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.

Sexism and Fine Dining

I really hadn’t thought about it before, but if I were at a restaurant, say with a guy, and the first plate of food brought out went to him, I might actually kind of care.

Well actually, now that I’ve processed the hypothetical scenario, maybe not, but when this example came up in the NYTimes article, Old Gender Roles with your Dinner?, my first reaction was “Yeah, that would feel odd.”

The article’s main point is that, at upscale restaurants in particular, men and women are — and sometimes expect to be — treated differently. The rationale for basing service decisions on gender is that “[restaurants] learned that ignoring gender is risky, and often foolish, because men and women approach and respond to restaurants in different ways, looking for different things.” Fair enough; in my experience this has sometimes been true. But while some examples are arguably innocuous and fall under the category of chivalry or “ladies first” (being seated first, being handed the menu & order taken first, getting your plate first), others are implicitly insulting and demeaning: handing the male companion at the table the wine to taste, and (in older times; I don’t think anymore) handing a the woman a menu that doesn’t include the prices if she’s out with a man. Other examples still are outrightly rude: women, especially if they come in a group without any men, getting seated at crappier tables and getting crappier, rushed service because they’re likely to spend less and stay longer “gabbing” to one another than men.

My general reaction is that these are some unfortunate examples of where gender double standards are still acceptable, by fault of both the customers and the restaurant owners. Where men and women expect to be treated differently — even in terms of the innocuous things like who gets their food first — they will be. Plus, an environment that lets women be condescended to with chivalry is a breeding ground for more virulent strains of discriminatory behavior (e.g., crap service), because it seems that any acceptance of the fact that women are different in their preferences and behaviors (they are!) opens the door for self-interested mistreatment of them on the part of those who stand to gain. My solution: get over yourself, recognize the bad behavior, and overcompensate to stop doing it! (This is how I deal with people I don’t like but am required to interact with. Like MW of Depress & Anx)

Anyway, the good news is that this might be changing. Steve said: “most of the places i’ve gone to eat with bri she always takes the lead, and i’ve never seen it happen where she orders the wine and it’s not brought back to her…” Cool.  Plus, the article itself started with the example of Jenny Moon who opened Apiary and specifically trained her servers to move away from all of the “ladies first” practices. The response was that some customers got pissed off, but I admire her compromise: “Read the table…and if it seems like they would appreciate ladies being served first, just do it.” She needs to not piss off her customers, after all.  But let the lesson be learned: servers respond to your expectations.

Michelle Obama

I wanted to write about something other than politics & the presidential race today, but this is kind of where I’ve been spending most of my mental, reading, and internet browsing energy lately.

So anyway, I appreciated the article from TIME this week on Michelle Obama.  It’s unclear to me why exactly we care about Michelle Obama — that is, what do (or should) Americans expect of a First Lady?  Judging by the way the media treats her, as well as other potential First Ladies of elections past, primarily they are supposed to represent something to the American public.  At the least, they are supposed to be relatable, maternal, poised, and composed.  When the public perceives them to depart from any of these, they pose a liability to their husbands’ campaigns.  MIchelle in particular has had a hard time countering the angry Black, hates-her-country-and-all-the-white-people-in-it image that the media constructed to…. make things more interesting?  The article does a really good job of explaining how Michelle is not only totally normal and completely relatable, but also exemplifies the modern, successful woman that many would aspire to be.

In the interview for the article, she talks about the exertion of will it takes to succeed in the face of lowered expectations on account of her race, gender, and socioeconomic background. She deserves a lot of respect for the kind of life she’s built for herself and the attitude she now has about it (“When you’re a person like me who steps outside the normal boundaries of what their life is supposed to be like–say going to Princeton–you’re worried that maybe you’re not prepared, because everybody has told me you probably won’t be… I think many of us are more prepared for certain situations than we imagine.”)

Michelle is very obviously as strong and as smart as her husband. There was a time in their marriage when she earned more than half their combined income.  Contrast this to Laura Bush, who married W. and quit her job before having kids.  That’s all very fine and well if you can swing it financially, but I have to agree with the author when she says, “[Laura] is of an older generation and has made choices… that are the choices of another time.”  I can sympathize, for obvious reasons, with the author’s final summary of who Michelle represents to American women:

[S]he’s actually recognizable as a very particular type… I suspect this person will be familiar to anyone who has, in the past 25 years, been a young, college-educated woman in her first real job: you’re, say, 22 and somewhat clueless, and you go to work in an office where there’s a woman eight or 10 or 12 years older than you who’s not only visibly good at her job but also confident and friendly and well-dressed and busy with a life that features a cute husband, a nice house and maybe even a couple of kids.  And you think maybe, if everything goes right, your own life could turn out like hers.

I still think conceptions of what a First Lady is, and expectations of what she should be, are troubling:  if she’s not what we take to be a perfect supporting spouse and wonderful mother, homemaker, and moral symbol, she becomes a “problem” in the campaign.  But if we are about to place one Lady in this country on a pedestal as an exibition of what lies within the boundaries of a normal, successful, idealistic political marriage, then I would much much rather it be Michelle than the lipoe-ed, second trophy-wife heiress that is our alternative.  She’s brilliant and successful in her own right, she sacrifices for her daughters, she adores her (cute) husband, but somehow doesn’t let his political ambition diminish her standing.  And as though this hasn’t been talked about enough, I thought the dap was the cutest thing ever: she’s hip, she’s strong; she and her husband are a team.