When I was twelve I had a friend who’s family was fairly well off. I have a lot of memories that showcase the extreme disparity between us, but the time we ate lunch together at his parents’ tennis club is perhaps the most clear. He ordered this plate of nachos and after eating only about 1/3 of it he threw it away. I looked at him as if he’d just eaten the face off a newborn child. “What?? Why did you do that? It was perfectly good to eat!” cried I. He said, simply, that he was done eating and wasn’t hungry anymore.

Anyone who has been to weight watchers knows what the “clean plate club” is, and for those who aren’t familiar with the term I think it’s pretty self-explanatory. We are people who feel a compulsive need to eat every speck of food on our plates. Over the course of my life, I’ve met some people who have this particular conditioned behavior something fierce. It causes them overwhelming psychological pain to see just one bite of food thrown away, even if it’s on someone else’s plate. I’ve witnessed people sit and miserably stuff themselves, sometimes on the brink of tears, because they just cannot bring themselves to “waste” it.

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Chris Matthews, a talk-show host for MSNBC, has been in the news recently for making a gaffe about president Obama while commenting on his state of the union address. Taken out of context, the gaffe sounds pretty bad: ” . . . I forgot he was black tonight for an hour.”

Ouch.

It’s one of those moments where white people everywhere get really uncomfortable while we wait to see how the black community reacts. If they react negatively, we throw Chris under the bus. That’s what’s currently happening, but read his whole comment and see if that changes how you feel about his “d’oh!” moment: (more…)

I awoke this morning from an interesting dream. I was filling out some kind of long, cavernous form and I got tripped up by one question: “Do you have private health insurance or state health insurance?”

The question bugged me, and I remember specifically thinking about it for a long time. I rolled it over in my head. Which one did I have? Then I looked over the options for the state program and it asked if I had purchased a specific plan (if so, which one) or if I payed into the general fund. If I payed into the general fund, how much did I invest, etc. It occurred to me that once in high school I’d won a scholarship for high test scores, and that fund had won me some interest over the years . . . perhaps that counted?

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WARNING: what follows is me being stereotypically female. I hate being stereotypically anything, but I was having these thoughts so I figured I’d post. That is all. Well, that is all for this intro I mean . . . well, I guess not really if I’m still typing . . . I mean . . . FUDGE

I love being married. I love my husband. Being married, for me, has been one of the best things that has ever happened to me.

There’s only one thing.
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Like most americans, my childhood was filled with thoughts about this magical day wherein I could open all my presents and the wondering what they were would finally be over. There was such a buildup, such an incredible excitement, then days of glow while messing with all the new junk I acquired.

As I got older and grew to loath consumerism, the magic of Christmas wore off for me. Consumerism is like a kind of modern Robin Hood tale where retailers steal from the poor and give to the rich.

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