Lusciousity

You will love the Ray Bradbury short story “There Will Come Soft Rains.” It is a haunting short story about our technological future. I was thinking about it last week when a coworker and I were discussing the relative merits of robots in our lives. Coworker was pro-robot, especially the Roomba. Me, well, I think I am pro-robot, because I do hate to see Asimo fall down, but do we really need more beings/things to do our work for us?

Anyway, to fulfill the nostalgifying requirement I have set for myself in my Tuesday blogs, I’ll mention that I first read that story during my brief stint as the only student in my English independent study sophomore year of high school. I call it a brief stint because within a week of starting my sophomore year at my regular public high school, I found out that I had gotten last minute financial aid to move to the performing arts high school I eventually graduated from. But one of the reasons that I think I might have been okay even if that had not worked out is that the teacher who I was assigned to was clearly going to let me push ahead as far as I possibly could. He assigned me three short stories to read in a week; I of course had to read them in one day. He assigned me a book the next week; again, finished by my next class meeting (I remember the book, it was the classic A Separate Peace). So it looked like I might finally have met my match. But then, right when the leaves had started to turn and I had started to accept the school year rhythm of getting to school at 7am and riding the short bus to the math and science center after lunch, I got the call that turned me into an oboe player for the next three years. Funny how you think things are going to turn out, and then the way they actually do.

But local food is catching on in a big way, and to that Lusciousity says yum and it’s about time. Just today Salon ran an article about Georgetown Law’s attempt to integrate local food into their cafeteria cuisine and I ran across a south Florida blog that is spreading the word about community supported agriculture down here in the third world*… oh I mean tri-county area. Local food is something that I have wanted to support with my very own dollars ever since a presentation an Ohio farmer gave to our history of food class senior year. He was a farmer’s farmer with a four year degree in economics. He connected a lot of dots that I was only just beginning to see. Firstly, the percentage of budget that Americans spend on food has gone down twelve percent in the past century. And that twelve percent saved has not been evenly distributed among other costs or pumped into luxury goods. The segment of our budget that has gone up is health care. 2) The amount that farmers are able to sell staple foods for hasn’t gone up either. The price of a bushel of this or that has not fluctuated all that much since the subsidies went. So while everything it takes to grow the stuff has gone up, its market value has not. 3) The most profitable thing for farms to grow these days are houses. We are giving up our farmland to McMansions and unlike soybeans and corn, they don’t give the land back.

In my mind, all of this adds up to s-c-a-r-y, but there are glimpses of hope and sanity returning in small ways, like the willingness of people to become farmers and find a way to make growing high quality local food work as a livelihood. Daniel talked about doing that when we graduated, and I laughed at him, but seeing as there is a waiting list for every local community supported agriculture collective that I have found, maybe I shouldn’t have. The will and apparently the dollars are out there (even though really it’s not an exorbitant cost by any means, no more than what I’d spend a week on fruit at Publix if I didn’t restrain myself), so this is one luscious trend I’d like to see grow and grow.

*I kid because I love–if this part of the US resembles the third world any more than any other part of the country, it certainly isn’t because of the melange of languages and cultures, it’s because of the income inequality and structurally corrupt government IMHO. I should shut up before I have to start sounding intelligent to gain credibility.

Asimo is the name of my new robot friend. You can see him do a jog here, but what makes him luscious today is heart-panging reverie he sent me on this afternoon when I watched him fall down here. Even though I know he is a robot and therefore just a machine, watching him turn his head toward the audience quizzically yet pluckily while he faces the stairs in front of him made me want to leap through the YouTube screen, back in time, and right up on stage to catch poor Asimo before he fell. See, I feel that he knew the stairs were too much for him, but because he is a loyal robot and he knew we were all watching he tried to do it anyway and ended up a curled up ball of hurt robot just because he didn’t want to let us down. This really got to me, almost but not quite as much as watching the animated movie The Brave Little Toaster once brought me to tears and marked me for life as one who felt true pain for the brave little appliance, throwing himself into the garbage compactor at the crucial moment just to save the mean vacuum cleaner who would clearly never put his skinny metallic neck out for anyone. I still think about the brave little toaster, and now I’m going to keep thinking about Asimo too. Some people have told me I am too sensitive, and they are right, but I just can’t keep myself from worrying about the innocent machines among us. We are a long way from A.I. or I, Robot, but I’m one of those ones who will be passing around get organized petitions and promoting robot solidarity when the time comes.

…but as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would tell us, it bends towards justice if we all keep doing our little bits every day. Celebrate the lusciousness of fighting the good fight by checking out video of Dr. King here and write a letter to your Representative about the plight of Iraqi refugees. 50,000 of them are fleeing their homes every month, and so far the US has accepted only 202 refugees from a war we started into our country. As Senator Kennedy says, we must do better. Sorry to get all soapbox on your Monday, but this really bothers me, and anger feels a lot better if it is directed somewhere and what else are Congress people for?

No, the title of this post does not mean that I am either crying in the bathtub (that would be a bit treacherous for my beloved Mac friend) or leading a sing along. It means that I have been listening to my weekly does of All Songs Considered, a podcast by NPR music critic Bob Boilen, and that this week’s featured artist was Emily Haines (also of Broken Social Scene) whose latest album is The Knives Don’t Have Your Back, and that was how she introduced one of her songs. The podcast has a brief interview with Ms. Haines and, best of all, several songs recorded from a live performance she recently gave in DC. I just discovered All Songs Considered this week, and I’m pumped. It looks like it has a pretty decent line up of featured bands and artists, and I’ve generally enjoyed Bob Boilen’s music reviews on Fresh Air. Best of all, it comes straight to me even though I don’t have an iPod, because you can subscribe to it via RSS feed and listen directly through your RSS reader. That means I don’t have to download anything or be at the computer with my iTunes on it. It’s web based, and it sounds good, and it might just give you an extra peek at some cool music.

My mouth is already watering reading this NYT write-up on Starbucks’s most recent attempt to bring it’s breakfast A-game to a store near you. As you may have noticed, their breakfast food is currently limited to pastries of variable qualities. I’ve had cinnamon scones that made me want to marry them and cinnamon scones that tasted like quick dry cement. This is in striking contrast to their coffee, which is uniformly what it is, and I like it what it is so I feel safe going into any store for my cuppa. Attempting to grab some of McDonald’s ginormous market share, they are engineering their own egg-cheese-and-bread combo and investing in gizmos to heat them up really fast and really hot so that they don’t have to have actual kitchens in their stores. Now, reheated food is generally not on my luscious list, but when Starbucks does reheating, you know it’s going to add what it refers to as the “thoughtful” twist. So, rather than a plain old bacon and eggs biscuit, they are offering, for instance a “chilled egg sandwich garnished with spinach and ricotta-herb spread for lunch. After the barista stuck it in the speed oven for 60 seconds, the English muffin was brown and crisp, the cheese had melted and the egg was steaming hot.” Seeing as I live in South Florida, I’m not holding my breath, but when I start smelling the warm goodness of eggy breakfast sandwiches, I’m going to first in line.

As promised, this Wednesday will be the first installment of a recurring series, Literary Lusciousity. Since I got the idea to make Wednesday lit day because it is also the day that I have poetry workshop this semester, it seems appropriate for me to include a little something we got in our first meeting, today. My professor put three quotations on our syllabus, and this one is from our luscious French friend, Paul Valery:

Ignorance is a treasure of infinite price that most [wo]men squander, when they should cherish its least fragments; some ruin it by educating themselves, others, unable so much as to conceive of making use of it, let it waste away. Quite on the contrary, we should search for it assiduously in what we think we know best. Leaf through a dictionary or try to make one, and you will find that every word covers and masks a well so bottomless that the questions you toss into it arouse no more than an echo. –from Man and the Sea Shell

This got me thinking about that article that has been at the top of the NYT most-emailed this week called Happiness 101. I read part of it, and one thing that sticks with me is how when they gave students the assignment to be mindful of the world around them for five minutes a day, they all wandered back into the classroom awestruck and high on life and said things like “I never knew there were so many different kinds of trees on the way to campus.” So many of the hours of my day are spent trying to know more, I’ll admit that I pretty much forget that sometimes it pays to approach the world as if I knew nothing about it, because really, I don’t. Like anything alive and luscious, words and the world and the people we know are constantly under transformation.  We struggle to navigate their fluidity by trying to establish constants, but there is so much joy and discovery in letting everything befuddle us again. On that note, I think I am going to take a walk and be ignorant for a while.

…and that’s why, on my latest trip to the public library (not the stuffy academic one I work at), actually my first library trip of the new year, I couldn’t resist picking up this slim volume. On the one hand, the “you can change your life by thinking less, doing more, and getting started right now” philosophy that this book espouses is bit repellant in and of itself, but on the other hand, it is entirely possible that one small hint could get you out of a rut you might have wandered into. So I’m not reading this book cover to cover, I’m just leaving it around the apartment and reading a couple of pages every now and again. This is guaranteed to last only as long as my new year’s resolutions, so not long, but here’s what it has offered me most recently: understanding is the booby prize. In short, what author MJ Ryan tells us is that it is far less important to understand why you do what you do than to be able to change what you are doing if it makes you unhappy. This is advice that I would generally qualify substantially (hey, understanding is the whole god@#$% raison de etre of us English, not to mention that I am a believer in the talking cure for a variety of ills), but I put it to good use tonight. While making dinner with D, I found myself relegated to the task peeling, coring, and slicing of one green apple. The peeling went fine, but when I got to the coring part I realized that I was 1) completely inept with a paring knife and 2) extremely scared of chopping my thumb in half as I attempted to pull the knife towards me in an effort to remove the core part of my quartered, peeled apple. I had a choice. I could give up and make D do it, which he usually does all on his own as soon as he sees a blade come too near one of my fingers, or I could just take it slow and get it done somehow and not let myself get stalled in my usual muck of questions when something slightly frustrating comes into my life. I.e., Why am I the kind of person who can’t core an apple? Why can’t I cook? What am I doing wrong and does God hate me? In this instance, I chose to believe that understanding was the booby prize and soldiered on until I had only the edible parts of the apple ready to chop before me. I may never know just why coring apples isn’t my strong suit, but tonight I cored an apple and did my bit to get that Chicken with Apple and Mushroom Sauce and Steam Asparagus on the table, proving that at least once in a while, the less examined life is actually more worth living.

Here concludes this Monday’s Lusciousity cheerleading pep talk. Go forth and understand no more!

My Global Voices RSS feed brought me some luscious riches this morning: a link to Peruvian gourmand Alejandro’s blog called Peru Food and in particular this post about Amazonian street food, mostly fruit-based concoctions, complete with photos. Although I’ve never tasted camu camu or aguaje, looking at these pictures made me want to, and it took me right back to my days in Brazil, where all sorts of fruit were cheap and plentiful and mixed up in ways I had never dreamed of before. For the final month of our stay there, D and I pretty much lived on açai smoothies, in part because we knew we wouldn’t be finding any once we got back to the States. That turns out to be only partially true, as açai looks poised to come into healthy vogue any day now, but I have yet to find a place that mixes up açai na tigela on demand. Probably the best thing to do is just go back and be even more adventurous with my fruit choices. Still, when you can’t fly to South America on a whim, cruising Peru Food has to be one of the next best things.

I’m kicking around the idea of having a loose posting schedule for Lusciousity, so that readers could have at least some idea of what they are going to see when they tune in. Not that I want to cast aside serendipity and spur of the moment lusciousness, but maybe something like this:

Monday: Luscious Cheerleading–a little something uplifting to get the week going

Tuesday: In Search of Lost Luscious–your basic nostalgifying

Wednesday: Literary Luscious–this coincides with the day of my poetry workshop this semester, so there should be plenty of material

Thursday: Food & Drink–enough said

Friday: Film and Other Luscious Forms of Culture–b/c you might need something to do over the weekend

Saturday & Sunday: Lusciousity goes on hiatus except in cases of extreme inspiration

We shall see. I am sure this basic frame could use some tweaking, but for now I kind of like the idea of having a little focus to bring to this blog post form when I sit down to fill it up.  I can already think of a couple of things that got left out, Unluscious Item of the Week, for example, so I might need to build in a wildcard day. In any case, let the experiment begin!