Fig. 1. This is Lucy on a travel day. She was having a problem with static electricity.
Fig. 4. The African violet in my office finally bloomed again.
so clearly identify as, but an article on New York Magazine .com and a response on Jezebel made me stop and think about what constitutes a Feminist in a pretty remarkable way today. I'm by no means close to an answer myself, but the following really bothered me. A few choice quotes from "Should Gender Equality Extend to Drinking.""My point here is that the closing of the gender gap isn’t about men—needing to compete with men or wanting to feel like men. It’s about women going after the things they want and feeling that alcohol, variously, can help them. If men come into the picture at all, it’s only because what women sometimes want is sex, the final frontier of gender equality..."This quote sounds a little unrealistic when read side-by-side with the next one, about the author's friend Kate, who works in the hyper-masculine investment banking fast-track:
Going out with them meant drinking, usually heavy drinking, which suited Kate’s mind-set at the time. “I felt like I deserved it,” she says. “I realized I can work crazy hours, I can work just like anyone else, so I can party just like anyone else.” Soon she had an agenda: If she could finish her work by 2 a.m., she would grab a guy from the office—“I had no girlfriends, it’s such a male- dominated industry”—and they’d hurry to a bar, order a few rounds of shots, and try to catch up with the people who were already drunk. “I drank almost every day,” she says. “But I thought it was normal because I was always going out, and when you’re out, everyone else is drinking.”The part of this that bothers me is the "I had no girlfriends" and the fact that she felt like she had to go out [drinking] with "the guys" to be accepted and get ahead in her career of choice. No, none of that is explicitly stated in the article, but yes, that is the (not very hidden) subtext of this particular drinking anecdote. I think PilgrimSoul put it best in her response (on Jezebel.com) to this passage:
Also maybe ambitious young women drink more because the frontiers for ambitious young women are pretty depressing. You all know me as a bit hardcore now, but before I ended up in the "high-end" job I'm in now I thought workplace sexism was something of a myth. I thought, hey, I will never find myself in discussions where superiors are joking about prostitutes or making awkward and ill-timed remarks about what I'm wearing or people at my same level are telling me to answer the fucking phone for them because clearly by virtue of my possession of ovaries I want nothing more than to be their assistant. I never though that I would be convinced, as I am now, that, "I will always be the bitch in the corner who doesn't find your hall-soccer-playing, chest-beating masculinity impressive or something to emulate." I thought, I will never see an acquaintance hired and fired by a person who claims to care about gender equality while simultaneously justifying said firing by way of the phrase, "I tried to tame a mustang." About all of this I was, however, wrong.
So I'm not really going to fault ambitious young women for drinking, nosiree, I am not.
For the bulk of history, women have skewed toward the teetotaler end of the spectrum; not until the middle of the last century did a burgeoning relationship with alcohol coincide with Second Wave feminism and a general impulse to close the gender gap across the board. “As women ‘immigrated’ into the culture that was once unique to men,” says Grucza, “they picked up a lot of the same mores and attitudes and behaviors and ideas about what is socially acceptable that men had previously held. We call this acculturation—people adopt the drinking attitude and behaviors of the dominant culture.” Which explains why researchers have found that women in the demographic closest to being dominant (young, white, middle-class, educated) are leading the charge in terms of increased alcohol consumption. The trend is so pronounced that in Britain, home to the Bridget Joneses of the world, public-health officials launched an ad campaign picturing a grizzled man in drag (or a very mannish woman) with the caption: “If you drink like a man, you might end up looking like one.” But no public-service announcement is likely to turn back this tide, especially among the very young.This, too, seems to undercut the notion that the increase in women's drinking is not about men. The quote about acculturation also underlines the assumption (apparently un-challenged) that male culture is still the dominant culture. The other thing that bothers me about this article in general is the comparison of women drinking more (as much as men) to any of the other feminist-driven gender-gap-closing projects of the past. i.e. "I want the right to vote" is roughly equivalent to "Another scotch, please." If we are meant to worry as much as this article tells us to about the negative repercussions of drinking, is it also telling us that our other progressive leanings are subtly dangerous as well? (This reminds me of a much-beloved teacher I had in high school who said the fall of all great empires was foreshadowed/caused by the merging of roles between men and women in a given society. In other words, the narrowing of the gender gap in our country must presage the great Fall of our Civilization. In other words, stay down and stop wearing pants, ladies!)
This conversation is from a posted IM exchange (with tidied punctuation) between two editors at Jezebel.com, a Website that is an avatar of a certain of-the-moment brand of feminism appealing to women too young to remember the heyday of Ms. magazine. Jezebel is very pro-alcohol.Jezebel is not pro-alcohol. The Jezzies talk a lot about alcohol. But they also talk a lot about health concerns, sex, careers, Feminism, and the economy, entertainment and politics, politics as entertainment, etc etc etc. What Jezebel provides, (beyond a non-judgmental (in most cases, but notably not in the case of this article's comments), supportive, progressive, feminist community at a time when I feel a good feminist is hard to find) is a forum for women to discuss what happens in women's lives. For all their immodest disclosure about bodily fluids and sexual encounters as well as bad credit and shitty jobs, why should they not talk about the cocktails they enjoy and the hangovers they suffer? It is a full disclosure website and I, for one, find it refreshing in a time when post-feminism seems to have ushered back into style some more traditional feminine (anti-feminIST) values.
The above screengrab is VERY gratifying.
FINALLY a lame duck! Officially! 11 weeks til the Inaguration! Also, Sarah Palin can crawl back into the hole she came out of. And her daughter has a prayer of a normal-ish life with her baby.
"Democrats are cheered by early numbers showing that Obama holds a healthy lead in Vigo County, a place that one Dem described to us as "the most reliable bellwether county in the country."
"Vigo has only been wrong on president twice since 1892," this Dem enthuses."
31,268,357 voters have cast votes early in America, which represents 25.3% of the total of all ballots cast in 2004. Nobody doubts we are headed for an absolute record turnout in this election.
The responsible thing to do would be for the networks to hold off until at least 7 PM to project Indiana, when polls have closed in Gary and the northwestern part of the state just across the border from Chicago—where Obama hopes to rack up huge margins among black and working-class voters. If for some reason the state is called before 7 PM for John McCain, that probably means we're in for a long night. If, on the other hand, the state is called for Obama in the first hour after the polls close, that could indicate that the force of Obama's field operation has been underestimated, and that McCain is in for a catastrophically poor evening.
Ohio State University law professor Edward Foley, an election law specialist, said the lawsuit was a placeholder to be used by the Republicans to challenge the final results if the outcome in Ohio is close, using the Bush v. Gore decision by the Supreme Court in 2000."
2:27 PM: This is really cool: the NYTimes Election wordtrain. Shows you how people are feeling.
What a GREAT campaign...There were 45 cars at my precinct at 0600... 42 more than last Fall.
"Monday evening's CNN national Poll of Polls -- incorporating our new CNN survey, as well as new tracking numbers from Gallup and Hotline taken October 3-5 -- shows Obama leading McCain by 6 points -- at 49 to 43 percent.
President Bush may be part of the reason why Obama's making gains. Only 24 percent of those polled approve of Bush's job as president, an all-time low for a CNN survey."Bush has now tied Richard Nixon's worst rating ever, taken in a poll just before he resigned in 1974, and is only 2 points higher than the worst presidential approval rating in history, Harry Truman's 22 percent mark in February 1952," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland."
Even more than that, I wonder if diet blogs can be positive at all. It's good for women to have spaces where they can speak freely about their issues and feelings, but whenever we do posts about weight, discussion always devolves into people posting their heights and weights down to the decimal point.It's not about my weight or my clothing size or my food issues. It's about the culture of thinness and the pressure put on women to conform to an ideal that, if they attained it, would certainly cause bad health and possibly even death. I just think that our society needs to broaden its understanding of what's thin, doctors need to either explain to me how my boobs fit into their BMI or come up with a system that fairly tells women (who have all the parts they came with) what's healthy and what isn't, and stores need to actually cater to their customers, 95% of whom are NOT shaped like their models.
I made a basic bread dough (following J.O.'s recipe and using my Kitchen Aid). This is a picture of it rising beautifully.
While the dough was doing its thing, I crushed up some serious 70% Ghirardelli chocolate.
When the dough was ready to go, I rolled it out, coated it with a LOT of butter, and sprinkled it generously with chocolate crumbles. Then I rolled it up, jelly-roll style, and sliced it. This is what they looked like (messy) after assembled.
Fig. 1. Here you can see the dough with the Good Stuff spread all over. We're in the process of rolling it up.
Fig. 2. Here we've rolled up the dough and are pinching it together so that the good stuff doesn't squish out.
Fig. 3. at the bottom of this photo you can see the slices. At the top, I've just finished forming one.
Fig. 4. Here I'm forming the Franzbrötchen using the "Kochlöffel-Trick" - basically you press the handle of a wooden spoon into the center of a slice, causing the middle to buckle and the sides to turn slightly upwards. Then you press them flat and put them on the baking sheet. It takes a while to get the hang of it, but the results are most satisfying.
Fig. 4. These are the finished product. These emerge out of the oven after they've been baked about15-20 minutes at 180° C. They turned out kind of ugly, but in my experience, the uglier they are, the better they taste.
I cooked a LOT of spaghetti, drained it, doused it with good olive oil and let it sit.
Meanwhile, and afterward, I cooked a LOT of homemade tomato sauce (canned crushed tomatoes, about 4 cloves of garlic, a little onion, fresh basil, mushrooms, zucchini).
I mixed it all up with a good deal of cheese (parmigiano reggiano, romano, mozzarella), and baked at 400° until done. Quite delicious.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
Lightly grease a 9 1/4 by 5 1/4 by 2 1/2-inch loaf pan with 1 teaspoon of the butter.
Puree the bananas, sour cream, eggs and vanilla in a food processor.
Sift the cake flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder and salt into the bowl of an electric mixer fixed with a whisk attachment. Add the remaining 10 tablespoons butter and mix on medium-low speed until blended, about 30 seconds. Add the banana mixture in 3 batches, scraping the sides of the bowl and mixing on medium speed between each addition. Fold in the nuts.
Pour into the loaf pan. Bake until lightly browned and bread bounces back to the touch, about 1 hour 10 minutes. Remove from the oven and cool for 10 minutes before turning out onto wire rack to cool completely.
walnuts, in classic semi-hobo fashion. Oh, and I had to do the mixing by hand, which was a joy. Pre-baking this is the mess I had on my hands:
