Shorter Mitch Albom: Get Off My Lawn... And Back In The Kitchen

This  (which I found here) makes me feel better about really disliking Mitch Albom without ever having read a single one of his books.

(The husband loved Tuesdays With Morrie, and I contemplated giving it a shot, until I read some of the guy's opinion pieces, and… gack.  It was this kind of stuff. Loooots of this kind of stuff.)

I have a few thoughts, only the first of which is how sad I am that Mitch Albom would probably never like my Brazilian wax post, then.  I use the word "vagina."  Maybe if I go change it to "your v-word" he'll read it!

I read a comment on the Twitter with which I heartily agree, and which I feel sums up the entire problem with this piece (if we don't treat the get-off-my-lawn premise as a problem but rather as a mentality of its own).

The comment was something to the effect of, "Never complained about the whole male-run porn industry thing, didja?"  Certainly the numbers of porn viewers are untold leaps and bounds beyond the readers of Shades of Grey.

I'd add that I've never seen Mitch Albom write up a critically lauded film wherein male characters use vulgar words for vagina.  Because no movies like that exist, I'm sure.  Definitely, definitely sure.

And it's a little ~telling~ that Mitch takes issue with Girls, and yet I don't recall a similar rant from him when Game of Thrones premiered last year.  Let's compare:

Girls
- Shows breasts
- Shows penis (1 so far, I think)
- Shows vigorous sex (including with not-peak-of-attractive bodies)
- Uses foul language
- Lady creator
- Lady show runner
- Lady writers
- Touchy issues other than depiction of/conversation about sex: abortion, STI's, sexual harassment

Game of Thrones
- Shows breasts
- Shows penises (2 come to mind, but it might be 3?)
- Shows vigorous sex (including woman-on-woman prostitution)
- Uses foul language
- Dude creators (books and show)
- Dude show runners
- Dude writer (books); Dude and lady writers (show) (well, a lady writer is credited once for "teleplay," and another lady writer is credited twice for "written by"... out of 20 episodes)
- Touchy issues other than depiction of/conversation about sex: limbs sawed off and intestines hanging out, a four-stroke beheading.  Also some burnt children's bodies, children being shoved out of windows, children being stabbed through the throat.  Also people burning alive.  Incest (forgetting the depiction of, it's a moving force in the storyline).

I think you see where I'm going with this.  (Note: I love Game of Thrones and really don't love Girls.  Just so we're clear.)

I can't wrap this up without also referencing Albom's apparent problem with the movie Hysteria.  If you think a movie about the invention of the vibrator has nothing to do with the majorly stunted agency of women at that time in history, then you, sir or madam, have some reading up to do.

Recovery Relapse (Yes, Really)

It is possible - just possible - that April and May were total shit.  I am admitting to nothing outright, but let's just say that it's possible and leave it at that.

Put another way, sometimes I feel like the only person on earth who can attend a wedding rehearsal dinner involving pizza and a birthday party involving cake, and come away losing weight both times.

Despite being in really excellent care right now, and despite really, honest-to-god trying, I have actually gotten to my lowest weight since at least June 2003.  Lose.  Lose, lose, lose.  Loser.  I feel like one literally and colloquially.

I've been keeping a food log with my therapist, and it does give me a fair amount of insight into, "Okay, that really is NOT enough food to maintain this weight," as well as, "Wow, I sure do eat a lot of apples and bananas."

I am just so angry with myself that I want to cry.  I've always been an angry crier.

I can't blame myself totally (not in the sense that I blame other people for my own actions) because April and May were... Wow, you guys, they were epic, and their epic nature was not of my making or under my control. 

The rest of June and July are going to be tough, but better.  I hope.  I pray.  (I don't pray, literally.  I... concentrate.)

It is my intent to blog more frequently, but the blog might turn into a spate of navel-gazing for a little while (ha, I mean, more than usual) in tandem with some "homework" for my treatment.  You've been warned.

For now I'll leave you with a flower.  It's blooming at my East River park right now, and it is a singularly comforting shade of yellow.

The NY Times, Meat Eaters, Ethical Eating, Lazy Thinking

Let's chat about this contest in the NY Times Magazine, asking entrants to reason out the strongest ethical argument for meat eating.

As someone who is currently embroiled in a battle with myself to make it okay to eat anything (steak, macaroni & cheese, oatmeal, whatever), I read this from a very specific point of view.  Short version: "Animals are sentient beings and I try to eat ones that I know have been treated well.  However, right now, I have to pay most attention to eating protein in appropriate amounts and to getting re-attuned to my own intuitive eating cues."  (You should know by now that this is what passes for a "short version" with me.)

So from that somewhat specific yet hardly unique standpoint, how do I read this contest?  (Literally read and figuratively "read.")    First, I kinda dig the winning entry.  I particularly appreciate what many vegetarians and vegans I've known tend to ignore in chat (with me, at least): soy production is not necessarily much less stressful to the earth than some forms of meat production.  A soy farm using petrochemical fertilizer is above and beyond a small or mid-size organic, cage-free poultry operation, in terms of damage to the local ecosystem.

Unfortunately, the winning essay doesn't actually correlate with the real world most U.S. citizens live in today.  If you're living in the Sonora Desert in a yurt, then yes, you presumably have access to the ethical options the author describes.  But if you're living in a Sonora Desert in an adobe ranch house with your Honda Civic taking you back and forth to Whole Foods, then going out and hunting lizards is not for you.

Let's skip back to the contest wrap-up piece itself. (Emphasis mine.)

Some critics insisted that even contemplating a life without meat was an indulgent luxury, a silly game for a wealthy first-worlder. I found this puzzling — as if the poor feast nightly on roast suckling pig and only the 1 percent eat boiled tubers. Over all, rich nations eat much more meat than poor ones, and raising animals for food takes more agricultural resources than raising crops. In any case, a vast number of the world’s ethical vegetarians live in India. Caviar is a luxury. Ethical discussion is not.

Problematic statement is problematic.  Actually, Ariel Kaminer, what the poor in the U.S. do is cut high-fat hamburger meat with rice and vegetables to stretch the protein farther, whereas the middle class and rich buy the 90% lean ground beef and mix in free-range eggs when making their Italian meatballs.

What the poor do is buy ham and bologna cold cuts that are such a high percentage water and sodium that their texture resembles rubber more closely than pig or cow flesh, whereas the middle class and rich get the stuff sliced at the deli counter that's antibiotic free, fresh roasted in the store, etc.  Ethical discussion is, at some point, a luxury.  Deal with it.  Moving on.


A few months ago Mark Bittman (I think it was him - he's a heavyweight in the NYT Dining section, and one of the judges here) noted that McDonald's has requested that its pork suppliers phase out their gestation crates, and he rightly pointed out that this was, as the kids say, kind of a big deal.  McDonald's is a huge buyer of animal products of all kinds, and what they say essentially goes.  People can rant and rave against the ethical evils of McDonald's, but their new policy on gestation crates will create huge, forward-moving waves in the hog and pig farming industry.

Having said that, this was an interesting snark inclusion:

The contest is anti-pig-istI don’t get why the contest graphics failed to include a pig. Pork is a more popular meat than goat, lamb or veal. Lobster, fish and squid are not meats. Since there was no pig shown in the graphics, it made me feel people who eat pork were not welcomed to participate. BLASMAIC, WASHINGTON, ON THE 6TH FLOOR BLOG

Honestly, it is strange that a pig isn't included, since gestation crates are one of the better-known ethical violations going on in factory farming, and this is a discussion on the ethics of meat eating.  I'm not sure where the writer jumped from "no pig" to "pork eaters not welcome," but the point stands.


People saw conspiracy in this contest, and misogyny, and racism, and more. Honestly, all I see is lazy thinking.

The Vatican Wrist-Slaps Nuns, Because Women

Allow me to change the subject.  Let's talk about nuns.

Yep, you read that right.

Last night I was reading this, thinking to myself, "These guys are scum, but even so, most of them were around before the Church as we know it even existed."

*cough cough*  *cough cough coughcoughcough*

Then this afternoon, Marzie linked to a story that MSNBC headlined "Catholic nuns group 'stunned' by Vatican scolding for 'radical feminist' ideas."

Covering the same news the Huffington Post interviews a nun who volunteers escorting women into abortion clinics, and yeah, I can see where the Vatican would call that a "radical feminist" thing to do.  (I just don't happen to agree with them, is all.)

But what are they mostly talking about here?  Spending too much time on "social justice" issues and not enough time promoting pro-life and traditional sexuality issues.  (The Leadership Conference of Religious Women, the group the Vatican's ire is focused on, even has a "Social Justice" drop-down menu on their homepage, o noes!)  One of the big issues?  The LCRW was a big Obama supporter in the health reform wars.  The Vatican didn't like this, presumably because access to stuff like chemotherapy isn't as important as lack of access to contraception.

Other issues highlighted on the group's website include Haiti earthquake relief (where there are a lot of Catholics), immigration reform (which would, demographically speaking, probably benefit a lot of Catholics), and issues where they're totally in step with the Vatican (things like climate change, nuclear proliferation, war and refugees and torture, and potable water access (a huge, huge issue in the developing world where there are, you guessed it, a lot of Catholics).  Annual resolutions over the past decade include "Strengthen Bonds Among Religious Women Globally" and "Reduce our Carbon Footprint."  In 2001 they released a resolution on human trafficking.  Some seriously radical-feminist stuff, I tell you.

Longtime, detail-oriented readers already know that I grew up Catholic and left that faith by the wayside.  Even though I had to keep going to school Masses, I stopped receiving the Eucharist, which is the entire point of the Catholic Mass, in 1998, so that's when you can say I really stopped being Catholic, if you want to split hairs.

Even so, I still feel an... I guess you could call it an attachment to Catholicism.  I still have some kind of proprietary feeling toward it.  I don't know if you'd break it down that I feel it's "mine" and I ought to defend it, or the other way around - that I feel it still defines me or reflects upon me in some vague way.

I don't really know.  I do know that when I see stories like this, I kind of go Hulk, at least on the inside. Stories of men, rich men for the most part, set up in mansions and townhouses and Bruno Maglis - of men essentially telling women to ignore the poor, ignore injustice, ignore thirst, ignore hunger, ignore violence, ignore wounded combat veterans - or at least don't pay quite so much attention to those things so you can pay more attention to undermining access to healthcare for millions of Americans, and the access to institutionalized recognition and support for millions of others.

I just... what?  WHAT?  How does that even work?  Where is the reality of the world in that worldview?

I am by no stretch of the imagination a religious person.  It's not just that I don't believe in Catholicism anymore (if I ever really did), it's that I am an agnostic atheist in terms of belief, a secular humanist in terms of action.  So while it might be my personal bias to look at an organization like LCRW and shrug at the emphasis on God in their work, but that's not the point.  The point is that they do the work.  "We risk being agents of change within Church and society," their site says.  And the point is that that is NOT the point to the Vatican.

Because if there's anything we know for certain about Jesus, it's that he that he thought all those early Church Fathers were right.  Women are gross and scary and wrong, because, women.

Eating Disorder Recovery: Check-In

As you might have noticed, I haven't been around much during the slide into the worst part of my relapse, nor much so far during my early weeks striving for recovery (again).

This is mostly because the worst part of my relapse tied directly into things I can't get into on this blog for my own privacy (for all that this blog is at least semi-anonymous).

It's also also because ~dearth of interesting ideas~

As a general update for those who are playing along at home:

- My weight has finally started to go back up.  I had my annual GYN exam Friday and (in jeans) I was back up to my weight from about October.  If you saw me in October, you're going, "Seriously, that's it?" right now.  And yeah, seriously, that's it, but I'm calling it a win.  (Point of interest for longtime readers: my doctor actually laughed [with me not at me] at what a painful-looking job I did on my last wax.)

- Today I had my first ever super exciting echocardiogram.  (Pro tip:  it was cold.)  I meant to ask for the pictures to be emailed to me (because who doesn't want to look at their own heart? I sure as shit do) but I forgot.  Pretty sure I forgot because I had to fast before this appointment.  I may have a history of anorexia and all, but I do not do well with fasting.

- Last night I had an intake meeting for a NYC-based organization called the Center for the Study of Anorexia and Bulimia.  This will be to find an individual therapist who is more effective for me than the one I was seeing in 2011, as well as possibly for group therapy.  I'm going to a separate monthly support group for the first time on Thursday night, through a group called ROAED.

- I have been (for a whole 8 days now) going to the gym in our building's basement.  I can say without exaggeration that this is - for whatever reason - the first time in my life that I've gone to the gym without undue obsession over calories burned.  No idea why, but I'm not looking a gift horse in the mouth.  [redacted]'s jaw will hit the floor when I tell her that I actually ran today.  (Okay, I ran for 4 of the minutes.  What.  It counts.)

I have more to say.  About marriage and recovery and how it's a whole other beast recovering while partnered than recovering while single.  About trying not to play the Cassandra with hand-wringing over, "Oh, it's not so entirely horrendous now, but it's going to be, oh, it's going to be!" About things that are more interesting than bullet-pointed lists, generally.

But that can come later.