19 posts from March 2008

What do you most hate sharing with other people?

My feelings.

Or maybe pie.

What do you most hate sharing with other people?

My feelings.

Or maybe pie.

Why do you think it is some people don't get along with you?

I am given to understand some people think I am judgmental.  Feh.  I say most people are not judgmental enough.

And, if we're being honest here, I don't care if everyone likes me.  If I did, I guess I would try to be nicer.  But I don't, so I go on being my harsh, abrasive self and kind of not caring about other people's feelings and still enough people like me as I am.  My husband thinks I'm a freakin disaster, but he seems to enjoy the spectacle. 

Double feh.

So, I'm really hooked on Top Chef.  I should never have got satellite TV.  I used to watch Top Chef in season 2, then I didn't have TV for a while and almost forgot about it, but now it's taken over my life again. 

I have some pet peeves about this show, though.  For one thing, could we stop using "housewife food" as a dis?  I mean, I get the idea, but let me tell you something:  Those chefs would be hard pressed to do what your average housewife does, which is put 2-3 homecooked meals on the table, different every day, on a limited budget, with a kid hanging on her leg and, most likely, slightly crappy tools to work with.  I mean, sure, we're talking about a different skill set here.  The cheftestants do not have to answer the phone, placate a child, look at a somewhat forlorn piece of salmon you had totally forgotten was in the freezer and has been there for, god, months! and decide what could make this poor thing palatable.  Cheftestants do not have to care if the dishes they serve provide balanced nutrition, day in and day out.  They do not have to care about the leftovers.  Yeah, housewives--we may not cook 100 sauces to go on every dish just to make it look pretty, but that's mainly because we have to do our own dishes.  Feh.

Second, what's with the condescension toward kids?  It seems like, in every season, there is some challenge involving the feeding of kids, and then we get cheftestants complaining about the unsophisticated palates of kids and just about the horrors of having to deal with children at all.  For one thing, I hate to tell them this, but even if you only do fine dining, you're going to have to please your customers, and sometimes your customers are going to have decidedly unsophisticated palates, no matter what their ages.  I liked when Tiffani (season 1) asked Colicchio how he would feel if someone came in to CraftSteak and asked him to deep fry their steak, and he's all, "It happens."  That's the reason he is a successful chef.  Your unsophisticated customer wants shit on a shingle--you give it to them.  They come back and throw more money at you.  You get to go on TV and cavort with Padma Lakshmi.  It's pretty simple, really.  Also, if you want the kids of today to have sophisticated palates as adults, it's a good idea to start with them when they're young.  Instead of sneering at them for the unfortunate fact of their age, make them some great food.  Not all food that gets served to kids needs to patronize them, but at the same time, they are going to be less impressed with your clever ideas than with the way the food actually tastes. 

Third, what's with the molecular gastronomy?  Now, I've really only *read* about wd-50 and Ferran Adria and all that, and I totally get that what they're doing and what Marcel and Richard (cheftestants from different seasons) are doing is not the same thing.  I think, from what I've read and the few recipes I've sussed out, Wylie Dufresne and Adria and those guys are doing some pretty amazing things with food.  But, maybe I'm some kind of bumpkin, but...uh...gelees are just Jell-O, you know?  I mean, I didn't really realize that gelees were considered molecular gastronomy until I encountered the unfortunately-coiffed Marcel in season 2.  And this whole "we can make food taste better through science" is really what Con-Agra and Kraft have been asserting for years.  How is it different for some anonymous food scientist at some Con-Agra plant somewhere to use bizarre chemicals in food from a chef using them?  I really don't want to eat chemicals and nonfoods, although I tolerate green food dye in my beer at St. Patty's day.  I want to eat food.  I am supposing that this makes me inexcusably out of touch, but I don't give a fig, or even a fig foam.  I just don't see what all the hype is about.  Admittedly, though, having the mere scent of smoked ras al hanout waft over my crab cake is intriguing and good sounding.  But I'm OK without isomalt or any other food additive.  Food tastes good, you know.  I heard a while back that at a conference Ferran Adria decided he had found the perfect gelee in the natural substance that occurs around tomato seeds.  So, um, maybe we should take that as a clue, guys.  Perfect ingredients don't need your tools and scientific ingredients, although ras al hanout is usually not a bad thing. 

Anyway, this season, this Dale guy--damn I want to have a beer with him.  He seems so...bitter.  Hot.

And finally, I'm getting a bit of a crush on Padma.  At first, I thought she was, you know, a bit spokesmodelly.  Like, all style (and clearly a LOT of style), no substance.  Then I found out she was married to Salman Rushdie, and I had to rethink my entire opinion of her.  I mean...really?  Rushdie?  Damn.  She must have something under the hood, no?  Then she published some great chutney recipes and was all, "oh, these old things?" about it.  Then I heard she curses a lot off camera.  Then she was hanging out in a tight shirt-dress playing pool, and I'm kinda in love.  Yeah, that's all it takes.

Oh, and one last thing:  Why do they keep complaining about not being pastry chefs?  Yeah, yeah, baking is a particular science, but fekkin-A, you know you're going on Top Chef, learn some basic desserts.  And if you ever serve me cake mix for my wedding, I will cut you.  Not that I'm ever going to have a wedding, let alone one that is catered, let alone one that is catered by awesomely prickish cheftestants on the greatest competition-reality show of all time (after Project Runway, that is). 

Show us your favorite flower.

The iris.  The standard purple-and-yellow are fine, but not my favorite.  My favorite place in Tokyo that is not a drinking establishment is the Meiji Iris Garden in full bloom.  The scent of the irises--that wet, dense perfume they give off--drifts all the way out to the main path that leads to the Meiji Shrine and it curls around you as you walk toward the iris garden.  I love the weeping, open shape and the patterns of the colors.  

On one of our first dates, I had gone to Nagoya to see T, carrying a copy of a Heisei-era poem that had been composed about an iris garden near Nagoya.  The poem itself, in ancient Japanese, started each line with a syllable from the Japanese word for iris (kakitsubata--thus the five lines started with the syllables ka-ki-tsu-ba-ta).  I wanted to see this garden, allegedly still standing.  T worked on deciphering the poem and its context from the photocopy of the scholarly text I had got it from (don't ask) and found the temple and the garden and took me there.  I would have married him there on the spot.  It's a beautiful little ancient garden, and it was so sweet of him to find it for me.

What quality in your best friend are you most envious of and why?

It depends on which friend we're talking about.

The one:  I'm probably most envious of his utter self-containment.  He is hermit-like and apparently comfortable with that.  It's very Aristotelian of him, and I envy that.  (I'm referring to Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics when I say Aristotelian).

The other:  So, OK, he's a bit of a dilettante, but he knows something about everything.  I mean, he's been in the army and achieved fluency in Spanish and Arabic along with some degree of ability (I'm not sure how much) of Italian and Slovene and then busts out with French or Scots when you least expect it--not to mention that he can insult you in Russian.  He's been a shipbuilder.  He brews his own beer and makes his own furniture.  He knows his liquor, he knows random things about beekeeping.  He is, wow.  I am in awe of the sheer volume and breadth.  It's really something. 

I wish I knew shit.  Alternatively I wish I could do the hermit thing, thereby hiding the fact that I don't know shit from everyone. 

OOOOH, Emily Yoffe has brought the noise! 

Yeah, she made the outrageous claim that kids do better in a household with two married parents, preferably their natural ones (but, sure, adopted ones can stand in just fine and so can responsible and caring stepparents--that's my commentary, I guess, since I don't think she really addresses it, but given the fact that her article is so focused on the economic benefits of two-parent households, it would make sense).  I know, I know!  She's so utterly Victorian!  To even suggest that women might oughtn't (Too much time in Arkansas.  Just deal with the double modal.) conceive of children with someone who ain't going to be around come time to buy diapers!  It's so oppressive!

Or, I guess, that's what Broadsheet thinks.  But, meh.  They get a big meh and even a snort of contempt because they (where "they" equals Tracy Clark-Flory) present no actual evidence or data to counter anything Yoffe wrote.  Nothing.

The thing that bothered me most about Yoffe's piece wasn't the thesis of it or her focus on the economic indicators, because those are important.  But I thought she ignored one of the most brutal problems with kids born out of wedlock:  Not only are these kids almost certainly going to grow up poorer and with less parental involvement (duh), they are vastly more likely to be victims of child abuse.  Kids raised by two parents other than their own natural or adoptive parents are at increased risk of being abused, but that number increases higher for kids who have no father figure around at all, except maybe (and possibly worst of all) a string of boyfriends.

There are a lot of possible reasons for this, and you can peruse the Internet at your leisure to find hypotheses galore, although a lot of them have to do with economic stress and are thus related to the poverty argument, but there are other possibilities as well.  It is a fact that most fatal child abuse is perpetrated by the biological mother and most sexual abuse of children is perpetrated by a male who is not the biological father. 

There are a host of other worrisome statistics.  Kids who grow up without their fathers are more likely--in some cases, vastly more likely--to engage in all kinds of risky behavior, end up dropping out of school, end up on drugs, in prison, etc.  Most rapists grew up in fatherless households.

I have seen some research suggesting that two adoptive, committed parents of the same sex (yeah, I'm talking about the gays.  Yesterday I mentioned the Latins.  Today it's the gays.) are equally effective at preventing most of these bad outcomes (I'd say becoming a rapist is a bad outcome, wouldn't you?), leading some to suggest that perhaps it is the mere presence of two loving people who are absolutely committed to the child's best interests.  However, the research is somewhat limited due to a) that type of family being relatively rare and b) the fact that most of the gay couples who adopt/give birth are well educated and of above-average income, confounding comparison with most children born out of wedlock.  That being said, I will continue my support for gay adoptive parents--I don't know, but I have a gut feeling that the more loving and stable adoptive homes that exist for kids, the better off we all are.

It is of grave concern to me that feminism seems to care very little about what is good for kids (or men) because they are so focused on what is "good" for women.  Feminism will continue to ignore the data that kids do much better in a stable home with two parents because it suggests that women should, oh, at least consider how their choices are going to affect others.  And we can't have that.  Or at least Tracy Clark-Flory can't.  The commenters on that piece are a bit more reasonable about it.  No one--not even me or Emily Yoffe--is suggesting that women should marry men who are clearly unable to act responsibly toward both the mother and child and obviously not abusive men or men who have violent rages and make the house feel unsafe and constantly stressful.  Yoffe and I would venture to suggest, though, that perhaps women should GET ON THE FUCKING PILL before they allow themselves to get knocked up by these guys.  But, of course, we shouldn't get all judgey and preachy at women (and men, sure) who are totally fucking their kids over because it's, like, a woman's right to do what she pleases.

Every time some new report comes out that links some behavior in the mother with some outcome in the kid, every damn feminist website screams, "OH MY GOD, THEY ALWAYS BLAME THE MOM."  Well, sometimes, maybe it's the mom's fault, eh?  It's less about blaming the woman, I think, than about finding out what's best for kids, but the constant focus on the woman, the woman, always the woman, means that we can't find out what risk factors there might be for childhood obesity, for example.  Because if it's linked to working mothers, as it has been, the feminists will fucking shriek.  Similarly, there will be a shrill outcry if it is suggested that wymmins are animals and share any qualities with other female animals, including, of course, the dreaded maternal instinct.  We don't have instincts!  We went to college! 

I know, I know.  I'm hopelessly conservative and out of date.  But I warned you:  I care fuck-all about "progress" if progress means throwing kids under the bus.  I also famously hate the type of diseased individualism we have taken to celebrating in this country--hey, man, whatever you want to do as long as it makes you happy.  Feh.  As Kant said, doing your duty first makes you worthy of happiness and 'duty' implies the existence of some type of relationship.

Now, maybe I'm just engaging in pointless handwringing.  God knows, that's what Tracy Clark-Flory would say, right?  Maybe all of those differences between single-parent households and two-parent households can be explained simply by the poverty.  I don't really see how you can ferret out the differences between differences caused solely by poverty and those related to the presence of parents, because in so many cases it is precisely the loss of the one parent that causes the poverty.  So, is the loss of the parent causing the poverty, and then the poverty causes the other problems?  Or is the absence of the parent causing all of it, proximally?  And what are we to make of the fact that biological fathers who live with their children are, compared to single mothers and unrelated men, less likely to abuse their children?  And, by the way, comparisons to Scandi-fuckin-navia don't really hold up; there are so many cultural differences between the US and Sweden that it's way too hard to control for all the variables.  It is certainly possible that with their system that has come close, or so I hear, to eliminating child poverty in their countries also eliminate or nearly eliminate the social difficulties of single-parent households.  Anyway, eliminating child poverty is a worthy goal even if it doesn't, but it's too hard to say. 

Furthermore, comparisons with the animal world are not helpful here since there are no other animals that I can think of who require several years of care before they become independent of their parents.  Also, no other animal young are expected to learn language, to learn to be civilized and ethical, etc.  Human children take much more effort and care and time than any other animal young, so far as I know.  Correct me if I'm wrong--is there some rare bird in the Upper Orinoco that has young who now require 12 years of schooling before they are ready to the leave the nest?

I'm going to go ahead, since it's late and I'm tired, and go way out on a limb here.  I have, as some of you know, a special interest in sociopathy.  Of the sociopaths I have personally known, all of them came from fatherless homes (and some of them from motherless homes, too, i.e., they had been abandoned by both parents).  It makes a certain amount of sense since, while there is probably a biological component for the antisocial personality disorders, it is thought that they can be prevented in early childhood through certain parenting techniques--parenting techniques that are often more doable in a two-parent household.  I would suggest--and some others have, too--that single-parent households are more likely to push kids who already have the biological component to become sociopaths and that two-parent households have a higher likelihood of preventing it.  Incidentally, the rapists mentioned above are more likely to be psychopaths than sociopaths, though they both lie at various places on the antisocial spectrum.

I was just thinking about this the other day, how in this country we put children in their own beds as soon as we can get them to sleep there.  We have a host of experts telling us how to fight the baby's natural instinct to cry like hell when they are left to sleep by themselves; we have to send the message, of course, that in this life, kiddo, you're on your own.  I think attachment parenting gets some stuff wrong, too, but how can we expect kids to grow up feeling part of a deeply loving relationship, feeling that other people's feelings matter, feeling connected to other people when we ignore the kid's needs from infancy.  Not all the kid's needs, yeah, just the need to feel safe with his parents while he sleeps.  I figure that as human emotions and relationships have evolved, sleeping was probably a dangerous time.  A lot of predators are nocturnal, and a baby left alone in a crib all night would have been easy prey.  It seems at least plausible to me that we evolved to prefer sleeping with our loved ones (and this is still how it's done in many places) because it was safer.  (We had our kid sleep in his own bed in our room--our bed when he was very young was too damned fluffy to be safe for an infant--but we got up with him every time he cried.  He now sleeps in his own bed in his own room without any trouble, but if he wakes up in the middle of the night and needs us, we let him sleep with us.  To me it is more important that he know that we are always there with him and for him than to promote a very false independence.  He's 3, man, he is not independent, although he does go potty all by himself.  woot!)  It isn't just the sleeping thing.  I know parents who don't think twice about keeping their baby essentially confined all day long--in cribs, playpens, high chairs, car seats--forcing the baby to conform to the adult's schedule and needs and utterly ignoring the need the baby has to play, move, rest, eat when hungry, etc.  Not to mention that the kid is basically alone most of these times, experiencing the world without the touch, voice, smell of a loved one.  Working parents have come out and admitted in national magazines that they don't enjoy and cannot force themselves to enjoy playing with their kids, so they work instead and hire out the play, as if the kids won't get the message.  But to kids, "love" isn't a word or a feeling--it's an action.  They don't think you love them because you say it, because the word itself doesn't mean much to a 2-year-old.  They learn what it means by associating it with actions and with time spent (the currency of love is time).  A child whose parents are there, making that child their first (not only, but first) time and energy commitment, obviously enjoying the time spent and actively joining the child in their engagement with the world--that child knows it is loved and is lovable, and that child conversely learns to do love to others.  "Do love" is an odd construction, I know, but we adults have come to think of "love" as just a feeling, not an action.  I accepted that without thinking about it until I met T who doesn't like to say "I love you" but is always sure to act in such a way that he doesn't need to; he gives me the time and energy that are love.  We give that to each other, and we give that to our son. 

Love is an action.  The currency of love is time.  Do your duty by your spouse and kids.  Take responsibility--yeah, of course, fathers that goes for you, too, but fathers have less reproductive choice here, having no birth control pill and no say in the abortion question--for the life you create. 

I'm too tired to proofread this now, and tomorrow is my darling son's birthday, not to mention the community Easter egg hunt, and I have a ladybug-shaped cake to frost (coconut cake, and man, it is some fabulous cake--Martha Stewart's recipe, even!) and presents to wrap and gather and blah blah.  Ha.  It's 4:00 a.m.  Awesome.  So, if there are places I should have edited, grant me a modicum of latitude, I beg of you. 

Oh, finally, don't get all up in my face with cohabitation being as good as marriage.  In America, at least, cohabitations are much more likely to break up than marriages are.  In their first 5 years, 20% of marriages will break up, but 40% of cohabitations will; in the next 5 years, the numbers jump to 40% for marriages and 60% for cohabitations.  So, in terms of commitment and stability, they aren't equivalent to marriage. 

I read, a little while ago, a post from Jack Yan about the new Vogue cover featuring LeBron James and the sort of irritating (to me) Gisele Bundchen (umlaut purposefully omitted).  I have seen the cover in the supermarkets and stuff and thought it was, whatever, LeBron looks kind of hot, Gisele looks like Gisele, but whatever.

I never once thought of King Kong or the threat white women face from big, bad, burly black men.  Not once.  At least, not until I read Jack Yan's post.  And see, that is why I am a racist I guess, because I am completely oblivious to the racist stereotypes being perpetrated at my local supermarket.  The blogosphere is apparently alive! with all kinds of people being offended by the presentation of LeBron as scary and gorilla-like.  They have taken umbrage!  I had no idea until I read Jack Yan's post, and then I dismissed it as another case of people who have an ideology that they then go around seeking evidence for--as the Great Tony Mattina used to say, let the data drive the theory, not the other way around.  If you want to find evidence of racism, you'll certainly find it, but the actual data would suggest a much more complex picture--complex and nuanced like Obama's speech (a speech, by the way, that I thought was fucking excellent.  Obama, I will vote for you.  Unless you do something really stupid, like have sex with rabbits on camera with that blind guy from New York.)

Then, because my job is totally sucking tonight (grrrrr--pulmonary function tests suck ass!), I perused some of the links Jack provides and even read what my old friends at Jezebel had to say*.  And now I have to add this:

If you look at that picture of LeBron and the G-bund and see King Kong and a scary black man--maybe even a criminal!  get out the chastity belts!--that says way more about you than it does about the rest of us who just looked at it and thought, "oh, wow, rich, famous people on the cover of a magazine.  fancy that.  maybe i'll get some altoids..."

I'm not going to say I'm colorblind--I can't, since about a year after I moved to Montana (by far the whitest place I ever lived, since I divided my childhood between Hispanic-majority New Mexico and a black-majority part of Arkansas) I caught myself thinking, as I saw a black man walking down the street, "Ooh, black dude.  Damn, I'll bet he's conscious of that all the time living here.  Or maybe not.  Maybe all the white people just pretend they don't notice, like I'm pretending not to notice.  I'm way overthinking this.  He's just a dude, walking down the street.  But why is he carrying a squeegee?  Eh, what the hell?  Why not carry a squeegee?"

But, honestly, when I looked at that Vogue cover I didn't see a "black man" let alone a "scary black man" and certainly not a gorilla-like black man.  I saw LeBron James, with a basketball and a Brazilian (model).  No umbrage necessary. 

Also, offense is regularly taken at the fact that Vogue so rarely features anything but white (assuming we count the Latins as white.  Yeah, I said "the Latins.") on its covers...so...I'm not sure exactly what the offended multitudes want. 

Days like this, and especially since the speech, I really think we need Obama at this point.  We have got to start getting past this shit, people.  In general, certain segments of the population are getting way too offended all the time (I have no idea how you even live that way--what is it like to be offended all the time?  It must particularly suck since you do not, in fact, have a right not to be offended). 

Or should we just keep fighting over the actions of our ancestors?  Mine, before coming to America, were sitting around in Ireland wondering if they should try to hold out during the Great Potato Famine (fortunately, we're stout people) or get on a boat to come to the promised land to be...wage slaves and sharecroppers.  By the time they got here, slavery was near its end in this country (though wage slavery continues unabated), and anyway they were far too freakin poor to own anyone.  And the Osage ancestors were, you know, chilling on the res after walking the Trail of Tears and all that (but they weren't slaves, right?  so that makes it all OK.  except that some of them were slaves, and anyway, like 95% of them died).  So, those are my oppressive white ancestors*.  How about yours?

Also, why don't African-American people in America seem more concerned, as a whole, about slavery that is still going on in Africa?  You'd think there would be a sympathy thing.  Feh.  (moderately related side note:  The entire reason I cannot stomach Chris Rock is that I once saw him doing stand-up and he was saying that white people are always complaining about everything, "Oh, I'm lactose intolerant" but you don't see starving Africans complaining about being lactose intolerant because they're just happy to get milk.  This left me speechless.  I'm just a cracker, but even I know that most Africans are in fact lactose intolerant, and so if they are being given milk, they aren't complaining about lactose intolerance mainly because they're too sick to do so.  As Public Enemy once said, "Read a book or something.  Learn about yourself, learn your culture."  WORD.  But, hey, with a bit of luck, the people who are in charge of sending Africans relief packages are also crackers who know about the racial and geographic lines of lactose intolerance.  Hmm, but now I'm reading through this collection of quotes and finding him kind of awesome.  Maybe I gave up on him too soon.  He should have just gone with the peanut allergy instead of lactose intolerance.) 

But that's just me.  I am white, and so that per force makes me a racist in the irrefutable logic of the offended.

*But on one of their many sister sites, Guanabee, I found this interesting tidbit:  "There’s been a long tradition of a “fight for white,” meaning that various ethnic groups over the years have had to struggle for the chance to be seen as normal and neutral. Irish-Americans, for example, who are today almost synonymous with the concept of what it means to be white (fevered dancing without the use of hips or shoulders, the consumption of potatoes), were very much “the other” for a very, very long time in America. Jewish and Italian Americans were also not always considered white folks here in the old U.S. of A. " 

**I also have Quapaw Indian ancestry.  And no, you cannot tell by just looking at me.  I pretty much look like a potato-eatin honky.

Alright, here's something most of you don't know about me:

Back in the day--really, back before I could actually vote, but that's neither here nor there--I was a fan of Reagan, a supporter of the death penalty, and a devotee of William F. Buckley.  No, it's true.  I was openly conservative.  I relished the humor of P.J. O'Rourke and delighted in bashing hippies. 

Nevermind what changed, but when I turned 18, I voted for Bill Clinton.  Yes, Clinton. 

I still read O'Rourke and Buckley and loved them (I actually still harbor admiration for O'Rourke's earlier work and for Buckley in general--dude had class) and I often read George F. Will, but something changed during those Clinton years.  (Besides, Buckley was really a libertarian, and his analysis of why we end the War on Drugs was spot-on).

O'Rourke stopped being funny.  Not just O'Rourke.  The right in general lost its shit and went off some kind of invisible edge that apparently leads to instantly becoming a bitter old loser.  I couldn't really tolerate the way the right reacted to the Clinton presidency.  The Kenneth Starr thing--all of it, but especially the probing into Clinton's apparently consensual sexual relationships--really pissed me off.  The general disrespect the right suddenly showed to the office of the president pissed me off.  Conservatives are supposed to be all about traditional values like respect.  But in every red quarter, from the National Review to the increasingly abrasive Christopher Hitchens, absolute disrespect was the order of the day.  This offended my conservative nature, really and truly, and I gradually abandoned all things Republican. 

Now, as you're aware, I've hardly become some kind of Berkeley hippie (sorry, electric firefly!).  I still have a lot of things in common with the right, including my extreme tendency toward libertarianism and my general conservatism as regards social and cultural values.  As we say in country music, I still say "yes, ma'am" and "no, sir" and call men "sugar" and "honey" even if I don't know them.  I know, I know, the retrograde gender roles drive you nuts, don't they? 

Anyway, this is all leading somewhere.  While most of the right-ish commentators went through an extremely ugly period during the Clinton years, the more serious ones have recovered and become readable again (I don't even bother with the wingnuts on talk radio or Fox, not at all), the Hitch has not.

Listen up, Hitchens ('s if, right?):  YOU WERE WRONG, AND ARE STILL WRONG, ABOUT IRAQ.  None of your arguments are consistent or logically coherent--they hardly constitute arguments anymore.  You're scrabbling around for any reason for the waste of life and resources and money (did we mention the 3 trillion or so dollars this shit is costing us?  did we further mention that we're in a recession, the dollar is weak, and we could probably find better, less fatal things to spend a trillion bucks on?  finally, for a laugh, did we mention that that is apparently twice the GNP of Canada!  LOL  Ah, Canada always makes me chuckle--but I digress).  And you're not coming up with anything solid.  Yeah, Saddam is out of power.  Woo-freakin-hoo.  Beyond that, though--uh, nothing.  There's nothing.  No other good has come of this.  (I know the Hitch would ding me for being overly flip about Saddam being out of power.  If the overthrow of Saddam Hussein eventually leads to some good for the people of Iraq, then fantastic.  I shall at that time eat my fucking shoe, OK?  So far pretty much all they've got in return is death, terror, and chaos.  At least under Saddam, they only had the first two.  Damn!  I'm being flippant again!)

If you're not concerned about the monetary toll--although that should be the first consideration of a true Reagan conservative--and maybe you don't care about what we're actually doing to the nation and people of Iraq, let's talk about our own soldiers for a minute.  Let's remind ourselves how many of our own young men and women have died so far (nearly 4000 with close to 30,000 casualties).  Then maybe we should have a sit-down about what this is doing to families all over America, families whose sons and daughters and mothers and fathers are deployed for looooong stretches of time--many of whom were in the freakin' National Guard and NEVER expected an overseas deployment.  See, conservatives are supposed to care first about money and second about the troops and about families.  But we're not caring about any of those things anymore, are we?  We are abusing our soldiers by reneging on our obligations to them; we are abusing their families the same way.  A good soldier probably wouldn't say that, but I'm only a (ex-)soldier's daughter, so I can get out of line.  We are abusing the trust that our troops and their families have in us, to only risk their lives when it is going to serve some goddamned purpose.  Perhaps we should remind ourselves that, once our soldiers do finally get to come home, many of them are returning in no condition to participate in society again.  Thanks to the damage war has done to many of them--physical damage and psychological damage--they, like other generations of soldiers before them, are having a difficult time reintegrating (it doesn't help, no doubt, that there are no jobs here waiting for them; it helps somewhat less that many of them are stop-lossed).  Some portion of these people, we can be reasonably sure, due both to the failing economy and to the psychological damage I mentioned earlier, will end up on the street corner near your local Wal-Mart with a sign offering a blessing from God and a plea for any change you can spare.  People who have risked their lives to defend the "American dream" and our constitutional rights (not that either is actually at stake in this particular conflict, but they haven't *really* been in most of the wars we've engaged in) deserve better, man.

And we haven't even talked about what we're doing to Iraq or to the Middle East in general.  Or to our long-term relationships in the world.  Sorry, but these ain't the Reagan years anymore.  This isn't the dread Communists we're fighting, and we are no longer the world's only superpower.  We're throwing the future of our country down the drain, mainly to appease a bunch of elderly, rich white men who talk daily to God--oh, and to appease hawkish pundits like you. 

As a former conservative, frankly, it makes me pretty sick.  As the proud daughter of a Marine who went for two tours of duty in Vietnam, it makes me quite ill.  As an American who is not especially interested in being the world's only superpower (nice syntax, eh?), it just disgusts me.  This is not where we need to be going.

Not to mention--Hitch, lay off God, alright?  Your self-assured self-righteousness and bitter bigotry is no better than that of the Christian fundies you despise.  You make me sick, man.  You used to be witty and have a decent head on your shoulders, but Clinton seems to have screwed you up, bad.  Maybe you have some kind of political PTSD?  Maybe you're just jealous that Monica didn't blow you.  Whatever.  I can no longer even pretend to take your shit seriously. 

That's right.  Henceforth, Christopher Hitchens is DEAD TO ME.

P.S. Speaking of infiltrating sovereign nations to overthrow their governments, does anyone actually know why the CIA infiltrated Australia?  Was it because of Elvis?  Also, why aren't Aussies more bitter about it?

If you could go back and change one thing you've done in your life, what would it be?
Submitted by Devinoid.

What is with these questions?  They're big on the deaths and regrets lately.  I've never understood this particular type of question.  If I changed something I had done in my life--anything--I would be a different person than I am today, in a different place.  Why would I want that?  I like who I am, I have a fantastic marriage, great friends, a lovely extended family, my own house with two unteachable hounds living in the backyard, a good relationship with my parents, and a son who is a really terrific person whom I enjoy spending time with.  So, if I went back and changed something that I've done, any choice I've made, I wouldn't be here now.  Maybe the alternate ending in that Choose-Your-Own-Adventure would be nice, too, but I like this one.  Besides, you never know when you're going to end up in the dungeon of some evil lord.

I do, however, often wish that my dad had lived long enough to meet his grandson.  Nothing would have made my father happier--or it might be better to say that meeting him would have been the only real happiness in my dad's life, since he felt he fucked things up with me pretty badly, and he would have had a second chance with his grandson.  And my son would have loved my dad's singing and bizarre sense of humor.  I sing a lot of crazy songs to my son, but I can't remember the words to "One-Eyed Flying Purple People-Eater" which my dad used to sing to me all the time.  My stepdad is a fantastic grandpa, too, absolutely, but my son and my father would have really hit it off.  Admittedly, I kind of all around wish my dad hadn't died, but I never wished so more than when I had my baby.

But, see, there again.  It is possible that if my first husband had not been a completely self-absorbed prick when my dad died and we went back for the funeral and everything, I might not have divorced him when I did (oh, it would have happened someday, but to be a self-absorbed prick at the funeral of your wife's father is just unacceptable and kind of pushed me over the edge)--and if I hadn't divorced him when I did, I wouldn't have flown off to Japan just when I did, and I wouldn't have been in that street in Numazu that sunny day in March, and I wouldn't have met the T and had this gorgeous son...

I'm going to stop short of saying something cloying like "everything happens for a reason," but you can't go back and change anything.  The bad choices and mistakes had just as much influence over where I ended up, so we have to leave them in there to get here. 

Or, as Rascal Flatts says, "God bless the broken road that led me straight to you."  Yick.