Down By the Old Crock Pot

Haven't used the thing in a blue moon. But why not? It's there, it does everything for you, and all you have to do is load it up. 

I loaded as follows:

A piece of parchment paper (since fish otherwise tends to stick to the bottom of the pot)

A few slices of fresh fennel

A piece of frozen salmon

Salt and pepper

A slosh of white wine

A handful of cocktail tomatoes

A few slices of lemon on top:

Took about an hour and a half, since the fish was rock-solid frozen. Over rice, it was quite delicious. A glass of wine, a plate of perfect fish, and Netflix (binge-watching Suits at the moment).

                                                        What could be bad?

 

Nikki Haley on Racism: What is Right, What is Wrong

 Nikki Haley said, “We’re not a racist country. We’ve never been a racist country.”

That's true and untrue. The Declaration of Independence is remarkably forward-looking. In 18th century colonial America, women could not vote--about 60% of men, mostly white, mostly landowning landowning men could. Having any voters at all was a new, radical idea. And the idea of all citizens voting was there--it just took a while to include women and nonwhite persons.

The famously ambiguous Declaration states: "all men are created equal," a loopily insane statement if taken to mean "of the same talents and attractiveness"--unless you've read through Jefferson's letters and know something of his biography. Unless you have a sense of the personal experiences giving rise to that political remark. Briefly: he was the genius child in a highly unequal group of siblings, two of whom were either very slow learners or intellectually disabled. Keenly conscious of the inequalities in his own family, he tried to even things up, arranging for his slow brother to take violin lessons. He wanted his siblings to be intellectually equal to himself--a tall order.

His letters show a more realistic grasp on equality: there, he wanted an artistocracy of virtue and talent rather than the European one of birth and wealth.

So his goal, like Nikki Haley's, was “lift up everybody, not go and divide people on race or gender or party or anything else.”

Haley was referring to Jefferson's aspirations--not to the systemic racism that came with slavery and Jim Crow, and which has now, through the legislature envisioned by Jefferson, been vanquished. Long vanquished. 

In other words, Nikki Haley is my second choice after Biden.

Celebrating Martin Luther King

In a nuanced Quillete article, John R. Wood reflects on Dr. Martin Luther King's connections to the notion of systemic racism; having fought for basic decency for African-Americans, King wanted to tackle the economic problems of the poor, believing that whites in favor of ending crimes against blacks were not pushing for actual equality. Yet King regretted the Black Power Movement--Wood points to this:

“Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout ‘White power!’—when nobody will shout ‘Black power!’—but everybody will talk about God’s power and human power,” Dr. King declared in 1967, in the last year of his life. 

King was well aware of growing up in a middle-class family; his experiences with racism remained matters of coldness and distrust rather than brutality, and he advocated for an affirmative action policy forcing companies to hire a certain percentage of black workers and for boycotting companies refusing to employ blacks. But he never lost faith in the basic message: win people over with persuasion and love. Seek and find common ground. Identity politics and "affinity" groups based on ethnicity rather than common interests build walls, not unity. Likewise, trotting out dubious statistics about what percentage of "black people" and "white people" think "white people" are superior/part of systemic racism.

The strength and the weakness of King's message was his believe in Agape--love--and its healing power. Yes, that's the right message. But love is far more ambivalent than hatred, because love makes people vulnerable. To find the courage to love, rather than hate--that's an essential feature of any person or institution seeking to reduce racism. 

The content of a person's character--the line immortalized by Shelby Steele in the book we would all do well to read, especially today--is what we should think of when we judge people. Not immutable traits like their skin color!

It's hard to believe how necessary it is to repeat this message in 2024. Happy Martin Luther King Day; take to heart his methods and philosophy.

Lizard Eyes: Your Looks on Trodelvy

Side-effects are well-documented; some of us have them worse than others. But we're all bald, and for most of us, that means no eyebrows and no eyelashes. Which means your eyes take on the look of a lizard's--note that many lizard eyes have pupils and irises resembling human ones (apart from being surrounded by Green reptilian skin). But none of those reptiles can bat their eyelashes. Until recently, I had about six eyelashes (a young relative counted them at Thanksgiving). Now I'm down to one, and it looks embattled. A very few eyebrow hairs remain, but they're going too.

Eyeliner does camouflage some of the damage--or I think it does until I see a photo of myself. But the tumor markers are down! Ladies and Gentlemen, the tumor markers are down. I feel okay, apart from needing more naps and forgetting things, especially the day after treatment. 

You're also--more ickily--deprived of nose hair. Which means keeping a tissue with you at all times, and strategically deploying it to your nose the nanosecond it tickles, or before. Or all the time. Otherwise, it will drip like a leaky faucet and you won't notice until a few disgusted stares remind you. 

Eyelashes aren't just cosmetic--they protect your eyes and make it easy to wear contacts. I think nostalgically of the last time I used mascara.  

There's always microblading, a semi-permanent tattoo for cancer ladies, but I think I'll go for the low-tech approach--stencils and pencils. Previous experience tells me that once I'm off chemo, eyebrows and eyelashes grow back--curlier, too, like the rest of my hair. So what if it's steel woolish and dry? So nice when it's there!