An Iced Cappuccino

I had one. Today. An iced cappuccino. This means I had coffee. For the first time in, what, two months? One other time I had a small decaf; I shared it with my husband, in fact. But today, I had to. My son was up at 2:30 and did not go back to sleep. That's 2:30 AM. And I was tired, and up at 11:40 with my daughter. I would like to say that the iced coffee drink has jolted me to a better place, but it didn't. I think it's just given me a little burn in my chest along with maybe just barely enough energy to get through the rest of the day....as long as I don't drive or operate any heavy machinery.

Douthat, Palin, Yeah Yeah Yeah

I was going to write something about Ross Douthat's NY Times column about Sarah Palin because it was so --wrong. Then I figured someone else would say at least some of what I wanted to say about it and Andrew Sullivan would have everyone saying everything about it it. I was right. There's also this by Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post. (via Sullivan originally, the whole thing is worth reading.)

The Hagiography of Those Who Grow Good Food

In my senior year of college I wrote an undergraduate thesis on the infancy narrative of Ethiopian Christian saints' biographies, or, as they're technically called, hagiographies. The narratives were all the same: There was a barren but righteous woman; there were bees hovering around the door of the house where the child was born; there was some kind of miraculous revelation in childhood and then Poof! A child became a saint.

I thought about these narratives yesterday after I read the compelling story of Will Allen in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Allen, a former athlete and wildly successful salesman, grows a lot of food on relatively little land in Milwaukee. He's committed to bringing good food people of color. He's not interested in fetishizing the perfect tomato and he loves his donuts, although he appreciates one. He's interested in equitable and sustainable agriculture.

As compelling as the story is, it's also as predictable as the infancy narratives. As an American over fifty, he had to have a period in Europe to awaken a certain Je ne sais quoi about food. For Alice Waters it was seasonal produce in Provence and for Will Allen it was compost in Antwerp where he lived and played basketball. He has his gaggle of admirers hovering at the door. And he has his -- you know what's coming -- MscArthur genius grant!

Now, I don't want to take away one thing from Will Allen. I put down that magazine yesterday and I thought: "I want to be an urban gardener! I want to teach children in gardens and grow my own food and actively reject the food-industrial complex! Will Allen says it's OK if I don't like to garden, I can shop at a farm market. But I don't just want to shop, I want to garden! Why don't I like to garden at all?" It was so comforting, the story, and frankly I'm really glad to be inspired by someone other than Michael Pollan. But my response to it was so predictable, almost, oh no, ritualized. I think that's the problem....unless it's the solution to easy food. Make the getting and cooking of good food something of a ritual with weight and meaning and purpose and then it might be easier to resist the easy packages. I don't know. I do know, though, that I have got to get to the market!

Bad Mommy Wah Wah Wah

In Tablet, Marjorie Ingall (full disclosure: I know Marjorie) takes apart the faux-ness of the bad mommy movement and shows how the I'm-not-a-great-mom thing is just another pose. She writes:

"What is new is the notion of fake casualness. Now we’re supposed to be relaxed and real, but this unstudied-ness is, in fact, carefully studied. “Authenticity” is the operative buzzword. One trend in weddings is for low-key-seeming family-style fetes that actually cost as much as a more formal event. Clothing trends are bohemian and punk-influenced rather than overtly luxe, but they still come at price points that would make a real hippie have a seizure. Fashion mags talk about how much men love women who eat, and urge women to have dessert, but we’re still supposed to be a size two.

In other words, the standards women are held to are as high as ever. Now we’re not supposed to be self-negatingly child-centered, but our kids still have to come out brilliant, accomplished, and adorable. No wonder it’s easier to throw up your hands and call yourself “bad” than engage in debate about the impossibility of perfect goodness."

The new fake standards for moms don't anybody readjust the fundamentals of motherhood or, more importantly, re-evaluating our woeful infrastructure for new families in need. (This reminds me of the "breastfeeding sucks" kerfluffle Hanna Rosin and Judith Warner stoked a few months back.) The bottom line is you can bitch all you want about how bad a mom you are but what about the moms who struggle day in and day out to make sure there's food on the table and a roof over their heads? All that show-offy bitching not only doesn't help anyone, but it's still about being the coolest mommy of them all. Smells like teen spirit to me.....

Jezebel

Since last fall when Jezebel had some layoffs the site has been, to me at least, less interesting. But today, there are several pieces there worth reading. Forgive the round-up, I do think these each give something to chew on, even if I might chew somewhat differently. Then again, don't we all? In any case, here goes:

Here's a piece on confessional journalism and the women who write it. It's a little insider-ish, meaning to really get it all you have to read the articles it links to (which I did not), but it's definitely worth reading and thinking about.

Jezebel has a former (or current, I can't tell) model writing for it and she has a piece on Karen Mulder who was a super model and has been arrested in France for attacking her plastic surgeon. It's fairly awful, the business of beauty and its exploitation, but there it is. Mulder may not be the most reliable narrator of what goes on in that business, but no doubt awful things are done every day to women with little power and men with lots of it.

Madonna's adopting another child from Africa and Vogue had someone write about it (I haven't read that piece yet, either) and Jezebel discusses. Well.

Thursday

It's been a day so far, and since my mom taught me not to say anything if I can't say anything nice, I'm going to leave it at that. My time is short, but I have good, almost great cherry tomatoes from the farm market on the kitchen counter and I have these photos from the White House to resist. I could spend all day with them. But here's my problem with all the White House photos--the White House isn't the West Wing. All the pictures make it seem like a TV show. Plus. someone has to be there taking the pictures all the time. Do you think you just get used to that after a while? I know if there were a photographer taking pictures of me and my kids this morning, there'd be not one worth sharing. Some mornings are like that, even in New York City.

Insurance Fraud

I had one of those moments this morning when I read something and it makes me want to kick something. Hard. Today it was a New York Times article about the under-insured. It features a couple named Larry and Claire Yurdin who've been brought to bankruptcy because their health insurance covered hospital stays but no procedures. The patient, Larry Yurdin, could sleep at the hospital, but blood tests? Not so much. Here's a choice bit:

"Insurers like Aetna generally defend limited-benefit policies as a byproduct of the nation’s flawed health care system, which they say makes it too expensive to adequately insure someone like Mr. Yurdin."

So Aetna sells health insurance but they can't make enough money to insure people if they're going to get sick and it's just not their fault. Riiiight.

I once had Aetna insurance through a Cobra plan. While covered by Aetna, I had to have a diagnostic procedure, a surgry that was the only way to figure out if I had a specific condition. When I didn't have the condition the surgery was assessing, Aetna refused to cover it. The procedure's cost for a regular person (that is the uninsured) was $15,000. Aetna would have -- and eventually did -- pay significantly less. That whole thing sucked. Then, when our Cobra coverage was running out, my husband and I went looking for other insurance. At the time I was trying to get pregnant. Desperately. Frantically. Impatiently trying to get pregnant. But most inurance plans available to us wouldn't provide coverage for maternity care. "Oh you just pay the OB, five thousand and that takes care of it." Right. And if I had had any complications? Required any special testing? What about a hospital stay? My relatively uneventful pregnancy involved all three. If I had had the non-maternity coverage, who would have paid for all of it? Moreover, if I had actually become pregnant before switching coverage new insurance wouldn't have covered my pregnancy because it would have been considered a "pre-existing condition."

Now we have insurance through my husband's job and I can't even get started on how bad they suck. I can't. Its so boring and everyone has heard the stories before. The evasions, the delays, the out and out lies. It's just gross. These are the gatekeepers to our health care system. These are the people who've argued against coverage and who now claim (according to the Times) that if everyone were covered they could do a better job insuring. All I can say is these insurance executives and lobbyists better not be involved in the new health care plan. That'd be kind of like having veteran Wall Streeters figuring out how to fix our broken financial system. I mean, that would be nuts, right?