The date was Sunday, September 16, 2001 and like many other people around the world, I was still trying to find my balance in the “new normal.” Already, critical thinking had been swept away and replaced by jingoism and a caustic patriotic fervor. Two days earlier, I’d watched with great skepticism as our then-president stood bow-legged atop a pile of rubble, a bullhorn in one hand and the shoulder of an exhausted firefighter in the other. It was a photo-op made in publicist heaven.

We’ll smoke ‘em outta their holes, he said. You’re either with us or with the terrorists, he said. By September 20^th, the man widely perceived as a spoiled dolt on September 10^th was suddenly enjoying a historical 90% approval rating. America had had an abrupt and virulent case of amnesia. I had hoped we were smarter than that. But we weren’t and we’re not.

Nine years later, the un-thinking zombie-people among us not only have the bullhorn, but with it—and the complicity of Republicans and the still-spineless Democratic leadership as well—they’re framing the debate. As usual. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Those of us who cling to reason until our nails peel back and point to the First Amendment until our joints lock, can see the truth through the agenda-driven spin. But it’s pretty dang tough to fight the hysteria ginned up over the Mosque at Ground Zero Islamic Cultural Center, when leaders like Howard Dean and Harry Reid retaliate with a hem and a haw. Their let’s-try-and-find-a-compromise legitimization of right-wing idealoguery is about as effective as if they showed up to a duel, whipped out their guns and fired off little yellow banners reading “POW!”

Meanwhile, to the cacophony of Christian imperialists screeching about hallowed ground and the Islamization of America, a privileged college kid the media insists on absolving as “drunken,” went all West Side Story with his pocket-knife on the face of a Manhattan cabbie. Ahmed Sharif answered “yes” when the fare asked whether he was a Muslim. That was Sharif’s second mistake. His first was going to his job of 15-years that morning, only to be violently attacked by someone who didn’t like his way of life.

Hmmm—that’s eerily familiar. It’s reminiscent of something—. What could it be? Oh! I know! It’s like the 3,000 people—Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Atheists, Scientologists, Hedonists, Nudists, Humanists, Wiccans, members of Iglesia Maradoniana and probably a Satan Worshipper or two—who showed up to work at One World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001.

It cannot be understated that all who died that day deserve to be equally commemorated.

And speaking of commemorating them, Pastor Terry Jones of Gainesville, Florida, is having a bonfire on September 11^th to do just that. The International Burn a Koran Day event will be held at Jones’s church, the ironically named Dove World Outreach Center. I often think of book burning and peace doves and world outreach in the same meditation, don’t you?

According to Jones’s website, his 50-member church is “a New Testament, Charismatic, Non-Denominational Church that believes in the whole Bible and that we are to act in response to the word of God in order to change the times we are living in. Those times have gotten further and futher [their typo, not mine] away from God; full of deception like abortion and same sex marriages.” I really like the charismatic part.

Pastor Terry is as egomaniacal and presumptuous (i.e. cray-zay!) as the next extremist and claims to know the difference between the word of God and the dirty lies of Allah. Even though he told New York Times reporter Damien Cave that, when it comes to his familiarity with the Koran, “I have no experience with it whatsoever. I only know what the Bible says.”

I personally prefer to read a book before I burn it. But I like broad horizons, while Pastor Terry? Well. His worldview is smaller than his penis.

Normally, a dude with God’s ear and a flaccid member bigger than his global awareness is largely discounted by the masses as a street corner proselytizing whack job with little impact on so much as whether a dung beetle rolls or buries its “food.”  And, too, it’s not like he’s the first White Christian to exhibit nincompoopy aggression toward Muslims; Florida, specifically, has seen a recent uptick in acts of domestic terrorism aimed at Muslims.

But as Cave pointed out, Pastor Terry’s bonfire has earned him denouncements from a number of Islamic leaders around the world; one English Islamic group is urging its members to “rise up and act.” Not surprisingly, Terry is deaf to the possibility that his actions are dangerously inflammatory and in fact feels he’s the one being persecuted. Not the brightest bulb in the Evangelical shed, that one.

Personally, if I were a book burner, I would call for the event to be inclusive. Something more along the lines of International Burn a Bible, A Book of Mormon, a Torah, Dianetics and The Entire Twilight Series Day. It’s all just a bunch of hooey that leads certain gullibles to do very ugly things in the name of their God, which is always the Only God.

Flag waving or not, an extremist is an extremist is an extremist.

(As published today in San Diego CityBeat.)

RUBY: Because I have brown skin and they don’t think brown skin is very good.

ME: Well (crap), no. (Think quick.) That’s not why. (Address it or not to address it, that is the question.) I mean (always address it), it’s true: There are people in this world who don’t think that brown skin is as good as pink skin. And they’re wrong about that.  They’re what we call “ignorant”.

RUBY: And I just walk away from them!

ME: That’s right. You just walk away with your shoulders back and your head held high. You do not listen to them. You do not let their words get inside your heart.

RUBY: No!

ME: But those sales people who told you your eyes were beautiful? Remember them?

RUBY: Yeah.

ME: Yes?

RUBY: Yes.

ME: Well, they told you your eyes were beautiful because they are.

Unlike me, Slater didn’t just daydream a magnificent exit with an expletive-filled PSA and a slide down the plane’s inflatable emergency chute. He went right ahead and lived it. And I went right ahead and signed on as the 61,403rd supporter of his Facebook page. By last Thursday night, his fan tally hovered at 200,000, but as much as I liked the suggestion by another fan that “White Castle should rename their sliders ‘Slaters,’” that number no longer included me.

After reading a short blurb titled “Is Steven Slater a Hoax, Too?” on Slate (slate.com), I fought back my inner Howard Beale and the companion urge to pour my bourbon directly into my keyboard—I didn’t need another trip to the Genius Bar, so instead of punishing my information source, I begrudgingly clicked “unlike.”

After the initial story spread like Rod Stewart’s seed, The Wall Street Journal and CBS News did this antiquated thing called “vetting,” in which reporters check out the “facts” of a story—usually done before publication—and, wouldn’t you know it, there are witnesses who contradict Slater’s version. How much Slater will be discredited by the time this goes to press, I can only surmise. But even at this juncture, I could hardly be more disappointed if my kid were to become a Christian fundamentalist and take up golf.

For me, it isn’t just the possibility that this particular story has a less vicariously liberating side than initially portrayed, though that is certainly a knife to my left lung. I so love to see the little guy win, and it really sucks when the little guy turns out to be a cheat. But it’s the cumulative effect of these Boy-Who-Cried- Wolf incidents that leaves me hollow.

The revelation that the Slater story might be more than it appeared was immediately preceded by the uncovering of a similar hoax perpetrated by The Chive, in which a young woman named “Jenny” quits her job via dry-erase board, displayed in a series of photos. I didn’t find the Jenny joke compelling because I was too engrossed in the more organic, slapstick victory of Mr. Slater.

But I fell for Balloon Boy in a big way. I watched from my office that day, horrified and near tears. It was just like watching a late-night Sally Struthers commercial for starving children: I knew I should turn it off, but I couldn’t. I just kept imagining it was my child in that silver, Mylar balloon contraption, spinning and hurtling across a blue sky. I very nearly sent those wicked people a donation.

And, of course, we know our government agencies aren’t impervious to such reporting shenanigans. The Department of Agriculture didn’t waste any time validating an out-of-context video clip of employee Shirley Sherrod making what appeared to be racist comments. They just took the carefully edited clip posted to the Interwebs by a right-wing blogger as empirical evidence that Sherrod needed to go. So bumbling was the reaction to the offending snippet that it made me long for the Bush administration. They would never have fired anyone based on a lie, and there’s plenty of proof of that.

I’m beginning to think we’re a society of Patsies, too many gullible Charlie Browns. So much false information is dressed up to look like truth, and when we so richly reward the lowest common denominator (hi, Snookie!), why look any deeper? Why aim any higher? We live in an era of an ever-changing media clamoring to get the story first, instead of clamoring to get a story right. Our worldview is so defined by Photoshop and blogger pundits and the entertainment-izing of news programs that strive to keep our attention and feed our insatiable appetite for drama that it’s tough to decipher the presented reality from truth.

No matter where the fault lies, there’s something especially disappointing in the knowledge that Steven Slater may have acted disingenuously. Because what he did—or rather, the original story of it—was an unleashing of something primal that many of us suppress day after day as we go through the motion of our lives. We are reamed daily at our jobs, and by politicians, and church leaders, and bankers and by the airline industry, too. We are assaulted from every angle, and most of us put our heads down and muscle through because we can’t afford to blow. There’s just too much to lose.

But there is a deep satisfaction in knowing someone is ballsy enough to risk it all, a celebration in seeing a small part of yourself reflected in that defiant stick-it-to-the-man act. With his outburst, Slater offered a sense of vindication to those of us who only dream about doing it. His act offered a sense of attaboy! possibility. That he may have orchestrated the whole thing is deeply disheartening and leads me to think Jersey Shore might be a more accurate depiction of who we really are.

(As published in San Diego CityBeat.)

My big almost-kindergartener.

Who’s buying me the first cocktail?

This picture was taken when Ruby was three weeks old, during my second week of mothering. It was early in the triathlon of late night feedings, diaper changes, and the seemingly endless shooshing of a crying baby, and already Sam and I were exhausted. We’d had 36 hours—not 9 months—to prep ourselves for parenthood (the last minute crash course in swaddling proved to be clutch). But this isn’t a competition.

Regardless of allotted nesting time, I think what we were experiencing when my cousin snapped this photo is universal among new parents: While we were nothing short of elated, there was a sense that we’d been hit and flattened like silly cartoon characters, by an 18-wheeler that missed a hairpin turn after careening down an 11% grade slicked with black ice.  The impact on our lives was so stunning, I didn’t even hear the warning screech of air brakes. One minute, I wasn’t a mother, the next minute I was. And this photo, which I’ve posted before, exemplifies that for me.

And it reminds me, every time, of a conversation I had with a representative from my HR department two months before it was taken. I had called to find out whether I would qualify for maternity leave once we were matched with our baby, and was told that I would not. “You’re not really a mother,” the representative told me.  “Maternity leave is for women who have babies. Because they have to heal. You’re not healing from anything.” I hung up in disbelief and anger.

But I let it go and when Ruby was born,  I took 12-weeks off without pay so I could not really be a mother. My husband and I borrowed 3-months’ worth of salary from my generous in-laws so that I could not really make and wash bottles, not really change diapers, not really attend doctor visits, not really pace around my dining room table for hours and hours with a crying baby in my arms, so I could not really rock her to sleep. I had support—certainly not from my employer—that allowed me the luxury to not really bond with my new child, to not really sit in my rocker with her or lie in my bed with her naked body curled like a ribbon against mine, to not really have her perfect ear pressed as close as possible to the beating of my heart, a sound I hoped was something close to the white noise she’d known in her birth-mother’s belly.

Today, a court ruled that the Massachusettes Maternity Leave Act, a law from the dark age of 1972, affords a woman 8-weeks of maternity leave following the birth or adoption of a child. After that time, she is not protected by the law and can be fired from her job. An excellent policy for children and parents as far as I can tell.

Apparently, I was lucky to have absconded with an entire 12-weeks of unpaid leave without fear of being fired from a place that clearly undervalues me to begin with.

]]> http://www.aarynbelfer.com/2010/08/2337.html/feed 11 http://www.aarynbelfer.com/2010/08/about-my-skillz-in-the-kitchen.html http://www.aarynbelfer.com/2010/08/about-my-skillz-in-the-kitchen.html#comments Fri, 06 Aug 2010 06:21:34 +0000 Aaryn http://www.aarynbelfer.com/?p=2315 For the last two months or so, we’ve been getting a “box” of vegetables from Suzy’s Organic Farm every-other-week. We pick up our veggies at the elementary school Ruby will be attending come September—excuse me for a minute while I get a tissue…

Oh Jesus. Hold another second, please…

Ah, that’s better. Off to school you go, wee one!

Anyway, I feel pretty great about taking part in Community Supported Agriculture because we walk down the block to pick up our veggies. And, too, because I can say, Hey y’all! I’m participating in Community Supported Agriculture! as I pat myself on the back for being this much [] closer to the source of my food.

But I gotta be honest: Beyond that? Not so wowed. I find, as much as I fight it, I’m becoming ever-less enchanted with my every-other-Wednesday loot. This week, we got four tomatoes. Four. And they tasted just as much like wet cardboard as those from my grocery store. We didn’t get any lettuce but got enough arugla to feed everyone within a three block radius of our home. For a month. That is, if the arugula weren’t more bitter than Betty Draper chewing coffee grounds in between cigarettes.

Of course, we did get 3 eggplants, two gnarled and pocked squashes (is that a word? squashes?), a bag of emaciated Romanian green beans and about 60 peppers. 60 very useful Cherry Bomb, Serrano and Hungarian Hot Wax chili peppers. As much as I like supporting my local farmers, bitter arugula and flaming peppers are not helping my family meal planning. Not that I would know since I don’t normally cook, but nothing is normal around here these days. My period shows up whenever it feels like it, forty is the new 32 and last night, I baked a chicken. I touched giblets and a neck. I made a paste with olive oil and oregano leftover from the last CSA box and smeared it around under the skin. Take that store bought rotisserie chickens!

And since procrastination is an art form of the most highly disciplined avoider, I embraced this new-found talent and skipped writing in lieu of cooking again today. (Of course, here I sit writing, so it’s all getting done as it should.) And what did I do with all the weird and useless veggies from last night’s CSA box? I went shopping and got all the necessary ingredients to make this gazpacho right here.

It only took me an hour and the kitchen was a wall-splattered Jackson-Pollack-meets-Frida-Kahlo masterpiece. My gazpacho was red and not at all green, like the pretty picture on the No More Dirty Looks website, probably because I didn’t follow the directions and removed the cucumber skin, resulting in a final product that looked more closely related to the vomit of a frat boy on a bender than it did an Ayurvedic delicacy. But whew! I did it. I’m just lucky I didn’t lose a toe when the blade from my miniature food processor went flying to the ground, a credit to my natural athletical inclinations.

Like a mad scientist on a roll, I made some grilled trout for dinner.

Okay, that’s a total lie. Sam prepped and cooked the trout. But I bought it and took a photo of it just before I dealt with those pesky peppers. What to do about those peppers, right?

Even I know, when in doubt, add bacon. And cream cheese.

I sliced and cleaned 15 of these babies without getting any spice-juice in my eyes, smeared them full of cream cheese, wrapped them in bacon, slid them into the oven and then forgot to take any pictures of the end product because they were as eye-wateringly scrumptious as the gazpacho was not. And it turns out, a few of them weren’t spicy at all. Her entire face may have puckered at the flavor of the gazpacho, but one guess as to who asked for a bacon wrapped, cream cheese stuffed pepper for dessert?

I gotta say, failure be damned—and to Ruby’s teacher, I honestly thought it was a nice gesture bringing you a bowl of chilled upchuck—the effort to fun ratio was, for once, pretty inspiring.

Our friends managed to get in and have a ceremony because they knew someone in the DA’s office (it was all very illicit but times like this, you take advantage of any advantage). The women in front of us, a lovely couple in their mid-sixties, weren’t so lucky. They had flown all the way from Florida and they stood, their suitcases at their ankles,  despondent at hearing a man on a bullhorn announce, as he paced the line, that they might as well come back in the morning and take their chances then. “But what about us?” one of them asked him. “We’ve waited for this day for 32 years. We just flew in this morning.”

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what to tell you except that maybe you can go to the A-Line and ask someone if they might be willing to give up their ticket for you.”

So the shorter and rounder of the two women kissed her partner good-bye, leveraged herself over a retaining wall onto the sprawling green lawn and made her way toward those lucky thousands (and their family members and friends who’d come out to witness the happy day) in possession of tickets. Forty minutes later, as we were still negotiating how we were going to be sneaked through a side entry to the building, the woman came running across the lawn, her hand raised high above her head and in it, was a little piece of paper.

“We’re getting married! We’re getting married!” She said. There were tears running down her face. The hopeful overflowers cheered and applauded and whistled and cried. The woman on the grass leaped into the arms of her beloved and they kissed. I remember they both had short hair the color of the clouded sky above us. I remember their suitcases toppling awkwardly as they heaved to pull them up and over the wall. I remember them walking away to get married, schlepping their stuff from the C-Line to the A-Line, their hearts buoyant and full.

The day was not a political statement for that couple or any of the other thousands of couples who waited to marry. It was not an agenda driven act designed to vex right wingers and the morally indignant. It was about love and commitment and a rightful public declaration of that love and commitment. It was, to this day, one of the happiest days of my life.

That a Bush One-appointed California judge overturned proposition 8 today has left me breathless. I had steeled myself for the other verdict. And in a time when each day–and the one that preceded it, and the one that preceded it, and so on and so on—is filled with so much bad news and injustice of all kinds, this clear and obviously just ruling blows my hair back.

And I’m not alone. Below are some of the status updates on my Facebook wall this afternoon:

WAY TO GO CALIFORNIA.

‎”Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California constitution the notion that opposite sex couples are superior to same sex couples.” – U.S. District Court Chief Judge Vaughn Walker

To celebrate Prop 8 being ruled unconstitutional, I ordered this t-shirt for my kid. She loves toast. http://tinyurl.com/2djpywe

PROP 8 overturned in CAlifornia supreme court—–YAAAAAAA, now I need to find a husband

YES!!! Prop 8 GOES DOWN AGAIN!!!! Yay for Judge Walker!!

News flash: Prop 8 has been OVERTURNED! No More H8!

Yes!!!!!

“Moral disapproval alone is an improper basis on which to deny rights to gay men and lesbians.” Judge Walker

My love and I are no longer outlaws.

[Name redacted] is pleased to see that reason has prevailed, and very happy for those whose lives are directly affected by this law.

Woooooo!

I’m proud of California today! Woo-hoo!

#Prop8 gets rim-rocked, reminds me why I traded TX for CA in the 1st place.

blam suckas…all the fundie christians can pretty much, well, ya know…welcome to civil society, where your pastor/priest. etc doesn’t have shit to say about the law. Don’t like it. Move.

[Name redacted] must join the chorus and send mad props to Judge Walker for holding some truths to be self-evident.

Very happy that Prop 8 was overturned today. A big step forward in LGBT rights and for our society as a whole.

Human Rights = 1. Discrimination = 0. Prop 8 is overturned. Tonight, we celebrate. Tomorrow, the fight continues.

To: aaryn730@gmail.com

Subject: You asked if I felt old…

Well…a sure sign that you’re turning forty is when your mother takes a shower with her glasses on!

Dear Aaryn-

I read your blog post today.  You are absolutely right in pointing out our grammatical mistake with the English language, it was not intentional.  That was an error on our part and we have changed the text to read “coach.com anyway.”

We strive to give our base a good experience when exploring our site and discovering new styles.Please feel free to call me at [redacted] or at jennifer@polyvore.com.

That a girl raised on the pristine streets of Salt Lake City should venture to the Coach website is absurd. I hail from the place that patented the claw bang and the annoy-een habit of drop-een the “g” from the end-eens of words. Coach is beneath my station.

But even more disturb-een (OK, I’ll stop now) is the usage of a non-word word on a website that boasts 140 million monthly page views, a guerilla attack on the English language if I’ve ever seen one. Especially—or should I say, expecially?—because fabulously dressed women should know better. Use of “anyways” indicates one’s proclivity for dotting her “i”s with bubbly hearts, a habit that should be illegal for anyone older than 12.In that one message, Polyvore revealed her inner bimbo.

Here’s the thing: There is the purposeful creation of a new word to make a point or an intended misuse on the side of irony, and then there is the insidious, Palin-type jackassian nincompoopery, and never the twain shall meet. What follows are a few examples of the latter, so-called words that cause my spellcheck feature to freeze in exasperation.

Schoobrary: The only way this can be taken seriously is if it’s delivered with a snicker and a set of air quotes. In case you live under a rock—or anywhere in the entire world outside of San Diego—“schoobrary” is a lazy, shortcut term to describe the long anticipated Downtown library, which, if ever built, will house a school. Only, “schoobrary” isn’t really a shortcut because when you use it in a sentence, it still requires an explanation. “Schoobrary” isn’t a word, and I have to question whether Scott Lewis (CEO of Voice of San Diego) wasn’t munching on schooby snacks when he coined a now-broadly used term that sounds more like a cartoon dog’s breakfast cereal than a place of higher learning.

Athletical: Like its bastard cousin “schoobrary,” “athletical” is a regional colloquialism. And by regional, I mean used in Wisconsin. By my father-in-law. “That kid on my soccer team is a natural. He’s really very athletical,” he might say. Or, “Sure, Brett Favre is a fuckwad. But you gotta admit, he’s still got his athletical abilities.” The first time he said it, I squelched my urge to correct him. It’s sort of endearing, after all, and since I respect my elders, I chose to say nothing and make fun of him here instead.

Nucular: Dubya. Need I say more?

Heighth: Usually accompanied by width, “height” is guilty by association. Unless you have a lisp, “heighth” is not a word.

Irregardless: Ah, one of my favs. Like the phrase “for all intensive purposes,” this oldie but goodie is fun to say, flows off the tongue, gives the impression that the speaker has contemplated his situation from every possible angle and is completely, maddeningly wrong. It’s frequently overheard during grocery-store exchanges between long-lost acquaintances catching up while palming the avocados. One or the other person complains about his boss or cloying in-laws or the options for his upcoming colonoscopy. “I could take the pills or gag down the juice, but, irregardless, the emptying is going to suck.” People: It’s “regardless” or “irrespective.” Pick one and go with it. (And, FYI, my in-laws say the pills are the way to go.)

Expresso: Do you think they’ll serve expresso at the schoobrary when it opens? No. They will not. You know why? Because there is no such thing as “expresso.” There is also no such thing as a “venti.” Yes, it takes less time to make an espresso than a pot of coffee, and you can now get it in an extra-large cup from a drive-thru window. Certainly, this is very confusing. But when you order a double shot of expresso in your venti látte, you just sound like a douche bag.

Douche bag: OK, this is a real word that is, admittedly, pretty fun to use out of context, specifically when applied to people who frequent Starbucks, attend tea-party rallies or go by the name Mel Gibson. On the other hand, it’s tired and offensive. It should be scratched. Or not.

Supposebly and ostensively: These substitutions for “supposedly” and “ostensibly” sound so similar to the real thing that it can be tough to catch the imposters, especially if the person speaking has a Hungarian accent. But again, they’re not words. They’re faux words and they’re dangerous because the temptation to use them ironically can be irresistible, and if substituted long enough, they will become part of the user’s vernacular. Say a thing often enough and it becomes the truth. Which brings me to my next word…

Nonplussed: Ah, the pièce de résistance of my pet-peeve world. An actual word, to be nonplussed is to be perplexed, and how awesome is it that the meaning and the sound are in direct contrast to one another? It just blows my hair back. This definition, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, goes back to the early 16th century, and I’m sticking to it. But it’s been used to mean “unfazed” or “nonchalant” for so long, by so many people—et tu, New York Times, et tu?—that the wrong definition has become a commonly accepted definition.

And while such an occurrence doesn’t make me very happy, it should bring great hope to those who support schoobraries, those cultivating their natural athletical abilities and the fashionistas of the world who have to decide if they would like to click through to coach.com anyways.

(As published today in San Diego CityBeat.)