Mark Bittman

on what's wrong with the way we eat

anthem

If there were a song that signaled a universal get your butt to the dance floor, both Wolf Parade's I'll Believe in Everything and NERD's She Wants to Move would be it for me.

upside down and backwards sunglasses

Somewhere there must be a photography exhibit that displays snapshots of the folks who ride public transit, or a short film titled People Who Ride Public Transit Are Funny.

-The teenagers rank as one of the most entertaining social groups. It's like watching a mini-soap opera of people who look like small, fineline-less, versions of you (you in your twenties). The young ladies are already dressing like they're in college and the young menfolk wish they looked like they were in college. I love eavesdropping on their most pressing social concerns and listening to them try desperately to assert themselves as young adults.

-Small children engulfed by their bus seats, insistent that they hold their bus tickets, pea-coated and loved, make for another group of entertaining (tiny) people. The children in strollers wearing sunglasses look so very serious about their current state of affairs.

-There's usually an older gentleman intent on dispensing his advice about living in the city and being nice on crowded busses whose stentorian voice carries throughout the entire crowd of folks on the bus.

-My 28 bus makes the Golden Gate Bridge stop: the tourists are sun-burnt, fanny-packed, and bickering generally (or sharing Jolly Ranchers) in various European languages. They are usually gasping when we get to the Golden Gate Bridge.

I love you 28 and especially N-line.

things for which I'd be willing to sell my soul:

-the end of automated customer service (and specifically, Sprint's customer service)
-the cessation of all air time (air time in cars on my street, air time in apartments with windows open, etc) for Lynard Skynard's Sweet Home Alabama

Dear American Apparel,

You are but one part of an overwhelming social message that we give a daily ringing endorsement. 1) Sex is a commodity up for purchase and 2) there is one, very specific type of sex up for sale, against which women are measured. Your marketing campaign, while clearly successful, showcases skin and makes the women in your ads appear as though they're filming soft-core porn. While there are certainly women who are lauded for their voice and their power to create, you stoke the cultural onslaught of women who are tiny and beautiful and charmingly unintelligent.

Your labor policies are good and your clothes comfortable. So the options are bad: no one loses limbs creating your product, but if I buy it I'm giving you my resounding approval and feeding the marketing campaign that strips women of intelligence and instead replaces it with airbrushed sex appeal. Thank you Erica Jong - no one will elect Carrie Bradshaw to the Senate nor will they promote to CEO a woman whose most important feature is her sexiness.

I curse you consumerism America, curse your damn name.

skin vanity

So 26 finds me reflecting on my 20s, to which I refer and curse, habitually. Also. 26 finds me thinking I have some kind of insight about my 20s.

1) It's the decade in which we really are incapable of getting a handle on what's ahead. (Early to mid part of the decade anyway.) The possibility is open to anyone's interpretation, which is neat. (They're cliches for a reason people.) The ease with which I've been able to change is in some regards unique to your 20s, and for that I am eternally grateful.

2) I think you also do this in them: feel untethered and fuck up relationships and generally walk in and out of burning houses. And then sometimes, with something that feels like a choking gasp, you hang on and believe with unyielding confidence (somewhat like irrational teenagers) that you will pass through them, and not entirely unscathed. Sometimes all evidence feels like it's pointing toward chaos, but it's not.

3) I also find myself less interested in and feeling anger toward the accepted social constructions of beauty. (Less interested, not entirely free from thinking I should fit more carefully into these shapes that are actually not shapes into which any human can fit.)

4) Most importantly, I am certain if I read this again in maybe only months but definitely years, I will feel way less cool for having written these things. (Because our former selves are always less cool and wrong about most things.)

...sexual freedom can be a smokescreen for how far we haven't come.

Ladies! (and guys!) This is a good book!

"Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, published in 1973, famously introduced Americans to the idea that a woman might desire a consequence-free 'zipless fuck.' 'I had to create the zipless fuck to rebel against my fifties upbringing,' she said. 'I told my daughter the other day, "Your generation does it; my generation just talked about it." I look at my daughter and her friends in their twenties and they are reveling in their sexuality. They don't feel guilty, and why should they? Men never did. Right now, they're young and beautiful and full of energy and they don't necessarily want to have a relationship, or even necessarily have a guy stay the whole night!

'But I would be happier if my daughter and her friends were crashing through the glass ceiling insteadof the sexual ceiling,' Jong continued. 'Being able to have an orgasm with a man you don't love or having Sex and the City on television, that is not liberation. If you start to think about women as if we're all Carrie on Sex and the City, well, the problem is: You're not going to elect Carrie to the Senate or to run your company. Let's see the Senate fifty percent female; let's see women in decision-making positions - that's power. Sexual freedom can be a smokescreen for how far we haven't come.

from Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture

people in San Francisco are wearing winter coats!

people! It's in the 50s and 60s! It's sunny! This is not winter attire weather!

(I look like the lone person wearing shorts in March in Indiana, praying the weather is nicer than it is - but it is nice here.)

Dear May 5,

Please come sooner. I am ready to leave Bloomington now.

Love,
Lucy

I'm going untitled till I get a name that seems more appropriate. I feel like I've grown out of blogging, and it feels kind of lame unless I can post something other than what I feel like I've been posting. I'm just keeping it around so friends and family can get Peace Corps updates. (Today's? A billion immunizations and 3 hours of doctors appointments later, I'm slowly getting together my physical stuff so they can actually assign me a country.)

on mollusks and the anthropology of women's breasts:

perverse and often baffling
(Act Four: Tough News Room)

keep meaning to post!

Stuff White People Like


interview with the blogger on NPR

woohoo!

I'm headed to Africa in November! The Peace Corps nominated me for a health care program that starts in the fall. No, they can't give me a more specific location than anywhere on the continent until I go through my health exam.

Yippee! Or, as Lisa told me, I'm blowin this popsicle stand folks.

Poverty is Poison

Why yes I am a progressive Paul Krugman!

I wish this were shocking.

A year after the Axis of Evil speech, President Bush met with three Iraqi Americans: the author Kanan Makiya; Hatem Mukhlis, a doctor; and Rend Rahim, who later became postwar Iraq's first representative to the United States. As the three described what they thought would be the political situation after Saddam's fall, they talked about Sunnis and Shiites. It became apparent to them that the president was unfamiliar with these terms. The three spent part of the meeting explaining that there are two major sects in Islam.

So two months before he ordered US troops into the country, the president of the United States did not appear to know about the division among Iraqis that has defined the country's history and politics.

-an excerpt from the book The End of Iraq, by former US ambassador and author Peter Galbraith

from one of the neatest ladies I know

Hilary Henry, my friends, has a blog:

All the Cool Kids Love to Craft

who is interested in accompanying me on a road trip to Tulsa, Oklahoma? I swear I am not kidding I want to see this man preach.

I was fingerprinted today.

Both hands - twice - for the Peace Corps! so that's coming right along it seems.

you look dumb

but seriously, and more importantly, wtf "students against terrorism" shirts! What does that even mean? Are there students for terrorism? Doesn't a shirt that says "students against terrorism" sound like a joke?

(These "SAT" shirts have been around for a while - I was just reminded twice today how terrible I think they are.)

maybe I should have waited

I'm in this Arabic class, and it runs my life. But I do know how to say: This is my first time in a sandstorm.

I probably wanted to look like this as a child.

Part I, on language

It's so important. The Republicans have been running a brilliant campaign using words like "tax relief", "permission slip", "the long war on terror" and by turning "liberal" into a pejorative word. ("We don't need a permission slip to defend America," Bush swore.) It's why racial slurs still carry so much power and why politicians that simply call environmental groups "anti-growth" get legislation passed against their efforts.

I'm increasingly cranky about language. I feel inundated by words that a speaker often uses with benignity, but words that nonetheless carry with them a whole host of thoughts and significant if upspoken ideas that have simply worn me out. I'm tired of hearing "wifebeater" to mean ribbed, white, tank top. I'm tired of hearing "bitch" as a term used to accost men as I feel it's an affront because it insinuates something weak associated with femininity.

Occasionally someone will respond to me like I'm a cantankerous old lady with hold-ups about things that "just don't matter that much" - but don't we have to be thoughtful about the language that frames our world and the way people think about and respond to us in it?

every morning

FEMA wants their money back?

FEMA is demanding $175 million back from Katrina victims the agency claims were ineligible recipients. While some of the articles I've read sound like there are some legitimate concerns about fraud and misappropriated funds, most of news sounds like the process of doling out funds has been disastrous and confusing for the needy recipients. New Orleanians still struggling to get their lives together are receiving letters demanding payback for the aid they were given, and the Bush Administration is appealing the court order requiring them to come through on housing payments for families who lost their homes.

this seems crazy.

Barnaby Furnas

well spent IU Foundation money

I can't get internet on the 6th floor of the library in the stacks (where it's silent and I'm surrounded by every book written on the subject of my paper) but I do have the privilege of listening to the outrageously expensive chiming clocks around campus.

!

The origin of HIV/AIDS has now been traced to the time and place of colonial rule in DRC. (Yes, this is clearly open to debate, immunization campaigns were, however, a reality in colonial Africa.) "Benevolent" immunization campaigns run by Western colonial officials are one of the culprits of the spread of the disease. Syringes were expensive and hand-made during the early 1900s, so doctors reused needles without sterilizing them. One campaign alone used six needles for 80,000 Africans.

Makiko Kudo

Carrie Mae Weems

Martin Creed

Wangechi Mutu

Sigmar Polke

Cecily Brown

still celebrating, of all the victories, Rick Santorum's defeat

Yes! The #3 Republican who likened homosexual relationships to man-on-dog sex is out of the Senate!

Yes #2! The Tavis Smiley Show and This American Life are on itunes now!

attempt #3

I use the Google too.



shoes are nice and so are Erik's dancin pants.

(sorry if these are reposted links. I naturally forget.)

holy lord

I just realized that ever since I have known the word "travesty" I have been using it incorrectly - and I've been way off on my understanding of that word. I have no idea how I got to thinking it meant what I thought it meant.

also. why are these leg warmers $72?