Three Things Make a Post. Pity I Only Have One...

Started writing a post about The Windup Girl, then was beaten out by the heat.

Tra-la.

Have been spending most of my updating time on Facebook, as it's faster and easier to update than the blog when all you've got are a couple of links and some piecemeal reactions to random life events. Too much work blogging means too little personal blogging, and that is kind of a problem.

Hoping for a day without a heat index of 100+ and humid. May free up the brain pan some.

For the Record...

... the nearest Meetup group that shows up when ones searches for "feminism" is in Louisville.

I suspect searching for something like "women's studies" would end up with similar results.

There is a gay Christians group, however.

You've got a long way to go, Ohio.

God's War & Infidel Book Contract Arrived Today

(yes, yes, this is the SECOND one. It's a wacky business)

Need I say  more?

Words for the Road

"As long as you make an identity for yourself out of pain, you cannot be free of it."
-Eckhart Tolle

Half our cauliflowers appear to have been eaten by some kind of fungus, but these two turned out lovely, and we'll be turning them into a fine cauliflower mash tomorrow.

 And here's what our garden currently look like, after harvesting some peas, a tomato, two cauliflowers, and two broccoli (including harvest of broccoli florets after initial head harvest):

I've been growing more keenly aware of where my food comes from (and what it's actually made out of) the last couple of years. I grew up eating fast food. My parents both worked at a fast food company for 25 years. It was just... what you ate. It never occurred to me that you should eat any differently. I didn't spend much time in the produce aisle until I was 18 and interested in dropping some weight I'd put on while on the pill. Switching to fruits, vegetables, and protein meant dropping 60 lbs in about 6-8 months. It felt almost effortless.

I've read all the books - like Fast Food Nation, The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food - and watched all the shows, like King Corn, Supersize Me, and Food, Inc.I know how we got here. And I know why.
These days, I work hard to eat well.

And, of course, that's just it - I have to work hard to eat well. Folks who haven't tried it really don't know just how tough it is. Fast food, prepared food, soda, crackers, canned soup, frozen meals... these are revolutionary, time saving victuals that make it possible to feed a tremendous number of people on a very small amount of land with 80% of the base made of up just one versatile commodity crop - corn.

And it's a blessing.

Yes, it's killing us prematurely, because we have no defense against a double bacon cheeseburger. It sets off all of our primitive pleasure centers. Why not eat them all day?

Because, of course, you'll die of malnutrition. But you'll keep doing it, and doing it, like a rat with a way to self-administer cocaine. Giving up carbs is really hard to do. Even before I was sick, I'd get the shakes, and intense cravings. Then there are the visual cues, which are constant. As somebody in marketing and advertising, I know just how helpless we can be in the face of $5.99 single-topping pizza specials, particularly when you're exhausted after work, haven't eaten in six hours, and are faced with the prospect of an hour's cooking time before food ingestion.

It's amazing that we can feed ourselves so cheaply and easily in this country. Try growing a garden. Try losing half your cauliflower crop to fungus, like we did. "It's a good thing we're not relying on any of this to feed ourselves," I told J. as I pulled out the cauliflower. Our little garden is just for fun. When we get a house with more land, we'll likely be able to feed more of ourselves with it, but even a "for fun" garden is disappointing when you discover half your land was wasted on crops that don't feed you.

As sympathetic as I am to the bullshit and poison that's ended up in our food, I'm also very much aware of how things were before cheap food. Farming is not a fun life. Food doesn't just roll out of the truck at the end of the day, full-formed. And after you grow it, you know... then you need to cook it. And that takes time. And planning.

On the one hand, the West is addicted to a diet that's killing us. On the other hand, we spend less than 20% of our income on food and spend less than, what, 10 hours a week? preparing food (on average). As somebody who's had to rebuild her entire conception of food from the ground up, I'm still sympathetic to the thinking behind where we are today.

There is another way to eat, I know, somewhere between industrialized, corn-fed fake food and fungus-ridden-today-we're-eating-dirt-grown-your-own-grass food. There are farmer's markets. Local agriculture. All that jazz. But that doesn't take into account how people are going to eat during the winter, or those precious spring months when you're growing what you'll gorge on come end of summer. You end up eating a lot of turnips and jam and drinking a lot of vodka.

What''s on offer now is so damn good that's it's been a struggle to break the pizza-burgers-prepared-food-cycle. Taking that next step - the parsley-at-all-meals-turnips-all-winter step - is something I just don't know that I can do if I want to continue to maintain a modern lifestyle.

There's a better way to eat. And I'm still struggling to find it.

What We Eat

I made the switch to eating like a real person back in Chicago (I lived well in Alaska, too, but fell on hard times in South Africa where I subsisted mainly on peri-peri rice, spinach pies, and Woolworth's prepared foods), but I'm still sometimes impressed at the amount of shrubbery that goes into the shopping cart each week.

The older (and creakier) I get, the more I pay attention to what I eat. Getting sick four years ago only made it easier to make the correlation between mood and what I was eating.

Words for the Road

Greatness

SOMEDAY

Someday I will write something besides radio spots and social media strategies again.

SOMEDAY.

Happy Happy

Five False Myths About Gender Differences

Blah, blah, blah... But say it enough times and maybe folks will start to look a the world a little differently. Can't change something if you don't know what's broken.

One for the Road

"Be civil to all; sociable to many; familiar with few; friend to one; enemy to none."
- Benjamin Franklin

Ok, besides 1, 2 and 5 I'm doing pretty well.

Where's My Pony?

(Via hannah)

An Oldie But A Goodie

Food. Get Some.

Have been a crazy Mad Men fool lately. Look! Here's a picture of some excellent food at Boulevard Haus to distract you!

Am looking forward to upcoming vacation mainly because it means I can unplug from social media pursuits for a whole three days and work on some actual fiction. I've got Babylon and Iron Maiden languishing out there on Dropbox.What's the use of a mobile file management system if you never use it?

Also, boxing classes start when I get back from the Left Coast. Yeah, yeah, delay involves a sprained right finger, which involves a bad dog and a leash. Not nearly as exciting as it sounds.

Man, I'm looking forward to this vacation. Just wish it was another three or four days longer.

Ass-Kicking Heroines Unite

"In her interview with TrekMovie last November, the actress (Zoe Saldana) said that she wanted to "kick some ass" in a fight scene in the Star Trek sequel, and more recently she has revealed that JJ Abrams has agreed to give her that fight scene."

Apparently, she used to pretend she was Ripley and Sarah Conner as a kid. WIN.

See, folks? It's all connected.

Level Up

Switched from 5 lb weights during my morning circuit to 10 lb weights. Yes, yes, I can heft my 20 lb and 30 lb for limited exercises, but 3 minutes of strength followed by cardio followed by strength again is a liiiittle tougher. Two weeks with the 5 lbs was just enough for me to start getting bored. Now it's 10 lbs and I felt like I was gonna die again.

Good times.

Hoping to max out at 20lbs with these (was doing 12-15 at the gym back when I was doing circuit, but at home, I only have 10's and 20's. So they'll be another hefty level up here sometime in a couple weeks).

How Does Your Graden Grow?

Quite remarkably, it turns out. Raised beds all the way!

Cilantro.

Full garden

First broccoli florets.

Broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and red onions.

Tomatoes, peas, eggplants, yellow squash, red onions.

In Which the World Doesn't End

Some time back, I misplaced my flash drive at the new day job, most likely while moving my office from downstairs to up. Long searches in old office, new office, and three different possible bags I may have stowed it in turned up nothing. The last backup of the files I had on the flash drive was from November 12th, saved to my laptop.

This was deeply crappy, but not a total fail, as I had printed out recent copies of Babylon and Iron Maiden. But it did mean lack of get-up-and-go due to the fact that, you know, I was going to have to retype at least half of 100 pages worth of stuff.

Last night I was going through my old laptop one last time to see if maybe I'd created another flash drive backup before that one, and lo and behold, I found that I'd recently replaced the Babylon file in the actual Babylon subfolder in my novels folder on my hard drive. So, I hadn't backed up the whole flash drive (most of that info doesn't change), but I *did* back up the stuff I was working on.

I'd started backing up projects I was regularly working to my laptop on back in December, with just such a scenerio in mind (copying over the whole drive got tedious). I really miss that damn flash drive, but at least I don't have to retype most of Babylon from scratch.

Now I need to effing get back to work on it.

Moral is, as ever: always backup.

Yes, Mercenaries Die. That's Why You're Getting Paid So Damn Much

Watched a documentary tonight about profiteering in the Iraq war by private companies like Halliburton, Caci, Titan, Blackwater, and others. I'm always amused that the same folks protesting using tax money to provide healthcare to their neighbors didn't raise a peep when Halliburton was charging U.S. taxpayers $100 a pop to do a load of laundry for soldiers, and whose blatant disregard for said soldiers' health resulted in death and dismemberment of troops and civilians.

But that stuff's old news. Halliburton and the private contractors' abuses are a rant for a whole nother post. Don't get me started.

In this instance, what struck me as interesting was the way they portrayed the civilian contractors as totally naive casualties of war. These folks went over there with a passionate desire to help, yes, and they felt fucked over when it turned out they were just part of a profiteering system.

BUT.

The company I worked for back in Chicago was among those called on by Halliburton and others as subcontractors in Iraq, and you know what? The package they offer you is pretty sweet. 2.5 times your base salary plus combat pay, generous vacation time, and you only had to sign a 6-12 month contract. I'd have been getting paid almost $100,000 as a project assistant/glorified admin. I gnawed hard on this and finally decided that, you know, we made the mess, we should go over there and fix it.

That was the moral piece I needed to push me over there.

But let's be honest, folks.

It sure as fuck wasn't moralitythat got me interested.

It was that sweet, sweet, $100,000.

The morality just made me feel better about it when I sent off my resume.

Anybody who went over to rebuild Iraq as a private contractor was doing so as a mercenary. As a mercenary, there are certain things you're going to expect: 1) you'll be in a lot of danger, and there's a real possibility you'll come back dead or maimed,  2) because of this, you'll be paid an assload of money 3) because you're a mercenary and are expendable, your employer really doesn't care too terribly about your safety.

Time and again I was struck by these families' outrage that their son/brother/husband had gone over into a war zone to make 100-120-140K driving a truck or 200-250-300K setting up water sanitation sites and being absolutely stunned that they'd been hurt/maimed/killed.

Death is a horrible, horrible thing, but if a soldier dies in a war, do we ask why the government didn't do more to protect them? These days, perhaps we do. Why didn't they have better armor, better intelligence, better logistics? We demand amazing things from our government and rightly so. In a perfect world the war machine would run magnificently and folks whose countries we invade wouldn't fight back. But this is what war is. War is dirty and messy and horrifying and people die. Did we expect something different?

Maybe this is just because I've read and written so much about war, and because so much of my family has served in war (including the Iraq war). Maybe it's also because when I sent in my resume for consideration as a private contractor in Iraq subcontracted to Halliburton that I was very, very clear about just what kind of shitstorm that would entail. I would likely have been one of the folks in the video decrying the abuses of Halliburton as far as waste and endangering soldiers' lives, but I don't know that I'd have been upset because Halliburton put me in a war zone.

Halliburton didn't put me in a war zone.

I had a price, and Halliburton was willing to pay it.

That's what being a mercenary is, and it's not all candy and roses and "hey I'll drive a trunk for 100K and come home smelling like the desert."

Anybody who thinks they're getting paid 100K just to drive a trunk is woefully naive of what the fuck a war zone is, and has absolutely no conception of what it'd be like to be a member of a country that's just been invaded, no matter how right or just or patriotic the invaders feel.

Are we really all this isolated and naive? Do we all make the same sorts of moral justifications like the one I made back then,  ("wellllll... we broke it, so we really should fix i"t) to make ourselves feel better about being profiteering mercenaries? You can pretty it up any way you like, but if you were to offer the same job ("drive a truck and get shot at") to somebody for 20-40K, see just how many sign up for patriotism.

The ones who signed up for patriotism are the soldiers. You know, the ones actually getting paid the shit money to get shot at in the desert. Everybody else is a fucking mercenary.

Me included.

At the end of the day, I was not among the folks selected to go oversees. But I would have gone. For $100K to pay off all those student loans and credit card debt and come back with a fresh new start?

You're damn right I'd risk driving a truck across a mine field for that.