Mmmmmm mmmmm good!

What to do with a multitude of gleaned tomatoes from the CSA? We didn't get any tomatoes in our share this week but were told we could go out to the fields and take what we wanted. We picked pounds of under and over ripe tomatoes with plans on making sauce and roasting some. Inspired by a woman we met in the field, J picked four big green tomatoes so we could make fried green tomatoes even though neither have of us have ever had them and I had no idea how to make them.

After browsing a dozen or so recipes online, I decided to make a hybrid of the recipes and go it on my own since it seems pretty straightforward. Here is what I did:

1. Sliced the tomatoes, salted them and let them sweat for an hour or so. I dried them off a bit with a flour sack towel.
2. Heated up about half an inch of canola oil. I have never, ever fried anything before so I wasn't quite sure how to do this. I did it in a large, shallow straight side pan with a lid.
3. Dipped some of the tomatoes in egg white, and some I left naked.
4. Dipped all the tomatoes in a mixture of flour, cornmeal, salt and pepper. I used more flour than cornmeal but I think I would reverse the ratios in the future or use just cornmeal.
5. Threw the tomatoes about five slices at a time in the oil.
6. Ate them.

They turned out great. At least, we thought they were good (although neither of us have anything to compare them to). I don't want to get into a frying habit but if I'm going to pour that much oil in a pan again I think it would have to be for green tomatoes.

(The picture doesn't look nearly as good as they tasted. The tomatoes in this picture are day old and served on sourdough bread for lunch.)

Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as too much Sriracha

Note to self: if you add too much Sriracha to peanut sauce it turns a weird color.

The Icing on the Customer Service

Two companies are getting letters from me: GEICO and Verizon. GEICO for the outstanding, compassionate, fast service I received after my car accident. Verizon for being the exact opposite of GEICO.

I have been trying to get phone and DSL service since mid-August. They told me the service was working on August 28 but, well, it's not. Numerous phone calls, burning through minutes on my "emergency only" cell phone, later I was offered the icing on the customer service cake...

After being on the phone for over an hour with various Verizon representatives I was transferred to yet another rep who wanted to hear my entire story again. As he accessed my records, he filled the time with this friendly sales pitch: "Are you interested in digital cable?"

Um, sure. Because I don't have a television in the apartment. And because I want to spend the rest of my life waiting for your company to figure out how to hook it up in my apartment.

Ultimate Happiness for a Nerd

Good thing that happened in the last 48 hours:

I found out that as a PhD student I can check unlimited numbers of books out of the library for 6 months at a time.

Unlimited.

Shitty First Drafts Are Better Than Shitty Days

I've had a couple shitty days. They are the kind of days that I know aren't a big deal in the grand scheme of things. I've had moments of clarity about how minor my problems are but more often I have been frustrated and stressed out.

In the last 48 hours: minor car accident, should be no problem, but it lead to nightmare insurance issues because the person behind me lied, minor whiplash, no phone or internet or water at my apartment near school (not related to a storm or other disaster), parking issues, etcetera. Really. Not that bad, but dang, it just keeps piling on. I feel completely overwhelmed at work, out of touch with friends and disconnected from my husband because we are both so busy.

This however, in stark contrast to my advisor who told me she had a car accident in her two week old car, had another accident three weeks later, took someone to court because he lied about the circumstances and lost, and her partner of 30 years left her, all around the same time.

Yeah, I'll take my shitty days over hers.

Shitty First Drafts

Part of the reason I started this was so I could dump all my thoughts in one place in a place accessible from anywhere I am online (work, home, school, travel) and not worry about saying anything wrong/dumb/silly. But I find myself hesitant to post some days mostly because I am worried that what I'm saying is wrong/dumb/silly. The wrongest/dumbest/silliest thing is that no one is probably reading this.

In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott writes about shitty first drafts. I need to learn to accept this here and in my non-online writing. I have a really difficult time just putting stuff out there, even though I always think I don't care what other people think. Well, um, I do.

Research Ideas

I can't call these dissertation ideas because I am officially over thinking about it for awhile. I have moved on to the more general category of research ideas because that's where it all starts and since I'm just beginning it seems like the right place to be.

In an effort to begin on neutral territory and make some decisions about what really interests me and not just focusing on what I've been working on, I went to the bookstore and browsed the social science, anthropology, political science, and philosophy sections. Expecting a eureka moment proved a thousand times more ambitious than I should have been: I should have hoped for a bit of a narrowing of ideas. Instead I found this...

Things that interest me: social stratification, abject poverty, comparative poverty, food security, political poverty, policy formation, child welfare, linguistics as a basis for social work, working class issues, feminist philosophy, equality (gender, ethnic, etc), and pretty much everything else.

Another thing that has been weighing on me is that scholars spend a lot of time being scholarly and I don't know how well that translates to social work getting done. Is that a possible topic? Considering how social work practioners learn about and use research? There are many aspects to this including the language used in peer reviewed journals, the accessibility of peer reviewed journals, support for changing practices in bureaucratic agencies, interest in learning about new research, etcetera, etcetera.

So many thoughts, so little time. I only wish my thoughts were currency.

Things I Will Do (not squishy "be a good person" things)

1. Earn a PhD.
2. Cook all the recipes in one cookbook.
3. Be interviewed on NPR as an expert in my field, whatever the hell that is.
4. Own a Karmann Ghia.
5. Run a 5K.
6. Learn to drive a motorcycle.
7. Get a tattoo.
8. Write a vegetarian cookbook.
9. Hike something significant.
10. Learn to cook one cuisine really, really well.

Conscious Living

For quite a while I frequented simple living websites and read simple living books and articles. Immersing myself in simple living ideas and discussions perhaps didn't make my life simpler but it did contribute to a higher level of awareness about choices I was making. People define simple living in different ways and I think what I took from it was less about living simply and more about living consciously.

I try to make choices about what I eat and use and drive and do that will have a neutral effect on the environment and have positive economic, political and social effects. I think some of my choices are fairly easy--sticking to a vegetarian diet, driving a biodiesel car when I don't take public transportation, choosing flourescent lights, joining a CSA--but some things aren't so easy and I don't choose well. For example, our home may be small and efficient by US standards but compared to the rest of the world our 1,000 square foot air-conditioned and centrally heated condo is almost luxurious and certainly wasteful.

Conscious living isn't easy because it means knowing that some of your choices may adversely effect other people, animals, and the earth. And by knowing I mean feeling it in your gut, deeply and frequently. It means knowing that buying cheap clothes in an attempt to live frugally (often an important part of simple living) may support child labor in another country, keep already low wages for retail workers unlivable, encourage harmful environmental practices, and other negative consequences. It means imagining a 12 year old girl sold into modern day slavery to work in a clothing factory to pay off her parents debt.

It means losing sleep over some of these possible consequences.

So how does one go about living life with all of these possibilities swirling madly through one's mind? I have never quite found the right balance but when I fill my mind with new thoughts I can push some of the images of irreparable damage to the edge. For now, while I immerse myself in the philosophy of science and sociological theory and quantitative methods I am able to just live. As scared as I am to start school and be faced with understanding a new body of thought, it also provides relief to some of my overconscious living tendencies and I haven't decided yet if that is good or bad or value neutral.

Blame Diddy

Last night J played poker with some friends of a friend. This friend of ours is a former intern to another friend and half a dozen years younger than us. We once went to a birthday party with this group of friends and we were by far the oldest and stodgiest. I like to think that we are still hip and maybe for the over 30 crowd we are, but not in the world of the just-out-of-college. Apparently we are on the approved list because we have been invited back for other events but I think of us as an example of what they will be someday not who they are now. I don’t even know if we’re who they want to be. Maybe we’re there as a warning of who they could become if they’re not careful.

He came home very late last night so we didn’t talk about the game other than, of course, my question to him about winning because I needed to know if I should quit my job or not (answer hint: I am at work as I’m writing this).

This morning he held his fist up to me, knuckles pointed towards me. “Do this,” he said. I held up my fist and he knocked his into mine. “And this,” he said, cupping his hand and facing the palm up, the thumb vertical to the floor. Instead of a cupped hand, palm sideways, thumb horizontal to the floor which allows for a normal handshake, this tilted version just allows for a brief cupping and a sort of half hug if one adds that to the greeting. “I don’t understand,” he said. “The fist knocking, the not really a handshake handshake. What is that?”

“That’s what Diddy does,” I told him.

“Diddy?! This is Diddy’s fault? We can’t shake hands anymore like normal people because of Diddy?!”

“Yes,” I said. “Diddy has made us old and uncool.” Damn you, Diddy.

[The rain is so heavy it looks like it’s coming from the ground and from the sky and from the buildings. It’s chilly, too, which makes it perfect school and fall and NFL weather, all good things!]