After Twilight...

I have a deep love of young adult fiction. Some of the books I loved the most were Ursula K. LeGuin’s “Earthsea Trilogy” and Susan Cooper’s “The Dark is Rising Sequence.” Later on… I enjoyed some of the “teen trash” that was floating around in the 1980’s. And as popular stuff comes out… Harry Potter… Percy Jackson…I check them out of the library so I can figure out what all the buzz is about. What I’d be reading if I magically turned into a teenager. Some of the stuff out there has been fluffy. I read several of P.C. Cast’s “House of the Night” books… and found the plot uninteresting… but the storytelling to be at least engaging. I’ve read the books that the Vampire 90210 television series “The Vampire Diaries” was based on… and thought they were semi-enjoyable romance novels with a suspense twist. So… I figured I’d join “Team Herd” and finally buckle down and read Stephanie Meyer’s “Twilight” series.

I understand the age group the books were supposed to be written for…really I do. But that said…I am scratching my head as to why people… teen readers and adults… think these are the best romance books since Jane Austen wrote about Lizzie and Darcy.

I don’t just read YA fiction…I also read romance novels. Regency mostly…but I enjoy a well-spun romantic tale just like the next girl. I do not think they’re “fluffy” reading. (I do admit that most of them have “disposable” plots. But so do most genre novels. Mystery…horror…etc.) But they usually have an overarching theme of the nature of love…the difficulty of relationships…and the joy of finding the “right” person. (Anything that is about…boinking…boinking…boinking…reaches into erotica. Which I won’t knock…I like erotica…but there’s nothing romantic about an anonymous hook-up. I equate erotica with “sports novels.” The joy of kicking the winning goal…the joy of…well…you know. Ahem.)

So… it was with horror and dismay that I finished “Breaking Dawn.” I would have thrown the book across the room except for the fact I’d checked it out of the library on my Kindle… and I don’t think the Amazon warranty covers damage due to disgust. So… here’s my review of the “Twilight”… and what goes for the books… at least from the first two movies… goes for the movies. Except I actually used to really like Muse before they became the Twilight OST band.

What bothers me most about the Twilight series? Bella…is vapid. Passive. Her most pronounced feature is some sort of congenital inner ear problem that makes her clumsy. Through the course of the books…we learn NADA about her personality…because she doesn’t have one. She likes…Edward…her Dad…Edward…Jacob…her truck…Edward…and anything fast and dangerous that will help her hallucinate Edward when Edward isn’t around. Reading? Crochet? Television? My life when I was a teenager…was full of…well…things. Girl Scouts. Reading. Hanging out with friends. Teenaged drama… and occasional tragedy of a non-supernatural sort. But in Forks…Bella…loves Edward…attends school…and cooks for her dad. She has no aspirations for the future…interest in politics…she doesn’t volunteer, have a social conscience… or even stop to do her nails. Nada. She doesn’t want to save the wales…listen to music…or smoke pot… though if it made her hallucinate Edward she’d be Dime Bag Bella. Her other features? Apparently her BO is vampire crack…and her skull is really, really thick.

Edward…is every parent’s nightmare. Hot. Rich. Obsessed. Drives a fast expensive car. And is about 80 years older than their daughter. It makes Anna Nicole Smith’s relationship with J. Howard Marshall understandable…you know? (And the fact that Bella has less personality than Anna Nicole…is pretty sad.) He’s also…disturbingly controlling. Like the uber-Lassie…every time it looks like Bella might fall down the well…Edward is there…stalking her. Or having his family stalk her. Because the big, bad vampires might kill her. Because she’s human and frangible and might stub her toe and die. When he’s not stalking her…he’s kidnapping her. Or causing her to run away from home to save him from committing suicide. Edward at least has a bit of a personality. He likes… family. Music. Cars. Blood sports. Bella’s BO. He’s well-traveled…educated…and an ex serial killer. But since he’s gone the vampire equivalent of vegan…the fact that he’s a killer is somehow a-ok….because it’s completely balanced by believing in chastity until marriage. The fact that being with Bella…will cause her to lose her family and give up her friends…die…and give up her chances of growing old and contributing to society…did I mention die? They give him angst…but Bella’s BO overrides his 80 odd years of moral existence.

UGH.

And final random thoughts:

Plot arc? New girl meets handsome topaz-eyed loner dude. After initial conflict…they fall for each other. They break up. She pines. She starts stringing along another guy who will never live up to “danger loner dude.” She gets back together with loner dude…they overcome danger. And then it turns into a weird Jerry Springer episode. Girl gets knocked up…nearly killed by the alien in her stomach…and of course…no difficult birth goes unpunished…and the poor hapless woman ends up learning some sort of mental jujitsu to fend off the vampire DCFS. Loose plot ends are tied up when second-best “nice guy” stops lusting after a married woman and becomes an insta-pedophile. Oh…and they meet Dracula and his twin brother Vlad. Tidy. Creepy.

There are also at least four places in the plot where any red-blooded American father with knowledge of firearms would have simply shot Edward in the head…or sent Bella off to boarding school. Charlie…not winning any father of the year awards. And…despite several hundred years of medical and scientific experience. ..the fact Carlisle couldn’t come up with the vampire equivalent of full-body concealer…just boggles the mind. Kat Von D put out a line of concealer that can cover up her tattoos… there’s got to be some sort of roll on for the sparkles by now.

And that’s the main feeling I came away with… Creepy. Bella let herself get sucked into her partner’s life. Let him isolate her and pull her into their cult. And I don’t mean Mormons… but the cult of being a woman with a controlling husband. I thought Edward bruising her up so badly on their “wedding night” was about the only logical conclusion to their relationship. Along with how forgiving she was of him. Because all of his actions before their marriage screamed “controlling abuser stalker dude.” The fact he did so unconsciously…and was forgiven so quickly…was just…well…creepy.

Meyer also desperately needed this little thing called an “editor.” What was up with the intro of Breaking Dawn? Did she become too successful to “need” editing?

To Meyer’s readers… I hope you can quickly move on to something else. If you still need your vampire fix… I’ve heard the Sookie Stackhouse books are very entertaining. I haven’t read them… because I was burned once by Laurell K. Hamilton and I want the series to actually END before I start reading them to make sure they don't devolve into masturbatory fantasies for bored housewives. I HAVE read quite a few of MaryJanice Davidson’s “Undead” series… and find them to be adequate beach reading. A vampires meets chick-lit sort of read. Enjoyable… but unmemorable. I’ve also read most of Sherrilyn Kenyon’s “Dark Hunter” series… thanks to paperbackswap.com… and if you enjoy paranormal romance… they’re also decent reading. Usually every other book is pretty tight… and the one between is a toss-off. I think “Seize the Night” was my favorite… and that’s just because of those four years of Latin I took back in High School. Any of these… even the vamperotica novels of Laurell K. Hamilton have stronger female characters than poor Bella.

In short... Twilight sucked.

Dances with Names

I’m on my continuing my odyssey into researching Smart Grid topics for work. I’ve had to stop and develop a Smart Grid acronym glossary. It’s really sad when there are so many hard to understand terms floating around… that you have to list them out in order to read a simple three page document. DMS, OMS, FLISR… I really am wondering if a set of preschooler’s magnetic letters might be a good purchase. I can’t keep them straight. I’m reading a white paper now… which is by a competitor so it shall remain nameless… that uses nine different acronyms in the same paragraph. I literally read it… and spent the next five minutes flipping backwards through the document to find out where they were all spelled out. If you’re going to go that acronym-crazy… spell them out every few pages so losers like me don’t forget what you’re talking about when your Outage Management System (OMS) is linked to your Network Topology Processor (NTP) which is tied into your Geographic Information System (GIS) all receiving commands from your DMS via SCADA.

Makes “deely-bobber” and “thing-a-ma-gig” sound positively descriptive…

Anyway… creating a glossary of unusual terms when creating a technical document is always a good idea. And it’s usually a step I fudge. And since I’m trying to get back into the “Do what I say because that’s what I do” philosophy of technical writing… I’ll divulge a few technical glossary tips.

When writing up an instruction manual, the first thing I usually do is look at what the engineer named the “wingle-ma-doodle” on the print. Sometimes there are three “L Brackets” or “Spacer Washers” and I need to differentiate between them somehow. Sometimes I’m starting my draft before the design is finished… and I get to name the wingle-ma-doodle. That can be dangerous, because my inclination is to name everything “George” so I can love it, and hug it… and have it be my best friend. Aren’t you my best friend George? (If you didn’t watch “Marvin the Martian” cartoons… disregard the above.)

But since my second inclination is to give things a name that is descriptive, I’m usually OK. First I start by taking a snapshot of the product… or ask the designer to send me an exploded view of the drawing. And… I label all of the parts. This usually gets tacked up on my cubicle wall somewhere for the duration of the project… so whenever I’m writing and can’t remember whether it’s a Belleville or a lockwasher… I have that information right in front of me. If fasteners need a certain torque… I jot it down next to the fastener callout on my diagram. If things need lubricant or some other kind of surface prep… I’ll try to jot that out too. Usually it’s something like wire brushing… or grease removal. Grease can have a part number… or can be something considered industry standard. Like aluminum conductor prep compound… I’ll call out what we suggest… and then ask the engineer if the customer is OK using their favorite aluminum prep if the stuff we use is unavailable. I’ll try to make any notes on places where an instructional tag or label might be needed. This is my “master sheet” and usually ends up crinkled and coffee-stained at the end of a project.

How often to I actually have the luxury to do this? Well… a lot less often then I like to admit. Sometimes I’m scrambling so hard… I don’t know what I’m called… much less the product I’m documenting. I don’t have time… or the engineer changes the part and now naming it the shunt latch won’t work because it neither shunts… nor latches… and I have to pull a new name out of my rectum and hope that the gods of “find and replace” are with me. Often… they aren’t. Changing the name of a part is a sure-fire way of inserting errors into documentation. Not for the faint of heart…

But this white paper writing about high level stuff is more difficult. It’s a lot of acronyms for names made up by people who don’t have any idea how to functionally name something… or who don’t know how to be brief. (Because SCADA… or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition is not intuitive… unless you’re sex life is really, really dull…ya know? For one… the “Supervisory” is kind of ambiguous as to what it means… usually it means monitored by a computer. Or monitored by a computer and including an interface for human interaction. Usually it collects data and allows some sort of pre-programmed external set of control parameters tell it what to do. So if you have one of these nifty digital thermostats that receive signals from an indoor/outdoor weather station… before it makes the decision on whether or not to kick on your furnace…or turn on your humidifier…then there’s some SCADA going on somewhere…between the weather station…thermostat…furnace…and whatever dingle-dongle you use inside your house to monitor the temperature of your living room.

Anyway… now that I’m trying to figure out how a GIS connects with a DMS… I’ve found it helpful to make myself a table of acronyms, what they stand for, and a brief description. I have to keep stopping and adding things… and eventually it will need to be alphabetized… but for now it’s a start. A real professional indexer could tell you an easier way… but sometimes a simple list works. It’s kept me in groceries for the last 25 years…

NANOWRIMO failure...again.

I made a valiant attempt at NANOWRIMO for the third year in a row.

I always lose it in the third week.

The main reason... that will ALWAYS BE the main reason is work. As a technical writer, I am not writing for eight straight hours a day, but I usually am doing a lot of writing sort of thinking all day. At the end of the day all I really want to do is hug the dog and watch crappy television and avoid having to use language period.

I reread a little of what I wrote last night. Ugh. I really am a terrible fiction writer. I feel the urge to put down every thought and action that my character has or does… like I was documenting a process. Maybe I should be pre-post-modern and try to meld the world of the novel with the instruction manual?
Now there’s an idea…

I am born. Wait… that’s been done before. How about…

Procedure for Human Birth
Procedure Time: Nine months after conception.
Procedure Environment: Clean sterile environment.
Tools Required: Basic medical supplies as would be supplied in a hospital or home birth setting.
Technical Skill: Moderate to Skilled

Step 1
After dilation to approximately…..

Yeah….well, maybe not.

But in all honesty… that’s not too far off from what my fiction reads like. My characters breathe in… raise their arms… walk across the room. I have no idea how to write as a fiction writer and not like an observant bystander. I think it’s po-mo or bust for me…

I hate to admit it… but my secondary concentration in the “Program for Writers” wasn’t fiction…it was poetry. I’ve always been better at it than fiction. Short stories are the hardest things to write… you almost have to have the entire story in your head before you start. But poetry can be narrative, or jump from image to image. It can be a list, a letter, a song; it can rhyme or use language so jarring that it’s difficult to read. It can have shape...or be one line.

I won’t regale you with any of my poetry. Especially anything I did as a teenager… which was usually all about being worried that someone would drop the bomb… and that I’d never finish college. But as much as I enjoyed the classes as I was taking them… I also realized at the time… like I do now… how useless they were.

Oh sure… art for art’s sake. But when your mother cleans toilets for a living and you’re rationing your student loan money in order to eat regular meals… ART FOR ART’S SAKE is a really fucking stupid idea. College for me was a business transaction. I really wish I could say it was more… that I wanted to be a Renaissance woman or some such drivel… but what I really wanted was a four year degree… ANY four year degree… so I wouldn’t have to scrub toilets for a living too. (Which I did in college… to help pay for my tuition. So I know what that’s like.)

As a result, I actually feel like I didn’t get as much out of the whole experience as some people who actually went to school because they like school… or because they’re good at it did. I was never a straight A student. I don’t consider myself that bright. I have a knack for writing things down as I think them… thought to hand… and it’s not even that knacky of a knack. (Not fishing for compliments… but there’s a grammatical or spelling error in here somewhere. Wait for it…)

I keep thinking I want to do something different with my life… but then I look at the education I have… and what I’d like to do… and realize that I might need more education… and there’s my pause. Every time grad school has seemed like a good idea, I remember being in college… and think to myself how damn glad I am not to be in college anymore. It was HARD. Homework… trying to cram stuff into my brain on a timetable that was too short for my limited ability to absorb new information. Ugh. I’m a terrible student. Even now, I’m taking Norwegian Classes one night a week and can’t get my homework done on time… and I’m not even getting graded!

But people tell me that they think I’m smart… and full of answers. I’ve never felt smart. Ever. Because I think real smart people don’t have to expend any effort to learn what they’re studying… or to do what they’re doing. I’ve been struggling for weeks to write a white paper for work… sweating, swearing… even went on a crying jag in my car when I got really frustrated. I procrastinated for an entire week… and now I have one crappy page written. And it’s crappy… but at least it’s down on paper. Because my first rule of writing is:

1) Give yourself permission to write utter crap. Shit. Verbal dungheaps. Bad grammar. Sentence fragments. Don’t spellcheck. Don’t look up word meanings or punctuation rules. Just get a draft.

Because if you agonize about what you’re writing… and whether or not it’s perfect… you’ll never get it on paper. Or the screen. It’s like being so afraid of getting in an accident that you never get behind the wheel of a car to practice. Sure, you’ll never get in an accident…but you'll never learn to drive either.

That's my main rule. I have more rules… and I really should post them in my cubicle but I'd hate to let on to the rest of my coworkers that I need a reminder list on how to do my job. So, I’ll share them with you here… this is what a college degree and 15 years of professional writing has taught me:

2) Set aside time to write, without disturbances… and with coffee.
3) Write in your OWN WORDS and do not try to be Kafka… or sound like a technical paper. You can always fancy stuff up later.
4) Know your audience. In technical writing… I also ask:

o Do they need background info on your subject?
o Do they need any of your language defined?
o Is English their first language?

5) Avoid jargon…buzzwords…marketingese…and synergistic keystone strategies for leveraging concise dynamic and impactful mindshare opportunities to interface with your metrics and methodologies and facilitate extensible infrastructures of innovative communications…and avoid clichés unless you’re trying to be cute. Yeah, everyone knows the early bird gets the worm… and that the early mouse doesn’t get the cheese… but there’s a simpler way to say it without using a cliché... and it's going to sound better.
6) No stressing about spelling, grammar and formatting…yet. See rule #1.
7) No writer is an island. Someone else needs to see your work before it goes live… no matter how good you think you are. Even here on my blog… I rely on my other personality to proofread.

I also have a few tricks I use. I’ll begin at the end… speak into a tape recorder in my car… write part of a blog post as a warm up… pick up my work and move to another area. Work at home. But they’re just gimmicks. Really it comes down to rule numero uno... and a lot of revision.

So… that’s it. Writing wisdom from a professional writer who can’t complete a crappy novel in a month of NANOWRIMO…. Who really, really needs to take her own advice once in a blue moon.

Fender bender

I was in a minor car accident on Friday. I can say minor, because besides being shook up… and some minor aches and pains… I’m OK. Besides a little pooch in my bumper… my car is OK.
It was slick out on Friday… our first sticking snowfall of the season… and I was leaving work early to get in for an early morning meeting. The radio said there was an accident on 290 just as I was approaching Washington… so I decided to skip the expressway and take Washington in to Cicero… and Cicero north.

Traffic is always weird on Washington. I hate to say it’s a little ghetto… but it’s a little ghetto, though the community organization along Washington does try its best. I pulled up behind someone who was double-parked in front of an apartment building, and waited for the traffic behind me to pass before I pulled out. Only it didn’t pass… the guy behind me slid into two parked cars before slamming into the back of mine with enough force that the bags probably would have deployed if the street wasn’t so slick that my car slid forward about two feet from the impact.

I was rattled. I was also momentarily blind as my glasses had flown off my head… and landed with my hat in the back seat. The contents of my car had been tossed around like popcorn. I’m still missing a few things out of my purse that I’m sure I’ll find in the seats eventually. The guy who hit me had come to rest with his driver’s side door against my bumper, and the passenger side door against one of the cars he’d hit. Pretty pinned in. I got out, looked at my bumper… and took snapshots of his license plate with my phone before I pulled my car up and gave him enough room to get out. He started begging me not to call the cops… suspended license… no insurance… I kind of figured from the sled he was driving that it was the case… and I wasn’t in a neighborhood where starting an argument would be a good idea… so since there was no real damage… I made him call my cellphone so I had his number… and left for work.

I got to work, and checked in with the nurse. She checked my blood pressure… kind of said…”Oh, we’re going to have you lie down…” and about 40 minutes and two ice packs later I went back to work. Or non-work. I kind of spent the day in a bit of a haze… I suppose early morning adrenaline rush will do that to you. I stretched a bit at lunch… and tried my best to workout after work even though I was sore and just wanted to go home.

What I didn’t expect… was the anxiety that driving home caused. Every time I stopped… it was like I expected someone to slam into the back of my car. I kept replaying the morning over and over. Saturday, when my husband and I drove out to Bensenville… I was kind of sick in the car the entire way. (The warehouse where my storage container smelled like fish, which didn’t help…) This morning on my way to work… was just 100% pure anxiety. And I don’t just like driving… I usually find it relaxing. Sometimes relaxing enough that I start pulling into the parking lot here at work and don’t quite remember the drive… it’s like I was in some sort of Zen meditative state. But this morning… I had to stop and put on an audio book in order to calm down. Same anxiety as last Friday… just waiting for someone to hit me.

And it makes me feel… well… weak. Because though I’ve been tapped before… I never really considered the distinct possibility before that with as much as I drive… the likelihood that I’m going to be in a serious accident someday is pretty high. One of my co-workers from my old building was in a four-car pileup a few weeks back. Whiplash and a near-totaled car just in time for the holidays.

Winter is coming... be careful out there.

Why Occupy?

I feel like a failed liberal sometimes. Or maybe it’s just turning 40… and the natural exuberance of youth finally petering out as I crest the hill of middle age.

I don’t like the Occupy movement.

First of all… semantics. Occupation has overtones of when a larger, more powerful government or people… subjugates, exploits, colonizes or marginalizes another people. Most of the Age of Exploration was people from one country amazingly “discovering” another people... and new real estate... and then taking it because they could.

Poor choice of words people….

And I have direct personal reasons…for one… they tend to like to occupy downtown Chicago which I have to drive through twice daily to get to and from work. And I’ve heard stories from friends and other coworkers who go to downtown meetings about getting shouted at… spat on… and harassed because they happen to be in business attire and walking into an office building. Does the Occupy Movement not realize that 99% of the folks who work in finance… are ALSO the 99%? And can't they tell the difference between a custom and off the rack suit? What… are the people who work in finance supposed to throw away their CPA license and become hairdressers?

My Mother worked downtown for years… and my Great Aunt Helen. Both at Continental Bank, which enjoyed its own financial scandal back in the early 1980’s after it snapped up a bunch of bad oil and gas investments from Penn Square. She was a computer operator… back when computers looked like storage furniture from Ikea. Which meant she spent most of her time mounting and dismounting data reels and pulling reports off of the printers. Not what I’d call a career... but it was a decent job.

Until I was about 10, she worked the night shift and I saw her as this sleeping lump in the bed most of the time. And then the bank started to collapse… and Mom’s hours got kind of crazy for a while until she was doing more “part-time” maid work for Phone-A-Maid than she was working at the bank. Then she started doing full-time maid work because it paid better than WORKING AT A BANK.

I digress…

The thing is… corporations are some of the largest employers of the 99%. YOU know or are related to someone who works in the financial sector. I work for a corporation… though not a publicly held one. If people started protesting outside my workplace…I’d have to say…”Hey…what gives? It’s a pretty decent place to work. Good benefits. Good wages. So it’s a little quirky at times… what company isn’t?”

And I imagine most people who work for BoA and Chase and La Salle feel the same way. And the liberal (mostly white…and college-aged… i.e. people who have probably never held down a job before) youth of America is beating wash pail drums outside of their office window and shouting slogans like…”This is what a police state looks like.” Meanwhile… the greedy Mr. Potter that they really should be shouting at probably lives in another state…probably somewhere with less traffic. This isn’t freaking Bedford Falls… it’s Chicago. If you were rich beyond belief… would you live here… or somewhere else where the sandy beaches didn’t freeze solid every December? Hmmmm?

In the meantime… I’m stuck in traffic while the police try to clear protesters off of Michigan Avenue… anxiously looking at my gas gauge hoping I have enough to get me home. Gas that I’m paying for. And we ALL pay taxes for the overtime required for the police… and trash removal folks who have to clean up after the police state we all apparently live in. You wanna see a police state? Visit North Korea. Go to western Africa. Send me a postcard from Somalia.

We are SO FUCKING LUCKY to be living in this police state… there are people in other countries who… after walking two days into town for food, water and medical supplies… will look at those silly Americans on the town’s only working television set… fat with warm coats and the best REI camping equipment money can buy… and here’s what they think…

"What are they so upset about? I can’t leave my house because I may get raped. Three of my children have died. Two of my teenage sons have been taken and forced into the army. I have AIDS… and who will take care of my kids when I’m gone?"

This might be the message to send to corporate America… but what kind of message does it send to everyone else? To the REAL 99%. It’s like we’re fucking shouting “I want my MTV!”

Unbelievable.

And these campouts… are not the bucolic Woodstock love and flowers places that we think they are. I was freaking scared out of my mind sitting in my Toyota while protesters flooded around me. I had momentary visions of the LA riots and having my car flipped over. And Chicago is TAME compared to the Oakland folks… where the Occupy movement has become a breeding ground for crime… and a “fuck the police” mentality that doesn’t take into account that the police thanklessly do one of the crappiest jobs on the planet. Imagine if you were the cashier at Wal-Mart… and every customer who came by heckled you for even lower prices… or spat at you because your job supported child labor in China… or you had to tackle them to get them to pay for their stuff? And then when it was closing time… they WOULDN’T LEAVE. And then they decided to move into the home and garden section like Natalie Portman in “Where the Heart Is.” How does that police officer feel when they tell you to move along… tell you to get back on the sidewalk…try to let traffic pass… and you flip them off… call them a pig… and then get angry with them when in order to do their jobs… they have to muscle you around. Because protesting is perfectly legal… and the police know that. Squatting on someone else’s property… is NOT. Even public property. And if it is… sweet!! I’m plunking a mobile home down in Warren Park and cutting my commute down to a five minute walk. And I expect the taxpayers to pay for my water and sewage hookup…

I'm not against protesting... not by a long shot. Every Thursday morning I see the same group of people... protesting the Iraq war... standing at the overpass on Austin and 290. Every week... a visible reminder that we're still at war. That American Soldiers are overseas when they should be here... with their families. Peaceful. Non-disruptive. And very poignant. At first... I thought they were annoying. Then silly. Now... YEARS later... I have a LOT of respect for them. I spend my morning swearing in traffic. These retired hippies spend theirs reminding me of the real cost of war.

In contrast... at first I was thumbs up for the Occupy Movement... until its underbelly started to show. OK... you have everyone's attention. Now what? You don't want to pick representatives to negotiate because you're a "true democracy" and negotiation means consensus...blah, blah... Have you EVER tried to get anything done when all decisions are made by a committee before? What are you smoking?

There are people all over the world who have no choice but to live in tent cities. You're not proving anything by doing it too. Even if yours has free daycare (scary...stranger daycare) and a yoga tent.

So… since it’s not good to critique something without proposing an alternate solution… here goes:

Back in the day… and that day is the 1980’s… “health food stores” sold dusty boxes of dehydrated hummus… and all sorts of weirdness coated with carob. A few bags of unusual grain… maybe a case or two of frozen food… and three to four aisles of supplements. Occasionally… they carried this strange thing called “organic produce” which was still pretty much in its embryonic stage in development. Did organic mean grown without spraying? Added cow poop? Something I needed to wash extra well before eating? Now… I can shop at Whole Foods… for organic, vegan, sustainable, shade grown…fair trade everything. An idea… has become an industry. And a pretty well managed one. And it did it because someone got tired of carob rice cakes and protein powder that smelled like the inside of a gym locker… and decided to take organic… corporate. Now we have “locally grown” movements… slow food… eating in season. More people give a crap about where their food comes from NOW then they have since we all pretty much grew it ourselves. The health food nuts… have an industry built around their wants and needs for handmade soap and tofu. They wanted better choices… and voila!

And I think that’s what finance needs… we need to demand something DIFFERENT from our financial institutions. We wanted easy home loans and home equity loans... and look where that got us? Right now all we want is free checking and low ATM fees. So… the OM had “move your money to a small bank day.” And every large bank in America that had free checking and e-deposit consumer accounts was probably saying…”THANK YOU JESUS” because now the customers who are annoying them for very little profit have gone off to bother the folks at the small local bank where you have to pay forty cents per check. Buh-by now… and don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out…

*chuckle*

The thing about the housing bubble…at least that I noticed when my Corus Bank account mysteriously changed to MB Financial… is that a lot of those small local banks failed… sometimes in more spectacular ways than the larger banks who were considered “too big to fail.” And I’m going to go back to” It’s a Wonderful Life” and Bedford Falls... because my first lesson about finance was watching the movie one Christmas...remember the run on the Building and Loan scene? Where is my money? Is it in my neighbor’s home and business when I deposit it into my savings account? Is it paving the road outside of my house?

Yeah…right. It’s bundled into some sort of interest asset portfolio… when it’s making any interest at all. Probably invested in Mutual Funds… or some such financial gibberdy-flibbit that I couldn’t pronounce much less understand. If you want to bank with the Bailey Building and Loan… you need to join a Credit Union. (I belong to one...FYI.) You'll get higher interest rates on your savings… AND your money will be helping to buy another member of the CU a new car, house … or send their kid to Lincoln Tech. Because they give out pretty sensible loans, at reasonable interest rates… and do a pretty good job of scoping out what you want to DO with the money… and make sure it has nothing to do with Las Vegas. No easy money or 10k limit credit card.

The other thing that bothers me is… a lot of the 1% worked pretty fucking hard to get that money. Bill Gates could have been a complete grease spot on the road to riches… you know? Bigger risks… bigger rewards… and if you look at some of the “ultra-rich” … they’re not. I’m in better financial shape than Donald Trump where debt to income ratio is concerned. AND I’ll never have to worry about Hair Club for Men. Even where I work...I’ve met our company president… actually had breakfast with him once. (I won breakfast in a company contest...I don't have THAT fancy of a job where I eat breakfast with our CEO on a daily basis.) And for one… he’s REALLY smart. Really smart. And a very interesting person to listen to. For two… I know he’s probably the hardest working person in the company. Sure… he flies planes as a hobby… and that’s the sort of hobby you have to have more than “disposable income” to do. But he also... I think... really believes that our company is here FIRST to make great stuff for our customers... SECOND to provide great jobs for it's employees... and THIRD... to give back to the shareholders and community. And I’d like to say he’s unique and that I live in la-la never-never land...but with the exception of one job I’ve had… the company presidents have never been amoral asshats. (The ONE would be the philandering president of my first job out of college… who will remain nameless.)

I’d like to see the Occupy Movement start supporting an alternative financial system… or SPECIFIC REFORM to our current system. Social equity…ok…HOW? What do you want the other half of the 1%... who got their money manipulating the system… to do? You think they care? What would you like our government to do to them… or for us? Tax them all the way to a new home-office in the Caribbean? Slime will always ooze. And yeah... for every decent CEO there's someone who has dollar signs tattooed to the inside of their eyelids. But Bill Gates and my company’s CEO… they deserve every penny they make as far as I’m concerned. A lot of the Chicago-based companies...seem pretty decent. It's hard enough to want to get people to move their business to Chicago... and here we are beating drums while they're trying to work.

There has to be a way to build a Whole Foods out of the carob snack shack here somewhere… but Occupy isn’t doing much more than making noise… trash… and will possibly someday incite a riot.

Politics of Putting By

My husband and I have recently gotten into canning our own food. It started last year at the end of the summer… when we had two gallons of leftover green tomatoes from the garden at the end of the year. I figured we could make a batch of green tomato pickles… and that would be that. So $18 for a granny ware water bath canner… and another $12 for a box of Ball jars later… and we canned pickles.

Delicious pickles. Really they’re the perfect thing for a ham sandwich.

Then for Christmas… I thought I’d be cute and I bought the hubby a sauerkraut fermentation pot. It’s got a water seal lip… and you pretty much put cabbage and salt and water in… and pull kraut out in three weeks.
Delicious sauerkraut. Really… once you’ve made homemade the store bought stuff just tastes vile. And that’s when we started developing a collection of Mason jars. We’d give away some kraut… buy more jars. Got to be where people were trading us empty jars for kraut.

And then after the holidays… my Mom moved over to the Mayslake Senior Living Apartments… and she gave Tim her pressure canner. I think I remember my mom using the pressure canner exactly once when I was growing up… so it was still in its box with all the packing.

So here we were… with all the supplies to really “put food by” but we live in a condo. It’s not like I can farm my living room? And then we started experimenting. First with mint jelly. Our mint plant at the community garden went crazy… and I had GOBS of mint. So we made mint jelly. It was good… I refused to put the green food coloring in that the recipe called for… and it made the jelly a lovely golden color.

Then the farmer’s market rolled around… and we bought a couple of half bushels of slightly bruised tomatoes. We canned tomato-basil sauce. (One of the acid recipes from the Ball Book where you add lemon juice to make sure it’s acid enough for water bath canning.) Again… really delicious… and besides the outlay for jars… pretty cheap.

Then we decided to take a day one weekend in October and go apple picking. And we found a place that had U-pick vegetables. So we brought home a bushel of tomatoes… and a bushel of mixed carrots… several pie pumpkins, squashes… and a bunch of eggplant.

And then the canning began in earnest. Pepper rings, smoky chili BBQ sauce, pumpkin-pineapple compote, more tomato sauce. Jalapeno jelly, and we roasted some of the eggplant for freezing… and froze some of the pumpkin… and some roasted chilis. And applesauce. We’d scored a bushel of “applesauce apples” when we went apple picking… and I don’t know how many quarts of applesauce we put up… but it was a freakload of applesauce. At least three canners full. Two batches plain, one batch spiced.

So here Thanksgiving rolls around… and I start thinking to myself… “Self. Now is the only season when pineapple, sweet potatoes… and cranberries are at a reasonable price. I love pineapple. I’m pretty fond of sweet potatoes… and rather UN-fond of commercially canned sweet potatoes because they’re usually swimming in weird brown syrup. And I love cranberry sauce.

So one trip to Aldis…and I come home with five bags of sweet potatoes… five pineapples… and six bags of cranberries.

I started looking around on the Internet for more canning ideas… and that’s where I started coming across this phenomena called “prepping.” It seems like a philosophy somewhere between the Mormon mandate to put food by in case God decides to raid your pantry… and preparing for the zombie apocalypse. Hoard food, guns, water… personal supplies… and if the virus that could destroy humanity hits the fan… or the commies finally attack…you have the ability to fend off your hungry neighbors with a shotgun.

At first glance… there’s something that seems very sane about emergency preparedness. I could probably eat for several months out of the contents of my pantry. Mind you… it wouldn’t be a stunning variety in meals… rice and beans… rice and chili… pasta and sauce… pasta and beans….

But I could do it. And not because I believe in zombies… but because I believe in THRIFT. Pick up an extra when something goes on sale. Buy in bulk. And now our home craze of canning sale produce so we can enjoy it all year long. Sure…I’m going to end up with flats of sweet potatoes under my bed… but what the hell? They were cheap!

But… I think about all of those fearful people out there… hoarding food and water and ammo in a back closet so they can protect their family in case of economic collapse… and then I listen to the pleas of our local food pantries who have had to stop giving out bags because they’ve run out of food… and think to myself… WTF. Take care of my family… sure. But what about everyone else?

I realize no food pantry in their right mind would accept home canned goods. I don’t feel weird about stocking up on canned pineapple… because Jeez… you stand in the kitchen for several hours minding a boiling canner and that pineapple is not only cheap… it’s the literal “fruit” of my labor. I put the filled cans back in the case… slip them downstairs onto a basement shelf… and know I’ve done something to save my planet by processing my own food… in season. (Even if it was supermarket food.) But the idea of stocking up on six months of living supplies in case I miss the rapture?

It’s like planning for the scenario where the government breaks down… and Mel Gibson is leading us in a wild-haired chase across the new American wasteland for guns, food, and fuel… until Tina Turner ushers us into the Thunderdome. If that ever happens… if our society ever breaks down to the point where I need to carry a gun to keep from getting raped in the street… or Tina ever does turn away from soul to soldier…

Pinto beans would be the last think I‘d be thinking about.

Prolonging a life that would become ever more nasty and brutish in the hopes that somehow… order would prevail after the collapse of my civilization? Whaaa? I mean... my heart bleeds for the people of Somalia... I have serious respect for their plight... because I wouldn't last 50 seconds over there.

Growing up...in the event of a nuclear holocaust…I actually felt pretty good about living in Chicago. We have Great Lakes Naval Base. We’d be front and center if the Ruskies decided to bomb us into oblivion. A flash of light… and then my retinas would vaporize before the fact I was about to die would even register in my brain. I’d never have to see the aftermath. I spent most of my childhood living in the cold war era… with that thought as a COMFORT. Comfort. If the worst happened… I wouldn’t survive to watch my hair fall off... and my friends and family mutate.

So as I watch these prepper videos… trying to learn a better way to chop sweet potatoes for canning… listening to the underlying message of ”Those godless ACLU loving crazies are going to try to take away my guns, freedom, fresh water… and canned pumpkin… and when our financial system collapses after the Socialists take over...” inwardly I cringe a little. Has the zombie apocalypse already started… and it’s happening on youtube? Sustainable I care about… we've lost touch with our food. Most of us... myself included... have lost touch with our waistlines. Anything I can do to make eating more REAL and less FAST is a good thing.

But survivable? Am I worried that the end is near... and someday Swiss Miss Cocoa mix will be a commodity item? Not so much.

http://www.chicagosfoodbank.org/

Samuel Insull...the most famous Chicagoan you've never heard of...

I'm trying to work up a White Paper on the Smart Grid... and am in that stage of writing where I'm desparately trying to educate myself on the subject and feeling like a big, stupid, dopey, graduate of a sub-standard liberal arts program.

Oh...wait...

But I've become enthralled with Samuel Insull. Here's the skinny...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Insull

Now I'm going to assume that you've just clicked off my blog and read that entire wikipedia article. M'kay?

Wow. Talk about rags to riches to rags! This is the man who created the modern electric grid. Who created the BUSINESS of selling electricity. And want a quote:

"For my own part, I cannot see how we can expect to obtain from the communites in which we operate, or from the state having control over those communities, certain privlages so far as a monopoly is concerned, and at the same time contend against regulation."

Right there...black and white... the FATHER of the modern power grid pretty much spells out that electrical infrastructure... with declining costs for production, high capital expenses, and intensive scrutiny by government and politicians... would NEED regulation.

And what did we do over the last 20 years? Deregulated the electrical system. Made it "for profit." Like anything that's for profit... the basic business premise is to sell as much as possible to as many people as possible at the highest price you possibly can.

Exactly opposite most of the goals of the Smart Grid. Limiting GHG emissions... creating supply stability... promoting efficiency... it's counterintuitive. We shot ourselves in our collective feet on that one...didn't we?