I'm serious -- I had NBC on all night w/ the sound off and I just saw that they're teasing the SURPRISE on The Office tonight as a news item -- which is bad enough. You know, like after the news about the tens of thousands dead in China, we get to the number two story of the night about Pamela's wedding proposal ... ANYHOW please tell me in comments what it was because I have no intention of turning the sound on.

Attn: EVERYONE, but especially book publishers and celebrated photographers

Analogies, metaphors and visuals which may be taken as comparing black people to chimps, apes, and monkeys are offensive.  I know, I know -- those pictures comparing George W. Bush to a chimp are really funny. But that is different. For one thing, he makes many monkey faces. For another, his people (rich, white) haven't been oppressed for generations and haven't had that oppression often accompanied with comparisons of them to simian denizens of the jungle.  (See also: Jungle bunnies) Although Denzel Washington can compare himself -- favorably! --- to King Kong in Training Day, you should not compare any black man to King Kong. In short, don't do it! Thank you!

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OK so the fake Thai food came out great. It was a completely slapstick adventure in cooking, though. First we discovered we didn't have any rice except some really old brown rice from Trader's Joes which smelled funny. So I ran out to Giant and got more rice. Then we discovered that all we have in the way of oils was some olive oil that smelled rancid and some canola mixture that smelled even worse. I don't even know what happened to my jar of peanut oil. So we sauteed the garlic, serrano peppers, onion and a bunch of other things, including the Prik Khing paste, in butter. No oil and no rice -- BUT! I had an unopened jar of fish sauce and finally an opportunity to open it.  TDO was wary but all the Thai recipe websites we looked at were all about the fish sauce (except Martha Stewart who had some crazy anchovy paste/soy sauce substitute) so we went with it. Long story short, it was delicious. 

I just got back from the library and they didn't have any Thai recipe books!!! I am accepting recommendations of books and websites since it seems like we're on a kick here.  Had dinner w/ a bunch of TDO's current and former co-workers last night and I was reliably informed that the "best" fish sauce is the one with a fat baby on the label. I shall investigate further and report back.

I have vowed to get all my oils in small containers from now on and keep them in the fridge if possible, even though the olive oil gets weird when refrigerated. What do you guys do to keep your oils fresh?
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I have been thinking a lot about chocolate lately. Like, of all the chocolate delivery systems, which is the best? Which is the worst? I think the worst might be sugar-free 60 calorie chocolate pudding, although your mileage may vary. TDO isn't a chocolate fan like me but I bet she would pick some chocolate protein bar because she hates the flavor of soy protein.  Then when thinking about the best, my brain goes to cookies and cake and drinking chocolate but you know what, those delivery systems completely skip the marvelous part where chocolate's freakish melting point (higher than, say, butter, but lower than sugar) pays off in your mouth, slowly. 

Anyhow I got Chai Tea flavored bonbons made by Starbucks today (at the supermarket) and they were good, but not mindblowingly so. I also got these dark chocolate covered soy nuggets from South Beach and they were surprisingly good insofar as despite having 3 grams of protein, they didn't taste like protein and didn't completely suck.

It did not rain today. There were no tornadoes nearby, nor cyclones and nary a cloud was seen in the glassy blue sky. Even better, the torrential rain washed away pollen and I could breathe. It was a beautiful day in the high 60s and I could breathe.

Does anyone know why Thai Drunken Noodle is called "drunken"? Thank you in advance.

Man, it looks like they are going in some dark, dark directions with the character in this one. Warning, content around the middle may be disturbing.

I enjoyed the way the last ep of BSG made dying of cancer seem a billion times more harrowing than being in a shootout on a crappy little ship in the middle of bugfucknowhere galaxy. 

We had an excellent weekend, even though it has been raining off and on for what seems like weeks, and that's just in the last three or four days.  The sometimes-torrential rain is accompanied by intermittent thunder and lightning, so Dax has been in a state of nervous gloom since Thursday.  I think it was Thursday night: I was watching something boring on TV to combat insomnia and they broke into whatever was on to announce that there were tornadoes in Virginia. Not far from here, either, Fredericksburg. Then they helpfully went to live coverage of torrential rain falling on a neighborhood of McMansions, one of which had had the side just blown off so it was standing there like an enormous dollhouse, the side opened up to little pastel rooms with enormous toy furniture all toppled as if the Twilight Zone Gigantic Child had thrown all the furniture inside and ran off to dinner.

So Dax was shivering in his storm t-shirt, all ninety pounds of him trying to sit on my head. And I was listening to the storm in bed, at 3 AM, TDO snoozing next to me, and I was REALLY REALLY WIDE AWAKE then.

That was Thursday night. I've also been taking antibiotics since then for my sinus infection and they are kicking my ass. Today's the last one, though.

I got very grumpy this morning because I suppose I should be doing the neti pot like two times daily, even if I don't think I need to.  My sulky inner child is still pissed off that I have to brush my teeth incessantly, much less irrigate my goddamned sinuses. 

Anyhow, the weekend was excellent. We went to Grand Mart, the big Korean International Supermarket down the block, and stocked up on thrilling vegetables and got a bunch of Thai pastes in cans and now I'm going to try making some fake Thai dishes.

TDO grilled burgers on Saturday night and we watched Lars and The Real Girl which was almost excruciatingly too-sad and yet funny and sweet and not-sad by the end. Fun fact: During the making of the film, "Bianca," the doll which Lars treats as a real girl, was treated as a real actress by the entire crew. She changed clothes in her own trailer and was only on the set when she had a scene.  Patricia Clarkson was great and I was reminded of another great little movie about shyness and loneliness and introverts with Patricia Clarkson in it -- The Station Agent.  I don't know if you would want to watch those two movies on one night, though, it might be too too.  Anyhow, Lars made me sad and yet made me feel like I could actually have the tools to actually grieve in some constructive way, that everyone has them.

We even went back to Grand Mart on Sunday and got some Thai basil and green beans and more ingredients for my famous green chutney.

Oh, right, and on Saturday TDO helped me christen the giant black food processor with a double batch of green chutney, half of which went to TDO's mom for mother's day, which they don't celebrate but what the hell. Her parents gave me the giant food processor for Christmas but we've been so sad since Daybreak died, we haven't used it until now.

Then we watched American Gangster with TDO's parents on Sunday night and came home and made -- you guessed it -- more chutney! The scallions were especially cheap and plentiful at Grand Mart and I still have some left over, even after four batches.  American Gangster was ridiculously dark -- not in tone but literally -- as TDO's mom put it, "you couldn't see anyone's faces -- even the white people." I wonder today if this was done deliberately in some fiendish conspiracy to make people convert to Blu-ray. Seriously, we had to turn brightness up to 11 before we could make out an expression on Crowe's face.  TDO's dad hated it, he doesn't like the curses -- I watched him try to endure them and it looked like he was being smacked every time someone said fuck, and with this movie, that was constant.  I don't think he minded the pretty, all-natural '70's titties on the naked girls cutting up the heroin, though. 

I liked American Gangster but I didn't love it and it seemed like it could have been a billion times better with a little tweaking.  Also, at one point they shoot a dog, and even though they don't show the shooting, they do play that goddamned sound effect of a dog in pain which I think is the same one they always use, I swear. Plus would a dog even make a noise if you shot it in the head? Would it make THAT noise? The best part of the movie, basically, is how Denzel's character gets away with everything for so long because no one can imagine that a black man is running the whole show. Pretty much the plot is how the black gangster uses white privilege and racism to his advantage. 

Another highlight of my weekend was a long walk with TDO and Cyclone, up to her old school, during a brief non-raining interlude Saturday night.  It was super-dark on the path up through the pine trees but TDO pointed out that she'd walked that path thousands of times and then I looked up into the briefly-visible moon and stars and thought about paths I've walked on thousands of times and the sky was so vast and beautiful and all I could hear was our footsteps, human and canine, and I was content.

OK I am going to try to write the privilege post again, but not today. I still feel like ass and my glands *hurt* and my throat *hurts* and I am seeing my doctor tomorrow.  Wahhhhmbulance!

I nevertheless have continued (in fits and starts!) on Project Laundry and it's almost done, except I still haven't gone through my clothes, or done anything to --- I mean everything is clean but I can't put my clothes away, I have no more room.  It's pretty sad.

Also sad: I can't give a landscaper instructions on how to get here because I don't know the names of streets in the immediate vicinity. It's like I'm an idiot savant, for real. I know how to get here, you take a right at that light on the big street by the farm, and then the right at the top of the hill and then the third right after that, or maybe fourth? where the huge cherry tree is. What STREETS those are? No clue. I have to have TDO write it down for me or something so I can tell people how to get here in the future because not knowing is WEAK.

This is what I mean by a space cadet. And yet I can reliably name almost any movie based on 1-5 seconds of footage while surfing the cable. THE STREET down the block? Can't name it.

I shouldn't try to write complicated posts when I am suffering (SUFFERING!) in a daze of whatever, which subsided over the weekend but came back in force last night.   My immune system sucks, it's like it kicks in and then it's like oh shiny and gets distracted.  Bah. I think the pollen is up again too. 

See, it was one time when I was thinking about being left-handed that I "got" the concept of white/male/heterosexual privilege. The world is not built for left-handed people. I've known that for a while, although I am sometimes still surprised when I remember that something (for instance, setting my watch) is awkward for me because I'm left-handed, not because I am awkward.  Just about everything is designed for right-handed people. Purses, oh man, purses. You have no idea how much of purse design is presuming that it's hanging on your left shoulder until you flip it to the other side.  ETA: Purses was a really bad example. TDO came home and pointed out a bunch of stuff with the important buttons either on the right side (the TV, the printer, computer monitors, portable cameras) and noted that cell phones have the TALK button on the left where you can easily press it with your thumb if you are holding it in your right hand. By the time she was done, I was TOTALLY BITTER.

So I'm reading this site where they ask how racism harms white people, and a bunch of respondents can't think of any reasons. Some of them hop on the reverse racism bandwagon and say it hurts just as much when black people are mean to white people, and so on. 

A. I'm wondering if my readers have opinions about how racism harms white people. I don't mean "racism" as "individual acts of meanness," but in the sense of how if you are white, (or right-handed!) you were lucky enough to be born to the powerful majority in this country and basically the world is built for you, not me, your left-handed friend. That's what white privilege is. I'm using right-handed vs. left-handed because I don't think any right-handed people bear me any ill will but that doesn't change the fact that this world is built for you, not me. And I will, as a result, think I am awkward when I'm not.  And you will coast through life with everything designed for you and never notice. Did you know that scissors are -handed? I have met some right-handed people who barely notice that. Anyhow, that's my analogy and I don't want to beat it to death. I'm just saying, you can love people of color, it doesn't mean you're not soaking in white privilege if you are white. You can't help it. 

2. How does right-handed privilege harm right-handed people? Does it?

I guess this is from the NYT? Someone posted it in one of my communities, and I liked it very much.

Can You Become a Creature of New Habits?

May 4, 2008 Unboxed

By JANET RAE-DUPREE

HABITS
are a funny thing. We reach for them mindlessly, setting our brains on auto-pilot and relaxing into the unconscious comfort of familiar routine. “Not choice, but habit rules the unreflecting herd,” William Wordsworth said in the 19th century. In the ever-changing 21st century, even the word “habit” carries a negative connotation.

So it seems antithetical to talk about habits in the same context as creativity and innovation. But brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.

Rather than dismissing ourselves as unchangeable creatures of habit, we can instead direct our own change by consciously developing new habits. In fact, the more new things we try — the more we step outside our comfort zone — the more inherently creative we become, both in the workplace and in our personal lives.

But don’t bother trying to kill off old habits; once those ruts of procedure are worn into the hippocampus, they’re there to stay. Instead, the new habits we deliberately ingrain into ourselves create parallel pathways that can bypass those old roads.

“The first thing needed for innovation is a fascination with wonder,” says Dawna Markova, author of “The Open Mind” and an executive change consultant for Professional Thinking Partners. “But we are taught instead to ‘decide,’ just as our president calls himself ‘the Decider.’ ” She adds, however, that “to decide is to kill off all possibilities but one. A good innovational thinker is always exploring the many other possibilities.”

All of us work through problems in ways of which we’re unaware, she says. Researchers in the late 1960s discovered that humans are born with the capacity to approach challenges in four primary ways: analytically, procedurally, relationally (or collaboratively) and innovatively. At puberty, however, the brain shuts down half of that capacity, preserving only those modes of thought that have seemed most valuable during the first decade or so of life.

The current emphasis on standardized testing highlights analysis and procedure, meaning that few of us inherently use our innovative and collaborative modes of thought. “This breaks the major rule in the American belief system — that anyone can do anything,” explains M. J. Ryan, author of the 2006 book “This Year I Will...” and Ms. Markova’s business partner. “That’s a lie that we have perpetuated, and it fosters mediocrity. Knowing what you’re good at and doing even more of it creates excellence.”

This is where developing new habits comes in. If you’re an analytical or procedural thinker, you learn in different ways than someone who is inherently innovative or collaborative. Figure out what has worked for you when you’ve learned in the past, and you can draw your own map for developing additional skills and behaviors for the future.

“I apprentice myself to someone when I want to learn something new or develop a new habit,” Ms. Ryan says. “Other people read a book about it or take a course. If you have a pathway to learning, use it because that’s going to be easier than creating an entirely new pathway in your brain.”

Ms. Ryan and Ms. Markova have found what they call three zones of existence: comfort, stretch and stress. Comfort is the realm of existing habit. Stress occurs when a challenge is so far beyond current experience as to be overwhelming. It’s that stretch zone in the middle — activities that feel a bit awkward and unfamiliar — where true change occurs.

“Getting into the stretch zone is good for you,” Ms. Ryan says in “This Year I Will... .” “It helps keep your brain healthy. It turns out that unless we continue to learn new things, which challenges our brains to create new pathways, they literally begin to atrophy, which may result in dementia, Alzheimer’s and other brain diseases. Continuously stretching ourselves will even help us lose weight, according to one study. Researchers who asked folks to do something different every day — listen to a new radio station, for instance — found that they lost and kept off weight. No one is sure why, but scientists speculate that getting out of routines makes us more aware in general.”

She recommends practicing a Japanese technique called kaizen, which calls for tiny, continuous improvements.

“Whenever we initiate change, even a positive one, we activate fear in our emotional brain,” Ms. Ryan notes in her book. “If the fear is big enough, the fight-or-flight response will go off and we’ll run from what we’re trying to do. The small steps in kaizen don’t set off fight or flight, but rather keep us in the thinking brain, where we have access to our creativity and playfulness.”

Simultaneously, take a look at how colleagues approach challenges, Ms. Markova suggests. We tend to believe that those who think the way we do are smarter than those who don’t. That can be fatal in business, particularly for executives who surround themselves with like-thinkers. If seniority and promotion are based on similarity to those at the top, chances are strong that the company lacks intellectual diversity.

“Try lacing your hands together,” Ms. Markova says. “You habitually do it one way. Now try doing it with the other thumb on top. Feels awkward, doesn’t it? That’s the valuable moment we call confusion, when we fuse the old with the new.”

AFTER the churn of confusion, she says, the brain begins organizing the new input, ultimately creating new synaptic connections if the process is repeated enough.

But if, during creation of that new habit, the “Great Decider” steps in to protest against taking the unfamiliar path, “you get convergence and we keep doing the same thing over and over again,” she says.

“You cannot have innovation,” she adds, “unless you are willing and able to move through the unknown and go from curiosity to wonder.”

Janet Rae-Dupree writes about science and emerging technology in Silicon Valley.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Iron Man was good.  As this review giddily comments, it contains a metric shitload of top-grade gadget porn.  I admired the script and Downey Jr. -- check out how swiftly good writing and acting tell you everything you need to know about Tony Stark in like three minutes of interaction with soldiers in a Humvee. Gadget porn + genius playboy = heroism geeks can aspire to. I like movies where the hero's secret power is he's the smartest guy in any room. Wait through the credits for awesomeness.

I am still feeling asstastic but tonight we are going out to dinner for TDO's mom's 70th birthday. I want to say she looks 50 but then what do I look like? She looks great, anyhow, and has her own metric shitload of energy and verve to burn.

In other movie news, I learned today that our cable company is finally giving us the IFC channel. And TDO learned today that I have never seen The Outsiders. I just saw like an hour of it on A&E. Yeah, you'd think with my interests in shirtless greasers, chain-smoking, "sosh" privilege and homoerotic soap operatic cinema ... but nope, never saw it.

TDO was so nice last night and I slept in forever today and now I am going to stagger into the daylight -- twilight -- whatever -- and we're going to see Iron Man.  Can't wait, really, I have been enraptured with the way Downey reads the line "Yeah. I can fly," since I first saw the trailer. 

Also, speaking of Robert Downey Jr., it is very nice to see him looking hot and regarded in most reviews as the main reason to see the film. Remember when he was really, really, really down and out, lost in drugs and madness? Good to see him back on his game, is what I'm getting at.

I have something: a sore throat, achy  armpits (???) and I'm rilly rilly stupid, like, stupider than my usual space cadet fog.  Feh. This totally ruins my plans of talking TDO into going to the Kinetic Sculpture Race tomorrow since, well, I don't even want to get out of bed.  My throat hurrrrrrrts. Like all the time, not just when I swallow.  ::cry:: 

Teh Suck, this is it.

In other news, I called a bunch of lawn professionals to get an estimate on cleaning up the backyard and they all called back within minutes. I remember a few years ago when I could barely get someone over here for a much bigger job. The economy is truly sucking, is my point

There are so many people, threads, etc., that I want to engage with in LJ today so naturally I am v. v. busy.

Went to the gym! Yay me.

Continue to organize bedroom, laundry. 

I am officially (for now) bored with thinking about my weight but for the record I am at 162.4 today and at least that is 15+ lbs less than I was a year ago.  I don't want to go to Weight Watchers tonight because it's starting to feel like I'm not learning anything new and I don't really care if I get applauded or supported or not so it feels like a 30 minute waste of time, which is sort of ridiculous given how much time I waste on memes or whatever. Of course it's impossible not to think about weight and fitness when I'm going through all my clothes and doing a massive purge but whatever.  I have clothes from sizes 10 to 16, of course. Awesome! Not.

I want to write a great good post about race and gender and how iconic/ironic whatever it is that we're choosing between a Person of Color, a White Feminist and an Old White Man With Medals while all this race/gender stuff is bubbling up around our national consciousness.  BUT for that I will need to compile links! and so forth so later today, I hope.

I need to go shopping and go to the library and make the kinds of phone calls and appointments that I am prone to spacing out on when I start surfing teh intarnets.

Yeah, it's not all The Wire in B'more -- sometimes it's really twee hippie stuff. Oh, oh and Saturday is also Free Comic Book Day! Go to a comic book store and git yer free comic. Bring your kids! Although there was some thing a while back where some kid got the wrong comic and there was a whole THING about exposing Teh Children to naked boobies or something so if you're like that, check the comic before passing it along to the kid and skip the lawsuit later.

Ah, the house is a mess. By that I don't mean one or two things is out of place. I mean that there's nowhere to sit downstairs; that the ostensible "family room" down there is being used for unruly chaotic storage, and that the floor of TDO's workroom (which is part of the laundry room) has been covered with needing-to-be-washed bedlinens since like just after my facelift. (Last August? Possible.)

And it's the sort of a mess where you don't do anything about it because it's all intersectional (like feminism and racism!!!) where you can't fix one thing without hitting upon another thing that needs fixing which can't be fixed until the back yard is mowed. And then it rains. The end.

It doesn't help? hurt? helpurt? that I actually know something about Feng Shui. For instance, I have known that one of the worst spots upstairs has been my corner of the bedroom which happens to be the relationship corner. OK, we don't have to go into Feng Shui like that, like relationship, career, money. Just go with me here: your environment has an effect on you and if you are surrounded with chaos and clutter and things you value mixed up with things you don't value, it will have an effect on your state of mind.

(About two weeks ago, TDO subtly altered the space in the living room by changing/fixing up one corner of it. As soon as she did that, Cyke began jumping onto the couch. He would never do it before! He'd half jump up or jump up and jump off very quickly. But something TDO did to the room made him more comfortable about lying on the couch. Now around here I would say, Well yeah, she changed the chi and now it's flowing better.)

Anyhow I don't know how but I started reorganizing my corner of the bedroom Saturday and the chi is flowing and today I just realized that I'm almost on top of the laundry and can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Once I get the laundry together, I can actually see fixing up the downstairs. It's like I have non-depressed access to my brain functions! Amazing. One thing I have done is consciously been using the "perfect is the enemy of the good" and just trying to improve all the time, not perfect. Stopping when I am burnt out on reorganizing and picking it up later. Doing enough to be able to feel it and then stopping. But keeping at it day after day. I have had a mode for most of my life of BINGE organizing that goes on into the night and then I'm completely burnt out and it never gets integrated into real life.

Anyhow I thought it might be worthwhile for the Queer Housewife to talk about housework. What the hell. Yes, I have a load of laundry in the washer and one in the dryer RIGHT NOW!

Dude, seriously. Think about it. Can you trust white people? I just read pages and pages of discussion regarding the phrase, passed from an older person of color to her daughter or granddaughter: "You can't trust white people."

Stop me if you've heard this one, but guess what happened after someone told that story? YOU GUESSED IT! White people were very upset and demanded a modifier in the sentence to make it be "You can't trust most white people" or maybe "You can't trust some white people."

But, McKennl, you say, doesn't the modifier completely change the gist of the sentence? Isn't the point that since you don't know which white people are trustable or not, and that history has shown that making a mistake and trusting the wrong white people will get you dead, that it's safer just to remember not to trust any of them?

Well, yes, Imaginary Interlocuter, it does! But the modifier also makes white people feel better and since you can't trust them, probably you should throw it in there just to be safe.

I don't know what point I'm making, I'm just sick of white people being stupid and demanding modifiers. Like it's not good enough to be white in the first place, now people of color have to be extra nice to me? WTF.  And you know, I've been in conversations with Canadians where they were throwing around lots of "Americans are [fill in the blank -- war mongers, stupid, whatever]" and I've been offended and had the vapors but you know what, I'm officially over that now. Americans ARE all those things, and adding a modifier to make me feel better, to bow to my super-sensitive American ass is bullshit.  I am a White American and I can fucking well afford a thicker skin and by God-or-Gods, I shall grow it.  For serious.

So Amanda Marcotte wrote a book about feminism and used the word "jungle" metaphorically in the title and then, even though there was already a dustup in the feminist community about Marcotte having appropriated ideas from WoC without giving credit, someone got the genius idea to illustrate the book with retro pictures of a blonde white woman overcoming the "jungle" -- including kicking booga-booga black "natives."

So today the dust continues not to settle and the dialog -- including good apologies and not-so-good ones -- drags on. But what I am wondering is how are people who are so naive as to not have red flags going up when they are illustrating a "jungle" theme with "retro" images -- what are these incredibly out-of-it and clueless people doing getting book deals? I mean would anyone doing a video game be so stupid? What world are you living in, White Feminists? JUNGLE??? HELLO!!!! RETRO JUNGLE IMAGES!!!!??? No? No red flags yet? WHITE LADY KICKING NATIVES!!! Still, nothing? Not even a faint tingle?? Ok then.

I dunno, man. I dunno.  I mean I don't know if hiring Anti-Racist Sidekicks is going to help anyone who is so culturally and socially and issues-wise tone deaf and I really wonder why such a person is earning a living writing about the zeitgeist when they are capable of not even knowing when they are SOAKING IN IT.