Skip to main content

Three Good Things for Monday, February 26th

It's been a long day so I'm keeping my words short tonight.


1. Blogging.

A passionflower vine trying to cling to a lime leaf.


I am really enjoying this daily exercise of writing and gratitude. And it feels good to be "creating content" solely on my own behalf and not to help Mark Zuckerberg get even more obscenely wealthy. I chose the right turn of phrase when I renamed this blog. Long live Antisocial Media!


2. Cooking food that my kids request.


J Kenji Lopez-Alt's NYT recipe for
wildly garlicky noodles

My youngest has been asking for "the garlic noodles" for a few days, and I was so excited to finally have a window to make them that I may have sliiiiiiightly overdone it on the garlic. I mean, what's thirty cloves between friends?
It's a delicious recipe, and while it's simple there's a lot of nuanced care demanded by the process. I'm able to make it reliably edible, but I'm quite a ways from mastering it. 
Can't wait to bring the leftovers to work tomorrow and incapacitate the entire office with my laudatory garlic breath. Remember, you can't spell "clove" without "love."

3. The Corner Store.
The front facade of the Regent Market Co-op

They were out of cinnamon raisin bagels, but I had a great time dropping by the Regent Market tonight. I still think of it as "Joe's", which is what we called it when I was a kid and it was still owned by Joe the Grocer. He used to chide me, in his good-naturedly exasperated way, about my habit of sitting on the piles of water softener salt and reading my way through the comics on the spinner rack by the front door. 

The store's grown since then, and evolved into a co-op, but the friendly neighborhood hub vibes remain strong. Sometimes, like I did tonight, I'll bump into my friend Dr Rich as we're both out on a quick errand after the kids are in bed, and we'll jaw about politics and working in hospitals and capitalism. Then I'll drive home with my bagels and coffee beans, happy to have connected with a friend. Like Vonnegut said, we're here on this Earth to fart around and don't let anyone tell you different.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Three Good Things for Thursday, March 7th

No time to waste, let's hit those Three Good Things: 1. "Fifteen bucks for the whole seat but you'll only need the edge, Edge, EDGE!" An impossibly red, impossibly cute 1997 Suzuki X-90. It looks like a real-life Barbie car, a mini two-seater pickup, minus the bed and with a little spoiler on the back. Also it has a T-top. In college some buddies and I drove up to Cleveland one weekend to see the monster truck rally at the Gund Arena. Were we genuinely interested in it? Was it an act of willful irony? We were the last gasp of Generation X, so there is truly no way to know. What I remember most aside from the noise and fumes was that the promotion ran a contest in between "acts" where local schmoes could try their personal vehicles on the motocross track they'd constructed on the arena floor, with the fastest time taking home a cash prize.  One of the first contestants roared out of the gate in a huge, very obviously brand new, very obviously expensively
Post a Comment
Read more

Family and Gender in Ancient Rome

I mentioned below that Prof. Diane Lipsett delivered a wonderful lecture on the conversation currently taking place between New Testament scholars, family historians, social archaeologists and the like. The title of this post is actually the title of en entire semester-long course taught by Prof. Lipsett, so for our, geez, ninety minute session she condensed her focus to Men, Women, and Children in Ancient Rome. With her permission, I am posting my notes from this lecture below, tweaked a little for readability. Prof. Lipsett is interested in studies of gender formation among non-elites as well as elites, those people about whom we know much less because they did not have the resources or clout to commemorate and study themselves, generally speaking. Roman households were much broader than we conceive of in modern terms, with a wide spectrum of people connected by family and employment living under one roof (the terms domus/eikos/ikea capture this idea of an indiscriminate household
Post a Comment
Read more

Be true to your school now!

This is a cross-posting of a comment I left on peacebang.com's recent post about my school, Starr King School for the Ministry. PeaceBang, who is apparently a UU Minister in the Northeast, posted a few days ago an item about my school's supposed "banning" of the term, "brown bag lunch," because of the racialized connotations of brown bags.* Her post was, to my reading, haughty and dismissive, and she seemed awfully pleased with her own wit and ability to take cheap shots at others with little to no basis for her opinions. I think the comments for that post are up to 40, and it's a pretty lively back and forth. So, here is my contribution: "This may not be the ideal forum for “deep, serious conversation,” but one of the cornerstones of Educating to Counter Oppression is the importance of having deep, serious conversations wherever they happen. The status quo of “waiting for the right moment or forum” to engage with these issues too often leads to
13 comments
Read more