Times Like This...

It was hella maudlin and trite, the way my FB feed and Twitter filled up in the hours after the US election results with statements like, "In times like this, art is more important than ever," and other similar sentiments exhorting people to write, make art, pour themselves into some creative expression of their shock, disbelief, anger, and hurt at the results.  And yet.  

Monday night I went to see Colson Whitehead interviewed by Desmond Cole at the Bluma Appel Salon.  The talk was fine.  I wasn't familiar with Whitehead's work.  The only thing of his that's crossed my radar was his Zone One book, which is about some kind of zombie apocalypse, so I just assumed that he wrote elevated genre fiction.  TURNS OUT: he's actually hella literary.  The interview was okay.  Desmond Cole (one of the Toronto Star's only saving graces) was being very earnest and Colson Whitehead was being quippy and snarky and ungenerous in the face of earnest questions, which I find somewhat unforgivable and classless.

I chased the talk by seeing Moonlight with Dr. Rei. I mean, if I had known what was coming, would I have reveled in the beauty and stillness of this film, more?  I doubt that's even possible.  I watched this movie with my heart in my throat the entire time.  This film is heartrendingly beautiful. It's a film of moments, moods, shades of stillness, timbre of gazes. Based on Tarell Alvin McCraney's play, In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue and written and directed by Barry Jenkins, it's a quiet look at three stages in the life of Chiron, a boy growing up impoverished with a drug addicted mother in Miami, coming to terms with his sexuality and masculinity in an unforgiving pocket of America (exceptionally unforgiving? That I can't speak to.  Maybe just standard-issue unforgiving.)

The movie is widely lauded. Perhaps overmuch?  It's hard to say.  I think after so many pinned hopes for Nate Parker's Birth of a Nation [interlude: my sister messaging me in the summer saying, "I just can't with Nate Parker after what's come out about him" and me responding, "Is it because his wife is white?" and her being like, "Uhhh, no...about the fact that he raped a woman!?!?"] to ameliorate the 2016 #oscarssowhite debacle went up in flames, Moonlight could not have been better positioned.  It's difficult to disentangle the timing of Moonlight from it's near-universal effusive reception, but I kinda DGAF - it's not perfect, but we (read: I) try not to let the perfect be the enemy of the very, very, very good.

I watched this with my heart in my throat. It is so achingly beautiful - the bleached brittle light of Miami in the day, the humid interplay of shadows and ocean at night, black bodies lit properly. Each act of the film is a collection of tones and moods and impressions - this is not a film that bludgeons you with exposition, character development, plot.  It's a collection of moments, some so tender that I could feel my heart breaking the way glass does when you fill it with something hot...a tiny pop and then radiating hairline fissures etching fine across the surface. It's a movie about looks, the weight of what's unsaid, pauses and spaces with the mass and presence of mountains. It's about masculinity, fatherhood, parenthood, sexuality, confusion, violence, performance, class. It's about what happens to a person when external pressures cause them to fold in on themselves, when the impossibility of their material conditions renders them guarded, mistrustful, wary, fearful of betrayal.  The main character, Chiron, is so still and reserved, all his emotions in his eyes, and his small tics.  The performances are almost all uniformly great...except for Janelle Monae who is a touch stiff in her role as a surrogate mother to Chiron.  Naomie Harris is an excellent actress but her role is overdrawn and is the only one that nears-caricature.  

Considering what a giant, terrifying, saddening s**tshow the rest of the week ended up being, I'm glad that I had the opportunity to revel in something beautiful and quiet and sweet, with someone I love.

I mean, I don't know how to sum up my feelings about the election.  I have a lot of thoughts.  I felt sick to my stomach.  I feel stupid...I mean, whiteness advertises itself on a daily basis.  It tells us EXACTLY what it is...and I still thought he wouldn't win.  I thought the imperfect alternative (HRC) would prevail.  So I feel duped.  I also feel like you can't underestimate the power of economic disenfranchisement and class and the effects of smug left-leaning politics.  

The night of the election, one of the scariest things I read, was a tweet where someone said, "a lot of white people kept their heads down, their mouths shut, smiled at their neighbours, and marched into those booths and marked Trump" and the truth of that gave me goosebumps.  The insidious banality of self-interest.  How left-leaning media have engendered a situation where people know enough to hide their reptilian, base selves.  

More thoughts on this to come.

For now, there is beauty. In spite of, despite, in the face of...everything else.

Fin.

Living and Thinking and Carrying On

Things I've been thinking about, lately:

1) Decentreing whiteness (and heternormativity) and how so many (white, heteronormative) people get so bent out of shape as soon as they're not the focus of like, everything.  It's like, seriously?  Have some chill for once in your damned lives.  The number of assumptions that get made on a daily basis by white people about what the cultural touchstones should be has been really chafing me lately.

2) Further to the above, I've been thinking about how annoying white moms are on the internet.  I mean, as was rightly pointed out to me, "that's on you." Haha!  That's true, I don't have to go looking for anxious, spun up, privileged intensive mothers who are going to make my blood boil with their neuroses and anxieties and constant need for validation from randoms.  But sometimes...I come across it and it makes me SO ANGRY that capable women are choosing to be oppressed and neurotic about the dumbest s**t, that I just can't even.

I got into it with this woman on my twins forum who was basically ready to fire her nanny because of some small infraction (the woman's son wouldn't let the nanny leave because he wanted to hold the nanny's umbrella and so the nanny told him to go take a bite of an apple and then she would let him hold the umbrella and when he went to eat the apple, she snuck out - this of course led to a chorus of [all white] women freaking out about how "deceptive" a practice this is, etc.,) and then of course the conversation spiraled into these wackadoos and their wackadoo expectations for the less privileged (almost universally), women of colour (ditto) who look after their children for not very much money at all.  These employers expect gold-plated service but certainly don't pay the amount that you would assume if you expect your caregiver to basically have a Phd in child psychology, or be an exact proxy for the parent.  There's a different between a caregiver and a parent.  There are huge structural differences between the (often vulnerable) people we pay to look aft our children and us.  It sucks, and you know what, lady?  Some people have real problems.  Why don't you go to Emergency a few more times because your kid has a "strange rash."

Further to the above, someone posted this thing on Facebook that was women's stories of being "assaulted" in child birth by medical practitioners who performed c-sections "without consent" and where women were "shackled" to fetal monitors and "strapped" to hospital beds and "forcibly" coerced into one "medicalized" procedure or another.  My immediate reaction was, that this whole thing of women thinking they know better than medical professionals about what's safe and natural for their children is what lead to the anti-vaccine movement?  I ended up running it by my midwife friend who had some smart points - namely, there's a difference between trauma and assault.  Lots of births can be traumatic - she said that she even found my birth, with the twins, traumatic, but that there is a fundamental difference between trauma and assault.  Like, having to have your baby's collarbone broken so that they can fit through your pelvic opening is super traumatic.  Labour and delivery is such an intimate experience that it's kind of already poised for trauma - you're dealing with life and death!  I think it's wonderful that evidenced-based decision making and women becoming their own health advocates is more and more of a thing, however, we need to strike that balance and dichotomizing the issue so that you have midwives on one hand and evil, military-industrial complex OBs on the other doesn't really sense.  As I was looking into this, I saw that some people use the term "birth rape" which is hugely problematic.

3) I have so many thoughts on the Ghomeshi trial, which is obviously a flashpoint for feminists.  I think ultimately, I feel like I can support and believe women who have been the victims of sexual assault and at the same time, feel like he is absolutely guilty in the court of real life, but that also, the judge's verdict does not constitute a miscarriage of justice.  I don't know how the courts will reconcile the fluidity of consent with the necessary standard of guilt required by the law, I don't know that the courts are the place to do this, even as they are so much a necessary piece of the larger framework.

Right now, I have a kid who likes to strum his junk like a guitar and thinks it's hilarious to do so in mixed company.  I don't know what I'm supposed to do with that and how to manage that, in a way that preserves his innocence and still doesn't allow the calcification of misogyny.

I recently read Chester Brown's The Playboy, which is a comic that was originally published in 1990 and was reissued.  It details Brown's (author of Louis Riel, among other comics) anxiety and guilt around masturbation and purchasing Playboy magazine.  The Dotytron and I both read it, and even though we both agreed that Chester Brown, as a person, is kind of gross, the Dotytron thought that Brown does a good job of honestly representing the shame spiral that happens for adolescent boys faced with the driving compulsions of their desire.  Like, apparently it feels like your brain kind of shuts off and your primordial lizard brain takes over when you're masturbating and then when it's done and you've had an orgasm, then shame comes flooding in.  Shame at what?  He (the Dotytron) posits that the shame is rooted in how quickly the lizard brain takes over and how subsumed the person is to it - like your desire to masturbate is so all-consuming that you're embarrassed and how you let it control your life.

This spurred a conversation about how to negotiate this, as the parents to three boys.  Is the shame and guilt necessary?  Does it have to be that way?  My favorite podcast, Pop Rocket recently had a sex-themed episode and two of the hosts, who are around my age talked about going into bookstores or the library and taking out the sex manuals and moving to a different part of the store/library and furtively thumbing through the pages.  HOW INNOCENT IS THAT?!?  Like, now, you can see the most depraved, disgusting, dehumanizing stuff with the right search string (or even a very wrong search string!).  How do you mitigate THAT? How do you make sure that your kid is processing and on some level, critically engaging with the stuff that shapes their sexuality?

Hell if I know.

Snapchat is kind of the best.

Last weekend was B-A-N-A-N-A-S.  But it was the kind of soul-affirming weekend that grizzled parents need sometime to remind us that we are multi-dimensional people with brilliant, smart, funny, dear friends.

Auntie Em got the twins these jackets recently and they are THE BEST.  Look at these guys!  It's almost like they get along!

I made a new friend!  At JJ and S's house, we were invited to brunch along with their colleagues, whom we had never met before.  At first, the Dotytron and I were like, "no new friends" and were kind of being sour pusses about it, but it turns out these people are AWESOME.  They live in our 'hood, they are both professors at U of T, they are funny, and the woman was automatic kindred spirit.  We are both obsessed with American Crime Story and Togetherness and she is just lovely and smart and their daughter is adorable.  This is a woman who described author Junot Diaz as: "His 'decolonial' love' shtick is kind of catnip for woke WOC" - a million heart eyes emojis.

 Corned beef hash is pretty much the best dish post-late-night dancing dish in the world.

That night I went to Pusha T with my buddy Merrick and it was everything this ol' gal needed.  Pusha T was incendiary.  The crowd was a beautiful multi-ethnic mix of hip hop heads and I got to dance my butt off and it was amazing.

Came home and Record Club was in full swing, which meant that I got to swan in, high off an amazing hip hop show and try to weasel my way in as the only woman in Record Club with my thoughtful insights into Kamasi Washington's album, The Epic.  Late night, and the next day the Dotytron was pretty ruined, so I made myself some corned beef hash and eggs, and then the Dotytron rallied enough so that we could take the kids to an east side indoor play space, which we love, because it's big and clean and the Dotytron and I can go head-to-head on the pop-a-shot game:

Twin A is terrible at this.

Our general modus operandi when doing stuff with the kids is to act like giant idiots and have all the fun while our kids tool around untended.  Half the time we take the kids to a playground, the Dotytron and I are challenging each other to weird parkour or rock climbing stunts while our kids give us the side-eye and other kids stand staring at us, mouth agape, because we generally cavort like fools.  Being able to be a ding dong around kids is very important.  Never lose your silly.

 Then on Sunday, our supper club of mostly high school friends met at Magic Noodle on Harbord. They do Northern Chinese hand-cut noodles in broth and some small shareable plates.  I got the brisket soup which was delicious, and the noodles were fantastic (nicely chewy), but the small plates were hit or miss.  In the top right of the picture above you can see there's a chicken dish which had this weird, mala-style Sichuan peppercorn based sauce that just tasted weird and funky.  We got this potato salad which was good, and lamb skewers (also good).  I don't know if I'd go again, especially given we're on such a ramen kick lately.  

 Quincess wearing his goggles.

Speaking of ramen, we took it easy this weekend and visited my grandma in Markham, followed by Sansotei with my mum.  This crew.

Sansotei why are you so damned delicious???

Some of what I'm doing on Snapchat - a van full of Peppas on the way to the pool.

 

My classic bin of beans made its first appearance for the twins this weekend.  It kept them quietly occupied and giggling for about 30 minutes?  Which is next level.  But then they started dumping beans everywhere which was annoying and inevitable.

Twin A double-fisting this disgusting breakfast concoction I force them to eat: steel cut oats, mixed with full fat cottage cheese, apple sauce, vitamin D droplets and hemp/flax oil.  It's so gross!  

 

Twin B singing the Totoro main theme in Japanese.

Twin A has a huge sweet tooth and loves all things cake, cookies, ice cream, chocolate, etc.  When we had Momma D and Ehmdo over for dinner last night, we took a break after finishing dinner to tidy up the kitchen, pack away leftovers, and open presents before the cake portion.  I popped my head out of the kitchen and saw that Twin A was still sitting in his high chair, so I asked Ehmdo to take him out.  She said that she had tried to do that, but he refused.  As it turns out, he was doggedly sitting in the chair because he was waiting for the dessert portion of the meal.  He sat there for 30 minutes, craning his neck to see the action in the living room, and refused to let us even turn his chair to face the living room.  Such a crafty little sugar butt:

Wanting to be involved, but wanting more, for cake.

For the birthday dinner I roasted two chickens, made gravy, roasted potatoes, roasted cauliflower, and roasted brussels sprouts.  It was an all-oven meal:

I also made this cake, which is known as "The World's Best Cake."  It's Norwegian in origin and features two duplicate layers of butter cake, with a layer of almond-flecked soft and marshmallowy meringue adhered to the cake, and the two layers held together with whipped cream.  I think next time I might add some sliced strawberries to the middle layer, but otherwise, it might not be quite the "world's best" cake, but it's pretty damned delicious.  I've posted the recipe below.

Other things I've eaten/made lately:

I made Smitten Kitchen's spaghetti pie (which is based on cacio e pepe) and I thought it was kind of meh.  I used good fontina and the cheese flavour was kind of pungent but the overall dish was bland and the baked spaghetti texture just wasn't a good fit.  We had this with a classic chocolate cake (I used this Food52 recipe), which turned out good, but not as fudgy as my go-to devil's food cake recipe and the frosting was only so-so.  Still on the hunt for the perfect quick and easy chocolate frosting (not buttercream).  This cake was adapted from the classic Hershey's chocolate cake recipe and I honestly think the Hershey's is better.  Can't improve on that.

Breakfast burritos: scrambled eggs with spinach, piled in a large flour tortilla that's been spread with refried beans (I made mine but easily could be canned), with some grated cheddar.  Rolled up burrito style and then pressed on a panini press and served with tomatillo salsa, sour cream, and guacamole.

Ribollita - basically a version of minestrone with kale, and lots of vegetables and plump canellini beans.  Topped with a very necessary dollop if Italian style salsa verde (parsley, mint, garlic, capers, etc.) and big slices of my sourdough bread with grated parm, toasted for dunking.

Yellow dhal with coconut and muttar paneer and brown basmati rice.

Leftover Micelli Monday taco meat became a giant taco salad - a whole heap of greens, diced tomatoes, sliced black olives, tossed together and topped with the taco meat, optional beans, guacamole, salsa, sour cream, and crunched up tortilla chips for extra texture.  

The Big Yam is obsessed (OBSESSED) with pulses of all shapes and sizes.  Good thing this year is the year of the pulse, according to the WHO.  This is an oldie, bacon-braised lentils, atop a bed of baby spinach, and breaded, fried pucks of goat's cheese to be smeared on crusty bread.  It's a go-to meatless meal.

My St. Paddy's day meal.  Once I started baking corned beef, I've never gone back.  I smear it with a paste of brown sugar and grainy mustard and then bake it in a foil packet until tender. With champ and roasted brussels sprouts and maple carrots.

This was the birthday bundt cake that I made for my mom that she didn't care for.  The recipe (from Baked Occasions) had me right up until I was supposed to mix a portion of the batter with cocoa powder and chocolate and use that to make the dark tunnel.  I dunno, I think I just like a classic, pound-cakey kind of bundt cake.  The chocolate-coconut tunnel was kind of dry and crumbly and tasted neither chocolately or coconutty.  I wouldn't make this again.

 Fin.


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The World's Best Cake
Serves 10-12, technique adapted from Sweet Paul Magazine

10½ tablespoons (1 stick plus 21⁄2 tablespoons) butter, softened

1 2⁄ 3 cups granulated sugar, separated

1 1⁄ 3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

5 large eggs, separated

1⁄ 3 cup whole milk

1⁄4 cup sliced almonds

1 cup heavy cream

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F, with a rack in the middle position. Line 2 8" round cake pans with parchment paper. Grease the pans and the paper.  The original recipe recommended using metal pans over glass. I had metal pans so that's what I used so I can't comment on the glass.
2. Beat the butter and 2⁄ 3 cup of the sugar in a large bowl with an electric mixer until light and creamy, about 3 minutes.
3. Add the flour and baking powder and mix well on low speed.
4. Mix in the egg yolks and milk.
5. Scrape the batter into the baking pan (the batter will be thick - I used an offset spatula to spread it).
6. In a large clean bowl, beat the egg whites and the remaining 1 cup sugar to soft peaks. Spread on top of the cake layer. Sprinkle with the almond slices.
7. Bake for 30-35 minutes, or until the meringue is golden brown and puffed. Cool on a wire rack in the pan. Gently unmold one of the cake layers and place cake-side-down on a serving platter.
8. When the cake is cool, put the cream in a medium bowl and add some vanilla extract (I used 1/2 tsp. of vanilla bean paste). Beat to medium-firm peaks with an electric mixer, about 3 minutes.
9. Cover the cake on the platter with the cream. Gently unmold the other cake from the baking pan.  Place the other half, meringue side up, on top.
10. Let the cake sit for 1 hour in the fridge before serving.

Reading Rainbow

My grey matter has been hyperactive, of late.  I've been getting a lot of mental inspiration from stuff I've been reading/seeing/thinking about and my pistons are firing (in case you couldn't tell from the last post).

Further to that, I was at a dinner party last weekend and when the talk about white people being racist came up, a smug white person (is there any other kind?) of the mansplaining variety said, "but aren't we all racist?" and I was like, okay, yeah, fine.  And then this other mansplainer jumped in, and to his credit, talked about racism being a structural thing, so everyone is bigoted (or can be), but not all people possess the structural power to exclude others.  He said something along the lines of, "I'm sure there might be some cultures where whiteness isn't dominant" at which point I was just about to interject that I don't believe that to be true, when my dear friend gave an example of "racism" when she was singled out and treated differently when she was a white woman living in Japan for a year.

Keep in mind: I was the only person of colour at the table.  The Dotytron had left for another engagement.  In that context, among those people, I consider the Dotytron a person of colour, because he's really the closest thing to it.  He's considered "black-ish" by his colleagues at school.  I tried to make a point that Japanese men fetishizing her whiteness is still a privileging of white skin (although a twisted articulation of it), but it got swallowed up in the din of whiteness and mansplaining (a lethal combination).

It was very difficult to sit at that table and listen to that conversation unspool as it did.  I didn't speak up because I'm not very deft when it comes to doing that.  I would have gone full-bore FRANZ FANON this! and bell hooks THAT! And probably gone berserk with post-colonial, can-the-subaltern-speak talk.

Here's the thing: some of those people are wannabe public policy wanksters.  They're not, because they're the kind of oily political staffers that I see prancing around my work, in shrunken suits, who don't actually know how to do anything but play the "game" of politics, but the point is: they FANCY themselves to be the "right" people to make those decisions.

You've heard me go on and on about the myopic nature of the left and how entrenched positions never yield fruitful conversations.  This was a table full of that.  Big voices from people who don't know anything beyond their own narrow slice of urban smugness.

I'm sorry, but you don't have to go very far to get a sense of the discourse on white privilege and racism.  Like, it got played out in the Taylor Swift-Nicki Minaj beef on Twitter.  It's on Scandal, like, every 5th episode.  It's kind of everywhere?  IF you take a minute to step outside the narrow confines of a limited peer group.  It's weird how rarefied your world can become.  I'm sometimes shocked by how much otherwise intelligent, smart, thinking people I know don't know about stuff.  Maybe this is what happens when you only get a CBC/NPR view of the world?  What is that world even like?

Thankfully, I'll never have to know.

Edit: I love my best friend because I have been working on this post all week and then we went to lunch and basically hashed out all of the above.  She's a glorious, brilliant, magical, inspiring creature who makes me a better person.

This week I saw Jillian and Mariko Tamaki do a talk organized by my friend JT.  It was awesome.  Yes, please smart Asian-Canadian women who are feminists and think about girlhood and coming-of-age, and narrative reliability and are kick-a** illustrators.  Yes, please.

This One Summer is their latest work (they also write independently of each other, although Jillian does illustration whereas Mariko doesn't).  This won a Prinz and a Caldecott, kind of a big deal.  It's covers a summer spent at the cottage with two friends, Windy and Rose, both who are on the cusp of early-adulthood, and who are experiencing that transition and the shifting of their identities in different ways that strain and balance their friendship.  There are confusing things afoot with the adults in their lives, and with the townie teenagers the two spy on.  I love Jillian Tamaki's illustration style.  I just love it.  I couldn't love it more.  It is the perfect balance between clear and expressive and referencing traditional cartooning.  The story is fragmented and the telling of the narrative evokes summer itself - how some days are long and languid and some seem to flash by in a blur.  There is a lot that isn't said through text, leaning all the more on Jillian Tamaki's wondrous illustrations to add the nuance and shading and subtext.  It perfectly captured the confusing miasma of fraught female friendships at a tumultuous time.  

This was OBVIOUSLY an Academic Book Club pick.  I don't know from Ann-Marie MacDonald.  I didn't read The Way the Crow Flies or Fall On Your Knees because I suspected white lady problems and I wasn't up for it then, and I'm rarely up for it now.  This is about a character, not-Ann-Marie who lives a very similar life to Ann-Marie but isn't her, okay?  Even though they are both lesbians living in the Annex with similar professions for their spouses and raising kids and blah blah blah.  I didn't finish reading this to be honest because it was about how she was feeling suffocated by stifling domesticity.  It's a Talking Heads, is this my beautiful wife? Is this my beautiful car? type of book and I'm sorry, but from rich white ladies who are all, "how do I find myself here?" I'm like, figure it out! I don't care!  I couldn't get into her "problems" and I didn't want to try.

The Girl on the Train was last year's answer to Gone Girl but not as good and without the feminism.  An alcoholic woman named Rachel pieces together a mystery from the glimpses of a house she passes by on her train commute every day.  Secrets abound, blah blah.  It's a page turner but I didn't really like any of the characters and the writing wasn't all that great and the twist ending wasn't all that surprising, so the end result is that it was perfect for that time in my life (I read this over a year ago...I think when the twins were quite wee and my life was punctuated with tandem breastfeeds every 3 hours).

All YA books are set up to be like, "The next Fault in Our Stars" or "The next Eleanor and Park."  This was marketed like this but it's quite different.  It's about a Hasidic Jewish girl and a West Indian boy who cross over their respective communities' boundaries in Brooklyn and meet in a hospital elevator during a hurricane.  Their families disapprove, their burgeoning relationship must be kept a secret.  For the most part, the book defies easy stereotypes - Jaxon, the boy, is a high-achieving nerdy student and the book ends with melodramatic elements, but a more realistic ending than most.  I liked this book - it was sweetly touching.

Saga.  You guys.  Brian K. Vaughan is obviously a hero in the comics world.  I love his writing.  But Fiona Staples?!?  Where have you BEEN all my comic-reading life?  Look at those drawings!  The drawings are incredible.  This is about two members of alien races, at war for generations, who fall in love and defect to raise their child, on the run from bounty hunters and government forces.  Brian K. Vaughan's writing is always slyly political, but funny, and very wry.  I love this and can't wait for the next installments.  Again, the illustrations, guys!  The worlds that are created!  

SMcKay recently questioned me because I got midnight screening tickets (thanks, Bruce Wayne!) for the new Star Wars: Force Awakens film.  I was like, dude, I'm a nerd.  And she said, "I'm a nerd, too..." and I was like, whoa whoa whoa.  I am a real, deal nerd.  Like, an old skool 90s alt-Asian girl nerd.  I like Star Trek: TNG, Star Wars, comics, Voltron, Ghost in the Shell, Autechre, Aphex Twin, all the rest of that stuff.  You want to talk Brian K. Vaughan?  Let's talk Brian K. Vaughan.  This is real comics, not the Seth/Adrian Tomine, graphic novel stuff.  It is a brilliant series though...you have to take my word for it.  

Allie Brosh's web comics (and maybe some original material?  I'm not sure) were collected in this book, Hyperbole and a Half.  There is something about her naive (but assuredly time-consuming) MS Paint illustrations that are the best.  In particular, her series on her own depression and wanting to die, is one of the things that has best crystallized for me, what it must be like for someone to be going through those mental health issues.  It's strange, but her writing on her depression is one of the first times I've actually understood what it must be like.  It made that expression of mental illness accessible in a way that it hadn't before, and in so doing, made me able to empathize with people with mental illness on a much more intuitive level.  

I mean really, isn't this like, me all the damn time?!

I know, I'm so behind on book reviews that you read and digested and loaned this to your friend already.  Allow me to join the chorus of voices who loved Amy Poehler's book.  I love this woman.  I was told by people that some of her reactions to situations as detailed in the book reminded them of me, and by that I mean I think Amy Poehler and I share the propensity to be small, smart women who are cocksure and as a general rule, DON'T TAKE S**T LYING DOWN.  I am generally honoured by the comparison.  

I loved this book.  The essays were by turns funny, true, heartening, and revealing.  This is the kind of book that as a woman, you sometimes clutch it to your breast and just breath, "yes."  I get that.  This woman gets me.  Women getting other women is a magical gift and is not to be trifled with.  I enjoyed this more than Bossypants because as a whole, I find Poehler less guarded.  Tina Fey comes off very cerebral and her smart can be distancing, whereas Poehler allows you in a bit more.  Whatever, they're both brilliant, funny, amazing women and there is room for both of them and a whole lot more.

I suggested this for Academic Book Club.  It generated a s**t tonne of discussion but I had major issues with this book.  I think Lena Dunham is a creative, gifted, incredibly accomplished woman who has her heart in the right place.  I think the video advice series that she developed to promote the book was brilliant and funny and I loved it.  The actual book however, I do have notes about.  She's...just not that great a writer, guys.  She's a voracious reader and she's been around a highly educated, artistic milieu her whole life (what comes through loud and clear in this book is how much she idolizes her artist parents), and I've heard her speak and she's articulate and insightful...but it doesn't translate as much to the written word.  

I've subscribed to her Lenny newsletter that she does with Jenni Konner and I'd say the same thing.  She's not a great interviewer and the writing just doesn't equal the sum of the inputs.  She is an oversharer with some things, but then when the time comes to discuss her relationship with Jack Antonoff, she gets weirdly shy and reticent and all, "that's private!" and obviously I get that everyone gets to choose what's private for them, but it just seemed incongruous and kind of juvenile.  There are ways to talk about your boyfriend/partner/significant other, whathaveyou, without giving it all away and feeling like you sold yourself (see: Amy Poehler above).  It was worthwhile reading because this book generated a lot of mainstream interest and was zeitgeisty, and as we all know, even though I'm a nerd, I stay on top of the zeitgeist like it's my full time job.

That's it for book reviews today.  Stay tuned for Halloween wrap-up, more musings on parenthood, what I've made for dinner lately, and more!

Fin.

This is a Rant

They see me rantin', I'm ravin'...

Very much not into this ^^^ lately

The Dotytron has some extended family members who are...how do I put this delicately...ummm...RACISTS?!?  They are "old stock" Canadians and lately, I'm like, done with that shiz.  An uncle referred to a musician at a Jamaican resort he didn't care for as a "Rasta piece of crap" (you are surprised that your musician in JAMAICA was [might] have been Rastafarian?!).  That same uncle also believes President Obama is a Muslim, and furthermore, THINKS THERE'S SOMETHING INHERENTLY WRONG ABOUT THAT.  A groomsman at a wedding that I (thankfully) didn't go to, used the N-word IN THE RACIST, NON-REAPPROPRIATING WAY.  An Aunt re-posted a picture of the twin towers with accompanying text to the effect of: "this image is going to offend some people [emphasis mine] that our government is too PC to fight back against but I don't care (blah blah blah insert nationalistic - American! - jingoism here)..." In the run-up to this past federal election, the only people on my Facebook wall who have been posting scare-mongering stuff about how Justin Trudeau is going to run up a giant deficit or op-ed pieces from the Toronto Sun (!), about how stellar Harper's record has been are from his aunts and uncles with accompanying entreaties that we should read their posts and "think before we vote!"  These are people who get their "news" and political information from memes.

I also made the mistake of clicking on the comments from provincial PC leader Patrick Brown's Facebook message wishing Muslims a happy Eid.  It was, as you could imagine, filled with racist vitriol and the linchpin issue for scared white bread old stock everywhere, how you CAN'T SAY MERRY CHRISTMAS ANYMORE AND YOU HAVE TO SAY "HAPPY HOLIDAYS" AND WHAT A TRAVESTY THAT IS AND A HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATION, etc., etc.

At a Dotytron family xmas event a couple of years ago, an aunt mad an off-hand snide remark that someone better watch what they say to me, because "otherwise she'll be posting about you [on social media] with the things she doesn't like" and just the mere memory of that makes me so. damn. mad.  I am filled with a howling, chomping, rage that rises in me and slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.

I'm sorry, am I too smart, critical, and outspoken for you?  What's the role of a good woman in your books?  That I should be making shortbread cookies and planning my wedding and taking my partner's last name and accept mail addressed to "Mr. and Mrs. Dotytron"?  HOW ABOUT YOU TAKE SOME OF MY BRILL OPINIONS and sit down and quietly be spoon fed them the way disenfranchised people are forced to quietly be spoon fed your white privilege since time immemorial?  

These are opinions that family by marriage (only - thank goodness), think it's okay to share PUBLICLY.  So I think to myself...why do I want to be around that?  What do I get out of descending into that intellectual decrepitude?  What must they think of me?  What must they think of my beautiful biracial children?  

You know what this is?  This is white privilege folks.  The kind of myopic, "convenient theories for me" narrative that means that women, women of colour, women who don't fit the box that is convenient for us to be place in by the constructs of the dominant hegemony, have to behave in a certain way, lest we be designated as too "loud" or "opinionated" or "untoward."

BE UNTOWARD.

I chose Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me for the next Book Club I'm hosting.  We had just read (or in my case, hate-read and then dropped 1/10th of the way through), Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend and I was looking at options and I was like, you know what?  I'm tired of reading about white women!  I haven't finished this, but the review is forthcoming.

Last night we finished watching Fruitvale Station, starring the hotness that is Michael B. Jordan. I suggested the film as an accompaniment to the reading for Book Club. After the last few years where the black community has become increasingly visibly radicalized in the face of systemic and visible murder by entrenched racism and the demonization of black masculinity, the film enraged me.  Oscar's story happens all the freakin' time.  We have a confluence of entrenched racism in the United States, lack of class mobility, segregation, disempowerment, a heady gun culture, and the simultaneous fetishization and demonization of black masculinity contributing to black bodies being treated as disposable.

Then you read reports about how something was "disrupted" by Black Lives Matter advocates.  You see news reports that fix the rioting in Ferguson in a fetishisitic gaze while simultaneously moralizing and wagging a finger at our collective entrancement with the activities images of black bodies "acting out."

Why do we hold oppressed people to a higher standard?  Why do we grind people under our heels and then expect them to be "good corporate citizens" or to protest in a way that we deem acceptable and not give in to that rage?

All my life I've been told that I'm too angry, too outspoken, not basic enough for this world.  I was born with a surfeit of confidence and the privilege of an upper-middle class upbringing in a developed nation to back it up, but still, rage is

Can you imagine what it must be like to be black in America?  To be Hispanic in America?  To be First Nations in Canada?  To be Muslim around the Dotytron's extended family (lol!)?  

I just finished reading Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist.  It is a collection of Gay's essays.  This was good stuff, folks.  She talks about how we have to stop lobbying accusations of privilege, how it feels being a feminist but still liking questionable pop music (e.g. "Blurred Lines") in spite of yourself, what it means to be a "bad feminist."  I loved this collection, even if I didn't agree with all her points.  There was an essay about the N-word and I gotta say, as someone who has studied language and writing and meaning,   Surprisingly, my favorite essay is about Gay's entré into the world of competitive Scrabble playing.  She balances the line between anger, indignation, reflexivity, passion...I can't believe I'm only discovering her now, but I'm so glad I did.  It's nice to have a woman of colour be represented in mainstream feminist discourse, especially one as funny, self-aware, critical, and whip smart as Gay.

I saw Straight Outta Compton a few weeks ago with a friend.  Dotytron had gone right when it was released with his Record Club homies.  I saw it after ingesting all the information that circulated in the immediate aftermath of the movie's release about how Dre has a history of beating up women. I don't know much about rap history or about NWA, other than the hits from that era that everyone knows.  It was definitely an entertaining movie and the performances are almost all uniformly good, especially Jason Mitchell as Eazy-E and O'Shea Jackson Jr. as Ice Cube.  In particular, Jackson Jr. is incredible.  It helps that in a film where the actor's likeness to the character they played could be tenuous at best (I'm looking at you, the guy who played Snoop), Jackson Jr. looks EXACTLY like his dad and the mannerisms were perfect.  The guy who plays Dre, Corey Hawkins, got daps but he relies too much on the squinty eyes (admittedly, so does Dr. Dre in real life).  All that aside, there is no denying that the movie is very entertaining.  However, there is no denying that the guys who comes off the worst in the film are a) the guy who is dead (Eazy-E) and b) the guy who is a known psychopath (Suge Knight).  Dre and Cube come off as angels, and as I linked above, we know that is certainly not the case.  It could be because Cube co-wrote the film?  Who knows.  I did like the fact that Eazy-E's widow is one of the executive producers.  The other thing is that the film trades on a LOT of misogynistic depictions of women and quite frankly, I don't have the stomach for that anymore.  The film also glosses over the fact that the fetishization of young black male inner city culture was packaged to a white audience to sell it.  In fact, I think the film does the same thing, and trades on it to sell this film to a mass white audience (the film did remarkable box office).  Once again, you have the Narcos phenomena of the simultaneous glorification of the violence, and misogyny and the vague finger-wagging happening in the sub-sub-subtext.  We glorify the exploits of this disenfranchised black masculinity as a means of selling movie tickets.

Rant over.

Fin.

Your Regularly Scheduled Post

My new posting routine is going to be upended this week because I have back-to-back-to-back job interviews on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

I'm basically a giant ball of anxiety and nerves right now.

It's awesome having a high-stakes job interview, on the first day of the new school year, after a long weekend, when your partner is a teacher and is similarly a ball of nerves.

I will leave you with some quality reading I've come across lately:

Mindy Kaling's Guide to Killer Confidence

Patrick Ness, who is one of my favorite YA authors, started this fundraising campaign to help Syrian refugees because he was tired of tweeting his despair.  A bunch of authors (at first limited to the YA community, but now expanding) pledged matching 10,000 pound contributions and now the campaign is up at 500K pounds!  This makes me so happy

Bill Hader and Fred Armisen and Seth Myers are doing this spoof on documentaries in the series, Documentary Now!  It is so, so, so funny.

This article on Amazon was depressing.

Speaking of refugees, I came across this poem on a blog and it totally moved me.  The author is London-based, Kenyan-born, Somali poet and author, Warsan Shire.

Home

by: Warsan Shire

no one leaves home unless 

home is the mouth of a shark

you only run for the border

when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough

the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
n*****s with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess up ours
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off

or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hungry
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here

Fin.

Identity

I have been mildly stressed lately by the following:
1) How few pie baking days there are in the summer (pie season) in relation to how very many pies I want to bake (and eat), not even considering ones that I would like to make multiple times
2) How many New York Times articles I want to read
3) How meagre my many vacation days seem in light of the fact that I had TWO SUMMERS OF MATERNITY LEAVE (TWO!). Summer babies are the best, guys. If you have the means, I highly recommend it.

So the whole Rachel Dolezal thing burning up the “news.” It’s not really what I would consider to be “news” but it is the current hot button issue for getting the talking heads a’ talkin’.

Let me contextualize my take with this preamble. When Pingy and the Roomie were over, we had a big conversation about transgender issues (kick-started by the big Caitlyn Jenner reveal that had happened the day before the dinner). Pingy had taught a girl who identified as a “cisgender polyromantic woman” and Pingy, bless her patrician heart, was all like, “What does that even mean?!” So we parsed it out (short story – I think poly-romantic means that the person felt they could fall in love with anyone, a distinction that’s made against the body-parts oriented context of identifying as “homosexual” or “bisexual” or “straight.” I was a little bit weirded out that Caitlyn chose to reveal herself in ye classic exploitive, sex bomb fashion and it kind of offended me as a feminist. The Roomie made the point that since she’s now a woman, she could be objectified like women are. Errr…is that progress?

Then I read this: What Makes A Woman, and the author identifies some of the ways that I situate the transgender movement. If, like me, you consider binary gender distinctions a total social construction (and I do), then I feel like the transgender movement is a temporary way station en route to the total negation of social gender constructions. We are moving towards a point when you won’t “feel” like you were born in the “wrong body” in a way that’s related to gender. Maybe you’ll want a penis, that’ll be cool – it will just be like wanting to wear coloured contact lenses. It won’t be about gender. You won’t feel like you’re in the wrong body, because being in any body won’t MEAN anything in particular, insofar as your gender is concerned. Great. We get that. We’re all on board, right?

So when Rachel Dolezal identifies as “black” but isn’t “black” per se – why can’t we apply the same logic? Being black isn’t a quantifiable thing, it is arbitrary and sloppy language for having more melatonin than (what? What’s our baseline here?) than others. There is no genetic underpinning for race – it’s even more of a social/cultural construct than the concept of gender. Before it came out that she might not be the greatest person (suing Howard for discrimination, possibly making up claims of harassment and discrimination), then if she wanted to identify as black, then why not? What’s the big deal? People accused her of trading on the oppressed while still having the security of her white privilege. Yet, people don’t accuse women, who transition into being men, of trying to hop on the tails of patriarchal privilege. No way. If you did suggest that, then you, like the author of the New York Times article above, is accused of being transphobic. I think there’s a gap in my understanding here that I would like someone who does consider the New York Times article transphobic, to illuminate for me, because as of right now, I’m not getting it. I think it’s because I do so believe in the social construction of race, but this quote from this Washington Post  article gave me pause:

“Race is a social construct. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t real as a lived experience in America, and it wasn’t constructed out of thin air. On this broken foundation, African Americans led, created communities and built a movement that transformed, and strives to further transform, America for the better.” 

I think I do have a tendency to jump forward to the world that exists in my head, and assume that this is the norm (or should be) for everyone. This is a classic problem for me. My mum has told me since I was a kid that I have a problem seeing things from other people’s perspectives. Her working theory is that I was delivered by forceps (I was a breach baby with my umbilical cord wrapped around my neck – which in earlier days would have had me killed for being a witch), and that the forceps crushed the empathy part of my brain. The Dotytron and the Roomie generally endorse this theory. LOL!

Anyway, yes, race is a lived experience with real results, but even knowing that, while I don’t want to avoid questioning and problematizing Rachel Dolezal’s motives and privilege, I’m curious about why, as a theoretical exercise, a white woman choosing to live her experience as a black woman is substantively different than a woman choosing to live her experience as a man. Insert your thoughts here.

[edit: in light of the horrifying, racist, terrorist murders of Cynthia Hurd, 54; Susie Jackson, 87; Ethel Lance, 70; Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, 49; Hon. Rev. Clementa Pinckney, 41; Tywanza Sanders, 26; Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr., 74; Rev. Sharonda Singleton, 45; Myra Thompson, 59; I would like to further underline my solidarity with people who are living the lived experience of race and the very real, deathly implications of it.]

When I read the profiles of the people who were shot, I cried and it makes my heart hurt. I’m also angry. I am enraged by the entrenched, institutionalized racism that infects the world generally and the United States in a particularly acute fashion. I am sickened by the “friends” of the shooter who blithely passed off his racism (the unspoken subtext of the articles reporting their comments is that they themselves share his views, if not the desire to act on them?) and are quoted as saying things like, “He was racist, but I don’t judge.” Probably because you’re a white supremacist bigot yourself.

The other night we watched the documentary After Tiller, which is about the last 4 doctors in the United States who still perform late-term (past 20 weeks) abortions after the murder of Dr. Tiller at his church by a pro-life fanatic. It was admittedly, a sympathetic portrayal of these doctors, feminists all, and the women who seek their assistance. The doctors seemingly didn’t undertake the task lightly and neither did the women – very often there were compelling medical reasons (fetal abnormalities that would grossly impact their child’s quality of life, shortened life expectancies) and social reasons (rape). To see these people put their lives on the line to offer a legally protected right to women was inspiring. To see the lengths that people are willing to go to out of misogynistic ideology was repellant. The film doesn’t really tell you anything you don’t already know or suspect, but it is an important voice in the diminishing conversation for women’s reproductive and bodily rights.

Now on to more mundane matters. Last weekend we celebrated the twins birthday for the fourth or fifth time, with Momma D and Ehmdo and the Dotytron’s Nany (the kids’ Great Nany D). I love me some Great Nany D. She is a treat. She is mostly well of body and very sound of mind and I just GET her. She’s so practical and prosaic and her parenting advice is almost always sound. She’s a very relaxed, non-intensive mother parent who has been through 4 kids and consequently, just gets it, ya know? She doesn’t get fussed if the kids are loud or misbehave and has a generally “eh, so what” attitude about little ones that I love. I picked her up from her place in the west end as she shouldn’t be driving anymore and she kept up a steady stream of companionable, interesting chatter. Aside from some mild racism (the old person kind) and social conservatism she’s the greatest. Momma D made corn on the cob and I gave each baby half an ear. Nany wanted to know if it was buttered. I said, no. Momma D said, “they don’t need butter.” Nany: “Well of course they need butter, it makes it taste better.” I said, “Well, we don’t give them butter on their corn so they get used to eating it without, and then when they’re older and they already like the taste of corn, we can add butter and it will be even better.” Nany stopped, looked me dead in the eye, and said, “That makes no sense.” LOL!!! I about died laughing. So good.

The Big Yam’s best friend at school, F, is like a negative version of the Big Yam. They share similar wide, closed mouthed smiles and eyes that disappear into crescent moon squints. “F has white hair” the Big Yam told me, early on in the school year. He is a white-blonde kid and has a similar bowl cut. It’s a little sad because F goes away to Europe all summer. “F’s going to Plogg, soon” the Big Yam informed us the other night. Need I also mention that F has a million allergies and always speaks with a stuffed up voice?

I spent the bulk of the one beautiful day we had last weekend driving across town to grab Nany and so this weekend I’m trying to make it so that I actually have time to savour my weekend. I want to take the kids to a picnic at the Scarborough bluffs or on the beach, for a long bike ride, for a garden putter. We have plans to eat dinner with MHui and her family and for Father’s Day, I’m fulfilling the Dotytron’s greatest wish and making ourselves scarce for a big chunk of the day.

The muumuu and America's Next Top Model posing beside me so smyze-ing his heart out.

Here’s what we’ve been eating lately:

Moco loco for dinner!  Spam, fried eggs, gravy on rice!

Lamb rogan josh and muttar paneer

I am going to talk about this dinner at length because it was so delicious and because it came to me in a dream and I executed it and it was “the stuff that dreams are made of” (when you read that line you actually have to sing it out loud in your best Carly Simon voice, which I know you have in your back pocket, at the ready, just in case. THAT IS VERY WISE OF YOU). 

Here’s the thing about Cobb salad: it’s like, fake salad. Minus the blue cheese, which I’ve become less enamored of as I get older (being less tolerant of strong blue cheeses and having to wear bike shorts under my skirts are two of the harbingers of old age that I’m the most bummed about), it’s basically like a breakfast sandwich, minus the bun. What’s NOT to like about bacon, chopped hard boiled egg, avocado, and tomatoes and chicken? Sauced in a creamy, mayo-based dressing (or in my case, a buttermilk dill dressing) and with some chopped romaine to avoid a talking-to from My Fitness Pal, you’re good to go. Here’s where my dream came in, though. In my dream, I had replaced the standard cubes of cold, chicken breast in the classic Cobb salad with buffalo fried chicken. *Pulls record back on turntable*. 

Yes. Genius! I took boneless, skinless chicken thighs, the existence of which, in quantity, is but one of many reasons why I will never give up my Costco membership (seriously, like, 5lbs of boneless, skinless chicken thighs for $20?! Get outta here!), soaked them in a buttermilk brine, tossed them in some seasoned flour jacked up with some cornstarch and a bit of baking powder, and then fried them in lard. Once they were crisp I took them out, let them drain on paper towel, and then dragged each one through a mix of equal parts butter and Frank’s Red Hot (which, spoiler alert: IS BUFFALO SAUCE. You don’t have to buy it pre-made!), before arranging them lovingly on the salad. The resulting dinner salad was spicy, cool, crunchy, substantive, and each bite was different, which is generally one of my salad prerequisites. I will definitely put this on the rotation again (which means we’re lucky if I get to it before summer is up).

Strawberry shortcake made with Claudia Fleming's genius shortcake recipe.  It is so good, guys.  The perfect sweet biscuit.  Crisp edged and so, short, almost like a shortbread crossed with a biscuit.  Sturdy enough to soak up copious macerated strawberry juices and absolutely lugubrious with softly whipped cream.  

Shrimp and tofu pad thai

Ottolenghi's cauliflower cake is delicious.  It's also Quincess' platonic ideal of a vehicle for vegetable consumption.  That kid loves a quiche/cake/vegetable patty/fritter like no one else.

Fin.