Some Food Thoughts

I have two motivations for this post.

1) The Gilmore Girls have been the front page of my blog for far too long.

2) I want to make a record of a few interesting food experiences I've had lately.

So, here are those food experiences.

Experience A: Figs



I had fresh figs for the first time that I can recall this weekend. I don't like them. There are too many seeds, and the flavor isn't sharp enough for my liking. I actually ate them with goat cheese, which has a very sharp flavor, but the flavors didn't mix well enough to improve the pungent fig taste for me.

Despite this bad experience with fresh figs, Fig Newtons are still awesome.

Experience B: Naan Bread



Normally, I like Indian food when it's there, but I never crave it. I have a newfound respect for Tikki Masala, but that would be a tangent. And I'm not a man who tolerates tangents. In any case, Naan bread is one of the greatest things to come out of India since the Just So Stories. I realize that the bread was probably around before Rudyard Kipling.

Experience C: The Cheese Shop

So, this past Thursday, we went to help Annie's mom paint in a place called Ridgefield, CT. It's rather a rich person's town. We saw one of these on the road:



NOTE: It's an Aston Martin DB9. I knew this because I've started watching Top Gear, one of the funniest television shows ever. It's a show about cars, which may make it inaccessible for some of you who read this blog, but when I make Annie watch clips of it, she always laughs a lot. Yet she still won't watch full episodes with me. Odd? I think so, but I'm sure she has her reasons. Anyway, writing any more about this would be another tangent. And again, I'm not a man who tolerates tangents.

In any case, while in Ridgefield, CT, I had the opportunity to walk into a cheese shop. It was all I could do not to launch into the Monty Python cheese shop sketch the moment I walked in the door. Still, I was able to control myself, and after a conversation with the extraordinarily helpful shop owner, I bought two kinds of cheese.

First, Brebirousse D'Argental.



Artisancheesegallery.wordpress.com has this to say about Brebirousse: "A ewe’s milk cheese from the Lyon region, France, the Brebirousse is a lovely soft and creamy aromatic cheese. It spreads wonderfully on a sliced baguette and pairs with both a crisp dry white and a sweet ice wine."

Second, Tallegio



Tallegio, according to artisanalcheese.com, is "a semi-soft, washed-rind cheese from the Valtaleggio region in northern Italy, near Lombardy. It is characteristically aromatic yet mild in flavor and features tangy, meaty notes with a fruity finish."

I absolutely loved both of these things. I may be a little bit of a food snob, and I'm absolutely a nerd, but I really love good cheese. I could have spent an hour in that cheese shop, and I can hardly stand to spend an hour in any store.

I'm not going to back off of my stance on tangents, but I'm going to go on a bit of a sidebar here. One of the troubles with the view that we should all give away everything we have above subsistence level until everyone in the world reaches subsistence level is that most of the things that really make life interesting and sweet would not longer be economically viable to produce. There would be no Brebirousse, no Tallegio, no Aston Martin DB9's, no television shows--probably no televisions, for that matter--no internet, etc. I'm not saying that this makes economic equality an undesirable goal, but I'm saying that there's something important against which to balance the goal.

That's about the whole of it. I'll end with a gratuitous picture of my wife. Because I love her.

What I Learned from the Gilmore Girls

Annie loves Gilmore Girls--as, I've found, do a lot of women I know. I'm generally not so fond of the show. My main quarrel with it is that many of the "conversations"--especially those between the two main characters--seem to be races to see how fast they can get the lines out. They sound like they're just saying lines really fast rather than actually talking to each other, and the frenetic pace gets under my skin a little.

So the other night, I was wanting to do something that Annie likes to do. Usually, in order to do this, I have to think of something that she would want to do, propose that we do it, and then convince Annie that I actually want to do it. Otherwise she won't do it and we have to do something that I like. Few men have to suffer so much to do things for their wives :)

On this particular night, I proposed that we watch Gilmore Girls and managed to convince Annie that I wanted to do it. So we did. In the first episode we watched, Rory was having a hot affair with a former boyfriend (Dean) who had since married Lindsay (I think), who appeared to be a lovely girl.

Immediately I wondered why so many women that I know and admire, including my wife, talk about loving Rory so much. Rory's a tramp who breaks up a marriage that the wife was clearly trying desperately to save! Seeing later episodes only made it worse--yeah, Rory feels bad about it for a while, but ultimately she and Dean establish that he would have left his wife for Rory even if the wife hadn't kicked Dean out, and he and Rory date.

So my opinion of Rory was quite low.

To my astonishment, Annie had forgotten that the affair even occurred. She had an "oh, yeah..." moment as we began watching and were immediately confronted with Rory's adultery. How could something so big as a flagrant violation of the seventh commandment escape her memory?

My conclusion was that Annie had seen all seven seasons of Gilmore Girls multiple times, and thus she knew Rory a lot better than I did. Maybe Rory learns, at some point, that adultery is still a horrible thing no matter how much you happen to love the other person. Or, more likely, maybe Annie, knowing more of Rory, was able to balance everything out and still love her.

That would have some comforting implications. I tend to look at my mistakes one by one and internally castigate myself for each mistake relative to its severity. Because I make a lot of mistakes, some of them quite serious, I'm almost always mad at myself about something. This is extremely frustrating to Annie, who frequently has to assure me that I am a good person and that she loves me even though I keep screwing up. She looks at me as a whole, and miraculously is able to see good.

For God, who can look on the totality of my existence, perhaps that ability is eternally magnified. Perhaps that is why He can have billions of children who rape, murder, steal, and commit senseless acts of cruelty, and still love each of them more than we can comprehend. And perhaps that is why every time I pray saying "Father, I messed up again," He's there to help me pick up the pieces.

A Room With A View (Part II)

Better now?

A Room with a View

Boston's kind of a pretty place. People should come visit us.

The Non-Super Bowl Party

As much as I love football, I've never watched a Super Bowl. That's just how my parents raised me. In what probably amounts to a case of ignorance being bliss, it's never bothered me too much that I don't get to see the game. However, as I grew older and came to know the wonders of good party fare/appetizers, I became extremely envious of Super Bowl parties, where apparently such things are had in abundance. I explained my frustrations to Annie last year around this time. We decided that there was no reason we couldn't have a party celebrating the joys of finger food even if we didn't partake of the pinnacle of commercial glamor and American sport that usually accompanies such parties. Thus, in what we hoped would become a tradition, we held our inaugural Non-Super Bowl Party.

We continued the tradition this year. We made a fruit salad, bought some wings, and procured a bag of tater tots that really should only have been purchased by a day care or a mother of twelve. We invited a few other couples, who brought other fantastic appetizers, including homemade meatballs that just made the world better and the greatest cheese dip ever (they mail ordered the ingredients). It was great fun, and we may have made some friends, which would be a first for us as a couple.

I would have posted pictures, but the following happened: part of our massive grocery shopping trip for the party (3 grocery stores! None of them had Lil' Smokies!) included a trip to BJ's--a sort of east coast Costco. There, we got batteries for my camera. As we were heading out, I realized that the cashier hadn't rung up the batteries, so I went back and paid for them. The guy who checks your receipt at the door was very impressed. He was adamant that I should receive a medal. Well, however much integrity I have, I make up for it with stupidity. I left the batteries in the shopping cart in the parking lot. So we don't have any pictures.

...and then I found five bucks!

The Rest of My Day

1:30- I start working again. My lunch breaks are always longer than I want them to be because I'm easily distracted. ESPN.com, realclearpolitics.com, drudgereport.com, hulu.com, and my netflix account constantly beg for my attention, and I give it to them much more often than I should. Incidentally, all of the stories about Peyton Manning paint him as a great guy, extremely hard worker. It's a sad product of today's sports that I'm just waiting for him to make the inevitable mistake that will assassinate his character.

I start working on the Natural Resources homework for tomorrow. The assignments usually range between 40-50 pages per night. A lot of students here are probably faster, but it usually takes me three or four hours to get through all of it. Today, by 3:00, my head is about to explode. I decide that now would be a good time to go back to the gym, but Annie gets off at 3, and I want to see her before I go. So I start doing research for the Environmental Law Clinic, which I'm doing this semester.

3:00-4:30 research. Reading statutes and cases, figuring how how they apply to the facts of our case. I like doing this, which bodes well for my career. I often don't like law school, but I like doing litigation work. I hope I'm actually good at it, but I don't know. I wrote a brief for a really easy appellate case last summer, and we won that case. But it was the legal equivalent of a layup. I spend about 30 minutes a day torturing myself by wondering whether I'll really be a good lawyer or not.

4:45- out the door to the gym. Spent a few minutes just talking and goofing off with Annie before I left. Best part of my day so far.

5:00-6:30- basketball. Spent most of the time waiting to get on the court. I'm slower than I used to be, I can't shoot anymore, and I don't jump as high as I used to. I shouldn't feel old at 25. But gosh, do I love playing sports. You know how some people just feel at home in the water, swimming? I feel at home on the soccer field and the basketball court.

On the way home, I pick up parsley for the pesto we're going to make for dinner. Annie ends up making it while I continue reading my Natural Resources assignment.

8:00- FHE. We sing before we study, which Annie originally hated (and may still hate), but I love and think is important. Her voice is really good; I wish I could get her to sing louder so that I could hear it :)

8:30- a couple episodes of Seinfeld. Sometimes this space is filled with Friends (Annie cannot live without Friends, and it turns out I like the show), Alias, or the Dick Van Dyke Show.

9:30- back to work. Still have to read for Theories About Law, tomorrow's assignment for Federal Civil Litigation, and the scriptures. Still, I'll put a cap on it around 11. I've learned over the years that you can get away without doing all of the reading.

My Day

Many of you may not be aware of the kind of person I've become. I think that most everyone who ever looks at this thing has spent some period of time in which they were pretty closely involved in my life--knew what I did most of the time. But not anymore. So, this is how things go now.

Woke up at 7:45. That's a good morning--3 mornings per week I go prepare breakfast for a lesbian couple and "their" son, and then I take the little boy to school. Those mornings, I have to wake up at 6:15. Even waking up at 7:45 today, I seriously contemplated going back to sleep until I absolutely had to wake up.

Annie did that morning job this morning, and she gets home from it at about 8:25. Just in time for me to kiss her as I'm walking out the door. We make fruit smoothies every morning--I left it on the counter for her, where I also tragically left my part of it.

Class at 8:40- Federal Civil Litigation. My group and I, along with all of the other groups, had submitted a drafts of a Complaint last Friday, and the professor spent today telling us how terribly we'd done. He thinks that we should be so dedicated to our jobs that we should be up every night reading laws and treatises between midnight and 2 a.m. He tells us that every day of class.

Class at 10:20, right after the first one ended--Natural Resources Law and Policy. I have a visiting professor for this one, and my experience with those that they're fairly low quality. If this guy's tasteful clothes and impeccably styled hair are any indication, he plays for the other team. He also has stlyishly long stubble, which he sometimes plays with absently as he's trying to get through another sentence, which doesn't come easily to him. The concepts in the class are interesting, but I prefer to get them from the book.

11:50- walking home for lunch. I had planned to play basketball at the campus gym before going home, but my gym clothes are sitting, perfectly packed, next to my smoothie. It's a 15 minute walk. Winds in Harvard Square average around 12 mph, which combined with the habitually sub-freezing winter temperatures makes for a cold walk. Deciding whether or not to call Annie or a family member on the walk home is a question of how much I love my hand that day.

I guess I have a lot to say about my day :) So I'll split it into another post.

Natural Resources Law and Policy

That's one of my classes this semester. And I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I think the way we treat the non-human parts of our world is important, for a couple of reasons. Oh, incidentally, for those of you who may have thought about this a lot more than I have, I'd like to point out that I know that everything I'm about to write over-simplifies the issues, but you have to start somewhere.

First, how I treat the environment affects other people. After all, what I pour into the river upstream is what you're drinking downstream. So, in some ways, how I treat the environment is part of how I treat other people. There's also the bit about preserving the environment for future generations.

Second, how I treat the environment is important in itself. I draw this from Genesis 1:28, among other scriptures. That's the one about multiplying and replenishing the earth, subduing it and having dominion over it, etc. I read this to mean "stewardship."

So those are the reasons that I think it's important to think about and try to preserve/improve/whatever the non-human parts of the world (it's been pointed out to me that "nature" is kind of a hard term to pin down).

On the other hand, to study Natural Resources Law and Policy at Harvard Law School, you have to deal with a lot of ideologies that I find kind of strange. For instance, some people believe in "deep ecology," which has among its tenets that "all organisms and entities in the ecosphere, as parts of the interrelated whole, are equal in intrinsic worth" and that "the flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease."

These other ideologies are, of course, very popular in Cambridge, MA. Indeed, for many of the modern residents here, environmentalism is religion. That can make it difficult for someone like me, who cares about the environment in a more utilitarian fashion.

So how can you study and care about the environment today without going to extremes? I'm open for suggestions.

P.S.- My wife thinks it's really funny when I'm frustrated. Yesterday we were driving to the nearest Sears Auto Center to get new tires--a good 25 minutes, if you know where you're going. That last bit was important: if you know where you're going. My lovely wife often knows generally where she's going, but not exactly where she's going. So on occasions like yesterday, when I forgot to ask whether she knew exactly where she was going, we sometimes get to the general area and then have to drive around kind of hoping we happen upon the right street. We did, eventually, but while we were just kind of driving around, my frustration started to build a little bit, and my wife thought it was hilarious.

Now that the moment has passed, I can look back and laugh, too. But does anyone else's wife have trouble taking him seriously when he's frustrated? Is this normal? Should I just get used to it? There may not be easy answers to these questions.