did you try looking under the couch cushion in hell?
! Springsteen fans, here is a link to a local news channel’s grainy video of a 42-minute acoustic set at a Vote for Change Rally in Philadelphia this past weekend. Also, if anyone who knows more about extracting audio than I do could extract that audio (particularly the audio of “Thunder Road”), I would be in your debt.
@ Speaking of the impending 11-3-08 apocalypse, I did not watch the debate last night. I tried to watch the first presidential debate, and I tried to watch the vice presidential debate, but I just -- can’t. Because there’s nothing that McCain/Palin could say that would make me any less likely to vote for them than I already am and there are any number of things that Obama/Biden could say that will make me less enthusiastic about the fact that I already know I’m going to vote for them.
Not to oversimplify the obvious, but: people choose political allegiances by formulating a list of their own values and selecting the candidate who shares their values, right? And when operating within the framework of America’s two party system, you don’t have the option of picking the candidate who 100% or even 90% shares your exact values, you get two choices and that’s it.
(And yes, the bigger problem is that the two party system sucks, and this is why people get cynical and say there’s no real difference between Democrats and Republicans and I understand that, but the only way that I, personally, feel that I can affect change in this arena is on a local level. Which is to say: Dear Green Party, deputy mayors in small towns across the country run unopposed all the time, why not try your hand at more of those races instead of spending all your energy throwing Ralph Nader out there every four years? Also, when it comes down to it: you still have to vote for a president every four years, and it’s unlikely that the United States is going to become a parliamentary democracy any time in the next one hundred years.)
So, you’ve got two choices. Maybe -- by chance -- you exactly agree, word for word, with every single position one candidate takes and every single opinion they express. But that’s not too likely, right? And so then (and maybe not everyone thinks of it this way, but this is how I’ve always thought about it) you’ve got to figure out which of your values are most important to you, and which candidate is closest to the mark on those values.
And that’s why I can’t really fault gay Republicans. If you are gay and the #1 thing you want from your government is an increase in domestic oil production? You should vote for John McCain. Personally, reliance on foreign oil is not more important to me than my civil liberties, and personally, I don’t think increased Alaskan off-shore drilling is the answer, but dude, you have a right to feel that why. For me, as a voter, the #1 thing I want from my government is civil liberties (the mixed bag of same-sex marital rights, reproductive freedoms, physician-assisted suicide - hah! You didn’t see physician-assisted suicide coming, did you? I actually feel incredibly zealously about that one, don’t get me started).
So I am always going to vote for the Democrat because the Democratic Party best meets my most important political priorities. But what really sucks is that they don’t actually meet them very well at all, they just meet them better than the Republican Party. So the hypothetical gay Republican who is voting for John McCain because he’s most worried about his country’s reliance on foreign oil? He’s actually getting more of his needs met politically than I am, over here voting for Barack Obama, still trying to figure out how civil unions aren’t separate but equal.
So when same-sex marriage became the punch line of the Biden/Palin debate, the “hahah, at least we both agree on SOMETHING” moment? I just couldn’t watch anymore. I know I have to compromise my values in order to keep voting Democratic, but I can’t stand to have my nose rubbed in it.
# So what I’ve been thinking about a lot instead is slow-roasting and freezing tomatoes, which (as my poor roommate can attest) has basically become my part-time job. Here is what you do: go to your local farmer’s market and scout out a stand that is selling “sauce” tomatoes, the tomatoes that are slightly bug-bitten or bruised or otherwise defective. (Boston folks: I see them regularly at the City Hall Plaza and Copley markets, but not at Kendall, Union Square or Davis.) The sauce tomatoes should be significantly cheaper than the regular tomatoes, probably a buck or a buck-fifty a pound.
Buy a shit-ton of these, cut them in half, stash them in some type of baking dish lined with parchment paper (roasting pan, cookie sheet, cast iron skillet, whatever), drizzle them with olive oil and sprinkle with sea salt and then roast them for about three hours at 275 degrees. Then turn the oven off, crack it open (if you live in a cold climate and are trying to save money on your heat bill, this also warms up your kitchen!) and let the tomatoes dry out in the oven over night. The next morning, you can refrigerate them to be eaten now or freeze them in a plastic bag to be defrosted and eaten all winter long.
And these tomatoes are, oh my god, so fucking delicious. They are amazing whole on sandwiches and on top of eggs, diced up in pasta salads and soups and pureed in salsa. You can slip them out of their skins and crush them up with your hands and you’ve got the instant base for a pasta or pizza sauce that is so intensely flavorful that you barely need to season it. Seriously, they’re addictive.
(But when I’m buying sauce tomatoes, I’m actually cheating on my obligation to my weekly farm share. Using up everything in the farm share produces a lot of entertaining mystery grab bag cooking, like last night when I was all, “let’s see what happens when I make muffins by shredding these carrots, beets and apples, add the fresh minced ginger and roasted sweet potato I found in the fridge and the walnuts, golden raisins and candied ginger pieces I found in the pantry!” The result? DELICIOUS. )
% So when I’m burying my head in the sand over the election, and trying to ignore my greatest and most irrational fear (that the Bush administration will somehow use the economic crisis to declare martial law and refuse to leave office in January), mostly I roast tomatoes and complain about the explosion across the street that flooded my gym with raw sewage and forced them to close for a month for renovations. My gym figured out some solution our memberships are being honored at another gym a couple blocks away for the month, which was very nice of them, but I feel like a kid who’s been sent to summer camp and I waaaaaaaaaaaanna go hooooooooome. The best part is that my gym is a windowless basement level craphole and this gym offers superior luxuries like, you know, a steam room, and televisions, and, you know, a water fountain, and towels, and air conditioning. But I want to go back to my crap gym, because that one was a women’s only gym and this one is not.
I believe we have discussed before: I don’t go to a women’s gym because I do not like working out in front of men. I could give a shit about working out in front of men, I don’t like working out in front of women who like working out in front of men. Going to a women’s gym gets rid of these women, excluding men is just a by-product. For a while I’ve suspected that my image of these women in my head was a bit of a caricature, but after a week at the stupid fancy palace gym, it’s TOTALLY NOT, YOU GUYS. Everywhere I look, there’s women touching up their make-up in the locker room before they start their work-outs, and women wearing matching capri pant and sports bra ensembles and they intimidate the shit out of me and I don’t like it. If I can’t roll in to the gym wearing sweatpants, a bandana and an “I [heart] Hazel Mae” t-shirt with the neck cut out, I don’t even know, man. I want back in the windowless dungeon that blasted techno remix covers of Rascal Flats songs, where multiple women old enough to be my grandmother lifted weights while wearing a leotard and nude pantyhose.
^ One of the people on my team quit so I had to hire a replacement. She’s a little older than I am (so far I have carefully concealed from her that she has a boss who is younger than her younger brother) but is old-school butch in a men’s blazers/comfortable loafers/crew cut kind of way, and a couple times she has made fun of me for wearing lipstick. This makes me think complicated thoughts about how much I hate everything associated with the butch/femme dynamic, but then I stay up really late watching baseball (BABY CRAB LESTER!) and lack the energy to inflict them.
@ Speaking of the impending 11-3-08 apocalypse, I did not watch the debate last night. I tried to watch the first presidential debate, and I tried to watch the vice presidential debate, but I just -- can’t. Because there’s nothing that McCain/Palin could say that would make me any less likely to vote for them than I already am and there are any number of things that Obama/Biden could say that will make me less enthusiastic about the fact that I already know I’m going to vote for them.
Not to oversimplify the obvious, but: people choose political allegiances by formulating a list of their own values and selecting the candidate who shares their values, right? And when operating within the framework of America’s two party system, you don’t have the option of picking the candidate who 100% or even 90% shares your exact values, you get two choices and that’s it.
(And yes, the bigger problem is that the two party system sucks, and this is why people get cynical and say there’s no real difference between Democrats and Republicans and I understand that, but the only way that I, personally, feel that I can affect change in this arena is on a local level. Which is to say: Dear Green Party, deputy mayors in small towns across the country run unopposed all the time, why not try your hand at more of those races instead of spending all your energy throwing Ralph Nader out there every four years? Also, when it comes down to it: you still have to vote for a president every four years, and it’s unlikely that the United States is going to become a parliamentary democracy any time in the next one hundred years.)
So, you’ve got two choices. Maybe -- by chance -- you exactly agree, word for word, with every single position one candidate takes and every single opinion they express. But that’s not too likely, right? And so then (and maybe not everyone thinks of it this way, but this is how I’ve always thought about it) you’ve got to figure out which of your values are most important to you, and which candidate is closest to the mark on those values.
And that’s why I can’t really fault gay Republicans. If you are gay and the #1 thing you want from your government is an increase in domestic oil production? You should vote for John McCain. Personally, reliance on foreign oil is not more important to me than my civil liberties, and personally, I don’t think increased Alaskan off-shore drilling is the answer, but dude, you have a right to feel that why. For me, as a voter, the #1 thing I want from my government is civil liberties (the mixed bag of same-sex marital rights, reproductive freedoms, physician-assisted suicide - hah! You didn’t see physician-assisted suicide coming, did you? I actually feel incredibly zealously about that one, don’t get me started).
So I am always going to vote for the Democrat because the Democratic Party best meets my most important political priorities. But what really sucks is that they don’t actually meet them very well at all, they just meet them better than the Republican Party. So the hypothetical gay Republican who is voting for John McCain because he’s most worried about his country’s reliance on foreign oil? He’s actually getting more of his needs met politically than I am, over here voting for Barack Obama, still trying to figure out how civil unions aren’t separate but equal.
So when same-sex marriage became the punch line of the Biden/Palin debate, the “hahah, at least we both agree on SOMETHING” moment? I just couldn’t watch anymore. I know I have to compromise my values in order to keep voting Democratic, but I can’t stand to have my nose rubbed in it.
# So what I’ve been thinking about a lot instead is slow-roasting and freezing tomatoes, which (as my poor roommate can attest) has basically become my part-time job. Here is what you do: go to your local farmer’s market and scout out a stand that is selling “sauce” tomatoes, the tomatoes that are slightly bug-bitten or bruised or otherwise defective. (Boston folks: I see them regularly at the City Hall Plaza and Copley markets, but not at Kendall, Union Square or Davis.) The sauce tomatoes should be significantly cheaper than the regular tomatoes, probably a buck or a buck-fifty a pound.
Buy a shit-ton of these, cut them in half, stash them in some type of baking dish lined with parchment paper (roasting pan, cookie sheet, cast iron skillet, whatever), drizzle them with olive oil and sprinkle with sea salt and then roast them for about three hours at 275 degrees. Then turn the oven off, crack it open (if you live in a cold climate and are trying to save money on your heat bill, this also warms up your kitchen!) and let the tomatoes dry out in the oven over night. The next morning, you can refrigerate them to be eaten now or freeze them in a plastic bag to be defrosted and eaten all winter long.
And these tomatoes are, oh my god, so fucking delicious. They are amazing whole on sandwiches and on top of eggs, diced up in pasta salads and soups and pureed in salsa. You can slip them out of their skins and crush them up with your hands and you’ve got the instant base for a pasta or pizza sauce that is so intensely flavorful that you barely need to season it. Seriously, they’re addictive.
(But when I’m buying sauce tomatoes, I’m actually cheating on my obligation to my weekly farm share. Using up everything in the farm share produces a lot of entertaining mystery grab bag cooking, like last night when I was all, “let’s see what happens when I make muffins by shredding these carrots, beets and apples, add the fresh minced ginger and roasted sweet potato I found in the fridge and the walnuts, golden raisins and candied ginger pieces I found in the pantry!” The result? DELICIOUS. )
% So when I’m burying my head in the sand over the election, and trying to ignore my greatest and most irrational fear (that the Bush administration will somehow use the economic crisis to declare martial law and refuse to leave office in January), mostly I roast tomatoes and complain about the explosion across the street that flooded my gym with raw sewage and forced them to close for a month for renovations. My gym figured out some solution our memberships are being honored at another gym a couple blocks away for the month, which was very nice of them, but I feel like a kid who’s been sent to summer camp and I waaaaaaaaaaaanna go hooooooooome. The best part is that my gym is a windowless basement level craphole and this gym offers superior luxuries like, you know, a steam room, and televisions, and, you know, a water fountain, and towels, and air conditioning. But I want to go back to my crap gym, because that one was a women’s only gym and this one is not.
I believe we have discussed before: I don’t go to a women’s gym because I do not like working out in front of men. I could give a shit about working out in front of men, I don’t like working out in front of women who like working out in front of men. Going to a women’s gym gets rid of these women, excluding men is just a by-product. For a while I’ve suspected that my image of these women in my head was a bit of a caricature, but after a week at the stupid fancy palace gym, it’s TOTALLY NOT, YOU GUYS. Everywhere I look, there’s women touching up their make-up in the locker room before they start their work-outs, and women wearing matching capri pant and sports bra ensembles and they intimidate the shit out of me and I don’t like it. If I can’t roll in to the gym wearing sweatpants, a bandana and an “I [heart] Hazel Mae” t-shirt with the neck cut out, I don’t even know, man. I want back in the windowless dungeon that blasted techno remix covers of Rascal Flats songs, where multiple women old enough to be my grandmother lifted weights while wearing a leotard and nude pantyhose.
^ One of the people on my team quit so I had to hire a replacement. She’s a little older than I am (so far I have carefully concealed from her that she has a boss who is younger than her younger brother) but is old-school butch in a men’s blazers/comfortable loafers/crew cut kind of way, and a couple times she has made fun of me for wearing lipstick. This makes me think complicated thoughts about how much I hate everything associated with the butch/femme dynamic, but then I stay up really late watching baseball (BABY CRAB LESTER!) and lack the energy to inflict them.