I don't know if I've had periods of depression. If you wanted to be highly technical, the "periods" of depression I can remember are 1995 to 1999, 2000 to mid-'03, and '04 to the present. (I have no memories of any kind, good or bad, before 1994. To the best of my recollection, life began at 16.) It might be more accurate to say I have periods of where I delude myself into thinking things might be okay that float in a sea of lucid, rational hopelessness.

Even by that standard, things seem kind of dark lately. It's hard to explain why. If misery were waterboarding, hope would be what they would pour over your nose and mouth. There isn't any hope, just like you're not really drowning, but the visceral reaction to hope is deep in our animal instinct where no reason will reach.

I'm going to disable comments, which I don't normally do, because someone, driven out of nothing more than a misplaced sense of obligation and some kind of disgusted pity, would contradict me or say something positive, and the truth--the truth, the only merciful thing I can do is allow myself the truth--the truth is that things are probably worse than they seem, they're just so bad that what's left of my useless, never-accomplished-anything-important garbage dump of a brain can't piece together the whole picture and is content to be shocked by whatever it can see.

That's all, I can't say anything else. Nothing constructive, anyhow.

I saw rose petals falling down the Rosslyn metro escalator yesterday. Here's a poem about it.
Here's the mp3 if you don't like flash.

better

how nice it is
to live without
a struggle, you
must be thinking

how the limp embrace
of mediocrity is all
that is advertized
on the label

how much better
things have been
since you settled
down for him

and every load
of laundry is
exactly as soft
as the teddy bear

and how someday
your husband will
surely cure cancer
or write a poem

that convinces the
whole watching world
you haven't made
a terrible mistake

Love Poem

There's a junkie on my train, twitching, crying,
ever-writhing in the throes of dying
hanging like a ceiling fan's chain in the vortex
or the tattered threads of the cortex ravaged
outward with every thump. Outward with every thump
like plexiglass that jumps when she falls into it,
both weaving and unweaving her life all at once.
All at once, I catch the red cracks of her eyes
smearing isolated oceans at the barrier,
as if to say, don't stare--care, or don't care.

But I have never been victimized by love like heroin--
as real, as tangible, as faithful, as reliable,
as likely to be there tomorrow as needle tracks,
as warm as a street vent, as nourishing as a soup kitchen,
as transformative as rape, as certain as coroners--
and frankly--frankly--don't expect me to care,
or not care, or not to stare, because you don't,
you don't deserve to be a victim of heroin,
you haven't half earned the scars between your toes.

tickets

we live our mistakes like musicals
pancaked up so many bright nights
screaming at an audience laughing at us
recursing tragedies from the coda
hitting every mark in iron boots beating
the boards warped until we fall through

but we really all just wanted to be stars
singing to the audience of the bathroom
laughing at you laughing at me
laughing at the suds dripping from the ceiling
until our mouths filled up with water
and we still had lungs to object

and now, here I am, over my head
and it is so very dark down here
underneath this interrogation light
and my mouth is open and I am screaming
but I can't hear anything and the tap
is dripping over my head somewhere

For those of you in MMORPG guilds...

I'm an officer in a guild of 500 people, where I'm ranked #3 in gear and #4 in accomplishments (both general and quest/raid). I took all my alts out of the guild today, and I'm pondering quitting altogether, because while I was on an alt, some guild noob started complaining that he couldn't view the bank tabs. I said it was because some people whine for gear from the tabs, and it wasn't worth putting up with, and he started attacking me, saying how I must be ignorant because that's what a guild bank is for. (By the way, there are lots of things a guild bank is for, and that's not really the important one, which is collecting materials needed to raid-gear members. Nobody needs to request raid gear. If you get invited to the raid and don't have it, someone will give it to you. From. The. Bank.)

So one of my fellow officers, meanwhile, starts sending me (polite) messages suggesting I should let it go and let him win on this one. And I realized that, y'know, any time there's a dispute between me and another player, I get told to swallow it. This is about the fourth time it's happened. So for all of the nice lovely hand-holding song-singing love-ins we do at raid time, I take more shit from guildies than I do from PUGs.

I've been in the guild for over a year now, and they've been instrumental in getting me geared and making me the best-geared (for now) tank in the guild (for now). But I can't shake that other thought. Why am I in a guild where I have to have so many members on /ignore? Especially since, at this point, the guild needs me more than I need the guild. I can jump to a more skilled raid guild. Preferably one that occasionally backs up their friends over random jackholes who joined that day.

Am I missing something? Is this the way all guilds work? My impression of normal guild drama is personality conflicts between specific people; this is something else--a general feeling that the guild wants me (and most of its officers, really) to take abuse from noobs because they want the guild to be big. But y'know, the raids only hold 25 people. We don't need member #501.

And #3 doesn't need them.

I'm just so upset they're making Julie & Julia into a movie that I can't even express it. Just so, so upset. I'm upset that some degenerate actually thought it was an accomplishment to (sort of) feed herself for a year, and even more so that anyone lauded her for it, and even more than that, that some piece of flesh-colored filth thought this was an accomplishment worth watching.

Dear Universe: please strike everyone involved with this production stone dead immediately.

Food chat corrections.
( Read more... )

Dear Family,

I understand that you feel that I am hard on you, that I don't give you enough slack, that I expect you to be right all the time and not screw up. This is because we share some degree of common DNA. I expect more than average out of myself and I expect slightly less than that out of you.

You (collectively) simply cannot be as stupid as you act, most of the time. You cannot possibly be as subhumanly inconsiderate as you are being at this moment. And I am not sorry for pointing this out and making you feel like crap, which you most assuredly are.

All I expect from you is that you behave in accordance with some minimal level of courtesy and decorum, the sort that the family dogs have in abundance. As you notice, I show them affection and they act within these parameters. I show you affection and you metaphorically pee on my leg. You are less than dogs, and less deserving of affection from anyone, let alone from me.

It's entirely possible that I'm not even blaming you enough for the things I should probably be blaming you for, not the least of which are my high standards for personal conduct and my unforgiving nature. I've blocked out any memory of my childhood, which I can only assume is because you were all motherfucking bastards then, too.

In short, fuck you all, you devolved pieces of fucking shit. I would gladly trade you for a handful of magic beans, or just regular beans.

Yours,
Junk.

Squarely

Dovetailed indecisions sit between the two
interlocked and loaded, like a Rubik's cube
teetering between the orange and the blue,
no yellow bricks lining a road to resolution
on the black-and-white vinyl tile floor.
I don't think they're in Kansas anymore.
Suddenly, the kettle goes off, awfully frantic,
chemotherapy-pitch screaming through the tension
metastasizing rampant red over the conversation
about sorting lives into used cardboard boxes,
as if the boxes themselves weren't the answer.
Any corners will cut through the circumstances.
Speed kills, but then again, so does cancer.

They Named a Disaster After You

The details must be getting fuzzy.
Was it the third, or tenth?
Thirteenth? When was it?
You must be very addled to forget.
You must be very addled.

You must be very troubled by that drink,
stirring it around to Category Five.
You must be very addled.
You must be very sad to be alive.
When was it? Thirteenth?

How much have you got riding on the spin,
turning around what happened until
you're a Category Five victim,
when you don't even know when it happened?
You must be very sad,
You must be very addled to be alive.

Do you find these questions bewildering?
You must be very confused to be asking,
when, after all, I'm the villain--
You must be very addled,
You must be very Category Five.

So sad that it should come to this! We tried to warn you, yes, it's true!

Every now and again, the mass hysteria we usually reserve for riots after sporting events and dramatic forecasts of the impending death of life on Earth takes a tilt to the left and instead tries to save us from our eating habits. Recent examples include NYC's band on trans fats and Chicago's recently repealed ban on foie gras, but America has a history of questionable food decisions, often based on junk science, or no science at all.

Trans fats are created by taking an unsaturated fat and using an isomer fatty acid to replicate saturated animal fats; typically, hydrogen is used to saturate some molecules until the consistency approximates rendered animal fat (hence the phrase "partially hydrongenated" that you'll find in the labels of so many shelf-stable products). The objections to trans fats go something like this: "they make you fat and give you heart disease, which is bad."

I'll give you that. You know what else makes you fat and gives you heart disease? Rendered animal fat. You know what the cheapest, most likely substitute for trans fats will be in restaurants? Rendered animal fat. And animal fat has a few added problems, not the least of them being a much quicker rate of rancidity, which could lead to death in a whole new and exciting way, depending on just how toxic your particular batch happens to be.

Even the more expensive substitutes for trans fats aren't all that safe. For example, Crisco reformulated a few years ago so it could boast "0g Trans Fat Per Serving!" Unfortunately, the FDA allows manufacturers to round down; if there's half a gram or less trans fat per serving, Crisco can put 0g per serving on the label. But prior to reformulation, Crisco only had 1.5g trans fat per serving, which raises the question: if trans fats are so bad that we shouldn't be allowed to put them in restaurant food, then shouldn't we be honest about how much is in each serving?

Evidently not; NYC's ban also exempts fats with less than 0.5g trans fat per serving from their ban. And no one has taken the somewhat obvious step of asking--how much trans fat is in the finished food, and how much of that food are people eating? Are restaurants replacing some of the missing hydrogenated fat with animal fat? If any of this had anything to do with health, wouldn't it be worth someone asking?

Of course, if this had the slightest thing to do with health, we might well ask. But nothing in our history of food legislation suggests health motivates our food bans.

( More than you ever wanted to know about food and yet not enough. )

By the way, I still have pictures of the brioche-making. I'm just too lazy to upload them and need to write down the damn recipe. Bleh.

I started writing this as a reply to a post by campbellpaige, but since I kind of went off the rails on the question track, I thought, meh, I'll whine about it here...

It's about Sex and the City, and whether or not the movie was good or not, or people should be satisfied with it, and whether or not the characters are strong women because of what happens in the movie. So anyway, this is what I was saying:

I know I'm not the target demo here, but frankly, I think they're whores who should consider themselves lucky to have anyone.

Strong women? How? Fucking a lot of people doesn't make someone strong, it makes him or her a whore. So they're mega-accomplished 5th degree blackbelt whores by the time we start the movie, and then we're supposed to feel sympathy for anything that happens to them, as if their lives should be rewarded for maintaining a constantly vacuous level.

I dunno... I can't think of a male protagonist you could swap with these women since Johnny Wadd, and yet anyone who would venerate the work of John Holmes in the way SanC is so blankly parroted would be--and should be--viewed as a product of brain damage.

The funny thing is, sexploitation films are far more progressive and empowering than anything that's ever happened to any of the characters or actresses or writers or producers of SatC. Sexploitation was about a reclaiming of femininity and, in a sense, sexuality from the confines of contemporary expectations. It did it by putting women in a context where they were in control of their destiny in absurd, unlikely and often naked ways, but they were nevertheless decision-makers and heroines of their own outlandish stories, given the cheesy one-liners that belonged only to their male rescuers a decade ago.

But there's a difference between empowering a rape victim to hunt down and kill her rapists one by one ("I Spit On Your Grave," an absolute exploitation classic), and suggesting that, somehow, when men sleep with a bunch of women they're bad, but when women sleep with a bunch of men, they're empowered.

Nope, sorry, they're all whores. Which makes certain points in the series totally baffling. Why Carrie would feel like more of a whore when someone leaves money on the nightstand is beyond me--she was a whore when she decided to fuck a guy she knew for 24 hours. Frankly, she was never worth as much as was on the table.

Is "empowerment" some kind of code word in modern American feminism designed to mean immunity for consequences of bad decision-making? It seems to be. The Spice Girls sold "girl power" as a concept that required 11-year-old children to wear corsets, and a good segment of the population bought that. So SatC is somehow the perfection of this marketing model, the idea that actually fucking large numbers of people is okay as long as you're for-really-and-truly on the quest for True Love.

Yeah, that's logical. And it's okay to steal as long as you're for-really-and-truly on the quest for True Wealth. And it's okay to sell arms to get money to trade for hostages as long as you're for-really-and-truly on the quest for the American Way. Mmhmm. I hope you'll understand when I crush your skull with my boot, because I'm for-really-and-truly on the quest for True Sanity.

As the saying goes, "it is a mark of insincerity to look for the Emperor in the low-class tea shops." Just as it is insincere to look for love in sex, and to look for empowerment in whores.

Meh, the video is too long and cuts off at the end. It's 10 minutes of hearing me snivel and curse. NSFW unless you have headphones and/or a very liberal workplace, though I think I only drop two or four f-bombs, which is a record for me.

So apparently, it's racist when Hillary points out that the not inconsequential numbers of white folks in this country prefer her, but when Obama calls a reporter "sweetie," it's the media trying to tarnish his name and divert attention from "real issues."

I dunno, the fact that Obama is sexist and dismissive--when he knew he was being watched--seems like a real issue. Lord knows what he does when he thinks nobody's looking. And yet, to read the comments on that story, the CNN readership seems to think it's not a big deal.

So would it be racist if someone else said, "Hold on, boy," to Obama? And how is that different than sweetie? Why is it okay to dismiss someone because of their gender but not because of their race? Perhaps the most disgusting part of this is the apology he offered didn't acknowledge the sexism of the statement. It's not clear he even knows why he apologized.

This isn't even really about the election; I want to know why a member of congress would use that. Habit was his defense. Habit? Is it supposed to be comforting he has a habit of sexism? Am I supposed to feel better about that?

And no, he's far from the first person in congress to be a sexist or a bigot. Obviously, very far. My own rep, Jim Moran, is an anti-Semite I vote against every election, but the idiots in this district just vote by the party and not by the candidate.

Well, I'm not that kind of idiot. If the Democrats give me Obama, it's McCain '08 for me. And I don't even have guns or religion to cling to. Just common sense.

Honestly?

I wasn't feeling well today and was home from work, so I was thinking about food. I came up with an idea for a meal: paneer gnocchi tossed with pureed and chopped beet greens, served with a limoncello lassi. Ricotta gnocci are possibly the best thing to come out of southern Italy; the main difference between ricotta and paneer is that ricotta sits in its whey to achieve a creamy texture, and paneer doesn't.

So, the tricky technique to make this possible... I will have to actually make whey, add vinegar, and force the paneer to sit in it until it has a texture similar to ricotta. That will take about eight hours, I imagine. At that point it should be a doable thing. The beet greens are my (equally?) cheeky send-up of saag paneer.

Anyway, in the course of forming this plan, I had the occasion to browse some Web sites and view some videos on things that weren't totally related, but were horrifying.

About.com features two videos that are so bad, they put abortion in perspective. Let's start with the Holocaust of potato gnocchi.

First off, gnocchi rhymes with smoky. It does not rhyme with jockey. (If you are Canadian, that may not apply to you--I don't know how if there's an accepted different Canadianization of that.) Americans and Italians pronounce it exactly the same way.

So, let's see. She starts by cooking three potatoes in the oven for 40 minutes, then scooping out the inside and discarding the peels. Hmmmm. Well, unless you feel a massive need to serve potato skins with your gnocchi, there's no reason to cook the potatoes in the oven. If you want cooked potato flesh, your microwave will oblige in less than a quarter of the time.

Problem #2 is that she's got a bowl of scooped-out potato insides. She explains that to make gnyawkee, you need "super-smooth" potatoes, and that to achieve that, she's going to whip them.

HOLYGODNOEPICFAIL. No no no no no. No. No. No. No. No. Not at all.

Potatoes--particularly the russet ones she's using here--are high in starch. When you treat starch violently, the starches break down and form gluten. Gluten makes things glue-y. If you're making bread, this is good; gluten is what makes the bread elastic. That's why you knead it. Violence for bread is good. But gnocchi, as she describes later, are supposed to be "light and fluffy."

Now, what about glue screams "light and fluffy" to you? If you're making mashed potatoes, you can get away with whipping, because you're adding butter or cream before you whip. Mixing your starch with grease helps prevent the rupture of the cells. But you don't do that in making gnocchi. And she didn't.

You have two options in making gnocchi. Option number one, which is the one you pick unless you're some kind of savage, is to get a potato ricer, which makes potatoes smooth with a minimum of violence. The other option is to use potatoes that are already smooth... like dehydrated mashed potatoes from a box.

When you watch the video, you'll see that her gnocchi have the apparent texture of a bunch of flour mixed with Elmer's glue. It makes me cringe to see the little lead-pellets sitting there with the runny sauce strained around them. But we're just getting started listing the offenses in this video.

Next, she mixes a cup and a half of flour and two egg yolks in with three potatoes. A cup and a half? Wow. One of the "secrets"--and by secret, I mean it's something every man, woman and dog in Italy knows--of good gnocchi is to use as little flour as you can to make the potatoes hold together. You also use whole, beaten egg to add structure to the cooked gnocchi. These two forces are in a kind of tug-of-war; flour improves the texture of the dough, but adds nothing you especially want in your finished gnocchi; egg adds structure to finished gnocchi, but makes the dough more finicky. My general rule of thumb is no more than a tablespoon of flour per potato, and no more than one egg per four potatoes.

The amount of flour used makes this hardly even "potato" gnocchi, and adding a bunch of flour once you've turned the potatoes into a gummy, glue-y mess won't improve them. But the eggs are even more baffling. Egg yolks are rich. They are not "light and fluffy." There's nothing here to emulsify. There's no particular reason to add egg yolk, unless you want gnocchi that taste like egg yolk. Which is fine, but I'm generally of the opinion that potato gnocchi should taste like, I dunno, potato.

Next, she rolls the rubber-like mixture she's created, which would be better suited for soles of Chuck Taylors, into a rope and cuts them into pieces with the shape and texture of a tootsie roll. Then she explains the next step is to press them against the tines of a fork to give them texture, as the video shows her mashing the tootsie-roll-thing violently against a fork. Then she says, oh, you can also jab the bottom of the fork into the side of the tube to create little dents.

I guess that's what you do, if your gnocchi is the consistency of dried caulk. But actual gnocchi at this point is light and delicate. And the actual manuver one who wants good gnocchi is performing at this stage is dramatically different than what she's doing--but results in both ridges on one side and a deep pinch on the other. What you do is, you pick up the light, fluffy piece of dough, roll it quickly between your hands to make a ball, and press the ball against the back of the fork in a rolling downward motion. The ball flattens against the fork, then curls on itself as your thumb presses it off, resulting in ridges on the side that faced the fork, and a deep pinch where the gnocchi rolled onto itself.

But like I said, you can only do that if your gnocchi dough isn't rubbery. Suffice it to say, if anyone--hell, if my mother--served me the gnyawkee made in this video, I would feed them a bleach and thumbtacks milkshake. And then, and only then, we would be even.

She fares little better in attempting to make ravioli. Let's see, you've done a lot of reading... maybe I can sum up the problems in this video in one breath.

*deep breath* The pasta is rolled too thick, it's uneven because the machine wasn't bolted properly, the filling is too runny, the ravioli are over-filled, the sealing process she uses doesn't press out excess air, not enough dough was left around the filling, the ravioli didn't stand for long enough, andthentoservethemshe... *gasp* She just put them on a plate and dumped some sauce in the middle. Damn, I almost made it!

Y'know, just to touch on one of these things, when pasta comes out of the water, it's vulnerable. It's ready to stick to something. You want that something to be sauce. If you wait until it's dried in the air, you'll taste plain pasta with sauce resting on it. If you make sure they mingle promptly, you'll have pasta with a sauce in a marriage that makes it tough to determine where sauce ends and pasta begins--that's what you want to eat.

One final note on both of these videos: investigate nutmeg. Nutmeg is your friend. It also goes in both cheese ravioli and gnocchi when you don't flavor them with something else.

It's late, so one last link to comment on: some stupidity saying retaining pasta water doesn't do anything. This is a misunderstanding caused by a lack of vocabulary. You retain pasta water for oil or butter sauces. You need to add something to them unless you want to put half a cup of grease on your pasta. Pasta water is already seasoned, hot, and there. It's also slightly viscous, which is why it "thickens"--it's about as thick as the oil, and it's thicker than plain boiled water. There's texture to it. That's why you retain it. It doesn't "thicken sauces" in the abstract; it thickens butter and oil sauces more than using other water does.

All of which leads back to the initial question... why is pasta so hard for people? It really and for truly is not rocket science. A person of average intelligence should, at some point in his or her life, have a plate of good pasta, and be able to ask himself or herself, "are the things that I'm doing recreating the experience of good pasta, or do I need to go back and rethink what I'm doing?"

Are we getting too dumb to feed ourselves?

China Doll

How do you live with lilac cream-thick in the air
and cushioned surfaces obscuring dangerous angles,
tea sets shuttered behind white ceramic handles
and molded trays shaped like where silverware belongs?
And do you feel confined, and do you feel condemned,
And do you taste the green apple on the dish-soap label?
Does the china take the opportunity to caress you back
when you clink the saucer up atop the stack?

Would you recognize yourself fogged in by fumes
and sunken into the diesel world of inopportune corners,
uncomfortable chairs and narrow corridors
blown open by the steel elephant in the room?
And would you be confused, and would you be contrite,
And would you recognize me on the track?
And if you saw the question written on my face,
Would you say something, or just gawk in place?