What I Was Thinking.

Grownups

Washington is a grown-up place.  We dress up, go to work every day, cook dinner every night...real life is hard, but we're adjusting.  Some of my favorite aspects of grown-up life:

Being unable to sleep in.

Maybe it's because I'm getting older and I'm ready to seize the day.  Or maybe it's because my bed is directly under a window.

Voting absentee.

I've voted in the local elections since I turned 18, but I've been out of Ohio for the last two presidential elections.  In 2008 I was in Israel and my voting experience was like an action movie, a race against the clock.  This time, I was organized.  I pre-ordered my ballot before I left for Washington.  Then, when my absentee ballot arrived I researched the issues and voted my heartout.

 

Hosting family dinners.

We set up a family dinner!  Each of us prepared a dish, set up the conference room, and took some time to hang out in a relaxed setting.

 

Grown-up friends.

Quite a few of my friends back home are older than me, and now that I'm 23 (oy), those friends are starting their professional lives.  My friends are rabbis, moms, community organizers, restauranteurs, and writers.  Working in D.C. has helped me to feel like a part of that "grown-up" group.

Me, Leah, and our friend Ellen who now works for Planned Parenthood in D.C.  Ellen was a senior when we were freshmen at Ohio State.  We saw her around campus, we were in clubs together, and now we get to know her in a professional capacity.  We really are growing up!

Leah's friend Tiffany came to visit us!  Tiffany is fun, energetic, and a grown-up.  She has a family, she's a nurse and a teacher, a Mary Kay consultant, and an aspiring public servant.  I love making new friends and moving forward.

Mentoring

One of the most rewarding aspects of my semester in Washington, D.C. has been the mentoring program.  The Washington Academic Internship Program sets up each Glenn Fellow with an Ohio State graduate who now works in D.C.

My mentor Kirstin works for FedEx and handles sales involving the Department of Defense.  She has worked for FedEx for years, and her ambition has paid off.  Kirstin works hard and travels often, and she loves her job.  Many of our lunches have ended with Kirstin letting me know she'd be in Dubai the following week, or St. Louis for a conference followed by a trip to Ohio.  Kirstin even knows my uncle, who works for FedEx in Memphis! Small world.  She's an impressive woman and a wonderul mentor.

We've gone out to lunch quite a few times to talk about internships, life in Washington, D.C., and being a powerful woman in a society that is embarrassed by competitive, successful women.

 

Kirstin and I at the White House Garden Tour - a new D.C. experience for both of us!

 

Many of my friends on the WAIP program have had trouble meeting up with their mentors, and many of them have met Kirstin at several different events.  Everyone is impressed by Kirstin and her committment to the mentoring program.

I have a friend who is an Ohio State grad and a WAIP alum who now lives and works in D.C., and mentors a friend currently in the program with me.  She has come with Kirstin and me to lunch, and Kirstin has helped her to learn more about her role as a mentor.

 

Over the weekend I met Kirstin in Alexandria at Ernie's Crab House.  My family is from New Orleans and we love our seafood, but I have never dissected my dinner quite like that!

 

Kirstin and I will meet a few more times before I return home at the end of the semester.  I've enjoyed getting to know her and learn from her, and I will make sure we keep in touch when my time in Washington ends.

Food=Ochel=Comida=DC

Big cities are expensive and before I came to Washington, D.C. I knew I would be "eating in" as much as possible.

My roommates and I get along really well.  I knew we would be peas in a pod when my most important roommate criterion was met: combining finances when it comes to food.  We love to cook, and we cook almost every night.

Our parameters and/or roadblocks:

A is a vegan.

L won't eat beets, cherries, or goat cheese.

Thanks to malaria pills I took during world travels in 2008 and 2009 I can't eat acidic foods like tomatoes, and eggplants trigger my migraines.  A and L love spicy foods, and I have a more sensitive palate.  

Our roadblocks:

Our "fully furnished" apartment contained no measuring spoons or cups and no sharp knives.  Some other pepole in our apartment building had no serrated knives, and others had no cutting boards while we had around five.  We've done some trading and sharing.

Our "fully furnished" apartment is also without a dishwasher.  This is a huge problem for us.  I often think of my grandfather, Papa Bee, when I cook.  He loved to cook and was very creative, but he hated to do the dishes and he often left my grandma's kitchen a mess.  The food was worth it.  Still, none of us like to clean our own dishes.  Our new fix: we've made friends with our next-door neighbors and we now use their dishwasher.

We live in a bit of a food desert.  There's a supermarket around the corner from our apartment where we can get produce at affordable prices, but things like chips, milk, and cereal are marked way up.  Apparently there is a Safeway supermarket near us.  I helped another intern in our building carry her groceries into the elevator, and asked her where she went for our food.  She told me there was a Safeway grocery store nearby in Southeast Washington.  "But," she told me, "It's in a bad neighborhood.  A really bad neighborhood.  I'm not kidding.  When you leave Safeway, run, don't walk."

I knew that wasn't going to work for us.

Still, we've made it work.

Where does our food come from?

Safeway delivery orders, Giant delivery orders, lugging grocieries from the Van Ness Giant, fresh produce from the Eastern Market, and the occasional haul from Trader Joe's near Foggy Bottom.

Now to the fun stuff.  What have we cooked?

One of our first meals.

L and I have only cooked meat once, and it was just ok.  It looks pretty, though!  Chicken with cilantro, lime, and a few shakes of chili powder cooked in our George Foreman grill.  We ate these with beans and maza that A made.

 

One of our favorites.

We made a fresh salsa: roasted yellow corn, avocados, diced red and green bell peppers, chopped onions, cilantro, and lime juice.  This is a great dinner! All fresh ingredients from the farmer's market and blue corn chips.

We've been trying not to repeat meals but this one was so good, we made it two weeks in a row.  Cooking "vegan" has been much easier than we anticipated.

A Mexican dish

The roommates talked me into this.  We made enchiladas with many of the same ingredients that we used in the fresh salsa: bell peppers, corn, garlic, onions, and we added butternut squash (I eat so much squash in the winter).  L had homemade enchilada sauce.  It was delish, but a bit too much tomato for me.  We added lime and cilantro to the sauce.  It was great!

One of my favorites:

Pasta with veggies and cream sauce with sauteed garlic.  This recipe didn't work as perfectly as it has in the past for me.  In the past this recipe says that I should put cold peas and fresh spinach in with drained pasta and the spinach will wilt.  This was strong-willed spinach.  We added some heat to wilt the spinach, then added carrots.  We made a red sauce for A, and roasted garlic with some balsamic vinegar.

 

A weird one.

L and I were preparing to go to an important service at a synagogue far away.  It was 6pm, and we realized we just wouldn't have time to make it out to Tenleytown and walk a mile to a service held in a place we've never visited.  We ran out to a bakery and picked up a round ceremonial challah, grabbed some apples and honey, and "live-streamed" a service in Columbus.  

It was a pretty funny setup. We dressed as we would if we were going to shul, put a laptop and some food on our ironing board in our room, and prayed.  It was a very new experience.

All-time favorite.

Banana chocolate chip muffins.  We have made these five or six times now, and every time we come WAY too close to leaving out important ingredients.  Once we left out the chocolate chips, once we left out a cup of flour, and once I almost forgot the bananas! Ridiculous.  They always turned out well.

We're OK cooks, but we have fun.  Come join us for tasty vegan treats sometime!

Halloween Strip-Down

A new thaaaaaaang I'm doing.  Check out these Halloween costumes.  Creative?  Absolutely.  Conducive to women's wellbeing?  Probably not.  Kudos and no judgment to women who choose to wear these costumes - I'm not brave enough to bare much skin in a public place, let alone have my costume include a stuffed beaver that covers my ladyparts (scroll down for that one!).  But I have friends who go as sexy nurses, sexy maids, sexy sexy sexy, and they look great.

I've chosen what I think are the most creative or stupid of the bunch.  There are plenty of other costumes that were MUCH more scandalous, but my grandmother reads this blog so I thought I'd keep it moderately kosher.

For me, though, these are absurd and out of the question.  I'll be going as myself - a sexy Fireman!  Or maybe a panda or a kitty cat if I find some facepaint.

Here is sexy Big Bird.  Topical, of course, and I'm sure this will be a very popular costume this year.  Confusing to kindergarteners? Certainly. At least it's not a particularly revealing Big Bird.

 

This is fairly straightforward, but this costume was called China Doll Geisha Girl.  First of all, geishas are Japanese.  Second of all, this is racially offensive.

 

 

And for you Ohioans wanting to make it clear where you're from...

Here is some sexy corn. Because nothing is sexier than shucking and eating corn.

 

I just like the title of this costume: Cute Lady Cavewoman.  Because without the TWO clarifiers that this costume is for a woman, we wouldn't have been able to tell.  Sarcasm.

 

This would be a cute little candy costume if she weren't holding a phallic purse that said "lik-a-stik" on it.

 

As I perused costume websites while watching TLC's Long Island Medium (she talks to dead people and has the greatest accent I've ever heard.  She might be MY Halloween costume), my roommate, watching with me, looked over my shoulder and said, "ooh, I would wear that as a regular dress."

Fair enough.  But this costume is lime wedge.  LIME WEDGE. Lime wedge.  God.  How strange.

 

Maybe lime wedge goes with martini.

This one's not subtle or clever.  I mean, I guess olive centers as nipples is a little clever, but I won't be giving any points for originality.

 

Sexy clownfish

This definitely didn't exist before Finding Nemo.  That's all I'm saying.

 

This month is Breast Cancer Awareness Month.  I would like to emphasize that buying this gaudy costume does not give ANY money toward breast cancer research.  This is one example of pinkwashing.  People sell pink junk during October.  Some of it goes to breast cancer research, but a lot of it doesn't.  Just keep that in mind.

 

Sexy Pinnochio features a dildo-esque nose on a stick and an applique on the skirt that says "Give a Lil' Whistle."  Great.

 

This is a sexy coal miner.  That's weird.

 

Sexy raccoon.  Because nothing says sexy like pillaging vermin.

 

 

This little getup was $300.00 and is listed as "Sassy inuit."  Though it's not applicable to this specific outfit, here comes my second PSA, brought to you by Ohio University:

 

 

As a nerd this just bugs me.  Nope, not "Spider-lady."  That's not  a thing and that's not a creative name for a feminized superhero.  Why is her tongue sticking out?  Do spiders stick their tongues out?  Does Spider-Man stick his tongue out?  No because his face is covered by a mask.  Oh right, that's sexy, apparently.

 

"The Wood Chipper"

This one was the greatest of all.  It's called Lady Wood Chipper/Sexy Beaver Costume.  Description:

        The Wood Chipper costume includes a wood patterned, Lycra mini dress with strapless silhouette and detachable plush beaver. 

Plush beaver.  Placed over her...well, over her beaver.  *sigh.*  I have to admit I'm impressed, though that plush toy is not well-made.  I wouldn't have known it was a beaver if the description hadn't offered that information.

 

And finally, just for fun..

This hysterical, ridiculous costume that apparently only works if you stick your arms behind you like wings (despite the costume already having wings) and bend over in what looks like a VERY comfortable, even yogi-esque position.  Who wants to be a turkey for halloween?  Looks like fun.

Also, please enjoy my friend Marissa's rules regarding candy corn.

1. Candy corn is only to be eaten during the month of October.

2. Only the on-brand stuff is acceptable (i.e. Brach's Candy Corn, which I just bought).

3. None of that pumpkin-shaped, "fall flavors" or brown candy corn crap is accepted.  Yellow, orange, white candy corn.  Shaped like traffic cones.

4. It's only for October, so you're not allowed to judge how much candy corn I might consume during October.

Now, I'm off to bed and plan to watch some Disney Channel Halloween movies and a ton of Sabrina The Teenage Witch during this witching month.  

And please remember:

Have a safe, candy-filled Halloween! Eat lots of squash and pumpkin seeds!

Thanks to my awesome friend Max Zuckert for posting this. I'm going to start posting feminst-y things simultaneously on my Typepad and my Tumb1r. If you're not into weird pictures of sparkly things or comics or hippies or whatever, just skip the Tumb1r.

What I Really Want to Say When I Gush About Aaron Sorkin

Before beginning this post, I'd like to pose a little something that I found on twitter.  But seriously, discuss.

PPS (pre-pre-script), I love The West Wing, I greatly enjoy Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and I like Sports Night, the most innocent of the Sorkin family of behind-the-scenes shows.  I haven't seen any of his films.  I need to.

I'm disenchanted with Sorkin partly because I believe people on the internet.  Based on his interviews he's pompous, he recycles dialogue and characters from ALL his shows and films, and if he couldn't hide behind his brilliant characters who say all the right things, he'd be seen as a liberal bully. 

He's writing women pretty poorly in this show so far.  I'm not looking for the ideal woman, I'm not looking for a brilliant feminist, and I don't expect him to ever write a female character as well as Joss Whedon thinks he does (another conversation for another time).  Caveats aside, as a writer for The Daily put it, "forget everything you learned from Keith Olbermann during your research for the show. If she’ll have you, spend a little time shadowing Rachel Maddow instead. Maybe that way, you’ll quit treating women like frivolous narrative ornaments who only act with agency if it’s in furtherance of a male ego." We should expect this from him.  I'll give him credit here:  when Emily Mortimer tells Olivia Munn the real reasons she's being hired (ep 2), she's honest.  Sexist, but honest.

He should be writing more women like C.J. Cregg and Ainsley Hayes, not women like Natalie Hurley and Dana Whitacre.  Yes, Natalie and Dana are closer parallels to Maggie and Mackenzie.  But a decade later, the characters should have evolved because the world has evolved just a tiny bit.  We get it.  It's a man's world out there.  Most jobs worth watching on television are male-dominated.  But you know what?  If we know this to be true, then Sorkin's female characters know it too and shouldn't be written as though every move is a battle to stay afloat in a man's world.

None of this is to say that Sorkin is being untrue to himself or to us.  I think he writes with honesty, but that he's honestly a pompous jerk masquarading as someone who likes to pretend that he writes "corny, you know?"

Also despite the little end bit with the reveal about Mac actually being in the audience at Will's Northwestern speech (that bit made me all happy and starry-eyed for a few minutes), his heavy-handed rants and his idealistic rants and his rants rants rants are no longer cute and they're getting less smart.  They're just heavy-handed and idealistic.

Basically, Aaron Sorkin is smarter than a lot of us but he makes sure we know it.  And Sorkin gives credit where credit is due, but these days he thinks white middle-aged men are the only people who deserve that credit.

Aaron Sorkin, you are smarter than me.  I know it and you know it.  That's fine.  What isn't fine is that you treat me as though you are smarter than me and you know it.  Sometimes I'm smart, too (read: different genitals, different perspective).

Part of the problem is Sorkin fans expect more.  The West Wing was just what we didn't know we needed - an incredibly smart president and a staff so perfectly picked that we liberals involved with politics couldn't have done it better if we had written ourselves into the story.  We needed The West Wing increasingly more as 2000 came and went.  Nobody asked for a "fantasy about newscasters," or however Sorkin describes his vision of this newest show.  Sorkin is giving us a great cast, cute little metaphors about fantasy and idealism at every turn (Atlantis, Don Quixote, etc), funny quips and fast talking/fast walking.  But we didn't ask for it.  This comes easy to Sorkin.  So now we're asking for more.

Imagine me saying this and walking very fast down a hallway.

Old Posts

Angst and heartbreak straight from my freshman year of college.  Enjoy!

Little Alternatives to Crying (or, nonsensical rantings)

waiting winning losing

winning losing waiting, losing 

putting that thing back together and painting it a new color. it'll stay in my chest as long as I can keep it there
last time it got out it bounced its little self all over the walls and made a mess of every hallway
those things aren't like skin
they aren't like women who are back on their feet days after giving birth
when that new life is its own the pain goes away and the essence of softness is all that remains

but when you let that thing out of your chest, if you think you're gonna get it back the way it was you are wrong

baby I rewrote The End. We changed our lives. we grew
we grew up and acted down, and it was fresh cold
I grew faster, I was so much taller and you shrunk me and stood
stood on my toes and then left me there, half buried
and you ran
you ran faster than I could, but it wasn't a bird, it wasn't like the sun
it wasn't drinking in the air like life
it was down, falling like you do, falling into countries and metaphors
yawning at emotions when they try to get out 

doubt stayed awake 419 days

muted like brass, sad and unsure

but you are here
and i am here
and we tested the waters while you slept

You didn't think to jump.
I didn't think not to.

Tee hee hee. I always knew I liked Billy Collins. Maybe all Emily Dickinson needed was a good roll in the hay (Thanks M for showing this to me!).

http://homepages.sover.net/~nichael/nlc-poetry/bc1.html

Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes
Billy Collins

First, her tippet made of tulle,
easily lifted off her shoulders and laid
on the back of a wooden chair.

And her bonnet,
the bow undone with a light forward pull.

Then the long white dress, a more
complicated matter with mother-of-pearl
buttons down the back,
so tiny and numerous that it takes forever
before my hands can part the fabric,
like a swimmer's dividing water,
and slip inside.

You will want to know
that she was standing
by an open window in an upstairs bedroom,
motionless, a little wide-eyed,
looking out at the orchard below,
the white dress puddled at her feet
on the wide-board, hardwood floor.

The complexity of women's undergarments
in nineteenth-century America
is not to be waved off,
and I proceeded like a polar explorer
through clips, clasps, and moorings,
catches, straps, and whalebone stays,
sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.

Later, I wrote in a notebook
it was like riding a swan into the night,
but, of course, I cannot tell you everything -
the way she closed her eyes to the orchard,
how her hair tumbled free of its pins,
how there were sudden dashes
whenever we spoke.

What I can tell you is
it was terribly quiet in Amherst
that Sabbath afternoon,
nothing but a carriage passing the house,
a fly buzzing in a windowpane.

So I could plainly hear her inhale
when I undid the very top
hook-and-eye fastener of her corset

and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,
the way some readers sigh when they realize
that Hope has feathers,
that reason is a plank,
that life is a loaded gun
that looks right at you with a yellow eye.
--From Picnic, Lightning
(University of Pittsburgh Press)

Old experiences revisited

I wrote this about a month ago when I spoke at Hillel on Shabbat.  I'm a little proud of it, so I thought I'd post it here.

Shabbat shalom, everyone. 

We all know Parshat B’Shalach – it’s a fantastic story.  God works miracles through Moses and ten plagues later, the Israelites are packing their belongings and leaving Egypt.  The Exodus begins, and God continues to impress.  God sends the Israelites out of Egypt cloaked by a cloud during the day, and by a pillar of fire by night.  When Pharaoh’s chariots close in on them, God works through Moses once again to split the sea for the Israelites and then close it on the Egyptians.  God makes Mannah rain down from the sky, and turns the bitter water of Marah sweet.  It has all the elements of a great story, but with just these details it feels as though it’s missing something.

 

In the summer of 2006 I went on my first trip to Israel with my best friend and 23 kids we didn’t know. In mid-July we were way up north.  We had just toured Safed and taken a “water hike” in the southernmost part of the Golan Heights.  We were in our rooms at Kibbutz Hukok when Hezbollah began firing katyusha rockets into Israel.  Our counselors explained what was happening and told us we needed to be packed and ready to leave in ten minutes.  We could see the missiles flying overhead as we called our parents to let them know we were relocating and that we were safe.  We didn't have time to stow our belongings properly under the bus, so we just shoved them in the back.  A few of us sat in the back and braced the bags.  We were tense and uncomfortable and overwhelmed.  Our group was just getting to know each other, and we were too preoccupied to make small talk. 

 

About 20 minutes into our hour-long drive the bus lurched forward.  Someone’s backpack fell on my head, but we did our best to keep heavy things from falling.  Our madrichim and driver got off the bus, came back on, and announced that the bus had hit a sheep.  Some vegetarians on the bus were horrified, some of the weird kids got off to see the damage, but the rest of us relaxed and laughed at the irony.  One guy yelled, “yeah, schawarma for dinner!”  Why did this happen?  We were fleeing a war zone as fast as we could and God sends a sheep to slow us down?  

 

This bizarre thing had happened, and it chilled us out and we connected over it.  The Israelites, too, had distractions and humanizing moments during their departure.  They also had to pack their bags in a hurry.  They packed the ingredients for bread, which they ended up not needing since God provided Mannah in the desert.

 

According to the rabbis, Moses’ staff alone didn’t split the Sea of Reeds.  An old man figured God was waiting for the people give a sign that they trusted God, so he walked into the water, praising God until the water was up to his nose.

 

The Matzah, the Mi Chamochah and the sheep added a human element to these stories.  Despite the surrealness of the escapes we can come back to the stories over and over again and relate to them every time.  They represent the way we as Jews connect to everything in our lives – through food, through music, and through laughter.

Shabbat Shalom!

 

I am a nail polish fanatic. I am also a Hunger Games fanatic! That book series is AWESOME. Forget team Peeta / team Gale, this book is about girl power and inner strength, not some hot guys. Glam Polish, in her infinite awesomeness, is having a giveaway of China Glaze's new Hunger Games - inspired collection, "Capitol Colors." I could not be more excited. These colors are SENSATIONAL! So pretty! And as I am a NEW nail fanatic, I would love love love to add these to my small but growing collection. Check me out, Glam Polish! Ohh the awesomeness. Be well!
-Maddie.

http://glam-polish.blogspot.com/2012/01/500-follower-giveaway-china-glaze.html