My Resolutions

I’m sort of bummed the holidays are over.  I go back to work tomorrow for the first full day in 2 weeks, and I’m already going through some mental exercises that I hope will make it possible for me to get out of bed in the morning.

Now that I’ve had some time to reminisce about the last year, here’s what I resolve:

1. To stick to an actual budget each month, with a specific savings goal and limits on luxuries like bars, restaurants, and “non-essential” groceries like, um, booze and fancy cheese.

2. My obligatory health-related goal is to cut back on my 2 most unhealthy behaviors: eating too much of things like sugar and super-fatty things like, say, a pound of cheese in one sitting; and drinking too much too often. The details of this need still to be worked out. This goal is still a little too vague as stated, so my first step will be to determine what I consider to be a “modest-to-moderate” amount of these things, and set my limits. A true behavior-change strategy would likely include a tracking scheme, but I really don’t want to make it so hard or annoying for myself. I’ll be satisfied if I can establish a general sense that I’ve achieved these cutbacks. I’ll probably fail for this reason.

3. To get to work between 9:00 and 9:15.  Lately my arrivals at the office have inched all the way up to (and sometimes past) 9:30.  While I haven’t gotten in trouble at all, it makes me feel lame and sets too hectic a tone for the day.

4. To read more books.  My reading of books tends to happen in phases, where I’ll read several books over the span of a few months, then happen upon one that I think sucks, and stop reading books at all for several months, until I somehow end up reading something that I think is awesome again. My goal is not necessarily read at any particular pace, but rather, on any day that I feel compelled to spend some time just reading, I already have a book picked out, or one I’m already reading.  This way I can’t say, “Well I have nothing to read except gmail, facebook, and the 10 most emailed from the New York Times.” Right now, I’m 2/3 way through Haruki Murakami’s “The Wind-up Bird Chronicle,” and 2 chapters into Nicholas Kristof’s “Half the Sky: turning opression into opportunity for women worldwide”.  This second one I will probably have a lot to say about in the next several weeks.

5. To make a new good friend in 2010.  Because I want to.

2009 and the Aughts

As I sit here twiddling my thumbs, having just eaten dinner but determining that it’s just a bit too early to put on my sequin dress to go out for the night, like a lot of people I’m thinking about the last year, and this year, the last decade.

Having drinks with a friend a few nights ago, remarking at the turn of the decade and how fast it all went, I said more or less off the cuff that I’d rather be where I am now than where I was 10 years ago. Thinking about that, I’ve decided that’s really true and that I must be doing something right if that’s the case.  When it turned the year 2000, I was a freshman in high school.  It was an exciting year, but a tough one, too.  A lot of things changed.  I believe this was the first year in which I fell in love — as misguided as that love may have been — and the first year I thoroughly got my heart broken. I wasn’t getting along with my parents or anyone in my family really (it would be maybe a year before I really hit it off with Molly, and more years still before I learned to get along with Man Ting, and then finally my parents).  My self esteem was definitely lower.

In the last 10 years, I went to high school and graduated a happier person than when I had started, though there would be some real lows along the way.  I can’t quite say I graduated college happier than when I started, because my first week of college was probably the happiest of my life up until that point.  There would be some serious lows in those four years, too, but I can surely say that after them, I was way more confident in my ability to take on life, to experience pain and bounce back, to love and accept love, to do less than all my assigned reading and to skip classes without feeling guilty about it, and indeed, to impress others enough for them to give me a job.

Since college, I would say meeting Steve is the single best thing to have happened to me.  Sparing any readers a lot of gushy love stuff, I’ll just say that September 2008 was the most fun I’ve had and the happiest I’d been since that aforementioned first week of college.  I’m finishing out the decade more in love and securely enjoying a relationship than I thought possible. Aside from that, I’m self-sufficient, I have a job, I have a loving family and some really important (to me, that is) friends.

Sotomayor

Now I haven’t posted in quite some time now, but I have to say that the claims over the last 2 days that Sotomayor would be unable as a Supreme Court judge to decide cases impartially, given her background, is a complete load of crap.

The question isn’t whether she can be impartial, but why people seem to think that anyone else, even the age-old arbiters of objectivity and unadultered rationality (white men! yeah right….) would be impartial.  I can hear just about every Anthropology, Feminist philosophy, Psychology, and gender studies professor I ever had in college grinding their teeth over the fact that a Latina Woman now stands a really good chance of becoming the first to sit on the Supreme Court, and all the Right can do is claim that her backgroud, her culture (!), her race and her sex give her a bias that presupposes her being able to reach the same conclusion she would if she where white and a man.   Anyone with color and/or a vagina obviously has some axe to grind over the supposed patriarchy that haunted their past and made it harder for them to get ahead.  Why?  Because they have a Culture!  And not the kind where you powder your whig and go to the opera.  But the kind that forms a shadowy film of subjectivity over your every observation and interaction with the world.  White men on the other hand, are culture-free, seeing all realities with perfect Cartesian clarity.

It’s tragic – and I imagine Sotamayor herself has to be be frustrated by the irony — that a supremely educated, culturally sensitive, experienced judge finds herself before a group of right-wing men expecting her to convince them that her background and her experience mean nothing when she makes decisions.  I really really give it to her for trying to explain the nuance of her earlier statements on being a “wise Latina woman” rather than denying  it has any bearing at all.  But Oh. My. Heavens.  College freshmen understand this shit better than Jeff Sessions.

What I learned Today: Margaritas!

To my utter delight, I’ve just become informed that true, authentic margaritas are made from only 3 ingredients: Tequila, Tripel Sec/Cointreau, and lime juice.  That is, NO sugar.  I’ve always liked my drinks as unsweet as possible, so the more tart a margarita, the better I like it.  Last night, Taly had a garden party to welcome Spring to Hoboken, and made margaritas this way, with zero sweetener. I said they were amazing, and she said she’d been reading on the internet that this is how they’re “supposed” to be made.  And sure enough, the perfect margarita.

They also put me in a coma by 10pm.

Snowboarding

This almost falls into the category of “What I learned today”, except that I learned it on the weekend. I learned how to snowboard at Camelback in PA this Saturday, and I learned that all the falling hurts you way more the day after (and 2 more days after that) than the actual falls. I like to think that all the hoisting myself off the ground onto my feet was a great upper body workout.

I had a GREAT time though! Some pictures of my day:

I was very excited to get started...

First I learned how to stand up:

The ski lift was fun!

And finally, I could get down the mountain!!

What I learned today: Hard-boiled eggs

Despite my experience with and mastery of different ways of cooking, there are some really basic things I do not yet know how to make. Today I took a crack (haha..) at making hard-boiled eggs. Because this little food is a new favorite of mine, I thought it would be good to start buying the Omega-3 enhanced, hormone-free eggs and boil them up myself.
What I learned is that, boiled too long or made too hot too quickly, eggs will crack and ooze their egg juice out into the boiling water. This is no disaster though, because the boiling water instantly cooks the egg as it seeps out, merely causing it to form a sort of albumin tumor — an egg drip frozen in space. This is what I found upon returning to my boiling pot after 20 min. According to Incredible Egg, 15 min would have been sufficient.

This post also marks the first in a series I call What I Learned Today. My hope is that having a recurring theme or two will get me updating more frequently than I have been. Otherwise, what’s the point in having this little blog. And who knows, you may learn something, too!

Some Soup

It’s occurred to me that I would like to start posting some of the recipes I come up with from time to time.  I am what you might call an improvisational cooker.  I rarely use a cookbook.  I do read recipes in magazines and check out certain cookbooks that I think look interesting or have a really great theme, but this is mostly for inspiration, and it’s rare that I ever stick to the proportions or even steps that a recipe might recommend.

Anyway, I come up with some pretty good creations that I think would be useful to to keep track of, in case I forget.  The last 2 weeks I made giant batches of what I thought turned out to be really good stew/soup, so here they are:

#1

1 giant can of diced tomatoes

1 bag of frozen peas

1 box frozen spinach

1 package tofu

1 smallish white onion

To taste, Garam Masala, turmeric, cloves, dried basil, cayenne pepper (which I really put in everything), and salt

Voila, it’s delicious and spicy and warm, pretty filling, and passes as Indian food.  When I originally made this, it also included chickpeas.  This was good, I just forgot them this time.

#2

2 cans black beans, drained

1 can kidney beans, drained

2 cans chicken broth

Chicken breast, chopped up

1 box frozen spinach

1 small can diced tomatoes

To taste, garlic, salt, cayenne, cumin, ground cloves, dried basil

I’m becoming fond of canned and/or frozen vegetables, and recipes where you just dump whole cans/packages of things in a pot and wait till it’s hot enough to taste good.

I think these are my favorite things to eat.

Apparently, the name of these is “Manner”.  I never could make out the name from the script on the package.  Wanner? Wamner?

Also, Look!  A German deli online!

Oh right, Why I hate them

Lest we forget that there is more at stake in this election than a govt. response to the tanking economy and the war in Iraq; thank you Nicholas Kristof for the reminder that John McCain and Sarah Palin have both supported “Pro-Life” legislation that, in fact, leads to unwanted pregnancy, contraction of preventable disease and illnesses,  and sometimes just more abortions.  Seriously, 4 more years of the kind of utter bull that refuses to address the desperate need for means of preventing pregnancy and STIs (like, oh, AIDS!) in 3rd world and developing countries — thanks, John! — OR makes women pay for their own rape kits?  That makes me pretty anxious.

Geek Moment

I learned a new term this morning that I can whip out to sound really smart the next time my friends and I are drinking smoothies (which happens all the time…).

sphenopalatine ganglioneuroma = brain freeze!

Thank you, WIRED.