Pushing

Odd things happen when you turn my age, which is 70.  For some reason, at 69 you can tell people you go out to walk and run, or that you ride a horse, and although they may be somewhat surprised, as soon as you turn 70 they are appalled. 

By sheer chance, I came across a book of scientific journalism on the history of the development of our current nutritional guidelines.  It is called "The Big Fat Surprise", by Nina Teicholz, who also wandered into the field almost by accident due to her own experiences.  Deciding to experiment on myself, and encouraged by the author's own discoveries, I stopped eating "healthy" and proceeded to lose five kilos, my hair has become thicker and darker, and even my fibro has reduced somewhat.  I did that when I was 69, a month ago, but now that I'm 70, you'd think it was a suicidal act.

Let me make clear that my mind is only 30 and will probably never get past that age.  As a result of my former life as an aerobics teacher, the impulse to push myself past certain limits still remains in place.  Yeah, yeah, I went to the cardiologist and the sports medicine doctor, just to make sure I wasn't going to push myself into an open grave or drop dead on the running path, but in spite of these prudent steps, people who find out I go out and run at this age think I'm nuts.

They could be right.  One must always leave some room for doubt when others disagree, a precept that people involved in religion or politics have forgotten in their desperate struggle for certainty.  So, if I'm nuts, well, then I fulfill my own definition of happiness: the person who is content with his/her own brand of insanity. 

Meanwhile, back in the kitchen, it's bacon and eggs for me.

Elitist magazines and weird people even closer to home...

A cooking magazine comes to me each month, and it has really wonderful recipes...well, some of them are.  Lots of the ingredients are either unavailable here or are things nothing would induce me to place in my mouth--fish sauce, for example, pretty run-of-the-mill these days but still horrible.  I'm not nuts about fish in its fresh form, much less some kind of fermented extract of rotten fish.

That isn't why the magazine gets on my nerves, though.  It is an elitist magazine, filled with pictures of young folks at the height of their profession, rolling in money, enjoying a dinner party;  or at so-and-so restaurant you are assured that the clients are part of the "fashionable crowd", complete with a picture of someone fashionable: a gal with hair that may have been washed this year, but we aren't sure, and wearing something that could have come from a thrift shop.  Everything she has on probably costs more than my car, but my car sure looks better.  There is something repulsive in this too-cute groveling at the foot of money and expensive eats when people I know just a few blocks away are having a hard time buying healthy food for their kids.  The recipes from said magazine that get to my inbox are often very good, as long as you aren't put off by the silly, inane banter of whoever is responsable for the write-ups.  It isn't the dedication to good food and innovative recipes I object to, it is the self-congratulatory note about how sophisticated we are and the chef name-dropping.  One of the reason Bobby Flay (yes, I dropped his name!!) is so great is that he likes family-style serving in his own home, the kind that avoids the three strings of something green placed with geometric precision to the left of an unidentified sauce (three drops of it) in a main dish you suspect won't have enough calories to allow you to leave the restaurant with energy to spare.  (I have to admit, though, that even funnier than said main courses are t.v. shows that have the chef bending low over his plating, almost touching it with his nose, while with a pair of tweezers he puts a quarter-olive on top of an inch of meat that rests on a thimbleful of sauce.)

Dragging myself to the vet's today on foot to buy dog food, I encountered a running-park acquaintance who asked about my Spinone, who is going back to his breeder on Saturday due to an allergy which can't be successfully treated here.  I never should have opened my mouth--if "live and learn" is true, I'll be dead before that ever happens.  Turns out he is a homeopathic practitioner, and he launched into a speech about how he could cure my dog, how vets know nothing, how commercial dog food, even the specialized kind my dogs eat, is worse than dirt, and my dogs should be eating everything totally raw.  To say that this is controversial still is an understatement in spite of the current trend to give dogs raw meat and raw vegetables and raw bones and raw shoes. 

The guy then went on to say he could cure my fibromyalgia too.  I looked him up on Google once I got home but he does not appear.  He has no office, does homeopathic housecalls, and must make a mint.  I don't really know why these people surprise me again and again.  Considering that nine percent of surveyed folks think the disappeared Malaysian airliner was taken by aliens, and about half of Americans surveyed think the Ukraine is in the U.S., my little sugar pill proponent is on the low end of overall nuttiness. 

Maybe my problem is some kind of unsuspected, unconscious optimism about people that keeps popping up....I could have sworn I'm a realist.

Blessed are those who clean, for they shall babysit Bolix...

A number of unfortunate circumstances have prevented me and my husband from travelling these past three or four months, but we had made arrangements to take our kids and grandkids to an adventure hotel in the state of Mexico (there is a city, a country, and a state called "Mexico", don't get confused!) right after Christmas.  They wanted to go anyway because the grandkids need time to share adventures and play, so off they went with our blessing.

That meant, though, that I was asked to babysit Bolix, the pet rabbit of one of my grand-daughters.  She shares it with two other school mates, who take their turns at other times.  Bolix is cuter than puppies, tame, knows his (her?) name, and can even run around the back yard harmlessly without trying to escape.

But our weather has been cold and rainy, so Bolix must live in his cage indoors at least for the moment.  Listen, the danged thing is adorable, and I have mucked out horse stalls, changed diapers, cleaned up adult poo, and dealt with compost, but rabbit urine is atrocious.  How this rabbit puts out so much when he doesn't seem to drink water is a mystery hidden within rabbit physiology, but I swear it weighs as much as he does at the end of the day, filling the sodden, pestiferous pull-out tray which I line with sheets and sheets of newspaper.

Pray for a sunny day!  I need to free this animal in my yard, get out a scrub brush, and go at that cage like the avenging angel.  My standard poodle has lived with cats and wouldn't bother Bolix, who is also used to dogs and cats, and I think Lusso would be intrigued but not aggressive.  (Lusso is shaping up to be something special and unusual, but that is another story.  Let it suffice to say that Lusso removes money from my purse when I forget to zip it up and offers it to visitors.)

Bless the beasts and the children and the rabbits, and those of us who have to clean up after all of them! 

Mexican talk radio...

Recently a new "news" station came on the air, and its host let us know that it was not the usual news fare--and endless repetition of the same thing hour after hour.  He had that part right, by the way,  as people try to fill in empty air time with a veritable locust swarm of inane remarks and pointless blabbing.  It isn't their fault, they have to be on the air and when there is nothing new to say, you have to wing it.

This guy, however, said that his program was going to be talk radio.  Mexico copies everything else the U.S. does, except mow down its school children with guns, so why not talk radio?  The guy obviously is unaware that except for talk sports--the only thing worth listening to on talk radio--the rest is some of the most banal and uninspired drivel produced by what passes for a human brain.  But okay, no one gets as verbally violent or paranoid schizophrenic as they do in the U.S. because it is illegal in Mexico to do so; you can say what you want but you have to be classy about it--no calling the governor of the state vulgar names or suggesting what he might do with his mother.

And then I realized who this paragon of the pioneering talk radio really is (and no, someone else also has something we could consider talk radio):  He is the anchorman who was fired from a television station because of his chronic, uncontrollable sexual harassment of the weather gals.  True, those poor girls have to dress like ladies of the night, but this guy took the look seriously. 

He has adopted a self-rightous tone, filled with self-important solemnity, which is kind of like appointing G. Gordon Liddy to a human rights committee or as president of an anti-capital punishment group.  The fun just never seems to stop.

Things you learned but wished you hadn't...

You can't help but wonder what your kids have learned that you wished you hadn't taught them, if, of course, you have kids. 

Everyone says he or she won't commit the same mistakes one's parents made, and that may be right.  But rest assured, you'll make a whole batch of new mistakes and few of the old ones.

I can remember wandering around high school from class to class with a frown on my face because I thought that's the way people usually looked.  That's because my mother had a permanent frown from having to deal with my dad.  I can remember times when she had lots of fun, would dance to her favorite records, have parties and be enthusiastic.  As time went by, especially after we lived in Michigan, it all went away. 

One time I asked her why she hadn't divorced Dad, and she had a number of pretty good reasons, but I've always wondered if any of them had been worth giving up her joy in life.  You can't judge someone's reasons for doing things or not doing things if you haven't lived in that person's skin, so all I can do is speculate. 

Mom had a stream of complaints about Dad, her friends, other people's problems, as if she simply couldn't get by without finding some place to express an anger that surely had nothing to do with the things that bothered her.  She never put a stop to Dad's snide remarks made in public by answering him in public--a sure-fire way of short-circuiting people who try to hide behind good manners and decorum in order to get a jab in here or there without fearing a response.  Most people won't snap back at you in public, thus the protection. 

Once, after Mom had gone into the endless supplies of her best friend's faults, idiocies, and problems of the friend's own making, I asked her how this person could be her best friend if she was such a dolt and a pest.  The question seemed to leave her speechless for a minute or two, as if she had never wondered about that herself. 

I'm thankful I managed to get past that unfortunate style of relating to people; some of my friends are so different from me that it is puzzling how we get along at all, but we set everything else aside--political, religious, or family attitudes--and they just don't seem to matter.  A person can spout all kinds of silliness, but if the individual acts with a generous, caring spirit, what do the opinions matter?  As we say in Spanish, "Obras son amores", or it's what you do that shows your soul, not what you say.  Words are powerful, but they can also be cheap.

Again...

And so it begins again.

The unannounced policy of the state government of diminishing the military presence in the state and replacing it with the new state police is having the consequences anyone with two neurons still firing could have predicted: organized crime.

At our quinta, people began watching the house from vehicles, planning something--robbery, kidnapping, who knows?  The first problem was trying to report this activity.  The so-called emergency number didn't even answer; the state police number was "restricted".  The army and the marines did anwer their phones and take down our information, but they obviously have to report incidents of this kind to the state command center (yes, it works), which sent out state police who have been patrolling the countryside around the quinta for several days now.

Yesterday a man was kidnapped by a ski-masked commando from an upscale butcher shop on one of the main streets in our township, supposedly the safest one in the state.  But thanks to the epic stupidity of our state government at all levels, thanks to a do-nothing national congress (you think the U.S. congress is bad?  You aint seen nothin' yet!), municipal and state governments have become indebted for the next several decades.  We have police patrols that are out of action due to lack of maintenance.  It took the police fifteen minutes to show up at the butcher shop yesterday even though it is a scarce few blocks from police headquarters--one patrol, one policeman.  Fortunately the anti-kidnapping unit is in action, and they are the only ones who seem to capture criminals and rescue victims now that the army and the marines are in the back seat.  Some suspect they aren't even in the car any longer...

But let's talk about the state police.  This new, "elite" police corps has around 2500 people at the very most; it is well-equipped so far.  Unfortunately, some of its members have been involved in theft, in rape, and in kidnapping and assassination of a kidnapping victim.  I don't care how many people, victims themselves of an almost mythical level of wishful thinking, claim that these are just a few rotten apples, there is rot and then there is massive, horrendous, unimaginable decomposition that stinks to high heaven and beyond.  You can't claim to be using filters and high-level training when you wind up with members of a police force that are psychopaths.

The only thing standing between the citizenry of this country and the law of the jungle is the military.  The reason, of course, it that Mexico is next to the most prolific user of legal and illegal drugs in the world.  With breath-taking hypocrisy the United States thinks it can threaten Mexico with reprisals if we legalize marijuana here when there state after state is doing just that--legalizing it.  Didn't the U.S. learn anything from the Prohibition era?  Or does it not matter as long as the bloodshed is happening across the border and not within the U.S.?

There is a saying in Spanish: "Poor Mexico, so close to the U.S. and so far from God."  Maybe the two conditions are inevitably connected.

Misadventures with sourdough

This is the second time I have attempted to produce sourdough starter.  The first time, foolishly, I followed some idiot's instructions that were based on capturing "natural" yeast spores from the air in a batch of flour and water.  You capture stuff, all right, but I don't think it was sourdough yeast.  Some of it could even be seen with the naked eye, and when that happens, you'd better suspect it isn't yeast, natural or otherwise.

So I ordered some starter from a company that has the original San Francisco strain.  I followed the directions to the letter, and at first, the mixture of starter, flour and water bubbled and popped away just beautifully. 

By day two, however, all was not well.  You have to keep feeding this mixture as if it were some kind of damned pet--a very delicate, not particularly healthy pet that needs plenty of vet care and lots of love.  Something went wrong and the mixture developed a smell that was between tangy and god-awful.  There were some desultory bubbles making their way to the surface, sort of like swamp gas. A dark, watery liquid covered the surface too, and anyone wanting to make bread with this junk surely risked poisoning from who-knows-what bacteria.

So in order not to waste any more bread flour feeding this unspeakable mass, out it went.  You can't get sourdough bread in Mexico.  That means no sourdough biscuits, no sourdough pancakes...

However, there is a webpage that offers starter free from some guy who has, according to the users, the best starter in the world, a lively, bubbly, tangy product almost guaranteed...Problem is, if I send in my self-addressed, stamped envelope, there is no way customs is going to let through a suspicious envelope containing a slightly damp mixture of flour and some kind of white powder.