more articles... and my white-bread restaurant

Today I'm catching up on my news reading, hence my newsie posts. I'm now reading the comments for an article on health inspection of restaurants.

Fernando and I often eat at Scores, a very run-of-the-mill family restaurant. (I hesitate to call it a white-bread restaurant though. The croutons are multi-ethnic.) It is certainly not a *foodie* sort of a place. But I like it because (a) there are few interesting restaurants along our bus routes; (b) we just go for the salad bar, so it's inexpensive; (c) it's relatively healthy, versus much of the processed crapitude in low-mid-expense restaurants; (d) it's clean, including the bathrooms; and (e) the service is uniformly excellent.

I think the last two points are probably connected to how safe the food is. You can only have that level of cheerful and efficient service (every single time we go, from every single staff member) if there's good management; and where there's good management, there will probably be food-safety. Ditto with the bathrooms, as confirmed by this guy who commented on the article I just read: "Ps if the washrooms are clean and scrubbed and well stocked, chances are the kitchen will not kill you. Just my experience as a chef of 25 years."

a little humour

This is just randomly amusing.

Olympic swim superman dude, Michael Phelps, eats 12 000 calories a day. Which just shows, you know, that we could all be eating as much crap as we want if only we'd be willing to exercise all the rest of our waking hours. -->The closest I came to this was when my jaw was wired shut after an operation and I had to eat through a straw. I would end each day with a chocolate milkshake to bring up my calorie count. Sweeet.

Anyway, this is a funny article of a food critic trying to keep up with Phelps. It greatly resembles my own life.

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No one would ever confuse me with an Olympic athlete. I was picked last in softball and the last time I was competitive about anything, it was apathy (remember being in your 20s?).

...

So I head to nearest body of water. ... It's adult swim time and the grown-ups are swimming laps. An old man swims width-wise across the pool. It's not clear if he's crazy or just a jerk. ... I swim a lap. This pool must be much larger than an Olympic pool because I get tired very quickly. Having achieved a small victory with my lap I go out on a high note, at the peak of my performance ability.

...

Any serious athlete is up before dawn to train. I rise at 4 a.m., stretch, walk to the bathroom, urinate, and head back to bed.

...

I receive a devastating piece of news. "A lap is generally there and back," says Zach Weston, professor of kinesiology at Wilfrid Laurier University. "A length is just there."

Cutting off my citrus supply route!

All the cookbooks I own use fresh-this and fresh-that, such as fresh lemon juice. I still stick to my bottles because it's easier to have on hand, and to take out just the amount I need etc. But when I ran out of lemon juice this summer and tried to buy more, Maxi was always out--though I was able to buy fresh lemons.

Sure enough, there has been a Lemon Shortage! How alarming! How shocking! Surely a harbinger of worse things to come! And now I've been forced to become one of those Fresh Lemon Cooking people. Hmph!

My life in stalking

A few weeks ago, when all I was doing was researching my book every day, I ran out of blog ideas for several of my blogs. But this past week I've been on a book-break, doing chores and budgets and stuff, and spending more time surfing. Which generates lots of things to say! So I've been writing up blog postings with future dates, to get me through any dry spells. At this point Practically Moral is ahead by a month. Ease!

But not this blog--this one's real time. Cause I don't care how often I post or not. Anyway, here's the latest: My Life in Pictures

This is my library. It's an important part of my world.

Here are the two cats living in Pablo's old apartment. No people, just cats. I think one's a calico and one's a tabby.

My Future Flamed Fame

Ohhhh I'm slipping off my 4 AM bed rule... mehhhh. Fernando seems to be having trouble sleeping this week, I can hear him watching some show about safety standards on buildings.

I was just reading a few random blog entries by romance author Jennifer Crusie, and one of them was about all the hassle that comes when you write something that Outrages! some people, and whether it's worth it for authors to bother blogging at all.

One of the classic examples she gives is writing something that's meant to be funny, and having Serious Minded People tell you how offensive you've been. Well there's no doubt that crucifixion-by-offensive-humour could certainly happen to me. I mean, it happens often enough in my real life.

But worrying about this now is something I will classify under: Things people spend time thinking about when they're not doing their actual work (be it writing, painting, making music, etc.) Like guys spending hours thinking up the perfect band name, rather than practicing. Or people planning their web sites before they've done anything that merits a web site. Or thinking up pseudonyms, or designing book covers, or speculating on how one will handle one's massive future fame. In other words: You don't have a hope in hell of having this *problem* unless you get back to work!

What is more likely is that I'll have to watch my Editorial Content when I one day get a teaching job. I would probably make this blog private, even though it's pretty benign. The other ones I write should in theory be Google-izable by Students since they're more about my opinions, less about my personal life. (No I don't plan to teach under the name Mabel, but it's in all my email addresses.)

And so... yawn yawn yawn. Off to bed.

Losing My Sleep (but not my religion)

I can't sleep. I've been going to bed at a good regular time lately, and was on schedule to do so tonight, but... whenever I get things On The Mind... I'm done for. So I'll sit here for a bit, listening to Joan Baez and checking on Gustav's progress.

I went Chenoying with Gilby and The Missus tonight. We got to talking about some old friendships, so now my mind's all roiled up like a Gustav again! It was roiled earlier this week, and I finally unroiled it, and now it's re-roiled. Curses! I have lunch with Maewitch tomorrow, so maybe it can be unroiled again. Darn pathetic fallacy! If this were a movie you'd see me sitting here in the dark with my laptop, a sad Joan Baez song playing, intercut with CNN reports about Hurricane Gustav.

Gilby has an amusing but useful new analogy for friendships. He sees his friends as positions in a company, and sometimes you demote someone, or promote someone, or fire someone etc. If you demote a friend they have less responsibility, so you know, yay for them--but it means less benefits and pay too. Amusing, but pretty true. I'm on Gilby's Board of Directors, so I guess I'm alright.

I think my policy these days is to only hire the best... firings suck, after all. I don't want to let people into my life who might require a Clear Out Your Desk.

Changing Topic: Man... the pictures you can find of people on Facebook when you can't sleep... back when The Boy really was a boy. Now I can picture him starring in Annie.


Changing Topic: Céline Dion sings a song I really like called "On ne change pas." I guess it reminds me of my mother's opinion (after watching my brother and I growing up) that people don't really change from childhood on. Your basic character is right there when you're little, and there it stays. I don't know if people find that discouraging, or comforting. I kind of like it--I like the idea that I'm right here where I put myself. "Oh that's where I left me! It's so obvious, I should have checked here first."

On croit que l'on fait des choix
Mais si tu grattes là
Tout près de l'apparence tremble
Un petit qui nous ressemble
On sait bien qu'il est là

That reminds me of a couple favourite bits of writing. The first is from Joseph Campbell's Hero With a 1000 Faces, speaking of the "infantile unconscious:"

"We carry it within ourselves forever. All the ogres and secret helpers of our nursery are there, all the magic of childhood. And more important, all the life-potentialities that we never managed to bring to adult realization, those other portions of ourself, are there; for such golden seeds do not die. If only a portion of that lost totality could be dredged uo into the light of day, we should experience a marvelous expansion of our powers, a vivid renewal of life."

How beautiful is that? And his whole point about the hero journey is that life is always sending out these "calls to adventure"--opportunities which, if we take them, will allow us to dig deep and find the "lost potentialities."

His point is illustrated in his interview with Bill Moyers, when he tells the story of Hanuman the Monkey King, from the Ramayana. When Hanuman was a child he had phenomenal powers, but he was michievious and annoying so his elders placed a curse on him so that he would forget his powers, and this is how he grows up. Lord Rama asks for his help to rescue his wife Sita, and it's only through this adventure that Hanuman remembers his powers and uses them to perform great feats. (The story is wonderfully retold in this children's book.)

I'm also reminded of my favourite Matthew Arnold poem, "The Buried Life." The poem is about the way our true selves flow like an underground river, and that loving someone is often about the desire to escape the everyday noise of life, and drop inwards to our true selves.

"Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,

And turn those limpid eyes on mine,

And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul.
...
But often, in the world's most crowded streets,

But often, in the din of strife,

There rises an unspeakable desire

After the knowledge of our buried life".

Arnold writes that if we were given free and easy access to our real self, we would fuck it up--it's buried this deep so that we can't capriciously change it.

"Fate, which foresaw

How frivolous a baby man would be--

By what distractions he would be possess'd,

How he would pour himself in every strife,

And well-nigh change his own identity--

That it might keep from his capricious play

His genuine self, and force him to obey

Even in his own despite his being's law,

Bade through the deep recesses of our breast

The unregarded river of our life

Pursue with indiscernible flow its way".

He says we use the everyday noise to distract ourselves--we "demand / Of all the thousand nothings of the hour / Their stupefying power; / Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call!"--but that love has the power to push that aside and bring out the truth:

"When our world-deafen'd ear

Is by the tones of a loved voice caress'd--

A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,

And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.

The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,

And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know."

That's a pretty interesting way to regard romantic love. Campbell called marriage "a recognition of spiritual identity. ... it's an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of the ego to a relationship in which two have become one." If you think about it, a serious and committed relationship is one of those calls to adventure; think about how vulnerable you have to make yourself to the other, to get anywhere with it.

I remember when a friend of mine was in the early stages of a relationship, and she was afraid to tell her boyfriend such n' such thoughts (I don't remember the details) because of how he might react. And all I could advise was--that's intimacy. Unless you put yourself on the line, and risk rejection, the relationship won't slip into a deeper, more meaningful and satisfying stage. I think that's why Arnold and Campbell were right about the potential of love to help us unlock the "golden seeds" of childhood.

Wrapping Up: Well my eyelids are droopy... one last check on Gustav... "Gustav is 20 miles from Port Fourchon; 85 from New Orleans."

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"Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again."
Joseph Campbell

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Protesting The Man in Ole San Fran

There are a couple good Activism Sights one can see in San Fran. The University of California at Berkeley is the most famous, both for the spontaneous sit-ins to protest the lack of free speech on campus, and Reagan sending in the National Guard to oust people from the People's Park--when the University was already peacefully handling the issue. (Bast!)



And second, the San Francisco State University--where protests led to one of the first Black Studies programs.



I shall bring my peace flowers and sing Bob Dylan songs in a Joan Baez tone! (Hey, the one thing I never worry about when traveling is acting Touristy.)

(Or better yet, I'm gonna write a song based on the title on this blog post.)