Because We Need To Finish The Veal Stew First

I had promised an ambitious food posting, but then there's still stew to be eaten and fish doesn't keep, so fish later, stew until there is no more, and something different for reading today.

Last weekend, we had brunch with my mother-in-law and devoted partner(husband)'s former minister whom I had only met once at a Border's in 19something and who wasn't able to attend our wedding. She asked us a question which, strangely, people have been asking: does it feel different to be married? And I don't want to belittle the question because it's a rather valid one in our circumstance. We were together a very long time before making it official and that perplexed people; as it perplexed them when, seemingly out of nowhere, we decided to go ahead and sign the papers and serve wine with them. I think if you had asked me to answer that question before marriage I would have given a flippant answer. Now, though, I have to admit that it is different. But in very specific, kinda cheesy ways.

I draw your attention to two things I've read about love and marriage in the past day, both courtesy of friend postings on Facebook. The first a story about a married couple whose lives were irrevocably changed when the husband suffered irreversible brain damage; the second about a single woman my age contemplating a lifetime with a man whose views on religion deviate so wildly from her own that crying is a frequent occurrence.

Both of these articles incited emotion from me; emotion that would have been different prior to marriage. I would have, without hesitation, assured you, in my pre-marriage state, that I was with devoted partner in sickness and in health. But I would have been under no moral, ethical, or quasi-legal obligation to do so. It was merely my love for him that prompted that response. Now, though, it's serious. It's real. Words are only words save for how you endow them with meaning, and when we recited our vows - our traditional, old-fashioned vows - we meant them. Literally. Irrevocably. I think it's why we wanted those vows. Those were the lessons of marriage that spoke to us and we wanted it to be absolutely clear that we were signing on for old-fashioned, irrevocable marriage. It wasn't just laziness on our parts. Or as Henry Rollins said, "Me and you until we die. For better for worse. You get cancer, I'm sticking with you, your tits get cut off, I'm sticking with you, you f-ing grow this melanoma lump out of your f-ing head, I'm staying with you. I gotta put you in adult f-ing diapers when you're 90, I love you and I'm going to do it every day."* We didn't think the guests would really get that, so we went with the book of common prayer. And this first article is absolutely heartbreaking because it resonates so strongly. Sure, we had gobs of years in the bag where that's what we thought, but being married feels different because we know we're going to do it now.

Which brings me to the second article where a woman is wondering if she should enter into what any rational person could see is a doomed long-term relationship simply because she's 34 and her pickings are slim. All the self-righteous crap I just spewed above, that's MY truth. MY life. MY stubbornness. And I do my level best not to judge how others do it simply because we decided on the Thunderdome interpretation of marriage. But it gets me in the gut to read and hear about this paranoia of being left alone and grabbing at anything vaguely compatible to avoid this. As if you get a medal for it, or that at your funeral they make mention that you lived your life summa cum somebody. Marriages are tough in the best of situations, but entering into one where you already have one of the three bellwethers of divorce checked off (the other two are money and kids) beggars belief. And doing so because you think it's the best you'll ever get (an outlook, by the way, which I believe dooms one to only getting the ok out of life)?

Listen, I'm now a big advocate of this whole spending-your-life-with-the-same-person thing, I like it, but the whole Big Capitalized Vow aspect? I never could have done that for someone who was just the best I could get. I'd like to think most people (or most of the people I know) get into marriage because they love the other person and think it's going to work forever, not simply so they can check "married" off on their bucket lists; it's terrible when it doesn't work out that way, but knowing it's not going to work out that way and having the party anyway? Ick. I mean these are the author's own words: "But if I decide not to be a part of this holy threesome, I could risk ending up on my own. That doesn't sound like a very good deal to make. In fact, that sounds rather like a deal with the Devil." Great, so marry someone with whom you have fundamental, intrinsic differences and enjoy the two years or so of getting to claim you're married before you kill each other or merely divide your stuff and flee to opposite ends of the country. Is there a prize for that?

So, yes, it feels different to be married. More weighty. More explicitly responsibility-laden. And while I clearly did judge the soon-to-be-married-and-then-divorced author, there are too many struggling marriages that deserve a chance for me to get worked up about a theoretical one that should never happen. We waited a long time, and I'm glad we did. Not because it is an amusing story to tell new people, but because, given our feelings about marriage, we wanted to be damn sure we meant it. Having set it down on paper? Yeah, that feels pretty damned different!

*Dear Henry Rollins, This is now the third time I have bought this album. Today I did it to find that one passage. Thank goodness for The Cloud because, theoretically, it means I won't have to buy it again. Love, Yelena.

When The Pants Come Off

I should mention the things I'm reading more often, especially when I both like what I've read and I know the author. This morning it was an article by a college chum, Chris, on male and female body issues and a call for more nudity. Sign me up! Oh wait, as anyone who has ever had the (mis)fortune of living with or near me knows, I've already signed up.

Now, I may have an unfair advantage in that I grew up in a clothing-optional or, put a more accurate way, too-lazy-to-really-dress household. Some of this naturally arose from 4 people living in 650 square feet with one bathroom, but some of it was probably latent and subconscious hippiedom on the part of my not-that-hippie parents. We weren't full on nudists, we were just more of a "hey, is it ok if we wear our underwear to dinner?" kind of group. Other people tell me that's kind of gross.

Whatever long-lasting psychological damage I feel sure my more modest brother suffered from this, I do know that nudity and shame were never a thing we had in our house. It just wouldn't have occurred to us. Gym class? Not a problem. Those bizarre open changing rooms in some department stores? Ditto. I remember being shocked at the grown-up gym one time when I had been working out with a female coworker who went through all kinds of frightful contortions to cover herself after showering and wondering how that became her normal; similarly I may have inappropriately busted out laughing at college once upon discovering that a couple I knew slept in full-on clothing together. It's one of those things where what you grow up with really does become default normal. And just like the woman's side of the bed is the left side, the proper attire for sleep is nothing. It's just what I knew.

Now I can't claim all of the benefits Chris has discovered from an embracing of less clothing - I still weigh myself quite a bit (and can someone explain how the scale went up .2 pounds this morning from the time I woke up through the time I had finished my daily coffee and what comes after coffee?) and I still worry about how this or that part looks, but the root causes of my here-and-there body dissatisfactions don't come from a place of shame and for that I am eternally thankful to good old not-quite-dressed mom and dad.

It is, however, worth noting that the brain still edits. For example: would I be comfortable meeting up with Chris and his family at a clothing-optional mini-golf course? I honestly don't know. The stubborn, defensive part of me says, "of course! Naked mini-golf with open-minded friends is what all normal people should do!" But nudity in front of family or strangers is still far more comfortable than nudity in front of people one actually knows. However attired we were for family dinners, when we had friends for dinner, it wasn't like my dad actually showed up in his briefs, or encouraged his guests to do likewise.

So I'm going to think about this, Chris, because I like to be proven a hypocrite as often as possible (and lest anyone reading this gets the wrong idea, no naked mini-golf has been proposed). In the meantime, though, if any of you come over and want to take off your pants, we're chill with that!

Curse You, Default Sheep Mentality

While we're on the subject of cooking, I thought I'd share a problem I've been having recently: following directions. As in, I follow them when I know I shouldn't. The wedding cake death march should have taught me that, when reading a recipe, be skeptical.

Over the holidays, we sampled some really delicious chocolate sables from a bakery in San Francisco. They were delicious enough that I wanted to find the recipe and crank out some myself. It took me until now to try (also I needed more cocoa, aforementioned wedding cake having thoroughly plundered my supply) them and how lucky I was that the recipe was available on el internet. In fairness, I gave myself every opportunity to correct the obvious fault with the recipe. I read it several times, opened up my master notebook of working recipes to compare, read the original again, shrugged my shoulders, and said (in a famous last words kind of way): "they published this recipe in a book, it MUST work."

Intrepid readers and bakers, perhaps you can spot the missing ingredient: cocoa, butter, sugar, flour, baking soda, vanilla extract, grated chocolate.

I'll give you a minute.

For those who don't bake often, the missing ingredient is some form of EGG PRODUCT. An ingredient, by the way, that was in every sable recipe I had in the master notebook. The mixture this recipe gave me could politely be described as "sandy." It was so dry and separate-y that even an attempt to roll it in log form in cling wrap did nothing for it. While the recipe implies that one should be able to roll the dough out and cut it into shapes, this was demonstrably untrue; instead I mashed it onto a cookie sheet as best I could and threw the whole mess in the oven (the final destination of these cookies is, as luck would have it, the crust for a cheesecake, so presentation is the least of my concerns as the whole mess will end up in the food processor anyway). What came out of the oven could politely be described as looking like the waste product of a mammal pressed onto a baking sheet and cooked.

The flavor was fine, but you couldn't possibly mistake it for a cookie - or a sable for that matter. It should work for its purpose, but don't expect to see these tied up with ribbon and presented as gifts anytime soon.

So while I seem to be a know-it-all, when confronted with written instructions, I tend to follow blindly and curse later. I find the same thing when following a knitting pattern. In both of these endeavors, I need to stop trusting the authors and instead trusting my wealth of accumulated knowledge.

On the bright side, and following from yesterday's post, the utter and complete failure of this extraordinarily simple recipe removes any chance that I would buy the full cookbook (oh, I realize I have been protecting the guilty: the recipe was from the Miette cookbook).

Otherwise They're Just Taking Up Space

One of the novelties of our suburban life which pleased me to no end was this magical extra room known as the laundry room. In apartment life the laundry room was in the basement if you were lucky, or several blocks away if you weren't. I spent many many years paying other people to do our laundry because I simply couldn't endure the laundromat - a luxury I know, but one which we endlessly justified by comparing our hourly rate at work vs. the .60/pound the nice people charged to do our laundry (and fold it) for us.

With the advent of in-house laundry, this rationalization flew out the window. I still do not relish the laundry job, but I have come to accept it as something normal people do. However, our particular laundry room may well be the largest room in our house and that seemed like a lot of room to allocate just to soiled things. So, in my optimism, I rechristened our laundry room: the prep kitchen. It has industrial shelving and a 6 foot long stainless table; all of the bizarro ingredients that don't belong in our regular kitchen (I'm looking at you, atomized glucose); and the massive stacks of cookbooks I have amassed over the years. This configuration, though, has proven the out of sight out of mind adage, and only in very special circumstances do I pick up one of those dusty cookbooks.

This will now change.

Starting this week, I will select a never before made recipe from on of the books and we will have it for dinner on Thursdays. There is really no point in ever buying another cookbook (and on this point, I have been rather firm - I haven't had a new cookbook in well over a year) if I haven't made at least some of the recipes from the existing ones.

True, there are some limitations. As there is still some calorie-watching going on in our household, it will be safe to assume that pork belly in cream sauce will not be on the menu anytime soon but, as luck would have it, the first book I selected at random immediately coughed up an acceptable meal: lime and chili crusted seared tuna.

Watch this space on Friday for the post-game.

My Open Job Application to The Daily Show

Dear The Daily Show,
I'm a woman. There have been rumors that women don't feel so much of the love working for you. I don't really care. I'm a big fan and I can clearly take what you can dish. What I do care about is that other women seem to be hired in my stead. Granted, you've never received a formal letter of interest from me, but I'm considering changing that. Your women don't seem to last long with the exception of Samantha Bee, and I have a theory on that: she's the only one who is funny. These other women you hire, they are not funny. They are cloying and annoying and seem to equate humor with being massively, cliche-ly over the top. You have a new woman whose name I haven't bothered to learn because I doubt she'll be around long, and in her first appearance, she was a train-jumping hobo. Who wasn't funny. Not even a little bit. Then she was in a maelstrom of primary antagonism in South Carolina. Also not funny. She pulled faces and made silly voices and did pretty much everything I don't associate with humor on your show. Olivia Munn was just as bad. And don't get me started on the girl with the annoying voice.

Samantha Bee is self-deprecating, sarcastic, sardonic, all the good S-es. It's why I like her. The other women should be on sitcoms with laugh tracks for all the originality and verve they bring.

So, I would like to volunteer my services. I am a sarcastic, rage-filled, New York snob who would describe her attitude towards modern political life as ennui-filled, but can't because I do seem to still care. Previous experience includes a serious consideration of a run for the Senate seat soon-to-be-vacated by Joe Lieberman which I abandoned when I discovered he was no longer running, thus nullifying my campaign slogan, "I couldn't possibly be worse than this guy." I was also frankly adorable during several appearances on a game show in 1982-84. I don't think I'm necessarily funny, but I could work on my confidence in that arena. I know I'm funnier than the other fly-by-night women you have employed. And, not being a professional comedienne, don't have much invested in myself in that regard. Which means I won't throw hissy fits over my creative voice.

Furthermore, I'd be rather perfect at PR because I would happily stand in front of cameras and tape recorders and assure your critics that the women who have been unhappy in your employ were a bunch of whiners. I have no ego when it comes to being made to look ridiculous, and am rather phenomenal at keeping a straight face; also lying. While others might find me insufferable, I have never found myself to be. Additionally, if you hired me, I could finally convince my parents to stop watching the NBC local news at 11.

In short, I think I have The Daily Show voice. I think we could work well together. While I'm not really a cult of personality-type person, I might be able to get it going for Mr. Stewart, and I'd be all for practical jokes when Donald Rumsfeld or similar is in the green room. I would also bake cupcakes. I mention this because my understanding is that people like cupcakes. And my baking is pretty outstanding.

Please contact me at your earliest convenience. Or I'll just assume you've already read this when I send you my letter of inquiry.

Best,

Yelena

Why I Shouldn't Be Allowed To Read The Internet

It starts, innocently enough, with a link on facebook. Then I read one article which links to another which links to another which gets me to this.

And then I get all aggro again.

"Real Bodies Unite is appealing to all those women fed up of being bombarded with unrealistic imagery in the fashion and beauty industry, by launching a global campaign to raise at least 10,000 signatures for the use of body diversity instead."

Flashback: the year is 1991. A certain young feminist author with a hot, new, provocative book comes to talk to our eighth grade class (yes, I just outed my age). She talks to just the girls in the class about how Vogue and, I don't know, Beverly Hills 90210 are forcing us to hate ourselves and how we look and how those are the reasons we have poor body image. A certain student in the class raises her hand and politely (ok, probably not that politely) asks the feminist author if she is smoking crack. How on earth can a magazine make us do or feel anything we don't want? Vogue doesn't make this young lady feel bad about weighing 150+ pounds at 14 - she feels bad about her weight because she looks bad. Objectively. Whether or not Anna Wintour exists. It is possible that said young student is forcibly escorted out of the room and counseled by a teacher to maybe stop with the talking because the feminist author's message will be important to some of the student's classmates and she shouldn't ruin it for everyone.

20 years later and this theory has become widely accepted and a cottage industry.

It is neither the anorexic model, nor the agency that employs her, nor the magazine that prints her, nor the designer who hires her, who is at fault in the tiresome lady-body-image debate. We, the ladies. We're the problem.

Yup, I said it. Wanna be taken seriously, ladies? Accept responsibility for your own complicity in this. Reading the Real Bodies Unite mission statement (which I sincerely hope was written by a teenager, otherwise I cannot excuse the poor grasp of the English language) would have you imagining that the media (capital-M, lowercase-M, whichever) puts thoughts into your head. Thoughts you can't un-put there. Like Son of Sam and his dog. She/we are powerless when the media speaks. The thoughts are unthinkable. Good thing it's only telling us to hurt ourselves emotionally and psychologically, otherwise the courts would be jam-packed with defendants saying "Glamour made me do it."

Even as the crusaders admit that they know the representations of women in the media are "not real," they seem powerless to separate fantasy from reality. Herein lies another gripe: designers don't design for "real women." (For real we should assume heavyish.) Sadly, there's a Freakonomics problem here: heavy women aren't wealthy. Only wealthy women buy designer clothing. Ergo, designers have slender women modelling their clothing. Take a look at the society pages and you'll notice that those women (possibly real, even) are similarly sized and shaped to the women in the fashion magazines. If you are 300 pounds, statistics suggest you do not have $7,000 for a dress. Why would the person selling a $7,000 dress care if you identify with his model if you're not the intended audience any way? The $7,000 dress is a fantasy just as the model is. Why isn't there a movement whose mission is to compel couture houses to make dresses that cost $70? After all, by the same logic, it's unfair to the rest of us that they don't. That we expect women to understand that ownership of a $7,000 dress is a fantasy, but ownership of the body modelling it shouldn't be, is a leap I am unwilling to make.

Women in fashion magazines, movies, television, are professionally beautiful. Being beautiful in an unattainable way is their job. They work every day to be that beautiful. Were that my job, I would lift more weights, clean my face on a regular basis, not consider exfoliation to be "a hassle," and never eat a carb. But since I don't get paid to be attractive, it's bread and sleeping in eyeliner for me. If you, personally, don't like their occasionally boyish figures or outsized busts, it shouldn't matter to you that you don't look like that. There is a serious disconnect between complaining about how unattractively thin models are and then complaining that the selfsame things you find unattractive about them, being unattainable for you, make you feel unattractive yourself.

Does anyone really, truly, honestly think that if there were women of all shapes and sizes in the media, that we women wouldn't find something else to be self-hateful about? Is it really that simplistic? Get a bunch of regular sized and lumpy chicks on the pages of InStyle and we'll all live in Utopian body satisfaction world? To quote the girl from 1991: are you smoking crack?

Want a great example? This photo. Oh, look, girls who also have rolls in their stomachs when they lean over. Bravo! But do you notice what these "real" women don't have? Here's a cursory list:

Cellulite
Scars from ingrown leg hairs
Any body hair whatsoever or the razor burn/waxing bumps to prove they ever had any
Thin hair
Split ends
Visible stretch marks
Wrinkles
Grey hair
Weird moles
Uneven skin tone
And so on, etc. etc.

Also these women may be non-thin, but none is fat. Also none is over 30. If you want to pay money to look at a non-thin-but-not-fat, over thirty woman with thin hair, stretch marks, scars on her knees from summer camp, broken blood vessels on her nose, and the remnants of a manicure from October, I'll start telling you where to send the checks. The women in that picture are no more representative of the rest of us than Kate Moss. They're merely 40 pounds heavier than Kate Moss. Everything else remains the same (it should be noted that I have no idea if there are Supermodels anymore, and Kate Moss is the last one I remember who was very skinny - I realize Kate Moss is now well over 30).

So putting beautiful women 40 pounds heavier than Kate Moss, but whose skin, hair, etc. is equally airbrushed, who have spent the same number of hours in the stylist's chair prior to being photographed, in magazines, as opposed to only showing women as thin as Kate Moss will do absolutely nothing to improve women's self-image issues. And anyone who says otherwise is an imbecile.

A dangerous imbecile who is doing exactly the same thing to women as he/she claims the media is: reducing an entire gender to a group of mouthbreathers incapable of making decisions -good and bad- for itself. Oh, don't blame that woman for her poor self-image; the magazine made her do it. She couldn't possibly be expected to stand up for herself on her own. We need to change the magazines so that the poor thing can get out of bed in the morning without wanting to take a razor to her fat, hairy wrists.

These purported feminists are doing more to halt women's progress than any fashion magazine could ever claim to do. I don't want my raison d'etre as a woman to be perpetual victimhood, nor am I comfortable with the notion that until some third-party changes its ways, I will be unable to change my own.

There is a self-image problem that exists for women, but the hard truth is that in many cases it is created by women. We are the consumers and the judges of other consumers. Beauty as a status symbol is a tenet upheld by us all and no amount of media manipulation alone will change that. Belief that we are all equally beautiful negates the very idea of beauty. Admitting that beauty is both subjective and rare doesn't hurt the feminist cause. Attempting to deny subjective beauty makes us both naive and fatuous. The actual challenge is creating a hierarchy where beauty is not the only barometer of success for women. Ignoring beauty as a factor in how we evaluate others does nothing to broaden the scope of our evaluations; it reinforces a narrow view of worth in women. If we, as women, are only evaluating ourselves and others by their beauty, we're the problem. And we need to change. Otherwise, the magazines could print blank page upon blank page, and we'd still be no better off.

The Toughest Review I've Ever Had To Write

It's tangentially related to the honeymoon, but if you're truly more interested in photos of baby elephants (and who isn't) head on over to my facebook or flickr. Devoted partner and I are now proud owners of e-readers; he, a kindle, me, a nook. This has drastically changed the way we pack for trips as we no longer need to allocate 20 or so pounds for books. Prior to leaving for Corisca, I downloaded a pantsload of books to my nook so that the beach would not be boring. Consequently, we spent precious little time doing nothing on that trip, so my nook remained full. Part of this was my fault as I chose a 700+ page tome on the Algerian war which remained only half finished upon our return.

For this trip, I didn't need to add to my selections and, furthermore, the book I really wanted to read wasn't to be released until after we left. Sadly, the author's tour was also going to coincide with the trip and I would be unable to foolishly prostrate myself at the feet of my hero (devoted partner was less upset by this as I freely admit the carnal aspect of my hero worship).

So imagine my delight when, upon finally receiving internet access, I discovered the book was available for download. Oh, joy! I would be able to read the long-awaited novel whilst on the pristine beaches of Mauritius. But satisfaction delayed is often just as sweet, so I finished up with the Algerians first. Aside: yes, it was long, but A Savage War of Peace was also really really fascinating.

The sun was shining, I was in a new bright traffic cone orange bikini, and a man was bringing drinks to my deck chair. I was ready. Umberto, I come for you and your brilliant new novel, The Prague Cemetery.

For those who are possibly unaware, I own all of his books. Even the lengthy, of interest only to doctoral students of semiotics, philosophical tomes. I have read Foucault's Pendulum no fewer than 20 times. I even own a copy in Italian, a language I neither speak nor read. I am smitten by the kind of puppy love that only makes sense when it begins in adolescence. For his last book tour, I brought him chocolates and a 10-page, quite stalkerish letter (still waiting on a reply). My smitten is unwavering.

So, I cannot even begin to explain how devastated I was that this new book...oh god this is hard...is a steaming pile of, well I won't say excrement, discarded notes from all of his actually good books. Literally. As a reader of all of his books I could actually envision him going through old notebooks from 30 years ago and gathering up the stuff that wasn't good enough then and combining it to make this mostly unreadable novel. And not unreadable due to complexity or snotty vocabulary. Unreadable in its lack of plot, lack of character development, lack of interestingness, lack lack lack! The Prague Cemetery has none of the oomph. It feels so mailed in that I briefly wondered if it was a joke. A horrible joke perpetrated at my expense (narcissism, I know). I simply don't know what happened here.

The book is about the development of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion which isn't a bad idea for a book. For the first 100 or so pages, one could almost imagine that there would be light at the end of the tunnel (that is if one were so enamoured with the author as to think he could do no wrong). The protagonist has no redeeming qualities, you don't care about him or his story, and you wonder where his mental diarrhea comes from and how it can be so uninteresting. And then it just goes on and on and on. The epitome of sound and fury signifying nothing. Furthermore, the virulent anti-semitism one would expect from a book on this subject just rang so hollow because you could tell Eco's heart wasn't in it. And, unlike Stephen Colbert, he couldn't amusingly fake opinions so radically different from his own.

Upon finishing, and I did finish, I was overwhelmed by feelings of WTF? Why did you write this book, Umberto? It didn't seem like you were interested or invested in it. It read lazily. And you're not lazy. You're meticulous and brainy. I know you're a little pissed off that a no-talent hack like Dan Brown made like he invented Templarian mysteries, but that doesn't mean you should start phoning in your own novels. I wait upon these new tomes of yours with baited breath. I mean have you seen what my other options are for reading these days? And, let's be honest, you don't have that many books left. Would you really be happy if this was the last work you left us?

I'm not going to go overboard and say this ruined our honeymoon and the reason is, it just wasn't significant enough to do anything but leave a bad taste in my mouth (which I washed out with rum). It just made me sad. After plowing through J. Maarten Troost's Life on Planet China and Too Close to the Sun, a biography of Denys Finch Hatton, I had to start on Name of the Rose just to get the taste of Prague Cemetery out of my mouth (rum-soaked though it was). I hope we can reconcile soon. A small book of your essays would help.

Everyone else: if a die-hard fangirl like me can find nothing good to say about this book, you should probably leave it on the shelf.