losing metal points, and elk

I spent three hours in the kitchen this afternoon. I made kale salad and curry meatballs, which involves a lot of chopping the same thing for both dishes. Carrots. Apples. Onions. And then, for variety, a leek! Crazy times. I never thought of apples as something for cooking (except for desserts) before I got my Scandinavian cookbook, even though I knew about "cooking apples." I thought they meant for pie. Now I am looking for things to which I can add apples. The good part of three hours in the kitchen is I have enough meatballs for 4 separate meals for the pair of us. And I have enough kale salad for a herd of wildebeests, which means the pair of us will be eating a lot of that this week. But it's kale. It's a superfood! And we both like it, which is rare and wonderful for greens. Usually we just suck it up and eat the damn things because They Are Good For Us(tm).

 Anyway. This cookbook is responsible for both kale salad and meatballs. Shan got it for us last Yule, and it's pretty damn awesome. I count three Viking/Scandinavian cookbooks in our possession, not counting the æbelskiver cookbook (which Shan also got for me. Do we sense a theme?). I intend to add the Nordic Diet to our collection this year. Anyway, with the exception of aforementioned æbelskiver, all of the cookbooks include game meat. Elk. Moose. Venison. Reindeer. (oh, Donner!) We count ourselves fortunate if we can find bison around here (yes, but only at Whole Foods). So we were pretty happy when we stopped at the local Sprouts on Friday (because we walk through grocery stores for fun) and found ground venison, wild boar(!), and elk. From New Zealand, mind, but whatever. We stood there for 10 minutes debating the merits of which to buy, and settled on the elk. And it, along with a package of bison, went into the meatballs. Yes, you can tell a difference. Elk's a super dark-red meat, not much fat. I haven't had it since I was a kid, when my dad shot one and brought it home (we lived in South Dakota at the time, and I wanted so badly to go hunting with him; but my mother decreed it too cold for me to go with him. I think it was because I was a little girl, and not a little boy). Anyway, Dad shot this elk and brought her home and hung her carcass in the front yard from the tree and butchered her. He'd skinned and dressed her already; this was the sawing into pieces part of the process. I remember vividly the sound the saw made going through her spinal column. I remember the texture of her muscles in their little sheath of viscera. I watched him butcher her and bring her pieces inside. My mother was Profoundly Unhappy(tm) with the color of the meat, but she cooked it. I remember loving the elk chili. I also remember getting violently ill shortly thereafter, and blaming the elk (unfairly). I wish we could get elk steak, but I'm pretty happy to've found it at all. If I make sausage stuffing this winter, I'll definitely use the wild boar stuff. I'm curious if there's as marked a difference between wild pig and domestic as there is between tame cow and bison.

But the whole point of this post was how I entertained myself while doing the megacookathon. Lady Gaga (newly acquired from the Rat). Dude. I lost so many metal points.  Nous says I am more metal not giving a damn how unmetal Gaga is than if I didn't listen to her because it's not metal. ...because, as we all know, I sit around worrying about whether or not I am sufficiently metal.

Anyway. I think it's appropriate to make a two-meat meatballs while rocking out to the chick who wore a meat dress to the VMAs last year. Well. I like to think I was rocking out, but I know me, and I know how I look when I dance, and I am hoping like hell the solid sheet of rain outside kept any neighbors from seeing that performance.

i am having trouble

...with this whole Penn State thing. I cannot wrap my head around how shit like this goes on and no one does anything. How the victims are named One and Two because no one knows who they are, but they have been seen by witnesses being abused and no one bothered to ask their goddamned names because no one bothered to intervene. I don't get how you see something like that happening and you just, oh, walk away. I'm kinda with Jon Stewart, on that one. Call Cops! Stop Rape! Or Stop Rape! Call Cops! Really. One of those things. Walk away? Not so much. Let's leave aside the dude who saw it--the big one, the former quarterback, that dude. So he can't bring himself to say anything, okay (but not really). So he calls daddy (daddy? daddy?) and waits a full fucking day to tell his superior, who reports to his, and by the end of it, raping a child in the lockerroom becomes questionable sexual behavior becomes horseplay that made a grad student uncomfortable. I can feel blood vessels popping in my brain even typing that.

And the pity for Joe Paterno... I don't get it. I don't want to get it. This man covered up child rape. He knew shit was happening and he did. Nothing. He has regrets? I bet he does. What about the kids? You think they might have some? Those folks who defend Paterno, who "support him"...the ones for whom football is more important than stopping pedophilia... words fail. Truly.  I just want to know who they are, in case I ever have the chance to boycott a business, or refuse employment, or have a clear line of sight and some extra spit.

what's wrong with this picture?

Good lord, daydrinking. I should totally know better than to drink a "high alcohol" beer on a Luna bar at 2PM, but WTF EVER. There was pumpkin porter! and good company! and I have to spend tomorrow with student thesis statements!

So yeah. Daydrinking. Anyway.

You know that XKCD comic? The one that says there's people doing stupid things on the internet? And the little stick man gets all pissed off and can't let it go?

Yeah. Well. This isn't a stupid thing, what's got me all ticked--but it's a symptomatic thing. In short: this picture.

It makes me angry.

And more than it, the response to it makes me angry. I got into it, briefly, on Facebook, and I walked away before it got personal and angrier. And because Facebook isn't the place for argument, and because it wasn't my Facebook, and because the impetus behind the posting was, for the poster, rather personal. So okay. I get that. Fine. I was bulimic in high school. I get not finding validation in the media for my body type (which is, for the record, mesomorphic. I am muscular. Not gaunt. Not curvy). But I had, and have, friends on both sides of the fat/skinny divide, so siding with one and slamming the other was and is not an option.

Anyway. This is my space, and I'm still pissed off about this picture and its message and the women who are passing it around and liking it and who should all fucking know better. 

So tell me.

Why is the curvy woman more attractive than the skinny one? Seriously. Why? Because more women have hips? More women are curvy? More women have big breasts? Is this an argument by majority? More of us can attain the hips and butt and tits, so the other one is clearly the problem?

I don't get it. They're both women. We can't tell from the image if the thinner woman works out, is anorexic, is naturally gaunt, or what. We can only lay our value judgments on her, and then back up and pretend we're being feminist while doing so. If the thin one works out to be thin, she's Bad because she's conforming to society's expectations! She is? How do we know this? Maybe she likes to work out. Maybe she's naturally skinny. Maybe she catches shit from people all the time for having a small chest and bony hips. Maybe she tries like hell to gain weight and can't.  Maybe she really does work out 10 hours a day and eat three leaves of lettuce a day and drink only water and take speed to keep skinny because Hollywood tells her to so she can have her image posted on the internet  for people to make fun of and judge to get validation from strangers?
 
It doesn't matter. She has a body and she's living in it. Curvy women, fat women, skinny women, athletic women, transwomen--all have bodies. And we're all living in them. And we really, really don't need to be judged and policed by our own because... because... what? Society is currently favoring the thin over the fat? It's all bullshit, people. Shaming the skinny chick to validate the curvy one is no different than fat-shaming. And don't even bring up 'health' to me, okay? Health isn't measured by skinny or fat. You can't fucking tell from looking. Citing health as a reason for personal preference is concern trolling at best.

What the image, and the comments about it, come down to are personal aesthetics and an adolescent need to justify one's self by denigrating someone else. Seriously. We need to be the fuck over that shit by now.

In order to stick up for the curvy chick, we have to slam the skinny one. We have to decide that one of them is ugly, and one of them is not. That tells me we're still talking about attractiveness as some objective value, without discussing who decides what's attractive. In this case--you know what? It's the same fucking society. The one that deemed Marilyn beautiful is the same one that's decided the skinny woman is beautiful. It's called... wait for it... PATRIARCHY. It's MEN deciding which of our bodies is acceptable, and whose is not, and assigning us value based on that. So you know what? When we think we're being all rebelllious and valuing the curvy woman over the thin one, we're still playing their game. We're still buying into their power structure.

Shit. We don't need the patriarchy. We do it to ourselves.