I heard a fascinating broadcast on NPR tonight. Recorded on January 25, Madeliene Albright was addressing the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. The title of her speech was "Restoring America's Reputation and Leadership". It was the most concise and enlightening summary of the current state of American foreign policy I've heard.

I try to follow the news, but I have to admit that I often find it difficult. I'm either daunted by the sheer amount of information available or I'm disgusted by the way that information is disseminated. I'm not a political scientist and foreign policy isn't my hobby, but I want to understand what's going on in the world. I get frustrated sometimes because I feel like I should have a better grasp of world events. I know the raw information is out there, but how do I piece it together into something coherent? I don't want my information filtered through the polemic and agendas of pundits, but I also want a deeper understanding of the bare facts.

Albright's speech did more to school me on several major issues than just about anything I've heard, seen, or read over the past several months. She's recently written a book entitled "Memo to the President-Elect", and I assume her speech was an abstract of that book. She covered the most important and difficult issues that the next POTUS will face, and in doing so shed a lot of light on the failures of the current administration. She discussed globalization and foreign policy in ways that I could easily grasp, but she didn't water or dumb it down in any way.

I think that because she teaches at Georgetown she has an excellent grasp of how to TEACH. It wasn't a lecture so much as an education. I won't try to summarize or even quote from it, because the entire thing is too dense and well-worded to pick apart. The Q&A is amazing.

The speech is here if you'd like to listen to it (fifth from the top). I can't recommend it highly enough for anyone who, like myself, wants to know what's going on with American foreign policy but is a little foggy in some key areas. There isn't  a transcript available yet, but I got a lot more out of listening to it than I would have by reading it.

The woman who introduced Albright spoke for me when she said that she'd write in Albright on the ballot. After listening and re-listening to this speech I'm tempted to do so myself.

Fashion Week in NYC. Normally, I do not give a shit. HOWEVER:

I know this is an older video, but it's still amazing. I mean, c'mon. It's a hippie! Giving free hugs! On the street, to strangers!

I was inspired by rugrat's journal. I challenge all of you to hug someone today. It doesn't have to be someone on the street or someone you don't know...but make it a great, deep, full-bodied hug.

You never know how much it's going to heal someone.


go here, because I'm apparently retarded when it comes to embedding video.

Today is Ash Wednesday. I haven't been a practicing Episcopalian for quite a while, but I do love the concept behind Lent. It used to be a season of preparation for baptism, but somehow it got tangled up with self-sacrifice and asceticism. I had a great minister at one time who turned the concept of Lent on its head for me. Rather than giving something up for forty days, he suggested taking on a task. (He called giving something up a "false discipline" that generally has the effect of making you miserable and then smug, in that order. I miss him.)

I've been considering what I'd like to start doing for a while now. I've decided on three small things, because in combination they'll constitute daily discipline. First of all, I'm going to start going back to church. I've been tossing this around in my head for quite some time now, and I think it's important for me to go ahead and put down some roots in the community here. There's a solid (if slightly insular) church within walking distance from my apartment, and I feel as though I have the internal balance that makes me ready for that sort of social interaction. If it turns out not to be the right place for me, I'll just quietly slip out after Easter services.

As a related discipline, I'm going to read through the gospels during the season. I plan on reading four chapters a day, one from each gospel, in the morning with my tea. I don't plan on "studying" the books, just a solid re-read. In the past it's always been a very good thing when I get a daily dose of what the scriptures *really* say, completely divorced from outside interpretation.

The third thing is purely fun. Two to three times a week I plan on baking something to give to my family and friends - cookies, pies, cakes, tarts, crumbles, and bread. Bread is a biggie. In the past I've always shied away from trying yeasty breads because of the time and effort required to make them, so I'm gathering quick bread recipes. I'm going to go ahead and cautiously try some yeast-bread recipes as well. If any of you have something like that, or any good baking-related recipes, I'd love to give them a try. I'll tackle my first bread recipe tomorrow.

There's a chain Italian restaurant called Macaroni Grill. The food is okay - consistent if not terribly authentic - but the real treat there is the bread. It's a rosemary-scented yeast roll, and it's always delicious. I found the recipe the other day and will bake it up tomorrow.

I'll be posting my efforts every few days or so. Here's the recipe for the bread in case any of you would like to give it a try.

It's cold. Really cold. I'm sick of the cold. So I fought back using the power of chowder!

Yesterday I made a pot of this and I wasn't sorry at all. I've already eaten almost half of it. This is a soup that will make you gluttonous. It's a perfect example of a dish that's way, way more than the sum of its part - inexpensive, easy, and beyond delicious. The most difficult part is chopping up some vegetables. Plus, soup-making always makes me feel accomplished. If you try it, let me know what you think.

Here's the recipe (sorry, vegetarians; next week I'll post my recipe for creamed spinach).

 

Because T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" has been translated.

Into LOLcat speak.

Oh hai, Internets, will u mary meh? U can evn shar mah bukkit!

...and might possibly intrigue about two of y'all, but this is why I love the internet...because it's really made of people and ideas as well as information, and I am a sucker for niches and subgenres.  Like such as.

So, here's some further ado and a link:

As much as I loves the baconstuff, this is really just....too much:

Bacon Cheese Baconburger

The antidote to this can be found somewhere in this list of 101 Simple Appetizers in Under 20 Minutes.

(A number of the app recipes are meaty, but the veg ones look really good as well.)




That there is a hell of a lotta pig in one place.

I don't usually get a lot of responses on my posts, maybe because I am boring and long-winded or maybe because I don't have a ginormous list of friends, but I thought this might be fun. Share your Christmas cookie recipes! I am always looking for new cookie recipes (I love to bake). The only rules are that the cookies have to be easy to make and the ingredients have to be relatively inexpensive.

(Truth is, it is ALWAYS less expensive to bake for people than to buy stuff for them, and it is almost always appreciated more than a pair of gloves or whatever. Homemade treats make everyone happy.)

So under my recipe, please post your own favorites. I may not use them this year, but I will file them away for further baking, most definitely.

OK, this Christmas I am really poor, so almost everyone on my list is getting cookies. And they will love them, because my cookies kick ass.

 "Why do your cookies kick so much ass, Ashley?" you are probably wondering, and who could blame you? "How can any baked good that fits neatly in the palm of your hand and goes well with coffee or tea be that amazing?" Well, I will tell you:

because they are inexpensive and halfway-already made.

This is sort of a cheaty "Sandra Lee Semi-Homemade Cooking" recipe, but I swear to you that I got this from an elderly neighbor before I had ever head of the pox that is Sandra Lee. The morning of the day I first tasted these, I'd been bitching to my mother about how long it's been since I had macaroons, which are one of my favorite things in the world...and that afternoon, Lola brought over this enormous plate full of  - yep! - macaroons. It was as though the cookie gods had heard my cry and smiled upon me.

And damn, they were good. It tasted like she'd slaved over these. They were less 100% coconut and corn syrup-y than any macaroons I'd ever had, which is a very good thing, because traditional macaroons, while delicious, require judicious nibbling so as not to lapse into sugar shock. These were definitely more cookie-like, and as a huge bonus they also came with chocolate chips and pecans inside them.

So I begged her for the recipe between gigantic mouthfuls of macaroon cookies, and she laughed at me and gave me the one I am about to give you. It's ridiculously, insanely simple. I've memorized it and make it at least once a month for various reasons, often because I just want some macaroons.

The truth is that even good chefs will tell you that today's cake mixes are NEARLY as good as homemade, simply because they contain all the basic dry ingredients as more labor-intensive cakes without all the fussy measuring. Plus you can doctor them up with vanilla and nuts and poppyseeds and zest and whatever else you want, and then you have a cake that's all yours. So these cookies start out with a store-bought cake mix.

So first of all, make sure to ascertain that your gift recipients enjoy coconut. If they don't, give them some sugar cookies or something.

                                                                             COCONUT MACAROON COOKIES

**Warning: if you are a guy, this post will almost certainly put your feet to sleep. If you are not a guy, it will likely be equally boring, though it may contain moments where you nod and go, "Yep, I, too, once fell in love with a pair of jeans/silk dress/perfect-tshirt-that-made-my-boobs-look-epic." Plus, the entire thing is probably really crass and shallow, and it's solipsistic as hell, because, well, it's a long and rambly Live Journal entry. And it's about clothes. The only way I could make the following post more navel gaze-y is to tack on some angsty poetry. So every last one of y'all might want to just go away now. For those of you who are just dropping in and popping back out, do enjoy the pic of Daniel Craig adjusting his package. Take care, and have a pleasant Sunday!**

I love clothes, but I hate clothes shopping. Isn't it ironic? *tip of the fedora to Kevin Smith. And: if I could actually rock a Marlene Dietrich fedora I so completely would. Every. Single. Day.*

Bathing suit shopping is, of course, the seminal exercise in woe and gloom that annually destroys the prospect of beachy summers for me and zillions of other women. Bra shopping also sucks, but at least I'm pretty much the only person who sees me in my bra, so it isn't as bad as (dun dun DUUUN) shopping for jeans.

I blame the morbid combination of teensy dressing rooms, three-way mirrors, the near-inevitability of strangers seeing your panties, and fluorescent lighting. Maybe it's just the evil alliance of three-way mirrors under fluorescent lights, which transcends the Realm Of Sartorial Indignity and leaps squarely into the Prefecture Of Excruciating Misery Where No Woman Needs To See That Much Of Her Own Ass But Is Forced To Anyway. This particular psychic landscape looks like central Saskatchewan and smells like Newark.

I've hated clothes shopping since I was old enough to be dragged into dressing rooms by my mother, which was (I think) around the time I stopped wearing size 6x sundresses. The hatred blossomed like a noxious weed when I hit middle school, which was the beginning of my Really Supersize Mega Awkward Period (which lasted from the time I was 12 until I was about 21, judging from family and - *shudder* - school photographs). I was all legs and arms and shoulders and extremely sharp bones. I bore a striking resemblance to a baby stork, especially during that unfortunate year I decided to cut my hair very short. Bad idea.

I can at this stage in my life look at photographs of me from about 22 years old on and say that, empirically, I got better looking once I slipped the surly bonds of adolescence and touched the face of a decent colorist, but that fact had zero impact on my white-hot loathing of the mirrors and the lights and that gut-churning feeling of "Oh, shit, does my ass really look like that in this swimsuit?"  People have been known to self-medicate over that feeling, often with food, which perpetuates the Great Circle Of Badonkadonk Butt.

Anyway.

So it is with great pleasure that I can this morning relate not one but TWO happy clothes-reaping stories from this past week!

This is the Cat's Eye Nebula, which is three thousand light years away from where you're standing right now. It's beautiful and vast beyond comprehension and it makes me feel appropriately tiny and awestruck. It also puts my yesterday (which really sucked) squarely into big-picture perspective, which is always useful.

Once I thought the Hubble telescope was a waste of tax dollars, but now I know better.

To see over a decade's worth of photographs that provide awe-inspiring perspective on your daily life (and hopefully remind you how lucky and random an occurrence your existence is), check out NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day archives.

I found an interesting thread over at Pajiba last night. It asked people two questions: with a date/relationship, what are your personal dealbreakers? You get to be as petty and shallow as you want to be, but what can someone absolutely not get away with - the things that cause you to say, "Thanks for playing, don't let the door whack your ass on the way out."

The second question was what are your personal headscratchers? "Headscratchers" are defined as those odd traits that are mildly-to-wildly annoying or odd or even just very amusing but make you wonder, "What exactly was it that attracted me to this person in the first place, cute/wonderful/great in bed though they are?"

I find the concept of headscratchers to be a bit more intriguing, because those seem to shed a great deal more light into the ways that opposites can truly attract - drive each other nuts occasionally, but attract nonetheless. I thought it would be fun to see what ten of each might look like. I had to really dig, actually.

I'll go:

I generally choose to be amused by stuff that explicitly objectifies women, because I realize that most of it springs directly from the hormone-addled brains of 16-24-year-old college students. I love pin-up girls (check my default pic for proof), and well-done pornography neither disgusts nor offends me.

But seriously, folks, come on.

Not a single one of these objects could have been designed or implemented by anyone under the age of frat boys who snicker at songs like "Titties and Beer".

None of them. Not the urinal designed to look like a woman's red-lipsticked mouth. Not the toilet shaped like a dominatrix's headless torso so that you can piss and shit directly into your "Whip me, Mistress, and call me Susan" fantasies. Not the fiberglass casts of women's red-fishnetted-and-stilettoed lower torsos bent doggy-style over sinks so that you can wash your hands while dominating an imaginary whore. And certainly not the urinal shaped like an upside-down woman's legs, helpfully spread so that you can piss into the hole where her vagina (oh, sorry, I mean her cunt) should be.

Seriously? Yep.

Maybe I should just laugh. Maybe the lack of subtlety makes it ironic! Maybe it is therefore funny!

Or maybe it's sick. As in deeply, serial killer-level disturbed. As in, "I really enjoy beating off to necroporn." As in, "Women are really much better without heads or with mouths that are open only as a receptacle for my bodily fluids."

From the blog that gathered these lovely images:

If you ever come across someone who questions why there's (still) a need for feminism, someone who suggests that sexism no longer exists or someone who asserts that it's time for a humanist movement to eclipse the feminist movement, just point them to this post. We've got women's disembodied parts being used as toilets in restaurants, on airplanes, in public fucking spaces, as if there's nothing wrong with it, and mounted disembodied breasts being sold as a gag gift as if there's nothing wrong with it. (It's a gag all right. I'm gagging right now.)

As I've said before: Telling a girl since birth that she is equal matters little if she travels within a culture that consistently sends signals to the contrary.

There's a huge moon tonight. You would not believe the coyotes - they're yipping and howling like they're auditioning for a Western. The weather's been misty all day long, which is unusual here. There's an eerie halo around the moon and the chill is wet enough to seep into my bones when I step outside. It's October in Eastern Oregon but it feels like February in South Carolina.

I live in a town that packs onions, and it's harvest time. I've been wishing all week long that they'd grow thyme or olives or roses or ANYTHING other than onions. The whole town reeks of onions, onions, onions - a raw sulfurous smell that digs into the back of my throat and forces its way into my sinuses. It makes my lungs burn like I've been smoking a pack a day, and it literally brings me to tears when I open my windows. My apartment is stuffy and hot, but outside there is nothing but onion stink and a shrouded moon and the loneliest noises in the world - trains and coyotes.

I've been thinking a lot about Charleston lately. Impressions, not fully formed thoughts. The scent-tease of honeysuckle and wisteria and gardenia, the way the whole earth seems to be perfumed and flirtatious. Live oaks dripping with spanish moss. Fried shrimp and crab crackings. Days at the beach, watching the sailboarders be sexy without even trying and the labradors playing fetch with their people. Driving home sun-drunk and salty with the windows rolled down and the radio turned up. Pluff mud and marshes, tides and water birds. Water, always water; water the temperature of blood, water that tastes like tears. I grew up with the ocean in my backyard and now rivers are never enough.

When my thoughts coalesce into something solid they make me uneasy. I've been thinking about what home means, about where it is. About whether home even exists. Is home a place or a person? And if it actually is a person, will I be homesick forever?

I've been thinking that even though there isn't really any good place to be lonely, there are places that have oceans, places that don't smell like onions. Life is lonely enough; adding coyotes and deserts and the occasional distant train whistle is really a bit much. I don't let myself feel this way very often. Sometimes I get mugged by my own past, and tonight I feel tender, bruised by memories I wish I didn't have.

Tonight I miss the South. Her scent, her flavor. The way she looks at three o'clock in the morning when she's sleeping, when she's unaware of her beauty, when moonlight illuminates her skies and silvers her ocean and makes her heartbreakingly, impossibly radiant.

The South is always, always a woman. I'm grieving her like a lost lover.

I was reading this excellent article (titled "The Corrections")in the Oct. 22 New Yorker about the intrinsic problem with adapting great works of literature. Not adapting as in Cliff Notes, but in the "Reader's Digest Condensed Books" format. It seems there's a perfectly serviceable imprint called Orion that specializes in taking "the fat" out of masterpieces like Moby Dick and Anna Karenina. It was to the author of the piece's great credit that he didn't lose his mind over this kind of thing; on the contrary, it's a measured and patient exploration of why, exactly, certain books simply cannot be corralled.

There is nothing more satisfying than hearing that little chime in my head when I read something that's eloquently and succinctly written. It's an almost physical sensation, like the tingle I get when I hit a tennis ball just right and it POPS off the sweet spot of my racket. It makes my mind feel the way my body does when I execute a perfect dive and slice cleanly into warm, clear water. The one thing I can think of that's better is when I write something like that myself, but in this case I tripped over a pearl written by good ol' Adam Gopnik. I wanted to get this in here so I don't forget it.

The real lesson of the compact editions is not that vandals shouldn't be let loose on masterpieces but that masterpieces are inherently a little loony. They run on the engine of their own accumulated habits and weirdnesses and self-indulgent excesses. They have to, since originality is, necessarily, something still strange to us, rather than something that we already know about and approve.

What makes writing matter is not a story, cleanly told, but a voice, however odd or ordinary, and a point of view, however strange or sentimental. Books can be snipped at, and made less melodically muddled, but they lose their overtones, their bass notes, their chesty resonance - the same thing that happens, come to think of it, to human castrati.

I love it when someone tells me something I didn't already know I knew.

(I'm cross-posting from E2 here - I won't do it often, but this test thing is really worth a look.)

It's easy to fall in love. What's harder to do is think about why you fall in love. What's even more difficult is asking yourself the question, is this person right for me? Often, the answer is absolutely not. So why do we have such a strong tendency to fall in love with people who are completely, utterly wrong for us? This is an important question...maybe even the most important question.

The following exercise helped me understand several of the reasons behind the worst and most damaging decisions I've made. I might not have a choice about how I feel about someone, but I have a choice to think about it rationally. Feelings are not facts. I have to choose to cooperate with love. If it isn't healthy, I can choose to say no.

I hope this gives you some food for thought. I'm still chewing. Here's the exercise.