In which I feel both uplifted and awkward.
Once in awhile, I fall accidentally into a religious conversation with a devout Christian about the experience of the practice of religion. And she says stuff, and I say stuff, and she’s pleased with my insight and depth of understanding, and we’re really grooving and having a meaningful chat about life and love and suffering and learning and keeping covenant and watching the mind and all that grooviness, and then suddenly I realize I’m fucking trapped.
Because by understanding her subtlest spiritual work, I’ve more or less “led” her to believe I’m also a Christian, which I’m really, really not, and it’d be awkward if I revealed that I’m a so-called heathen, and I end up feeling kinda bad about it, and then I start fearing I’ll be asked when I was saved or born again or baptized or whatever, because I won’t know what to say without ruining the fine fellow-feeling that I feel and know is well and truly earned.
I enjoy talking to devotees of any stripe, but Christians can get upset to learn that their little two-thousand year old, truncated, gutted religion’s precepts are not exactly philosophically hard to get one’s brain around, or that the work they’re doing — everything from forbearance to surrender to love in action to devotion to all the rest of it — is known to earnest followers of every religion ever, even the religions they hate or believe to be false, and that the only things unique to Christianity are irrelevant not only to all non-Christians but to the actual practices of religion itself (because most stuff unique to Christianity is actually politics, not spirituality, and everybody knows it. Same for the other Abrahamic branches, and a variety of other traditions, as well).
What’s most interesting, really, is how a philosophy as broken as modern western Christianity still has such passionate, fervent followers with so much bhakti (loving devotion toward God) and intimacy with their guru, whom they call Lamb of God, without irony, realizing not at all that God takes birth repeatedly because He’s fucking INFINITE and unbounded and can do literally everything, and does. (That in and of itself essentially proves the fundamentals of Vedanta, really, but you can’t say that because it would be more unkind than useful.)
I mean, really. The very idea that God mandated only one opportunity is contrary to the concept of a loving God entirely. You can’t have it both ways: either your God is loving and absolute, or He’s a jerk who wants to damn entire swathes of His own creation.
I got into a big ol’ conversation with a customer at work tonight after I fixed her system and alleviated her worries about how it was functioning. I learned about some big parts of her life, of what she’s going through now, from marriage problems to serious health issues, and we had some really deep conversation about right action, ego, spiritual work, fear, and love. I felt really grateful for the connection with a total stranger, and she averred she did, too, but at the end of conversation I knew she was just this close to asking me when I found Jesus, which, in the sense she means, as far as I understand “finding Jesus,” I haven’t.
Well, actually, I have, but not in a way that I could articulate without using language not typical to Christianity. Have I had an experience of Christ? Sure, yes, but I consider Jesus to be but one flower on an entire tree of enlightened avatars of God, born of Self-effort to reach us all, where and when and as we are, for the purpose of revealing, through their lives’ example, our own indwelling nature as That. Persons who have never been exposed to knowledge of Christ — for instance, every human life that occurred before His own, and millions since — are not doomed to “hell,” a metaphorical, and not literal, place. To think they are is to limit the limitless, to project upon God the flaws of our own self-made minds, and to reduce the infinite into our finite.
I’ve spoken intimately with several Christian women over the years, and their astonishment at my grasp of subtle concepts is very near universal. It blows their minds that a religion with thousands of icons knows things they thought were Christian Mysterees, because their religion teaches them that all other religions are fundamentally wrong.
I’m pretty sure that any religion that calls itself the only path is deeply suspect, because it’s obviously ridiculous to posit an infinite, all-knowing God The Creator And Source Of All, and then say there’s only one way to get to Him because he wasn’t clever enough to allow for the foibles of all the souls in his His beloved creation.
Some day I need to figure out how to indicate, without sounding like a pompous jerk, that I’m not Christian but do know (though I’m not a proper scholar by any stretch), a bit about the fundamentals of religious philosophies. Hmm.
In which I buy stuff I don’t really need like an asshole, but at least it’s all used so I can say I’m “upcycling”!
Bought a table today! A used table! A TABLE YOU CAN EAT AT!
It’s a brown pub-style table and chairs set, and it’s taller than strictly necessary but I think it’ll be comfortable for the man, who is tall. The chairs are not-awful considering how austere they look, and not so high I can’t easily reach a sewing machine pedal.
I’m already imagining our having our next bi-annual games night while sitting at it, and it’s still 3 blocks away! (We’re going to bring it home when the man gets home from work.) Trivial Pursuit! Yahtzee! Cards! Dice! At a pub table! Brilliant!
I have also, I might add, in the past two months, bought: dishes, water glasses, a gravy boat, and candlestick holders, mainly in anticipation of setting a semi-proper Thanksgiving table this year. It’ll only be the two of us again, of course, but I’m so tired of eating on the couch hunched over the coffee table on holidays. It’ll be so great to sit down to a proper meal together on occasion!
You don’t think of yourself as “a table person” until you go over two years without one. I haven’t owned one for a really long time, but I lived with one until moving here. You just don’t really notice the stuff a table’s good for until there’s no table. Games night. Sewing. Filling out Christmas cards. Dinner dates. Wrapping gifts. Opening boxes from Amazon. Putting down the groceries.
I was, briefly, considering buying TV trays, but then I was just, like, OMFG, NERD, GET RID OF THE RECLINER WE LITERALLY NEVER, EVER SIT ON, AND THEN THERE WILL BE ROOM FOR A SMALL TABLE! So I took pictures of it — the recliner, I mean — and put it on Craigslist and it was not only gone in a week, but we got $25 more than we asked for!
Now that I have a table, I might buy fabric and make a runner, or placemats, or a tablecloth or something! Or, OMG, I could do seasonally appropriate centerpieces. It’s already September, I need a bowl and some pine cones and mini-pumpkins, stat! (While that is a joke, it’s also not. I’m totally gonna centerpiece it up for turkey day: I don’t even care that it’s common and privileged and totally something white bitches my age obsess over. Whoo! I even have a tray that’ll work for Xmas, maybe with candles and ornaments…)
Oh, who am I kidding. It’ll be covered in random shit within two weeks, and nobody’ll ever see any decorative centerpieces, and I’ll have to clean it off in order to eat at it, but at least I don’t have to eat on the couch anymore! Whoo! I’m gonna post the best Thanksgiving pictures this year!
In which I wax enthusiastic about a very old product!
Even with shipping, I got a frying pan, a sauce pan, and two lids for $25. Which is a really decent price, considering you could easily pay almost that for a lidded 6″ non-stick that you’d have to throw out and replace in two years.
Behold the P-81-B, which is the 1-pint covered sauce pan on the left, and the P-83-B, the 6-1/2 inch covered skillet you see on the right! The “P” series ran from 1958 to 1972, so these pans are 44 years old at the very youngest, and they could easily be older than I am by a decade.
These things are awesome! They heat up just as fast as cheap non-stick pans, and while they’re not non-stick per se, you can fry eggs and hamburgers in them with a little bit of butter and nothing sticks!
They’re also a pure and angelic white, so they look antiseptic as fuck. They scrub clean with remarkable ease.
They’re small and they have lids. I find that I’m cooking in them over much lower flame than I would with bigger pans, and of course lids keep the heat in too. Today I’ve fried a couple of eggs and a hamburger over very low flame in not much time at all. So they’re unexpectedly fuel-economical. Who knew!
And while you can’t buy either of these particular pieces new anymore, Corning Ware still offers some of the casseroles in this pattern. (I totally want them, and no doubt they’re worth every penny of the retail price, but if I do buy them I’ll probably buy them used because I’m cheap. You can almost see why so many companies went for planned obsolescence rather than quality when you contemplate that Corning Ware’s 50-year-old pieces are viably competing with their brand-new products.)
I love their sizes; great for cooking for one or two. (Not to mention great for not cooking far too much food every time you step up to the stove.) I’m not really sure why pan sizes have grown and grown when family sizes are smaller; I do know that when I was learning to cook I always made far too much food because the pots and pans were so big.
Knowing that the sauce pan holds exactly enough soup for two small bowlsful makes me happy.
I’m pretty sure there are a couple of these in my g’ma’s kitchen, but I didn’t cook with them much (beyond occasionally using one to put something in the toaster oven). I always used the small non-stick to fry or scramble eggs rather than the Corning Ware frying pan; habit, I suppose. Plus they look like they should stick, after years of using Teflon-coated pans, but they don’t.
I think between these and a decent cast iron pan or two, a person could easily give up cheap, disposable non-stick pans entirely! (I can’t speak for high-dollar non-stick cookware, because I’ve never had any.)
I love these pans!
In which I got a shit-ton of stuff done today.
Here’s the very exciting list:
tidied up generally
scrubbed the stove top
made awesome coffee in the Pyrex percolator
took pictures of the brown recliner
put all the throw rugs in the hall
swept the living room and bath
mopped the kitchen until the mop fell apart
put all the kitchen and bath linens into the wash
took all the rugs outside and shook the hell out of them
spot-scrubbed the living room and entryway floors with the mophead
listed the brown recliner on Craigslist
put the laundry in the dryer
made a pile of his stuff and asked him to deal with it
dusted and washed the coffee tables
washed the garbage pail lid
made the bed
put the rugs back down
folded the laundry and brought it back up
took pictures of the extra office chair to sell it
got permission to sell the PS3
Yay! Accomplishments!
In which it’s so political out there that it’s just better if I bitch here, where nobody but, like, five people and a couple of bots will ever see it.
This article just showed up in my timeline. Being a woman, I clicked on it.
https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/the-reality-that-all-women-experience-that-men-dont-know-about-kelly-jrmk/
Oh. My. Fucking. GOD. Don’t click through. It’s awful. Let me summarize it for you:
“Men have libidos and they look at us, beginning as soon as we go through puberty. We’re totally TRAUMATIZED by this and expect to be protected from ever being looked at or desired, ever. Because we’re inherently weak victims by nature.”
I am so sick of this idiot “narrative” that can’t tell the goddamned difference between evil (murderers) and horniness (young males), between actual danger (ISIL) and vague interest (a guy who looks at you), and which remains so completely convinced of its intrinsic worth and right to a voice that its adherents complaint-blog about men everywhere, constantly, all the time.
Sometimes it’s not even about “sexual harassment” (aka being human in public); they’ll blog about males simply being nice to them, because their victim-as-identity mentality is so deeply embedded in their psyches that they can’t tell the difference between a male with bad manners and a male that is trying to be helpful. Literally.
Any time a male interacts with them and doesn’t cower and grovel and spew “feminist” platitudes, it’s “harassment.” And if a man tries to help them, they’re instantly pissed off and insulted because they don’t need help from men and are perfectly capable, and being offered assistance is an insult!
Ladies: you’re not “feminists.” Feminism died before most of you were born. Actual feminists fought for equality and had legitimate academic clout. “Feminism” has degraded into a male-hating pogrom and it’s ugly, unbalanced, ignorant, privileged, immature, selfish, sexist, and wrong.
I loathe this article. It’s simple, petulant, and privileged, and sounds like it was written by an indoctrinated twelve-year-old still struggling with puberty and the measurable, demonstrable fact that boys and girls are different.
If I were more attached to my sex than my humanity, I’d be embarrassed by it, and go on apologetically about how most women aren’t nearly half as stupid, self-obsessed, and immature as the author appears to be, and I’d say that most of us are quite capable of rational thought and can tell the difference between being looked at and the legal definition of harassment.
Except judging by the massive volume of complaint-blogs about males and re-posts by women, apparently it’s not true.
This kind of thing isn’t groundbreaking, it isn’t useful, and it isn’t feminism. It’s privileged whining as a wrapper around full-on hatred of the masculine. It’s sexism.
I can’t believe how many otherwise intelligent women are applauding this article. Wives of husbands, mothers of sons! And if they’re instilling this kind loathing into their boys, well, it’s no wonder they’re all transgender. (Three of the women who reposted the link are mothers of boys who want to be girls.)
+~+~+~
This was posted, in earnest I believe, on Facebook yesterday:
http://mysteriousearth.net/2016/07/17/smithsonian-admits-to-destruction-of-thousands-of-giant-human-skeletons-in-early-1900%E2%80%B2s/
Really? Are you not even gonna use any part of that university education you paid tens of thousands of dollars for? I won’t even bother to say that both Nat Geo and Snopes say “hoax,” because it’s obvious.
Filed under chemtrails. Ye gods, people.
+~+~+~
http://www.salon.com/2016/03/03/my_gen_x_hillary_problem_i_know_why_we_dont_like_clinton/
A more mature rant, but still about the same shit: ZOMG SEXISM IS EVERYWHERE, ENTRENCHED AND RAMPANT!
Please. You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. Women abandoned tech because they didn’t want to be there. I personally spent my career — what there was of it — in tech. Women don’t like tech for two reasons: they don’t like being on call all night because they have families to deal with, and nerds expect them to be competent. The ones who aren’t competent find that using feminine wiles on (most) nerds is an epic fail, because (most) nerds either don’t notice or don’t care but they definitely know you have no idea how to configure a border router or do subnetting in your head.
Being annoyed once in awhile by an idiot who happens to be male and says dumb shit does not equal rampant, entrenched sexism. The rest of your male employees and clients were capable of behaving normally, but the occasional reject proves “sexism” to you? Really?
Sexism is “prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination on the basis of sex.” It’s when someone says, “I do not believe you are capable of doing this because of your chromosomes.” Not getting a job in the engineering department because you don’t know how to subnet is not sexism.
‘And then I turned 40 in the office,’ and confused sexism with ageism. Any idea how many males get let go because they’re “old”? Our culture is obsessed with youth.
And let us not forget that our culture undervalues motherhood as a whole and half of “our culture” is voting women who haven’t bothered to do shit about it. If you chose housewifery over a job that undervalued home and family and valued only itself, that was capitalism, not sexism.
It’s not men who say that making money at work is so important that it must take precedence over caregiving, it’s all of us. If women wanted it fixed, they’d get it fixed. Our society in general feels, if pay rates are anything to go by, that being the CEO of a successful corporation is valuable, being a doctor is less valuable, being a teacher is even less valuable, and being a mother is worth nothing at all.
Don’t like it? FIX IT, LADIES. YOU HAVE THE VOTE.
In which I go off on victimhood mentality as displayed by a member of a privileged* class.
I just read a huge, long, 40-post tweetfest freakout about “sexual assault.”
The writer claims that she got licked on the cleavage in a hotel bar. She’d gone merely to collect a fork, with which to eat her dinner in her room, and a man demanded a hug and then licked her chest. It was at the DNC, apparently. She went on and on and on about how broken “the system” is, how people “wanted to, but couldn’t” help her after her “sexual assault.”
Help with what?
Well, she wanted the drunk licking-man’s convention credentials pulled, and she wanted him evicted from the hotel. Apparently the very sight of him brought back the trauma of having been licked on the breastbone — very near her nipple! — by a fucking idiot she should have just laughed at for being a pathetic, stupid, neckless loser.
Instead, per her own story, she complained to everyone, over and over, in graphic detail. From other convention-goers, to the hotel staff, to the police, as if it were a horrific crime and not just a super annoying annoyance.
And when people asked her, as she documented in her tweetfest, why she didn’t grab his dick and twist until he squealed, or punch him out, or react in any sort of self-preserving way, what they meant was, why didn’t you react in ANY sort of self-preserving way if being licked on the breastbone was so traumatic for you? Apparently she did and said nothing, just allowed it to happen.
Which is implied consent, actually. I get being shocked into immobility by something truly horrific, like war, but you’re just being licked on the chest by a short, no-necked drunken moron, in public, and you’re just standing there. To use an insult usually reserved for the opposite sex, why don’t you just grow a pair and, if you’re so in need of protecting, protect yourself?
Oh, because you’re an habitual “victim” who needs men to protect her while she simultaneously categorizes poor male behavior as “sexual assault.” Well, you can’t have it both ways. Either all men are assholes and you protect yourself, or all men are your saviors and you let them lick you because you’re weak and helpless.
Then she tweets about going to her room to cry and shower in a vignette designed to make her sound just like a rape victim, clearly seeing no difference between her experience of a drunk idiot’s bad social judgement and the experiences of actual rape and assault victims. Because an entitled, privileged white woman being licked in a convention hotel bar is exactly like being a third world child bride or an ISIL sex slave.
Then she’s upset about being driven to make her statement in a cop car (a ride she didn’t even have to pay for), because apparently she expected cop cars to be comfortable, softly-upholstered, and nicely scented. (She could have taken a taxi, or hired a car, if she needed coddling so much.) She bitches about the interview room because it’s utilitarian and ugly (entirely missing, which is weird for a DNC attendee, that it’s probably under-funded, and that the detective probably hates it too). She calls the disgusting fart who bothered her into a hug and then licked her chest for a few seconds in a bar at two in the morning her “attacker.” She calls the experience of being exposed to a man’s immature and stupid behavior “my trauma,” and she’s shocked and appalled by having had the sensation of saliva drying on her skin. She calls herself a “survivor.”
(Just wait ’til she whelps. The “trauma” of giving up her entire body to something that’s forever leaving various fluids on her skin will probably drive her to in-patient psych care. And if she’s a survivor, I’m literally risen from the dead so many times I’m basically a cat.)
Being licked on the breastbone by a drunk fuck in a bar is not sexual assault. The reason nobody rushed to protect her was that she didn’t need protecting. It was inappropriate, yes, and embarrassing and desperate, but it wasn’t assault. The cops were bored with her because there hadn’t been a crime, just a case of male poor judgement and female social privilege.
After she reports to a police officer, she says she isn’t sure she wishes to file. So why did she report, then? I’ll say why: for attention. If you’re not going to file, why else report? Oh, to document it? Document what? No crime occurred. You were the “victim” of drink and desperation, not rape.
“Sexual assault is any type of sexual contact or behavior that occurs without the explicit consent of the recipient. Falling under the definition of sexual assault are sexual activities as forced sexual intercourse, forcible sodomy, child molestation, incest, fondling, and attempted rape.” So, very, very loosely per the first sentence, sure, being licked is sexual assault; I’d imagine if it happened frequently and under some form of actual duress, a victim could use it in court. But once? In a bar? At oh-drunk-thirty, at a convention? I really doubt it, because it falls squarely into what anyone not raised as a victim would see was just dumb bad judgement, quickly and easily quashed with a sneer, derision, and mockery. Something along the lines of, “Hey, guys, look at this pathetic no-necked creep! He just licked me! Have you ever seen weaker game? My God, Walter, you ridiculous loser!” Boom. Problem solved, man humiliated, “trauma” averted.
Telling the hotel management? Whatever for? What were they supposed to do? It’s like blaming the waiter for your own allergic reaction to a dish you didn’t examine before you stuffed it in your life-threateningly allergic mouth. You’re at a political convention and you’re old enough to be in a bar; one assumes you have at least some working knowledge of the world, and yet there you are, whining to the wrong people and demanding your “attacker” be evicted from a room he paid for because he annoyed you?
Now, I’m going to say something and I’m going to use crass language, because sometimes crass language is called for. And before you come back with a bunch of bullshit about nuance and every situation being unique, I’m going to say that I already know that and ask you not to insult my intelligence. But here’s the deal: Men want pussy. And women decide who gets pussy. You’re not the goddamned victim, because you have dominion over what he wants. And this dynamic doesn’t change until and unless you’re under actual fucking duress.
And not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s obvious by his behavior that he’s very, very bad at getting what he wants. (If he weren’t, he’d have learned long ago not to lick girls when they’re just trying to get a fucking fork from the bar so they can eat their macaroni and cheese TV dinner in their room.) If his idea of come-hither behavior is to lick a random chick on the neck, he probably hasn’t been laid, like, ever, and your power in this situation is so obvious your lack of apprehension is laughable.
Bad things do happen, yes. But not, in this case, to you.
—
* Contrary to popular belief held by feminists, a white woman, statistically likely to be educated, attending a political convention and staying at a hotel, is not disenfranchised in any meaningful or measurable way.
In which I lecture people on Facebook who will never read this.
Do not vote third party. Not in this election. I can understand not liking Clinton, but voting for anybody else is a vote for Trump.
Is Clinton ideal? Certainly not. I don’t like her at all.
Is it absurd and baffling that the GOP couldn’t be bothered to field a real candidate and we ended up with this reality TV fucktard? Absolutely, yes.
Is it all just infuriating, insulting, dumb, and awful? Yes. Yes it is.
But SO THE FUCK WHAT. Adult up already and understand that they call it a “wasted vote” because voting for a third-party candidate is, literally and unequivocally, A WASTED VOTE. And we can’t afford that shit right now.
You can pontificate all you like about “our hijacked democracy” and “the Clinton agenda” and you wouldn’t be wrong, but if all you immature, idealistic nerds vote your so-called consciences, TRUMP AS POTUS IS GOING TO BE YOUR FAULT. You think this country’s going to hell in a handbasket now? Put a total idiot in office for four years and watch what happens to a nation as precariously balanced as this one when the leadership is utterly incompetent.
This is not the election for idealism. Do not elect a TV personality by tossing your vote away on some obscure candidate most Americans have never heard of just because you’re mad that the system isn’t what you’d like.
You’re not twelve fucking years old. You’re an adult, capable of subtle analysis, and you’re smart enough to see that you cannot allow Trump to sit in that chair. He’s unqualified as fuck, and he has a very upsetting agenda, full of ignorance and provincialism more suited to the world climate of a century ago. Worse, he suffers a painful lack of historical, political, or legal knowledge and an utter ignorance of protocol, with an apparent complete absence of desire to acquire same.
This is the election for pragmatism. If you truly wanted to fix the system, you’d have tried to do so long before now, and the vast majority of you haven’t.
So STFU about how Clinton isn’t ideal. WE ALL KNOW THAT, even the giddy feminists waxing breathless about Clinton’s possessing a vagina. At least she’s an actual politician. At this point, we just need to keep Trump out of the goddamned office; after that we can talk about fixing things.
…but we won’t. We’ll all go back to whatever we do on non-election years, and our “deeply-held” political beliefs — those ridiculous idealistic ones that prompt us to WASTE OUR ONE AND ONLY VOTE — will cause us to do what we always did, which is not much of anything useful as far as fixing our democracy.
Do not vote third party. Not in this election.
In which there’s good news.
We flew to DC last Thursday so I could see Amma.
We had a very short layover in Milwaukee, then got to Reagan, walked to the hotel shuttle stand, and waited for the bus. Got to the hotel, went out to eat on a cute little street a few blocks away, and walked back to our hotel around midnight. Only when back in our room after having been in Arlington for hours did I bother to unpack, assemble, fill, and use my ecig device, and then only briefly before going to bed.
The next day, I realized that in all that travel I never once wanted to smoke. I thought about smoking in a vague sort of way when we were waiting at the bus stand; I thought, “A few months ago, I’d be considering smoking now, even though it’s probably not allowed. I’d probably cross the street and stand over there and suck down a cig and hope the shuttle didn’t come until I was done.”
Every previous layover on every previous flight I’ve ever taken, I’ve furiously crunched times in my head and if there was enough, I rushed to smoke. Is there a smoking lounge in this airport? How far is it from my gate? Can I get there and back in time? Will I miss my flight? If not, do I have enough time to get all the way outside, smoke, and get back in through security and still make my connection?
And on arrival, the same thing: where am I meeting my ride? Where’s the smoking area? Do I have enough time to smoke? HOW DO I GET OUT OF THIS PLACE SO I CAN SMOKE?
It was really nice, not giving a shit about smoking! I didn’t even remember that I was a(n ex) smoker during the Milwaukee layover; past me would have been infuriated that it was so short and that I’d been denied the opportunity to try to get a cig in, but current me didn’t even think about it.
Same on the trip home: instead of standing outside, sucking down a few cigs while waiting for the cab back to the airport, I just sat inside the hotel lobby by the doors to the taxi stand, waiting like a normal person. Didn’t think about smoking at all during the two-hour layover, didn’t think about it when we arrived back in MSP, didn’t have to smoke in the parking garage before getting in the truck to drive back to the apartment, didn’t have to smoke when we got home. (Did have a lovely chain-vape later, before finally keeling over from the exhaustion of having been up all night, though.)
Having never travelled without having to figure out how and where and when to smoke before in my adult life, the experience was really wonderful. No cravings, no anxiety about how and where to get my fix in. No simmering rage at the constant non-smoking announcements and signage one is endlessly subjected to in airports and on airplanes.
Vaping continues to be a fantastic solution for me. I have to admit to being quite surprised at how quickly it has broken all the habits and thought patterns associated with being a smoker. When I leave the house now, I just leave and don’t automatically check my bag for a pack of cigs and a lighter. (I rarely take my mod with me when I go out, unless I’m going to the ecig store for liquid or coils, and only then because it’s fun to vape inside the store itself since it’s allowed.) I have 31 years of smoking habits to overcome, but they just seem to be going away on their own without stress or even effort. I didn’t even think about smoking while we were traveling! I was not annoyed, I did not have a nic fit! Not even a little!
I have yet to go an entire day without vaping at all, since quitting smoking 62 days ago, but while on some days I do start vaping earlier than I ever smoked (I’ve never been a morning smoker; I always did all my smoking from late afternoon on), or I indulge in a few hours of “chain vaping,” on other days I just use it for a few minutes a few times in the evenings. It continues to be much cheaper than smoking, because even though a 30ml bottle of liquid is twenty bucks, it lasts many more days than the same value of cigarettes ever did. My lung health is much, much better. I don’t clear my throat all the time, I don’t have weird snot, and my voice doesn’t sound like that of a smoker, either, which is a cool benefit.
While I suspect that Scott doesn’t like the smell (he’s too nice to say, really), it’s very mild and leaves virtually no permanent odor. I’ve tested this by vaping for a bit, then going out to the corner store and returning with a fresh nose. One gets the impression that there was maybe some weak-ass incense burnt a few days ago, but that’s about it (and as we do burn incense fairly regularly, sometimes I can’t tell if it’s that or the vapor residue). For awhile I had a little bowlful of used coils sitting around, but that did smell bad, so I got rid of them; and I now keep the bottles of liquids in a plastic bag because the combination of their various scents is gross, but in general I see no reason not to vape indoors.
My clothes, hair, skin, pockets, and purse don’t smell like cigarettes, butts, or smoke anymore. It’s great! Added benefit: I’m no longer terrified of catching a cold and ending up in an oxygen tent with a lung infection.
Like I’ve said before, it’s probably not a zero-harm activity, but compared to smoking cigarettes the benefits of vaping are enormous.
In which there’s a recipe.
I’ve been eating these all week.
They’re really just bean tostadas, but you should make some anyway because they’re fantastic.
This is a strange but delicious guacamole. Make some. (Click on the pic for the recipe.)
Now put it in the fridge to chill.
Put some grated cheese — I used a Mexican three-cheese blend — on a fried corn tortilla/tostada shell.
Nuke until melted. I do mine for 33 seconds.
Top with, in this order: bubbling-hot refried beans (black, ideally, but I had regular refried pinto beans on hand), diced onions, salsa or hot sauce, shredded lettuce, a dollop of the cottage cheese guacamole, and diced tomatoes.
Eat your tostadas.
Here’s a salsa recipe, if you want one. (Click on the pic for the recipe.)
In which there’s some perspective.
Oil is in everything. Oil is in every single thing you ever use, touch, or buy.
How does food get to the store or farmer’s market? In trucks that are running on gas. How do you carry your food home? In plastic bags. How do you store your leftovers? In plastic containers in plastic fridge interiors sitting on linoleum, laminate wood, or carpeted floors, all three of which are petroleum products.
Your prescription lenses are a petroleum product, your window blinds are a petroleum product, your brassiere is a petroleum product, and every board and nail your house was built with were made with and transported to your property on equipments burning petroleum products.
Your toothbrush is a petroleum product, the materials used to make your shoes and coats are petroleum products, and the plastic clothes hangars in your front coat closet are petroleum products. Nearly all your personal care items are in plastic containers or contain petroleum products.
It’s easy to get mad about spills and pipelines and fracking, but we have to remember that “the fossil fuel industry” is us. If we’re sick of it, if we want it to change, then we have to change.
We have to demand wooden toothbrushes, woolen coats, fewer cars and more trains. We have to refuse to place every single piece of succulent produce we buy into a thin plastic bag we subsequently throw away. We have to be okay with things arriving at stores unwrapped and possibly in need of cleaning before we can utilize them. We have to bring our own containers for nearly everything, and we have to recycle the shit out of what’s left.
We have to demand less plastic in all packaging, from bed linen sets to hummus to children’s toys. We have to quit buying baggies and Tupperware and Saran wrap, and re-use the stuff we already have. We have to quit buying plastic plates and forks and Solo cups for BBQs and camping.
We have to quit buying disposable crap. We have to demand that our appliances be repairable, long-term investments, rather than engineered to fail in 18 months.
We have to buy fewer cell phones. We have to keep our computers longer. We have to walk more and drive less. We have to quit ordering take-out and eat in, on dishes, instead. We have to demand paper wrapping for our drive-thru foods.
We need to stop buying individual beverage servings; everything in those cold cases in gas stations has to stop. Buy fountain drinks only, in paper cups or a reusable container you brought with you, or STFU.
We absolutely must stop buying bottled water. There used to be drinking fountains all over the place. Bring them back.
We also have to be willing to accept things that aren’t quite as good. Wooden toothbrushes are porous and capable of harboring germs. Woolen coats aren’t waterproof and compared to modern synthetics are heavy and bulky. Paper bags fall apart in the rain. Leather shoes are cold and they leak. Real rubber degrades in sunlight. Shake shingles don’t last as long.
These massive oil spills are not just happening in a vacuum. The fossil fuel industry exists because we buy their wares, and we buy them all day long, every single day.
Americans consume petroleum products at a rate of three-and-a-half gallons of oil and more than 250 cubic feet of natural gas per day each.
Every latte lid, every drinking straw, every produce bag, every cell phone, every oscillating floor fan. Every quick little errand in the car, every elective surgery, every bottle of herbal supplements or tube of organic moisturizer.
Every plastic laundry basket, every pair of Fiskars, every casserole dish lid. Every bottle of liquid laundry or dish soap, every bottle of shampoo and conditioner, every shower shell, every vinyl floor tile, every set of speakers, every stick of deodorant. Every hand tool, every automobile, every plush toy, every microfiber throw, every Rubbermaid storage bin, every USB cable and extension cord and surge protector bar.
Even if you ride your bike to the greenhouse for a bouquet of fresh flowers, your bike was built with petroleum products and the greenhouse’s mulch and seeds were brought in on trucks.
Here is a picture of a long line of people standing on a beach protesting fossil fuels:
Swimwear and flipflops? Petroleum products. Lotions, sunglasses, SPF cream? Petroleum products. Ice chests and parasols? Beach towels and plastic zippers? Nylon rope, surf boards? All petroleum products.
Everything in your medicine cabinet and under your kitchen sink: petroleum products. The kiddie pool, the lawn hose, the patio furniture: petroleum products.
It’s not that I don’t think massive spills aren’t a problem. I do. But we need to change the market if we want to change big oil; there’s no other way to reduce these risks or to reduce or stop fracking.
Oil is in everything. You use three gallons a day just sitting on your [synthetic and therefore petroleum product-containing] couch doing nothing but looking at your petroleum product-containing TV, the channels of which you change with your petroleum product-containing remote. When you get up to have some eggs, you cook them in your petroleum product-containing pan, and top them with cheese that came out of a petroleum product-containing package. When you go to wash your plate, you use a kitchen sponge made of petroleum products.
“The fossil fuel industry” is us. If we’re sick of it, if we want it to change, then we have to change.
VSCO
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4 random books from my Library!
