yes, am hoping to start updating regularly again. maybe country music brings out the urge to navel gaze.

Current Music: Helpless (Neil Young) (Hymns Of The 49th Parallel) by K.D. Lang

i just found this exchange in an old email from redspark:

Nietzsche: "What makes one regard philosophers half mistrustfully and half mockingly is not that one again and again detects how innocent they are - how often and how easily they fall into error and go astray, in short their childishness and childlikeness - but that they display altogether insufficient honesty, while making a mighty and virtuous noise as soon as the problem of truthfulness is even remotely touched on"

Deborah: Wow, It's like Nietzsche MET us.

Current Music: bang the drum slowly (Red Dirt Girl) by Emmylou Harris
Current Mood: contemplative

I succumbed... and have the dream pet I've always wanted.

Current Mood: pleased

Haha. Redspark has brought me questionnaire joy... and on a cold friday morning too.

( QuestionnaireCollapse )

Well, that sums me up.

Current Mood: mellow
Current Music: The White Stripes - My Doorbell

Reflections on 2005

Right. I've copied and pasted this from an entry last January, and I thought I might see how this year's answers compare to last year.

One thing is clear; I still don't know how to limit myself to answering with just *one* song, book, film, etc. But who can choose??

----------------------
1. What did you do in 2005 that you'd never done before?
Watched the Godfather. Walked 800km across spain with my mother. That sort of thing.

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I can't remember what they were! If any of them involved a new and improved work ethics, then I failed miserably. But I think I had a really happy year, and that should count.
As for new year's resolutions 2006:
FIND FUNDING. FINISH DISSERTATION. GET JOB.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Daragh gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, Anthea, just a few days before Christmas.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
Yes. Two family members who are always linked in my mind both passed away. Aunty Gen, my great aunt, died near the end of October. Pansy the cat, whose picture is immortalized in my user icon, ended her life on December 30. I went with my mother both to New Brunswick for my great aunt's funeral and burial, and to the vet, to put Pansy to sleep. She's now buried in my mother's garden.

5. What countries did you visit?
France and Spain. I didn't make it to Vienna until a few days after the New Year, so Austria can't go on the list. I'm tempted to add florida, since it felt like an entirely different country than Boston.

6. What would you like to have in 2006 that you lacked in 2005?
Conversational knowledge of German. A completed dissertation.

7. What dates from 2005 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
The day I reached Santiago. The day we took Pansy to the vet. And one memorable weekend that involved a party, ahorrific hangover, nearly getting evicted, being invited to an indie film fest and then getting to know Ellen again.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
The pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela - in so many ways. Also learning to box.

9. What was your biggest failure?
Not writing enough of my dissertation. spending most of the summer complaining about the weather, watching Buffy dvds or being trounced at backgammon and chess by Orla.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Nope.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
The gypsy shawls we picked up along the walk through Spain. I love every single one of them.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
Well, I reacquainted myself with Ellen Page, whom I had babysitted as a child, and spent three days with her (once in January, once in April, once in December). Each time I was reminded of how much I admire her.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
Oh god - the usual: George Bush, Paul Martin, all of them...

14. Where did most of your money go?
Rent, travel. Amazon and Itunes took a hefty chunk.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Seeing Orla again after six weeks apart.

16. What song will always remind you of 2005?
Winter: The Blower's Daughter (Damien Rice), The Origin of Love (Rufus Wainwright)
Summer: Good Day (The Dresden Dolls), A Little Respect (Erasure)
Winter, again: Cold Wind (The Arcade Fire), Diamonds and Rust (Joan Baez)


17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
a) happier or sadder? happier
b) thinner or fatter? about the same
c) richer or poorer? about the same

18. What do you wish you'd done more of?
exploring Boston

19. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Fretting and obsessing. Watching TV. Feeling sad or angry. Feeling guilty.
[I'm keeping this answer from last year.]

20. How did you spend Christmas?
At home in Halifax with all my family. Just as it should be.

21. Did you fall in love in 2005?
Stayed in love, which is better.

22. How many one-night stands?
None, thankfully.

23. What was your favorite TV program?
Firefly. I only found it this year. Also, the Wire and (blush - mutters...) L&O:SVU turned into a bit of a thing near the end.

24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?
Well, a certain Director of Graduate Studies (aka the Staple Scrooge) isn't on my Christmas card list.

25. What was the best book you read?
fiction: On Beauty by Zadie Smith, Saturday by Ian McEwan, Penelope by Margaret Atwood.
non-fiction: anything and everything by Karen Armstrong.

26. What was your greatest musical discovery?
The Arcade Fire, Stars, The Dresden Dolls

27. What did you want and get?
a fountain pen and a leather satchel; now I feel like I can play dress-up as an academic.

28. What did you want and not get?
Nothing that i can think of. I'd like to pretend it was a zen non-attachment thing, but I am extremely well cared for/spoiled (depending on your point of view)...

29. What was your favorite film of this year?
Good Night and Good Luck
March of the Penguins (without the family values subtext)
Serenity

30. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I spent most of the day at the airport between Halifax and Boston, but then I was taken out to dinner. I turned 27.

31.What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
A puppy. Or a hedgehog.

32. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2005?
I discovered orange and rediscovered soft chocolate pink. But not together, obviously. My favourite look is still that slightly frumpy/slightly sexy indie-secretary thing that Scarlett Johanssen pulls off occasionally and that Maggie Gyllenhaal delights in, but no one wears it as well as Clara does.

33. What kept you sane?
Melissa. Orla. Boxing. My bathtub. Joss Whedon.

34. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Well, I refuse to list anyone who is or got pregnant this year, because I'm so sick of it (and I mean *you* Jennifer Garner, Angelina Jolie, Mariska Hargitay). In fact, in protest I am returning to the classics: Clea Duvall, Alan Rickman.

35. What political issue stirred you the most?
2005 seems to have been a year when even the weather conspired to expose human incompetence and lack of compassion. I feel sick to think about the combined devastation of the tsunami, the pakistani earthquake and hurricanes' Katrina and Rita; I feel sicker to think about the [lack of] response by white people. We suck.

36. Who did you miss?
My brother.

37. Who was the best new person you met?
I refuse to choose among them, so, all the women I've gotten to know from boxing: Dunya, Jen, Julie, Teanna, Jaqi, Hana.

38. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2005.
Never rent an apartment (or anything else) from a fundamentalist Christian. Seriously. Our landlord is evil.

39. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.
Hah. I have no idea... I've procrastinated about posting this because I can't think of anything suitable. I'll stick with this for now.

'I don't go to therapy to find out if I'm a freak' - Dar Williams

Current Music: Stars - Ageless Beauty
Current Mood: contemplative

for some reason, i hadn't heard this before (poor old illiterate me)

"philosophy and the study of the real world are related to one another like masturbation and sexual love"
-Karl Marx

Current Music: your ex lover is dead - stars
Current Mood: cold

RIP Pansy
1986?-2005

Current Music: Tom Mcrae - A Day Like Today
Current Mood: sad

and in other news...my god, poor london! Redspark, you must definitely be ready to leave for a week. I picture the city just covered in fumes.

Current Music: The Arcade Fire - Cold Wind

"It is possible, of course, to imagine a world without forgiveness or any of its allied concepts. But that world would, it seems to me, either be more than human (that is, one in which no wrongs ar committed or suffered) or less than human - one where resentment and vengeance would not only have their day, but would also continue to have it, day after day after day."

Berel Lang, "Forgiveness," American Philosophical Quarterly, 31:2 (April 1994), pp. 105-117.

Current Music: Joan Baez - Diamonds and Rust
Current Mood: working

You know it's been awhile when Orlams is updating more than you are...

In other news, tomorrow I give my 'Practicing Forgiveness: A Feminist Approach' paper to the vicious wolves at WOGAP. I continue to buckle over in fear whenever I think about it, but I have a handy little denial technique that's working well for the time being. They're not really wolves, I guess. No, at least one of them is. She from Wellesley who will not be named scares the shit out of me. I picture her flipping through the pages of my paper which - I can see from across the room is covered in red scribbles - and saying, 'So, Alice, let me just try and get clear about what exactly it is that you want to argue in this paper...' and then the room just kind of fades away into black. Or at least, it would if there were a God. In actuality the light will continue to blare and I will have to answer whatever logical impossibilities she has discovered in my work.

Gak. Gak. Gak.

Current Mood: lonely
Current Music: Lolita - Martha Wainwright

someday i will write an ode to peanut butter m&ms. I will explain, in words as eloquent as they are poetic, why no other chocolately goodness will ever compare to them, and why it is fabulous that now they come in snack pack sizes at most CVS pharmacies.

Current Mood: satisfied
Current Music: Diamonds and Rust - Joan Baez

Ok, this is my last entry about food, promise.
I'm desperately procrastinating because I spent the whole day studying for my logic competency test next week and I have truth-functional connectives and quantifiers coming out of my ears... So I'm turning my mind to happier things. Since I couldn't celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving this year, I hope to do the American holiday in full style. Blah blah terrible history of oppressing the natives and I know it's wrong, but i so love a holiday without religion or gifts and that is ALL about FOOD. We have friends coming over, we plan to have a pot of mulled cider warming all day (with the whisky bottle sitting next to it), Orla is excited about 6 hours of uninterrupted American Football and I am preparing the following menu:

Roast Turkey with stuffing
Roasted and mashed potatoes (long story, but everyone has a favourite kind of potato)
Baked butternut squash stuffed with couscous and vegetables
Glazed cumin carrots
Broccoli with garlic, pine nuts and goats cheese
Cranberry Sauce

Pumpkin Pie and Ice Cream

Perhaps there should be a few more green vegetables?? oh well...

Current Mood: excited
Current Music: Bright Eyes - We are Nowhere and it's Now

This is in regards to the flurry of recipe postings about a month ago. When I first met Orla, I don't think I'd ever seen her eat salad. At first it was impossible to find any she genuinely liked and didn't just suffer through to make me go away, but I think these two have been a success. I'm posting the non-vegetarian version of the second, but it is just as good without chicken.

The best thing about both of these is that they are full meals, both filling and full of protein goodness.

1. Spicy Grain Salad:

1/2 cup brown rice
1/2 cup black beans
1/2 cup quinoa (which is, to my astonishment, pronounced keen-wa)
**you can vary the grains here. These are my favourite, but I've also done it with millet, barley and lentils in various combinations**
The rice (barley, millet) usually takes about 25-30 minutes to cook and the quinoa about 10. I buy the black beans and lentils in tins so I don't have to cook them, because I am lazy. Then they just need to be rinsed.

Combine all the grains, and add:
1/2 cup of sweet corn (either tinned or frozen, but i think frozen is better for you)
1 red pepper, chopped (if you like all peppers, add yellow and green as well)
1 jalapeno chopped, or dry pepper flakes
[1 carrot, finely chopped if you like - Orla does]
1/4 cup of cilantro chopped

Then, make the following dressing and add it to the salad
1 clove garlic, minced
1 Tb of sesame oil
1 Tb of rice wine or balsamic vinegar
juice of one lime, squeezed
honey to taste
pomegranate paste if you have it (this is Orla's favourite part)

These seem like long directions but it's really very simple: cook the grains, chop and add the vegetables, combine the dressing ingredients and mix together. It's really good and tastes both vaguely mexican and vaguely far eastern, thanks to the cilantro, lime, and pepper flakes combination.

2. Spinach and Goat Cheese Salad

I vary amounts here, so I'm just going to list the ingredients roughly.

baby spinach
cherry or grape tomatoes
cucumber sliced thinly
red pepper sliced long (notice a theme? this is a favourite vegetable of orla's)
avocado cut in long slices
(for non veggies, grilled chicken also in long slices: I grill it coated in sesame oil, lime juice and chili paste)
goats cheese, crumbled
pine nuts, toasted
pomegranate seeds

So, the only things you have to do in preparation other than slicing are to grill the chicken, and lightly toast the pine nuts in a small pan (watch out, they take very little and burn easily), and pick out the pomegranate seeds from the pomegranate. Orla usually does that part.

I start with a bed of baby spinach, then add the tomatoes, cucumber and peppers. I lay out the avocado and chicken slices alternating, then sprinkle the goats cheese, pine nuts and pomegranate seeds on top. Go nuts with the pomegranate seeds; they are small enough that they don't make the salad too sweet, and they combine with the goats cheese and pine nuts really nicely.

This is such a flavourful salad that I usually only squeeze a lime over it and add a little olive oil, but you could use any light vinaigrette. You might want to grind some black pepper over it and if you're a salt freak, add salt for the avocado and chicken

Current Music: Nerina Pallot - Geek Love
Current Mood: indescribable

Hurrah for us!! Our article proposal, ""Aliases, Alienation and Agency: The Physical Integrity of Sydney Bristow" has been accepted for inclusion in Reading Alias, a forthcoming book on the television series - following the 'X and Philosophy' trend and the massive number of scholarly texts on BtVS. In fact, I'm a little sad that our first contribution won't be directly Buffy-related...but it's still really cool.

On the other hand, my lovely girlfriend informs me that my academic credibility in the analytic philosophy community is shot. Fuck it.

Anyway, congratulations redspark - we did it!!

Current Music: Tom McRae - The Boy with the Bubblegun
Current Mood: jubilant

Apropos of absolutely nothing, if anyone out there is having any kind of skin trouble, I totally recommend witch hazel (specifically, 'Rose Thayer's Alcohol-Free Rose Petal Witch Hazel Skin Toner). For some reason I've had oily skin for months now; nothing too serious, but enough to distress me. Amanda recommended witch hazel about a week ago, and after faithfully applying it 2x a day since then, I find myself with softer, smoother and mostly clear skin. Nor am I in their employ, or sponsored by them in any way. Go buy it.

Current Mood: content
Current Music: The Magnetic Fields - Desperate things you made

I have only about a million things to do today, and i woke up to discover i have pulled something in my neck. Not actually my neck, or at least, not only my neck - it seems to start there and go all the way down the space between my left shoulderblade and my spine. it hurts a little bit all the time, and a lot if i look up, sideways, or tilt my head. i hate it when this happens.

i'm trying to decide if my yoga class will make it better or worse. that's the problem with yoga; it could go either way.

Current Mood: distressed

[yes, redspark, I am writing the alias abstract. but it's proceeding with a few distractions in tow]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-525-1848835-525,00.html

I don't feel nearly this strongly. In fact, I'm quite fond of many of you.

Current Music: Bright Eyes - We Are Nowhere and It's Now
Current Mood: amused

Teanna took these pictures last Saturday. It's not pretty, of course, but in a couple of them I *almost* look like a real boxer.

share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=8QasmrZyxbsIm

Current Mood: predatory
Current Music: Sia - Breathe Me

God our apartment is gorgeous - maybe a little bland, but with some throws, pictures etc it will be beautiful. I'm going to hate returning to Allston after living here.

share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=8QasmrZyxbsIE

Current Music: DeVotchka - You Love Me
Current Mood: happy

I keep meaning to post the conversation between my mother, Howard and me regarding feminism, following my brother's emails. But first, I was interested by this article...

the highbrow
Theories of the Erotic
Male traditionalists wring their hands at the "grim" lives of young women.
By Meghan O'Rourke
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2005, at 3:14 PM ET


Last week, Harvard government professor Harvey Mansfield told students that the sexual revolution may not have served the best interests of young women. Instead, it had merely "lower[ed]" us to the crass level of men, who pursue sex thoughtlessly an! d without hopes of marriage. In a talk titled "Feminism and the Autonomy of Women," he suggested that men who grow used to "free samples" in the bedroom are going to leave women high-and-dry when it comes to committed relationships. And then he revealed his insights into the erotic: "[Today's] women play the men's game, which they are bound to lose. Without modesty, there is no romance—it isn't so attractive or so erotic," said the professor. The solution to the problem, clearly, was for women to start saying no a little more often.

The need to tell young women how to behave often comes over middle-aged men—it's an itch right up there with buying a flashy new car. And Mansfield's case for modesty is merely a new version of, say, Leon Kass' argument in "The End of Courtship <http://www.thepublicinterest.com/notable/article7.html> ," a 1997 article currently posted on the Public Interest Web site, which I happened to stumble across after re! ading Mansfield's remarks. One similarity between them is particularly worth note. Mansfield and Kass don't suggest that female sexual activity is immoral or wrong. They suggest that it makes women unhappy: "Young women strike me as sad, lonely, and confused," Kass writes, voicing an avuncular worry about our "grim" lives. Like Mansfield, he goes on to express concern that contemporary sexuality isn't morally but erotically bankrupt. The best sex, he argues, is stimulated by reading poets like Shelley, and, "if properly sublimated, is transformable into genuine and lofty longings—not only for love and romance but for all the other higher human yearnings." Reading these two pieces back to back, one finds oneself envisioning conservative elders gathered over brunch with teary-eyed twentysomethings, Sex and the City-style, nodding and patting hands: I feel your pain, honey, they soothe. And I'll tell you how to really get your groove on. First, ! go get a ring.

Forty years after the sexual revolution of the 1960s, the terms of the debate over sexuality have irrevocably changed, and it is curious to watch middle-aged male traditionalists trying to keep up. If they have not quite absorbed the notion that women need to have a voice in shaping their own sexual identity, they acknowledge that it is no longer permissible, or at any rate very popular, simply to pronounce that premarital sex is wrong. Thus they cast the sexual revolution as something that makes women unhappy, couching their critique in the fuzzy language of gratification and personal gain that we Oprah-raised kids can relate to. Beneath Kass' pronouncements on what is erotic is a struggle not to come off as a prude; beneath Mansfield's, a quest to establish his credentials as not anti-sex. By adopting a soft stance of empathy, they conveniently skirt the need to supply any facts and figures about just what is going on in the hearts and be! drooms of America's youth.

In a way, this shift in rhetoric (from morality to gratification) makes it look like the argument about the criteria Americans should use to shape our ideas about relationships and marriage has already been settled. But it's more complicated than this. There's something slippery about the "sex will make you unhappy" position. It relies on a retrograde notion of female vulnerability while pretending to take women's side. It's offered in the name of an open-mindedness that is something of a pretense: Professor Mansfield does not exactly wish that sexual freedom had panned out for us—or recognize the extent to which it has. He presumes, for example, that all women have similar experiences and want the same things: love and marriage, the baby in the baby carriage, and so forth. Finally, this position holds women responsible for the supposed unwillingness of American young people to get with the marriage program an! d settle down. But what evidence is there that women are deeply unhappy in their sexual relationships with men? And if women really are, why is it up to them to "fix" what's broken by insisting on early marriage rather than on, say, serial monogamy followed by marriage later? If things are so bad, how do we explain the fact that social indicators are, for the most part, on an uptick over the past decade?

In fact, the evidence is thin that a woman should be concerned that giving out a "sample" will make a man less prone to marriage—or a future husband less likely to want to stay with her. First of all, according to the National Marriage Project <http://marriage.rutgers.edu/default.htm> at Rutgers University, "only 36% of single men agree that 'single men have better sex lives than married men.' " And only 22 percent of unmarried men report feeling that marriage is "personally" not for them, even if they're not interested in marriage in the! ir immediate future. Second, engaging in premarital sex with the partner you eventually marry apparently does not make you more likely to get a divorce, according to a 2003 study cited by the National Marriage Project. Kass complains that "the elite, those who in previous generations would have defined the conventions in these matters, lack a cultural script whose denouement is marriage." But is this the case? The majority of "elites" still get married, according to recent reports. And if they get married a little older—as Kass complains they do—this only seems to make their marriages more stable. The National Marriage Project reports that getting married after the age of 25 reduces the chance of divorce.

Fears of sexual anarchy and uncurbed licentiousness afflict every age. But the supposed sexual anarchy we live in is not as nihilistic and free of "family values" as these sorts of pieces make it out to be (just as the golden age of 1950s marriage wasn't as golden! as it is retrospectively made out to be). A 1992 study (conducted before Kass wrote his piece) found that 79 percent of Americans between 25 and 29 had had zero or one sexual partners over the past year, and the same was true for a significant (often larger) majority of Americans of all ages. It also found that the majority of marriages are characterized by fidelity and do not end in divorce. Another study found that this is especially the case among white Americans who are educated and get married over the age of 25 (a category the majority of Mansfield's Harvard students fall into). A recent study of teen behavior actually found that intercourse was down and oral sex was slightly up—which suggests, in fact, that students are listening to sex ed messages that advocate postponing full intercourse.

Of course, there remains important stock-taking to do, and Mansfield and Kass assume with good reason that the results of the sexual revolution are imperfect. But if the m! en who assume they have their pulse on the female experience were really paying attention, they might realize they could entrust some of this work to women themselves. Mansfield is making his gallant argument at a moment when there are plenty of women raising concerns that he might well appreciate, among them Ariel Levy in her recent book Female Chauvinist Pigs. Levy argues <http://www.slate.com/id/2126570/entry/2126575/> that we do live in a culture that celebrates—in its magazines, TV, and movies—an unbridled sexuality that hasn't served women well. And she claims that the proliferation of pornography has posed some intractable problems. But her proposed solutions don't presume that experience follows a tidy script of wanting to get a ring on our finger right away. She takes into account lesbians (who mostly can't get married) and women who aren't looking for long-term commitment. Her willingness to rethink ingrained libera! l assumptions—and to make women attentive to the consequences of promiscuous Girls Gone Wild-style behavior—is appealingly unpredictable.

The irony is that we seem only to have grown more demanding about what constitutes a happy marriage. And while marriage is undeniably less stable than it once was, it hardly seems on the verge of collapse. Recent studies show only a slight decline—5 and 8.5 percent respectively for men and women—in the reported happiness levels of married couples since the early 1970s, and we don't know what, exactly, accounts for this shift. Meanwhile, it remains unclear what role Mansfield and Kass think modesty actually plays in stable romantic relationships. Is Mansfield so sure everyone—not to mention today's 20-year-olds—finds it erotic? Take, for instance, the activist Havelock Ellis, an advocate of "trial" marriages, who in the 1920s—he was then in his 60s—was saying things about women that sound eerily familiar: "Mod! esty may almost be regarded as the chief secondary sexual character of women on the psychical side," he observed. But he went on to suggest that women would have to overcome this attribute before a happy sexual marriage—of precisely the type that Kass is advocating—could exist.
Meghan O'Rourke is Slate's culture editor.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2128818/

Current Mood: curious
Current Music: Antony and the Johnsons - Hope There's Someone