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July 25, 2006

Blueberries Are Good

Fresh blueberries have been on sale in my grocery store for the past few weeks, which makes me happy because I love love love love LOVE blueberries. I think they're among the cuter fruits the planet produces: OK, they're not big, prickly and imposing like a pineapple or a drag queen, but their tiny round vulnerable neatness appeals to me, as does the delicate little crown on the bottom (I wonder what purpose it serves), and I also love that blueberries really truly are blue! How many other naturally blue foods exist in the world? And they taste good. I like them fresh, but I especially like them cooked, so that they burst open and the insides turn purple from the juice in the skin and the sugar in them caramelizes a bit.

I didn't know I loved blueberries when I was little; I thought they were only OK, and this is entirely my mother's fault. The only way she fed us blueberries when I was growing up was in blueberry muffins--made, of course, from a mix that included canned blueberries. (I asked her about this recently; she said they were too expensive to buy fresh in Arizona, and it never occurred to her to buy them frozen.) I have compensated for this mistake by making blueberry muffins a grand total of once in my adult life: a few weeks ago I got to thinking about how I'd never made blueberry muffins and decided to try it, but I couldn't leave well enough alone and had to spiff up the recipe with cream cheese and chocolate chips, and the results were edible but not worth repeating.

But I love blueberry crumble--I LOVE it. I especially love it for breakfast, smothered with Stonyfield Farms Full Cream French Vanilla yogurt. YUM! I also love blueberry sorbet. Both recipes are below.

Blueberry Crumble

3-4 cups fresh or frozen blueberries
2 tbs lemon juice
1 cup brown sugar
½ cup butter, softened or partially melted
3/4 cup flour
1 cup quick-cooking oatmeal
3/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp salt

Put blueberries in the bottom of a 9x9 ungreased glass baking dish. Sprinkle with lemon juice. In mixing bowl, cream the butter and sugar, then add remaining ingredients. Sprinkle on top of blueberries.

Bake at 375 degrees until topping is brown and blueberries are hot, about 30-40 minutes.

Blueberry Sorbet

8 cups fresh blueberries, washed and dried
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
½ cup water

Puree blueberries in blender. Transfer to large pot.
Add other ingredients. Bring to a boil then remove from heat.
Strain into a bowl and allow to cool. Then pour into an airtight container and freeze.

Makes six cups.

Posted by holly at 10:44 AM | Comments (12)

July 24, 2006

Pioneer Day

Today is a holiday I haven’t celebrated since, oh, 1976. It’s Pioneer Day, anniversary of the day in 1847 when Brigham Young and a bunch of other guys (including my great-great-great-grandfather Tarleton Lewis, the first bishop of Salt Lake and the only man to be bishop of the entire city) arrived in the Salt Lake valley. Supposedly when they reached the descent into the valley, Brother Brigham, who was quite ill, sat up in his bed in the back of a wagon, surveyed the scene, then said, “This is the right place. Drive on.” (It’s often shortened to “This is the place.” But my dad, who reads lots of history books and loves correcting misinformed tour guides--he's done it all over the country, on topics ranging from the burial place of Wyatt Earp to the birthdate of Joseph Smith--always insisted that we say it correctly.)

When I was little we had big Pioneer Day celebrations; we dressed like pioneers and had parades with handcarts. But then the Church got ambitious and wanted to shed its provincial western image, and Pioneer Day ceased to be a big deal outside of Utah, where it's still a state holiday. I’m not complaining; it’s not all that fun to put on a long dress and sunbonnet and walk up and down the streets during monsoon season in southern Arizona.

But I admit I am totally captivated by the story of the trek across the plains, which killed a few of my relatives: Tarleton lost one of his sons that way, a small child of three or four, who wandered off one evening while collecting cow patties for fuel with a group of children. They found his bucket, but they never found the boy. Tarleton was heartbroken. Then there’s the story of the Willie and Martin handcart companies, a group of people who got a late start and so were overtaken by snow storms and blizzards. The survivors were eventually rescued by a bunch of young men. It chokes me up even to think about it.

In Primary we used to sing this song I absolutely loved, called “Pioneer Children.” It went,

Pioneer children sang as they walked... and walked... aaannd waaaaalked
They walked for miles....

and I can’t remember the rest. I just remember the way we’d draw out “aaannd waaaaalked.” It was fun.

So happy Pioneer Day! If you get a chance, take a walk. (I still can't--my gimpy hip is still bugging me.)

Posted by holly at 2:02 PM | Comments (9)

July 22, 2006

Not the Star I Paid to See

Picking up where I left off yesterday on the matter of unpleasant parents:

Another good thing about the way Mormons deal with kids: everyone (well, almost everyone) learns very early that there are places where it's just not appropriate to bring children. This doesn't cause kids much pain or resentment, because a lot of those adult forums are plain boring, and kids are rightfully glad to escape them. You learn that your parents can go off and leave with you a babysitter and it won't kill you, the babysitter OR your parents--in fact, if the babysitter is cool enough, you might even have fun, and you usually get something special for dinner.

The last ward (a Mormon congregation) I attended was an young adult/student ward at the Institute at the U of Arizona. There were no kids in this ward, because you had to be a childless university student and/or single person over the age of 18 but under 35 to attend it. The idea was to help young people meet potential mates, though childless couples in which at least one spouse was enrolled as a student could also attend this ward.

But there was this divorced woman in her late 20s who insisted on bringing her five-year-old daughter with her, and largely because the bishop felt sorry for her, both mother and child were allowed to attend. The daughter went to all the meetings with her mother, including Relief Society, the meeting for women. Well. One Sunday I was teaching the lesson, and I made an off-hand comment about how there was no Santa Claus.

Well!

The child was upset to learn that there was no Santa Claus, and the mother was incensed that I let that secret slip, and wanted me reprimanded. However, the RS president dealt with the matter in what I consider the most appropriate way: she told the woman, "If you don't want your child to hear adult conversations, don't bring your child to adult forums."

I really resent parents who refuse to get babysitters, who insist on bringing their kids with them to ANY and EVERYTHING they want to do. Neither I nor my sister (who had four kids of her own, but she and my brother-in-law got a babysitter) will ever forget the 2002 midnight premier of The Two Towers, mostly because some young couple brought their three-year-old. He cried for a good long while, and the parents let him. He kept saying, "I'm tired! It's noisy here. I want to go home." And finally, since he couldn't go home, the poor boy did what he could to escape the noise: he went out in the hall and fell asleep on the floor--and the parents left him there. There is no way in which such profoundly selfish behavior constitutes acceptable parenting. In fact, it might even considered criminally negligent--what if someone had stolen the kid? It wouldn't have been hard. And although the greatest wrong was done to the child, I also felt sorry for everyone else in that theater: we should not have had to listen to him cry. The parents should not have brought him, and when he began to cry, they should have left the theater.

The theaters where I live now try to prevent such situations; there's a sign at the box office with the picture of a really cute baby. Underneath is a caption reading, "Cute as you are, you are not the star I paid to see." The sign explains that no child under six years of age will be admitted to any R-rated movie beginning after 6 p.m. (I always used to wonder who would bring a child under six to ANY R-rated movie, no matter what time it showed. Then I found out.)

Restrictions like that really infuriate one of my friends, who fairly burst with pride as she told me how she'd taken her six-month-old child to a showing of Brokeback Mountain. And I kept thinking, "Brokeback Mountain is a really great movie, but you're an ass." She spent all this time telling me how lonely and depressing it is to be around a kid all day without other adult company, and how hard it is to get people to accommodate her motherhood. And then she and her husband and child and I went to dinner, and a fair portion of the meal was spent retrieving the silverware the child constantly threw on the floor. I have 14 nieces and nephews; I understand that small children need to be entertained. But I also understand that entertaining children requires energy, and that if you want a certain kind of adult conversation, you don't involve a kid. And as I listened to my friend go on and on about how lonely she is, I thought, "Could part of the problem be that you alienate people who would be DELIGHTED to give you the adult conversation you claim to crave, if you were just willing to pay a babysitter?"

In other words, I accept that if I visit friends who have children, part of my time will be spent getting to know and interacting with their children--and in many ways, I enjoy that, because as I said, I like kids! But if you assume that my primary motive in making the effort to visit you (particularly if it involves forking out several hundred bucks on airfare) is to watch you watch your child shred magazines, or if there's nary a single kid-free moment in a period exceeding seven or eight hours, or if over 50% of what you say to me is about your kid and the style of parenting you've adopted, well, I probably won't be back to see you until the kid's at least in junior high--and for god's sake, don't ask if you can bring the kid and visit me! Because cute as s/he might be, your child is not the star I really want to see. And as I have other friends who manage to raise children while retaining an identity other than parent, I'll just hang out with them.

Posted by holly at 8:38 AM | Comments (20)

July 20, 2006

It Says Sour

I wrote Monday about how I generally like children, but there are plenty of parents in the world who irritate me. Wednesday I wrote about dealing with parents and a child I liked, and today I'm sharing an anecdote about an encounter with a parent who totally pissed me off.

A couple of weeks ago I went to Target for some particular product. I don't remember what it was; I only remember that they didn't have it. They did, however, have Clueless on sale for $7.50, a spiffy anniversary edition dvd with lots of special features, and as I collect adaptations of Austen novels (in case you didn't know, Clueless is based on Emma) and as my VHS copy of Clueless has grown worn from use, I decided to buy the dvd. So I took my single item and went to stand in the express checkout line.

The woman ahead of me in the express lane was dealing with two children. She seemed a bit frazzled--her son, who seemed about six, wanted some gum, but kept picking out kinds that were sour, and she kept saying, "It says sour! See? It says sour!" I can be pretty good at tuning out other people, so I just ignored her and thought about the pleasant activities I had planned for the rest of the day--I think I was planning to sew. The cashier rang up and bagged my movie before the woman had removed her bags from the counter, and for some reason her son, who had not taken any of his mother's bags, picked up my bag.

"That's mine," I said, in a neutral voice with a neutral expression, and took the bag from him. While I didn't simply wait for him to hand the bag to me, I did not wrest it forcibly from his hand. I didn't smile and say, "Sorry, sweetie, but that's not your mama's bag; it's mine," but neither did I scowl and say, "Gimme that!" And having retrieved my package, I went about the business of handing a 20 dollar bill to the cashier.

The mother stood and eyed me for a moment. "I don't think my son meant to steal your bag," she said.

"I don't think he did, either," I said calmly, still focused on the cashier, who was handing me my change. I mean, why would he want a copy of Clueless?

"Well, you didn't need to be so nasty to him," the mother added, her voice rising.

And at that point I turned and gave the woman my full attention. "I wasn't nasty to your kid, you fucking bitch," I said. (And yes, I realize I exposed the child to genuine profanity. Shame on me, in some ways, and in other ways, WHATEVER. He'll hear it eventually anyway, if he hadn't heard it already. I wanted the mother to understand that there was a genuine difference between neutrality and nastiness.)

"Nice mouth!" she said, and headed out the door. I put my wallet back in my bag and headed out too. I thought briefly about saying something more to her--something like, "I hope you realize you spoke to your son far more sharply than I did," or, "Don't feel you have the right to criticize my behavior unless I also have the right to criticize yours"--but decided against it, got in my car and drove away. (Though in a later fantasy, I also considered the line, "There are some people who shouldn't have children, and you're obviously one of them. Don't take out on me the fact that you're stuck with two very big mistakes you clearly can't handle." But that, unlike the F-word, is something I would feel guilty for saying in front of a child.)

The point is, that was the moment when I said, officially, TO HELL WITH PARENTS WHO SEEK TO "CORRECT" THE BEHAVIOR OF EVERYONE BUT THEMSELVES AND THEIR CHILDREN.

I'm still not done.

Posted by holly at 5:32 PM | Comments (5)

July 19, 2006

Why I Didn't Post Yesterday, or a Hurt Hip and a Cute Kid

As I explain in this post about my freak dancing accident, and in this post about my bursitis diagnosis, I've been in pain lately. That's one reason–actually two reasons--I didn't post anything here yesterday: sitting was uncomfortable, and then I ended up spending several hours seeing a doctor and having x-rays and working with a physical therapist. The other reason I didn't post yesterday is that I had a dinner invitation that took precedence over writing.

My hosts were a colleague, her husband and their three-year-old son, who is really damn cute: big smile, bright brown eyes and this head full of tousled curls because his mom has been two busy to cut his hair recently. I sat down next to him at the dinner table, remembered what I'd posted Monday, and asked myself, "All right; do I like kids or not?"

And I decided I really do, if the parents allow both me and the kid to treat each other like people.

I asked the kid how old he was, what his name was--basic ice breakers, to which he gave me basic answers. His dad said, "We forgot your knife," and went to the kitchen. And the kid said to me, "I have a blue knife."

"That's pretty cool. I don't have a blue knife," I said, picking up the knife beside my plate. "All my knives are the same color as this one. I used to have a red knife, but the people at the airport took it away from me." (All through grad school I hauled a swiss army knife on my key chain, in part because I got tired of trying to track down a bottle opener at parties.)

It turned out that not only was his knife blue, but it was shaped like a shark; his spoon was a green snake. We were able to have a very rewarding conversation about cutlery in general. I got him to sing me the ABC song. And his parents didn't interrupt him or me. They didn't insist that I interact with him the way they interact with him. They DID tell him not to jump on me, because I'd hurt myself recently; they did reprove him in the one thing that mattered so that I didn't have to do it.

And then his dad gave him a bath and he went to bed. Except that several hours later, he came downstairs and wanted to stay downstairs, and was not compliant when his dad told him to go back to bed. Calling upon my experience as a doting aunt, I said, "You know what I just realized? I just realized you haven't shown me your room. Can I see it?"

I know parents who at that moment would have intervened, would have said, "No, we'll get the kid upstairs"-- I guess because they don't want anyone else exercising authority over their child? But the kid accepted that I might really have an interest in his room, and he was certainly interested in showing it to me, so we all walked upstairs, and once the child was in his bed, his dad picked out a story to read him, and after that he went to sleep.

And I really enjoyed the whole evening. I liked the kid, I liked the way he was a part but not the entire focus of the evening, and I liked that his parents let me and the kid interact on our own terms, which included exercising a little grownup authority and sneakiness on my part.

Posted by holly at 12:01 PM | Comments (6)

July 17, 2006

Go Away, Parent, You Bother Me

I think of myself as someone who likes children, mostly because there are a lot of children I like. OK, occasionally I meet a kid I truly dislike, same as with adults: a couple of my friends had five children, four of whom I found mildly repellent: they were not only badly behaved, but just plain weird--one in particular I rather expect to end up in the penal system. But generally, I'm well disposed to like kids. If I see a cute baby in a stroller, I usually smile and try to make eye contact. If I hear a child crying, I usually think, with a pang of genuine sympathy, "Oh, that poor thing."

I especially like kids old enough to walk and say at least a few words and feed themselves a high-chair-tray full of diced broccoli, but still small enough that you can pick them up and tickle them and play peekaboo with them: there's something profoundly wonderful about making those wee ones squeal and clap their hands in delight. I also like little kids whose parents buy them really cool electric train sets (that would be my brother and his wife). As I've watched my nieces and nephews grow up, I've noticed that sometimes they get hard to talk to around nine or ten (and they can stay that way for about a decade), but if a kid likes to read, I can usually manage a reasonably interesting conversation. And I'm gratified by the fact that the kids I like seem to like me OK, too.

There's a famous scene where WC Fields (I have no idea what movie it's from--I tried to find out) says to some child, "Go away, kid, you bother me," a particular expression of his general antipathy for children. I was always baffled by that in my youth, and offended as well: how could anybody who'd been a child dislike children on principle? I still sort of feel that way.... Because I really do like kids at least as often as I like adults. Change that: I like children more often than I like adults. It's certain parents, I've realized lately, that I really have problems with.

I've also realized as I've considered this matter that most of my attitudes about childrearing are influenced by my upbringing as the second of five children in a Mormon family. Not only did I have four other siblings, but I both watched and helped my mother raise the younger ones--especially my baby brother, who was born when I was almost nine. I also did a hell of a lot of babysitting for other Mormon families. And the entire situation left me, I honestly think, with some fairly sound ideas on the matter.

For better or worse, having children--plenty of them--is normalized in Mormon culture, and the culture accommodates the existence of children in many sensible ways the rest of society could benefit by imitating. Churches generally come equipped with playrooms for kids under three, and at least two or three people are given the specific assignment of taking care of all such children while everyone else goes to Sunday school. (I spent a couple of years in high school serving in the nursery.) Breastfeeding has always been encouraged in Mormondom, and many churches have a room where mothers can go to nurse or simply to tend a fussy child. Moreover, these rooms are often wired to the microphone in the chapel so the women can hear what's going on during Sacrament meeting. (In some wards, they even send an intrepid deacon--a boy 12 or 13 years of age--to bring these women the sacrament.) And because everyone has kids, people frequently trade babysitting during the day. Furthermore, teenagers know how to act around small kids, so you can trust many of them to care for your children for a couple of hours on a Friday night.

I realize not everyone lives like that. I realize that decent, reasonably priced child care is not necessarily a reason to join or remain active in the Mormon church if you don't believe its doctrines. I realize not everyone wants four to six (or eight) kids. Which is a damn good thing--as I mention in the comments to this post about my response to An Inconvenient Truth, reproducing has more impact on the environment than anything else we do. And while I don't advocate anything like China's "single child" policy and would never tell anyone how many children they could have, I don't think it's at all unselfish to have a huge family, which is what we were told at church: instead, I feel it's extremely selfish at this point in time to have a very large family, and that it's wise and a mark of consideration for everyone else you share the planet with to be content with fewer offspring. And indeed, even in Mormondom, families are getting smaller: couples frequently have three or four kids whereas 30 years they might have had seven or eight.

But I do think most--if not all--public buildings should have rooms where women can breastfeed or pump milk or whatever they need to do, and I also think that breastfeeding in public should be not only accepted but encouraged. I think new parents need a decent period of maternity/ paternity leave. I think K-12 education needs better funding at the local, state and federal level. I think anyone who doesn't like kids but still goes to Disneyland is an idiotic masochist.

In other words, like Jack Black in School of Rock, I believe that children are the future, and I want to see them well cared for. But there are plenty of ways in which I am not at all anxious to make someone else's child the center of my universe. And I've dealt with a lot of them lately.

This has become very long, so I'll continue it tomorrow. And maybe the day after that, too.

Posted by holly at 9:19 AM | Comments (7)

July 13, 2006

Search Me

Because I occasionally write about sex, and about sexual violence against women, and because I also discussed various terms for female genitalia and announced my preference for a particular term and my impatience with the misuse of another term, my blog can show up when people do searches for sexual images and situations. Thus, when I check the searches that have led people to my blog, a lot of them are deeply disturbing and vile. I won't provide examples because that would lead even more weirdos to my site. But I must say, that as someone who has stayed away from internet porn, it has been very educational to me to see some of what other people go looking for out there.

But this one I found amusing enough to share: a search on "naked women in teddies."

Dude, chick, whoever you are, grasp this obvious fact: If they're wearing teddies, they're not naked!

Posted by holly at 8:34 AM | Comments (6)

July 12, 2006

Hey Joe

Yesterday as I was getting in my car to run some errands, Joe, my mailman, strolled up to my driveway with my mail. I thought I would save him the few steps up to my porch and so walked over to take it from him.

"How you doin, Ms. Holly?" he asked. The first time he addressed me by name, I was a bit surprised; but I soon realized of course he knows my name; he reads it almost every day. He probably also knows, if he cares enough to analyze the magazines I subscribe to, my religious background, my political leanings, my general taste in music.

"I'm fine," I said, taking the envelopes he held. "Thanks. How are you?"

"Doing real good. You have a good day, now."

"You too," I said.

It was, like every interaction I have with Joe, brief and extremely pleasant. He's just so damn good-natured! It never occurred to me to notice the temperament of my postman, until I had a really pissy one: the previous one would huff and puff coming up my stairs like I was a little pig in a brick house he needed to blow down, and he'd thrust the mail through the slot as if enraged that my house was still standing, because that meant he'd have to come back and do the whole thing again the next day. The one time I spoke to him, to ask him if instead of leaving a package on my front porch he might place it on my back porch out of view and the elements, he replied, his entire being slack with resentment, that he'd try to remember to accommodate my special, unusual and extremely inconvenient request.

Not Joe! He's always polite, always grinning. He's also really hot, if you go for tall, well-muscled men with those lean, long legs that look good in bicycle shorts. He's an aging hippy, in his mid-40s, I'd guess, with a full head of dark hair (far less gray than I've got) which he wears gathered in a pony tail hanging to his waist.

Hot though I think he is, I simply am not the kind of person to entertain sexual fantasies about the mailman. Instead what I really respond to is his grinning affability. It arouses in me a benevolent protectiveness. I really want to make his life easier. I know that patches of ice are a serious occupational hazard for postal carriers, and I don't want him to fall, so I keep my walk shoveled and my porch steps swept all winter. I want this guy to stick around and deliver my mail for a long, long time to come.

Posted by holly at 5:00 PM | Comments (8)

July 11, 2006

Accompanied by a Drawing of a Burning Bridge

From that same journal as the last entry, this one on page 10. Dated 7 May 05. Accompanied by a drawing of a burning bridge, done by me in Crayola Crayons.

I love no spectacle so much as that of a burning bridge--OH the glowing beams, the leaping flames, all of that light reflected in the dark, rippling water--and then, when the fire burns through the structure and its timbers plunge into the water, so it bubbles and steams--

Well it's just so cool

Not that I've ever seen a burning wooden bridge, but I imagine it's quite a phenomenon

First you imagine the river. Deep, wide and rapid though it may be, you are looking for its narrowest, calmest spot. You construct a sturdy, serviceable crossing that stretches from bank to bank. Then you set it on fire.

And that's all.

Posted by holly at 10:48 AM | Comments (5)

July 10, 2006

Utility and Worth

Here's a strange little reflection I found on page one of a journal I started about two years ago. I avoided writing in it because it wasn't the format I generally prefer for a journal: heavy lined 8.5 by 11 loose leaf notebook paper. But for reasons I explain below, I finally started using this journal as well. I'm currently on page 13.

I have had this little book since before I graduated from high school in 1981. What the hell have I saved it for all these years? Good god, it's now 2004 and this book is still empty, unused-- not quite wasted (because it still has potential) but almost, since it is a thing that has a purpose and that purpose is going unfulfilled. And if that purpose is never fulfilled, well, then the thing is wasted.

Everything has a purpose, but we don't get to decide what those purposes are, necessarily-- only the purposes of the things we make. The purpose of a cow is not to be eaten, but to be a cow. However, the purpose of beef is to be eaten, and it would be wrong to waste beef. Once the sacrifice has been made, once a thing has been killed, then it's wrong to let it go to waste.

I'm thinking about issues of utility and worth-- I don't want to exploit things, and I also don't want to waste resources--

and that's it.

Posted by holly at 3:44 PM | Comments (4)

July 7, 2006

What He Said

I haven't read The End of Faith by Sam Harris, but after reading this interview with him in Salon, I want to. He hits on some of the reasons why I find many true believers intellectually, morally and spiritually repellent, and why I refuse to let my family bear their testimonies to me. Here are two excerpts from the interview conducted by Steve Paulson:

What about the Bible? Do you see this as a recipe for religious intolerance?

Oh, I do. There's no document that I know of that is more despicable in its morality than the first few books of the Hebrew Bible. Books like Exodus and Deuteronomy and Leviticus, these are diabolical books. The killing never stops. The reasons to kill your neighbor for theological crimes are explicit and preposterous. You have to kill people for worshiping foreign gods, for working on the Sabbath, for wizardry, for adultery. You kill your children for talking back to you. It's there and it's not a matter of metaphors. It is exactly what God expects us to do to rein in the free thought of our neighbors.

Now, it just so happens, however, that most Christians think there's something in the New Testament that fully and finally repudiates all of that. And therefore, we do not have to kill homosexuals. We don't have to kill adulterers. And that's a very good thing that most Christians think it. Now, most Christians actually are not on very firm ground theologically to think that. It's not an accident that St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine thought we should kill or torture heretics. Aquinas thought we should kill them, Augustine thought we should torture them. And Augustine's argument for the use of torture actually laid the foundations for the Inquisition. So it's not an accident that we were burning heretics and witches and other people in Europe for five centuries under the aegis of Christianity. But Christianity is at a different moment in its history.

But isn't this a problem mainly when you read the Bible or the Quran literally? Doesn't the conversation change once you stop reading sacred scriptures literally? If you understand, for instance, the historical context -- when Judaism or Christianity were first emerging, they were religions competing with other religions. Doesn't that free you up to appreciate their spiritual teachings?

I'd be the first to agree that it's better not to read these books literally. The problem is, the books never tell you that you're free not to read them literally. In fact, they tell you otherwise, explicitly so. Therefore, the fundamentalist is always on firmer ground theologically and -- I would argue -- intellectually than the moderate or the progressive. When you consult the books, you do not find more reasons to be a moderate or a liberal. You find more reasons to be a fundamentalist. I agree, it is a good thing to be cherry-picking these books and ignoring the bad parts. But we should have a 21st century conversation about morality and spiritual experience and public policy that is not constrained by superstition and taboo. In order to see how preposterous our situation really is, you need only imagine what our world would be like if we had people believing in the literal existence of Zeus. I defy anyone to come forward with the evidence that puts the Biblical God or the Quranic God on fundamentally different footing than the gods of Mt. Olympus. There are historical reasons why Zeus is no longer worshiped and the God of Abraham is. But there are not sound epistemological or philosophical or empirical reasons.

There's no doubt many awful things have been done in the name of religion over the centuries. But, of course, there have also been many wonderful religious people. I would argue, for instance, that Martin Luther King has been the most important moral leader in America over the last century. And I think it would be impossible to make sense of what he did without talking about his faith. It seems to me his Christian faith compelled him to be an activist and it's what gave him strength in very difficult times. What do you make of those kinds of people who've been inspired because of their faith?

I agree, King was an incredible person who did heroic and necessary work. A couple of answers here. There's no evidence that those things can only be done in the name of faith, whereas there is considerable evidence that really terrible acts of violence are being done only because of what people believe about God. For instance, while there are Christian missionaries working in sub-Saharan Africa doing heroic work to relieve famine, there are also secular people, like Doctors Without Borders, who work alongside them, doing the same kind of work and not doing it because they think Jesus was born of a virgin. They're not preaching the sinfulness of condom use the way Catholics and Christian ministers tend to do. So while Christian missionaries are helping people, they're also helping to spread AIDS with their sexual taboos and their prudery. So that's one issue.

I'm also breaking a taboo. I'm rejecting the idea that all of our religions are equally wise and emphasize compassion to the same degree. This is just clearly not true. Martin Luther King, to some significant degree, was animated by Christianity. But when you look at why he preached nonviolence to the degree that he did, he didn't get that from Christianity. He got it from Gandhi. And Gandhi got it from the Jains. Jainism is a religion of India that preaches this doctrine of nonviolence. To argue that that's the true face of Christianity is really misleading. Christianity also gives you the Jesus of the "Left Behind" novels who's going to come back and just hurl sinners into the pit. And the God who's going to punish homosexuals for eternity.

[....]

We've been talking about how intolerant so many religious people can be. But aren't you asking us to be very intolerant of religion?

It may sound paradoxical but it's not. I'm advocating a kind of conversational intolerance. It's really the same intolerance we express everywhere in our society when someone claims that Elvis is still alive, or that aliens are abducting ranchers and molesting them. These are beliefs that many people have. But these beliefs systematically exclude them from holding positions of responsibility. The person who's sure that Elvis is still alive and expresses this belief candidly does not wind up in the Oval Office or in our nation's boardrooms. And that's a very good thing. But when the conversation changes to Jesus being born of a virgin or Mohammed flying to heaven on a winged horse, then these beliefs not only do not exclude you from holding power in society; you could not possibly hold power, in a political sense, without endorsing this kind of thinking.

It should be terrifying to us because many of these beliefs are not just quaint and curious, like beliefs in Elvis. These are beliefs about the end of history, about the utility of trying to create a sustainable civilization for ourselves -- specifically, beliefs in eschatology. These are maladaptive. For instance, if a mushroom cloud replaced the city of New York tomorrow morning, something like half the American people would see a silver lining in that cloud because it would presage to them that the end of days are upon us.

Posted by holly at 1:39 PM | Comments (5)

July 6, 2006

A Slew of Inconvenient Truths

Much to my surprise, the theater in the rancid backwater I call home actually booked a few showings of An Inconvenient Truth--the movie arrived on Friday. Convinced it won't stay in town for long, I went to see it yesterday.

It didn't tell me much I hadn't heard before, and I was just so thrilled that the movie might be seen by people who might otherwise not think about this stuff, that it really cheered me up. But then I started thinking about how different the world might be if Bush had not stolen the White House, and I got really depressed.

I don't know how Al Gore would have handled the 9/11 attacks but I am convinced he'd be a better president than Bush--and even in 2000, when I had little affection or admiration for Gore, I still knew he'd be better than Bush--I KNEW Bush would be a disaster; I knew he was simply a bad, bad man. It was very painful for me to listen to my friends in the Green party insist that there was no difference between the two major parties' candidates, because there was so little difference between the two major parties.

One reason I suffer so from insomnia is that I have always been a worrier. I sometimes wake up out of a deep sleep, my heart racing and my mouth dry with panic over melting polar ice caps and destruction of wetlands. My primary obsession is the environment and I admit that I have long felt it should be everyone's because if our world is uninhabitable, what does the rest of it matter?

I became concerned with the environment because I started paying attention to it, after a couple of decades of being trained to think of the earth as a combination self-replenishing piggy bank and bottomless toilet: anything you want, take from it, because there will always be more; anything you don't want, just dump it someplace where you can neither see nor smell it and that's it, it's gone. Realizing how thoroughly fucked up that approach is was a big deal for me, and one that caused as much conflict in my family as my departure from the Mormon church. One of the ways my Mormon Republican father earned a living was suing the likes of the Sierra Club whenever they did anything that would inhibit the right of farmers to suck as much water as they wanted out of the local river, or inhibit the right of timber companies to cut down trees on our mountain, or inhibit the right of ranchers to kill any and all wildlife they didn't like. He was not happy when I joined the ACLU, but he said, "Just so long as you never join the Sierra Club."

I've lost track of how many environmental organizations I belong to (including the Sierra Club) but I feel it's a losing battle. I will continue to try to minimize and compensate for the amount of CO2 I produce, but we've just fucked so many things up--and so many people don't want to change. My neighbors, for instance, leave their porch light on all night and sometimes forget to turn it off in the morning--it drives me NUTS to see it burning there all day, giving off heat (because that's what incandescent bulbs do) and CO2.

Here's the thing: WE SUCK at our primary job as human beings, which is to take care of one another and the world we live in. I'm not much one for volunteering or activism any more--my mission kind of killed that impulse--but perhaps I must force myself to do it anyway. But what should I do?

It's not like simply knowing about shit really helps much: In early 2003, when it became clear that we were going to war no matter what, I became a news junkie. I began spending two to three hours every day reading half a dozen online newspapers, trying to understand what was happening in our world, as if understanding it could somehow mitigate its destructiveness. And then, after the elections in 2004, I forced myself to cut back. I got rid of my online subscription to the Washington Post and a few other newspapers. I even canceled my subscription to my local paper, which had endorsed George Bush for president. I felt so impotent and enraged and hopeless that I just couldn't bear it. Which is pretty much how I feel right now.

Posted by holly at 12:40 PM | Comments (9)

July 5, 2006

FYI

All I've ever really wanted, really and truly, is a lifetime of connection to transcendent beauty.

Really now, that's not too much to ask, is it?

There have been times when I've been willing to accept substitutes, like enlightenment and serenity, and I sought them diligently. But now I see what shoddy substitutes they are, and I seek them no more.

P.S. I'm not kidding.

Posted by holly at 9:19 AM | Comments (7)

July 3, 2006

More on Avocados

In the comments on my guacomole recipe, Juti (thanks, Juti!) provided a link to this recipe for an avocado milkshilk on this very cool blog, the Traveler's Lunchbox, written by a gastronome named Melissa.

I just tried the recipe. I can't decide whether it is more aptly described as "heavenly" or "obscenely delicious."

It was also ridiculously easy.

I'm posting the recipe here the way I made it, because I want easy access to it. But you should follow the links and read Melissa's essay about "the secret life of avocados" and check out the rest of her entries as well.

Holly's ever-so-slightly-modified Avocado Milkshake

1 ripe Haas (dark-skinned) avocado, peeled and pitted
1/3 cup sweetened condensed milk
1 cup cold milk, more or less depending on thickness desired
several handfuls of ice
a splash of amaretto (Melissa recommends a few drops orange extract, or some vanilla, rum or coffee, but as I didn't have rum or orange extract or brewed coffee and wanted something more exotic than vanilla, I tried a substitution, which worked OK)

Put everything in a blender and blend on high until the ice is chopped fine. Pour in a glass and enjoy.

Posted by holly at 5:48 PM | Comments (5)

July 2, 2006

Itty Bitty Scraps of Fabric

My last two weekends have sucked, especially both Sundays. Some miasmatic malaise has come upon me while I slept Saturday night, bringing with it troubled and unsettling dreams, so that I awoke in a truly vile mood.

Today I dealt with it by being dutiful; I went into my "screw it; I might as well do stuff I don't want to do if I'm already cranky" mode and attended to some chores I've long been neglecting. But last Sunday I took a completely different approach to my bad mood.

Around noon I was sort of reading The Great Transformation, Karen Armstrong's new book, out on my back porch, and sort of thinking about how much I'd like to piece a quilt top but really shouldn't because it's so labor intensive and I just shouldn't take that much time off from uh, WRITING (like I ever really write anything significant) until I get tenure. I'd wander down to my basement as I do from time to time, and, just as a diversion, look through the half a dozen bins and footlookers I have stuffed with unused fabric. I also delved into the big crate where I keep the scraps I will one day piece into quilt tops. And I thought again about how I really shouldn't start such a major project when I have all this writing to do. And I went back out on the porch with my book.

And then I shut the book and went back to the basement and hauled my ironing board, my iron, my rotary cutter, my cutting board and armfuls of fabric up to my living room, and I got busy cutting and piecing, because why the hell not be creative when it's what you really want to do.

So there I was, kneeling on the floor, surrounded by mounds and mounds of fabric scraps. I knew one way to make the piecing pass more quickly was to dispense with a pattern and just START, so that's what I did. The result is this huge dramatic random thing with no pattern whatsoever, but lots of nice sharp shapes and interesting lines and juxtapositions of prints. There are great big rhomboidish pieces and triangles of various sizes and little two-inch squares. The unifying feature is that all the fabric has a black background. The second most common color is red, though every other color is represented too, with the exception of purple. All the fabric I used is left over from clothes I've made for myself.

I managed to finish the top in only two days, because I did almost nothing else. I find it hard to let go of projects like that; once I start, I want to finish them. I stayed up until 4 a.m. Sunday night, because I just couldn't stop. I told a friend this and he commended me on my discipline, but it wasn't discipline that kept me up, just compulsion.... not only did I stay up too late, but I also neglected things like personal hygiene and proper nutrition. Oh, and blogging. I don't know if you noticed, but I didn't post or read a single blog entry last weekend.

Anyway. Piecing the top was only the first step; I also had to decide what I'd back it with. I have six yards of something suitable--gray background with a black and white vine twining up it--that I bought on sale for a buck a yard, but I still had to iron it, sew it together (cotton calico, which is the best fabric for quilting comes in widths of 44 inches, which is obviously not wide enough to back a queen-sized quilt) and size it lengthwise. I'll use plain black for the binding. I won't be quilting it myself, because it's too big a project for me: I don't have a huge quilting frame I can set up in my house or the time to quilt it--that's the REAL investment of labor--so I'll just send it to my mother and let her quilt it on her machine.

And I sort of feel that project sated my need to deal with textiles and I sort of don't. I will probably whip up some more clothes this summer–I already made two dresses, one for me and one for my sister--but the thing about making clothes is that when I'm done, I've got MORE SCRAPS. As much as anything, I'm glad to have decreased by a little the huge mess of leftover fabric in my basement. I could make a dozen quilts before I got rid of all the scraps I've got right this very second, and when I think about that, it's all I can do not to start another quilt right this very second. I could gladly piece another quilt today, making up a pattern this time, because it's cool to see a coherent design take shape. Or maybe I won't. I just heard about a new yarn shop in town--maybe I'll go see what they have to offer and take up knitting again.

Posted by holly at 6:50 PM | Comments (7)

July 1, 2006

Ding Dong, The Couch Is Gone

Remember when I wrote about how much I hated my couch, the hideous, old, uncomfortable couch desecrating my living room?

Well, last week I just couldn't stand it any more, so I went furniture shopping. It took me a while to find something I both liked and could afford, but eventually I came across something I could live with and put down a deposit. Tuesday two very nice young men showed up and assembled a spiffy new futon in my living room. At first I wasn't sure I liked it: it's a futon, not a couch, and futons just aren't as settled and grown-up as couches. But I wanted something practical--something my cat couldn't shred, first of all--and I also don't feel settled enough to invest in expensive upholstered furniture. The futon is also big: taller, wider, and deeper than its predecessor. At first it seemed to overpower the room, and I worried that I'd made a mistake.

But now I've had a few days to get used to it and it's fine. I don't love it, but I don't hate it the way I hated that couch, either. But the real bonus is that the couch has been granted a new life and I no longer hate it, either. In fact, I love it!

I have a screened back porch that's bigger than my bedroom. It's really great. I have lots of plants out there, and my cat sits and watches rabbits and robins cross my lawn, so she feels she's communing with the outdoors but I don't have to worry about her being run over or throttled by a nasty dog. There's a table and chairs as well, and I often eat out there during the summer. I sometimes sit and read, but the chairs are those formed plastic affairs and they just ain't good for long-term sitting.

Enter the crappy old couch! Originally I had the guys haul it back there just so I could store it someplace until I could call someone to take it to the dump. But then I thought, "What the hell; might as well use it for the summer," and I covered it with an old flannel sheet so the dust wouldn't settle into it. And then I sat down on it to read and while it wasn't very comfortable compared to the furniture INSIDE my house, it was a billion times more comfortable than the other patio furniture OUTSIDE. The cat seems pretty pleased with it too. And now I'm thinking I'll get a tarp and cover it during the winter so the snow doesn't damage it, and it can live out there forever.

One of my friends told me that when he lived in Syracuse, there was an ordinance banning furniture from front porches unless it met certain specifications: wicker was allowed, for instance, and wrought iron. But the ordinance was designed to make it impossible for people (i.e., students) too lazy and/or cheap to transport some awful castoff couch to the dump where it belonged to instead plop the couch down on the front porch where everyone would have to look at it, and where couch owners could lounge, drink beer, and heckle their neighbors and unsuspecting passers-by. My town has no such ordinance, but even if it did, I don't think it would matter because MY hideous castoff couch is on my BACK porch.

And it is glorious. I'm going out to sit there now.

Posted by holly at 8:01 AM | Comments (3)