled of gas. That certainly explained the headache I had and it was an easy trace -- the oven, which I had just finished using for a massive round of bread-baking, had reached the end of its useful lifespan. Technically, it was the gas valve feeding into the range that had gone kerplunk but it gave us a wonderful excuse to get rid of the appliance that was falling apart and spend money that we can't really afford to get something that we really needed. With me so far?

All right. Found a suitable replacement (floor model, on sale, yippee!) and I should have taken the hint from Murphy when the salesman got all stressed out on the matter of delivery. I wanted it 1. delivered 2. installed 3. the old appliance made off with. I found out that that was easy as cake IF you bought anything BUT a floor model. Floor models, it seems, are installed by an outside contractor who 1. couldn't be reached to make arrangements for delivery 2. was going to charge an arm, leg, and Megan for delivery, hookup, and disposal, and 3. probably wouldn't have the right parts and I'd just end up having to call the gas company anyway to get it hooked up. At which point I said I could take my van around to the loading dock and drag it home with me then. Seemed like a lot less hassle. On the way home I had the bright inspiration that hooking up the stove couldn't be THAT difficult. Right?

Long pause for the laughter to die down.

We will pass swiftly over the unloading of the stove, wherein I nearly squashed my husband. He's a good sport, and the bruises should go away in a few days :O.

It was at this point that I found out the valve leaked, and that I would have to return to a hardware store to find a new one. Three stores later we find someone who actually knows what I'm talking about and where the valve I need is located. Then I return home where I play Final Fantasy XII for two hours, working up the courage to clean the gunk of nearly 20 years, ten of which I'm actually responsible for. I found that home-made soap takes ancient grease off far better than 409. It wasn't even the good stuff, just the kitchen-scrap soap I did just to see if I could. I have also vowed to find whoever decided that textured walls would be a great idea in a kitchen. If I get a true jury of my peers I will never be convicted.

Tomorrow I get to hunt down the line I need to connect the stove to the house; after that I get to do the fun stuff -- actually connecting the stove to the house and leak checking everything. (My brother is considering getting a pool going as to whether and when the house burns down, if you're interested :D).

And speaking entirely without irony, I haven't had this much fun since I replaced the squirrel cage in the central AC unit.

So, my resolutions for 2007 have suddenly turned into a very short list. 1. Prove to my children that it's entirely possible for a woman to recover her mind after renovation.

Stop Treating Me Like An Idiot

2006-06-20T09:24:00.000-07:00

I was never convinced about Iraq. Oh, I'll never claim Iraq wasn't a problem. It was a huge one. Hussein is, was, and always will be a murderous thug. He is an arrogant bully and when he was in power he was always looking for a way to get over on anyone he perceived to be weaker or without powerful allies. Pardon me if I say so what. Thugs like this are in power all over the world and most of the time it doesn't make page 12 of the back section of any newspaper. How much do you know about Rwanda? Bosnia? Darfur? If you think they're unique then I have an interesting business proposition for you involving the Golden Gate bridge.

The American people were sold the Iraq war on two interlinked propositions: that Hussein and Bin Laden's Al Caida were inextricable linked (they hate each other), and that Hussein posed an imminent and dire threat to the safety of the United States of America because he possessed weapons of mass destruction. After September 11, 2001, the USA was only too ready to believe the worst about any penny-ante tyrant that could be plausibly painted up. But I kept waiting for the evidence. I remember being shown drawings of something that was touted as a mobile toxin factory. I waited for them to show me a real one -- not, perhaps, one of Hussein's, but something that had actually been used as one, or could plausibly be used as one. I'm not convinced by might-be, may be, could-have-been, we really think this is so wishful thinking. If this thing works, then give me more than a drawing. Give me a trail of evidence -- circumstantial will do -- that this is what you say it is. I got...an artist's rendering. A concept piece. A flappy scarecrow.

Oh, and there's this tubing over here that could possibly be used in a nuclear weapon. We have no other evidence, except for a vague report that an Iraqi official might have tried to obtain some weapons'-grade radioactive material, and some experts even dispute that this sort of tube would every be used in a nuclear weapon. Shorn of the political doublespeak and the theatrical buildup, this is all of the evidence I was ever presented with to convince me to go to war. Oh yes, and Hussein is a bad guy. He makes citizens disappear. His sons feed people into wood-chippers for amusement. This could be true (although the way this government treats things I'm not sure I'd believe them if they told me the sky was blue on their planet.) It still isn't enough to go to war with.

If I'm going to spend another person's life, I want to know the cause is worthwhile. If I'm going to be the one who must tell a family that they are now shattered beyond healing, that their loved one is never going to come home, I want the dubious comfort that those lives I've damaged and destroyed were spent on something that could have stood up to even the 9th circuit court of appeal's quixotic reasoning. My point is not that I have to see all of the evidence -- governments can't operate that way -- but I certainly have to see something convincing. I was never convinced. I wanted to scream in somebody's ear (precisely who is in charge, anyway?) that war is not playtime. It is not a sunny day at the beach where you pick up and come home when you start to get a bit sunburned. The world is irretrievably altered. Some people never come home. And sometimes home itself is remodeled in unsettling and unacceptable ways.

What was really unnerving about this war was the lack of planning for the aftermath. Yes, there is a day after victory is won -- and what are we going to do then? We were pretty much told that we would sweep up the little bit of litter that was left behind when the celebration ended, then hand the Iraqis the keys to their government building and come home. Perhaps the typical United States citizen will buy that; we've never seen civil disruption on a grand scale and we've certainly never been at ground zero for an invasion, even one purporting to be friendly. Our government and police force have never been dismantled to the point where any attempt to reassemble them has to start from a point too disorganized to be graced with the name of chaos. The average citizen of the United States had to endure an education here as well and may know history only as that class they spent an agonizing semester in back in high school. The average policymaker in position to take the country to war, however, should be a damned sight better versed in what war and its aftermath look like. They should plan for the worst-case scenario even if they're fully confident that it will never happen. They should have Sun-Tzu's Art of War tattooed on the back of their eyelids. Soldiers endure what the rest of us can only imagine, and what we can imagine is only the faintest ghost of the shadow of hard reality. They come home immutably changed from what they had to do, the lives they would still take and the ones that they wish they could bring back. Innocents get killed and atrocities happen. They cannot be avoided. They can only be minimized with proper planning -- you know, the planning that happens after you take the rosy sunglasses off.

I'm not a pacifist. Pacifism is for those souls lost in the thrall of idealism. It also helps to have a firm belief in a just god and a rosy afterlife. I, however, am a pragmatist: some times there is no other option but to take up arms and defend oneself, ones family, and those ideals which seem worth dying for. But because the lives we spend are so precious it pays to have a very clear idea of what we're doing and convincing proof that it needs to be done. I am way past the age where "Because I said so!" is enough.

A Modest -- and Silly! -- Proposal

2006-04-20T09:45:00.000-07:00

A certain cardiologist over at the Washington Post has one of the silliest ideas I've read in a long time. Indeed, it's tempting to compare him to Jonathan Swift, author of the original A Modest Proposal, except that it appears that John G. Sotos is completely serious when it comes to his proposal. Food calories, to quote the man, are so endemic as to warrant being called 'pollution' and treated as such. This is the first time I've heard my guacamole burger being equated with the wrapper it comes in, and it's an incredibly inept and inapt comparison.

Sotos believes that the marketplace is the key to treating obesity. If only we make the good-tasting-but-bad-for-you stuff more expensive than the good-for-you-but-blah-tasting stuff then everything will take care of itself. This is to be done through something called "calorie emission allowance" where high calorie foods couldn't be sold unless the companies producing them buy "calorie credits" from producers of low calorie food. Sotos himself isn't sure how things will turn out: "The hope, which should be tested, is that the number of calories eaten would drop, owing to the difficulty of consuming large numbers of calories from low-density foods." In other words, people will vote with their pocketbooks and become miraculously slimmer.

There are a few flaws with this theory and one need not posses a PhD to figure them out. People are paying for prepared foods because they taste good, yes, but also because they are convenient. Nuking a microwave dinner or stopping by a favorite fast-food joint will get someone a dinner that not only tastes good, but that someone else put all the prep work into. In a society where two-income families are often needed just to pay the mortgage (I live in Sunny Southern California where housing prices have not seen reasonable in quite some time and commutes are usually gawdawful), having someone else cook for you is a boon most people are willing to pay for anyway. There are low calorie alternatives even in fast food places, of course, but most of those are more difficult to eat in a moving car and they don't taste as good as their unwholesome brethren unless they're slathered in some sort of dressing or sauce that makes them just as unhealthy. Ditto for the microwaveable dinners -- ye cats, the 'lo cal' alternatives make chewing on cardboard downright attractive -- and we won't go into the hidden ingredients that often make these choices less healthy that their regular counterparts.

Here's a dirty little secret that Sotos doesn't seem to be able to wrap his brain around. Eating healthy is already cheaper than eating unhealthy. For what it would take to support my fast food choices for one day, I can eat for half a week. It won't be very exciting fare and I'll have to cook it myself, but if we're talking economics it's quite doable. Take a bag of pinto beans and a bag of rice, throw in a ham hock for taste (you may want to try something else, but hey, differences like these are what makes the world go around) and there's a dish in my fridge that is low calorie, high nutrition, plentiful, and cheap. Give me a couple of days of 'fast food allowance' and I can throw in fresh fruit and vegetables to round my diet out and stretch my staples further. Three days and I've got the cash for flour, yeast, salt, and sugar -- the primary ingredients in bread.

You see, economics is already in play but in vastly more complicated dances than Sotos and his ilk either comprehend or choose to believe. We're eating high calorie, low nutritional value foods because they're convenient and they taste good. We need this convenience because so many of us have to commute forever and three days to work, and/or once there have to spend another eternity and a half proving our worth to our bosses. Once that's over (and we endure the long slog to get back home) there are mates to reconnect with, children to ferry back and forth to their various projects, homework to go over with said offspring, and, eventually, hopefully, sleep. Our children are minus the jobs but live with a homework load that is purely insane and they are scheduled with various activities to within inches of their lives. The towns we live in have no sidewalks and nowhere to go to anyway, if perchance there happened to a half an hour that wasn't already allocated to some other task. Who has time to cook? Moreover, who has time to teach cooking, or nutrition, or to model the old-fashioned exercise that used to be known as spending time with the family? We have people graduating high school without knowing how to do a simple tax sheet or how to balance a check book -- certainly no one has ever taught them how to prepare a pot roast with root vegetables, or how to choose the ingredients that make a decent and tasty salad. Home Ec is so passe. Society gets its offspring to college with Calculus under its belt and spiderwebs in the pantry. (And for disclosure's sake, I never attended Home Ec. I did, however, have parents who were rabid on imparting survival skills -- both my brother and I can balance check books, cook, do simple clothes mending, and perform common household repairs. In fact my brother is a better cook than I am, but I'm a better welder so it all evens out.)

Given the factors already in play I don't see how raising the price of my butter is going to make me a better or thinner person. Sadly, in Sotos' eyes they amount to the same thing.

Schiavo redux, one more time

2005-03-26T10:21:00.000-08:00

Everyone else in the world has weighed in by now on the Schiavo case. They seem to be roughly divided into three camps: keep her alive at all costs, let her die already, and why in the world are we involved with this at all?

Put me firmly in the last. I'm tired of slippery-slope arguments. I've noticed that slope ain't so slippery as some idealists would have the rest of us believe. Oh yes, there are families out there who'd skin Mom just as soon as glance at her but they've always been there. Dysfunctional is a fairly new word but the concept has been around as long as there've been primates on the planet. There is another dysfunction that affects just as many families, and that is called denial. Terri Schiavo's parents and other kin fall firmly in that category but they are hardly unique. I don't blame them one iota for it. This isn't about guilt, it isn't about blame, there are no villains here although on occasion I have been filled with wonder about their obstinency and their hatred for and villification of anyone who thwarts what they want to do. They remind me of my four year old who still throws fits when he's been told he's not allowed to do something. He will demand that which is impossible and scream when he's denied, unable to believe that the demand is impossible. The Schindlers display an ignorance of our legal system that is downright shocking, considering how long they've been marinated in it. When they demand that Governor Bush disregard the law of the land and the constitution that provides its framework, they are brushing aside every tradition that we as a nation have held dear since the Revolutionary war, and they are doing it for personal and selfish reasons -- and insist, all evidence to the contrary, that Governor Bush does have the power to do what they order him to do. I hold no affection for the Bush clan but this strident and impossible demand makes me wince in sympathy for Jeb. Legally he can do nothing more than what he is doing, and they are demanding that he forfeit his office, his duties, and his freedoms in what would be a futile gesture anyway. If he had Terri moved from her hospice he would duly be charged with kidnapping and that would only be the beginning of his legal woes -- interfering with a court order and abuse of office would just be the beginning. And Terri would still not have the feeding tube reinserted.

But enough. What I want to ramble on about is something different and just as difficult. It is a matter of evolving technology and ethics. It is a concept that has been labeled Right to Die but I'm not certain the label is encompassing enough of the social concept that is evolving. Years ago Terri Schiavo wouldn't even be a footnote in a newspaper because the technology did not exist that would have brought her back from that fatal heart attack, did not exist that could have provided her sustenance and support even had she survived. I do not argue against the technology, only about our consensus on it.

testing ABC

2004-11-03T13:41:00.000-08:00

Just to see if I can get comments !