Wearing other people's shoes

My granddad is a big believer in the Pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps School of Life Management. Besides the obvious fact that pulling on your bootstraps tends to get you nowhere fast (try it next time you have boots and straps at the same time), I have always questioned whether the people who advocate this argument the most strongly are able to understand the obstacles that others face, having the capacity to understand that the playing field truly looks different to everyone.

"Et tu, Brutus?"

How many twenty-year-olds today could say where that came from, not to mention say what the question meant when it was uttered? Do younger learners have a lack of emphasis on what has come before, on learning myths, classics, Bible stories, Arabian nights tales, upanishads? (And does this rant mark me as a fogey? Yes. I know.) I wonder whether we, by not learning these stories and myths, lose some of our ability to empathize and have compassion for others. If all we get is TV sitcoms and movie thrillers with lots of explosions, how can we really believe in each other?

But when we learn of the travails of Odysseus (and the way they were kept alive by Homer), there's something to hope for in that effort having been made to communicate those travails alone. And the writer had the hope to write the story down and include lessons about our time and people and place in the scheme of things, and in seeing the poetic renditions of his journeys you feel for the man who has been separated from his wife and life and wonders whether she will remember him when he comes home. By the same token you must stop and wonder what it is like for Helen every day to fend for herself in the new post-Trojan War climate with no husband to stick up for her.

The instigator of this chain of thoughts was a big story in yesterday morning's paper about more than a thousand arrests in a U.S. Immigration Service raid on a large meatpacking business in Greeley. Today's paper had a follow-up story about how all of the service providers for the people affected are seeing a spike in requests for help, and the story featured the police department's pledge to have at all times a dedicated Hispanic advocate in place. Anxiety in the community is running high.

And there are an awful lot of people whose great-grandparents and even grandparents immigrated here but they can't see how this isn't different. They say, "If they're illegal, round 'em up and send 'em home."

I tend to stand on Mr. Laudisio's side when he says it is embarrassing for us to pretend we don't all depend on the services these people provide. I think he's right: if you rounded up everyone with faked papers and sent them home, who would mow your yards and change your oil and clean your Sears store and wash your restaurant dishes? Who would launder and press the clothes at your dry cleaner? And this is an embarrassment. I can't tell you the number of people I have met from other countries who were not able to use their skills here, like the fellow who had a motel just off the beach in Fort Lauderdale, who was a professor in Argentina. But to get people here to see him as an intellectual was impossible.

I cannot help remembering what it was like to arrive in Germany completely unable to recognize street signs and speak at all. Having no one get my jokes for six months. It was difficult -- and that was in a country where everyone speaks English, too, because English really has become the lingua franca. (Does anyone growing up now know what lingua franca means? Does anybody really care?)

But you might not know when you got to the U.S. whether to call it "the seven-eleven" as people here describe the chain of convenience stores, or whether you'd say "the seven-to-eleven." (Incidentally, since I seem to be in history mode, because most of the stores remain open around the clock the source of the name is no longer clear, but it was revolutionary, when convenience stores came along, for one to be open from seven a.m. until eleven p.m. (giving its proprietor barely enough time to sleep -- think about that life).

Somehow we must always preserve our ability to envision life in someone else's shoes, without coveting their life or the trappings thereof. (Sure, I envy the guys in Gomez for always getting to hang out and play music, but they've put in the thousands of hours to earn that for themselves. And that's just a message to me to do what I need to do in my life, right?)

I don't envy many people, having what feels like a very good life, but I always need to remember that not everyone makes their decisions from this comfy a perch in the world, and I could stand to put myself out there on others' behalf a little more than I do to level the playing field.

Seems like a lot of little people aren't getting what they need. I want to help in the best way I know how, and maybe that's writing something that can reach a little farther than I can one-on-one. Because I do have empathy for the cleaners and the immigrants and the people who aren't getting enough of the picture. The girls of the world.

And I must address this in a way I care about, and remember that is worthwhile, and I must make sure it is worthwhile, not let it slide into entertainment without any other reason for existence. That's what literary fiction is to me: fiction with meaning.

My main blog, My Mac Daddy Blog

This is the one I tell people about. I'm surprised how few people find my little corner of the universe; it's hard to get people to go look or read, but I have received sincere notes of praise for my blogs when people did look at them. So that's nice.

And it's my tour, this blog is, of the planet and the neighborhoods on it. As many as I can visit in my lifetime.

Somehow (in the darkness of winter) we've been talking over dinner about obituaries, and how thinking about what you would want your obituary to say is a powerful way to get yourself focused on what you want to be remembered for. Do you want to leave a legacy? "Loved her family well." Would you be content with what you've done if the proverbial bus knocked you down tomorrow, or was there some big thing you'd always assumed you'd get to?

Me, I have started this novel but not finished it, so now there's a sense of urgency that it get done, that what I mean to say will come across in the end. That the themes are themes all the way through; all of the commas are where they belong. And [this is the chore] all the bracketed text must be replaced with actual content! It's a big job but I want to get it done. I want people to see it. And a lot of people seem to be curious about it. I think that was my turning point: seeing that guy giving away Wild Animus after a Gomez show in Denver at the Fillmore one night, I thought: I want to write a novel for those people specifically. One I'd be proud to hand out after a show.

So that's what I'm trying to do. A novel for literate rockers like me and my friends.

Literary complex carbohydrates? Parallels between NaNoWriMo and Weight Watchers

I'm now taking a breather from my novel, Mix Tapes for Boys and Girls, after completing my November sprint to write 50,000 words, the arbitrary goal assigned by the folks at the Office of Letters and Light, aka National Novel Writing Month. It was such an odd but productive experience; I've had deadlines before but never the daily requirement to write a certain quantity.

In its absolute focus on word counts, the whole novel-writing experience reminded me a little of the Weight Watchers program (which I did for about three months a few years ago but probably would never do again). In the few months I did participate, I learned a lot about the caloric values of foods and about how much I really needed to eat. They talked about portion control, which is a good thing to be aware of; the best part was learning to change my focus to stopping when I'd had enough food instead of eating as much as I could get away with eating. I found that the quantity of food that satisfied me was, of course, quite a bit less than I had thought previously. It was a revelation that going to bed somewhat hungry wasn't such a bad thing after all; some of my fear of scarcity fell away when I realized nothing bad would happen if I went to bed with a rumbly tummy. (I read one account by someone who said that when dieting, she stopped eating early in the evening and then went to bed earlier than usual so she wouldn't be bothered by her hunger pangs. But skipping part of one's life in order to lose weight seemed extreme to me. Foregoing food is one thing; foregoing evenings is something else entirely.)

What I did not like upon reflection was Weight Watchers' narrow focus on the absolute number of calories consumed daily without any regard to the quality of the food being eaten. This oversimplified approach to dieting meant that things like nuts, olive oil, and avocadoes, all of which I love and consider "good fats," were as "expensive" as chocolate bars or cheesecake. I never bought into the notion that all fats were bad, nor did I buy into the "cholesterol is evil" ethos adopted wholesale by the medical establishment despite the studies on cholesterol having been conducted exclusively on high-risk males. I heard stories about people who tried to save many of their daily caloric allocations for alcoholic drinks or tried to avoid all fats entirely and found that the appearance of their skin, hair, and fingernails quickly deteriorated, probably reflecting their deteriorating underlying health. So on one hand it was useful to find out how many calories a day I needed to stop eating if I wanted to lose or maintain my weight, but on the other hand it seemed to discourage a healthful perspective on the relative nutritional values of foods. I found little discussion of how eating complex carbohydrates and some fat could also help you feel sated longer than eating simple carbs and lots of vegetables with icky nonfat dips or nonfat desserts with low-calorie "whipped topping."

So my disgust with Weight Watchers' absolutist approach to calorie counting led me to expect more inner resistance to having to write a certain number of words per day to meet this arbitrary goal of writing 50,000 words. I wondered, what if I wasn't inspired that day? What if I wrote 1,000 words and they were good, and everything after that for the day was drivel?

It didn't really happen that way (okay, it may have; I'm too close to the 53,500 words I wrote last month to be a good judge of their quality at this point). But not only was the 1,667-words-per-day deadline nowhere near as onerous a chore as I thought it would be, there was something good about being encouraged to "throw words willy-nilly at my novel," as I described the process to my mother earlier today. Instead of writing nonsense or unrelated stuff, I found myself getting deeper into my characters' thoughts and motivations. I found myself putting more from my own life and what was happening around me into the story. The word-count goal made me dispense with my usual poring over individual sentences and instead push on, which made me take more risks than I usually do in my writing. I had to "leave my inner editor behind" (as Chris Baty, NaNoWriMo founder recommends in his book No Plot, No Problem!) to succeed at the task, which turned out to be a very good thing indeed. (She's stirring and uncurling from her deep slumber, though; I'm looking for cover.)

I had thought this might be a sort of silly, wasteful way to write a novel; I suspected half or more of what I produced would be garbage and have to be cut out later. The jury's still out on that, but it was a fabulous exercise in getting stuff out of my head and onto the page. And I am relieved to believe there's more "good fat" in my story and far less dreck to be excised than I had predicted.

Now I just have to figure out how I am going to finish the thing!

The biggest surprise of Nanowrimo

Now that it's 11 a.m. on the 30th of November, and I'm 52,300 or so words into my novel, I'm pleased to report that I am a winner! And in more good news: I didn't fall apart along the way. In fact, the entire experience of writing 50,000 words in a month has been astonishingly pain-free. I've been able to sit down at the computer and write just about every day, and every day I've come up with something worth exploring. I may have to do some heavy lifting and chopping and reorganizing later, but there's a lot to work with and it wasn't so hard to generate it, which is a completely thrilling discovery.

At the table two nights ago, after I had posted my winning total word count and went to the movies, my sweetie asked, what are you thinking? And I said I have this little chant going through my head at all times saying, "You did it! You did it!"

The other one that runs through my mind often is "If I had known it was as easy as setting a goal and then trying to achieve that goal, I would have done it years ago." But I keep trying to cut myself some slack and tell myself that I would not have been ready then. Or maybe I would have but I didn't do it then and I am ready and able now. That's the real point. Being here, now, and not worrying about what might have happened.

So here I am with the first 50,000-and-some words of a novel. I'm just going to keep writing the kind of stuff I want to read and hoping that there are other readers like me out there.

Stretching the writing mind

And this quote came in too late to make the jacket copy deadline:

"Has broad ass-market appeal."

And this time you get to guess who said it.

That typo was in my excerpt for I don't know how long.

I'm cracking myself up again. This has to be good exercise, all this writing and cracking myself up. Good psychic exercise.

When I Paint My Masterpiece

I'm hurtling toward the so-called "end" of my story (lately lots of things are appearing in quotation marks), or at least the 50K-word hurdle.

And speaking of quotations, to celebrate closing in with ease on the "final" stretch, I sent out a few excerpts and received some "quotes" for my book jacket:

“A penetrating collection of wit-sharp insights permeated with the soulful exploration of the inner workings of the minds of two richly entangled young women in the high-flying world of fine dining.”
Susan Sontag

“Delicious.”
Gael Greene

“I eagerly await the sequel. And the prequel. And the two before that, and the four after it.”
George Lucas

“I laughed. I cried.”
Rex Reed

“Finally, she made that goddamned masterpiece she’s been going on about all this time.”
Gore Vidal

46,875 words so far....

Day 26: With mere days and a few more words to go

What would MacGyver do, anyway? Here are some things I did instinctively that have helped me feel like I have no doubt I will win Nanowrimo on this, my first try:

* Took my friend Kathy's advice to heart and never let myself get more than a few thousand words behind. And I stayed caught up after that.

* Participated in the occasional cafe session and write-in, including one all-nighter of dubious value (well, okay, I only wrote until 2 a.m. But I was too wired to sleep until about 3:30 a.m.).

* Allowed myself as much caffeine as I felt like consuming.

* Started yet another blog.

* Didn't deny myself cafe treats: coffees and teas and the occasional pastry.

* Listened to my body and adjusted my intake when I overdid it. (The day after the two martinis with dinner was a little disappointing, energy-level-wise. So I didn't do that again this month.) And I'm still taking my vitamins and drinking plenty of liquids.

* In a related move, I made a conscious decision not to take Chris Baty's advice about tricking myself into productivity through increased doses of junk food. I decided this month I would rather develop a writing habit than a junk-food habit.

* Revised my total word count online frequently and watched my little heap of words build up almost daily.

* Posted on the forums when I had something to say or needed a little support.

* Sat down and trusted myself to hear the characters speaking to me. (And it worked! Who knew that's all it takes to get them to come out and play?!)

* Didn't get stuck on any specific rituals or advice -- just sat down and gave myself lots of chances to write. (And when I asked for advice, I got it and it was good.)

* Kept reading and watching movies, which helped me think about why I want to tell my story.

* Not gotten hung up on trying to bring everything in my novel to an end by 50,000 words. I'm just getting going and 50,000 seems like more of a big milestone than the end of the road.

* Spent almost no time editing what I've done. For this lifelong editor, that feels like a real achievement!

44,434 words; only 5566 to go in the next four days!

Day 25: Arrival at Something, a Milestone

I keep driving deeper into novel territory, and something named Mix Tapes for Boys and Girls is taking shape and crawling out of the murky depths at last. It's all uphill from here, evolutionarily speaking. But it's evolving, darn it! It keeps going places I'm interested in going, and it's turning out to be this sort of vibrant parallel universe endlessly full of friendships and family stuff and crafts to do all the time. Heaven. On wheels. Those wheels that pop down from your shoes when you want them to.

That thing they always talk about? It's happening.

I am starting to be able to sit down at the keyboard and listen to my characters talk. They're kinda wacky. Like me, but not like me. And they get less like me the closer I listen.

Day 23 of Nanowrimo: 38,446 words, 132 pages of double-spaced text!

And then it's time to finish the darn thing. Perhaps the new motto is 80 K by December 21st.

Oh, yeah!

Soundtrack: Spoon: "My Mathematical Mind"

If I can dream it, must I do it?

I’ve decided the bravest things I see are the ones I must attempt. If I so admire people on the stage, for example. I need to find a way to do that myself. Now I’m writing a novel. I have 120 pages of a book -- 35,000 words -- I hadn't put together three weeks ago.

Now I can see how I regularly set myself these challenges. To paraphrase the Goethe quote: if you can dream it, do it. My own variation is if I can dream it up I have an obligation to do it. If I think of going to England to interview my favorite band, I should do it. (And I did! And until now, that was one of the best moments of my life!) If I want my character to be good at doing a five-minute stand-up comedy act, I need to try it out for myself. Get in those shoes and stand in front of the crowd. But I would think that, lately, wouldn’t I? I’ve been all about standing up and being heard for a while. A bit ineffectually to date, perhaps, but now a bunch of people are rooting for me, which I am enjoying. I feel I have been getting ready for this along. Alongalong.

Day 8: Surprises galore

I'm up to 12,000 words so far today, and my Word document is up to 42 pages. It's starting to look like something, even if I don't have much of an inkling about the plot yet. I thought I knew what it was when I started, but I'm still not sure this story is going where I had planned. My character doesn't yet seem quite ruthless enough to pull off the dirty deed I had planned for her, but then again I haven't put her under much pressure yet.

One thing that has surprised me about all of this is that I've been staying on track in terms of writing enough words per day and have still had time to read and watch movies. This is good, because I've been picking up all sorts of inspiring stuff, from Julia Cameron's autobiography, Floor Sample (too bad about the title, but it's an interesting read for anyone creative) to Steve Martin's comedy on Saturday Night Live and in The Jerk, to There Will Never Be Another You by Carolyn See and the Claire Messud novel The Emperor's Children (which I am in the middle of and am finding reassuringly heavy on character and light on plot).

The title of Messud's novel reminds me that ever since reading Ann Patchett's The Magician's Assistant, I still believe that a potential ticket to success is in a title in that same form: The Blank's Blank. Another example: Minette Walters' The Scold's Bridle. Maybe I'll change my current title (Making Mix Tapes for Boys and Girls), since I can't figure out what it has to do with the story and it makes it sound so much like a Nick Hornby book. How about The Foodie's Daughters?

Travels in my own mind: A fictional adventure

It's day 4 of National Novel Writing Month and this novelista has written 6,300 words so far (22 pages of 12-pt. double-spaced text). I posted a teensy and raw excerpt on the Nanowrimo site. I'm a little shy of where I'd like to be by now but I'm feeling like I'm making progress. Suddenly 44,000 words not only doesn't seem like so much more to write at this pace, but it also doesn't seem like much room to work in some of the themes and scenes I've been jotting down over the last little while.

Fiction: Magical thinking

Leah needs some attention. She thinks she knows where to find the right kind for her right now. She's feeling lucky today and wants to see whether she can prove it's for real and not just all in her mind.

A six on the table and an ace in her hand, she ponders her knowledge of the situation. Ol' Texan over here in the big hat has already doubled down on his pair of queens when he sees the dealer's five showing. Leah thinks about that dealer's five and knows he'll have to hit it once. At least. She knows she should simply stand, but she could no more stand than sprout wings and fly up above the table. So she asked for the Dealer's next card, which turned out to be a three. She stood pat then.

With an inner sigh, she thinks that nineteen will probably get her back on track this time. Only it isn't. The dealer turns up a six, against all odds with her six right there, but then adds on a 10 and takes all the money at the table. Which amounts to the tenth time in a row this has happened -- or a variant of it that has ended in her losing another bet backed on promises of money to people just a little too glad to have that hold on her.

Stubbornly, as when she'd drawn that three to her sixteen, she tosses her cards into the slush pile at the same time she tosses another handful of chips into the betting circle. She will have to keep looking for victory until she gets a lot richer or all the money's gone. Then she will have gotten rid of it once and for all, or she'll know she's destined to have it.

Finding Flaubert

I went to the Trident Booksellers the other day looking for a copy of Madame Bovary. I was drawing a blank when I tried to remember the author's name, so I went up to the counter and asked about it. I almost burst out laughing when he said, "It's Flaubert," rhyming the name with "Robert."

What's So Great About Good Food? Part II

Here's something I'll have to post about on chowhound:

I have a theory about Chef Lachlan MacKinnon-Patterson at Frasca Food and Wine. It goes like this:

With his uses of cured and pickled foods, Lachlan is tapping into people's wartime and depression-era memories of having to put things up for the winter, having to use everything you produce (especially when you can't eat all you harvest), and having to introduce variety in winter months with foods preserved from the summer months.

Sure, the folks at Frasca have cryovac machines and good freezers. You know they could probably find a way to serve you watermelon in January if they wanted to, but Lachlan works at this preservation aspect honestly, perhaps like his grandmother before him, and hers before her, in the new country and in the old.

And now some of Lachlan's grandma's peers are well-heeled folks who dine at Frasca, perhaps not only for the unforgettable combinations of ingredients (is it the clove in the shaved pork with cherries that makes it so memorable?) but also for a little history alongside an exploration of northern Italian cooking. And this history comes with a side of echoes of their own pasts through red pepper jelly and pickled green tomatoes from his family's repertoire. For the forward-looking, Lachlan takes ideas like this one and stretches them, pickling cauliflower and shallots for dressings, for example. It is the absence of gimmics or trickery and the deep respect for old ways that appeals to me here.

Lachlan may well be deliberately trying to attract the people who remember life during wartime or grew up in the long shadow of the depression, which adds up to a lot of people (although I suppose many of these are folks who wouldn't dream of spending $100-$150 on food and wine per person in an evening, if a perfectly adequate meal could be found for $20 or $30). Lachlan has something for everyone: He gives the people who are part of the Slow Food movement and who are nostalgic for another way of life (e.g., witness the hoops Bill Buford jumps in Heat) an opportunity to go back in time and yet be on the cutting edge of their own era all in one evening.

All I Want Is My Duct Tape, Paper Clips, WD-40...

We've been e-mailing for years and all the time more people start sending emails, so those urban legends and jokes that people started sending to one another when e-mail became more ubiquitous never died. There are good ones about how to resist telephone scams, and there's the hoax one about the kidnapping scam in Wal-Mart. Some of them take me back to those terrifying tales my aunt and her pals used to tell each other and me when I was little about girls killed in dramatic scenarios ("...and 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' was her favorite song!"). Urban myths and legends, some cautionary and true, some not, always seem to surface in one medium or another.

That said, I'm not even sure if it fits the same category as an e-mail chestnut but I just opened the WD-40 e-mail, which calls out some of the cures and problems for which people have used it: removing old tape, stripping dried bugs off the front of your car, attracting fish (for some reason this was the paragraph called out in red in the e-mail that came to me). Removing tarnish from silver, keeping pigeons off the balcony ("they hate the smell"), and cleaning shower doors. It's amazing.

Someone sent me an e-mail a couple of weeks ago that listed a bunch of miracle uses for different products. My hackles went up, though, when the list spelled out specific brands for every product. I'm cynical enough to believe if you traced all the products up the conglomerate tree, you'd probably find one behemoth corporation at the root of it and some brilliant PR wiz kid who came up with the notion of writing and disseminating it. (It wouldn't take so much effort to come up with one unusual use each for several different products.) Yet there's something more organic about the WD-40 one, more mythical. It has the ring of a cliche we all know because it's true.

WD-40 is, after all, a very cool product. It was named for the formula created to displace water (its name stands for "Water Displacement perfected on the 40th try"). Its uses are myriad, tested, and widely accepted. People use it, however, for more than anyone ever intended. Even the WD-40 Web site acknowledges that this product has fans far beyond the expected mechanics and do-it-yourselfers everywhere.

There are enough promises in the WD-40 mythology to incite that tingly, snake-oil salespitch or gold-rush itch, enough to make you wonder: "What if it were really that easy? What if really could help me with all those things -- catching more fish, keeping my shower doors clean, eliminating my arthritis?" Like some magic lantern, we want to ask and ask again, "How much more can you do for me? What would that world look like if you could really do all that?"

The truly magical part about this: All you have to do to find out is go out to your garage or if you don't have one, go buy yourself a can of WD-40, available practically anywhere. Let me know whether you find any truth in the rumors.

What's So Wonderful About Fancy Food?

I don't know when I started feeling this way, but I love to hear all the latest food news about restaurants in my town and even others farther away. When people go to interesting places, I'm as curious about what and how they ate as I am in the other things they did there. When I go on a trip, I remember it better if I keep a record of what we ate.

It is in part about scents anchoring memories: Dining of course involves the nose and tongue, the chief olfactory organs. Then there's the wonderful world of flavor, with its myriad combinations done and never before done (my happiest summer discovery was a salad of watermelon, feta, avocado, and vinaigrette, those basic notes of sweet and tart all balanced in entirely new proportions). In The Omnivore's Dilemma, which I've just begun reading, Michael Pollan says our desire for new foods has increased our brain size, which has in turn incited us to experiment with more foods and preparations. We have grown a big brain so we can not just eat but eat well.

In my world, food options are plentiful and rich. We happen to live comfortably enough to shop at Whole Foods once a week for our meats and fish. I have a long list of best places to find things by price and quality filed away in my head when I set about my weekly errands. (Vitamin Cottage for veggies, nuts, and flours - everything's fresh, organic, and there are just a few things too outrageously priced to buy there, like mushrooms. Lucky's for very good $5.99/pound coffee, and King Soopers for orange juice and some produce and pantry staples, cereals and canned things. We get our two weekly gallons of hormone-free local cows' milk delivered every Thursday morning, which makes shopping much easier -- and the milk is excellent. And the occasional trip to the farmer's market or India's Market or the Asian Deli for something new and different.)

One of the highlights of our life together has always been dining out. It was something we did when we became friends, hanging out with our pals in cafes after school and in the summer. We went out as students, and when we first got married, went on the big European trip, and came home and settled into life in San Francisco, for a while, anyway.

I was lucky in the places we happened to live, too. In Berkeley we lived around the corner from Chez Panisse and exactly one block from Peet's, on the Northside. It was lovely. Our roommate had gotten this lady to rent out her house five blocks from the campus and it was in a location that just got better and better while we lived there. We could see the Coop (pronounced Co-op) and the traffic on Shattuck but it was relatively quiet on our corner. I frequented Peet's and the little Juice Bar Collective for amazing lunches. Now the neighborhood is known as Berkeley's "gourmet ghetto."

While we lived there, I worked for a guy who had his psychoanalysis practice on a boat in the Berkeley Marina. (He had really low overhead and got to write off a lot of his boat expenses.) I was transcribing his autobiography and doing his accounts. That was the first time I realized that you could really get into wine; his weekly wine expenses were in the $75-100 range, not counting dining out. When it was time for me to move on, my employer took me to lunch upstairs at the Chez Panisse Cafe. I don't remember what I had, but I do remember it being wonderfully fresh and simple. We went across the Bay with our roommates for one memorable splurge at Stars, Jeremiah Tower's glitzy restaurant. There was a revelation of a dessert that included basil and black pepper.

In San Francisco, when the dot-com boom was just getting underway and no one had yet been paid cash for any of those stock options, we lived in a neighborhood at the edge of a foodie destination all its own: My father would bring me there as a child for the lengua and intestine burritos (the latter were very salty, which I loved then). When we moved there, established Peruvian seafood restaurants shared blocks with Chinese takeout joints and tacquerias and crepe cafes. A few blocks down from our apartment were Lucca Deli and then The Flying Saucer. New coffeehouses were springing up all over. The neighborhood was blossoming. Once we had both moved up a little from our beginning salaries, we could splurge on a dinner at Chez Panisse, downstairs this time. It was one of the best meals I've ever eaten.

We then moved to Germany and I learned a few cooking tricks from our lovely host family there; six months later we moved back to our hometown. We wanted to make pesto, one of the new tricks we'd picked up in California, so we searched for basil (it was May), but were repeatedly directed to the dried spices aisle. Now it's at every store throughout the year.

And our town has become a place where you can always get excellent food. I like many of the same things I always have: a good burrito, a good burger, a good pizza. I used to be a nut for breakfast: it was my favorite meal. Now, not so much. But I also enjoy the times my husband and I go out for a nice dinner; we've had peak moments and made some of our best decisions over meals. Our daughter knows that going out is a treat, too.

And when we go to fine restaurants, there's something wonderful about setting aside that time just to appreciate the subtle arts of eating, drinking, and conversation. When we went to Italy for a week, I kept that feeling of relaxing over meals with me for a long time after we returned home, like a shawl I could wrap around my shoulders. I can still summon that feeling if I try, and our nights on the town help me keep that in perspective. There's nothing like eating together, and eating something totally unique and unusual amplifies each occasion.

It also allows you to celebrate the basics: Instead of just eating a sandwich, chips, and a soda in front of the TV set, you can revel in being able to taste. You can experience the careful balancing of texture, aroma, and color that a great chef can bring to a meal. Is seeing a meal for being more than just fuel learned behavior, I wonder, like perceiving an abstract painting as an expression of something seen and felt rather than just a random collection of strokes on a canvas?

When I cook for my family, I love to make something that celebrates the goodness of food. Roasted and caramelized vegetables. Pan-toasted oatmeal with cranberries. It's busywork, sure, but it's always a pleasure to feed my people food I love.

The converse makes life tricky; it's getting harder for me to eat what I think of as bad food. It's a difficult line to walk with family and friends who don't share the same standards. I asked my mother-in-law once why she doesn't ever cook with organic produce or other products and she said, "I don't usually want to take the extra time." And she meant in the ingredient preparation: I think she thinks everything organic must be washed and trimmed and cut up. But the other factor she didn't say out loud was cost: It's more expensive. She both prizes frugality as a primary virtue and she has more faith in big business i this country. They buy their food at Wal-Mart.

But our bodies are our temples, and I do believe we have an opportunity to either drain resources or contribute to a sustainable culture with each food choice we make. And so I support and celebrate and set money aside to enjoy what can be done with great ingredients, especially when the chefs are working closely with local organic farmers and ranchers. It's not just what you put into your body that counts, but also what you put back into the community. That's why I try to buy things at Whole Foods that I can't find elsewhere. While Whole Foods does pretty well, they are still competing with major grocery chains and like them, shipping produce from all over the world; I'd rather invest more of our dollars in the local produce industry.

Enough for now. I've made myself hungry.

Early Stones and Gimme Shelter

Fortunately, the new DVD The Rolling Stones: A Critical Review is not as dreary as its title might suggest. The first film in the series brought me up to date on how they gained their toehold into the music scene in England and in the U.S. in their first years playing together. The film looks at the Stones by way of the first dozen or so hit singles that launched the group into becoming the superstars they are today.

This "critical retrospective" features early TV appearance and dubbed videos alternated with talking heads, who are by turns the friendly, astute, cool, and even a bit doddering British journos, staff, or friends (and sometimes both) of the Rolling Stones. I'd love to chat up these guys at a party; in an hour and a half they do give plenty of good dish on the group and their special place in history. It’s all in good nerdy fun; if you’re a true trivia hound, you can even test your mettle on the tough quiz in the extras.

Yet the songs themselves rarely get a chance to take off with the constant interspersion of interviews peppered with facts about the band: That the "mass hysteria" atmosphere was so thick at the Stones' early U.S. appearances that the first four rows of seats in any given theater could be predicted to be drenched with teen pee. That Brian Jones felt he brought the Stones together but was feeling marginalized toward the end of his life. “He was a lonely man,” says one of his cohorts, solemnly. Yet before he died in his swimming pool it was Brian Jones who first introduced lots of the unusual instruments into their arrangements (don’t we tend to only think of Lennon and Harrison that way?).

It’s fun to watch the early videos because the band are unschooled enough to show something of themselves and clearly on to something good –- you can just tell that it’s better than anything else they could be doing by a long way. (And the chicks dig it, hey?)

But there’s something eerie about it, too: Jagger’s always watching. He’s watching you watch him. Maybe that’s why he is irresistible. Maybe that’s what makes a stripper good at what she does. Maybe that’s the secret Madonna and Barbra Streisand know that the rest of us don’t. Watching him watch us watch him I wonder whether holding people, holding their attention so that you know they’re watching you, becomes more and more compelling if you do it all the time. He's evidence for it. It can be a form of control, even aggression. From the beginning, those hips, those lips, and that Package have always been all about the danger, the aggressive male in the sex pyramid.

Here's where I digress...

And I love getting in bed every night with with my sweetie and know I'm happier than I would be with that prancing drama queen of a husband, I'm sure. (When I was about 9 or 10 I really felt I should marry Mick Jagger and I was terribly jealous when he married Bianca. She had everything I would want as far as I could see.)

As a kid, I chafed not only at being told I was unlikely to ever marry Mick Jagger (I'm too flat-chested, from what I hear) but also at being told I was too young to go to a Rolling Stones concert. But my parents knew what happened at the Altamont Speedway show, it turned out. (That was one thing I was protected from. I saw Easy Rider at 7 but didn’t until recently watch Gimme Shelter in all its terrible tragedy when rage- and alcohol-fueled Hell’s Angels knifed a man who shot another. It’s awful to watch Gimme Shelter, especially when you put yourself in the band’s shoes as they see for the first time the film of what happened during their concert. The crowd were hot, crowded, and drunk or high on a staggering variety of substances and getting twitchy. The band kept after “The show must go on” tactic to defuse the situation but it was clearly the wrong thing to do in retrospect.

Yet even in Gimme Shelter when they watch that film, Mick’s watching, knowing he's on camera, reacting to what he's just heard about. )

OK, time to rein myself back in, edit this, and send it off.

p.s. Added later: Here's the published version.

HP's "Slimming" Bug -- or is that Feature?

I have just learned from a friend that HP has a “Slimming” feature in its new camera software. HP misguidedly has chosen healthy, fit women models for all the before pictures in their sample images, and shows each of these women shrunken down to Teri Hatcher proportions in the after images.

Is this all for the purpose of looking good in our match.com profiles? Or are we trying to experience seeing what our reflections would look like after losing more weight (or gaining it, in some cases) to motivate ourselves to try to do that? And it all begs the question: Do all of us healthy women really need to look like Twiggy or Kate Moss?

We've been coming up with all the other options you’d have to offer as well to legitimize adding just a the Slimming option. You’d really need a way to choose any body type, different proportions (maybe even with a fancy algorithm for adapting the shape and clothing and hair to different ages), add curving and straightening and "funhouse mirror," (where the mirror would let you adjust the shape of the curves however you like), or "weakening," as a software designer friend suggested, in which you make Arnold Schwartzenegger look like the 90-pound weakling at the beach who gets sand kicked in his face.

You’d also need to be able to reshape hair and even clothing style by decade. Hippie and Hawk, Jackie O, Joni Mitchell, Joan Jett, Joan Armatrading, Norah Jones, and so on.

Here's the letter my friend wrote to HP and copied to her friends. Forward it along if you are inspired!

******

Today I found out about a new feature of HP cameras: "Slimming". I am so appalled I am speechless. But never wordless! (thank goodness for keyboards) I hope you will forgive my mass email, but I'm making good on my promise to HP :-)

You can see for yourself here: http://www.hp.com/united-states/consumer/digital_photography/tours/slimming/index_f.html

I have written the CEO of HP ( http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/execteam/email/hurd/index.html) as well as provided feedback to the product team (I think, http://wwemail.support.hp.com/fd2/EmailForm?countrycode=us&langcode=en&sni=fd2-webfeedback2-ho

Here is what I said:

"Our culture has created enough body image issues for women without this offensive, sexist "feature". Perhaps you should review the Eating Disorder statistics to understand the far-reaching consequences of your "improvement": http://www.state.sc.us/dmh/anorexia/statistics.htm

As if the notion that photo subjects should "trim off pounds" wasn't bad enough, you seemed to have used only young, attractive, healthy women who have no need to be "slimmed". How many subjects of your software will become statistics (anorexia and bulimia are life-threatening diseases!)?

I have been a long-time customer of HP: virtually every printer I have ever owned was from HP; I never bother to shop - I always picked HP.

However, based on this product, I resolve to never purchase anything from HP ever again. Further, I plan to share this perspective with every person I know, so they can also make an informed decision about HP's ethics, exploitation of women, and blatant disregard for women's health."

I encourage you to let HP know how you feel about this new technology.

j

Sudoku puzzler

It was seeing a book entitled Snakes on a Sudoku at the grocery store last week that got me thinking about this.

About a month ago, I finally started doing sudoku puzzles. My best friend had said she found them relaxing and thought they might help keep her brain sharp, my husband and in-laws do them, and I know I'm smart enough to tackle them even though I tended to be the person who would come up with the most convoluted path to the solutions in algebra class.

So I do a couple or three puzzles a week now, the easy ones (and I have botched several). True to form, I started doing them the hard way: by writing every possible number at the edge of every square and then going through and eliminating all of the wrong guesses. Eventually I realized that there were more clues than I saw at the beginning of my sudoku odyssey. Now I'm much faster at solving them and no longer have to write all the little numbers in the squares the way I once did. I have goofed up on a few but solved lots of them.

My friend is right when she says they are relaxing in a certain way. Like any math or logic problem, they all have a correct answer. She was also right when she said, "You never have to guess," meaning that the layout of the numbers always gives you the clues you need to solve the puzzle without any guesswork. I still don't know how that works with the really difficult ones, but when I've solved puzzles I have indeed not needed to guess.

Yet I remain puzzled about the sudoku craze because people are spending so much time doing them, yet they still don't take vacations. Just google "americans vacation time" and you'll find many, many stories about the fact that not only do people get less vacation time in the U.S. than in other countries but that people are not even using all of their allotted time.

Does that mean that sudoku puzzles have come to serve as our mini-vacations? I think web surfing serves that purpose for some folks, but perhaps because of the mind-sharpening qualities of working out a logic problem, we see sudoku puzzles as a more profitable activity.

I've always felt that the goal of my work is to bring me to the dinner table with the ones I love at the end of the day. I also believe in the power of art and music to restore and refresh the soul. As much as I enjoy the feeling of accomplishment after I've solved a puzzle, I believe that all our time spent on sudoku puzzles might be better invested in having dinner with our friends and family, going out to hear live music for an hour or two, or planning our next vacation. Sounds good, but first I'm going to finish that puzzle.